Dead Poets Society

Peter Weir is a filmmaker fascinated by outsider protagonists thrust into strange environments that they must navigate, be it an Australian journalist in 1965 Jakarta (The Year of Living Dangerously) or a veteran Philadelphia cop hiding out in Amish country (Witness) or a headstrong inventor that moves his family from the United States to the jungles of Central America (The Mosquito Coast). Dead Poets Society (1989) continues this thematic preoccupation with a shy student spending his senior year of high school at a conservative all-boys prep boarding school in the 1950s where he falls in with a tight-knit group of colorful students and is in turn taught by the new English teacher whose unconventional methods are alien to the traditional ways of the school.

Right from the opening credits, Weir immerses us in the stuffy, authoritative atmosphere of Welton Academy where its students literally carry its ideals a.k.a. the Four Pillars (tradition, honor, discipline, excellence) on banners into chapel with all the pomp and circumstance befitting such an esteemed institution. Like new student Todd Anderson (Ethan Hawke), we are immersed in this foreign world and watch as he tries to adapt to and make sense of it all. He starts off as an inexperienced blank slate for Neil Parry (Robert Sean Leonard), the artistically-inclined student (despite his strict father’s wishes), and his friends – Richard Cameron (Dylan Kussman), the strictly-by-the-book type, Gerard Pitts (James Waterston), Steven Meeks (Allelon Ruggiero), Knox Overstreet (Josh Charles), the romantic, and Charlie Dalton (Gale Hansen), the rebel who’s up for anything – to imprint upon. They even have their own version of the Four Pillars: travesty, horror, decadence, and excrement.

Their first class with Professor John Keating (Robin Williams) is a memorable one as he takes them out of the classroom and into the hall. He quotes Walt Whitman, evokes the phrase carpe diem (Latin for “seize the day”) and gets them to look at old photographs of students in the trophy case to give an indication of their own mortality and to inspire them to also seize the day. For a brief but pivotal spell, Keating gets his students to think about English literature in a different way than they are normally accustomed to and this starts with having them rip out the introduction to their textbook that posits poetry should be tracked like a graph with its two axises being the poem’s perfection rated against its importance, which then determines its greatness. Through humor, Keating exposes the absurdity of applying a mathematical formula to art. He forces his students to think about poetry differently through the shock tactic of tearing out pages of the book thereby tearing down their pre-conceived notions of how poetry should be studied.

He hopes that they will learn to think for themselves. How could you not be inspired by someone like that at such an impressionable age? However, Keating is not saying that all other disciplines are less worthy – on the contrary, they are often crucial to our day-to-day existence – but a love of literature is good for the soul and enriches our lives. In their own respective ways, Neil and Keating are instrumental in bringing Todd out of his shell – whether he wants to or not. The last 30 minutes of Dead Poets Society take on a considerably darker tone as the boys are forced to grow up fast when faced with the death of one of their own. They must make some important choices that will change their future at Welton as they must decide if they should stick together or save their own skins as the ramifications could affect their future academic career. Weir takes great care to show how this death affects not just the boys but Keating as well in a deeply profound way.

Ethan Hawke plays Todd as a wide-eyed innocent, meek in temperament and soft-spoken with the hint of a nervous stutter. At times, Todd is so quiet that those around him are often barely aware he’s in the room and Weir conveys this visually by the character’s placement in a given shot. Along comes Keating who forces Todd out of his shell as only a charismatic teacher can with the rousing battle cry of carpe diem. It is this ideal that he tries to instill in Todd and his classmates and Hawke does a nice job over the course of Dead Poets Society showing how his character struggles with it. The moment where Keating forces Todd to let go and create a poem spontaneously is a powerful one as we are witness to a personal epiphany and an emotional breakthrough.

Robert Sean Leonard delivers what is arguably the most powerful performance in the film as a student who starts out full of passion for the written word thanks to Keating’s influence and this inspires him to get involved in theater. It is his idea to resurrect the Dead Poets Society and the other boys follow him because he is a natural, charismatic leader. As the film progresses, Neil’s personal arc takes on increasingly dramatic dimensions and Leonard is excellent at showing how the pressure that his father (Kurtwood Smith) exerts takes its toll. What was once a promising future eventually becomes a prison imposed by his father and Neil feels that there is only way out. As a result, he becomes a tragic figure and a potent warning of what happens when you buck the rigid system structure imposed by parents, authorities, etc.

Robin Williams is quite good and very believable as an English teacher. Weir reins him in and not once does the comedian go on one of his trademark manic tears, but still has his funny moments. More importantly, he is incredible at conveying a passion for literature and this in turn inspires his students who resurrect an old tradition of his when he was a student at the school – The Dead Poets Society, a group of boys who met, after lights out, at the old Indian cave off campus and recited their favorite poetry (and even some of their own). Keating is an outsider who used to be an insider – once a student at Welton Academy – and he’s gone on to be a free thinker who tries to impose his out-of-the-box approach on the school. Not surprisingly, he meets with resistance from the administration.

The cast is uniformly excellent and convincingly convey the kind of familiarity and friendship that exists and forms in a boarding school environment with Josh Charles and Gale Hansen being notable stand-outs with the former playing an irrepressible romantic that pursues a girl he pines for from afar and the latter playing a beatnik-in-training, who throws down the first gauntlet of rebellion against the administration. Even though they play archetypal characters, their performances move beyond the clichés into well-nuanced, three-dimensional people that we grow fond of and care about.

Weir perfectly captures the look and atmosphere of the northeast in autumn with orange and brown colored leaves on trees or lying on the ground as winter approaches. He also accurately depicts the rarified atmosphere of private school life: the camaraderie of the boys, the secret breaking of the rules, and the strict adherence to tradition. He shows us glimpses of the day-to-day goings on: chapel first thing in the morning, classes where one learns the standards (Latin, Trig, etc.) and the participation in sports like rowing.

