This appreciation of Elaine Stritch and her performance in Who Killed Teddy Bear? (1965) was written by Matthew Connolly, former Cinematheque staff member and Teaching Assistant in the UW Madison Department of Communication Arts. A 35mm print of Who Killed Teddy Bear?, courtesy of the Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research, will screen as the second half of a double bill of rare 1960s psychosexual film noirs on Saturday, April 25. An 8:30 p.m. screening of Who Killed Teddy Bear? will be preceded by a 7 p.m. screening of Leslie Stevens' Private Property (1960). Both screenings are free and open to the public.

By Matthew Connolly

Though she appeared in films by such famed auteurs as Woody Allen, Alain Resnais, and Blake Edwards, Elaine Stritch has never been much associated with the movies. This makes a certain amount of sense. Throughout a decades-spanning career on Broadway, she gave iconic stage performances in roles dramatic (Edward Albee’s A Delicate Balance) and musical (Stephen Sondheim’s Company), as well as anchoring a solo show that has become increasingly legendary in the annals of contemporary theater. (That show, Elaine Stritch at Liberty, earned her a Tony award after four nominations throughout her career.) Her razor-sharp comic timing, singular stage presence, and nuanced renditions of some of musical theater’s richest songs have linked her indelibly to the Great White Way. As The New York Times wrote in their obituary for Stritch (who died last year at 89),  “the stage was her true professional home. Whether in musicals, nonmusical dramas or solo cabaret shows, she drew audiences to her with her whiskey voice, her seen-it-all manner and the blunt charisma of a star.”

Stritch may have never made the screen her home, but she could translate her stage charisma before the camera in a way that eludes some Broadway stars. Many contemporary viewers most likely know her from television, particularly her Emmy Award-winning work as Jack Donaghy’s domineering mother on 30 Rock. While movie roles rarely offered the dramatic complexity or comic firepower of her best stage and small-screen roles, certain films provide a glimpse at the range of Stritch’s talents.

Who Killed Teddy Bear? offered her such a role. Joseph Cates’s vivid look at the sexual underbelly of mid-60s New York City primarily focuses on Norah (Juliet Prowse) a would-be actress and discotheque DJ whose life becomes upended after receiving a series of obscene and threatening phone calls by a mysterious man. (The gravely voice on the other end turns out to be the club’s psychologically-warped busboy, played by Sal Mineo.) Stritch portrays Marian Freeman, the club’s manager and a confidante to Norah as she grapples with her increasingly unhinged stalker. When we first meet Marian, she’s entering the discotheque floor, puffing a cigarette and tartly reminding her maître d’ to keep up the phony French accent he adopts with guests. It’s the sort of role that one would expect Stritch to play—flinty, no nonsense, tough-yet-fair—and her seen-it-all attitude seems to flow directly from the city itself, captured by Cates in extended, quasi-documentary interludes. (Watching Nora’s sojourns in and out of Broadway theaters at one point, one cannot help but imagine Stritch walking past those same theaters as a young actress.)

As the film progresses, though, we begin to see the full range of Marian’s affections for Nora. This becomes particularly apparent in a painful scene in Nora’s apartment, when Marian comforts her after yet another ominous phone call. Marian tightly embraces Nora on her bed, rubbing her back and comforting her “baby.” Nora slowly realizes the intimacy implied by Marian’s words, pulling away and asking Marian to leave. The scene itself reveals both the ambitions and limitations of the film’s sexual frankness, allowing a lesbian character like Marian visibility for the price of rejection and humiliation. But watch how Stritch plays the scene. Note the salty dash of female camaraderie she gives her observation that every man has a bit of the dark impulses made manifest in Nora’s stalker. Observe the long-squelched tenderness shine in her eyes and warm her steely voice as she comforts Nora—and note how she deflects Nora’s rebuffing with a complicated mixture of embarrassment, insecurity, and a defiant lack of apology. Her fact slowly regains its knowing, weary composure as Nora insists that she will apologize if she “is wrong” about Marian’s intentions. “Oh, yeah?” Marian says flatly. “I’ll look forward to it.” In a film fairly obsessed with notions of erotic dysfunction and its psychological roots, Stritch refuses to turn Marian into a repressed closet case on the prowl. Her performance is a small master class in using the smallest vocal inflections and facial movements to suggest a lifetime of hard scrabble living and tenacious survival.

