Hitchcock Wanted Robert Redford for Family Plot - Family Plot (1976) Discussion

[–] 13 years ago

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[–] 13 years ago

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[–] hisgrandmogulhighness 9 years ago

Yes, Redford would've been most intriguing in this part . . . so nasty . . .

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[–] 9 years ago

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[–] filmklassik 8 years ago

Respectfully disagree. With the right material and director, Paul Newman definitely had that quality of "studied cool" you have correctly ascribed to Robert Redford, or don't you think this description applies to Newman's performances in HOMBRE, HUD and THE STING?

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[–] ecarle 8 years ago

Respectfully disagree.

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I appreciate that you do -- disagreement can be a good thing, and I can change my mind. I sure have around here.

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With the right material and director, Paul Newman definitely had that quality of "studied cool" you have correctly ascribed to Robert Redford, or don't you think this description applies to Newman's performances in HOMBRE, HUD and THE STING?

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I have a phrase I use: "I was typing too fast." Or also not trying to write TOO much.

With Paul Newman, I do believe his early roles are marred by a bit too much mugging and smart-aleck behavior. I'm thinking mainly of The Prize(where he really has the Cary Grant role in North by Northwest, with the same screenwriter), but also aspects of What a Way to Go!(a flat out comedy), and Harper(a movie I really like) and even Hud. He's also a bit comedic and over-the-top as Butch Cassidy(Redford does the cool), but that's the Number One Movie of 1969, so who cares?

By the time Newman reached The Sting, I think he HAD calmed down to Redford-like cool. Torn Curtain helped get him there. And from The Sting on, a more mature Newman rather reshaped his persona. He's very subdued in Absence of Malice and The Verdict. THAT said, the wisenheimer is rather back on the job in the sublime "Slapshot" and even very late in age and career, in "Nobody's Fool."

As for "Hombre," I've always felt that Newman had to "fake" the cool that came to McQueen, Brando and (eventually) Bronson "on the natural." Newman in "Hombre" IS cool...but he's working at it.

Reviewing that list, I now agree with your respectful disagreement. Newman had some of that Redford cool, too.

Just not in every movie, and more in his later films than his earlier ones.

"IMHO."

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[–] telegonus 8 years ago

To jump in here briefly: I agree with you, EC, that Newman acquired the cool thing as he aged, however I don't think he ever had it, even then, at the Redford level. They're apples and oranges. Redford's cool feels, to me, natural. It's a logical extension of his screen persona, which is low key to begin with. Newman had that faux beatnick cum beach bum frat boy way about him, which can be charming but isn't really cool. He tightened up for Hombre, and it worked (the film's high quality being a major factor), and as the years went by he calmed down on screen. Also, Newman was, well, nobody's fool. He must have surely known, by the time the 80s arrived, that the Actors studio grad in the shrink's office near hysterical style of acting one sees him engaging in early in his career was simply out of fashion in the age of Reagan. Nobody was acting like that anymore.

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[–] filmklassik 8 years ago

Gentlemen --

I agree that Newman did occasionally "dine on the scenery" back in his pre-BUTCH CASSIDY days. Some of that faux-Brando shtick he was pulling in the fifties looks downright embarrassing now, when you could practically hear him shouting "Look, Lee! See how much I've prepared?!" And as long I'm being blunt, ecarle's right: He could be "big" and theatrical in the seventies too -- occasionally.

But when he was restrained (perhaps under the guiding hand of the right director), and the role was appropriate, nobody could touch him.

Maybe cool did come more naturally to Redford than it did to Newman, but I don't think Redford, even as he approached middle-age, could have handled the lead in COOL HAND LUKE as brilliantly as Newman did. Ditto THE VERDICT (a role Redford reportedly walked away from).

Understand that I adore both of those guys, and two more charismatic stars you aren't likely to find anywhere. I just wish they could've made one more film together.

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[–] telegonus 8 years ago

Paul Newman's acting surely improved over the years. He grew and he prospered, one of the few stars post-studio era who was able to enjoy a multi-decade career at or near the top, and to grow old gracefully. I agree that "one more time" with Newman and Redford would have been grand, though if it had come too late it might have turned out to be one of those "we'd rather they hadn't tried" projects that turn up now and again, when older star magic just isn't there anymore. If they'd done it sometime between roughly 1980 and 1990, with a good script I think it would have been a winner.

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[–] filmklassik 8 years ago

I'd expand that window to include the late 1990s, a time when Newman made a literate, witty and vastly underrated mystery for Robert Benton called TWILIGHT that the public completey ignored but shouldn't have. It's a de facto third HARPER movie, and Newman, as a tired PI in the... well the twilight of his career, is just extraordinary in it. A wonderful performance in a very good film.

Only a juvenile and downright embarrassing coda (involving Newman and Stockard Channing) takes it from a near-great three and a half stars down to three.

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[–] ecarle 8 years ago

I'd expand that window to include the late 1990s, a time when Newman made a literate, witty and vastly underrated mystery for Robert Benton called TWILIGHT that the public completey ignored but shouldn't have.

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That's a great little movie, kind of like The Long Goodbye. Benton was following up Nobody's Fool here. Good late-middle aged roles for Newman, Gene Hackman and especially James Garner.

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It's a de facto third HARPER movie,

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Yes!

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and Newman, as a tired PI in the... well the twilight of his career, is just extraordinary in it. A wonderful performance in a very good film.

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Agreed.

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Only a juvenile and downright embarrassing coda (involving Newman and Stockard Channing) takes it from a near-great three and a half stars down to three.

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Mercifully, I have lost the memory of that coda to the mists of time. Can't remember it at all.

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[–] ecarle 8 years ago

I agree that Newman did occasionally "dine on the scenery" back in his pre-BUTCH CASSIDY days. Some of that faux-Brando shtick he was pulling in the fifties looks downright embarrassing now, when you could practically hear him shouting "Look, Lee! See how much I've prepared?!" And as long I'm being blunt, ecarle's right: He could be "big" and theatrical in the seventies too -- occasionally.

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Appreciate the responsiveness here, and I will say that Newman was GOOD at his wisecrackery in one big scene in The Sting(where he goads Robert Shaw's gangster at poker with a series of slobby, gloating mind games) ; and in the entirety of Slapshot(where he plays a man who never grew up, and who slams the officious rich woman who owns his hockey team with an unprecedented burst of obscenity about her young son).

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But when he was restrained (perhaps under the guiding hand of the right director), and the role was appropriate, nobody could touch him.

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Well, let's put it this way: Newman had a lot more Best Actor nominations than Robert Redford has to date(one, in Redford's case, for The Sting) and more wins(one for The Color of Money and one for his body of work -- though Redford has one for directing.)

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Maybe cool did come more naturally to Redford than it did to Newman, but I don't think Redford, even as he approached middle-age, could have handled the lead in COOL HAND LUKE as brilliantly as Newman did.

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Yep. As above.

As Clint Eastwood said as Dirty Harry, paraphrased: Robert Redford knew his limitations.

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Ditto THE VERDICT (a role Redford reportedly walked away from).

