The Cincinnati Kid (1965)

"You're just not ready for me yet" - Cincinnati Kid

Most classic film enthusiasts consume films at a high rate. I am not one of those people. My slow rate of consumption leaves for a lot of new discovery. Having only seen two of Steve McQueen's movies prior to receiving a copy of the new McQueen biography, I thought it was a good as time as any to explore McQueen's body of work. I asked a few people which McQueen film they recommended I watch and pretty much received a list of every film the actor ever made. Carlos is a big Steve McQueen fan and was very excited about my new found interest in the actor. He showed me Bullitt (1968) and The Getaway (1972). But of all the McQueen films I hadn't seen, the first one on my list was The Cincinnati Kid (1965). Why? For various reasons. Stories set in the deep South are always so deliciously intense and I love anything sports related as long as it's connected with the 1920s/1930s. This film takes place in 1930s New Orleans and concerns itself with poker gambling (a "sport" of the elite and the lower class alike). It's got a magnificent cast including the beautiful 1960s starlets Tuesday Weld and Ann-Margret, the 1930s superstars Joan Blondell and Edward G. Robinson and the blue-eyed Karl Malden who always makes my heart melt a little whenever I watch him on screen. Steve McQueen just seems like the cherry on top of this delicious ice cream sundae of a film.

The Cincinnati Kid is not the best film I've ever seen but it's one of the coolest and most fun I've watched in a while. I was fascinated by Edward G. Robinson's tie pin and his glass of creme de menthe, Joan Blondell's fox stole complete with $100 bill in its mouth, the juxtaposition between sweet Tuesday Weld and the saucy Ann-Margret, how incredibly quiet Steve McQueen was and how well Karl Malden plays frightened characters. It's difficult for me to articulate why I wanted to watch this film and why I liked it. So I will allow these screen shots to express that for me.

Stay tuned, all of my screen caps (including several not posted here) will be available on the Out of the Past ~ A Classic Film Blog Facebook page!

There are lots of great overhead shots like this one. 

Train and Railroad track scenes always make me nervous. Run, McQueen run!

Could use some more Tabasco.

Tuesday Weld and Steve McQueen share a sweet yet oddly sexy scene together.

Do you always have to cheat?

Turkish bath looks pretty good to me right now.

What's up with that beer glass? What did Tuesday Weld eat? Should I make a Steak and Salad dinner? These are the type of random questions I ask myself throughout a movie.

You've got problems if there is a shooting range built into your home.

Frolicking in a field.

McQueen had a great smile. He should have used it more!

Pocket Watch sighting!

Two Hollywood legends meet again. Don't tell Blondell that Robinson called her an old b****.

Edward G. Robinson complained that Steve McQueen never looked him in the eye. Technically, he's looking at him here. 

Why are they sniffing the decks?

Karl Malden looking uber cool with his tie and matching pocket square. Dealin' out the cards.

Why?

Doubt that McQueen was tough? He's biting into a lemon. No joke. And he doesn't even wince from the sourness of the lemon juice. Amazing!

Bring out Lady Fingers!

See how that Fox Stole has a $100 bill in it's mouth. I'm guessing it's a $100 because Blondell is high class.

Another great overhead shot. If anything, this film is candy for the eyes.

Learning to Live Out Loud by Piper Laurie

"I had achieved my childhood dream of becoming a movie star and then left it all behind for a second career as a serious actor." - Piper Laurie


Learning to Live Out Loud: A Memoir
by Piper Laurie
Hardcover
9780823026685
November 2011
Crown Archetype (Random House)

It's a given that reading an autobiography is a much different experience than reading a biography. Any good biographer can dig up the facts on an important figure but they cannot present those facts with personal context. The autobiographer presents his or her story with a layer of nostalgia and a sense of pain that is the result of drudging up the past in a way that no biographer can. Film actress Piper Laurie wrote this autobiography in a storytelling style. This is much different than the conversational style of Ernest Borgnine's autobiography. Piper Laurie is not having a conversation with her readers, she doesn't even acknowledge them, she's just telling the story of her life and all the people who happened to be a part of it.

The title "Learning to Live Out Loud" stems from the actress' problems with being able to vocalize. It was less shyness and more just an innate instinct to be quiet and listen. It took her years just to be able to laugh out loud and speak up for herself. I think it's a wonder she became a movie star!

