"Babylon" (2022): the Mystery of It All

Babylon (2022): “Boogie Nights” meets “Singin’ in the Rain.” Or to wonder how a filmmaker can simultaneously celebrate the remarkable power of movies while indicting much about the industry, exploring the ability to create and destroy, prop up and tear down, in all its swirling glory. Deliberate and wise in all the ways a maximalist like Baz Luhrmann is not, writer-director Damien Chazelle’s (“Whiplash,” “La La Land”) “Babylon” is “Singin’ in the Rain” as a tragedy, albeit one that’s also filled with satirical comedy. Like “Singin’ in the Rain,” “Babylon” reaches from the past into the cinematic present, with another fact-based fantasy—a wild montage of subliminally brief clips that build the arc of movie history from Muybridge and the Lumière brothers to nineteen-sixties modernists and onward to recent cinematic times. 

Margot Robbie, in another starring performance that feels like a new discovery, plays Nellie, an aspiring actress in the mid-1920s who’s sure that she’s a star–it’s something you can’t become but simply something you are or aren’t, she says. She sneaks into a big-time Hollywood party thanks to Manny (Diego Calva of “Narcos: Mexico,” excellent), who has about as little clout as someone at this high-profile carnival of debauchery can have. (Manny helped secure the elephant, which is somehow one of the more restrained methods of entertainment on hand.) This event, which Chazelle gives dizzying life with the same astonishing flair he brought to the opening sequence of “La La Land,” will launch each character’s trajectory into moving pictures, and the results range from screamingly funny to surprisingly moving to immensely complex in its look at a world that replicates humanity but doesn’t always practice it.

This isn’t to suggest Chazelle is the first person to acknowledge the high stakes and cold realities of this industry. But few have brought such exhilarating contradictions to a portrait of people drawn to the development of an escape and yet inevitably victimized by the implicitly ticking clock of fantasy. Also featuring typically excellent, mature work by Brad Pitt as aging star Jack Conrad, “Babylon” considers the constantly expanding potential of movies as well as their limits as influenced by both the values and instincts of the people both making and watching. Also recalling Chazelle’s “La La Land,” the Coen brothers’ “Hail, Caesar” and the classic "A Star is Born." But Chazelle brings both empathy and strange truths to the idea that human flaws are forgotten any time a great love or a great movie emerges out of nothing–while wondering what we gain when looking to art as an artificial instead of a real source. “Babylon” is about how we delight in the ways movies lie to us, that something filmed is immortal. New ways push against old institutions. Multiple revolving doors determine the life cycle of creativity, and the timeframe of a legacy.

Most filmmakers can’t even fathom this many big ideas in a project so gutsy in its technical and historical scope. As with much of his previous work, Chazelle is an essential chronicler of fierce dreams and heartbreaking compromises. In “Babylon,” subjective taste and objective identity collide, with movies never seeming more human than when they pursue euphoria and make it seem like time can stop, only to, no matter how high the peaks, eventually reach a point when the lights turn on, and you go and determine how to engage with what else is out there.  Like most American institutions — in politics, in religion, in family-focused suburbs and packed-together urban spaces — the institution of Hollywood has a seedy underbelly. It’s just that in Hollywood, the scandals feel juicier, like continuations of the stories we’ve seen onscreen. “The dream,” Joan Didion once wrote of Hollywood, “was teaching the dreamers how to live.”

Chazelle accomplishes this by continually and, seemingly, anachronistically referencing the future throughout the film. Visual and narrative references to other movies made later appear throughout (like Singing in the Rain, My Fair Lady, and Phantom Thread); by the end, the continuum is made explicit. This is a movie about how Hollywood casts a spell on all of us, while also churning through talented yet damaged performers. Much of that churn is predicated on technological changes, as well as the shifting tastes of the country. Most of it is just about money: who brings it in, who doesn’t, and who executives guess will maximize profits while causing as few headaches as possible. That’s the sense in which Babylon is a profoundly humanist film, mourning the tragedies that litter Hollywood histories. But it’s also a worshipful film, one that gladly buys into the Tinseltown dream, the spell, the mystery of it all. 

And so to the grand finale. Suffice to say that it includes a generous splash of “Singin’ in the Rain” (1952)—which triggers an instant desire for more Gene Kelly. Undaunted, Chazelle then offers a frenzied scrapbook of the medium’s greatest hits, with bits of Kubrick, Godard, Bergman, Stanley Donen, Paul Thomas Anderson and God knows what all pasted together. The implication is that Jack, Nellie, Fay, and the gang, delirious and doomed as they were, did not strive in vain, and that from their efforts bloomed the glory of cinema, to which “Babylon” is a crowning valediction. In the brave words of Jack Conrad, “What I do means something.” Source: www.vox.com

Weird Rivalry: Steve McQueen and Paul Newman

Steve McQueen's chronicler Marshall Terrill evenhandedly dishes on the King of Cool’s collisions with fellow superstars Paul Newman, Elvis Presley, and John Wayne. As cerebral San Francisco Police Lieutenant Frank Bullitt, McQueen, stuck with his Colt Diamondback in Peter Yates’ “Bullitt,” won critical acclaim and strong box office receipts on October 17, 1968. Guilty as charged for penning authoritative tomes about Steve McQueen going back to 1993’s Portrait of an American Rebel, Marshall Terrill doesn’t sugarcoat the actor’s ceaselessly fascinating, complex life as was evidenced by a “Biographer of the Year” accolade bestowed by The Arizona Republic. Terrill also served as executive producer of the documentary Steve McQueen: The Salvation of an American Icon, which offers an interview probing McQueen’s lifelong rivalry with Paul Newman, the Boys Republic alum’s competitive romantic streak with Elvis Presley over stunning fashion model-actress Barbara Leigh, and an evening when the King of Cool stumbled upon John Wayne backstage at an awards ceremony.

