The Entertainer

A few thoughts on the passing of producer David Brown (1916-2010), best known for his partnership with Richard F. Zanuck (son of legendary Twentieth-Century Fox head honcho Darryl F.), which resulted in some of the biggest hits of the 1970s and ’80s.  Their credits included such disparate films as the Oscar-sweeping The Sting (1973); Steven Spielberg’s first feature, The Sugarland Express (1974), as well as his seminal blockbuster Jaws (1975) and Jeannot Szwarc’s 1978 sequel; the Gregory Peck biopic MacArthur (1977); Sidney Lumet’s outstanding The Verdict (1982); Ron Howard’s Cocoon (1985) and Daniel Petrie’s 1988 sequel; and Bruce Beresford’s delightful Driving Miss Daisy (1989).

After the amicable dissolution of Zanuck/Brown Productions, he kept his hand in with the likes of Robert Altman’s star-studded The Player (1992); Rob Reiner’s A Few Good Men (1992); Michael Moore’s insightful satire Canadian Bacon (1995); the James Patterson-based thriller Kiss the Girls (1997) and its sequel, Along Came a Spider (2001); and several that are still on my “to-see” list, including Deep Impact (1998), Alan Parker’s Angela’s Ashes (1999), and Lasse Hallström’s Chocolat (2000).  On the less successful side of the ledger, Brown was also behind the cheesy SF film Sssssss (1973), in which future Battlestar Galactica star Dirk Benedict gets turned into a snake; the so-so Don Siegel/Michael Caine spy story The Black Windmill (1974); Clint Eastwood’s disappointing The Eiger Sanction (1975); the disastrous Peter Benchley adaptation The Island (1980); the John Belushi/Dan Aykroyd oddity Neighbors (1981); and the misconceived Val Kilmer vehicle The Saint (1997).

Regarding Brown’s life and career outside of producing (e.g., his long marriage to Cosmopolitan editor Helen Gurley Brown), I can’t add anything to what’s in the other, more professional obituaries currently blanketing the media.  On a subjective note, however, several of his films loom large in my personal pantheon.  For example, I was ten when The Sting came out, and it remains one of my earliest and fondest film-going memories.  I saw it with my father and brother Steve (can’t recall if Mom was with us; she may have been off playing the cello at one of her orchestral gigs) and remember being absolutely blown away by the brilliance of its construction, the star power of Paul Newman and Robert Redford, the sumptuous period settings, and the infectious Scott Joplin ragtime score.  Innumerable subsequent viewings have done nothing to change that initial assessment.

I vividly remember the summer Jaws came out, because it was the one time I was shipped off to YMCA sleep-away camp…and I was apparently THE ONLY KID in the whole camp who hadn’t seen it already.  By the time I left Camp Hi-Rock in Mount Washington, Massachusetts, I knew every big money shot from the film (e.g., the one-eyed head falling out of the boat, the guy’s leg drifting down through the water).  I can’t remember why I hadn’t seen it yet—maybe Dad wasn’t interested; maybe I thought I’d be too scared or grossed out—but needless to say, even that didn’t detract from my eventual enjoyment of this outstanding film.  And The Verdict, which I saw on a date with the future Madame B, was (as I later learned) a rare example of a film adaptation that far outshines its source, in this case the novel by Barry Reed, with its superb script by David Mamet, powerhouse performance by Newman and solid supporting cast.

If you’re wondering about the title of this piece, by the way, it’s actually a twofer.  First, Brown entitled his 1990 memoir Let Me Entertain You.  Second, “The Entertainer” is the best-known of the wonderful Joplin rags that were brought back into vogue by The Sting, and soon became a staple in the ancestral Bradley manse.  (In fact, to this day, when people hear that tune, they will often say, “Hey, that’s ‘The Sting,’” a misconception I always take pains to correct.)  But it’s also a fitting epitaph for a filmmaker who had as high a batting average as David Brown’s.

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Bill Collectors

Our roving correspondent, Gilbert Colon (of Ferrara fame), informs me that this year will bring a flurry of activity surrounding the work of William Peter Blatty.  Bill, of course, is best known as the author of The Exorcist (1971), which he adapted for the screen and produced in 1973, and its legitimate sequel—i.e., ignoring Exorcist II: The Heretic (1977), John Boorman’s reviled followup film—Legion (1983), which he adapted and directed in 1990 under the studio-imposed title of Exorcist III.  Some years ago, Gilbert and I had the honor and pleasure of conducting a career-spanning interview with Bill, partly pursuant to the introduction I wrote for Gauntlet’s limited edition of The Exorcist (now sadly sold out).

According to http://www.theninthconfiguration.com/, a website devoted to Blatty and his work, these new offerings include:

*the long-awaited publication next month of his novel Dimiter by the Forge imprint of Tor Books (which also publishes Richard Matheson and is now a part of my erstwhile employer, St. Martin’s Press);

*another novel, Crazy, which Bill describes as “a total romp,” and says is due in September-October;

*a one-volume edition, published on June 1, that will contain both his original novel Twinkle, Twinkle, “Killer” Kane (1966) and the version he later rewrote (and filmed in 1980) as The Ninth Configuration (1978), plus an essay by Mark Kermode;

*a one-volume edition of The Exorcist and Legion, plus a Blatty interview by Brian Freeman, published by Cemetery Dance, which released his novel Elsewhere last year.