When writing the screenplay for Dead Poet Society, every character was based loosely on someone Tom Schulman knew in real life. For example, Keating was inspired by an English teacher he had in his sophomore year of high school and a teacher he had in the Actors and Directors Lab in Los Angeles years later. Of all the characters in the film, Todd is the one Schulmann identified with the most because he was also shy and afraid of public speaking.

Early on, Jeff Kanew (Revenge of the Nerds) was set to direct and he wanted Liam Neeson to play Keating but the studio wanted Robin Williams. The comedian wanted to do the film but not with Kanew. The film was originally planned to be shot outside of Atlanta with sets built but Williams did not show up for the first day of shooting. Afterwards, the studio shut down the production and burned down the sets. Kanew left as a result. In 1987, Peter Weir met with Walt Disney boss Jeffrey Katzenberg about making a film with them. At the end of the meeting, Katzenberg gave him the script for Dead Poets Society. The director read and loved it as well as the chance to work with Williams.

In order to bond as a group, the seven young actors that played Keating’s students played soccer together and ran through simple acting exercises prior to principal photography. To get them into the spirit of their characters, Weir created an “atmosphere where there was no real difference between off-camera and on-camera – they were those people.”

Weir shot the film in sequence so that the actors would experience the same rollercoaster of emotions as their characters. He was also careful to rein in Williams’ trademark knack for improvisational comedy so that the character’s humor “had to be part of the personality,” and so they agreed “at the start that he was not going to be an entertainer in the classroom.” For the pivotal setting of the fictional Welton Academy, the production used St. Andrew’s School in Middleton, near Wilmington, Delaware with filming taking place from mid-October 1988 to late January 1989. For the most part filming went smoothly, however, in order to keep the budget under control, Disney shortened the shooting schedule, which stressed Weir out to no end. The director finally snapped and straightened things out with Katzenberg.

Dead Poets Society received mixed reviews from mainstream critics with Roger Ebert infamously giving it two out of four stars. He wrote, “The movie pays lip service to qualities and values that, on the evidence of the screenplay itself, it is cheerfully willing to abandon. If you are going to evoke Henry David Thoreau as the patron saint of your movie, then you had better make a movie that he would have admired.” In his review for The New York Times, Vincent Canby wrote, “Even worse, Mr. Schulman and Mr. Weir seem to accept the Keating character at romantic face value. In allowing him to remain a sort of hip Mr. Chips, they leave unexplored the contradictory nature of his responsibilities.” The Los Angeles Times’ Michael Wilmington wrote, “Ultimately, whatever its flaws, The Dead Poets Society commands respect and affection. It becomes—in ways that most movies don’t even attempt—a cry of passion and rage against the brutality of a conformist society, against the deadening of our capacity for beauty.”

There’s a long-standing tradition of coming-of-age stories set in prep schools both in literature with likes of A Separate Peace and The Catcher in the Rye and films like If… (1968) and Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975). Dead Poets Society is very much in that tradition, offering a poignant coming-of-age tale featuring conflicts between individuality and conformity. A way someone comes of age is through experience and taking something away from it. After what happens to Neil and then Keating, Todd is finally moved to assert himself in a way he was unwilling to do so before in a moving scene that manages to end the film on a hopeful albeit bittersweet note. I always get the feeling that Neil and Keating’s respective sacrifices are not in vain and that Todd will carry on their passion for the arts and for life now that he has finally learned how to seize the day. By the end of the film, Neil and Keating have had a profound effect on not just Todd but many of his classmates.

Dead Poets Society would earn Robin Williams a much-deserved Academy Award nomination and launch the careers of Ethan Hawke, Robert Sean Leonard and Josh Charles, all of whom are still working in prominent movies and television to this day. The film would go on to inspire and influence subsequent boarding school movies like School Ties (1992) and Mona Lisa Smile (2003) among others but they all still live in the long shadow that Weir’s film casts. It still resonates today because its themes are timeless.

SOURCES

Anica, Rocio. “Screenwriter Tom Schulman Talks Dead Poets Society Blu-Ray.” I Am Rogue. January 19, 2012.

Brew, Simon. “Why Dead Poets Society’s Sets Were Burnt Down After One Day.” Mental Floss. April 24, 2015.

Griffin, Nancy. “Poetry Man.” Premiere. July 1989.

Mammarella, Ken. “Middletown Marks Dead Poets Society Anniversary.” The Delaware News Journal. March 22, 2014.

May, Grady. “Interview… Dead Poets Society Writer Tom Schulman.” GST. January 16, 2012.

Popeye

Popeye (1980) is the film you get when the powers that be entrust a big budget, high-profile project to an idiosyncratic maverick like Robert Altman who proceeds to take the studio’s money and produces a fascinating cinematic oddity. Never one to play it safe, he enlisted fellow iconoclastic artists like musician Harry Nilsson to compose the score, acclaimed playwright Jules Feiffer to write the screenplay and cast comedian Robin Williams, in only his second film role and first starring one, as the titular character. Looking back at it now, it’s amazing that the film ever got made in the first place (it almost didn’t). It is also a powerful reminder of just how safe and formulaic these kinds of films have become over the years (one only has to look as far as Michael Bay’s Transformers movies). And this is due in large part to publicized commercial failures like Popeye, Martin Scorsese’s New York, New York (1977), and Francis Ford Coppola’s One from the Heart (1982), which resulted in Hollywood freezing out these darlings of 1970s American cinema in favor of successful producers like Joel Silver, Don Simpson and Jerry Bruckheimer who helped usher in a flashy style over substance that reflected the materialistic decade of the 1980s.