Broadway had a new lead in Hatful of Rain. At this point, however, one might recycle that old folklore axiom, “Be careful what you wish for, because you might get it.” The part often seemed to overwhelm Steve McQueen, especially as he later confessed, in terms of a basic technical capacity, such as voice projection and effectively handling lengthy dialogue passages. He further revealed, “I had this one big scene where the character, who’s a dope addict, gets delirious—and it really spooked me. I mean, each night, doing that scene I got more and more depressed. Got so I couldn’t eat, and I began losing weight. I felt lousy. There was so much about acting I still didn’t know.” Among the major publications covering his Broadway debut, only Variety found him “mildly effective” as Johnny Pope. Not surprisingly, McQueen was dropped from the part after six weeks, with the play closing a month later (October 13, 1956). Paradoxically, even the great achievement of getting into the Actors Studio had been followed by a letdown. The central Method guru at the Studio, Lee Strasberg, was brilliant but also bullish. McQueen’s first wife Neile Adams wrote, “Strasberg had a way of dissecting and criticizing an actor’s work that Steve found intimidating and frightening at the same time. Steve would say ‘I would rather take my chances outside the Studio.’” 

McQueen still learned a great deal at the Studio, but more and more it was about watching others present special scenes. Fittingly, both this perspective and a fear of Strasberg’s merciless criticism, was something McQueen shared with fellow Studio actor (and McQueen's idol) James Dean. People whose association with the Studio put them in the audience for a scene presentation by either Dean or McQueen would include: Marilyn Monroe, Shelley Winters, Eli Wallach and Carroll Baker. James Dean was so hurt by Strasberg’s criticism he threatened to leave the Studio. His vulnerability was later revealed when he confessed, “I don’t know what happens when I act—inside. But if I let them dissect me, like a rabbit in a clinical research laboratory, I might not be able to act again. They might as well sterilize me.” 

Also Marilyn Monroe felt anxious in this environment. It's said James Dean and Steve McQueen, who tried to woo her, only annoyed the iconic blonde star; in the case of Dean probably due to his neuroticism; in the case of McQueen, due to his naked ambition. It seems the only male sex-symbol that attracted her was Paul Newman, and Newman was in love with Joanne Woodward. Somebody Up There Likes Me was undoubtedly the source for McQueen’s beginning of his one-sided rivalry with Paul Newman. New York’s new golden boy after the death of James Dean, Newman now represented the antihero bar for young actors. Being an unbilled player to Newman’s star turn made McQueen set his goal on eclipsing this other blue-eyed, soon-to-be superstar. McQueen later accomplished this goal, for a time, during the 1960s. Yet, McQueen’s fierce pride paid a price, too. For example, he later had an opportunity to costar with Newman in the now celebrated Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969), but only if he received top billing. Being naturally generous, Paul Newman, responsible for offering the part to McQueen in the first place, was willing to go the standard compromise route of cobilling, but negotiations broke down when McQueen was adamant that he would have to be number one. 

McQueen never forgot a slight, whether real or imagined. And Newman was always the actor he had to beat, including McQueen’s request for more lines than Newman when they both appeared with an all-star cast in The Towering Inferno (1974), a film in which McQueen received top billing. The bottom line is that McQueen was a kid from the streets who brought that same take-no-prisoners mentality to acting. One might best demonstrate that philosophy by his cutting comments upon the death of Dean, a performer whom he both admired and aped in some of his early roles: "I guess now there will be more roles for me." With James Dean’s death, Paul Newman had become a new McQueen role model, too. Biographer Penina Spiegel drew the following analogy: “Paul Newman was everything Steve McQueen wanted to be: Newman acted, raced, he was sort of an intellectual, he conducted a private life and a private love affair with the same woman. Newman had a reputation for sensitivity and good breeding, yet he was indisputably masculine. Newman was verbal, he was bright, and he was seemingly comfortable in his own skin—all the things McQueen felt he wasn’t.”

Ironically, for all this arbitrary competition and envy toward Newman as a paper lion, McQueen’s attraction to no-account screen characters often seems Newman-like. For example, McQueen’s part in Love with the Proper Stranger was originally earmarked for Newman. And The Cincinnati Kid is very much like The Hustler, in which another young hotshot is pitted against a wily veteran—only the game has changed, from pool to poker. Paradoxically, by the time Le Mans (1971) finally appeared, even McQueen’s self-appointed rival, Newman, had released a well-received racing film, Winning (1969). In The Towering Inferno, Newman is saddled often with the most stilted dialogue. Toward the movie’s conclusion, after the fire has finally been extinguished, Newman and his lover (Faye Dunaway) are safely at the tower base, and he says of the burned out skyscraper, “Maybe we should leave it this way as a kind of shrine to all the bullshit in the world.” 

For critics of the movie, which received decidedly mixed reviews, this quote was a popular target. To illustrate, New York Magazine’s Judith Crist responded directly to the actor in her critique, “Not all the bullshit in the world, Paul—just in movies co-produced by Twentieth Century-Fox and Warner Bros.” A suite at the Wilshire hotel was where McQueen met his third wife, fashion model Barbara Minty, twenty-four years his junior. He had seen her in a Club Med advertisement, and he set up a movie audition for a female part in Tom Horn (1980). Ironically, given McQueen’s long one-sided rivalry with Newman, Minty initially thought the audition would be with Newman. How was Steve McQueen intertwined with Elvis Presley? Sonny West told a story of how the two met one day on the way to the studio in the mid-’60s. Elvis was in a limousine when McQueen pulled up on a motorcycle. They were pleasant to each other but the exchange was brief. The two legends really collided when they were competing for the affections of actress Barbara Leigh, who Marshall Terrill also wrote a book with: The King, McQueen and the Love Machine [2002]. Barbara Leigh was Steve’s co-star in his 1972 rodeo western, Junior Bonner.