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Indeed. By 1982, the younger Redford was seen as a bigger current star than the older Newman, and was offered "The Verdict" first. It was greenlighted WITH Redford. But Redford balked at the seedier and alcoholic aspects of his failed lawyer character in "The Verdict," asked for script changes and was refused them. He quit. But Newman signed right up for the warts and all.

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Understand that I adore both of those guys,

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As do I

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and two more charismatic stars you aren't likely to find anywhere.

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And together those two times...unbeatable as a team. I like how from Butch to The Sting...the moustache switches from Redford to Newman. And thus do the characterizations change, just like that.

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I just wish they could've made one more film together.

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They lucked into two of the greatest screenplays ever written, and the irony is that the second one(The Sting) was written as a "one-lead" piece(the Redford role.) The film was greenlighted with Redford only. Newman got the script from director George Roy Hill and signed up for a supporting role...beefed up...and got top billing. Redford was reportedly sort of happy, and sort of not.

The search for that "third script" was daunting, the first two had been such successes.

The closest script for Newman and Redford to have filmed, seems to have been "A Walk in the Woods," intended for Bob and Paul in their older age, but Paul died and his role went to Nick Nolte. Its a good little movie but it would have been better with Bob and Paul...and it even has a "Butch Cassidy homage" cliff jump scene (except the jump is not made.)

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[–] filmklassik 8 years ago

Not much to disagree with here, ecarle. The only thing that surprises me is Redford requesting changes on THE VERDICT that were refused.

Jaw dropping.

I'm shocked that someone of Redford's star power and "weight" in the movie business (and still near the height of his career!) was shot down by... well, whoever did the shooting down (whether it was 20th Century Fox or the director -- and was Lumet on board at this point?)

Kind of amazing, that.

But of course it was our good fortune things worked out the way they did, because the role of Frank Galvin needed to be alcoholic, and desperate, and frankly rather pathetic in the beginning -- and Newman pulled it off brilliantly.

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[–] ecarle 8 years ago

Not much to disagree with here, ecarle. The only thing that surprises me is Redford requesting changes on THE VERDICT that were refused.

Jaw dropping.

I'm shocked that someone of Redford's star power and "weight" in the movie business (and still near the height of his career!) was shot down by... well, whoever did the shooting down (whether it was 20th Century Fox or the director -- and was Lumet on board at this point?)

Kind of amazing, that.

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The book where I read that happened said as much, that it was "positively shocking" for a superstar to get "fired" off a role. The combination was of director Lumet and producer Richard Zanuck. They felt that the tale HAD to be about redemption of a broken-down, alcoholic man.

Now, Redford had played a "lighter" version of this in 1979...as the wasted rodeo star in "The Electric Horseman," but I guess aspects of Frank Galvin didn't work for him. Like haunting funerals to try to get wrongful death suits.

And...punching a woman right in the jaw...

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But of course it was our good fortune things worked out the way they did, because the role of Frank Galvin needed to be alcoholic, and desperate, and frankly rather pathetic in the beginning -- and Newman pulled it off brilliantly.

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He really did. I have always likened Newman's performance(for the first 2/3 of the film, at least ) as connoting a "scared rabbit." He's physically shaky and his eyes often have the frightened look of a man no longer sure of his worth at all.

The film business can be tough, and Newman was indeed considered a bit "lesser" than Redford in 1982. Ironically, though, Newman had had two strong 80's films before The Verdict -- good in the OK "Fort Apache, The Bronx" and VERY good in the VERY good "Absence of Malice"(1981.)

About which: I do love that climactic scene where folksy old Deputy Attorney General Wilford Brimley takes down a roomful of politicians and lawyers with a series of insults, some "subpoenees"(his phrase) and reprimands("The last time there were this many leaks, Noah had to go build himself a BOAT!"). And he fires one bad lawyer("The President didn't hire you, I did. You got 30 days.")

But all through the scene, Paul Newman sits there in the room, quietly, in a dark blue suit and tie(the first time he wears a suit in the movie)looking...absolutely...gorgeous. Man, GORGEOUS. And I say that as a straight guy. Its like if one wants to see a movie star defined, this is the scene . Newman gives the scene to Brimley to run, but he's always there, the center of attention in all shots where he is on screen. And when Newman DOES speak, we listen.

Anyway, after a fairly hard 70's(some Altman failures and the awful disaster movie "When Time Ran Out"), Paul Newman had a one-two-three series of comeback movies in the early 80's, which bought him another decade of stardom.

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[–] filmklassik 8 years ago

...and I will say that Newman was GOOD at his wisecrackery in one big scene in The Sting(where he goads Robert Shaw's gangster at poker with a series of slobby, gloating mind games)

Wonderful scene -- arguably the finest in the whole movie (with the possible exception of that brilliant finale).

I remember Newman in an interview once discussing some comic piece of business he was playing in BUTCH CASSIDY AND THE SUNDANCE KID. The director, George Roy Hill, wasn't happy with the way it looked and kept asking Newman to do it again. Newman finally nailed it and when he asked Hill what he'd done differently that time Hill replied, "You weren't trying to be funny."

And that's the evolution of Paul Newman's career in a nutshell.

Of course he was blessed with great looks and tons of charisma, and even when he was "trying too hard" he was still a pretty good, capable, New York actor.

But when he learned the value of minimalism, he became great.

Were there relapses now and again? Of course there were. But not many. And his later work is nearly always compelling (even when the movies themselves are not).

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[–] ecarle 8 years ago

To jump in here briefly: I agree with you, EC, that Newman acquired the cool thing as he aged, however I don't think he ever had it, even then, at the Redford level. They're apples and oranges. Redford's cool feels, to me, natural. It's a logical extension of his screen persona, which is low key to begin with. Newman had that faux beatnick cum beach bum frat boy way about him, which can be charming but isn't really cool.

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Hey, telegonus!

I'm reminded here what some Hollywood wag said about the key to a true movie star: he or she is unique. "There's only one Blue Boy painting," I think he said, and there's only one Paul Newman and only one Robert Redford.

Given that Newman is now gone and Redford old but still with us, I'll note that Newman, older than Redford, had about a 14-year lead on Redford in stardom, and thus Newman indeed worked in an entirely different era(50s into 60's) when the Brando-inspired requirements for leading manhood were different than the seventies.

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He tightened up for Hombre, and it worked (the film's high quality being a major factor), and as the years went by he calmed down on screen.

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I've always found it intriguing that, while they differed in quality and success, Torn Curtain preceded Hombre by one year, and between the two films, "Paul Newman grew up." Torn Curtain has a bad reputation, but there is undeniable power in that scene where Newman is confronted by the middle-aged agent Gromek and must kill the man in the most slow and tortuous manner imaginable. "No room for wiseguys" here. Thus, Newman was in some ways prepared by Hitchcock for the better role in the better movie, Hombre.

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Also, Newman was, well, nobody's fool.

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Hah. I see what you did there.

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He must have surely known, by the time the 80s arrived, that the Actors studio grad in the shrink's office near hysterical style of acting one sees him engaging in early in his career was simply out of fashion in the age of Reagan. Nobody was acting like that anymore.