The film starts off on a dramatic note as we see Popeye (Robin Williams) arrive at the seaside town of Sweethaven on a rowboat during a dark and stormy night. As the opening credits end, night gives way to day and we are introduced to the town and its denizens. This also allows us a chance to marvel at the impressive production design as the entire shanty town of Sweethaven was built from scratch. It looks like a fully-functional, lived-in place much like the grungy, frontier town in Altman’s McCabe and Mrs. Miller (1971).

As soon as Popeye sets foot on the docks he’s greeted by the local taxman (Donald Moffat) and hit with a ridiculous number of taxes (docking tax, new-in-town tax, leaving-your-junk-around-the-warf tax, and so on). It also gives us the first indication of Robin Williams’ take on Popeye, which is muttering to others and mostly to himself. In this respect, his portrayal of the iconic sailor is reminiscent of Elliott Gould’s version of Philip Marlowe in Altman’s The Long Goodbye (1973). Popeye is on a journey to find his estranged father who left him when he was a baby. In a nice touch, he keeps an empty frame next to his bed with the words, “Me Poppa” scrawled where a picture should be.

The director applies his trademark layered audio tracks with a nicely orchestrated dinner sequence at the Oyl boarding house where Popeye. Olive (Shelley Duvall) and her family talk about Bluto (Paul L. Smith), her fiancé and a large man who resides on a ship known as the Vile Body. He enforces the various town ordinances, in particular, the 9 p.m. curfew where all the town lights must be out. Popeye gets ready to eat only to realize by the end of the scene that dinner is over and everyone has left the table. He mutters bemusedly to no one in particular, “Never good to be too full, I guess.”

The film’s first action sequence takes place at a local diner when six ruffians (including a young Dennis Franz) make fun of Popeye’s pappy and provoke him into showcasing his formidable brawling skills. Altman employs gifted physical performers to give the fight a stylized look as innocent bystanders do all kinds of pratfalls trying to avoid getting pulled into the fracas. It is refreshing to see a pre-CGI comic book adaptation eschew expensive special effects in favor of the natural physical prowess of an actor. For someone not known for action/adventure, the action sequences, especially Popeye’s fight with a giant octopus, are inventively staged by Altman. He favors long shots so that you can see all the action and, in the case of the climactic battle between Bluto and Popeye, the actors do most of their own stunts.

Popeye was Williams’ first starring role in a film and he certainly picked an ambitious one, playing an iconic character first popularized in comic strip form in the 1930s. It was the Fleischer brothers cartoons from that era that most people remember and was the criteria which many critics used to criticize his performance. This is quite unfair as Altman and Feiffer were trying to evoke the Popeye of E.C. Segar’s original comic strip. The actor does his best to ground the character while adding an air of whimsy to most of the things he says. Popeye is content to take things in stride, but isn’t afraid to stand up for himself. Williams, ever the expressive performer, is ideally cast as Popeye. The comedian grimaces and mutters his way through the film in a way that must’ve freaked out the studio who fretted so much about whether audiences would understand anything he said or not, forcing him to re-record Popeye’s dialogue

If there was any actress that was born to play Olive Oyl it would be Shelley Duvall. With her tall, slender frame and large expressive eyes, she does a fantastic job of embodying the high-strung Olive. There’s an adorable dorkiness to Duvall’s take on the character that is quite endearing. It also helps that she has good chemistry with Williams. They have a nice scene together when Popeye and Olive argue over how best to parent Swee’Pea (Wesley Ivan Hurt), a baby they found abandoned in a basket the night before. There’s another scene with the kid where Popeye and Olive serenade each other under the guise of singing the baby to sleep that is charming in its sincerity. The highlight of their sweet romance (and of Duvall’s performance) is when Olive serenades Popeye by singing “He Needs Me,” which is one of the loveliest, most fanciful love songs. Duvall pulls it off as Olive pines for Popeye by singing and dancing her way into his heart. The song would be resurrected years later by Altman devotee Paul Thomas Anderson in his own quirky romantic comedy Punch-Drunk Love (2002).

Far from the cinematic trainwreck that critics of the time pronounced it to be, Popeye is an engaging, fun fairy tale of a film that doesn’t have a cynical or crass bone in its body. This sincerity extends to Harry Nilsson’s delightful songs full of innocence and romance that probably flew over a lot of kids’ heads at the time. I know it did with me and it took years for me to appreciate the artistry that went into them. The decision to include numerous musical numbers and have the actors sing was certainly a ballsy one and adds to the stylized feel of the entire film. Robin Williams and Shelley Duvall were not accomplished singers and so having them to try carry a tune wasn’t always pleasing to the ear, but in the case of “He Needs Me” there is a sweet simplicity that works. There is an unpolished yearning in Duvall’s voice that you wouldn’t get in the same way with a professional singer.

  

After seeing the Broadway musical adaptation of Annie in 1977, Hollywood producer Robert Evans was so taken with it that he pursued the film rights. However, he was outbid for them. He still had his heart set on adapting a comic strip as a movie musical. As luck would have it a Paramount Studio executive reminded him that they had the rights to Popeye. Evans decided he would produce it. He was good friends with actor Dustin Hoffman and contacted him about playing the titular character.

Executive producer Richard Sylbert suggested Evans contact screenwriter Jules Feiffer (Little Murders) to write the screenplay. He jumped at the opportunity because the writer hadn’t had a script produced into a film since the early 1970s and idolized the work of E.C. Segar who created Popeye. Feiffer agreed to do it if he could replicate the tone of the comic strip and not the animated Fleischer brothers short films from the late ‘30s and early 1940s. Evans agreed, but under the condition that the film appeal to both adults and kids. Feiffer started by reading a book about Segar’s career. He found himself drawn to how civil Popeye was “about the awfulness of everybody,” and “a genuine charm … a civility towards his view of the universe.” Feiffer decided to have the romance between Popeye and Olive Oyl as the heart of the film while also having the sailor search for his estranged father.