Gilbert and I discussed most of these projects with Bill in our own interview, although a lot of our material ended up on the cutting-room floor when it was published in Filmfax.  However, Cinema Retro has expressed some interest in running the uncut version on its site, so watch this space for further details.  And, for those of you with a scholarly bent, check out editor Benjamin Szumskyj’s American Exorcist: Critical Essays on William Peter Blatty (McFarland, 2008).  I have yet to see that book myself, but I contributed to Benjamin’s subsequent volume The Man Who Collected Psychos: Critical Essays on Robert Bloch (http://www.mcfarlandpub.com/book-2.php?id=978-0-7864-4208-9).

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And, on a Personal Note…

Best birthday wishes to author (http://www.underlandpress.com/) and blogger (http://simondrax.com/) Simon Drax.  But if you REALLY want to make his day, sign up for his serialized prose-manga epic Doomtroopers (http://doomtroopers.wordpress.com/), which would make a smashing film.  You’ll be glad you did.

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Brix and Mortar

Here’s another one from the archives (vintage 2007), rescued from oblivion by my pal Gilbert.  Per Arthur Miller, “Attention must be paid,” even if belatedly.

I was shocked and saddened this morning [March 30] to learn of the recent death of Herman Brix at the impressive age of 100.  “Who the hell is Herman Brix?” I hear you ask.  Well, you might know him better—if you know him at all—as Bruce Bennett, the name under which he made most of his hundred-plus film and TV appearances.  But, to take things chronologically, it was Olympic shot-put medalist Brix who was hand-picked by Edgar Rice Burroughs to play his most famous creation in the serial The New Adventures of Tarzan, later broken down into two features.

It’s no classic, hampered by a low budget and production woes while filming in the Amazon (or some similarly godforsaken place), but Brix is far closer to ERB’s conception of the Ape Man than Johnny Weismuller, who found a success in the role that Herman did not.  So, Brix became Bennett, and continued laboring in the Hollywood vineyards for forty-odd years, carving out a modest career in supporting roles, mostly in films even I have never heard of.

I first encountered him in Bogart films like Sahara, Dark Passage and—most notably—The Treasure of the Sierre Madre.  But I submit that the quintesential Bennett role, also from his tenure at Warner Brothers, was the first husband of Joan Crawford’s Mildred Pierce (a movie I highly recommend, by the way).  Bennett’s flawed but basically decent guy wasn’t a showy part, yet it was the type that helps form the mortar holding a great film together, and proves that he deserved better than the relative obscurity in which he died…not to mention having to star in films like The Alligator People later in his career.

That was a rare horror/SF role, although he did appear in two of Boris Karloff’s mad doctor movies, Before I Hang and The Man with Nine Lives, plus five episodes of the pioneering Science Fiction Theatre, The Cosmic Man and—in a dismal 1973 swan song—The Clones.  What makes me the saddest is that after an absence from the screen of more than thirty years, I’d always assumed he was long dead, meanwhile rhapsodizing to my daughter, Alexandra, about how he was so underappreciated.  If I’d known he was alive, I might’ve tried to get a letter to the guy.  Let this be that belated letter for him.

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Grot Expectations

First—and briefly, I promise—I don’t want this (b)logrolling thing to get out of hand, but I’d be remiss if I didn’t thank Ed Gorman for the following comment on his blog (http://newimprovedgorman.blogspot.com/):  “I’ve been working with Matthew for probably a dozen years.  I’ve contributed to the books he’s edited and he’s contributed to mine.  Though Matthew’s work spans everything from literature to films he’s started a new blog that deals exclusively with film.  He’s an excellent writer as well as an excellent critic.  He wrote an amazingly good piece on the Matt Helm movies—amazing to me because I can’t stand them but thought his article was a knock-out.  Be sure to check it out.”

I do so not merely to toot my own horn, but also to let interested readers know that through Ed’s good offices, I had the enviable opportunity of contributing interviews with key creative personnel to both editions of Invasion of the Body Snatchers: A Tribute.  The first was W.D. Richter, the screenwriter of the 1978 version and many other excellent films, as well as the director of the cult classic The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the Eighth Dimension and the underappreciated Late for Dinner.  A longer version of that career-spanning interview is scheduled to appear in Filmfax, so stay tuned for details.  The second interview, appearing only in the revised version of the book—available from Stark House Press (http://starkhousepress.com/classicfilm.html)—was with Kevin McCarthy, the star of the 1956 original, and a legendary raconteur in his own right, not to mention a hell of a nice guy (as is Richter).  And, for those of you who share my appreciation for the third version, titled simply Body Snatchers, my Penguin pal Gilbert Colon interviewed its director, Abel Ferrara.  What’s not to like?