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Very true! Method acting was almost punished when TV execs took over the movies. Hanks and Cruise didn't do it.

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I would add that Cary Grant is another handsome younger man who rather pushed his comedic side in the early years and "fell back to quiet cool" in his later years. Grant and Newman also shared how they both aged remarkably well...getting more handsome into their fifties. Redford's looks deteriorated.

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[–] telegonus 8 years ago

The Newman-Grant comparison is a fascinating one, EC, and I think that you're onto something. Different as these two actors are, and from such different generations, backgrounds, nationalities--Grant was old enough to be Newman's father--they do seem to have a few things in common, such as starting out with a studio that didn't know what was good for them, and worse, didn't fully appreciate what talents they had.

To get humorous here, on could say that in some early Grant comedies, such as Arsenic And Old Lace his overplaying could be a bit much, though I enjoy watching an unhinged Cary Grant far better than an unhinged Paul Newman of his Left Handed Gun period, right through even The Hustler. For both men it was a few years after they were free from their exclusive studio contracts that they began shining.

Like Newman, Grant really started to turn up in top ten moneymakers in his second decade in films, by which I mean the 40s. In Newman's case it was the 60s. In each case it was somewhat similar, as in "we've got a superstar on our hands" the studio execs realized, actors well above the levels of their nearest rivals in terms of popularity. By 1942-43 Grant was way ahead of the likes of Robert Montgomery and Melvyn Douglas, Fred MacMurray and Ray Milland, just as after the one/two punch of The Hustler and Hud Newman had pulled way ahead of the Don Murrays and Cliff Robertsons, as well as various "aspiring Brandos" like Ben Gazzara and John Cassavettes.

The golden age for both men was sweet. They were high profile stars and personalities, real public figures. With all due respect to Paul Newman and his excellent filmography, Cary Grant has one of the best on record, period, of any major star. I believe we've been over this before, with both of us agreeing that of Grant's generation only fellow Hitchcock semi-regular leading man Jimmy Stewart can give him a run for his money. (I find Stewart's actually better, and not just because if It's A Wonderful Life but the Hitchcocks and the Anthony Mann westerns, Harvey and Anatomy Of A Muder, all in the space of one decade, but once more, I digress ).

At the time, in his heyday, it probably looked like Newman had a better filmography than either Grant or Stewart, but that's from the perspective of the 60s and a more liberal mindset, with many critics and moviegoers only regarding films that in one way or another that touch of "big issues" (race relations, sexuality, political corruption, the Cold War, alcoholism) seriously. Newman did his share of those, though there was, strangely, flexible and lively side, a willingness to make movies that just entertained, whether it was Paris Blues or the execrable Secret War Of Harry Frigg or, more typically, the Butch Cassidy blockbuster, and Hombre, though I regard the last named to be far better than that, at the the it was "Paul Newman's western".

Both men aged gracefully, too, and without losing their appeal to women. Each had his down periods, his bad year or two, yet they always bounced back. By the 70s it's difficult to compare the silver age Newman to the Grant of roughly the same vintage, which for him would have been the 50s. Yet one of Grant's biggest hits of the 50s,--I think that it is the biggest--is the just for fun service comedy Operation Petticoat, pairing him with the much younger Tony Curtis. Interestingly, in the 70s, Newman's biggest grosser was by far The Sting, which paired him with the not that much younger Robert Redford. Newman remained actor to a much older age than Grant, and while his later work is variable, some of it is quite good, and he kept on getting better as an actor. Grant seemed to coast more in his final years as a star, though his timing remained, as always impeccable.

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[–] filmklassik 8 years ago

My opinion? With Newman you're talking about seven indisputably great motion pictures: HUD, HOMBRE, THE HUSTLER (even though Newman is, yes, a bit theatrical in some of it), COOL HAND LUKE, BUTCH CASSIDY, THE STING, and THE VERDICT.

Several more fall just shy of greatness (ABSENCE OF MALICE, NOBODY'S FOOL, SLAPSHOT and THE COLOR OF MONEY, for starters)

And he gave wonderful performances in a handful that were frankly well beneath his talents (ROAD TO PERDITION anyone?)

Grant made more movies than Newman, and was terrific in most of them, but I'm not sure how many qualify as classics. It's safe to say NORTH BY NORTHWEST does. Ditto GUNGA DIN, HIS GIRL FRIDAY, ONLY ANGELS HAVE WINGS, THE PHILADELPHIA STORY, NOTORIOUS and CHARADE. All fabulous.

But I'd argue that THE AWFUL TRUTH and BRINGING UP BABY haven't aged particularly well. (But I suppose there's no arguing with their status as "classics").

BABY, in particular, is so labored it is almost painful to sit through.

Now to be fair, I haven't seen HOLIDAY or THE TALK OF THE TOWN, both of which are highly regarded.

So it looks like a dead heat.

Grant of course had a much lighter touch than Newman (as somebody already pointed out, THE PRIZE was basically Newman's disastrous riff on NORTH BY NORTHWEST, by the same screenwriter), but I also can't imagine Grant earning plaudits for COOL HAND LUKE or THE VERDICT.

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[–] filmklassik 8 years ago

*And I've also never seen MR. AND MRS. BRIDGE, which many say ranks with the best work of Newman's career and is, on its own, a brilliant motion picture.

Thoughts?

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[–] telegonus 8 years ago

Well, these two were different kinds of actor as to style. Newman was better educated, with a college degree and I believe a masters in drama, while Grant was at best a high school graduate (or whatever they call that in the UK). Their appeals were somewhat different, as were their personal tastes.

I've never seen Holiday, either, have read great things about it and Cary Grant's performance in it. Some have gone so far as to claim that "he found himself" when making that film. As an actor, I mean. Talk Of The Town is a joy, but that's me. It has many critics, and some consider it overlong. If you're a George Stevens fan you're more likely to warm to it.

I find that Grant's "light" films hold up well. Not just comedies but movies that are somewhat dramatic but don't cut too deep. Mr. Lucky, for instance. Also the war movie, actually quite serious but definitely melodrama, not drama, Destination Tokyo. I'm a huge fan of Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House, and I like the ambitious if only partly successful People Will Talk.

Paul Newman was no slouch at comedy, and I wish he'd done more. He had a sense of humor naturally, and it's there even in his more serious films. My favorite ugly duckling Paul Newman film is probably the outright comedy Rally Round The Flag, Boys!, which I loved the first time I saw it and still do. One of the major factors in my liking it is that when Newman gets wacky he's really funny. Alas, it's one of his lowest rated film, and worse, from his early "in the wilderness and in the shadow of Brando" period.

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[–] ecarle 8 years ago

Well, these two were different kinds of actor as to style. Newman was better educated, with a college degree and I believe a masters in drama,

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That put Newman ahead of a lot of movie stars. Steve McQueen, for instance(given their friendly rivalry.)

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while Grant was at best a high school graduate (or whatever they call that in the UK).

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Well, Grant came from a different era and a more hardscrabble life.

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Their appeals were somewhat different, as were their personal tastes.