It was soon announced that Lily Tomlin would play Olive Oyl and Hal Ashby was hired to direct. To prepare for the role, Hoffman took tap-dancing lessons and worked with a choreographer. During the rewriting process, Feiffer and Hoffman began to drift apart for reasons that are still unclear. Feiffer said, “It ended up just very unfriendly, and I still don’t remember finding out a damn thing about what he felt about the movie.” Incredibly, Evans sided with Feiffer and not his good friend Hoffman who subsequently left the project. With the lack of a bankable movie star, the project fell apart with studio executives losing interest and Ashby and Tomlin moving on to other films.

Evans stuck with the project and claimed that the material was so strong anyone could play Popeye even up and coming comedian Robin Williams who was enjoying success on the Mork and Mindy television show. Paramount executives loved the idea of Williams as Popeye and the project picked up momentum with Gilda Radner being considered for Olive Oyl thanks to the success of Saturday Night Live. Evans still needed a director. Arthur Penn and Mike Nichols were considered, but Robert Altman received a copy of the script. He was interested, but only if he would have creative control. Evans met with Altman and was impressed with his take on the material. He offered the director the job much to the chagrin of the studio who wanted to go with a more commercially viable director. At the time, Altman was coming off successive box office failures. However, Evans stood by Altman with Williams supporting him as well. The studio relented and Evans said, “It’s got to be exciting to make it. I’d rather take a chance on falling on my ass but possibly hitting magic than just make something that’s predictable.”

While Evans went off to Texas, overseeing preparations for Urban Cowboy (1980), Altman began populating the cast and crew with his regulars, including the likes of Paul Dooley and Shelley Duvall as Olive Oyl, which didn’t sit well with studio executives that needed convincing. Most interestingly, Altman hired singer-songwriter Harry Nilsson to compose the score despite others warning him against it. Williams supported the decision early on and after meeting the man, Altman was convinced.

Feiffer had his reservations about Altman because he knew of the director’s reputation for straying from the script and encouraging improvisation from his actors. His initial meetings with the director did little to reassure him. Feiffer also didn’t like the lyrics Nilsson wrote for many of the songs as he felt they conflicted with his script. Altman wasn’t convinced that he would be able to work with Evans or Feiffer who didn’t think he could work with Altman or Nilsson. Altman and Feiffer got along during meetings about the script, but once filming began the latter was unhappy with Williams’ improvisations. He complained to Altman who in turn complained about Feiffer to Evans. Altman told Feiffer to speak with Williams privately and that smoothed things over.

Altman loved shooting on location and away from the intrusive presence of the studio. To this end, he picked the island of Malta for the film. The remote location had its setback, however, as the production was plagued by bad weather, special effects problems, and accidents and injuries during filming which resulted in the production going $20+ million over budget. The production ran into difficulties with the creation of Popeye’s iconic muscular forearms which didn’t look right. Williams remembered that they were like “wearing two long gloves that you use to clean the toilet.” After a few tests proved that they didn’t work, the makeup person was fired and an Italian makeup crew was brought in and they did a much better job. Meanwhile, Altman had to film around Williams for almost four weeks while the arms were redesigned.

Due to the isolated location and shooting frequently at night, a lot of alcohol and drugs were consumed by the cast and crew. Altman’s wife, Kathryn remembers, “Everybody was very loaded. A lot of tantrums and fights and tantrums.” Williams concurred: “When we were on Malta, we were on everything but skates. And then they sent the skates in and it got interesting. The open bar at dailies? I think anything, everything was going on.” In addition to the pressures of starring in his first lead role on a big studio film, Williams and wife were not getting along and got into shouting matches after a day of filming had ended.

A six-track studio was built on the island for Nilsson and his musicians. He wrote at least three songs for the film there. Partway through principal photography, Altman did not know the final sequence of songs in the film and this upset the mercurial Nilsson resulting in him leaving the island in a rage. Arranger and conductor Van Dyke Parks took over and completed the score. Most of the tracks that had been laid down were not rerecorded with more polish and Altman liked their raw quality.

Despite all the tension and mishaps during principal photography, Altman cultivated a real sense of community, encouraging the cast and crew to bring family and friends to the location. Movies were flown in for weekend double features. Talent shows were organized and everyone got together to watch dailies. There were also many after hours parties hosted by Altman and his wife.

Far from box office bomb, Popeye made a profit, but the not the kind of numbers the studio was hoping for and this resulted in the film being forever tagged as a commercial flop. Not surprisingly, Popeye received mixed reviews from critics. Roger Ebert gave the film three out of four stars and wrote, “Popeye then, is lots of fun. It suggests that it is possible to take the broad strokes of a comic strip and turn them into sophisticated entertainment.” In his review for The New York Times, Vincent Canby wrote, “You keep expecting the film to erupt with the kind of boisterousness that is only possible in a musical. It never does. The dances, like the music, are tentative and restrained.” Pauline Kael felt that the film didn’t “come together, though, and much of it is cluttered, squawky, and eerily unfunny … But there are lovely moments – especially when Olive is loping along or singing.” Newsweek magazine’s David Ansen wrote, “This is high-risk chemistry, and the results are bizarre … Popeye’s air of alienated whimsy makes for an odd ‘family movie’ indeed.”