Before she met Steve, Barbara Leigh was dating Elvis and Metro Goldwyn Mayer studio executive Jim Aubrey in August 1970. She then got the role of “Charmagne”, and she and Steve started seeing each other on the set of Junior Bonner, and even after the movie was completed. Barbara, Steve, and Elvis had a “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy regarding the people they were dating. Steve knew she was still seeing Elvis and that Elvis knew she was seeing Steve. So when Elvis would call, he’d ask, “How’s that motorcycle hick”? And Steve would ask, “Was that the guitar hick?” It wasn’t often that McQueen or Elvis had to compete for a woman, but Barbara Leigh, who was a stunner, was worth the chase. When you got down to it, Barbara was really in love with James Aubrey. She knew Elvis would never give up other women and realized she and Steve weren’t a great match. The film that Terrill regretted seeing McQueen turn down the most was William Friedkin’s The Sorcerer. That’s a very good film with Roy Scheider in the lead role, but McQueen would have given it another dimension and made it a classic. Friedkin [The French Connection, The Exorcist] would have pushed McQueen to greatness on that film. It’s a shame that he didn’t make that movie, because right around the time he did An Enemy of the People in 1977, he could have used a box-office hit.

Psychologist Peter O. Whitmer believes that Steve McQueen had what he called a “weird professional sibling rivalry” with Paul Newman. In retrospect, did Newman speak about McQueen on-the-record? That’s a very interesting question because I’ve never come across an article or interview where Newman commented on the record about McQueen either during his lifetime or after his death. I find this very telling given that Newman lived almost 30 years after McQueen passed away. Newman’s lifelong friend, A.E. Hotchner, writes about visiting Newman on the set of The Towering Inferno. Hotchner said that Newman was very unhappy with himself and McQueen, going so far as to call McQueen "chicken shit" for counting up the lines in the screenplay and demanding parity. — Steve McQueen: The Great Escape (2009) by Wes D. Gehring 

Happy New Year 2023!

Gloria DeHaven.

Dorothy Lamour.

Joan Crawford.

Rhonda Fleming.

Jean Shepherd's elegy to JFK

For nearly sixty years, there have been widespread suspicions that JFK died at the hands of a conspiracy, as did his brother Robert Kennedy a few years later. Although these “conspiracy theories” have been ignored or dismissed by nearly our entire mainstream media, they have inspired hundreds or thousands of books and films along with countless articles, and have been widely believed by large portions of the American public. The resulting loss of faith in our major institutions has been dramatic, leading to today’s intense popular skepticism on so many other issues, whether justified or unjustified. Our government has still never released all of its official records on the death of our 35th President, but after almost six decades that monumental cover-up may finally be starting to collapse.

Tucker Carlson has the most popular cable news show, and late last week he aired an explosive segment in which he declared that the JFK assassination had been the work of a conspiracy, with our own CIA heavily involved. His nightly broadcast audience is over 3 million and just one copy of his Youtube video has already been watched 1.6 million times. So these shocking claims from a major media outlet have now reached many millions of ordinary Americans, probably more than anything else on this topic in the thirty years since Oliver Stone’s Oscar-winning film JFK was playing in the theaters. Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. is a prominent public figure and best-selling author, nephew of the slain President and son of his murdered brother. He praised Carlson’s show as “the most courageous newscast in 60 years,” and declared: “The CIA’s murder of my uncle was a successful coup d’etat from which our democracy has never recovered.” Source: unz.com

The tape of what appears to be Jean Shepherd’s first broadcast after Kennedy’s assassination shows he did not talk about the assassination the way others did—he spoke soberly, seriously, about what he saw and had long seen and talked about—indications in the United States of serious problems. Some years later, he commented that he still had a tape of this show. Surely, he recognized that it constituted an extraordinary elegy: "Well, tonight we’re going to talk about Mr. Kennedy and a lot of other associated problems and facts of American life, if we can. If you’re expecting any great revelations, I don’t think you’ll get it. I remember the first time I heard about John Kennedy. I’ve always been a Kennedy man. The one thing that I have always noticed about Kennedy, that appealed to me specifically, was that Kennedy was a realist. And being a realist in today’s world is very dangerous. Because realism is not a thing that is easily accepted by Americans in the 1960s. And I always felt sorry for Kennedy because I recognized the fact that Kennedy did not give people a soft pap that most of them somehow wanted–on both sides of the political fence..." 

[Shepherd talked about Kennedy’s intelligence, humor, zest—all of which made people nervous.] "I have a feeling inside of me—there is a great sense of—apprehension, of fear. It’s a kind of free-floating thing—a strange unreasonableness—a fanaticism that is slowly beginning to grow in this land. About a year or so ago I began to be aware-of a growing belief in violence in America—a growing impatience with the processes that are slow and painful, the processes of democracy—shall we say. More and more people see themselves as solitary, beautiful, sensitive individuals—arrayed against an unseen, unthinking, grinding, totally an—insensitive society. You might say it’s the Holden Caulfield syndrome beginning to grow. Today, more and more, we are beginning to believe in passion as a substitute for reason." 