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Yes. I'm not sure if Cary Grant's tastes and appeal really "travel" to modern stars. Its been said that George Clooney looks and sounds like late era Grant(gray hair, smooth voice) but that's about it. Clooney's roles are much more activist and rebellious.

I think that seventies Robert Redford is closer to Grant than sixties Paul Newman.

But..movie stars are unique. And maybe unique to their ERAS.

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I've never seen Holiday, either, have read great things about it and Cary Grant's performance in it. Some have gone so far as to claim that "he found himself" when making that film. As an actor, I mean. Talk Of The Town is a joy, but that's me. It has many critics, and some consider it overlong. If you're a George Stevens fan you're more likely to warm to it.

I find that Grant's "light" films hold up well. Not just comedies but movies that are somewhat dramatic but don't cut too deep. Mr. Lucky, for instance. Also the war movie, actually quite serious but definitely melodrama, not drama, Destination Tokyo. I'm a huge fan of Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House, and I like the ambitious if only partly successful People Will Talk.

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Lotta good movies in there. Cary Grant may have retired early for a movie star. But he jammed in a lot of movies before then.

Grant was somewhat limited in range, but he could go from light comedy to fairly serious drama(the war movies, Crisis, None but the Lonely Heart) fairly well.

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Paul Newman was no slouch at comedy, and I wish he'd done more.

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Except Harry Frigg was a big mistake.

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He had a sense of humor naturally, and it's there even in his more serious films.

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He has some nice one-liners in Hombre and he sells them with a twinkle behind his stoic calm.

When he glimpses Diane Cilento alone taking off her petticoat,he announces himself to her. The exchange:

Cilento: You could have opened your mouth.
Newman: But my heart was in it.

Hilarious in the trainboard poker game in The Sting; hilarious (and a bit tragic nonetheless) in Slapshot.

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My favorite ugly duckling Paul Newman film is probably the outright comedy Rally Round The Flag, Boys!, which I loved the first time I saw it and still do. One of the major factors in my liking it is that when Newman gets wacky he's really funny. Alas, it's one of his lowest rated film, and worse, from his early "in the wilderness and in the shadow of Brando" period.

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I recall seeing that movie on TV in the sixties or seventies. A weird mix of "suburban family humor" and something about military nuclear missile bases?

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[–] ecarle 8 years ago

My opinion? With Newman you're talking about seven indisputably great motion pictures: HUD, HOMBRE, THE HUSTLER (even though Newman is, yes, a bit theatrical in some of it), COOL HAND LUKE, BUTCH CASSIDY, THE STING, and THE VERDICT.

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That's a good list. Interestingly, I think all of those were the "accepted" classics except Hombre...and now its on the list, too.

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Several more fall just shy of greatness (ABSENCE OF MALICE, NOBODY'S FOOL, SLAPSHOT and THE COLOR OF MONEY, for starters)

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All great to me. Slapshot is incredible, and I remember the great shambling humor of Newman "giving up" on his brutish charges, the Hanson Brothers when the cops come in to arrest them for violence on the ice. Its a hilarious, improvised scene. Newman loved Slapshot.

And look: Newman didn't much like ceding "The Towering Inferno" to McQueen, but they are two great big movie stars together in it, and Newman CARED about his role here(as he would not care about his role in the much less solid "When Time Ran Out.") I put "The Towering Inferno" on Newman's second tier great list...even if he didn't.

And how about the Newman-directed logging movie "Sometimes a Great Notion," with its great scene in which Newman tries, and fails , to save his friend(Richard Jaeckel, Oscar-nommed) from drowning under a fallen tree in a lake?

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And he gave wonderful performances in a handful that were frankly well beneath his talents (ROAD TO PERDITION anyone?)

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I recall with interest how Newman took second billing to Hanks in that one, but Hanks took second billing to Leo DiCaprio in Catch Me if You Can.

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Grant made more movies than Newman, and was terrific in most of them, but I'm not sure how many qualify as classics. It's safe to say NORTH BY NORTHWEST does. Ditto GUNGA DIN, HIS GIRL FRIDAY, ONLY ANGELS HAVE WINGS, THE PHILADELPHIA STORY, NOTORIOUS and CHARADE. All fabulous.

But I'd argue that THE AWFUL TRUTH and BRINGING UP BABY haven't aged particularly well. (But I suppose there's no arguing with their status as "classics").

BABY, in particular, is so labored it is almost painful to sit through.

Now to be fair, I haven't seen HOLIDAY or THE TALK OF THE TOWN, both of which are highly regarded.

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Much of that group is surely classics. I have to add "To Catch A Thief" for Hitchcock, which seems the epitome of style and glamour to me. Some would add Grant's dark performance as the husband in "Suspicion."

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So it looks like a dead heat.

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Fair enough. The two men each had "long distance runner" careers in Hollywood -- decades as top stars. And both pretty much went out on top, though Newman had a few too many TV productions and lost his leading man status.

Notes in passing: Screenwriter William Goldman said that, hands down, Paul Newman was the most grounded and "normal" movie star he ever worked with(on Harper and Butch Cassidy). He added Clint Eastwood to that list years later when the two did "Absolute Power." Stars Goldman found to be pains were: Dustin Hoffman(on Marathon Man) and...uh oh...Robert Redford.

But Goldman also talked about a pre-meeting on Harper where Newman was late and some agent said: "Now, we'll wait for him. In a few years when he is Glenn Ford, we won't." A double whammy of Hollywood cynicism. But they were wrong. Newman lasted a lot longer as a star than Glenn Ford. (Apologies to Glenn Fod.)

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Grant of course had a much lighter touch than Newman (as somebody already pointed out, THE PRIZE was basically Newman's disastrous riff on NORTH BY NORTHWEST, by the same screenwriter), but I also can't imagine Grant earning plaudits for COOL HAND LUKE or THE VERDICT.

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Different actors lock down different types of roles. Newman could "suit up" in a movie like The Sting or Absence of Malice and project Grant-like cool, but Grant really wasn't built for something as raw and Method as Cool Hand Luke.

Interestingly, Cary Grant WAS mentioned as possible casting for The Verdict. Hollywood spent the almost 20 years of Grant's retirement to his death trying to lure him out. The role intended for Grant wasn't mentioned, but I figure they wanted him for the role James Mason played...an elegant and powerful but totally unscrupulous Boston lawyer. I would expect Grant demurred on returning to the screen as a villain. And I think The Verdict was Mason's last film before a heart attack got him. Well, one of the last.

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[–] ecarle 8 years ago

Stars Goldman found to be pains were: Dustin Hoffman(on Marathon Man) and...uh oh...Robert Redford.

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I rather feel that in everyone's leaping to the defense of Paul Newman, his "pal"(of sorts) Robert Redford got short-changed. My comment above, for instance. My noting that Redford had only one Oscar nom (for acting) versus Newman's multiples and two wins.

But there can be no doubt that just as Paul Newman dominated the 60's as a superstar, so did Robert Redford come into his own in the 70's.

Redford had been working for about a decade before "Butch Cassidy" made him a star after a group of superstars had passed or been cut for the role of Sundance(which Newman coveted, too): Steve McQueen, Warren Beatty, Marlon Brando. That was 1969.

