Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? is a 1966 American drama film directed by Mike Nichols. The screenplay by Ernest Lehman is an adaptation of the play of the same title by Edward Albee. It stars Elizabeth Taylor as Martha and Richard Burton as George, with George Segal as Nick and Sandy Dennis as Honey.
At the time of the release of the film, Warner Brothers Records released a deluxe, gatefold two-LP record set which included the entire film's dialogue. The album was made before some of the film's profanity was toned down, so Martha's original "Screw you!" line that welcomes Nick and Honey is heard on the LP but not in the final version of the film. This is one of the only cases in which Warner Brothers released an album of this kind. This album is out of print, extremely rare and hard to find. It has not been released on CD. A single-LP release featured dialogue excerpts and Alex North's score; this album was issued on CD by DRG in 2006.
The choice of Taylor -- at the time regarded as one of the most beautiful women in the world -- to play the frumpy, fifty-ish Martha surprised many, but the actress gained thirty pounds for the role and her performance (along with those of Burton, Segal and Dennis) was ultimately praised. According to Edward Albee, he had been told that Bette Davis and James Mason were going to play "Martha" and "George" — in the script, Martha references Davis and quotes her famous "What a dump!" line from the film Beyond the Forest (1949) — and was surprised by the Burton/Taylor casting, but stated that Taylor was quite good, and Burton was incredible.
The film was the only one to be nominated in every eligible category at the Academy Awards. Each of the four main actors was nominated for an Oscar but only Taylor and Sandy Dennis (Honey) won, for Best Actress and Supporting Actress, respectively. The film also won the Black and White Cinematography award for Haskell Wexler's stark, black-and-white camera work (it was the last film to win before the category was eliminated) and for Best Art Direction (Richard Sylbert, George James Hopkins). It was the first film to have its entire credited cast be nominated for acting Oscars. The film received the BAFTA Award for Best Film from any Source.
A Man and His Music + Ella + Jobim was a 1967 television special starring Frank Sinatra, Ella Fitzgerald, and Antonio Carlos Jobim, accompanied by the orchestras of Nelson Riddle and Gordon Jenkins. The medley that Jobim & Sinatra sing together was arranged by Claus Ogerman.
Earlier in the year Sinatra had recorded the album Francis Albert Sinatra & Antonio Carlos Jobim with Jobim, and this show offered a rare opportunity to see them both in live performance.
Sinatra had featured Ella on his Timex television shows in the late 1950s, and this show marked their first televisual appearance together since then, and their last until a series of live concerts at Caesars Palace in 1974.
Before Bond, before Bourne, there was Bonisseur de la Bath explains the Wall Street Journal. Created in 1949 by French thriller writer Jean Bruce (four years before Ian Fleming published his first Bond adventure, "Casino Royale"), Hubert Bonisseur de la Bath, otherwise known as OSS 117, was the original prototype for the globe-trotting, devil-may-care secret agent.
Bruce's creation -- a smooth-talking, Americanized Frenchman employed by the Office of Strategic Services (forerunner to the CIA) -- brought him fame and wealth in over 80 novels and half-a-dozen films before the author's untimely death in a car accident in 1963. Since then, Bruce's widow and children have churned out further OSS 117 adventures without ever hitting the heights of the originals.
But two new French films have successfully resurrected OSS 117 and introduced him to a new generation of fans. The first film, "OSS 117: Cairo, nest of spies," was released in France in 2006; it sold over two million tickets and was subsequently distributed throughout the world. A sequel, "OSS 117: Lost in Rio," came out in France last week and immediately shot to the top of the box-office charts.
Whereas the original books and films (most of which were made during the 1960s starring a variety of B-list actors like Frederick Stafford, John Gavin and Errol Flynn's son Sean Flynn as OSS) were fairly serious, though slightly tongue-in-cheek adventures, the new films are deliberately played for laughs. "We appropriated Bruce's character by taking all his faults and magnifying them," says Michel Hazanavicius, who directed both films. "We also decided to make the character purely French as opposed to an Americanized Frenchman."
Both films star 36-year-old French actor Jean Dujardin, whose good looks and comic timing have drawn widespread acclaim. "He has this handsome premier side but also an elastic face a bit like Jim Carrey, which makes him ideal for comedy," says Jean-François Halin, who wrote the first film and co-wrote the second with Mr. Hazanavicius. "I was watching the second film the other day where Jean has this scene with an American CIA agent and if you look closely you'll see him pull about 15 different facial expressions in 15 seconds."
Mr. Dujardin's portrayal of OSS 117 has also drawn numerous comparisons with a young Sean Connery.
"It's true that for Jean Dujardin's look in the first film we were inspired by Sean Connery in early Bond films like 'Dr. No,'" says Mr. Hazanavicius. "But in the second I wanted Jean to strike a more urbane pose so I got him to look at films like 'Harper' starring Paul Newman. There are two suits he wears in the new film, a dark blue and a brown, which are replicas of the ones Newman wore."
Twelve years separate the two films: the first is set in Cairo in 1955 with France still a colonial power to be reckoned with, while the second takes place in Rio in 1967 with the world on the brink of massive social upheaval. "We wanted to take OSS out of his comfort zone in the second film," explains Mr. Hazanavicius. "In the first film his brand of misogyny and racism is rarely called into question, but in the second he can no longer get away with such outrageous behavior."
The second film also provided the filmmakers with an opportunity to deliver a withering critique on Gaullist-era France. Near the end of the film OSS finds his boss on a list of higher-ups who have had their collaborationist past wiped from the record. His first reaction is to protest but he is quickly silenced when his boss tells him he is in line for the Légion d'honneur.
"We wanted to show how many French people deliberately turned a blind eye to what was going on during the Second World War in France and for years after," says Mr. Halin. "We wanted to puncture the myth propagated by de Gaulle that France was a country entirely made up of resistors of the German occupation. It was interesting to talk about this climate that still reigned in France at the end of the 1960s 40 years later."
Both Mr. Hazanavicius and Mr. Halin cut their comedy teeth working for Canal Plus, the French pay-per-view channel, through the 1990s on a series of satirical shows. The channel has become renowned for its irreverent tone and anti-establishment voice. It also helped to revolutionize comedy sketch shows in France by applying high production values and paying its writers competitive salaries.
"One of the things I learned working for Canal Plus was to make the kinds of things I would like to see and not to differentiate between my own tastes and those of the public," says Mr. Hazanavicius. "It may sound egotistical but everything I've ever done professionally has been done to amuse myself."
The only difference now is that Messrs. Hazanavicius and Halin are working on a grander scale. Both OSS films were bankrolled by French studio giant Gaumont, which, far from rushing "Lost in Rio" into production after the success of the first film, gave their screenwriters ample time to develop a second film that is not a carbon copy of the first and works well on its own terms.
