October is here! This is the only time of year you can talk
non-stop about werewolves and candy corn and Ray Bradbury and nobody looks at
you sideways, and I intend to take full advantage of it!
We’re starting with an
underrated gem in which George Hamilton plays Disco Dracula and Susan Saint
James is his pot smoking lady love.
The 70’s were a culturally awesome time for horror, much in
the way the 80’s would nail the fantasy genre. In 1972, American International
Pictures made a movie about an African prince who visits Transylvania, gets
turned into a vampire and sealed in a coffin until awakening in modern day Los
Angeles. In 1974, the late, great, forever in our hearts Gene Wilder teamed up
with Mel Brooks to astound one and all (including their investors) when they
made a hit comedy out of a Christmastime release of a black and white spoof of Universal’s
Son of Frankenstein. Sitting happily between Blacula and Young Frankenstein is 1979’s Love at First Bite.
I wouldn’t go so far to say it’s as good as either film, but it is good.
The story begins when the Romanian government commanders
Dracula’s castle as a gymnastics training center for Nadia Comaneci. He has two
days to pack up his coffin and his cobwebs and get out before they put in the
balance beams.
It’s not the worst thing that could’ve happened to this version
of Dracula. A sort of dusty gothic ennui has taken him over, and he’s been
bored. Not to mention terribly lonely. One of his few enjoyments comes from
American magazines that feature his latest obsession: fashion model Cindy Sondheim.
Dracula is convinced that Cindy is the reincarnation of his
great love, and had been Mina Harker in a previous life. In order to turn her
fully into a vampire so she can share his monstrous eternity with him, he has
to bite her on the neck three separate times. Getting kicked out of the castle
spurs him into action. He – along with his semi-immortal, bug eating sidekick
Renfield (played delightfully to the hilt by Arte Johnson) – are going to hit
up New York high society and find Cindy.
A lot of the comedy thereafter is about an out-of-touch
European relic trying to blend into the nightlife. But even more of it is about
how the expectations of movie audiences changed between 1931 and 1979, in the
same way Young Frankenstein had
explored genre shifts, but a little less elegantly. A running gag revolves
around whether or not Dracula has seen Roots,
and there are constant sly winks that hint the Hollywood version of 70’s New
York is authentic as the Hollywood versions of 1930’s London or Transylvania in
any time period.
There are terrific cameos from The Jeffersons; Sherman
Hemsley turns up as a corrupt preacher whose funeral service is interrupted,
and Isobel Sanford is an unsympathetic New York judge. Dick Shawn plays a
haggard police detective who doesn’t particularly want to believe in vampires,
but has to face facts, and Susan Tolsky gives a great, brief performance as
Cindy’s agent. There’s more than a little Sue Mengers in it.
George Hamilton is a charming, clever Dracula, weighing the
scales just right to evoke everyone’s memories of Bela Lugosi, but taking into
account the necessary angles to make him seem both human enough to carry the
story and inhuman enough to be funny.
If you’re of the camp that gets extremely annoyed by Susan
Saint James, I’d still suggest giving this one a try. I know several people who
can’t stand her, and a direct quote from one of them was: “I didn’t want to
punch Susan Saint James in the face in that Dracula thing you lent me.” If you
usually like her, you might enjoy seeing her with a very different look, as she
sports fluffy blonde supermodel hair and ultra-glam nightwear throughout.
The absolute highlight of Love at First Bite, for me at least, is Richard Benjamin as Dr.
Jeffrey Rosenberg. Jeffrey comes from the Van Helsing family, but changed his
name for professional purposes. He’s a psychiatrist to the rich and famous, and
very happily strings Cindy along in a commitment-free affair – until Dracula
appears and he almost instinctively transforms into an obsessive vampire
hunter. Except he can't quite remember how it's supposed to work. Vampires are the silver bullet ones, right?
It’s worth adding, though, that a serious familiarity with
Universal’s 1931 Dracula helps the
humour a lot. So if you’ve never seen the movie that started the sexy vampire
craze to begin with, start there. (Interesting tidbit: makeup artist William
Tuttle worked on both the 1931 Dracula
and Love At First Bite!) Otherwise,
consider adding this one to your lighthearted Halloween roster.