At the time, there was a trend to resurrect iconic characters from a bygone era thanks to the success of Superman: The Movie (1978), which begat high-profile commercial and critical failures like Flash Gordon (1980), The Legend of the Lone Ranger (1981), Bo Derek’s Tarzan the Ape Man (1981). Unfortunately, Popeye gets lumped in there as well. It was Altman’s swan song with Hollywood and its highly publicized failure effectively relegated him to outsider status for the rest of the ‘80s until his triumphant return with The Player (1992).

SOURCES

McGilligan, Patrick. Robert Altman: Jumping Off the Cliff. St. Martin’s Press. 1989.

Zuckoff, Mitchell. Robert Altman: An Oral Biography. Alfred A. Knopf. 2009.

Dead Again

From the early to mid-1990s, Kenneth Branagh and Emma Thompson was a power celebrity couple that managed to be incredibly popular, especially in their native United Kingdom, while also steering clear of being absorbed into the Hollywood system. They both brought considerable pedigree to their relationship as he had been responsible for revitalizing Shakespeare in cinema with highly acclaimed adaptations of Henry V (1989), Much Ado About Nothing (1993), and Hamlet (1996), while she was a Merchant Ivory star with Howards End (1992) and The Remains of the Day (1993). Not surprisingly, they appeared in several films together, most notably Peter’s Friends (1992), the aforementioned Much Ado and my personal favorite, the psychological thriller Dead Again (1991), before divorcing in 1995.

Dead Again was Branagh and Thompson’s brief dalliance with Hollywood, but on their terms. It is a modest neo-noir indebted to the films of Alfred Hitchcock with Branagh and Thompson playing dual roles in 1940s flashbacks and also present day. This film is often forgotten in their respective filmographies, which is a shame as it features a smartly written screenplay by Scott Frank and excellent performances from not just the lead actors, but the entire cast. The end result is a clever and engaging thriller.

Mike Church (Kenneth Branagh) is an ex-cop turned private investigator that specializes in missing persons cases. He’s doing nickel and dime jobs when asked to do a favor for a priest that took him in at Saint Audrey’s Home for Boys when he was quite young. A woman (Emma Thompson) showed up one day unable to speak and suffers from amnesia as well as horrible nightmares that take place in the 1940s where a famous composer by the name of Roman Strauss (Branagh) is convicted and sentenced to death for killing his wife Margaret (Thompson) with a pair of scissors. Roman professes his innocence, claiming a thief killed his wife, but his alibi doesn’t hold up and evidence points towards his guilt.

Branagh films these flashbacks in rich, atmospheric black and white in an obvious homage to classic film noir, complete with the ominous use of shadows, like when Gray Baker (Andy Garcia), the reporter that covered the murder trial, visits Roman on death row. These sequences really allow Branagh to ramp up the style and have a bit of fun. Andy Garcia has a plum supporting role as a disheveled, alcoholic reporter that has been spinning his wheels since World War II ended. The actor has his character’s look down cold with the rumpled clothes and unshaven (yet still handsome) appearance, but wisely doesn’t go over-the-top as would be the temptation for a drunken burn out like Baker.

Mike is enlisted to find out who this mysterious woman is and he’s immediately taken with her beauty (Thompson at arguably the height of her loveliness). After one look at the deplorable conditions of County Hospital, he decides to take her home. Branagh and Thompson are good in these initial scenes together as he plays Mike as a nice guy who nervously talks incessantly while she adopts a timid, fragile stance as her character is at the mercy of the world. There’s definitely a spark of attraction between Mike and this woman, which is enhanced by the chemistry between the two actors. After doing some digging, he finds out that Roman and Margaret were actual people and that she was murdered and he was executed for the crime.

The next day, a hypnotist cum antiques dealer by the name of Franklyn Madson (Derek Jacobi) shows up at Mike’s door claiming that he can help the woman figure out her identity. Derek Jacobi has a delicious role as a hypnotist who is a bit of an opportunist, putting people under not only to help them, but to also find out if they have any valuable knick-knacks that he can pilfer. Mike is dubious that Franklyn can help her, but goes along with the sessions. Once under hypnosis, she recounts how Roman and Margaret met and fell in love. As the film progresses, Mike tries to figure out how these recollections from the past inform the present. Is this mystery woman somehow the reincarnation of Margaret Strauss? Was he Roman? Will history repeat itself?

Early on in the film, Emma Thompson relies on her expressive eyes and facial features to convey the extreme emotions her character experiences. In doing so, she not only gains Mike’s sympathies, but also ours. Once her character is able to talk, the actress brings even more charm to the role as abundantly evident in the scene where Mike makes dinner for her character. If we haven’t become fully invested in her character’s plight then this moment seals the deal.

Kenneth Branagh does a fine job essaying a stereotypical cinematic gumshoe of the West Coast variety. He certainly doesn’t do anything to rise up in the pantheon of such characters and it looks like he’s having more fun in the flashbacks playing a famous German composer jealous that a rumpled reporter shows romantic interest in his wife. These sequences allow Branagh to act more theatrical and pretend like he’s in a classic Hollywood movie.

Being involved in real life certainly helps Branagh and Thompson’s on-screen chemistry, which is fantastic, but not every real-life couple have it so this was a bit of a gamble for them to take. Fortunately, it pays off. The looks that the two of them exchange throughout the film are warm and feel genuine. Looking back now, it’s hard not to feel a few pangs of nostalgia looking at an apparently happy couple that are no longer together.

Also of note is Robin Williams playing a small, but memorable role as a disgraced ex-psychiatrist working at a local convenience store dispensing advice to Mike. It’s a semi-serious role that saw the famous funnyman cracking jokes, but with the bitter edge of someone burnt out from life. The normally solid Wayne Knight adopts a distracting lisp/whistle through his teeth when he talks that seems like a bit much and an obvious attempt to make his character more colorful than it really is.