With the success of the second film now seemingly assured, Mr. Halin is keen for there to be one last installment in the adventures of OSS. "I think we're two-thirds way through this character's psychological arc and now we need to finish it," says Mr. Halin. "Cairo was the period of innocence, Rio that of doubt, it might be interesting in the third film to see an aging Hubert trading on former glories."
Beatrice "Bea" Arthur (May 13, 1922 – April 25, 2009) was an American comedienne, actress, and singer. In a career spanning seven decades, Arthur achieved success as the title character, Maude Findlay, on the 1970s sitcom Maude, and as Dorothy Zbornak on the 1980s sitcom The Golden Girls; she won Emmys for both roles.
Invitation to the Dance (1956) is an anthology film consisting of three distinct stories, all starring and directed by Gene Kelly.
The film is unique in that it has no spoken dialogue, with the characters performing their roles entirely through dance and mime. Kelly appears in all three stories, which feature leading dancers of the era including Tommy Rall, Igor Youskevitch, Tamara Toumanova and Carol Haney.
The movie was filmed in 1952, but its release was delayed until 1956 because of doubts at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer about its commercial viability. The movie was a failure at the box office, but is regarded today as a landmark all-dance film.
The first segment, "Circus", set to original music composed for the film by Jacques Ibert, is a tragic love triangle set in a mythical land sometime in the past. Kelly plays a clown, who is in love with another circus performer, played by Claire Sombert. She, however, is in love with an aerialist, played by Youskevitch. To impress Ms. Sombert, the clown performs a dangerous high-wire act, and falls.
The second segment, "Ring Around the Rosy", set to original music by André Previn, tells several romantic stories tied by the exchange of a gold bracelet. The bracelet is originally given by a husband (David Paltenghi) to his wife Daphne Dale. She gives the ring to a flirtatious artist (Youskevitch), at a party, infuriating the husband, who stalks off. The artist gives the bracelet to a model (Claude Bessy), and the bracelet changes hands through various performers, eventually returning to the husband, who reunites with his wife.
The third and best segment, "Sinbad the Sailor", is a fantasy consisting of live action and Hanna-Barbera-directed cartoons set in the casbah of a Middle Eastern country. Kelly plays a sailor who is sold a magic lantern. This puts him in conflict with cartoon villains wielding swords, and falling in love with a cartoon harem girl. This segment includes complex dance sequences showing a live Kelly dancing with cartoon characters; predating many ideas which reappeared in Mary Poppins. (Walt Disney was a friend of Gene Kelly's, and Disney animators provided technical consulting for the MGM animators on blending live action with animation for this film.) Good use is also made of the original themes of Rimsky-Korsakov's Scheherazade by the durable MGM music department team of adapter Roger Edens, conductor Johnny Green and orchestrator Conrad Salinger.
The film won the Golden Bear for Best Film at the Berlin International Film Festival.
Jack Cardiff OBE, B.S.C. (18 September 1914 – 22 April 2009) was a British cinematographer, director and photographer.
His career spanned the development of cinema, from silent film, through early experiments in Technicolor (and, less successfully, Smell-o-vision), to filmmaking in the 21st century. He was best known for his influential cinematography for directors such as Powell, Huston and Hitchcock.
In 2000 he was awarded an OBE and in 2001 he was awarded an Honorary Oscar for his contribution to the cinema.
Cardiff was born in Great Yarmouth, Norfolk, and his parents were music hall entertainers. He worked as an actor from an early age, both in the music hall and in a number of silent films: My Son, My Son (1918), Billy's Rose (1922), The Loves of Mary, Queen of Scots (1923) and Tiptoes (1927). At 15 he began working as a camera assistant, clapper boy and production runner for British International Pictures, including Hitchcock's The Skin Game (1931).
In 1935 Cardiff graduated to camera operator and occasional cinematographer, working mostly for London Films. He was the first to shoot a film in Britain in Technicolor: Wings of the Morning (1937). When the war began he worked as a cinematographer on public information films.
The turning point in his career was as a 2nd unit cameraman on Powell & Pressburger's The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (1943); they were impressed enough to hire Cardiff as cinematographer on their post-war Technicolor A Matter of Life and Death (1946). Their collaboration continued with Black Narcissus (1947), which won Cardiff an Oscar and a Golden Globe, and The Red Shoes (1948). These films put Cardiff's talents in high demand, and a string of big-budget films followed.
After concentrating on direction in the 1960s, he returned to cinematography in the 1970s and 1980s, though on undistinguished films.
Cardiff died of natural causes on 22 April 2009, the same day as Ken Annakin, with whom he had worked on The Fifth Musketeer (1979). He was survived by his wife and his four sons.
Kenneth Cooper Annakin, OBE (10 August 1914 – 22 April 2009) was an English film director.
His career in feature films followed early experience making documentaries, he made his fiction film debut in 1947 with the Rank Organisation. The following year he moved to Gainsborough Pictures to direct three films about the Huggetts, a working class family living in suburban England. Annakin became known for a series of Walt Disney adventures including The Story of Robin Hood and His Merrie Men (1952), The Sword and the Rose (1953) and Swiss Family Robinson (1960).
He was later associated with another American producer, Darryl F. Zanuck, when he was hired to direct the British segments in The Longest Day (1962). As head of the 20th Century-Fox Studio, Zanuck endorsed Annakin's most ambitious project Those Magnificent Men in Their Flying Machines (1965). Annakin also directed the big-scale war film Battle of the Bulge (also 1965) for the Warner Brothers studio.
However, some of Annakin's better received films are smaller-scale comedies and dramas, including his episodes in Quartet (1948) and Trio (1950), based on Somerset Maugham's stories, Hotel Sahara (1951), Across the Bridge (1957), Crooks Anonymous (1962), The Fast Lady (1963) and The Informers (1963).
Annakin's last completed film was The New Adventures of Pippi Longstocking (1988), Ghenghis Khan (1992) was not completed. He died on 22 April 2009, the same day as Jack Cardiff, who had been his cinematographer on the 1979 film The Fifth Musketeer.
Despite claims that George Lucas took the name for Anakin Skywalker in Star Wars from his friend and fellow film director, Lucas denied this via his publicist following Annakin's death in 2009.
Starring Spencer Tracy (Drummond) and Fredric March (Brady), and featuring Gene Kelly (Hornbeck), Dick York (Cates), Harry Morgan (Judge), Donna Anderson (Rachel Brown), Claude Akins (Rev. Brown), Noah Beery, Jr. (Stebbins), Florence Eldridge (Mrs. Brady), and Jimmy Boyd (Howard). The movie was adapted by Nedrick Young (originally as Nathan E. Douglas) and Harold Jacob Smith, and directed by Stanley Kramer.