Redford's peak stardom pretty much was...the seventies. It started with Butch in 1969 and ends with The Electric Horseman(opposite female superstar Jane Fonda) in 1979. Oh, Redford kept working on through the 80's through today, but more intermittently after 1980, and with a face that steadily lost its looks in a rather alarming way.

Still, Redford's run in the seventies -- looking great and maintaining his cool reserve -- was quite a run:

Butch Cassidy('69 into '70, with a '74 re-release to cash in on The Sting.)
The Hot Rock
The Candidate
Jeremiah Johnson
The Way We Were(his best role IMHO; great chemistry with Streisand and his own triumph as gorgeous leading man AND thinking man's star.)
The Sting (Unprecedented: lighting strikes twice with Newman...and a Best Picture win.)
The Great Gatsby (kind of a bust, but prestigious.)
Three Days of the Condor ("Smallish" then , but quite a classic now, with an all-star cast including Faye Dunaway from Chinatown and Max Von Sydow from The Exorcist and John Houseman from The Paper Chase.)
The Great Waldo Pepper(script by William "Butch Cassidy" Goldman; scary flight sequences)
All the President's Men(with Dustin Hoffman and in a movie ABOUT the seventies, in many ways.)
A Bridge Too Far (22 or so major stars are in this -- and Redford got the best role and paid the most.)
The Electric Horseman -- Jane Fonda, Sydney Pollack directing, the Sundance Kid moustache is back; slight but superstarry entertainment.

That group of films alone cemented Robert Redford for the ages, and he had that all-over-the-tabloids fame, too. But with nary a marital or sex scandal at all.

I recall a Hollywood wag quoted thus: "Robert Redford? Throw a stick on the beach at Malibu, and you'll hit ten of him." My own father -- a massive and lifelong Paul Newman fan, said to me "Robert Redford looks like a lot of guys...Paul Newman is unique."

Well, I listened to those critiques , but the truth is that Robert Redford beat that generalization. He was a blond hunk who projected intelligence, sensitivity, humor. Among the other blond male stars of Hollywood he looked special. "It is a matter of centimeters" on the face, wrote one critic of Redford's supremacy. His blond face just looked better than other blond faces. Thus are some superstars made.

I think as I entered on this topic, I will return(if not leave quite yet.) Robert Redford's quiet cool was/is closer to Cary Grant than Paul Newman's Method-bred bravado. Newman AND Redford were great, top level stars of long term success.

It boils down to what I''ve said before: if we are comparing Grant to Newman to Redford it really boils down to choosing among three handsome guys and trying to affix an artistic judgment to their works. All of them made some hits, Redford perhaps has the fewest classics, but he worked the least. (Let's not forget that Redford got the sometimes moving, sometimes dull 1985 Best Picture winner Out of Africa rather late in the game.)

As for Oscar nods? Well, Redford's got one nomination for acting so far.

Cary Grant only got two. And finally won a career special.

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[–] telegonus 8 years ago

You know what I think what brought Robert Redford down (as a star?): apathy. He didn't decline so much as move away from the spotlight. No sooner was he on a roll than did he start becoming picky about his projects, then downright imperious (producing), and after that aiming to be more than he was (a movie star) when he directed Ordinary People. It's like he was a little embarrassed over being a movie star, did his darnedest to show that there was more to him: concerned film-maker, good citizen environmentalist, a serious artist aside from his acting, and then, patron of the arts.

I've seen him do some first rate work as a serious actor; and he was much more than just a pretty face on the screen. In his early film and TV appearances,--think the Hitchcock hour A Piece Of The Action--he showed that he could hold his own with the big guys. He was cocky and competitive, a bit like Newman in that, but with less (outward) vulnerability and a more pensive, introverted disposition. I can see Redford credibly play a doctor, a diplomat or a college professor, while I can see Newman only bringing his star power and his screen persona to roles like that.

Redford was somewhat like Warren Beatty in seeming to fall in love with himself, with his fame, all the attention he got, and he couldn't pull away from it. While I wouldn't call either a megalomaniac, both men seemed to be always pushing upward, and in that both were a bit Gatsby-esque. There's nothing to be ashamed of in becoming a movie star. It's what they were aiming for, early on, after all. Yet as he grew older it wasn't enough.

Beatty began to movie into his own Warren In Wonderland phase in the wake of the extraordinary critical and commercial success of Bonnie And Clyde, and yet after that he was never so busy as he had been when he was younger, was never on a roll even at Redford's 1969-76 level, which is quite a few years. To his credit, Redford never got quite so weird as Beatty. Both are icons, but Redford's standing seems higher due to if nothing else his having done more than Beatty, tried harder at different things.

...and a merry Christmas to you and your loved ones, EC  .

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[–] ecarle 8 years ago

You know what I think what brought Robert Redford down (as a star?): apathy. He didn't decline so much as move away from the spotlight.

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Yes. This happened in an even more intense way with Warren Beatty, who made a grand total of two movies as an actor in the 80's(the well-regarded Reds and the infamous bomb "Ishtar") and rather staggered through the 90's before ending it for almost good with "Town and Country" in 2001. No movies since then til 2016. This year, as I post. Beatty's "comeback movie," "Rules Don't Apply," opened to no business a month ago and is gone. I think he may be , too (Hah...he'll do something..QT has wanted him since Kill Bill , to play Bill.)

But back to Redford:

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No sooner was he on a roll than did he start becoming picky about his projects, then downright imperious (producing), and after that aiming to be more than he was (a movie star) when he directed Ordinary People. It's like he was a little embarrassed over being a movie star, did his darnedest to show that there was more to him: concerned film-maker, good citizen environmentalist, a serious artist aside from his acting, and then, patron of the arts.

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The "little embarrassed to be a movie star" thing seems to hit a lot of them. Paul Newman and Steve McQueen took up auto racing to carve out another life(and Newman, I think, was quite good at it.) Redford (like Newman, and McQueen as a producer only) joined so many of them on the producer/director side of the camera, and won a Best Director Oscar for "Ordinary People." As Warren Beatty did for Reds. As Kevin Costner did for Dances With Wolves. As Mel Gibson did for Braveheart. A bit suspect, all of them -- and Hitchcock as we know NEVER won the Best Director Oscar. "Only in Hollywood."

Redford had a bit of a backfire with "Ordinary People" winning Picture and Director in 1980. That was the year of "Raging Bull" -- which won the major critics poll as "the best movie of the 80's" in 1990. By comparison, Redford's film looked precious and uptight and twee -- even with the serious subject matter of a prosperous family torn apart by a beloved son's death and his guilty brother's suicide attempt.

Redford as a star did the grim prison drama "Brubaker" in 1980 and nothing more til "The Natural" in 1984, prodding one critic to note: "Redford evidently only chooses to work in election years." But then something compelled a one(Natural/1984), two (Out of Africa 1985), three (Legal Eagles 1986) year-in-a-row combination. Rumors were: divorce dollars were necessary. Can't remember when that happened.

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I've seen him do some first rate work as a serious actor; and he was much more than just a pretty face on the screen.