Such an affinity for tough, sharp women would remain with Stritch throughout her career, from the world-weary Joanne in Company to the slashing wit of Coleen Donaghy to the dramatization of her own struggles with fame, men, and booze in Elaine Stritch at Liberty. Who Killed Teddy Bear? offers a bracing and lovely reminder that this fondness can be found even in the early days of her long and storied career. “Oh, she was a terrific character,” Stritch told the Village Voice’s Melissa Anderson in 2010 when asked about playing Marian. “She was a hard-boiled dame working in surroundings that were the pits in New York. She was a good egg, as my father used to say.”

Due to Badger basketball, the planned screening of Death Wish 3 on Monday, April 6, in the Cinematheque and WUD Film's Cannon Fodder series, has been postponed. Death Wish 3 will now screen at 9 p.m. on Monday, May 4, as a double feature with Lifeforce, which will screen at 7 p.m. The program will also include a dazzling 20-minute trailer reel of other Cannon "classics".

Cinematheque screenings will go on hiatus until Friday, April 17th. The 2015 Wisconsin Film Festival begins this Thursday, April 9, and continues through April 16th. If you're in need of a Cannon fix, allow us to recommend the screenings of Electric Boogaloo: The Wild, Untold Story of Cannon Films and Avenging Force on April 11th.  

This essay on Miloš Forman's Taking Off (1971) was written by Jonah Horwitz, Ph.D Candidate in the Communication Arts Department at UW Madison. A 35mm print of Taking Off, part of our "Universal '71" series, will screen on Sunday, April 5, at 2 p.m., in the Chazen Museum of Art.

by Jonah Horwitz

Taking Off was the first film Miloš Forman made outside of his native Czechoslovakia. It was co-written—by Forman, Jean-Claude Carrière, John Guare, and John Klein—in Paris and New York, shot in New York with English dialogue, and financed and distributed by Universal Pictures. Nevertheless, Forman writes in his autobiography that he thinks of Taking Off "as my last Czech film"—and I'd have to agree. Why? Because in the way it was made, its style, its themes, and its tone of affectionate satire, Taking Off resembles Forman's Czech films like Loves of a Blonde (1965) and Fireman's Ball (1967) much more than it does his award-winning Hollywood pictures that would follow.

Like the earlier films, Taking Off began with Forman observing the world around him. In 1968 he obtained a visa to plan a film in the US. But Forman and his compatriot Ivan Passer, set up in an East Village apartment, spent more time comparing notes on the thriving counterculture they found. The plot of Taking Off was inspired by a newspaper story Forman had read about a girl who would leave her affluent family in Connecticut every Monday to spend the week living on the street in New York City, all the while telling her folks that she was in school. Her double life was discovered only when she was found murdered in an apartment not far from that of Forman. But rather than adapt this sordid tale, Forman and Carrière set about interviewing teenage runaways in their neighborhood and their folks back home in Long Island and Westchester. Forman found himself at least as intrigued by the parents than the with-it kids. The shaggy-dog screenplay that Forman and his collaborators worked up is structured not by the struggle between the two sides of the Generation Gap—as was the case with so many other "youth pics" of the time—but by their mutual incomprehension.