After his directorial debut with Henry V, Kenneth Branagh was keen to film an adaptation of Thomas Hardy’s Return of the Native. After a booking in Australia fell though, Branagh and his wife, Emma Thompson, found themselves in Los Angeles performing Shakespeare’s King Lear and A Midsummer Night’s Dream with the theater troupe he had founded in 1987. It happened to coincide with the announcing of the Academy Award nominations. Henry V was the recipient of several, including Branagh for Best Actor and Direction. This caught the attention of Hollywood and he was approached by several studios keen to work with him. However, they only knew him from Henry V and weren’t interested in his new project. He started getting screenplays for art films, biopics, and war films: “All the Vietnam pictures that never got made,” he remembers. None of them appealed to him.

Then, producer Lindsay Doran sent him Scott Frank’s script for Dead Again. She had commissioned the script from the writer while at Paramount Pictures in 1986. She subsequently moved to Sydney Pollack’s production company where, with Frank’s help, began looking for a director. She saw Henry V and felt that Branagh was the right person for the job. When he read Frank’s script, Branagh was blown away by it. The script made him think of Alfred Hitchcock films like Rebecca (1940), Spellbound (1945) and Dial M for Murder (1954) – motion pictures that made big impressions on him when he was younger. He felt that Frank’s work had “all the classic ingredients of a mystery thriller on a noir-ish level. It was a good yarn, underneath which it touched lightly on the sense of ‘Are we meant to be with people in relationships that we resolve from lifetime to lifetime?’” Branagh immediately pictured Derek Jacobi as the antiques dealer and Thompson as the mystery woman with no memory. However, Doran initially only wanted him to direct, but he was also wanted to act opposite his wife with them playing dual roles that were originally intended for four different actors. In addition, he also wanted to cast Jacobi and a few key crew members from Henry V to work on it. The studio agreed, but only if the film had a couple of well-known American actors in it.

Branagh worked hard to adopt an American accent, spending hours listening to tapes and spending time with Frank. “I knew I had to deliver more than just a collection of representative sounds. Vocal cadences and rhythms had to be believable.” He also worked on his character’s body language by observing people walking around in L.A. and then going into shopping malls and trying out what he learned. Thompson found her role challenging because “if you’ve lost your memory you’ve lost your power to relate to anything at all … memories are not available to you, and you find you have very little to say … The principle thing you discover is it produces intense loneliness.”

Dead Again received positive to mixed notices from critics. Roger Ebert gave the film four out of four stars and wrote, “This film is made of guignol setting and mood, music and bold stylized camera angles, coincidence and shock, melodrama and romance. And it is also suffused with a strange, infectious humor; Branagh plays it dead seriously, but sees that it is funny.” In his review for The New York Times, Vincent Canby wrote, “Mr. Branagh doesn’t exactly transform the absurdities of the story into great art, which was probably never his intention. Instead he recognizes them without condescension, turning out a most enjoyable and knowing homage to a kind of fiction that, though dead, keeps coming back.” Newsweek magazine’s David Ansen wrote, “There’s little passion behind the pyrotechnics: you never quite shake the feeling that you’re watching a talented cast playing an elaborate game of Let’s Pretend. Still, be grateful for the genuine amusement Dead Again supplies. It may be cotton candy, but it’s well spun.”

Entertainment Weekly gave the film an “A” rating and Owen Gleiberman wrote, “The two lead performers triumph during the flashback sequences, which are really the heart of the film … Thompson and Branagh don’t do a parody of classic Hollywood acting so much as an homage to it. They made me appreciate the focus of the great old stars, the way they could define, with intoxicating clarity, the emotions on which a scene spun.” However, USA Today gave the film two out of four stars and Mike Clark wrote, “Thanks in part to some fundamental miscasting, this convoluted whodunit (half-period, half-contemporary) is a misconceived attempt to establish just-plain-folks credentials.” In her review for the Washington Post, Rita Kempley found the film, “a campy Gothic melodrama about one couple’s ongoing hassle with bad karma … this overwrought and overly facile look at accounts payable in the afterlife.”

Screenwriter Scott Frank creates an intriguing murder mystery as we wonder if Roman really killed Margaret in the past and who is Thompson’s amnesiac character in the present? Both storylines dovetail rather nicely at the film’s exciting climax, which goes off the rails a bit as Branagh’s flair for theatrics gets the better of him. Frank has gone on to become one of the best, most consistent writers working in Hollywood and while Dead Again is not a major work, it doesn’t try to be. The film is a clever cinematic equivalent of a page turner – entertainingly executed by Branagh and company.

SOURCES

Arnold, Gary. “Ken and Emma Put Their Act Together.” Washington Times. August 21, 1991.

Black, Kent. “Married … With Chutzpah.” Los Angeles Times. August 18, 1991.

Koltnow, Barry. “Irish Actor/Director Aims at America with Dual Role in Dead Again.” Orange County Register. August 21, 1991.

Lacey, Liam. “No Longer A ‘Classical’ Person.” Globe and Mail. August 19, 1991.

Portman, Jamie. “Irish-Born Actor at Home as Los Angeles Detective.” Ottawa Citizen. August 23, 1991.

Weber, Bruce. “From Shakespeare to Hollywood.” The New York Times. August 18, 1991.

Good Morning, Vietnam

I’ve always had a soft spot for Good Morning, Vietnam (1987). It isn’t Robin Williams’ best film or his best performance for that matter but it marked a pivotal moment in his career. Up to that point he had done several comedies built around his manic comedic sensibilities that were mostly commercial failures. Only The World According to Garp (1982) hinted at his capacity for mixing comedy and drama and it also scored both with critics and audiences. With Good Morning, Vietnam, Williams gave it another try, teaming up with director Barry Levinson, hot off the comedy Tin Men (1987) and who wisely surrounded the comedian with a rock solid cast of character actors. The result was a bonafide blockbuster (it was #1 at the box office for 9 weeks!) and a genuine crowd pleaser that received several accolades. For me, Good Morning, Vietnam is a fun, engaging film that lets Williams cut loose and do his thing while also attempting to impart a bittersweet romance and a sobering reminder of the war that the United States was losing.