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That's true. In the sixties when he did TV and some "early movies"(War Hunt, Inside Daisy Clover, This Property is Condemned), he really didn't have the looks yet, fully. But he had the attitude, and it WAS kind of Paul Newman cocky. Actually, his "too serious lawyer" newlywed in Barefoot in the Park made his name as a Broadway star AND as a movie star(in the movie with Jane Fonda.) Indeed, militating AGAINST Redford getting cast as the Sundance Kid was the bookishness he had in "Barefoot in the Park."

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In his early film and TV appearances,--think the Hitchcock hour A Piece Of The Action--he showed that he could hold his own with the big guys.

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That's a great episode..I believe it was the first hour-long Hitchcock as a series episode(Hitchcock had filmed some stand-alone hour episodes of anthology shows.)

Also on the Alfred Hitchcock Hour, Redford played a hot-tempered near-psycho who beats people up and commits murder.

And on The Twilight Zone...he played Death. No, really. Death.

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He was cocky and competitive, a bit like Newman in that, but with less (outward) vulnerability and a more pensive, introverted disposition. I can see Redford credibly play a doctor, a diplomat or a college professor, while I can see Newman only bringing his star power and his screen persona to roles like that.

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The time wasn't right, career-wise, but Robert Redford might have made more sense in Torn Curtain as a rocket scientist than Paul Newman. Though Newman made more sense than Steve McQueen.

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Redford was somewhat like Warren Beatty in seeming to fall in love with himself, with his fame, all the attention he got, and he couldn't pull away from it. While I wouldn't call either a megalomaniac, both men seemed to be always pushing upward, and in that both were a bit Gatsby-esque.

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There's a man named Peter Bart who ran Variety for some years(maybe he still does) after some years as Robert Evans' second-in-command at Paramount in those "seventies glory years"(True Grit, Love Story, The Godfather, Chinatown.) And Bart revealed in one of his books that Beatty and Redford had a decades long competition overtly run by Beatty, but engaged in by Redford. Beatty prided himself on saying he turned down many roles that Redford took (Sundance Kid, The Way We Were). Bart "ran the numbers" and found that Redford had far more hits than Beatty, even as Beatty had the historic moneymaker Bonnie and Clyde on his resume. Still, Redford won Best Director in 1980 and Beatty won Best Director in 1981...the competition was tight. It all came to a head in 1998, of all years, when Redford's The Horse Whisperer went up against Beatty's Bulworth...and Redford's movie won the box office while Beatty got the reviews.

In any event, it would seem that both Beatty and Redford at once got very powerful and elected to "recede from the movie world. Perhaps actors whose careers were so based on "prettiness" felt more harmed by age. I don't know.

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There's nothing to be ashamed of in becoming a movie star. It's what they were aiming for, early on, after all. Yet as he grew older it wasn't enough.

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Its very, very weird. They achieve the heights and feel oddly ashamed about it, particularly when they know it is about their looks(at least at first). I've opined that two handsome guys -- Paul Newman and Brad Pitt -- may have picked early roles meant to FIGHT their looks. Heels for Newman and greasy messed up guys for Pitt(like the psycho in Kalifornia.)

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Beatty began to movie into his own Warren In Wonderland phase in the wake of the extraordinary critical and commercial success of Bonnie And Clyde, and yet after that he was never so busy as he had been when he was younger, was never on a roll even at Redford's 1969-76 level, which is quite a few years. To his credit, Redford never got quite so weird as Beatty. Both are icons, but Redford's standing seems higher due to if nothing else his having done more than Beatty, tried harder at different things.

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Well, I"ve read a few books on Beatty, and though they must be taken with some grains of salt, it seems that the man had/has some mental issues to go with his star narcissism. Recall his sister Shirley is deep into spiritualism and some occult ideas. Beatty seems to have had a certain obsessiveness about filming(rivaling Kubrick for 100s of takes per scene) and a certain paranoia about MAKING movies.

One thing both Redford and Beatty learned that we can only envy: make your millions young and you can take off the rest of your life, if you want to. Make movies only when you want to.

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...and a merry Christmas to you and your loved ones, EC

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Thank you. And to you and yours! Me.... I've "gifted" myself a little time on the 'net today. And I received some DVDs and film books to re-stock my posts. Hah.

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[–] telegonus 8 years ago

That's interesting about the Beatty-Redford competition, EC. I'd never heard of it before but it makes sense. When I think of big star feuds my mind invariably drifts backward, to Bette and Joan, and before that Bette and Miriam (Hopkins). Bette really had her share of feuds. But seriously, Clark Gable was competitive with Gary Cooper, which has always struck me as odd, as they were so unalike as stars. If anything they seemed to complement one another, with Gable for Gone With The Wind, Cooper for Sergeant York and Pride Of The Yankees. For a while there Gable and Cagney were competitive, mostly early on; more so the former, I believe.

There's been less of that (that I know of) in recent years, basically since the studio system collapsed, and with it, the old Hollywood "infrastructure". Even as they were often co-starred one senses that Burt and Kirk were competitive. You can feel it on screen, though that was also usually in the script. Marlon and Monty weren't really particularly competitive personally, though their fans were often competitive as to which one was the better actor. Marilyn didn't seem competitive even with her rivals, and that includes the very un-Marilyn Kim Novak (whose birth name actually was Marilyn!). Had she not married the Prince of Monaco I can imagine Grace Kelly getting competitive with Audrey Hepburn, even as they were, like Gable and Cooper, unalike as types. More of a "who's classier" thing as well as, obviously, "who's the better actress".

One might have thought that William Holden would have been competitive with Alan Ladd, especially when both were with Paramount, but I've never read anything about that. Nor have I ever read that Holden was competitive with Glenn Ford, whom he somewhat resembled (they even played brothers once), but no. In fact, they were friends. I wonder about Eva Marie Saint and Lee Remick, though Saint was several years older. Remick came on stronger as a star, and on screen was far sexier than Saint (even as I personally prefer the latter), yet I doubt they were truly rivals. Saint was never glamorous even as she was quite beautiful in a placid sort of way. Remick was Hollywood glamorous even as she aspired to better things than (sigh) movie stardom. Maybe it's that Saint tended to play women of integrity, of honor, with her "holding the line", or trying to, in so many of the films she appeared in. Remick was more like "fallen", often literally, as in Days Of Wine And Roses, with Saint more likely to "rise" to the occasion.

To bring this closer to the present day , I have no idea whether Pacino and De Niro were ever truly rivals (I know that Pacino was somewhat competitive with Dustin Hoffman before The Godfather "saved" him). One might think that in the 70s-80s Burt Reynolds and Clint Eastwood would have better competitors for the title of Great American Star, male division, but those days were rather gone by then. Newman and McQueen, yes, but their peak years were somewhat earlier. Besides, Burt and Clint had carved out very different niches for themselves, weren't up for the same parts (that I know of). One might think that Gene Hackman and Robert Duvall would have been rivals for the mantle of Great American Character star, succeeding Spencer Tracy, and, a bit earlier, Paul Muni. Walter Huston's in there, too, but he was older when he began in films and never seemed to have much in the way of box-office. I do have to wonder if Mickey Rourke got p!ssed when Bruce Willis sort of succeeded him as the screen's premiere slob hero star. Or if Tim Hutton resented Sean Penn's becoming a much bigger star than he ever was, and lasting much longer.