It’s one of the core questions of paranormal plotlines. In Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw, in Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House, and in John Saul’s Cry For the Strangers. Is it ghosts or madness? And which one is
scarier?
This post is for Realweegiemidget’s Darlin’ DallasersBlogathon, an event dedicated to checking out the non-Dallas work of Dallas
regulars. I picked Patrick Duffy, who starred as Bobby Ewing – the initial main
character of the lauded primetime soap, and originator of the “it was just a
dream” shower reveal. Also, he sometimes hangs around with this crab:
In 1982, Duffy starred in a TV movie adaptation of Cry for the Strangers.
He played psychologist Brad Randall, a man tired of the
Frasier Crane Seattle psych scene and in the mood to shake things up in his
life. He and his wife, Elaine, decide to move down the Olympic peninsula to a
creepy little town called Clark’s Harbor. Having lived my entire life in the
PNW, I can tell you straight up that Clark’s Harbor is a weird place, and not
just because of the looming threat of the supernatural.
It’s described in the original novel thusly:
“And it did look like a picture-postcard New England town. The
buildings that clustered along the waterfront were all of a type: neat
clapboards, brightly painted, with manicured gardens flowering gaily in the
spring air.”
The film faithfully represents this, making Clark’s Harbor
look and feel like Cabot Cove’s prettier, more bedevilled cousin. It’s bizarre. I have no idea why you’d go to
all the trouble of setting something in Washington just so you could make it
look like New England. Why wouldn’t you just set it in New England?
Anyway, the town is peopled with the usual New Englanders,
including a reticent sheriff played by Brian Keith, fishwives and fishermen in
northeast garb, gossipy café waitresses, and a whole bunch of
multi-generational locals who give Brad and Elaine a frosty reception.
But that’s the town’s way. Newcomers aren’t welcome.
Newcomers aren’t safe.
Not when the storms are coming.
Clark’s Harbor, turns out, is beset by Gothic weather that
would make the Brontë sisters go: “Hey, cool it with the atmospheric symbolism.”
Lightning forks across moody purple skies, clouds roll in over swaying fishing
boats, and storms break… and break… and break… against the strangely abandoned Victorian
mansion that Brad has decided he has
to live in. It’s on a hill called Devil’s Elbow. Across the bay from Devil’s
Kneecap, I’m guessing. Just up the coastline from That Bruise the Devil Can’t
Remember How He Got.
Everyone loves a massive coincidence, and in this story, the
coincidence is the Palmer family. Their son, Robby, was diagnosed in Seattle as
being severely autistic (this was in the early, early days of modern autism
research, and it was kind of a hot topic in literature for a while. It was only
three years after autism was officially separated from schizophrenia in medical
literature, and horror writers in particular latched onto it).
You’ll never guess who Robby’s Seattle therapist was.
Dr. Brad Randall.
The Palmers, wanting a quiet and more easily structured life
away from the city, moved down to Clark’s Harbor the year before. Since then,
Robby’s made a miraculous transformation. He now behaves like any other boy his
age, as though he’d never been anything different.
Brad right away finds this impossibly suspicious, but he can’t
ignore that it seems to be happening.
Like any reasonable mental health expert, Brad begins to
wonder if Robby’s recovery might be related to the high number of storms. It’s
not totally out of left field, on the first night the Palmers rolled into town,
they camped on the beach during a terrible storm – because if there’s one thing
parents of autistic children know is
a good idea it’s moving houses without a plan and sleeping in an unfamiliar
setting during a thunderstorm. The Palmers are on the ball. Weirdly, though, that first night is when Robby started
to change for the better.
In a casual session with Brad, Robby explains that he finds
the storms soothing, but they put him in a kind of trance, and afterwards he
doesn’t remember anything he did during the night before. (Storms only happen
at night, you see.) At least once he’s snuck out with his younger sister Missy,
and during a recent storm they lost track of the family dog…
The whole thing would just be a small peculiarity if it wasn’t
for the murders. Every storm, a stranger dies. Someone from out of town, or not
originally from Clark’s Harbor, turns up extremely dead in the morning. It’s
pretty gruesome stuff, too. They’re usually found buried up to their necks in
pits on the beach, then slowly drowned as the tide comes in. This is why the
locals don’t like getting too close to newcomers, and also why Brad, Elaine,
and the Palmers are all in more danger than they know.