It is 1965 and Airman Adrian Cronauer (Robin Williams) arrives in Saigon to work as disc jockey for the Armed Forces Radio Service. He’s greeted at the airport by Private First Class Edward Garlick (Forest Whitaker) and right from the get-go Levinson does a nice job of evoking a sense of place by immersing us in the sights and sounds of this exotic city and its inhabitants. Once Cronauer and Garlick arrive at the base we are introduced to a colorful assortment of characters, starting with the strict commanding officers, Lt. Hauk (Bruno Kirby) and Sgt. Major Dickerson (J.T. Walsh). The former considers himself something of a comedian (“Readers Digest is considering publishing two of my jokes.”) but is hopelessly square when it comes to anything remotely funny. The latter is the film’s humorless antagonist who lays down the law with Cronauer early on in the film, shutting up the usually unflappable D.J. through intimidation and actually making him sweat (or is that just the heat?).

Cronauer’s first radio show is a dynamic debut as Williams gets to unleash his crazed stand-up routines with him voicing characters both based on actual people, like Gomer Pyle and Walter Cronkite, and ones that he makes up on the fly. Levinson breaks up the comedian’s whirlwind onslaught with a fantastic collection of period rock music by the likes of the Beach Boys, James Brown, Them, The Supremes and many others that plays over footage of soldiers toiling around Saigon or hanging out at their bases. It is an unorthodox radio show to say the least as Cronauer mercilessly parodies the United States military and the government with biting political humor that does little to endear him with Dickerson and Hauk, the latter of which reprimands him afterwards.

Of course it wouldn’t be a Barry Levinson film without a few scenes of guys sitting around talking (see Diner and Tin Men) and in Good Morning, Vietnam the place is Jimmy Wah’s, a local G.I. bar (“It’s real homey in an opium kind of way,” Cronauer deadpans upon first entering.) where Cronauer and the other D.J.s hang out. It is rather memorably owned by a man that calls everybody “Earl” and who is obsessed with actor Walter Brennan.

Cronauer finds himself attracted to a young Vietnamese woman named Trinh (Chintara Sukapatana) and becomes a teacher at an English-as-a-second language school in order to get closer to her. The introduction of this setting gives us a little insight into the Vietnamese people as Cronauer begins to interact with Trinh and her family, in particular her brother, Tuan (Tung Thanh Tran). The scene where Cronauer introduces himself to the class is particularly memorable because we see Williams the comedian playing to the hardest room of his career – a group that does not understand English. At first, they are unimpressed and confused but he eventually is able to communicate with them on a basic level. There is a spontaneous feel to these scenes as if what the Vietnamese actors (non-actors?) are saying was unscripted and Williams is simply reacting to whatever they say, eliciting genuine surprise and laughter from the gifted comic. This scene also continues Cronauer’s unorthodox yet effective way of communicating with others as he eschews stuffy text book phrases for common, every day sayings and, of course, curse words.

Director Barry Levinson successfully harnesses the comedian’s wild, manic energy in this film. Williams’ radio monologues (famously adlibbed by the comedian) are the highlights as he cuts loose with his trademark rapid-fire humor (“What’s the difference between the Army and the Cub Scouts? Cub Scouts don’t have heavy artillery.”). He is an actor who needs a strong director to rein him in. His best films are the ones where he collaborated with a director who had their own distinctive vision (Peter Weir, Terry Gilliam and Gus Van Sant) and this one is no different.

Even though Good Morning, Vietnam is essentially a vehicle for Williams, Levinson wisely surrounds him with a strong supporting cast of character actors, like Robert Wuhl, Bruno Kirby and J.T. Walsh. Kirby is excellent as the terminally unfunny and unhip Lt. Hauk. The scene where he temporarily takes over Cronauer’s show with his own brand of comedy is almost painful to watch. There is also an amusing running gag about how no one ever salutes him despite his rank. This film would mark the start of a memorable run of supporting roles in popular comedies like When Harry Met Sally… (1989), The Freshman (1990), and City Slickers (1991).

Walsh proved to be a very credible antagonist to Williams with his sober intensity and gravitas that he brings to the role. Williams is such a force of nature and a larger than life personality that he needs someone who is just as forceful and Walsh does an excellent job as his vindictive superior. Fresh from Oliver Stone’s gritty Vietnam War film Platoon (1986), Forest Whitaker is cast against type as Cronauer’s meek, by-the-book assistant and displays some nice comedic chops in various ways, like the nervous, high-pitched giggle he repeatedly emits upon first meeting Cronauer, or the way he always turns the ignition key when first getting into a jeep with the engine already running.

The first half of Good Morning, Vietnam is the light, entertaining stuff of an anarchic anti-authoritarian comedy as we see Cronauer gleefully breaking all the rules and having fun doing it. He gets into a bit of trouble but nothing major. The second half of the film sees the comedic elements take a back seat in favor of an unrequited romance between Cronauer and Trinh as well as the growing insurgency in Saigon. The tone of the film noticeably darkens when Cronauer narrowly escapes a bomb exploding at Jimmy Wah’s and Levinson doesn’t shy away from depicting the carnage and the ensuing chaos with shots of bloodied victims, both American soldiers and locals, as well as shots of dead bodies lying in the street. It is a shock not only to Cronauer but to us because nothing that came before prepared us for this.