The book reads chronologically from the very beginning of her life as Rosetta Jacobs and continues on to her movie and acting career as Piper Laurie. At a very young age, her parents sent her off to a sanitarium with her older sister Sherrye. This experience proved very traumatic for the young Rosetta who just wanted to be loved by her parents, especially her mom. By the age of 17, and with some theatre experience under her belt, Rosetta became Piper Laurie the film star. She had a 7 year contract with Universal which got her several B movies that left her frustrated as an actress. Laurie eventually got out of her contract and started making better pictures including The Hustler (1961). After The Hustler, she didn't make films for quite a long time but continued to act in theater and on TV. There were three phases of her career, her B movie/ Universal film career as a young starlet, her work in the late 1950s and early 1960s, then her work as an older woman starting from Carrie (1976) and on to various movies and TV shows.

Piper Laurie's autobiography was an absolute pleasure to read. Her writing style takes some getting used to but once you dive in you don't want to put the book down. Laurie's narrative is very charming and while she remembers a lot of specifics there are some failings of memory that are natural for someone who has had such a long and interesting life as she had. Laurie is not scared to talk about her many lovers. Some of her stories might shock you even though she never goes into any explicit details. I think highly conservative people may not enjoy reading about her experience with Ronald Reagan or a particular choice she made in her life. However, it's by no means a salacious tell-all. Laurie just happens to be a very independently minded woman who learned to live life on her own terms.

Laurie writes a lot about her experiences shooting different films. I enjoyed reading about The Hustler (1961), Until They Sail (1957) and even Carrie (1976) although I haven't seen that film. She also talks about notable Hollywood figures including Dennis Morgan, Donald O'Connor, Walter Matthau, Rock Hudson, Mel Gibson, George C. Scott, Jack Lemmon, Tony Curtis, Clark Gable,  Joseph Mankiewicz, Howard Hughes, Ronald Reagan, etc. Notice how all of those people I listed are men? Piper Laurie rarely talks about other actresses or women in the business. She did develop a friendship with her Until They Sail co-star Jean Simmons, Joanne Woodward, Elia Kazan's wife and a few other women but the only really important women in her life were her mom, her sister Sherrye and her daughter Anna. Laurie really thrived on her relationships with men.

What's interesting about Laurie's reminiscences of her film roles and theater productions is that she not only talks about the behind the scenes goings on but she also relates how she prepared for the roles, how she researched them (sometimes even putting herself in danger to do so) and the acting methods and techniques she learned and used. While a biography would give you cold hard facts, an autobiography like Piper Laurie's can give you so much more.

Even if you don't necessarily have an interest in Piper Laurie's acting career, I think classic film enthusiasts should read this book. The span of time between 1949 and 1961 is very telling about how the Hollywood machine would treat young starlets and it's great fun to read about the other major stars of the day. Laurie grew up enamored with film stars so she was star struck when she met many of the big legends in person. It's fun to be a classic film fan reading about another one.

Disclaimer: I contacted Crown Archetype to get this book to review.

Read my review of The Hustler (1961) as well as my Match.com inspired profile for the main character Fast Eddie Felson.

It's giveaway time! Thanks to the good folks at Crown Archetype (Random House), I'm giving away one copy of Learning to Live Out Loud by Piper Laurie. Just fill out the form! Contest ends 11/10/2011. US Only.

UPDATE: The giveaway is now over. Winner will be announced in a separate post.

Nicholas Ray: The Glorious Failure of an American Director by Patrick McGilligan

Nicholas Ray: The Glorious Failure of an American Director

by Patrick McGilligan

9780060731373 Hardcover

It Books (Harper Collins)

July 2011

560 pages

He had always been, at least potentially, an avant-garde, "arty" filmmaker, but perhaps one who had followed the wrong muse and ended up mismatched in the Hollywood factory. - Patrick McGilligan

[Ray] looks... not bad, really, but QUELLEd, somehow. - Charlton Heston

Nicholas Ray was a Hollywood director who made such classic films as In a Lonely Place (1950), Born to Be Bad (1950), On Dangerous Ground (1952),  The Lusty Men (1952), Rebel Without a Cause (1955), The True Story of Jesse James (1957) and The King of Kings (1967). Ray's career in filmmaking was varied and as the quote from McGilligan above suggests, he was meant to be an artsy independent filmmaker but got caught in the cog of the Hollywood machine. McGilligan is a prolific biographer and in this book looks at Nicholas Ray's career which was such a failure in so many ways yet 100 years after Ray's birth the man is still remembered as a legendary filmmaker.

Ray was born Raymond Nicholas Kienzle in 1911 Wisconsin. He was the youngest sibling with three older sisters. His childhood was full of rebellion. So much so that McGilligan often compares Ray's youth to Rebel Without a Cause. At first this sort of art imitates life comparison bugged me. McGilligan mentions several times in the book that Ray's life paralleled his movies (other sources such as Truffaut are referenced to back up his claims). These comparisons wane as the text progresses. 

