More farewells
The Gregorian calendar year draws down to its end. The days in the Northern Hemisphere grow shorter and darker. Time to say a few more farewells to some who made an impression on this blogger.
Weekend updater (1959-2021)
The central contradiction about Norm MacDonald, at least as I see it, was that he was the typically bland and mild Anglo Canadian (born in Quebec City) yet there was a subtly subversive and anarchical quality to him that made him sort of an unlikely Great White North answer to Andy Kaufman. Behind that silly grin lay a lot of darkness. In recent years, mainly by listening to Dennis Miller’s radio show (then podcast), I became aware that other comedians held him in some kind of awe for his quirky personality and his stubbornly independent way of doing business. It was as though he lived in his own world under his own rules and the fun of dealing with him was trying to work it all out.
His humor was so deadpan and idiosyncratic that even producers at supposedly ground-breaking Saturday Night Live didn’t totally get it. After a half-decade in the anchor seat of the Weekend Update sketch (memorable line after the OJ verdict: “Well, it is finally official: Murder is legal in the state of California”), he was basically fired for allegedly not being funny. His noteworthy SNL characters included Burt Reynolds, Quentin Tarantino, David Letterman, Larry King, Richard Nixon and the recently departed Bob Dole. It is worth noting that two decades before the Trump presidency his standard opening for Weekend Update was: “Now the fake news.”
Over the years he showed up in several movies with his comedian friends (Billy Madison, Dirty Work, Man on the Moon, Funny People, Grown Ups), and he did a fair amount of TV work, including his own sitcom Norm at the turn of the century. He was also a welcome recurring character as Neil Flynn’s man-child brother Rusty Heck in The Middle, as well as doing a lot of voice work in various animated series.
True to form, he never went public with his decade-long battle with cancer. As he once said, “All my life’s about is cracking up people and them cracking me up and trying not to think about dying. That doesn’t cost very much money.”
Admiral Al (1936-2021)
Okay, here’s my Dean Stockwell story. It’s not much, but it’s what I’ve got.
I exchanged words with him briefly in the mid-1990s. On a visit to Dublin where I was spending time with my future wife, she surprised me with a ticket to a sci-fi fan event at the Royal Dublin Society campus, mainly because two of the four special guests (Jerry Doyle and Andrea Thompson during their brief marriage) were actors on Babylon 5, which was then in its TV heyday. The other two guests were Denise Crosby—best known at the time for having played Tasha Yar on Star Trek: The Next Generation—and Dean Stockwell, who had recently played Admiral Al Calavicci on Quantum Leap. When we attendees dutifully queued for autographs, the pace was relaxed and allowed for easy chit-chat with the celebs. I had plenty to say to the B5 actors, and I took the opportunity to tell Crosby how much I had enjoyed her work in Steve De Jarnatt’s movie Miracle Mile. She said it was one of her favorites too. When it came to Stockwell, I had little to say because I had barely watched Quantum Leap. I towered over him, as he was nine inches shorter than me, and that seemed to annoy him. He asked me who I should write the autograph to, and I said, “Scott” and then in an attempt to be clever, I quickly added, “You know, like Bakula.” “Likely story,” he muttered, barely looking up at me through his bushy eyebrows as he scrawled his signature.
So that’s my story. I did warn you that it wasn’t much. I regret now that I didn’t take the opportunity to ask some questions about his extraordinary life. The product of a show business family, he was a professional actor from the age of seven. He was the young runaway frustrating the romantic plans of Gene Kelly and Frank Sinatra in Anchors Aweigh. He was William Powell and Myrna Loy’s son in Song of the Thin Man. He was Gregory Peck’s son in Gentleman’s Agreement. He was Margaret O’Brien’s cousin in The Secret Garden. He had the title roles in Joseph Losey’s The Boy with Green Hair and in an adaptation of Rudyard Kipling’s Kim, starring Errol Flynn. And that was all before the age of fifteen.
Later he and Bradford Dillman would play young killers in Richard Fleischer’s Compulsion (based on the Leopold and Loeb murder case), and he would co-star with Katharine Hepburn, Ralph Richardson and Jason Robards in Sidney Lumet’s Long Day’s Journey Into Night. He dropped out for a while during a hippie phase, hanging out with Dennis Hopper and Neil Young (reportedly, he gave the latter the inspiration for his After the Gold Rush album) before making movies like Psych-Out, The Loners and The Werewolf of Washington.