[Shepherd talked about the television broadcast from Arlington Cemetery.] "Here was just this little, simple grave—and—it was just a hole in the ground—there was this little, simple bronze coffin. And there was a quick shot, which they cut away from. I don’t know whether you saw this or not—but it was one of the most poignant shots of all. It was a little moment after the funeral party had left Arlington and—the cars were winding back up the drive over the bridge, back over the river to Washington. And the four soldiers were still standing guard over the grave. You saw, coming down from the lower left hand corner, two workmen. Did you see them? Dressed in overalls? Just two workmen with baseball caps, and they were coming to do the inevitable. There was a brief shot of them. They walked up, and one of them sort of kneeled down, and he started to pick things up around the grave. And they cut away from it very quickly. Maybe this was too much. I saw how small we are. Maybe this was one of the things that so profoundly moved me, and frightening about it, and at the same time, vaguely reassuring—it gave us all a sense of unbelievable loneliness... Maybe this is why people rushed off to football games—although that’s probably being kind to them. Because I wonder whether the British would consider having a professional soccer game in London—the day after the king died. I doubt it. We’re a different kind of people. This is not to say good, bad, or indifferent. Just very different. Sometimes you wonder just what kind we are. It was a terrible weekend. And I’m not so sure that we’re not in for a few more in the next hundred years."

As with Walt Whitman’s elegy to Lincoln, “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloomed,” the death of a president gave Jean Shepherd the opportunity to express sorrow in a form that encompassed some of his recurring themes. And the workmen seen fleetingly in a corner of the TV screen was a fine example of what Shepherd had frequently insisted—that the nearly unnoticed “cracks in the sidewalk” could reveal a truth. Shepherd’s style that week was atypical. Instead of giving the feeling of an informal dialogue with listeners, he spoke at them, in serious essays on subjects connected to the American temperament. He had indeed complained in broadcasts before about what he felt were naively unjust criticisms of his country by his countrymen. This must be understood in the context of the 1960s ferment—student unrest, civil rights struggle, civil disobedience, demonstrations, and riots in the streets. And the relentless America-bashing by Americans. Indeed, many Americans were criticizing America for not living up to its ideals. Shepherd admitted the problems, that America indeed needed to work to improve itself—but commented that other countries had even more problems, and those problems were inherent in humanity. He seemed to feel that the criticism had created a climate that resulted in violence and assassination, and in part, he implicated the popular “seriously funny” comic satirists and intellectual commentators of the day. On his next broadcast after the JFK assassination, he ruminated:

"I imagine right now there must be at least thirty-five thousand writers who earn a living on one principle—proving to all the other Americans that America has the worst way of life in the world. The dishonesty, the hypocrisy, blah, blah, blah—I think it must be based on an unbelievable lack of knowledge of the rest of the world. Mr. Kennedy—I think in so many ways—almost embodied America. He was the embodiment of us. His attitudes, the way he talked, the way he moved. The look in the eyes. And I think one of the great feelings of shock that all of us have is when he went, somehow a bit of our life went too. Because, you know, life is contagious. And I think a lot us caught it from Mr. Kennedy. Kids, are you listening? There is a limit, kid, to what you can do. Now you don’t know it—and maybe you’ll never find it out—but there is a limit in almost every direction you care to choose." —The Art and Enigma of Jean Shepherd (2005) by Eugene B. Bergmann

Paul Newman: one of the best actors of all time

For Empire’s February 2023 issue, we asked readers to vote for the best actors of all time – the silver-screen stars that always deliver, that have changed the game, and whose distinctive talents cannot be replicated. And the winners, in no particular order, are…

Marilyn Monroe

Notable roles: Rose Loomis (Niagara), Lorelei Lee (Gentlemen Prefer Blondes), Pola Debevoise (How to Marry a Millionaire), The Girl (The Seven Year Itch), Sugar "Kane" Kowalczyk (Some Like It Hot), Roslyn Tabor (The Misfits)

Oscars won: 0

Iconic line: "I wanna be loved by you, alone… Boop-boop-a-doop!" (Some Like It Hot)

A true movie star, in every sense, Marilyn Monroe's earth-shattering fame sometimes threatened to overshadow everything else – but beneath the ‘blonde bombshell’ sex symbol was the heart of a true artist, who was comfortable with her sexuality and femininity and used it to brilliant ends, in comedies and dramas.

Bette Davis

Notable roles: Margo Channing (All About Eve), Julie Marsden (Jezebel), Leslie Crosby (The Letter), Charlotte Vale (Now, Voyager), Baby Jane Hudson (What Ever Happened To Baby Jane?), Mildred Rogers (Of Human Bondage)

Oscars won: 2 (Jezebel, Dangerous)

Iconic line: “Fasten your seatbelts. It’s going to be a bumpy night.” (All About Eve)

Seldom has an actor emanated so much force on-screen: Bette Davis was a cinematic cyclone, sweeping through scenes, leaving co-stars dazed and debris in her wake. She took on one complex role after another, not caring if the characters were unlikeable, and aced them all. Her work still bites today.

Humphrey Bogart

Notable roles: Rick Blaine (Casablanca), Philip Marlowe (The Big Sleep), Frank McCloud (Key Largo), Charlie Allnutt (The African Queen), Sam Spade (The Maltese Falcon), Duke Mantee (The Petrified Forest), Harry Dawes (The Barefoot Contessa), Roy Earle (High Sierra), Harry 'Steve' Morgan (To Have And Have Not)

Oscars won: 1 (The African Queen)

Iconic line: “Here’s lookin’ at you, kid” (Casablanca)

The thing about Bogart is that his “iconic line” is basically every line he ever said. His laconic, tough-guy energy gave every line a spin of cool defiance that screenwriters rose to match. He wasn’t the tallest, strongest, or most handsome, and at times he barely seemed to move – but you could never take your eyes off him.