At the Berlin International Film Festival, March received the Silver Bear Award for Best Actor, and the film was nominated for the Golden Bear award. The movie was also nominated for the following Academy Awards: Best Actor in a Leading Role (Spencer Tracy), Best Cinematography, Black-and-White, Best Film Editing and Best Writing, Screenplay Based on Material from Another Medium. It was also nominated for BAFTA Best Film and Best Foreign Actor.
The film deviates from the play, most notably by reducing the unidimensionality of some of the characters. Furthermore, the friendship of Drummond and Brady is emphasized as they respectfully explain their positions in a cordial private conversation.
The film incorporates more of the actual trial transcript than does the stage play, most notably the incident in which Clarence Darrow is cited for contempt of court. The film includes a sequence where a mob harasses Cates in his jail cell and then threatens Drummond at his hotel. That same night, a conversation with Hornbeck inspires Drummond to call Brady as a witness, to expose the contradictions that result from a literal interpretation of the Bible.
The blurb for the 2002 DVD release of the film included the following factoid: "In 1960, Inherit the Wind became the world's first in-flight movie when Trans World Airlines used it to lure first-class passengers!"
The British film-making partnership of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, also known as The Archers, made a series of influential films in the 1940s and 1950s, and in 1983 were recognized for their contributions to British cinema with the BAFTA Academy Fellowship Award, the most prestigious award given by the British Academy of Film and Television Arts.
Their collaborations were mainly written by Pressburger, with Powell directing. Unusually, the pair shared a writer-director-producer credit for most of their films.
Michael Powell was already an experienced director, having worked his way up from making silent movies to the WWI drama The Spy in Black (1939), his first film for Hungarian émigré producer Alexander Korda. Emeric Pressburger, who had come from Hungary in 1935, already worked for Korda, and was asked to do some rewrites for the film. This collaboration would be the first of nineteen, most of which would be made over the next 18 years.
After Powell had made two further films for Korda, he was reunited with Pressburger in 1940 for Contraband, the first in a run of Powell and Pressburger films set during World War II. The second was 49th Parallel (1941), which won Pressburger an Academy Award for Best Story. Both are Hitchcock-like thrillers made as anti-German propaganda.
The pair adopted a joint writer-producer-director credit for their next film, One of Our Aircraft is Missing (1942). In 1943 they formed their own production company, Archers Film Productions and adopted a distinctive archery target logo which began each film. The joint credit "Written, Produced and Directed by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger" indicates their total joint responsibility for their own work and that they weren't beholden to any studio or other producers.
In a letter to Deborah Kerr, asking her to appear in Colonel Blimp, Pressburger explicitly set out 'The Archers' Manifesto'. Its five points express the pair's intentions:
We owe allegiance to nobody except the financial interests which provide our money; and, to them, the sole responsibility of ensuring them a profit, not a loss.
Every single foot in our films is our own responsibility and nobody else's. We refuse to be guided or coerced by any influence but our own judgement.
When we start work on a new idea we must be a year ahead, not only of our competitors, but also of the times. A real film, from idea to universal release, takes a year. Or more.
No artist believes in escapism. And we secretly believe that no audience does. We have proved, at any rate, that they will pay to see the truth, for other reasons than her nakedness.
At any time, and particularly at the present, the self respect of all collaborators, from star to prop-man, is sustained, or diminished, by the theme and purpose of the film they are working on.
They began to form a group of regular cast and crew members who were to work with them on many films over the next twelve years. Hardly any of these people were ever under contract to The Archers. They were hired film by film. But Powell and Pressburger soon learnt who they could work well with and these people enjoyed working with them. When Raymond Massey was offered the part of the Prosecuting Attorney in A Matter of Life and Death his cabled reply was "For the Archers anytime, this world or the next."
The remainder of the war saw them release a series of remarkably inventive films:
The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (1943)
The Volunteer (1943) a short propaganda film
A Canterbury Tale (1944)
I Know Where I'm Going! (1945)
A Matter of Life and Death (1946)
Black Narcissus (1947)
The Red Shoes (1948). Their most commercially successful film.
The Small Back Room (1949)
The Elusive Pimpernel (1950)
Gone to Earth (1950). A substantially re-edited version was released in the US as The Wild Heart (1952) by co-producer David O. Selznick, after a court battle with Powell and Pressburger. The film was fully restored by the British Film Archive in 1985.
The Tales of Hoffmann (1951)
Generally, Pressburger would create the original story (for all their films from 1940–1946 plus The Red Shoes) and write the first draft of the script. They would then pass the script back and forth a few times – they could never work on it together in the same room. For the actual dialogue, Pressburger would know what he wanted the characters to say but Powell would often supply some of the actual words.
They would both act as producers, perhaps Pressburger slightly more so than Powell, since he could sooth the feathers ruffled by Powell's forthright manner. They became their own producers mainly to stop anyone else poking their noses in, since they had a considerable degree of freedom, especially under Rank, to make just about any film they wanted.
The direction was nearly all done by Powell, but even so The Archers generally worked as a team, with the cast and crew often making suggestions. Pressburger was always on hand, usually on the studio floor, to make sure that these late changes fitted seamlessly into the story.
Once the filming was finished, Powell would usually go off for a walk in the hills of Scotland to clear his head, but Pressburger was often closely involved in the editing, especially of the way the music was used. Pressburger was a musician himself and played the violin in an orchestra in Hungary.
When the film was finally ready and Powell was back from the Highlands, it would usually be Powell that would be the front man in any promotional work, such as interviews for the trade papers or fan magazines.
Because collaborative efforts such as Powell's and Pressburger's were, and continue to be, unusual in the film industry, and because of the influence of the auteur theory, which elevates the director as a film's primary creator, Pressburger has sometimes been dismissed as "Michael Powell's scriptwriter", but Powell himself was the first to say, in many interviews, that he couldn't have done most of what he did without Pressburger.
British film critics gave the films of Powell and Pressburger a mixed reaction at the time, acknowledging their creativity but sometimes questioning their motivations and taste. For better or worse, The Archers were always out of step with mainstream British cinema.
From the 1970s onwards, British critical opinion began to revise this lukewarm assessment, with their first BFI retrospective in 1970 and another in 1978. They are now seen as playing a key part in the history of British film, and have become influential and iconic for many film-makers of later generations, such as Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola, George A. Romero, Wes Anderson and many more.
In the early 1950s the Powell and Pressburger began to produce fewer films, with notably less success. This may have been because they switched from making films for the British Rank Organisation to the Hollywood-led Alexander Korda. The Archers' productions officially came to an end in 1957, and the pair separated to pursue their individual careers. The separation was quite amicable and they remained devoted friends for the rest of their lives.