There might be ghosts. Maybe. It's probably a serial killer, or the spirits that killed the last couple to live in Devil's Elbow, it's all very vague.
Which brings us to the biggest trouble with Cry for the Strangers. In its efforts to
leave things eerily unexplained, keeping the madness door and the ghost door
open at the same time for as long as possible, it doesn’t explain much. Or
anything, really. Events just happen. Tension builds, but never suspense. The
plotting is muddled and unsatisfying. The ending literally has Elaine asking
about the many plot holes while Brad stares into the distance and tells us we’ll
never know the answers.
It’s worth checking out only if you’re extremely bored, or
if you find Patrick Duffy with a cheesy academic-type beard hilarious, which I
do. (It looks very Amityville Horror,
but like the low-fat yogurt version. Brad is the diet soda of horror
protagonists. I love him.)
What’s totally worth checking out, regardless of your boredom levels, are the other
posts in this blogathon! Yay! The master list posts on Sept. 22 on Realweegiemidget’s
blog, so be sure to stop by. And if you’re in the mood for more Dallas
tie-ins while you wait, you can check out Larry Hagman in these I Dream of Jeannierecaps.
You know what we haven’t seen enough of on this show?
Trespassers. Trespassers and inaccurately represented historical figures.
Luckily, this episode will remedy that, and also provide me with even more
opportunities to drone on about the history of silver mining in Nevada. Because
that’s the part you really come to
read about.
Also, for a fun change, we get to watch an episode that's
frequently criticized by fans of Bonanza
for being boring and terrible. Let’s find out why!
It’s an easy, soft-weathered day along the Ponderosa side of
Lake Tahoe. The sun is shining, the birds are fluttering, we’re looking at an
actual location shot next to a real lake instead of a painting, and everything
is pleasant. The Cartwrights ride up to the scenic vista, in good spirits but
tired. Adam lets us know that it’s hot work moving cattle into the high
country, and Hoss lets us know he’s super mega thirsty.
They all hop down to the shore and start drinking the nice,
clean water. Little Joe almost falls in, but Ben pulls him up in time.
“Careful, Little Joe!” Ben chuckles, “That’s the closest
you’ve come to taking a bath in months!”
First of all, that is disgusting. Second of all, if that’s
the case then Ben should push Joe in there and not let him come out until he’s
clean. Send one of the others home for soap and spare clothes.
This is the last week you can enter the "I Love Lucy Anniversary Giveaway" and win a $75 gift certificate of Lucy goodies. Make a dent in your Christmas shopping or get yourself a swag bag! Enter here!
Just for fun, below is a video from Allure magazine chronicling the manicure styles that have been popular for the last century:
What decade do you like best? I tend to wear something that looks like the 70's French manicure and it usually accidentally gets sanded off during work, but if I could get it to last more than two seconds, I think I'd like to try the silver-tipped red.
Think fast! If you were producing a weekly radio show and
wanted a big name star to headline it, what kinds of performers would be the worst possible choices? Mimes?
Puppeteers? Dancers?
The year was 1936, and The
Packard Hour, a sponsored variety program recently transplanted from New
York to L.A, wanted to add some stardust. A little extra razzle dazzle. In
those days, big name movie stars were signing on to radio shows to bolster
their off-camera images and to help cross-promote both industries. People with
vaudeville experience, like Bob Hope, often yielded the best results, because
they came with built-in routines and a kind of showbiz professionalism that
straight up Hollywood types often lacked.
For some reason – maybe it was madness – the people at Packard
decided the best fit for their show would be Fred Astaire.
Fred Astaire.
On radio.
Where no one could see him.
So, okay, maybe you’re thinking that Fred had a lot of
non-dancing charms. After all, he scored a couple of hit records, he could be
very funny in his scenes with Ginger, he had range.
But the good people at Packard were not interested in his
range.
In 1936, you could finish dinner, hurry with the dishes,
turn on the big family radio set and all gather around to listen to Fred Astaire dance.