As in his Czech films, Forman populated Taking Off with a mix of professional and non-professional actors. Lynn Carlin, as Lynn Tyne, was cast based on her performance in John Cassavetes' Faces, which had been her first professional role. Although Faces and Taking Off are opposed in tone, they both focus on the collision of the middle class with the sexual revolution; the climactic game of strip poker in Taking Off might be interpreted as Faces' psychodrama played for laughs. Buck Henry, as Larry Tyne, was best known as a writer, having won an Oscar for the screenplay to The Graduate. Linnea Heacock, who plays their daughter Jeannie, was discovered hanging out with friends in Washington Square Park, and her performance is affecting for completely lacking artifice. While the teenagers of contemporaneous counterculture films seem like know-it-all hipsters, Heacock comes across as precisely what she was: a shy 15-year-old girl. These performers, along with professionals like Paul Benedict and Georgia Engel (best known, of course, as Georgette on The Mary Tyler Moore Show), were encouraged to improvise based on Forman’s descriptions of the overall shape of a scene.

Taking Off is a partial remake of one of Forman's earliest films, Audition (1964). For that film, Forman staged a singing competition in Prague and filmed the results. A succession of would-be starlets sang their songs before a group of judges, with varied amounts of talent and professionalism and exhibiting a mix of gonzo enthusiasm, shy hesitation, and utter terror. Snatches of these performances—blessed with the unmistakable awkwardness of documentary—are interwoven with narrative strands that follow several (fictional) characters through a few days before, during, and after the competition. In a stylistic strategy employed by Forman in most of his Czech films, he cross-cuts between fragments of these stories for quite some time before their larger interconnectedness is revealed. A cabaret performance is bizarrely juxtaposed to scenes of pedicures being performed.  Much later, the connection is drawn as the cabaret performer—now one of the contest's judges—rejects one of the young pedicurists after her halting performance (in Czech) of "Hello Mary Lou."

Forman was disappointed in Audition, particularly its rough synch between sound and image, and decided that Taking Off afforded him the chance to do it over. So he staged another singing competition, this time in the Village, and the women who turned out are if anything more varied and spellbinding. Their collective presence transcends the individual songs and performances, and provides a powerfully authentic snapshot of youth culture of the time (among other things, it proves that "the Sixties" extended into the early 1970s).

Taking Off begins with a succession of fragments from these auditions, enigmatically intercut with a therapy session in which Larry Tyne tries to rid himself of a smoking habit through auto-hypnosis.  It takes some time before we realize that the young girl singled out in the audition scenes is his daughter. Forman continues to cut back and forth from the audition for the first half of the film, and returns to it several times afterward, including at the very end. As in Audition, this montage is often richly expressive. At times songs from the audition play "over" scenes from the lives of the adults. Sometimes the songs ironize the narrative situations, other times they render them surprisingly lyrical. As the adults explore teenage Jeannie's bedroom, still filled with stuffed animals and other childish trinkets, they're accompanied by a line from "And Even the Horses Had Wings," future Oscar-winner Kathy "Bobo" Bates's haunting ballad of lost innocence:  "That was the world that I knew as a child." But Forman immediately undercuts the lyricism with a punchline about a diaphragm.

This oscillation between pathos and broad humor defines Taking Off's tone, just as the cutting between documentary and fiction defines its stylistic texture. The middle-aged parents at the film's center are figures of fun, but they are also portrayed with unusual sympathy and deepening complexity. The few hippie characters are ciphers by comparison; the drama of the audition sequences speaks for their emotional lives. The unexpected focus on the squares is actually typical of Forman (though it may explain why Taking Off failed to find much of an audience in 1971). From Black Peter’s hapless teenager struggling to lose his virginity to Loves of a Blonde’s small-town factory girl who mistakes her seduction by a traveling jazz pianist for a grand love affair, Forman specialized in “outsiders,” protagonists whose inability to fathom their society’s unwritten rules produces both humor and tragedy.