It's worth at this juncture at least trying to bring this back to if not Family Plot, its director, Alfred Hitchcock. Early in his career, Hitchcock was an assistant to German director Fritz Lang, whose works his own films share some things in common with. Yet despite getting of to a flying start in America with his anti-lynching film Fury, Lang was unable to build on this even as he enjoyed a good twenty years in Hollywood; and it wasn't a bad run, either. But Hitchcock had padrone David Selznick on his first American film (and for several more years), and that one won the AA for best picture, a status no film of Lang's even came close to. Yet I can't help but think of Lang, whose films I was quite fond of when I was a very young man, as rival to Hitchcock, if only for their contributions to film noir and dark, often pessimistic films generally. Hitchcock wisely "went Hollywood", lightened up and really grew in the 50s. The nearly ten years older Lang didn't. Then there was Hitchcock's (seemingly insane) rivalry with horror exploitation director William Castle (like Castle was stealing Hitchcock's thunder? ). No matter. The fruit (no, not the cellar) of this rivalry was Psycho, so it was worth it.

That rivalry, which should have ended in the police station in Psycho, seemed to continue, if only a little, with The Birds, a movie Hitchcock marketed, as he did with his previous film, much as Castle marketed his horrors. Alas, while the movie made some money, it was an expensive film and didn't come close to equaling Psycho's grosses at the box-office. Then, as if that wasn't enough, Hitchcock got competitive with another TV series, also produced by MCA-Revue, Thriller, whose (again) horror ambiance (and perhaps cult following) he seemed jealous of. So he gets the wonderfully spooky Thriller cancelled, expands his own show from a half-hour to an hour; and by its last season many of the Hitchcock hours were coming to look (and play) like Thriller episodes! All this, it's worth noting, as a reality check, during the peak of Hitchcock's "Walt Disney period" as a kind of, well, not much beloved but very high profile figure in the entertainment industry, enjoying great success on television and in the movies. Just as Disney had his comic books (at the time still very popular), Hitchcock had, in print, those short story anthologies, in hardcover and paperback, that were popular at the time. I read a few of them myself when I was growing up. To his credit, Hitchcock seemed to stop competing then, or he was easing up. The Castle rivalry was, apparently, over, and Hitch never attempted to make a musical for children along the lines of Mary Poppins, though he did use that film's "bird lady", Jane Darwell, in one of his better hour long episodes, The Jar.

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[–] ecarle 8 years ago

That's interesting about the Beatty-Redford competition, EC. I'd never heard of it before but it makes sense.

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Well, as I say, this Peter Bart fellow was an insider at Paramount and in other production situations, and I think he elected, at a certain point in time, to "expose" some of the more petty situations he encountered working with stars.

Bart wrote also of Beatty that with the latter's political work and films like Bulworth taking on the oppression of the poor, he told Beatty over lunch that movie stars were therefore grossly overpaid and inequality would be corrected with lower movie star pay.

Whereupon Beatty answered, "But we're movie stars. That's entirely different. The star system is entirely different."

Which is true.

Peter Bart's Paramount career had interesting beginnings. First of all, Robert Evans was hired to run the studio ...and his resume was pretty slight. A few movies as a bad actor(though not necessarily bad movies), a career in fashion(Evan-Picone),a "producer" credit when he bought the book of The Detective for a movie with Frank Sinatra and...voila, they hired Evans to run Paramount.

Evans in turn, selected for his right hand man, Peter Bart...a reporter(NYT? WSJ?) who had interviewed him.

Something must have been right about that combo, for Evans and Bart greenlighted a lot of great stuff.

Meanwhile, Evans courted and won as "best friends," Warren Beatty and Jack Nicholson(thus agreeing to fund a lot of their films), but could never get close to Redford (who nonetheless made some Paramount films for Evans.)

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When I think of big star feuds my mind invariably drifts backward, to Bette and Joan, and before that Bette and Miriam (Hopkins). Bette really had her share of feuds.

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And Joan Fontaine and Olivia DeHavilland -- sisters. But honestly, out here in the real world are not we subject to competitions and jealousies...certainly among siblings(THAT's nature's way.)

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But seriously, Clark Gable was competitive with Gary Cooper, which has always struck me as odd, as they were so unalike as stars. If anything they seemed to complement one another, with Gable for Gone With The Wind, Cooper for Sergeant York and Pride Of The Yankees. For a while there Gable and Cagney were competitive, mostly early on; more so the former, I believe.

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Well, to BECOME a movie star of the top flight is pretty competitive. Cary Grant in the forties likened movie stars to a group of people hanging onto a trolley car. Some new ones jump on, some old ones fall off and, said Cary , "Gary Cooper always sits there comfortably on a seat in no danger at all."

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There's been less of that (that I know of) in recent years, basically since the studio system collapsed, and with it, the old Hollywood "infrastructure".

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Even as they were often co-starred one senses that Burt and Kirk were competitive. You can feel it on screen, though that was also usually in the script.

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They worked well together, but from what I've read, Burt always made a certain amount of fun towards Kirk..particularly Kirk's shorter height. And by 1961, Burt Lancaster had a Best Actor Oscar(for 1960), which Kirk didn't have.

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THAT said, when Kirk Douglas produced 7 Days in May in '64, he was set to play the military villain and then he learned the studio wanted...Paul Newman!...to play the hero. Kirk fought that, asked for Burt, offered Burt the hero OR the villain. Burt took the villain.

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Marlon and Monty weren't really particularly competitive personally, though their fans were often competitive as to which one was the better actor.

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Its odd...Monty came first(didn't he?) but Marlon seemed to be "the original."

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Marilyn didn't seem competitive even with her rivals, and that includes the very un-Marilyn Kim Novak (whose birth name actually was Marilyn!). Had she not married the Prince of Monaco I can imagine Grace Kelly getting competitive with Audrey Hepburn, even as they were, like Gable and Cooper, unalike as types. More of a "who's classier" thing as well as, obviously, "who's the better actress".

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Well, they generally keep these things to themselves, but certainly there can be competition when a role is lost to another.

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One might have thought that William Holden would have been competitive with Alan Ladd, especially when both were with Paramount, but I've never read anything about that. Nor have I ever read that Holden was competitive with Glenn Ford, whom he somewhat resembled (they even played brothers once), but no.

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Here I think the comfort level was this: so many damn movies were being made a year that every name actor knew he'd end up in SOME major movie.

So Holden and Ladd and Ford could all pick different movies, and all work. And the studio box office performance lists told them who was top (Holden a lot, Ford once, Ladd...not in the fifties).

I was watching Brad Pitt in Moneyball(2011) the other night, and I thought for a moment and then pictured -- George Clooney or Matt Damon in the same role. They all could have done it. Though Pitt and Clooney had more of the necessary cool guy leader of men thing going on that the role required.

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I wonder about Eva Marie Saint and Lee Remick, though Saint was several years older. Remick came on stronger as a star, and on screen was far sexier than Saint (even as I personally prefer the latter), yet I doubt they were truly rivals.