Marlon Brando

Notable roles: Stanley Kowalski (A Streetcar Named Desire), Terry Malloy (On The Waterfront), Vito Corleone (The Godfather), Colonel Kurtz (Apocalypse Now), Jor-El (Superman: The Movie)

Oscars won: 2 (On The Waterfront, The Godfather)

Iconic line: “I’m gonna make him an offer he can’t refuse.” (The Godfather)

Among the most influential screen actors of all-time, Brando hit Hollywood like a hammer in the early 1950s – fundamentally changing the definition of “good” acting, despite Truman Capote calling him "dumb as hell." Brando’s deeply-felt naturalism was magnetic, and all his famous difficulty was worth it for his undeniable power. 

Paul Newman

Notable roles: “Fast” Eddie Felson (The Hustler, The Color Of Money), Reggie Dunlop (Slap Shot), Frank Galvin (The Verdict), Hud Bannon (Hud), Henry Gondorff (The Sting), Luke Jackson (Cool Hand Luke), Butch Cassidy (Butch Cassidy And The Sundance Kid), John Rooney (Road To Perdition)

Oscars won: 1 (The Color Of Money)

Iconic line: “You don’t know what winning is, Bert. You’re a loser. ‘Cause you’re dead inside! Too high, Bert - the price is too high.”  (The Hustler)

Cool, laconic, capable of eating way more hard-boiled eggs than you – he was a bona fide movie star, film director, race car driver, philanthropist, and entrepreneur. Oscar Levant wrote that Newman initially was hesitant to leave New York for Hollywood, and that Newman had said, "Too close to the cake. Also, no place to study." The Hustler was the portrait of a sad man who's afraid to be a winner, that type perhaps was a first in the cannons of American cinema. Source: www.empireonline.com

While Hud does not shoot Homer in the film Hud, Lonnie nonetheless assigns him responsibility for his granddad’s demise. Old Homer moans and dies while lying across Hud’s lap. Lon pulls his dead granddad’s head out of Hud’s lap into his, accusing Hud of “fixing it so that he didn’t want to live anymore.” James Wong Howe gives us a high angle of Hud standing and moving to his right toward the Cadillac’s headlamps.  We cut to an instant of blackness before Hud enters the frame screen right, camera looking up. Hud stops in the center of this extraordinary shot, starkly but flatteringly lit against black, looking down at Lon and us: “You don’t know the whole story.” And then adds: “I guess you could say I helped him about as much as he helped me.” By now Martin Ritt may have assumed the audience would feel that no backstory could excuse Hud. But we must draw a vital distinction between explanation and justification in order to consider more thoroughly why Ritt’s desired effect was “lost in translation” from novel to film. First, the Hollywood-conditioned audience was likely pulling for Hud to be a misunderstood hero who will be redeemed by a good woman. Except for the attempted rape scene, for example, Newman is always photographed in classic three-point lighting, which enhances the star’s attractiveness. 

After the rape attempt, Hud spots Alma waiting at the bus station; “I’m sorry,” he says, cocking his hat. She reasserts her own libido and female power by stating an irony: she might have seduced him eventually “without the roughhouse.” Her silent stare at Hud when he responds, “Why didn’t you speak up sooner?,” fairly clenches Patricia Neal’s Academy Award for Best Actress. “I’ll remember you, Honey,” he says as she boards the bus, camera looking down on him from within. “You’re the one that got away.” Hud, the outsider, drifts to screen right and out of frame as bus and camera take Alma mercifully away from this “cold-blooded bastard.” But the original audience might still have wondered whether some part of Hud, a remorseful, tragic hero, really means, “You’re the one I could have loved had I not injured you so”? 

In any case, the film turns the novel’s antagonist into an ironic protagonist. This strongly suggests that Hud’s having accidentally killed his older brother Norman (Lon’s father) in a drunken car crash at age seventeen accounts for his need to protect himself from the guilt and loss. Homer “took that hard,” but reviled Hud long before the accident, we are surprised to learn. There are several instances of Hud’s aberrant behavior that might, with a different mode of narration, elicit compassion: Homer raised him harshly, kept him “driving that feedwagon” instead of letting him go to college (Horseman). In the novel Homer had sent him to the Pacific in World War II where he was left traumatized. Paul Newman’s biographer Daniel O’Brien writes, the actor “felt the audience had only seen the ‘cool’ superficial Hud Bannon, failing to pick up on the dark, amoral character underneath.” Newman said in 1967: "I got a lot of letters after that picture from kids saying Hud was right. The old man’s a jerk and the kid’s a schmuck. That son of a bitch that I hated they loved. So the audience makes a film their own – it depends what’s going on at the time in the country." 

Ritt, Ravetch, Frank Jr., and Newman transformed Hud somewhat out of the novel’s sociopath into what I call a wounded narcissist with antisocial traits, a role that proved the perfect vehicle for Paul Newman’s “sensitive rebel” persona, even if here Ritt thought to cast Newman against type as a raw villain. For in their urgency to portray Hud as no mere two-dimensional reprobate like his prototype in the novel, the filmmakers re-created the novel’s antagonist into the movie’s protagonist, yet evidently expecting the audience to condemn him nonetheless. As we know, in rebellious youth culture, the meaning of “cool” is that temporary ironic reversal of the very virtues and values the elders are trying to imprint onto the next generation, as if to question why the better part of wisdom is about never getting to have any fun. By the early 1960s, to be “cool,” perhaps, seemed integral to that separation and individuation process. It is important to understand that Hud’s original audience, did not need to endorse all of these behaviors in any literal sense in order for Hud’s acts to symbolize, even self-caricature, its own rebellious impulses. 