In 1960 Michael Powell directed Peeping Tom, which has been praised for its psychological complexity. On the surface, the film is about the Freudian relationship between the protagonist and his father and the protagonist and his victims. However, several critics argue that the film is as much about the voyeurism of the audience as they watch the protagonist's actions. For example, Roger Ebert, in his review of the film, states that "The movies make us into voyeurs. We sit in the dark, watching other people's lives. It is the bargain the cinema strikes with us, although most films are too well-behaved to mention it."
In this reading, Lewis is an allegory of the director of a horror film. In horror movies, the directors kill victims, often innocents, to provoke responses from the audiences and to manipulate their responses. Lewis records the deaths of his victims with his camera and by using the mirror and showing each of his victims their last moments, provokes their own fear even as he kills them.
Martin Scorsese, who has long been an admirer of Powell's works, has stated that this film, along with Federico Fellini's 8½, contains all that can be said about directing:
"I have always felt that Peeping Tom and 8½ say everything that can be said about film-making, about the process of dealing with film, the objectivity and subjectivity of it and the confusion between the two. 8½ captures the glamour and enjoyment of film-making, while Peeping Tom shows the aggression of it, how the camera violates... From studying them you can discover everything about people who make films, or at least people who express themselves through films."
Age of Consent (1969) is an Australian film which was the penultimate feature film directed by British director Michael Powell. The romantic comedy-drama stars James Mason, who also co-produced it with Powell, Helen Mirren, in her first major film role, and veteran Irish character actor Jack MacGowran. The screenplay by Peter Yeldham was adapted from the 1935 semi-autobiographical novel of the same name by Norman Lindsay. Lindsay was also the subject of the 1994 film Sirens by John Duigan.
Bradley Morahan (James Mason) is an Australian artist who feels he has become jaded by success and life in New York City. He decides that he needs to regain the edge he had as a young artist and returns to Australia.
He sets up in a shack on the shore of a small, sparsely-inhabited island on the Great Barrier Reef. There he meets young Cora Ryan (Helen Mirren), who has grown up wild, with her only relative, her difficult, gin-guzzling grandmother 'Ma' (Neva Carr-Glynn). To earn money, Cora sells Bradley fish that she has caught in the sea. She later sells him a chicken which she has stolen from his spinster neighbor Isabel Marley (Andonia Katsaros). When Bradley is suspected of being the thief, he pays Isabel and gets Cora to promise not to steal anymore. To help her save enough money to fulfill her dream of becoming a hairdresser in Brisbane, he pays her to be his model. She reinvigorates him, becoming his artistic muse.
Bradley's work is disrupted when his sponging longtime "friend" Nat Kelly (Jack MacGowran) shows up. Nat is hiding from the police over alimony he owes. When Bradley refuses to give him a loan, Nat invites himself to stay with Bradley. After several days, Bradley's patience becomes exhausted. Luckily, the problem is solved for him. Nat romances Isabel, hoping to get some money from her. Instead, she unexpectedly ravishes him. The next day, he hastily departs the island, but not before stealing Bradley's money and some of his drawings.
Then Ma catches Cora posing nude for Bradley and accuses him of carrying on with her underage granddaughter. Bradley protests that he has done nothing improper; finally, he gives her the little money he has left to get her to go away.
When Cora discovers that Ma has found her hidden cache of money, she chases after her. In the ensuing struggle, Ma falls down a hill, breaks her neck, and dies. The local policeman happens by while the woman is still lying on the beach, but he sees no reason to investigate further, since the old woman was known to be frequently drunk.
Later that night, Cora goes to Bradley's shack, but is disappointed when he seems to view her only as his model. When she runs out, Bradley follows her into the water. There, she finally gets him to see her as a desirable young woman.
Helen Mirren, who was a member of the Royal Shakespeare Company, and had played supporting roles in three films, was 22 at the time the filming of Age of Consent began.
James Mason met his future wife Clarissa Kaye-Mason (who was "Clarissa Kaye" at the time) on this film; she played the part of Bradley's ex-girlfriend in Australia. Their scene together was filmed in bed, and Kaye, who was recovering from pneumonia, had a temperature of 103 degrees F. After the filming, Mason began corresponding with Kaye, and the two were married in 1971, and remained so until Mason's death in 1984.
James Graham Ballard (15 November 1930 – 19 April 2009) was a British novelist and short story writer and former Japanese internee. He was born in the International Settlement in Shanghai, China. He was a prominent member of the New Wave in science fiction. His best known books are the controversial Crash, and the autobiographical novel Empire of the Sun, both of which have been adapted to film.
The adjective "Ballardian", defined as "resembling or suggestive of the conditions described in J. G. Ballard's novels and stories, especially dystopian modernity, bleak man-made landscapes and the psychological effects of technological, social or environmental developments", has been included in the Collins English Dictionary.
A January 2008 interview in The Sunday Times, promoting Ballard's autobiography Miracles of Life (2008), revealed that Ballard was diagnosed with advanced prostate cancer in June 2006. On 17 October 2008, the UK web site BookBrunch reported that Ballard's agent, Margaret Hanbury, had just arrived at the Frankfurt Book fair with a new manuscript from Ballard with the working title, Conversations with My Physician: The Meaning, if Any, of Life. The physician in question is oncologist Professor Jonathan Waxman of Imperial College, London, who was treating Ballard for prostate cancer. While it is in part a book about cancer, and Ballard's struggle with it, it reportedly moves on to broader themes. Hanbury is in conversation with publishers.
Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, Day actively promoted the annual Spay Day USA, and on a number of occasions, actively lobbied the United States Congress - and, it has been suggested, Presidents Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton - in support of legislation designed to safeguard animal rights. The Doris Day Animal League (www.ddal.org) is a group she funds. She was long known to stop her car on the Los Angeles freeways if and when she saw an abandoned, stray or injured animal. In 2006, The Humane Society of the United States merged with the Doris Day Animal League. Staff members of the Doris Day League took positions within The HSUS, and Day recorded public service announcements for the organization. The HSUS now manages Spay Day USA, the one-day spay/neuter event she originated
During the 1990s, interest in Doris Day grew again. The release of a greatest hits CD in 1992 garnered her another entry onto the British charts, while the inclusion of the song "Perhaps, Perhaps, Perhaps" in the soundtrack of the Australian film Strictly Ballroom gained her new fans.
During the late 1990s and early 2000s, the release of her films and TV series and specials on DVD further revived interest in her work, resulting in new websites devoted to Day and a growing number of academic texts analyzing various aspects of her career. In 2006, Day recorded a commentary for the DVD release of the fifth (and final) season of her TV show. Recently Day has participated in telephone interviews with a radio station that celebrates her birthday with an annual Doris Day music marathon. These interviews are available as downloadable podcasts.