He settled into TV work, but still made some notable big screen appearances, including Wim Wenders’s Paris, Texas, David Lynch’s Blue Velvet, Married to the Mob and Air Force One. In addition to Quantum Leap, he also had TV roles on Street Gear, The Tony Danza Show, JAG and the 2004-2009 version of Battlestar Galactica. He reunited with Scott Bakula for a 2002 episode of Star Trek: Enterprise.
Appropriately, his star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame was unveiled on February 29, 1992, i.e. on Leap Day.
A woman born with a very long name and who came from a whole family of people with very long names and who made movies with very long titles including one that had a profound effect on me (1928-2021)
As it happens, I began my tribute early to the Italian director Lina Wertmüller. A year and a half ago, French filmmaker Keyvan Sheikhalishahi sent me one of those weird social media challenges. As I recounted it at the time, the “challenge was to post photos of five filmmakers qui ont influencé mon regard et mon amour du cinéma au fil des années et qui m’ont donné l’envie d’aller voir leurs films, so basically the ones who have had a major influence of one’s love of cinema through the years and which inspired one to follow their work.”
There was no question that Wertmüller would be on the list. (For the record, the others were Ettore Scola, Wim Wenders, Sergio Leone and Terry Gilliam.) As a student at the University of California at Santa Barbara in the early 1970s, I walked into a campus auditorium with my then-girlfriend and my life—or at least my brain—was changed forever. It’s hard not to be impressed by a film which opens with the line: “I’m off to kill Mussolini. Screw the rest.” Giancarlo Giannini’s haunting eyes and massively freckled face also made quite the impression. A visual feast, it was part slapstick comedy, part tense political thriller, part sort-of love story. Giannini is an innocent from the country bent on revenge. Mariangela Melato is a cynical prostitute with anarchist political leanings. As I wrote previously, “It was about life, death, love, politics and everything else. It fit into my life so perfectly, I felt it had been made explicitly for me and the person I was seeing it with.”
I became a fan and sought out the filmmaker’s subsequent works. None ever matched Film d’amore e d’anarchia, ovvero ‘stamattina alle 10 in via dei Fiori nella nota casa di tolleranza…’ as it was originally titled. (Most people just call it Love and Anarchy.)
Born Arcangela Felice Assunta Wertmüller von Elgg Spañol von Braueich in Rome to a family of noble Swiss ancestry, she got her start with a touring puppet theater and musical comedies on television. Because her best friend was married to Marcello Mastroianni, she met Federico Fellini and he hired her to be his assistant director on 8½. She went to Cannes with The Seduction of Mimi (Mimi being played by Giannini, who by then was already a regular collaborator), the film that immediately preceded Love and Anarchy, which was followed by Pasqualino Settebellezze (Seven Beauties), which was controversial for its comic treatment of a German concentration camp. For that film she received an Academy Award nomination for directing, and some suggest the supposed Oscar curse ruined her. She was never so popular with critics again, though she did receive an honorary Oscar for her overall work in 2019.
Working frequently with Giannini and Melato, she settled into a pattern of films on the theme of sexual politics with ever longer titles. Just reading them is almost as good as seeing the movies: Swept Away by an Unusual Destiny in the Blue Sea of August (which would be remade by Guy Ritchie and star his then-wife Madonna); The End of the World in Our Usual Bed in a Night Full of Rain (pairing Candice Bergen with Giannini); A Joke of Destiny, Lying in Wait Around the Corner Like a Bandit; Summer Night with Greek Profile, Almond Eyes and Scent of Basil; The Blue Collar Worker and the Hairdresser in a Whirl of Sex and Politics; and Too Much Romance… It’s Time for Stuffed Peppers (with Sophia Loren and F. Murray Abraham).
It surprised me to learn that she was always more popular in the States than in Europe and that the film literati had turned on her so viciously. By the end of the 20th century she had been included in Variety’s “Missing Persons” column. It doesn’t matter. If she had only ever made Love and Anarchy and nothing else, it would have been enough for me to include her on my list of filmmakers who have had the most influence on me.
As Variety itself noted in its obituary for her, “To this, as to all criticism, she responded by invoking the ultimate authority: herself. Her films, she liked to say, were made to please an audience of one, and her methods were intuitive.”
Grazie, Lina, per il tuo intuito!
-S.L., 13 December 2021
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