What was dominant in the post-World War II West was that version of capitalism known as Keynesianism, a holdover from the New Deal. It was based on economist John Maynard Keynes’s notion that capitalism, while the best of all possible economies, nevertheless needed government intervention, progressive taxation, and regulation to balance private profit with public well-being: that is, to minimize negative and optimize positive externalities. “An external cost occurs,” writes economist Steven L. Slavin, “when the production or consumption of some good or service inflicts costs on a third party without compensation. An external benefit occurs when some of the benefits derived from the production of some good or service are enjoyed by a third party”. As Granddad Homer tells Lon early in the film, “I expect you’ll get your share of what’s good,” implying the capitalist ideal of pursuing personal gain without costing others: 

“A boy like you deserves it.” Indeed, after a night of carousing with, and defending, Hud, Granddad tells Lon, “You’re going to have to make up your own mind someday what’s right and what’s wrong.” Homer in fact speaks for the filmmakers when he warns the teen, “Little by little the look of the country changes because of the men we admire.” A large contingent of the New Left youth, likewise, would succumb to what Adam Curtis analyzes in the BBC documentary series The Century of the Self (2002). While some activists remained altruistically motivated, and counterculture hippies were communal, according to Curtis, many left-wing participants despaired of any outward revolution in favor of social change brought about through each individual’s inward liberation from outmoded social constraints. Technological advances in mass production allowed for a certain “customized” consumerism touting everyone’s unique individuality. Christopher Lasch likewise studied the mass psychology of the 1960s and 1970s as having grown dialectically out of older forms of neuroses like hysteria and obsessional neuroses, associated with older phases of capitalism, to the growing psychiatric concern with narcissism. 

In 2003, screenwriters Ravetch and Frank Jr. reflected back that something of this spirit was emerging during the making of Hud: “We felt the country was gradually moving into a kind of self-absorption, indulgence, and greed – which, of course, fully blossomed in the ’eighties and ’nineties’” (Baer 260). And narcissism itself indicates some psychological wounding at its heart contracted, as Marcuse argued in Eros and Civilization (1955), in a political economy experienced as “surplus repression.” The narcissist,” writes Christopher Lasch, “has no interest in the future because, in part, he has so little interest in the past”. It is as though the logical extension of Martin Ritt’s Old Left contempt for Haight-Ashbury was the Weather Underground, about which Lasch writes: “The atmosphere in which the weathermen lived – an atmosphere of violence, danger, drugs, sexual promiscuity, moral and psychic chaos – derived not so much from an older revolutionary tradition as from the turmoil and narcissistic anguish of contemporary America”.

As we have seen, Hud freely obeys his impulses, confident of simply improvising his way out of consequences. Homer argues not merely from neighborliness but from wider social responsibility: “And risk startin’ a’ epidemic in the entire country?”, which would be a severely negative economic externality. Hud argues from what he cynically regards as business norms: “Why, this whole country is run on epidemics, where you been?” In this sense, Hud, released on the eve of the JFK assassination, is not just a modern western but very much a film of the long 1950s at the “hard gate” of 1960s unrest, soon to be cynically embroiled in disappointed idealism-turned-mass-narcissistic indulgence. Interestingly, Larry McMurtry felt that sacrificing the herd, Homer’s life work, was the moral imperative. But though he admired the film, the author of Horseman assigned fault to the screenwriters for “following my novel too closely.” As Lasch maintains, “Many radicals still direct their indignation against the authoritarian family, repressive sexual morality, literary censorship, the work ethic, and other foundations of bourgeois order that have been weakened or destroyed by advanced capitalism itself” (xvi). Hud’s “rebellion” was therefore understandable in the abstract, even if such was the pseudo-rebellion of the new culture of narcissism across the political spectrum. —“You Don’t Know the Story”: Horseman, Pass By and the Misprision of Hud (2021) by Randall Spinks. Source: https://brightlightsfilm.com

Paul Newman: "In those days theatrical agents took the train up from Grand Central Station to New Haven to scout the new talent at the drama school. There was apparently at least one in attendance for one of Yale’s four performances of Beethoven, a fellow from the Liebling-Wood Agency, Jim Merrick. He came backstage afterwards, gave me his card, and suggested I come see him in Manhattan. The Liebling-Wood Agency was a powerhouse on Broadway. It represented many of the era’s leading playwrights—such as Tennessee Williams, William Inge, Yip Harburg—as well as some of the hottest stage talents, including Marlon Brando and Montgomery Clift. So I began making day trips to the city just to test the waters, on those days when I didn’t have classes. I read a theatrical trade paper called Actor’s Cues to find out about open casting calls, and went to many of them at CBS and NBC. They were airing a lot of live television dramas then being shot and broadcast from New York, but I never got any jobs from these open calls. Jim Merrick wanted to sign me to the Liebling-Wood Agency, but his bosses didn’t want to make a commitment to me. In the meantime, unbeknownst to Liebling-Wood, I’d also been seen by another talent agent, Maynard Morris, from the big MCA operation—but again with no commitment or obligation. One afternoon, Maynard sent me out to see a theater producer that the Liebling-Wood Agency had already had me visit. That’s when I decided to leave Liebling-Wood. That summer, I told Jackie I wanted to give New York a real try. For the time being, she would remain in New Haven with Scott, while I moved into a tiny apartment on the corner of Spring Street and Sixth Avenue, what’s now considered SoHo. It was incredibly tiny and I stayed there with two other people—a Yale young woman named Joan Szell and her boyfriend, who were summer housesitting for the actual tenants. Jackie had an aunt who lived on Staten Island and we moved there. Plus, someone we met suggested I might be able to get a job as a model. I was broke. I owned only one suit. And when I got offered a cover shoot for a detective magazine, I took it. I was posed with a cute girl in a brassiere, and I was supposed to be grabbing her arm. I was really embarrassed—but they paid me $150, which was quite a bit of money then. I walked out of that studio thinking, “Boy, I can go out now and buy me a new suit for $39.95!” 