From Taking Off's commercial failure Forman seems to have learned a lesson that, in my view, proved as artistically regrettable as it was beneficial to his career. He felt that he could no longer make movies as he did in Czechoslovakia. As a foreigner in America, he no longer trusted in his powers of observation and his ability to direct non-actors in an off-the-cuff fashion. "If I really wanted to make films in Hollywood," he reflected later, "I'd have to change my whole style of working." Forman's regrouping eventually paid off in the massive critical and commercial success of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1975) and Amadeus (1984) among other films. Those are both sturdy achievements, but they largely lack the distinctive, exploratory mix of tones and styles that makes Forman's early body of work, including Taking Off, so precious.

Further reading:

- Miloš Forman, Turnaround: A Memoir. New York: Villard Books, 1994.

- Miloš Forman, John Guare, Jean-Claude Carrière, and John Klein. Taking Off. New York: Signet, 1971. Not so much the screenplay as a transcription (hence memento) of the film, with new "scene settings" written by Forman and Nancy Hardin. It also includes an essay by Forman about his first years in America and the production of Taking Off.

Recommended viewing:

- All of Miloš Forman's Czech films, including Audition (also known as Talent Competition, 1964), Black Peter (1964), and Loves of a Blonde (1965).

- Intimate Lighting (1965), the only film directed in Czechoslovakia by Forman's collaborator (and childhood friend) Ivan Passer.

These notes on the Boulting Brothers' Brighton Rock (1948) were written by Cinematheque Programmer and Project Assistant Amanda McQueen. A 35mm print of Brighton Rock from Rialto Pictures will screen on Saturday, March 28, at 7 p.m. in 4070 Vilas Hall. The screening is the first of two that highlight the superb villainy of the late actor Richard Attenborough.

By Amanda McQueen

When Lord Richard Attenborough passed away in August 2014 at the age of 90, he left behind a career as an actor, producer, and director spanning an impressive 65 years – from his first minor role in 1942 to his final directorial feature in 2007. His diverse filmography holds no shortage of excellent performances, but one of his earliest is routinely singled out: juvenile gangster Pinkie Brown in Brighton Rock (1948). Although initial reception of the film was mixed, it has since become a canonized classic of British cinema, in no small part because of Attenborough's performance.

Graham Greene's 1938 novel Brighton Rock was adapted for the screen ten years after the book’s publication by twin brothers John and Roy Boulting; John acted as director, Roy as producer. Greene, in collaboration with Terence Rattigan, wrote the screenplay. Thanks to its literary origins and the strong reputation of the Boutling brothers, Associated British Picture Corporation (ABPC) – second only to the Rank Organization in terms of industrial clout – assigned the project a budget of £178,000, a mid-sized budget for the time but more than was generally allotted for a gangster picture. For ABPC, Brighton Rock was primarily a genre film – another entry in the popular post-war cycle of crime films – not a prestigious literary adaptation. Nevertheless, the Boultings were given a great deal of freedom during production and a lengthy shooting schedule of nearly six months.

Greene believed that films were most effective when they fused melodrama with realism, and the Boultings, known for cinematic depictions of social issues, concurred. The events depicted in the film were rooted in the real-life criminal underworld of 1930s Britain, when illegal cash gambling was a huge industry controlled by corrupt officials and gangs armed with straight razors. The seaside resort of Brighton, with its lavish hotels and racetrack, was a particularly notorious site for adultery, illicit gambling, and murder (despite assertions to the contrary, the town's reputation had not changed by 1948). For Greene, Brighton's contrasting sides – its bright, sophisticated exterior and its seedy underbelly – made it the ideal setting for an examination of good and evil. Brighton Rock’s production team thus sought to convey the town’s symbolic duality while also keeping the action rooted in a realistic world.