While Day turned down a tribute offer from the American Film Institute, she received and accepted the Golden Globe's Cecil B. DeMille Award for lifetime achievement in 1989. In 2004, Day was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom but declined to attend the ceremony because of a fear of flying. Day did not accept an invitation to be a recipient of the Kennedy Center Honors for undisclosed reasons. Liz Smith, a long-time entertainment gossip columnist, and movie critic Rex Reed have mounted vigorous campaigns to gather support for an honorary Academy Award for Day to herald her spectacular film career and her status as the top female box-office star of all time.
Day was honored with a Grammy for Lifetime Achievement in Music in February 2008.
Day now lives on an 11-acre (45,000 m2) ranch near Carmel, California and often uses the name Clara Kappelhoff. Clara is a nickname originally given to her by her Tea for Two co-star Billy De Wolfe, and close friends have called her that.
Ball of Fire (also known as The Professor and the Burlesque Queen) is a 1941 comedy film about a group of professors laboring for years to write an encyclopedia and their encounter with a nightclub performer who provides her own unique knowledge. The film stars Gary Cooper and Barbara Stanwyck, with a supporting cast that includes Oskar Homolka, Henry Travers, Richard Haydn, Dana Andrews, Dan Duryea and Elisha Cook Jr.
A group of professors have lived together, isolated for years in an urban residence, compiling an encyclopedia of all human knowledge. The youngest, Professor Bertram Potts (Cooper), is a scholar of grammar and language who is researching modern American slang. They are accustomed to working in relative seclusion at a leisurely pace, but their impatient financial backer suddenly demands that they finish their work soon.
Venturing out to do some independent research, Bertram becomes interested in the slang vocabulary of saucy burlesque performer "Sugarpuss" O'Shea (Stanwyck). She is reluctant to assist him in his research until she needs a place to hide from the police, who want to question her about her boyfriend, mob boss Joe Lilac (Andrews). Sugarpuss takes refuge in the house where the professors live and work, despite Bertram's objections.
The professors soon become enamored of her insouciance, and she unexpectedly begins to become quite fond of them. She teaches them to conga and demonstrates to Bertram the meaning of the phrase "yum yum" (kisses). She becomes attracted to Bertram, who reciprocates with a vengeance by awkwardly (and inadvertently) proposing to her. She accepts, but before they can do anything, she is taken away by Lilac's henchmen. Lilac also wants to marry her, but only so she cannot testify against him.
The professors eventually outwit Lilac and his henchmen and rescue Sugarpuss. She decides she is not good enough for Bertram, but his forceful application of "yum, yum" convinces her to change her mind.
The script was written by Charles Brackett, Thomas Monroe, and Billy Wilder from a short story written by Wilder while he was still in Europe, and based in part on the fairy tale Snow White. The professors themselves were based on the dwarfs from Walt Disney's animated film Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. Although Ball of Fire was directed ably by Howard Hawks, Wilder thereafter directed his own films. The film was the second feature of 1941 to pair Cooper and Stanwyck, following Meet John Doe.
Wilder reveled in poking fun at those who took politics too seriously. At one point, 'Sugarpuss' points to her sore throat and complains "Slight rosiness? It's as red as the Daily Worker and just as sore." Later, she gives the overbearing and unsmiling housekeeper the name 'Franco'.
In 1948, the plot was resurrected as a musical film, A Song Is Born, starring Danny Kaye and Virginia Mayo and directed by Howard Hawks.
Filmed in lavish Technicolor, it featured a stellar supporting cast of musical legends, including Tommy Dorsey, Benny Goodman, Louis Armstrong, Lionel Hampton, and Benny Carter. Other notable musicians playing themselves in the cast include Charlie Barnet, Mel Powell, Harry Babasin, Louis Bellson, Al Hendrickson, The Golden Gate Quartet, Russo and the Samba Kings, The Page Cavanaugh Trio, and Buck and Bubbles. Other actors include Steve Cochran and Hugh Herbert.
Shaken and Stirred: The David Arnold James Bond Project is a compilation album of cover versions of James Bond film themes organized and produced by David Arnold. Featuring contemporary rock and electronic artists of the time, it was compiled by Arnold in 1997 and released on Sire Records. Arnold, following this project, would go on to compose the music for a number of Bond films.
David Arnold was a Bond fan from an early age and also a fan of Bond composer John Barry. In 1997, Arnold produced Shaken and Stirred: The David Arnold James Bond Project, an album featuring new versions of the themes from various James Bond films. The album featured a variety of contemporary artists including Jarvis Cocker, Chrissie Hynde, Propellerheads and Iggy Pop; a version of You Only Live Twice by Björk was recorded but not included on the album. John Barry, the composer of many of the themes on the album, was complimentary about Arnold's interpretation of his work; "He was very faithful to the melodic and harmonic content, but he's added a whole other rhythmic freshness and some interesting casting in terms of the artists chosen to do the songs. I think it's a terrific album. I'm very flattered." Barry contacted Barbara Broccoli, producer of the then-upcoming Tomorrow Never Dies, to recommend Arnold as the film's composer.
Arnold was hired to score the installment, and he has since scored the four subsequent films; The World Is Not Enough, Die Another Day, Casino Royale and Quantum of Solace. Arnold also co-wrote the main theme songs for The World Is Not Enough ("The World Is Not Enough" by Garbage) and Casino Royale ("You Know My Name" by Chris Cornell) as well as "Surrender" by k.d. lang which appears during the end credits of Tomorrow Never Dies.
To Kill a Mockingbird is a Pulitzer Prize-winning novel by Harper Lee published in 1960. It was instantly successful and has become a classic of modern American fiction. The novel is loosely based on the author's observations of her family and neighbors, as well as on an event that occurred near her hometown in 1936, when she was 10 years old.
The novel is renowned for its warmth and humor, despite dealing with serious issues of rape and racial inequality. The narrator's father, Atticus Finch, has served as a moral hero for many readers and as a model of integrity for lawyers. One critic explained the novel's impact by writing, "In the twentieth century, To Kill a Mockingbird is probably the most widely read book dealing with race in America, and its protagonist, Atticus Finch, the most enduring fictional image of racial heroism."
Songbirds and their associated symbolism appear throughout the novel. For example, the family's last name is Finch. The titular mockingbird is a key motif of this theme, which first appears when Atticus, having given his children air-rifles for Christmas, allows their Uncle Jack to teach them to shoot. Atticus warns them that, although they can "shoot all the bluejays they want", they must remember that "it's a sin to kill a mockingbird". Confused, Scout approaches her neighbor Miss Maudie, who explains that mockingbirds never harm other living creatures. She points out that mockingbirds simply provide pleasure with their songs, saying, "They don't do one thing but sing their hearts out for us." Writer Edwin Bruell summarized the symbolism when he wrote in 1964, "'To kill a mockingbird' is to kill that which is innocent and harmless—like Tom Robinson."Scholars have noted that Lee often returns to the mockingbird theme when trying to make a moral point.