Naturally, that wasn’t the only thing that happened for the
entire hour. Nobody does an hour of live dancing, even if you can see them,
it’s exhausting. The rest of the show was filled in with songs from Fred’s
movies, new songs arranged by bandleader Johnny Green (who would later go on to
win an Academy Award for his work on Easter
Parade), numbers with singers Trudy Wood and Francia White, some skits with
the week’s guest star, and comedy routines by Charlie Butterworth.
If it helps you wrap your head around the whole idea, Fred’s
dances were always tap numbers. He would perform on a four by four wooden floor
rigged with microphones, and he would tap away in the studio. The sound and speed of those taps
were meant to express to the people at home the wonder of his skill.
It... doesn’t work.
There’s kind of a slapping quality to the sound, like
somebody spanking a coconut. It’s not as crisp as the footsteps on weekly radio
dramas, and even though it actually is
tap dancing, it doesn’t sound like
tap dancing. It’s very strange.
Jess Oppenheimer, who would later go on to produce I Love Lucy, got his first staff writing
gig on The Packard Hour. In his
autobiography, he writes:
“Astaire was an utter perfectionist, sometimes spending as
many as twelve hours at a time with the orchestra rehearsing dance routines
that no one would ever see.”
The show’s director suggested to Fred that he take it easy
and let a drummer tap out the sound-effects with his sticks, but no. That was
unethical. People would be tuning in to hear Fred Astaire dance, so Fred
Astaire was going to dance for them.
But despite Fred’s weird dedication to this ludicrous idea,
there was other trouble brewing.
Charlie Butterworth had started his career as a Broadway
regular. He was the upper class best friend in drawing room comedies, always
drawling out quips like his most famous “Why don’t you slip out of those wet
clothes and into a dry martini?” This was at a time when the hero in these
types of stories was the stalwart young man trying to get his life together,
while his sidekick was inclined to keep the party going. You can kind of see
why they thought he’d be a good accompaniment to Fred.
(Also, after his death, his likeness would become the inspiration for cereal mascot Cap'n Crunch, which is so weird I had to mention it somewhere.)
By the 1930’s, Butterworth had carved out a modest film
career and was doing well in radio with his same bumbling rich guy act. He had
a few problems, alcohol being chief among them, but writers liked working with
him, even if directors didn’t. The
Packard Hour figured he was worth the risk.
As it turned out, Charlie Butterworth and Fred Astaire hated
each other.
Nobody knew this, least of all Charlie and Fred, until they
started work on the first episode.
The most commonly cited reason for the tension was because
Fred didn’t like ad-libbing once the script was nailed down, and Charlie’s whole
shtick was ad-libbing. It was a clash of temperaments and approaches.
It got so bad, Fred Astaire didn’t even show up for the
first broadcast. Ginger Rogers and Jack Benny had to fill in for him at the
last minute.
By all accounts, after that first episode, Fred behaved
himself perfectly – as long as he wasn’t in the same room as Charlie Butterworth.
Their scenes together were always as brief as could be managed without the
audience getting wise to the rift, or suspicious about why the show’s two
biggest acts never spoke to one another.
After fulfilling his thirty-six episode contract, Fred
Astaire and The Packard Hour went on
summer hiatus never to return. Fred, of course, continued making movies where
people could see his feet while they moved. A wise decision.
He and Charlie Butterworth, surprisingly, worked together
again on 1940’s Second Chorus. It’s
pretty far from being Fred Astaire’s best film.
As for radio, you might be inclined to think that Fred would’ve
avoided it after this whole mess, but nope. As time went on, folks in radio
decided that versatility was indeed one of his selling points, so he often
appeared as a guest on other people’s shows.
In conclusion, they tried to make a Fred Astaire
dancing show where you couldn’t see him dance, and you should remember that the next time you make a mistake and want to crawl into a hole and die. Because at least you're not the guy who came up with that one.
Time once again to hear from regular guest contributor Daisy and the D&D gang! Like always, if you'd like to do your own guest recap of something, you can contact me at jvonhalsing@gmail.com for guidelines.
Episode four is called “Valley of the Unicorns.” It’s
written by Paul Dini again, this time with Karl Geurs, whom IMDb tells me worked on
Winnie the Pooh’s Most Grand Adventure
and The Jungle Book 2. So I guess we
can expect a lot of Uni for this one.
Oh joy.