To make matters worse, Cronauer goes on the air and gives his account of what happened without it being approved. Williams does a nice job here, first, in the aftermath of the bombing as he tries to make sense of the carnage, and secondly, when he tries to put on a funny face afterwards on his radio show. His jokes fall flat as the shock of what he saw and experienced sinks in. His defeated facial expression says it all. Mitch Markowitz’s screenplay makes a smooth transition between the two halves of the film by doing it gradually with elements of comedy and drama blending together naturally so that neither one is entirely abandoned in favor of the other. Levinson also shifts the emphasis on locales over the course of the film with most of it set in the army base for the first half and then opening things up in the second half as we see more of Saigon and the surrounding area. The focus also shifts to that of the Vietnamese as we see how Trinh and Tuan live when they take Cronauer to their village. At this point in the film he has gotten tired with being censored and told what to say, what news to report, and what songs he can play. He finds himself spending more time with Tuan and is soon rejected by Trinh, coming to the sobering realization that they never really had a chance to become romantically involved in the first place.

Adrian Cronauer got his start as a radio broadcaster when he helped start the University of Pittsburgh’s campus radio station. By 1962, he was majoring in broadcasting at the American University in Washington, D.C. He found himself eligible for the draft and decided to volunteer for the Air Force with his first choice being flight training. However, he didn’t want to make the kind of time commitment necessary and entered training for broadcasting and media operations. He successfully completed it and was transferred to an Armed Forces Radio station in Greece. He had one year left of his enlistment and was given a change of assignment with the option of either going back home to the United States, where he would work on training films, or broadcast live to American soldiers in either South Korea or South Vietnam. He chose Vietnam.

In 1979, Adrian Cronauer and one of his old military buddies Ben Moses were discussing the success of television shows M*A*S*H and WKRP in Cincinnati. They thought about creating a sitcom that fused the two shows together – a comedy based on U.S. armed forces radio. They wrote a treatment and pitched it to the networks but none of them were interested because Vietnam wasn’t considered very funny at the time. So, they put the treatment away until years later when they decided to change it from a sitcom to a movie of the week and sent it to Robin Williams’ manager.

Williams read the script and loved it. He suggested they make it into a feature film. He said in an interview, “It’s closer to me than anything I’ve ever done. It’s very close to home.” However, he couldn’t find a director to make it into a film. At some point, he met Barry Levinson who read it and liked the challenge of showcasing Williams’ acting abilities with his comedic sensibilities.

To capture Williams’ wild improvisations during the radio sequences Levinson used three cameras running at the same time. The only things scripting for these sequences was a line about cappuccino, an impression of Walter Cronkite, and a line about the Vietnam War being brought to us by the same people who brought us the Korean War – the rest was Williams riffing. As Levinson pointed out in an interview, “It’s one thing to do improvisation, it’s another thing to do period improvisation.” The comedian had done his homework, reading about the country, watching documentaries about the war and talking to people who had been there.

Good Morning, Vietnam was based very loosely on Adrian Cronauer’s experiences in Vietnam. He was not as funny or as wild as Williams, he butted heads with military censors once, and rebelled against the military’s “Polka Hour” programming with Top 40 music like Frank Sinatra. Unlike Williams’ version of Cronauer, the real one’s tour was significantly longer.

Good Morning, Vietnam received mostly positive reviews from critics. Roger Ebert gave the film four out of four stars and wrote, “Good Morning, Vietnam works as straight comedy and as a Vietnam-era MASH, and even the movie's love story has its own bittersweet integrity.” In his review for The New York Times, Vincent Canby praised Williams’ performance: “Mr. Williams's performance, though it's full of uproarious comedy, is the work of an accomplished actor. Good Morning, Vietnam is one man's tour de force.” The Globe and Mail’s Jay Scott wrote, “The first comedy about that war, Good Morning, Vietnam manages to be uproariously funny without ignoring or trivializing the tragedy. It's awkwardly contrived here and there, especially during its recon patrols into Vietnamese life, but for the most part Mitch Markowitz's skeletal script is smart enough to dig in, hunker down and stay out of Robin Williams' line of fire.” However, in his review for the Washington Post, Hal Hinson felt that the film was “a peculiar hybrid – a Robin Williams concert movie welded clumsily onto the plot from an old Danny Kaye picture. And neither half works.”

The successful run Good Morning, Vietnam enjoyed and the accolades Williams received emboldened him to try several other comedy-drama hybrids, most notably Dead Poets Society (1989), The Fisher King (1991) and Good Will Hunting (1997), which resulted in an Academy Award. Often cited as the first Vietnam War comedy (soon followed by Air America in 1990), it is interesting to note that the film came out the same year as Stanley Kubrick’s nihilistic take on the conflict, Full Metal Jacket but the two films couldn’t be further apart in their approaches. Along with Oliver Stone’s Heaven and Earth (1993), Good Morning, Vietnam attempted to give a human dimension to the Vietnamese people. Unlike many other Vietnam War films of the 1980s, the Vietnamese are not portrayed as some anonymous enemy but real people with their own distinctive personalities. If anything, Levinson’s film personalizes the Vietnam War and questions, in its own way, what exactly the U.S. was doing there in the first place while delivering an entertaining story as well.

SOURCES

Hawthorn, Tom. “Voice of Vietnam Adjusted by Hollywood.” Globe and Mail. February 26, 1988.

Reese, Michael. “Radio was the Only Thing the GI’s Had.” Newsweek. January 4, 1988.

Scott, Jay. “Inventiveness That’s Boundless: Williams Finds Freedom in Vietnam.” Globe and Mail. December 12, 1987.

Zekas, Rita. “No Radio Work in Robin Williams’ Future.” Toronto Star. January 12, 1988.