The Grouchy Editor

There is a scene in the 2008 family movie Marley & Me that depressed me.  No, it had nothing to do with the dog.  I’m referring to a scene in which we meet a middle-aged, pudgy character named “Ms. Kornblut.”  The chubby, plain-looking woman, obviously cast for comedic effect, looked vaguely familiar.  I sought her out in the end credits: “Ms. Kornblut — (oh … my … god) — Kathleen Turner.”

Thirty years ago I sat in a Texas movie theater and watched as a Hollywood sex symbol was born.  Lawrence Kasdan’s steamy Body Heat was taking the country by storm, largely due to the performance of 26-year-old Turner, making her film debut as conniving murderess Matty Walker.  In casting Turner for this role, Kasdan accomplished a Hollywood rarity:  He’d found a sex kitten with gravitas, a Lauren Bacall for the 1980s.

Turner’s Matty convinced everyone in the audience (and in the film) that she was much more than just a pretty face.  Here is critic Roger Ebert’s summation:  “Turner … played a woman so sexually confident that we can believe her lover (William Hurt) could be dazed into doing almost anything for her.  The moment we believe that, the movie stops being an exercise and starts working.”  By the end of the film, when Matty luxuriates on a tropical beach while her latest male victim rots in prison, I could also envision Turner, the retired movie star, lounging on just such a beach in 30 years.  Alas, I did not foresee Ms. Kornblut.

Body Heat is classic film noir for more reasons than Kathleen Turner, of course.  It features a meticulous, sly script by Kasdan, a perfect foil in Hurt, and nuanced supporting turns from Ted Danson, Mickey Rourke, and Richard Crenna.  The musical score by John Barry is legendary.  The 2006 DVD contains a treasure-trove of trivia.  Among the tidbits:  Filming of this oh-so-hot movie occurred during the coldest Florida weather in memory.  It was so chilly during the famous band shell scene with Turner and Hurt that you could actually see the actors’ breath.  Body heat, indeed.              Grade:  A

Director:  Lawrence Kasdan  Cast:  William Hurt, Kathleen Turner, Richard Crenna, Ted Danson, J.A. Preston, Mickey Rourke, Kim Zimmer  Release:  1981

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I interviewed actress Beverly Garland one day back in the 1980s.  Garland was best known for playing Barbara Douglas, second wife of Fred MacMurray’s character on the 1960s sitcom My Three Sons.  Garland was reminiscing about the show when I asked her what it was like working with MacMurray.  She hesitated, her tone changed, and she said something noncommittal about MacMurray’s not being on the set very much.  While the other cast members were working, she said, MacMurray was usually off playing golf, or vacationing in Europe. Apparently, the veteran actor’s contract stipulated that he receive a 10-week hiatus every year – right in the middle of the TV show’s shooting schedule.  This arrangement did not sit well with some of MacMurray’s co-stars.

I think about Garland’s comments whenever I watch The Apartment, director Billy Wilder’s classic comedy-drama about a corporate nobody (Jack Lemmon) who lends his apartment to bosses for their adulterous trysts. MacMurray — forever identified with good guy Steve Douglas on My Three Sons — plays one of filmdom’s most memorable heels, the arrogant Mr. Sheldrake.  I wonder, was Fred MacMurray, nicknamed “the thrifty multimillionaire” by some colleagues, typecast in the role?

MacMurray’s slimeball executive is pivotal to The Apartment, but the film really belongs to Wilder, Lemmon, and Shirley MacLaine.  All three pull off the trickiest job in cinema:  juggling comedy and pathos and doing it right.

Although it opened to mixed reviews in 1960, the movie is now considered one of Wilder’s best.  The crusty Austrian-American filmmaker described The Apartment’s main theme as corruption of The American Dream.  That’s a depressing thought.  Sort of like finding out that Steve Douglas wasn’t such a great guy, after all.         Grade:  A

Director:  Billy Wilder  Cast:  Jack Lemmon, Shirley MacLaine, Fred MacMurray, Edie Adams, Ray Walston, Jack Kruschen  Release:  1960

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Thirty minutes into the notorious art-porn movie Caligula, distinguished actor John Gielgud plays a suicide scene.  As Gielgud fades away, he turns to fellow thespians Peter O’Toole and Malcolm McDowell and declares, “From evils past and evils yet to come, I now choose to escape.”

It’s a tough call whether the old actor was referring to ancient Rome or to the daily rushes he might have been privy to on the set of Penthouse publisher Bob Guccione’s chronicle of the depraved Roman emperor, Caligula.  Guccione had a point to make with Caligula, and his message came through loud and clear:  People can be pigs. The only question is whether the pigs were in Rome A.D. 40, or behind the cameras on a soundstage in 1979.

Nothing is implied in this movie, not when grotesque and graphic footage can be used.  Why hint that some poor slave has been castrated, when the actual snipping and gushing can be filmed in living color?  Why suggest sex is afoot when it can be shown in gynecological detail?  If there’s a bodily fluid or secretion with which you are unfamiliar, it’s all here for your edification.

It’s easy, maybe too easy, to trash a film like Caligula, particularly when so many people involved in it have distanced themselves from the production (along with Gielgud, O’Toole, and McDowell, astute viewers will spot young Helen Mirren).  You could argue that this kind of depravity exists in human nature and we all need reminders lest we fall from grace.  Look what happened, you could point out, when the survivors of Auschwitz and Treblinka began to die off — a lot of people went into denial about the reality of the Holocaust.

But there is a point where you say, “OK.  I get it.  Enough is enough.”  Guccione assembled big stars, a renowned writer (Gore Vidal), expensive and admittedly gorgeous sets (the budget was $22 million – a fortune in 1979).  All that talent, and yet Guccione’s “lesson” is no different from what I learned in kindergarten as I watched kids torment other kids:  People can be pigs.          Grade:  D+

Director:  Tinto Brass  Cast:  Malcolm McDowell, Teresa Ann Savoy, John Gielgud, Peter O’Toole, Helen Mirren, Adriana Asti, Mirella D’Angelo, Guido Mannari  Release:  1979

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