We open to the scene of a spooky forest, where the trees
literally have faces and a fully grown unicorn is drinking from a pond.
Lightning cracks, and suddenly a pack of wargs descend upon the unicorn! As the
enemies face off, we jarringly cut to Uni, freaking out and jumping into
Bobby’s lap. Bobby asks her what’s wrong. Eric, who’s busy shaking rocks out of
his boots, says that it’s probably nothing, because Uni freaks out at the
slightest provocation. Which is true. But then Uni suddenly bolts.
The kids give chase, Eric awkwardly trying to yank his boot
back on.
Eric: “We can’t go anywhere until I get rid of the rocks in
my shoes!”
Diana: “Keep ‘em. Maybe the rocks in your head need company,
Eric!”
This is going to be one of those episodes where everyone is
a gigantic dick to Eric, isn’t it?
A shoemaker named Pierre Picaud, living in France in 1807,
was happily engaged to a beautiful, wealthy young woman. But the marriage was
not to be.
Three men who Picaud considered his friends plotted against
him and had him falsely accused of spying for England. Arrested and found
guilty, Picaud was sentenced to Fenestrelle Fort, where he was assigned as
servant to a rich Italian cleric. The cleric, over the years, grew to view
Picaud as something of a son, and when he died he bequeathed him his fortune.
Upon his release from prison, Picaud decided to seek his
revenge.
The first of his accusers was found dead with a knife in his
throat. The words “Number One” were engraved on the handle.
The second accuser was found poisoned not long after.
The third was different. He had married Picaud’s fiancé, and
so something more elaborate had to be planned. Loupian, as the third man was
called, was father to a son and daughter. Picaud lured the son into a life of
crime and arranged for the daughter to become a prostitute. It was all very
elaborate, and everything went according to plan.
Until a fourth man entered the picture.
Unbeknownst to Picaud, his three friends had asked for the
aid of a fourth in framing him. The fourth had declined, but had known of the
plot, and so was worried his life was in danger. He deduced Picaud’s identity,
and fatally stabbed him.
The police report was found, some years later, by a Parisian
true crime archivist by the name of Jacques Peuchet. Peuchet published it in a
collection of other intriguing murder tales in 1839.
Always on the lookout for inspiration, popular author
Alexandre Dumas picked up a copy of Peuchet’s crime stories. Though Peuchet had
a good idea of which stories would be interesting, he had an archivist’s skill for
narrating (it’s cool, Peuchet, so do I). But Dumas saw the potential in the Picaud
story.
He and his writing partner Auguste Maquet set about building
a novel around the revenge tale. They changed numerous elements, drawing on an
earlier novel they’d done called Georges,
about a vengeance obsessed young man lashing out at the bigotry he’d suffered
at the hands of his racist community.
For good measure, the Italian cleric was exchanged for
actual historical figure Abbé Faria, and an enormous secret treasure was added,
as well as some really good stuff about tunnelling out of an island fortress.
In 1844, the first instalment of The Count of Monte Cristo appeared and took France by storm. It
was, and remains, a terrifically good story.
My BFF Richard Chamberlain as the Count in 1975
And it was popular! It was an international sensation the
likes of which had never been seen before! Normally, a serialized novel would
be published gradually in its originating language, then collected, then
translated. But with Monte Cristo,
each installment was translated right away, and published in magazines around
the world. Everyone waited with bated breath to see what would happen to Edmond
Dantés in his obsessive quest for revenge.
Time to move forward thirty years and across the Atlantic to
the battlefields of the Civil War.
By this time, Monte
Cristo was well rooted in the literary consciousness, but it was far from
the mind of Major General Lew Wallace after the Battle of Shiloh. The number of
Union casualties reported climbed higher and higher, and it was becoming
apparent that the Confederates had won the meticulously planned battle. When
Lincoln demanded an explanation from generals Grant and Halleck, Halleck blamed
Wallace and his unit for the loss.
Wallace felt betrayed and slandered. He wrote to Grant
several times asking for a formal enquiry, and tried to encourage William
Tecumseh Sherman to help clear his name. Sherman urged patience.
The Shiloh controversy branded Wallace an ill-equipped
leader who had failed his country and his fellow soldiers.