Now, on to the true purpose of this post.  I have many reasons to be grateful to the members of the Monty Python troupe, only the most obvious of which is their legacy of television shows (Monty Python’s Flying Circus) and films (Monty Python and the Holy Grail).  But they were also indirectly responsible for introducing me to a number of other excellent Britcoms.  Like many of my generation, I first saw the Python series on Sunday nights on PBS, where I watched it religiously with my late father, and which often paired it with other shows such as The Two Ronnies.  Among these was The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin.

For a long time, this extraordinary BBC show was difficult to find.  About ten years ago, somebody put out the first few episodes on VHS.  Dad, of course, bought that, and we delighted in revisiting Reggie’s outrageous adventures.  But then he made the mistake of lending it to somebody who never returned it, and forgetting to whom he had lent it.  On top of that, the tape must not have sold very well, because I’m not aware that any subsequent episodes were released, at least Stateside.  Now, thank goodness, Koch has released the entire show (consisting of three series of seven episodes apiece) on a four-DVD set, complete with a retrospective devoted to its star, Leonard Rossiter, and a Christmas sketch that reunited the cast three years after the last episode.

The show’s brilliance may be chalked up chiefly to two men:  Rossiter and writer David Nobbs, who adapted the first series from his novel The Death of Reginald Perrin, later retitled to match the show.  He then wrote the other two series directly for the screen and subsequently novelized them as The Return… and The Better World of Reginald Perrin.  Rossiter, alas, was too-little known on this side of the Pond, although he had a nice supporting role in The Pink Panther Strikes Again, and Stanley Kubrick used him in both 2001: A Space Odyssey and Barry Lyndon.  I’ve always loved the scene in 2001 where Rossiter’s Russian doctor tries to smoke some information out of Dr. Heywood Floyd (William Sylvester), who tells him nothing but deftly allows him to believe the cover story about some sort of virus outbreak, or whatever it was.

So what the heck is this show?  As I started re-viewing the episodes, which begin with a fast-motion scene of Reggie leaving his clothes on the beach and walking out into the sea that is very reminiscent of Python, my first thought was, “If the Pythons had done a sitcom, this is what it would have been like.”  But that misses an important distinction, because the show is really one continuous story, that of businessman Reginald Iolanthe (yes, after the Gilbert and Sullivan operetta) Perrin, initially an executive at Sunshine Desserts.  It’s basically a chronicle of his midlife crisis and what he does about it, and since Reggie and I are now exactly the same age—46—well, let’s just say the show has a resonance for me now that it never did in my teens.  Although he fantasizes about his attractive and loyal secretary, Joan Greengross (Sue Nicholls), and even attempts an amusingly abortive tryst with her, deep down he is completely in love with his wife, Elizabeth (Pauline Yates).  Reggie’s problem is not that he doesn’t love his wife, despite constantly envisioning her mother as a hippopotamus, but that he hates the suffocating routine of his life.  This is brilliantly dramatized with a series of scenes showing his daily rituals, which begin to break down as his behavior becomes more and more eccentric.

Reggie is bemused by his pompous boss, C.J. (John Barron); by the company’s ineffectual doctor, Doc Morrisey (John Horsley); by his relentlessly upbeat and shallow colleagues; by British Rail, whose trains are so reliably eleven minutes late that he quite reasonably suggests they simply adjust their schedule by eleven minutes (an observation I’ve made more than once about the 5:27 from Norwalk on Metro-North); and by most of his immediate family.  Elizabeth’s brother, Jimmy (Geoffrey Palmer), is a clueless army officer who constantly comes by to cadge food; Reggie’s son, Mark (David Warwick), is a not-very-successful actor; and his son-in-law, Tom Patterson (Tim Preece, later replaced by Leslie Schofield), is a windbag who makes wine from nettles and other unappealing substances.  Each has his own peculiar speech patterns and habits, to which Reggie’s sarcastic responses, frequently prefaced by an exasperated “Oh, my God,” are absolutely priceless.

Unable to endure it any longer, Reggie fakes his own suicide (with the same method, although not in the same footage, shown in the credit sequence) and adopts a hilarious series of alternate identities.  The most sympathetic member of his family is his daughter, Linda (Sally-Jane Spencer), to whom he reveals his continued existence.  Ironically, despite his hatred for his old life, fate seems to keep pulling Reggie back into the same old patterns, not least his desire to be with Elizabeth, who is—somewhat implausibly (although admittedly that’s probably a moot point in such a fanciful show)—the only one to see through his current identity of “Martin Wellbourne.”

I’ve just finished the first series, which ends with “Martin” preparing to settle down to domestic bliss with Elizabeth and a new job with his old firm.  I can’t remember all of the developments to come, nor would I ruin them for you, but there is one that I look forward to with delicious pleasure.  During the second series, Reggie opens a shop called Grot that he intends from the outset to fail, selling useless items to people who don’t need them.  But then, in a plot twist worthy and reminscent of Leonard Wibberley’s delightful novel The Mouse That Roared and Jack Arnold’s sublime film version (with Peter Sellers in three roles), the shop becomes an unexpected success, and poor Reggie is right back in the corporate rat race where he started.  Do start from the beginning, though, and take this extraodinary journey with him.  It’s worth your while.

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