"I became a member of the Actors Studio, the extraordinary acting study group headed by Lee Strasberg and famous for preaching the Method—the art of using your own memories and feelings to inhabit a role. How, I still wonder, did I ever pass that audition? They didn’t, and couldn’t, have responded to my acting. I’m sure the other actors there wondered, “How did this son of a bitch get in here?” But when I mixed my confidence and energy with my real emotions—terror and fright (which came out as rage)—something genuine was going on, even if just by accident. I felt the Actors Studio members were the real actors, the bohemians, and they saw this kid from Shaker Heights wearing his seersucker suit and, well, I was in their world but definitely I was not a part of it." —"Paul Newman: The Extraordinary Life of An Ordinary Man" (2022) by Paul Newman

Frank & Marilyn: The Lives, the Loves

Marilyn received dispiriting career news: early in 1957, when Oscar nominations for 1956 were announced, she wasn’t on the list. Even worse: fellow Actors Studio actress Carroll Baker was nominated for Baby Doll, a role Marilyn had wanted. Perhaps the coup de grace: Don Murray, the newcomer launched to stardom thanks to being Marilyn’s leading man, was nominated for Best Supporting Actor. Poor Marilyn! “I never understood why she wasn’t nominated,” reflected Murray in later years. Both the movie and director Logan were also ignored by the Academy. “Marilyn had defied the system,” noted David Brown, “and you needed the studio behind you all the way to get nominations.” Don Murray felt that not only should Marilyn have been nominated, she should have won. “I thought Marilyn’s performance was so much richer, had so much more variety, and it was so much more interesting than Ingrid Bergman’s character in Anastasia,” he said. 

Unknown to many, Marilyn Monroe became a temporary but rather unstable member of the Rat Pack. Columnist Dorothy Kilgallen, an enemy of Sinatra, wrote that he dated some of the great beauties and stars of their day, including Lana Turner, Ava Gardner and Marilyn Monroe. “Others,” she claimed, “were fluffy struggling dolls of show business.” Although Joe DiMaggio socialized with Sinatra, he never completely trusted him, especially around Marilyn, causing a rift in the trio. Marilyn wanted to film What a Way to Go with Sinatra, but one night she decided that she preferred Gene Kelly as her co-star. At 20th Century Fox, executives wanted to co-star Marilyn and Sinatra in Pink Tights, a remake of Betty Grable’s 1943 Coney Island. Marilyn was open to the idea of co-starring with Frank in a film in which her character evolves from a prim schoolteacher to a torch-singing cabaret artiste. Frank’s moods—testy, difficult, unpredictable, rebellious, stubborn—were part of the package, as were Marilyn’s. Lauren Bacall, with her born-in-the-Bronx traditional Jewish upbringing, had been accustomed to far less volatile behavior when it came to relationships. Bogie had been “a pussycat.” Bacall had been romanced by Sinatra, but they broke up their announced engagement.

Since marrying Marilyn, Arthur had bought a second farmhouse in Roxbury, Connecticut, an upgrade from his previous home, where he and his ex-wife had lived since 1947, after the success of his play All My Sons. Pleased that Arthur’s property lent itself to improvement, she had an idea. Since she’d once met fabled architect Frank Lloyd Wright, she contacted him with a request—would he be interested in designing her “dream home”? He traveled to the site and came up with a rendering of a home that perhaps a Joseph Schenck or a Darryl Zanuck could afford. She loved it. But it was hardly Arthur Miller’s idea of a “dream home.” And the cost! The pool alone would have been $250,000 ($2.2 million in today’s dollars).  Marilyn faced reality: since Wright’s dream house was out of the question, she suggested to Arthur that they make some improvements: raise the roof of the house, add a guest bedroom, get a TV set, and she would do some inexpensive redecorating that would require very little reconstruction. Miller was agreeable. He was handy, describing himself as “a born carpenter and mechanic.” He’d been building things since he was seven.

When Glenn Ford announced Marilyn as the winner of the Golden Globe, there was prolonged applause as she made her way to the podium. When Ford handed her the statuette, she smiled broadly, turned to the audience, and clutched the award to her bosom. In a breathy voice, she said, “Thank you with all my heart.” According to Peter Lawford’s manager, Milton Ebbins, whose comments echoed those of Sinatra’s crony Jilly Rizzo, Frank was in love with Marilyn. Frank thought Marilyn was a great beauty in the same league than Ava Gardner. Marilyn confided in those closest to her that Frank was a skillful, unselfish lover. When they asked how Frank and DiMaggio compared, she purportedly replied: “He’s no Joe.” Frank dared to employ a highly dangerous tactic: he began having sex with Pat Lawford—Peter’s wife, RFK’s sister—hoping he could get her to use her influence with her brothers to let up on the mob. What he got was the undying enmity of Robert Kennedy, who learned about it when J. Edgar Hoover played him audiotapes of a Sinatra's phone conversation with Sam Giancana, during which the information was disclosed. Bobby demanded that his brother sever all ties with Frank. 