After the war, Wallace decided to try his hand at writing
fiction. His first novel was about Cortez’s conquest of Mexico. Wallace, like
many other officers of his generation, had fought in the Mexican-American War,
and it was a subject that fascinated him. That first novel was called The Fair Hand, and it wasn’t much of a
success, but the writing of it had so pleased Wallace that he decided to tackle
a more ambitious project.
He would combine his own bitterness about the Shiloh affair
with the plot and structure of one of his favourite books, The Count of Monte Cristo; and since he had enjoyed the researching
of his first novel, he would choose another historical setting. This time, it
would be Ancient Rome during the life of Jesus. He was an agnostic and totally
uninformed about the place and time he chose, but he diligently studied all
resources available at the Library of Congress, and imbued the Roman military
with his experiences in the Union Army.
Veterans of the Civil War would find much familiar; unlike Monte Cristo, there was no need to
understand the social impact of French politics in the Napoleonic era. All you
had to know was the basic story of Jesus, and in 19th century
America, most people did.
Wallace called his second novel Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ. It was first published in 1880.
Author Lew Wallace
In the story of Judah Ben-Hur, three wrongful accusers
became one man in the Roman tribune Messala. When the betrayed Ben-Hur finds himself working
the oars aboard the slave ship, with every push forward he swears his revenge.
Just as Edmond Dantés, he finds someone to educate him and help him make his
fortune. Then he reappears in glitzy high society to begin his much, much simpler plan of running over his
nemesis with a chariot. Judah Ben-Hur doesn’t like to waste time on panache.
Like Monte Cristo
before it, it was a runaway smash hit. It was the first novel to be blessed by
a Pope. It didn’t get a sandwich named after it, but it did have its own brand
of flour. (Tie-in marketing wasn’t really cohesive back then.)
Ben-Hur changed
everything for Wallace, even getting him a position as US ambassador to Turkey.
Unfortunately, he could never quite escape was the black eye of Shiloh. It wasn’t
until after Wallace’s death that Ulysses S. Grant officially explained that the
loss had not been Wallace’s fault.
By 1907, the story of Ben-Hur
was tightly woven into American popular culture. It was so ubiquitous that
Canadian silent film director Sydney Olcott decided to make a quick and cheap fifteen minute
silent film depicting the famous chariot race. Neither he nor the producing
studio had obtained the rights to do so, and the book was still under
copyright, at this time to Wallace’s widow.
In the early days of film, copyright infringement was par
for the course. Nobody in Hollywood cared, and the copyright holders felt that
there was little they could do about it.
Until Wallace’s widow and the
publishers of Ben-Hur, Harper &
Brothers, sued the pants off of Kalem Studios and The Motion Picture Patents
Company, dragged them all the way to the Supreme Court and in 1911 had the law
changed forever. From then on, if anybody wanted to make a film of any
previously published work still under copyright, they had to obtain the production
rights first.
And that brings us to our next batch of three men. These
three weren’t planning on framing anybody for treason, or scapegoating their
way out of a Civil War failure, they were trying to make a movie. It was 1925,
their names were Louis B. Mayer, Samuel Goldwyn and Irving Thalberg. They
needed a good idea, a framework for their next major project.
Ben-Hur hadn’t
been on anybody’s to-do list since the massive lawsuit, but as long as they
could get the film rights, why not?
It was a little more expensive than they were hoping. After
the copyright debacle in 1907, if you wanted to see a dramatization of Ben-Hur, you had to hit up a long-running
play produced by Abraham Erlanger. The play had run, enormously successfully,
for twenty-five years. The curtain had barely dropped on the final tour when
the Goldwyn Company came a-knocking. Erlanger would not budge on his price for
the production rights.
Expensive as it was, the three producers shilled out. There
was this vision of the chariot race being shot to look like a painting by
Alexander von Wagner, and nobody could shake it. It was a brilliant idea.
Wagner's painting. Click to embiggen.
1925’s Ben-Hur: A Tale
of the Christ was shot on location in Rome, at further expense. Everything
was replaced at least once, including the director and the stars. The finished
film was helmed by Fred Niblo, and featured Ramon Novarro as Judah Ben-Hur. The
scenes featuring Jesus were shot in two-tone Technicolor, and the chariot race
remains a spectacular feat of filming. The film clocks in at a comparatively
lean two and a half hours, most of it concerning the race.