Tom Robinson is the chief example among several innocents destroyed carelessly or deliberately throughout the novel. However, scholar Christopher Metress connects the mockingbird to Boo Radley: "Instead of wanting to exploit Boo for her own fun (as she does in the beginning of the novel by putting on gothic plays about his history), Scout comes to see him as a 'mockingbird' – that is, as someone with an inner goodness that must be cherished." The last pages of the book illustrate this as Scout relates the moral of a story Atticus has been reading to her, and in allusions to both Boo Radley and Tom Robinson states about a character who was misunderstood, "when they finally saw him, why he hadn't done any of those things ... Atticus, he was real nice," to which he responds, "Most people are, Scout, when you finally see them."
The novel exposes the loss of innocence (and innocents) so frequently that reviewer R. A. Dave claims it is inevitable that all the characters have faced or will face defeat, giving it elements of a classical tragedy. In exploring how each character deals with his or her own personal defeat, Lee builds a framework to judge whether the characters are heroes or fools. She guides the reader in such judgments, alternating between unabashed adoration and biting irony. For example, irony is employed by Lee as Scout witnesses the Missionary Society meeting, whose members mock Scout, gossip, and "reflect a smug, colonialist attitude toward other races" while giving the "appearance of gentility, piety, and morality". Conversely, when Atticus loses Tom's case, he is last to leave the courtroom, except for his children and the black spectators in the colored balcony, who rise silently as he walks underneath them, to honor his efforts.
The book was made into the well-received 1962 film with the same title, starring Gregory Peck as Atticus Finch. The film's producer, Alan J. Pakula, remembered Paramount Studios executives questioning him about a potential script: "They said, 'What story do you plan to tell for the film?' I said, 'Have you read the book?' They said, 'Yes.' I said, 'That's the story.'"The movie won three Oscars: Best Actor for Gregory Peck, Best Art Direction-Set Decoration, Black-and-White, and Best Writing, Screenplay Based on Material from Another Medium for Horton Foote. It was nominated for five more Oscars including Best Actress in a Supporting Role for Mary Badham, the actress who played Scout.
Harper Lee was pleased with the movie, saying: "In that film the man and the part met... I've had many, many offers to turn it into musicals, into TV or stage plays, but I've always refused. That film was a work of art." Peck met Lee's father, the model for Atticus, before the filming. Lee's father died before the film's release, and Lee was so impressed with Peck's performance that she gave him her father's pocketwatch, which he had with him the evening he was awarded the Oscar for best actor. Years later, he was reluctant to tell Lee that the watch was stolen out of his luggage in London Heathrow Airport. When Peck eventually did tell Lee, he said she responded, "'Well, it's only a watch.' Harper—she feels deeply, but she's not a sentimental person about things." Lee and Peck shared a friendship long after the movie was made. Peck's grandson was named "Harper" in her honor.
In May 2005, Lee made an uncharacteristic appearance at the Los Angeles Public Library for an event in her honor. It was hosted by Peck's widow Veronique, who said of Lee: "She's like a national treasure. She's someone who has made a difference...with this book. The book is still as strong as it ever was, and so is the film. All the kids in the United States read this book and see the film in the seventh and eighth grades and write papers and essays. My husband used to get thousands and thousands of letters from teachers who would send them to him."
Gregory Peck's performance became synonymous with the role and character of Atticus Finch. Alan J. Pakula remembered hearing from Peck when he was first approached with the role: "He called back immediately. No maybes. The fit was among the most natural things about a most natural film. I must say the man and the character he played were not unalike." Peck later said in an interview that he was drawn to the role because the book reminded him of growing up in La Jolla, California. "Hardly a day passes that I don't think how lucky I was to be cast in that film," Peck said in a 1997 interview. "I recently sat at a dinner next to a woman who saw it when she was 14 years old, and she said it changed her life. I hear things like that all the time."
Upon Peck's death in 2003, Brock Peters, who played Tom Robinson in the film version, quoted Harper Lee at Peck's eulogy, saying, "Atticus Finch gave him an opportunity to play himself". Peters concluded his eulogy stating, "To my friend Gregory Peck, to my friend Atticus Finch, vaya con Dios." Peters remembered the role of Tom Robinson when he recalled, "It certainly is one of my proudest achievements in life, one of the happiest participations in film or theater I have experienced." Peters remained friends not only with Peck but with Mary Badham throughout his life.
Charles Laughton (1 July 1899 – 15 December 1962) was an English Academy Award-winning stage and film actor, screenwriter, producer and two-time director.
While best known for his historical roles in films, he started his career as a remarkable stage actor. During a time when many serious stage actors despised the motion picture medium, seeing it only as a source of income, Laughton showed keen and serious interest in the pioneering possibilities of film, and later other media, such as radio, recordings, and TV, proving that quality work could be made available to audiences other than theatre-goers. He became an American citizen in 1950.
Laughton was born in Scarborough, Yorkshire, England, the son of Robert Laughton by his wife Elizabeth (née Conlon). His mother was a devout Catholic and he attended Stonyhurst College, a Jesuit school, in Lancashire, England. He served during World War I (in which he was gassed) first with the 2/1st Battalion of the Huntingdonshire Cyclist Regiment and later with the 7th Battalion of the Northamptonshire Regiment.
He started work in the family hotel business, while participating in amateur theatricals in Scarborough. Finally allowed by his family to become a drama student at RADA in 1925, Laughton made his first professional stage appearance on April 28, 1926 at the Barnes Theatre, as Osip in the comedy The Government Inspector, in which he also appeared at the London Gaiety Theatre in May. Despite not having the looks for a romantic lead, he impressed audiences with his talent and played classical roles in two plays by Chekov, The Cherry Orchard and The Three Sisters. He played the title role in Arnold Bennett's Mr Prohack (Elsa Lanchester was also in the cast), Agatha Christie's Hercule Poirot in Alibi, the title role in Mr Pickwick after Charles Dickens, Tony Perelli in Edgar Wallace's On the Spot and William Marble in Payment Deferred. He took this last play across the Atlantic and in it he made his debut in the USA on September 24, 1931, at the Lyceum Theatre (New York). He returned to London for the 1933-34 Old Vic Season and was engaged in four Shakespeare roles (as Macbeth and Henry VIII, Angelo in Measure for Measure and Prospero in The Tempest). In 1936 he went to Paris and on May 9 appeared at the Comedie Francaise as Sganarelle in the second act of Moliere's Le Medecin malgré lui, the first English actor to appear at that theatre, where he acted the part in French and received an ovation.
