In a certain vague sense, I was “there” when this Arthur scene was shot on Fifth Avenue and 59th Street. It was the summer of ’80 and I was anxious and under-employed. I was standing across the street with several other onlookers, and I recall watching Liza Minnelli, Dudley Moore and John Gielgud performing this scene two or three times. I can still hear Minnelli yelling “get me a cop!”, over and over….the clapper, “cut”, etc.
I remember staring at Gielgud between takes, parked on a canvas chair, and wondering why he was sitting so stiffly…motionless, like a sphinx. Then I saw the film a year later, and Gielgud’s snooty putdown riffs were hilarious. He and Minnelli had the funniest lines.
Minnelli was 34, Moore was 45, Gielgud was 77.
Posted on 2.18.06, roughly six years before I embraced sobriety:
“Dudley Moore‘s drunken playboy was funny in 1981’s Arthur, but less so in 1988’s Arthur 2: On The Rocks. Arthur was a fresher film, of course, with a kind of champagne-fizz attitude. The sequel was boozier and more “real.” Moore was obviously older in ’88, his career wasn’t going quite as well, the performance felt desperate and the mood wasn’t the same.
“Drunks aren’t funny in real life unless you’re 19 and hanging with your drunken friends and as drunk as they are. You have to be fairly young and unsullied.
“True story: I was staying with some friends at a beach house on the Jersey shore when we were all 17 or thereabouts, and there was this big guy named Richard Harris who was half-sitting and half-lying on the living-room couch and about to throw up from too much vodka. I was coming down the stairs and Harris was suddenly on his feet and making for the bathroom (or at least the kitchen sink), but he wasn’t fast enough.