Frank needed some breathing room, and he began a highly publicized “romance” with twenty-five-year-old dancer/actress Juliet Prowse. They even became “engaged.” She later stated emphatically that the whole affair had been strictly for publicity, for both of them, never anything more. Prowse would later date her co-star Elvis Presley while filming GI Blues, with everyone waiting to see what Elvis would do next in his career after military service. Elvis's one and only meeting with Marilyn Monroe also took place backstage at the Paramount lot in June 1960. In GI Blues, Elvis  played Army Specialist Tulsa McLean opposite her nightclub dancer Lili (Juliet Prowse), and their onscreen romance was mirrored behind the scenes. Prowse later said: "Elvis and I had an affair... We had a sexual attraction like two healthy young people, but he was already a victim of his fans. We always met in his room and never went out." Frank's affair with Juliet Prowse apparently did not fool Marilyn for long, because she and Frank got back together. 

It was around this time that Sinatra consulted his loyal attorney for an opinion on what he was now contemplating: marrying Monroe. Meanwhile, when the lawyer realized that Sinatra wasn’t joking about marrying Marilyn—he wasn’t acting on a whim or an impulse; he was dead serious—he pointed out to his client how marrying her could be problematic. However, Frank’s mind was made up. If Marilyn was his wife, he said, chances were that everyone would back off, give her some space, and allow her to get herself together. They wouldn’t dare do otherwise. Frank told his lawyer Lew Wasserman that he wanted the marriage to take place in Europe (probably Paris); that way he wouldn’t have to deal with DiMaggio. He told Wasserman to make inquiries about where the best place would be to get married quietly and assured the attorney that he was going to give the whole matter a lot of thought. He likened this decision to a film project in development and said that he was going to talk to Marilyn about it. “And then we’ll see what happens…” No one knows whether that discussion between Marilyn and Frank—did she really want to marry him?—ever took place. According to Jilly Rizzo, Frank did propose before the year 1961 was out, and he was surprised when she said no to him.

Frank was completely supportive of Marilyn’s imminent return to the screen, although he, and the rest of the industry, knew Fox was drowning. Peter Levathes, the executive recently appointed head of production, was “a dark and brooding man,” recalled David Brown. Eventually, Marilyn had won not only the battle with Fox but the respect of the industry. Norma Jean had proven her point: Marilyn Monroe was not a “disposable” star. It’s unlikely that so many questions would have been raised surrounding her untimely death if her efforts at resuscitating her career had failed. According to Arthur Schlesinger, Bobby Kennedy, “with his curiosity, his sympathy, his absolute directness of response to distress, in some way got through the glittering mist as few did.” Bobby certainly seemed to have a crush on Marilyn. She denied rumors of the affair, although she knew it was the talk of Hollywood. According to columnist Victor Lasky, "The White House was shaken by Marilyn’s death. The truth was that there had indeed been a cover-up, one designed to protect the Kennedys by hiding their relationship with the actress."

During the course of that ill-fated July weekend at Cal Neva, several disturbing incidents took place. In her bungalow, number 52, in front of Frank and the Lawfords, Marilyn removed several syringes from her purse, placed them on a table, and, with the cool precision of a surgeon, calmly filled them with the contents of a few “vitamin” capsules she had broken open. They all gasped as she proceeded to inject herself in the arm. Sinatra couldn’t believe what he just saw. “Don’t worry,” she said airily, “I know what I’m doing. It gets into your system faster that way.” Frank immediately phoned Dr. Greenson: Marilyn was a mess! What the hell was Greenson doing? She ought to be in a sanatorium! Frank had done everything he could to make her stay at Cal Neva comfortable, including issuing special orders for healthful meals to be sent to her bungalow. That was Mama Dolly’s cure-all: eat, you’ll feel better! The food, though, was hardly touched. Things seemed to spin out of control and Marilyn overdosed on barbiturates. The Lawfords were panic-stricken, but Frank knew what to do—along with Peter and Pat, he walked her around the room, keeping her awake with coffee. “She wants to kill herself,” said Frank, “I’ve been there…”

Late in 1963, Angie Dickinson—whose friendship with Sinatra would stand the test of time—arrived in New York to promote her MCA/Universal film Captain Newman, M.D. Interestingly, the picture was based on Dr. Ralph Greenson’s World War II experiences with soldiers suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder. Ms. Dickinson said how proud she was of the picture, saying that it was one she would like the president to see (there was no question that she wasn’t talking about the president of Universal). Ms. Dickinson’s relationship with JFK was very much a topic of conversation within the inner sanctums of MCA/Universal. Ms. Dickinson spoke openly. She’d liked Marilyn, and had seen her not long before she died. “She looked gorgeous,” she said, “but when I spoke with her, she didn’t recognize me. There was no expression in her eyes. Her eyes had a blankness.” 

From the personal files of Marilyn Monroe: one of her diary entries dated June 7, 1962, reports a fall in the shower between 2 and 3 a.m. resulting in swelling and tenderness of the nose. Monroe was brought to Dr. Gurdin by her psychoanalyst, Dr. Ralph Greenson. Monroe was referred to Drs. Conti and Steinberg for X-rays. For her visit to the radiologists she used the alias ‘Miss Joan Newman,’ and that name appears on the paperwork with Monroe’s Brentwood home address. The pseudonym was probably inspired by the golden couple Paul Newman/Joanne Woodward. In the memory-filled, hazy, wee small hours of the morning, how often must Frank have thought about the girl he’d failed to save. Garson Kanin (alongside his wife actress Ruth Gordon) years later recalled, “I know that Frank was very sensitive about anyone bringing up Marilyn Monroe’s name. A friend of mine once made that mistake—it was at a dinner party, and Frank and his wife Barbara were among the guests—and my inquisitive friend told me that the look he got from Frank was scary, ‘I thought he was going to hit me,’ he said. But for Frank, I think that awful Cal Neva weekend was like a wound that never healed.” —Frank & Marilyn: The Lives, the Loves, and the Fascinating Relationship of Frank Sinatra and Marilyn Monroe (2022) by Edward Z. Epstein