For a fun Easter egg, you can look at the gallery of stars watching
in Roman garb as the chariots thunder by. There’s Louis B. Mayer himself, a
very young Joan Crawford, the Gish sisters, the Barrymore brothers, Marion
Davies, John Gilbert, Harold Lloyd, Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks, all
chilling at the circus maximus.
The production was expensive and nobody
made back what they put into it, but the film itself was a critical darling and
scored big time with audiences. The publicity was excellent, and helped
establish the new MGM studios.
Thirty years of relentless innovation and cut-throat deals
later, MGM was no longer the new kid on the block. But things weren’t
going so well financially. Television had begun to cut considerably into the
profits of every studio, and MGM was among those struggling to keep afloat. Discussions of a remake of Ben-Hur had started in 1952, but it wasn’t until
Cecil B. DeMille’s The Ten Commandments
raked in major cash for Paramount that the discussion became serious.
In 1957, MGM studio head Joseph Vogel announced that a new,
glorious adaptation of Ben-Hur would
begin shooting in 1958 and reach theaters in 1959.
One problem: nobody wanted to play Judah Ben-Hur.
The original choice, back in 1952, had been Marlon Brando.
By 1957, that seemed like a terrible
idea, so MGM approached the ever-golden Burt Lancaster. Lancaster shot down the
offer right away. He thought the script was boring, and the way it used Jesus
as a side character was kind of offensively weird (I love you so much, Burt
Lancaster). Paul Newman declined because his first major film had been 1954’s The Silver Chalice about Ancient Greece,
and he hated the beefcake ethos of epic films so much he’d vowed never to do
another. “I don’t have the legs to wear a tunic,” he quipped. Rock Hudson,
Leslie Neilson, and Geoffrey Horne also all said no.
Messala was easier to cast, since Messala is pretty much the
best role. Director William Wyler had gotten his first choice, Charlton Heston.
With nobody playing Judah Ben-Hur, though, there wouldn’t be a movie, so Wyler
asked Heston if he’d be willing to switch roles.
About two seconds after this happened, Kirk Douglas offered
to play Ben-Hur if they were really stuck and willing to pay him a ton of
money. Heston was cheaper and had already agreed, so it was all settled.
The production is best described as “lavish” and “costly” –
like every epic ever, it was too expensive and took too long to film.
But it did make its 1959 release date.
With a four hour runtime, of particular note is the chariot racing sequence. Again. It was an almost shot-for-shot copy of the 1925 version,
with some extended tension and an extra stunt or two.
At the Oscars, Ben-Hur
won an unheard of eleven Academy Awards; a record that would not be broken until 1997’s Titanic.
In 2001, the chariot race was once more diligently
recreated, this time for the Boonta Eve Classic podracing sequence in Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace.
And tomorrow, you’ll get a chance to see another adaptation
of Ben-Hur or another adaptation of The Count of Monte Cristo, depending on
how you want to look at it. This time it stars Jack Huston of The Huston Dynasty,
who was originally cast as Messala but had to switch roles when they couldn’t
find anyone to play Judah Ben-Hur.
Director Timur Bekmambetov is especially pleased with (surprise!) the
chariot race. He hasn’t copied the 1925 version, he’s decided to take a cue
from how Nascar is filmed on mobile devices by audience members. So, like a
YouTube video from Ancient Rome.
No matter how you feel about this latest version, no matter
whether it sucks or does just fine, no matter how nauseated those chariot sequences make you, it’s a good thing that they’re trying
something new with an old favourite.
Everything from
the Parisian archivist to the Wallace novel to the 1959 version of Ben-Hur happened because somebody was “out
of ideas.” And from one accounting of a true story, there have grown abundant
retooling and retellings of a fictional story, which has doubtless indirectly
influenced and melded with others on the road to creating new stories.
There’s often a sense, when a new remake or reboot comes
out, that you shouldn’t mess with the classics. But that’s malarkey. Every idea
needs to come from somewhere. So what
if the beloved film version of Ben-Hur
comes from Monte Cristo which comes
from an essay on Picaud, which comes from real life? It’s probably a safe bet
that Picaud got the idea for his revenge scheme somewhere else, too.
