No offense but I’m starting to really hate these primitive, simpleton-level, supposed-conversation-starter Twitter posts. Ten minutes ago I saw one that said “North by NorthWest 1959…like or dislike?” Why did you capitalize the second “w” in Northwest, man? The movie title doesn’t so why did you?
Hats off to the NASS techies. The only thing wrong with this is that infuriating violet tint on the autos and buses. Otherwise it’s amazing. As one of the YouTube commenters has pointed out, the past has never looked or sounded this sharp or clear or life-like. Who cares if it’s colorized or if the street sounds are generic?
Someday a filmmaker will figure a way to integrate a higher rendering of historical footage with newly shot footage of name-brand actors.
This photo is actually new. (I think.) All he did was shave, drop ten pounds, and forsake the whiskers and man bun.
Message #1: “Have you revisited this scene? The serious girlfriend chastising the insouciant lout for being the proverbial overgrown adolescent. That behavior used to be the goal to avoid becoming the establishment and our parents. Now not just women are sounding like the cliched frustrated girlfriend, but society at large. We’re breaking up with Bill Murray and anarchist comedians.”
Message #1: “Some friends and comedy writers were talking about how it used to be a compliment to be kidded, ribbed and insulted. While these sort of sexual preference jokes are extinct, we can feel nostalgic for the time when someone as lofty as Jack Nicholson can take a gag at his own expense like a man and play along with it. Imagine the audience response if an Oscar host were to tell the ‘woke up with a poodle head in my bed’ joke. Technically 18 or 19 years ago, but boy, have times changed!
For decades I tried to catch the most highly-regarded Manhattan plays, and I’m very grateful that I made the effort. We all realize that the last Broadway era for great playwriting ended between 20 or 25 years ago. It’s all musicals now, and damn the sappy tourists for making this happen.
For me the mid ’70s to mid ’80s was close to a golden stage era. Which isn’t to say it was the greatest by the measure of any Broadway-veteran perspective, but simply a time when I was living near or in Manhattan, or often flying there from Los Angeles. Things were happening and I knew I had to get what I could.
It was a time in which certain well-reviewed plays (and one glorious musical, Sunday in the Park With George) seemed to speak directly to me and my experience…written by the youngish lions of that era (David Mamet, Simon Gray, Harold Pinter, Tom Stoppard, Peter Shaffer) and focused on anxious, unsatisfied white guys whose situations seemed to echo my own…taunted by various urban anxieties, ambitions…by aloneness, sex/love, existential voids, “who am I?”, “what’s it all about?” and “will my life always seem this much of an uphill thing?”
It almost makes me weep to reflect on that period, which for me began in ’76 and started to wind down in ’85. (I lived in Manhattan for a bit more than five years — ‘early ’78 to ‘mid ’83.) Film-wise and quite sadly for many of us, the last third of the ’70s marked the beginning of the end of the “Easy Riders, Raging Bulls” period, and the early ’80s would became known as an era in which “the bottom [had] fallen out of badness in movies,” to borrow from Andrew Sarris.
But the quality of the plays seemed wonderful; ditto the culture (mostly pre-AIDS) itself. Life was hard, of course (my finances were mostly a shambles until ’87) and the wrong people were in power and writers were stuck with typewriters and white-out, but compared to today it almost seems as if I was living a kind of half-charmed life. I could live and work and run around (my batting average was around .400, give or take**) and write without fear of wokester death squads, for one thing.
I wouldn’t say that my future seemed especially rosey or brilliant back then, but it certainly lay ahead. You don’t know what you’ve got ’til it’s gone.
The Reagan-era play that lifted me up and melted me down like none before or since was Tom Stoppard‘s The Real Thing (’84). Sappy as this sounds, it made me swoon. Okay, not “swoon” but it struck some kind of deep, profound chord. Partly because I saw it at a time when I believed that the right relationship with the right woman could really make a difference. That was then and this is now, but I was in the tank for this stuff in ’84. The play used the Monkees’ “I’m A Believer” as mood music, and I pretty much was one at the time.
I’m speaking of the original B’way production, of course, directed by Mike Nichols and costarring Jeremy Irons and Glenn Close. My admiration for Irons’ performance as Henry, a witty London playwright who resembled Stoppard in various ways, was boundless. Close, whom I was just getting to know back then, was truly magnificent as Annie. N.Y. Times critic Frank Rich called it “not only Mr. Stoppard’s most moving play, but also the most bracing play that anyone has written about love and marriage in years.”
(I went to see the 2000 B’way revival and was bitterly disappointed by Stephen Dillane‘s uncharismatic lead performance, which wasn’t even close to what Irons had brought.)
I was also floored that same year by James Lapine and Stephen Sondheim‘s Sunday in the Park With George, which opened at the Booth theatre on 5.2.84. It was one of the few B’way musicals that really reached inside, and it still makes me choke up when I watch it on YouTube.
I’m just going to list some of the plays that really hit the sweet spot between ’76 and ’85…I’m bypassing a few but here we go regardless:
Peter Shaffer‘s Equus, which I saw in London in the early summer of ’76. The great Colin Blakely was magnificent in the lead role of psychiatrist Martin Dysart (and better, I have to say, than Richard Burton was in the Sidney Lumet film version). I saw Anthony Perkins play the role in a B’way production of Equus in ’77, and I’m sorry to say that he underwhelmed.
A Broadway production of David Mamet‘s American Buffalo in early ’77. Directed by Ulu Grosbard with Robert Duvall, Kenneth McMillan and John Savage costarring. Four years later I saw it again (twice) at the Circle in the Square with Al Pacino as Teach. Pacino wasn’t a robot — he played certain lines and scenes a bit differently at times…experimentally, if you will. I was in heaven.
The elocutionary skills of British character actor Henry Daniell were more than formidable — they were delicious. He made the speaking of British-accented English a thing of beauty.
Consider Daniell’s cameo in the 1962 Mutiny on the Bounty (an uncredited role as “British chief court-martial admiral”) and particularly his reading of post-verdict commentary, which begins at 1:07. The dialogue is very precise and officer-class military proper, and yet curiously emotional when Daniell gets around to explaining and in fact lamenting the reason for the mutiny.
Daniell: “The articles [of war] are fallible, as any articles are bound to be. No code can cover all contingencies. We cannot put justice aboard our ships in books. Justice and decency are carried in the heart of the captain or they be not aboard.”