Laughton commenced his film career in England while still acting on the London stage. He took small roles in three short silent comedies starring his wife Elsa Lanchester, Daydreams, Blue Bottles and The Tonic (all 1928) which had been specially written for her by H. G. Wells. He made a brief appearance as a disgruntled diner in another silent film Piccadilly with Anna May Wong in 1929. He appeared with Elsa Lanchester again in a "film revue," featuring assorted British variety acts, called Comets (1930) in which they duetted in 'The Ballad of Frankie and Johnnie', and made two other early British talkies: Wolves with Dorothy Gish (1930) from a play set in a whaling camp in the frozen north, and Down River (1931) in which he played a murderous, half-oriental drug-smuggler.
His New York stage debut in 1931 immediately led to film offers and Laughton's first Hollywood film was The Old Dark House (1932) with Boris Karloff in which he played a bluff Yorkshire businessman marooned during a storm with other travellers in a creepy mansion in the Welsh mountains. He then played a demented submarine commander in The Devil and the Deep with Tallulah Bankhead, Gary Cooper and Cary Grant and followed this with his best-remembered film role of that year as Nero in Cecil B. DeMille's The Sign of the Cross. He also turned out a number of other memorable performances during that first Hollywood trip, repeating his stage role as a murderer in Payment Deferred, playing H. G. Wells's mad vivisectionist Dr. Moreau in Island of Lost Souls, and the meek raspberry-blowing clerk in the brief segment of If I Had a Million that was directed by Ernst Lubitsch.
His association with film director Alexander Korda began in 1933 with The Private Life of Henry VIII (loosely based on the life of King Henry VIII of England), for which Laughton won an Academy Award. However, he continued to act occasionally in the theatre, and his American production of Life of Galileo by (and with) Bertolt Brecht is legendary.
Laughton returned to Hollywood where his next film was White Woman (1933) in which he co-starred with Carole Lombard as a cockney river trader in the Malaysian jungle. Then came The Barretts of Wimpole Street (1934) as Norma Shearer's malevolent father; Les Misérables (1935) as Javert, the police inspector; Mutiny on the Bounty (1935) as Captain Bligh, one of his most famous screen roles, co-starring with Clark Gable as Fletcher Christian; and Ruggles of Red Gap (1935) as the very English butler transported to early 1900s America.
Back in England, and again with Alexander Korda, he played the title role in Rembrandt (1936). In 1937, also for Korda, he starred in an ill-fated film version of the classic novel, I, Claudius, by Robert Graves, which was abandoned during filming owing to the injuries suffered by co-star Merle Oberon in a car crash. (Out-takes from this film provided the material for a remarkable BBC TV documentary in 1965 entitled "The Epic That Never Was," narrated by Dirk Bogarde.)
After I, Claudius, he and the ex-patriate German film producer Erich Pommer founded the production company Mayflower Pictures in the UK, which produced three films starring Laughton: Vessel of Wrath (1938), based on a story by W. Somerset Maugham, in which Laughton's wife Elsa Lanchester co-starred; Sidewalks of London, a story about London street entertainers that also featured Vivien Leigh and Rex Harrison; and Jamaica Inn, with Maureen O'Hara and Robert Newton, based on a novel about Cornish smugglers by Daphne du Maurier, and the last film Alfred Hitchcock directed in Britain before moving to Hollywood in the late 1930s. The films produced were not successful enough, and the company was saved from bankruptcy when RKO Pictures offered Laughton the title role of Quasimodo in The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1939). Laughton and Pommer had plans to make further films, but the outbreak of World War II, which implied the loss of many foreign markets, meant the end of the company.
Laughton's film roles in the 1930s were among his finest and consisted almost entirely of the costume and historical drama parts for which he is best remembered (Nero, Henry VIII, Mr. Barrett, Captain Bligh, Rembrandt, Quasimodo and others). In his modern-dress film roles in his 1940s movies his acting style often led to variable results, particularly in a number of roles for which he was not ideally cast. He played an Italian vineyard owner in California in They Knew What They Wanted (1940); a South Seas patriarch in The Tuttles of Tahiti (1942); an American admiral in Stand by for Action (1942); a butler in Forever and a Day (1943); and an Australian bar-owner in The Man from Down Under (1943).
Still, some of these post-thirties performances could be remarkable when he came across a good script or a perceptive director, such is the case of a cowardly school-master in occupied France in This Land is Mine (1943), by Jean Renoir, in which he engaged himself most actively,in fact, while Renoir was still working in an early script, Laughton would talk to him about Alphonse Daudet's story "The Last Lesson", which suggested to Renoir a relevant scene of the film. He gave also an interesting portrait of a henpecked husband who eventually murders his wife in The Suspect (1944), directed by Robert Siodmak, who would become a good friend of Laughton. He played sympathetically an impoverished composer-pianist in Tales of Manhattan, and managed to transmit the eagerness of a little man who suddenly gets his only big chance to have success. He would also star in an up-dated version of Oscar Wilde's The Canterville Ghost (1944), and in spite of Wilde's original flavour being mangled in order to turn the story in a piece of wartime propaganda, he was able to recover irony and weary melancholia of the character as Wilde originally devised him.
Apart from these, he would enjoy his work in two comedies he made with Deanna Durbin, It Started with Eve (1941) and Because of Him (1946). He also seemed to enjoy himself both as a blood-thirsty pirate in Captain Kidd (1945) and as a malevolent judge in Alfred Hitchcock's The Paradine Case (1948). Laughton was on top form again as a megalomaniac press tycoon in The Big Clock (1948).
He had supporting roles as a Nazi in pre-war Paris in Arch of Triumph (1948); as a bishop in The Girl from Manhattan (1948); as a seedy go-between in The Bribe (1949); and a kindly widower in The Blue Veil (1951). He played a Bible-reading pastor in the multi-story A Miracle Can Happen (1947) but his sequence was deleted and replaced with another featuring Dorothy Lamour, and in this form the film was re-titled On Our Merry Way. However, an original print of A Miracle Can Happen was sent abroad for dubbing before the Laughton sequence was deleted and in this form it was shown in Spain under the title Una Encuesta Llamada Milagro.