Creating an authentic Brighton on screen was accomplished in part through location shooting. Contrary to popular myth, however, the bulk of the film was shot at ABPC's small studio at Welwyn and on MGM's large soundstages at Elstree, where Brighton landmarks like the Cosmopolitan Hotel and the seaside promenade were meticulously recreated. It’s a testament to John Howell’s art direction, Harry Waxman’s cinematography, and Peter Graham Scott’s editing that the location footage and studio footage are so seamlessly combined. To further assist in the creation of a believable criminal milieu, Roy Boulting brought in Carl Ramon, a card shark and ex-member of the Sabini gang, which had ruled Brighton Racecourse in the 1930s. It was Ramon who would instruct Attenborough on how to speak, walk, and dress like an authentic spiv.

Attenborough also had the advantage of having played Pinkie before. The stage version of Brighton Rock opened in the West End in 1943. Greene had wanted an unknown actor for the lead, and the twenty-year-old Attenborough, a recent graduate of the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art with only two minor film roles under his belt, was just that. Greene was initially unsure whether the actor's round, boyish face could connote the required evilness of the character, but Attenborough quickly won him over. His strong stage performance and the close relationship he formed with the Boultings during their time together in the RAF Film Unit assured that he would be brought in to reprise the role on film (Attenborough wasn't the only import, however; five other actors came with him from the stage version). With John Boulting's help, Attenborough learned how to tailor his performance to the intimacy of the screen and realistically convey his character's complex psychology. But while some contemporary reviewers believed that "Attenborough's performance . . . is so good that one loses all sense of its being a performance," not everyone agreed. The Daily Express famously quipped that "the film version of Pinkie is about as close to the real thing as Donald Duck is to Greta Garbo."

The range of responses to Attenborough's Pinkie were part of a larger debate about the fidelity of Brighton Rock to its source material. Adapting Greene's dark, heavily symbolic tale to the screen had not been easy. When he discovered that the theatrical adaptation had softened his novel's ending, Greene was furious. Yet he also stated that the original ending was too bleak for mainstream commercial cinema and approved Rattigan's suggestion to give Pinkie's wife Rose (Carol Marsh) a moment of happiness at the film's conclusion. Complaints that Brighton Rock lost something in translation might also derive from the fact that distributor Pathé insisted on cutting several scenes to make the film run a tight 92 minutes and fit on a double bill. Some have argued that by deleting expository scenes explaining Pinkie's background, the film becomes more thriller than social drama. Rather than being seen as a product of his poverty and upbringing, Pinkie is reduced to a monster, pure and simple. Finally, Brighton Rock was replete with violence and references to Catholicism, neither of which made it past the British Board of Film Censors completely intact. But even in its approved, somewhat diluted form, Brighton Rock was too brutal for some tastes. Daily Mirror film critic Reg Whitley condemned it as "false, cheap, nasty sensationalism" that no woman would go to see. The rate of adolescent incarceration was also rising rapidly in Britain, and many thought that popular entertainment should portray positive values, not razor-wielding teenage delinquents.

Of course, controversy often helps box office, and Brighton Rock was one of ABPC's top grossing films of the year. But its success was limited to the domestic market. Pathé worried the film wasn't exportable, even briefly changing its title to The Worst Sin out of concern that foreign audiences wouldn't be familiar with Brighton and the hard candy to which the titular "rock" refers. Foreign censor boards also posed a problem. Brighton Rock was banned in Holland, and ABPC didn't even submit the film to Hollywood's Production Code Administration, fearing it would demand additional cuts. Warner Bros., part-owner of ABPC, refused to distribute the film without a PCA seal, and so Brighton Rock didn't make it to America until 1951, when indie distributor Mayer-Kingsley gave it a limited release (without PCA approval) under the title Young Scarface.

Over time, Brighton Rock has come to be seen as a film ahead of its time in terms of performance and style. In 1999, it placed 15th on the BFI's poll of the 100 best British films of the 20th century, having been embraced as a brilliantly chilling depiction of the nation's dark side. And although the role of Pinkie Brown caused Attenborough to be typecast for a number of years as a spiv and a baby-faced teenager, there is little doubt that it launched the career of a man who would become an institution of the British film industry.