The book follows Ray's life and focuses much more on his film career than it does his personal life. We learn about his three wives Jean Evans, actress Gloria Grahame and dancer Betty Uyet and his last long-term relationship with Susana Schwartz/Ray. However, the book is really a profile of Ray as a filmmaker more so than it is a profile of Ray as a man. One of the ways we learn about Ray as a filmmaker is through his relationships with other men. Elia Kazan proves to be the most significant figure in his life. Both Kazan and Ray were part of the same theater group and both dabbled in leftist/communist politics. During the HUAC investigations, Ray was under similar pressure to Kazan to cough up names. I can tell McGilligan has somewhat of an agenda with Kazan. In a few of his footnotes and asides, the author points out that not all of the names that Kazan divulged were in accordance with a previously arranged agreement or were already publicly known as having communist ties. Kazan was a mentor to Ray, having started his directorial career a few years before Ray. Kazan's films were bigger, better and more successful and at many times during the text a Nicholas Ray film is put into chronological context with a Kazan film. Ray's career seems to have been constantly in the shadow of the great Kazan.

Ray worked well with men but not so much with women. The director figured out that both Humphrey Bogart (In a Lonely Place) and Robert Mitchum (The Lusty Men) were 6-take kind of guys. They had 6 takes in them and after that the quality of their acting decreased dramatically. When that happened, Ray would move on to other scenes. Ray always sought Marlon Brando for the roles of many of his films but never got to work with him. He considered Brando the best modern actor there was. Women actresses he had virtually no patience for. He had a difficult time working with such divas as Gloria Grahame (his second wife), Ava Gardner (not surprised), Joan Fontaine and Joan Crawford. 

The apex of Ray's career was definitely Rebel Without a Cause (1955). While it was a critical failure (both Kazan and Welles hated it), it was a box-office hit. Today it's well-known because of the iconic status of the young stars of the film: James Dean, Natalie Wood and Sal Mineo, who became even more infamous because of their violent deaths. McGilligan spends a lot of time on Rebel Without a Cause, devoting much of the middle section of the book to it. After the death of James Dean and the release of Rebel, Ray's film career went spiraling down. His films were less and less successful and he became more and more difficult to work with.  The last part of the book is a bit of a slog. I enjoyed some parts but found myself disinterested in Ray's post-King of Kings career and life. I always find biographies difficult to finish especially if the person being profiled has passed away. Ray's death (that of his career and his life) was painful to read.

I was worried that this book might be a salacious read considering the reputation of It Books, the publisher. However, McGilligan really focused on Ray's career and while he explored Ray's sexual life (including his affairs with men and women and scandals including that of Gloria Grahame and his son and his relationship with 16 year old Natalie Wood), we as the reader don't often get too many moments of TMI. Although the whole part about the film Wet Dreams still disturbs me.

There are lots of fun anecdotes in the book. I liked reading about how the original plot of In a Lonely Place was completely different from the final product. Ray was adamant about not letting Robert Mitchum sleep walk through The Lusty Men and worked to get the best performance out of him. Ray was influenced by Bunuel's film Los Olvidados to make Rebel Without a Cause. He really wanted to explore rebellion in middle class versus that of the lower class which had already been explored many times before. 

His relationship with James Dean was very interesting. They would sometimes have a father-son relationship and other times it would be more like brothers. Ray compared him to a Siamese Cat saying "the only thing to do with a Siamese cat is to let it take its own time. It will come up to you, walk around you, smell you. If it doesn't like you, it will go away again. If it does, it will stay." The original psychiatrist who did all the research that would influence Rebel was completely snuffed by Ray. Screenwriter Stewart Stern saw the three characters of the film much like those of Peter Pan (Dean - Peter, Wood - Wendy, Mineo - John). 

I don't want to give everything away but I do want to point out a couple more interesting anecdotes. Ray's third wife Betty Utey choreographed the great Salome dance sequenced that I loved so much in King of Kings. I thought it was strange that Ray had the King of Kings star Jeffrey Hunter have a nose job so his nose would look more like Jesus' would. WTF?! If you watch Nicholas Ray's films, make a note of the absence of blue. Ray disliked using the color blue in his films because he thought it was a "scene-stealer". I guess Ray would have hated 500 Days of Summer (2009).

Overall, the book was very organized and well-written. I had a difficult time at a certain points with the star and footnote system. The font was so small for the star that I would often miss it and sometimes couldn't even find it when I read the footnote. A lot of Ray's films started off with one title and ended up with another. McGilligan uses the first name and then finishes off with the second which would confuse me greatly. Otherwise, if you are interested in Nicholas Ray as a director I highly recommend this very thorough and informative book.

Disclaimer: I purchased this book from Barnes & Noble.