Laughton made his first colour film in Paris as Inspector Maigret in The Man on the Eiffel Tower (1949) and hammed it up enormously alongside Boris Karloff as a mad French nobleman in a version of Robert Louis Stevenson's The Strange Door in 1951. He was a tramp in O. Henry's Full House (1952) in which he had a one-minute scene with Marilyn Monroe. He became a pirate again, buffoon-style this time, in Abbott and Costello Meet Captain Kidd (1952). He guest-starred in an episode of the Colgate Comedy Hour on TV which also featured Abbot and Costello and was notable for his delivery of the Gettysburg Address. He played Herod Antipas in Salome (1953, with Rita Hayworth in the title role) and repeated his role as Henry VIII in Young Bess (1953). He returned to England to star in Hobson's Choice (1954) directed by David Lean.
Laughton received Academy Award and Golden Globe nominations for his role as Sir Wilfrid Robarts in the screen version of Agatha Christie's play Witness for the Prosecution (1957).
He played a British admiral in Under Ten Flags (1960) and worked for the only time with Laurence Olivier, in Spartacus (1960) as a wily Roman senator.
His final film was Advise and Consent (1962), for which he received favorable comments for his performance as a southern U.S. Senator (for which accent he studied recordings of the late Mississippi Senator John Stennis). Laughton worked on the film, which was directed by Otto Preminger, while he was dying from bone cancer.
The Night of the Hunter
Laughton took a stab at directing a movie, and the result was The Night of the Hunter (1955), starring Robert Mitchum, Shelley Winters and Lillian Gish. This movie is often cited among today's critics as one of the best movies of the 1950s., and has been selected by the United States National Film Preservation Board for preservation in the Library of Congress. Unfortunately, at the time it was originally released it was a critical and box-office failure, and Laughton never had another chance to direct a film. He did not appear in the film, but worked solely as a director. The documentary Charles Laughton Directs The Night of the Hunter by Robert Gitt (2002) features preserved rushes and outtakes with Laughton's audible off-camera direction.
He had a long and resilient marriage to actress Elsa Lanchester, although, in her autobiography, Lanchester revealed that Laughton was gay. According to her own account, she was shocked to learn about this, but eventually decided to remain married to him. However, she claims as a result of this, she decided not to have children with him. The decision caused him great grief, as he longed to become a father, as many friends of Laughton, among them Maureen O'Hara and Stanley Cortez.
His wife Elsa Lanchester appeared opposite him in several films, including Rembrandt (1936) and The Big Clock (1948). They both received Academy Award nominations for their performances in Witness for the Prosecution (1957) - Laughton for Best Actor, and Lanchester for Best Supporting Actress - but neither won.
The Ruling Class is a 1972 British comedy film, an adaptation of Peter Barnes' satirical stage play which tells the story of a paranoid schizophrenic British nobleman (played by Peter O'Toole) who inherits a peerage. The film costars Alastair Sim, William Mervyn, Coral Browne, Harry Andrews, Carolyn Seymour, James Villiers and Arthur Lowe. It was produced by Jules Buck and directed by Peter Medak. Peter O'Toole described the movie as "a comedy with tragic relief".
Jack Gurney, the 14th Earl of Gurney (O'Toole), at first he thinks he is God and shocks his family and friends with his talk of returning to the world to bring it love and charity, not to mention his penchant for breaking out into song and dance routines and sleeping upright on a cross. When faced with unpalatable facts (such as his identity as the 14th Earl), Jack puts them in his "galvanized pressure cooker" and they disappear. His unscrupulous uncle, Sir Charles (Merwyn), marries him to his own mistress, Grace (Seymour), in hopes of producing an heir and putting his nephew in an institution; the plan fails when Grace actually falls in love with Gurney.
Gurney gains another ally in Sir Charles' wife (Browne), who hates her husband and befriends Gurney just to spite him. She also begins sleeping with Gurney's psychiatrist, Dr. Herder (Michael Bryant), to persuade him to cure Gurney quickly.
Herder attempts to cure him through intensive psychotherapy, but this is to no avail; Gurney so thoroughly believes that he is the "God of Love" that, ironically, he dismisses any suggestion to the contrary as the rambling of lunatics. The night his wife goes into labour with their child, Herder makes one last effort at therapy; he introduces Gurney to McKyle (Nigel Green), a patient who also believes himself to be Christ, or, as the patient puts it, "The Electric Messiah", who subjects an unwitting Gurney to electroshock therapy. The plan is to use the electroshock to (literally) jolt Gurney out of his delusions, showing him that the two men could not both be God, and so he must be operating under hallucinations. The plan works, and, as Grace delivers a healthy baby boy, Gurney returns to his senses and reclaims his true identity, proclaiming "I'm Jack, I'm Jack".
Sir Charles, still intent on stealing the title, sends for a court psychiatrist to evaluate Gurney, confident that his nephew would be sent to an asylum for life. He is once again thwarted, however, when the psychiatrist discovers that Gurney was a fellow Old Etonian, bonds with him, and declares him sane.
Gurney soon relapses into mental illness, however, this time believing himself to be Jack the Ripper. Now a violent psychopath with a puritanical hatred of women, Gurney murders Sir Charles' wife in a fit of enraged revulsion when the aging woman tries to seduce him. He frames the Communist family butler, Tucker (Lowe), for the murder, and assumes his place in the House of Lords with a fiery speech in favor of capital and corporal punishment. Ironically, the speech is wildly applauded, and the lords have no idea that it is the ranting of a madman, in contrast to society's reaction when Gurney believed he was Christ. That night, he murders Grace for expressing her love for him.
The story's ending is ambiguous; it is left open to interpretation whether Gurney gets caught, or escapes detection to kill again.
The play was adapted by Peter Barnes from his play with few major changes. It cost around $1.4 million, with O'Toole working for free (he was instead paid a great deal for the big budget Man of La Mancha, released by the same studio later the same year). It was filmed at a sprawling estate in Harlaxton with the interiors reconstructed on sound stages.
It was the official British entry at the Cannes Film Festival in 1972, but divided critics. The New York Times described it as "fantastic fun" and Variety called it "brilliantly caustic", but the Los Angeles Times called it "snail-slow, shrill and gesticulating" and Newsweek said it was a "sledgehammer satire". Despite mixed critical reaction to the film, O'Toole's performance was universally praised and garnered numerous pretigious awards and prizes, including an Academy Award nomination for Best Actor. Reportedly, when United Artists, its North American distributor, told producer Jules Buck that it would be cutting the film extensively for US release, Buck punched the company's London representative and bought the film back. Avco Embassy then bought distribution rights and cut its 154-minute running time by six minutes.
In 1974, following an earlier-than-normal TV screening of the film on BBC TV, which broke a gentlemen's agreement allowing a 'window' of theatrical distribution before any TV screening, the UK's Cinematograph Exhibitors' Association (the theatrical distributors' association) recommended its members black all future movies produced by Jules Buck.
In my case, self-absorption is completely justified. I have never discovered any other subject quite so worthy of my attention.
(Waldo Lydecker - Laura 1944)