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I'm not sure WHO was rivals in that other generation. It just came to pass..different actors and actresses landed different roles based on availability.

I read of Michelle Pfeiffer having to turn down Thelma and Louise simply because she was booked in another movie, and couldn't do two at once.

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Saint was never glamorous even as she was quite beautiful in a placid sort of way.

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Hitchcock helped glamourize her a bit, for one film. She'd played plain-ish second fiddle to Liz Taylor in 1957's "Raintree County," but when Hitch got her -- the glamour came through. Hitchcock wrote to a friend after seeing Exodus the next year,"I glamourized her and now she looks like a waif again."

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Remick was Hollywood glamorous even as she aspired to better things than (sigh) movie stardom. Maybe it's that Saint tended to play women of integrity, of honor, with her "holding the line", or trying to, in so many of the films she appeared in. Remick was more like "fallen", often literally, as in Days Of Wine And Roses, with Saint more likely to "rise" to the occasion.

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Yes. Lee Remick is a favorite of mine. Do you know that BOTH Eva Marie Saint and Lee Remick were up to play "Marnie" for Hitch? Either would have been better than what we got.

Remick in the almost R-rated late sixties played sexual(rather than just sexy) women in such films as No Way to Treat a Lady, The Detective(a nympho in that one) and Hard Contract(where James Coburn mistakes the civilian Remick for a call girl, she goes along with the mistake -- and gets paid!)

In short, after awhile, Remick was playing much more sexual women than Eva Marie Saint could or perhaps wanted to.

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MORE

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[–] ecarle 8 years ago

To bring this closer to the present day , I have no idea whether Pacino and De Niro were ever truly rivals (I know that Pacino was somewhat competitive with Dustin Hoffman before The Godfather "saved" him).

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At a certain point in the 70's, I think Hoffman and Pacino were considered interchangeable at the studios.

BOTH Hoffman and Pacino were considered for Marathon Man(Hoffman got it.)

BOTH Hoffman and Pacino were considered to play Carl Bernstein in All the President's Men. (Hoffman got it.)

DeNiro came up fast behind those two and we really ended up with three somewhat different, somewhat the same actors , interchangeably available for the same parts. And we got DeNiro and Hoffman in Meet the Fockers; and DeNiro and Pacino in Heat. Never got Pacino and Hoffman...maybe they WERE competitive.

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One might think that in the 70s-80s Burt Reynolds and Clint Eastwood would have better competitors for the title of Great American Star, male division, but those days were rather gone by then.

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In 1978, Burt and Clint did a Time magazine cover together, standing back to back and smiling. The article pointed up near superstar-equality among the two, and a shared macho. In '78, Burt had made it big with Smokey and the Bandit and Clint reclaimed his throne with that orangatan movie.

Irony: there was all sorts of talk about teaming Burt and Clint up for a film. By the time they did it -- "City Heat" in 1984, Burt's career was already sliding (Cannonball 1 and Stroker Ace had done it) and Clint, while not the superstar of the 70's, rather slyly looked like a bigger star than Burt. This would not have been the case in 1978.

More irony: it was ON City Heat that a stuntman accidentally hit Burt's jaw with a real chair, plunging Burt into pain and surgeries for years. His career slowed down accordingly as he struggled to recuperate and get good movies. And soon...no more competition with Clint.

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Newman and McQueen, yes, but their peak years were somewhat earlier.

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Yes, as we've discussed to great value.

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Besides, Burt and Clint had carved out very different niches for themselves, weren't up for the same parts (that I know of).

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True. Burt definitely went in more for comedy and developed a "Ol' South persona" that broke with Clint's Westerner. I think at their peak , sometimes one got the roles the other turned down, though.

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One might think that Gene Hackman and Robert Duvall would have been rivals for the mantle of Great American Character star, succeeding Spencer Tracy, and, a bit earlier, Paul Muni.

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Definitely, but there were plenty of character roles so Gene and Bob worked all the time(together ever? I cant recall.) I would say that one thing Duvall lacked that Gene had, at least for a long time, was sex appeal. Its like Duvall finally got it in older age in "Lonesome Dove," but it was too late.

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I do have to wonder if Mickey Rourke got p!ssed when Bruce Willis sort of succeeded him as the screen's premiere slob hero star.

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I do know that Willis himself told an interviewer that he was mistaken for Rourke a lot early on. But Rourke self-destructed himself.

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Or if Tim Hutton resented Sean Penn's becoming a much bigger star than he ever was, and lasting much longer.

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Well, THAT one's as old as the hills in Hollywood. Tim Hutton was the star of "Taps," ...co-starring Sean Penn. And Tom Cruise. A few years later...ouch.

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It's worth at this juncture at least trying to bring this back to if not Family Plot, its director, Alfred Hitchcock.

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Sure, hey why not. This is not an OT thread, but I think we have the latitude to have gone OT and circled back. After all, Redford and Pacino and Reynolds and NIcholson were all offered Family Plot, so why not talk about them?

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Early in his career, Hitchcock was an assistant to German director Fritz Lang, whose works his own films share some things in common with. Yet despite getting of to a flying start in America with his anti-lynching film Fury, Lang was unable to build on this even as he enjoyed a good twenty years in Hollywood; and it wasn't a bad run, either. But Hitchcock had padrone David Selznick on his first American film (and for several more years), and that one won the AA for best picture, a status no film of Lang's even came close to. Yet I can't help but think of Lang, whose films I was quite fond of when I was a very young man, as rival to Hitchcock, if only for their contributions to film noir and dark, often pessimistic films generally.

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"The student becomes the teacher." Another Hollywood reality. But then Hitccock pretty much outdistanced EVERYBODY once the fifties hit, Paramount gave him big stars and budgets, his genius really kicked in and the TV show made him a star.

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Hitchcock wisely "went Hollywood", lightened up and really grew in the 50s. The nearly ten years older Lang didn't. Then there was Hitchcock's (seemingly insane) rivalry with horror exploitation director William Castle (like Castle was stealing Hitchcock's thunder? ). No matter. The fruit (no, not the cellar) of this rivalry was Psycho, so it was worth it.

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The William Castle rivalry seems to have been real. Psycho's the proof and its GREAT proof and hey -- part of the appeal of Psycho is that it DOES feel like a William Castle movie...b/w small town America with macabre, gory secrets...just much better written and made.

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That rivalry, which should have ended in the police station in Psycho, seemed to continue, if only a little, with The Birds, a movie Hitchcock marketed, as he did with his previous film, much as Castle marketed his horrors.

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It remains an irony that The Birds got the print ad campaign that Psycho SHOULD have had:

"Prepare yourself for the sheer stabbing shock of The Birds!""

"This could be the most terrifying movie I have ever made"

VS Psycho:

"A new and entirely different type of screen excitement!"

Well, Psycho certainly WAS "new and entirely different," but "stabbing shock"? "Most terrifying film?" That should have been for Psycho, not The Birds. Perhaps Paramount wasn't ready to advertise Psycho in such a "William Castle gory way." And definitely those phrases were used in the Birds campaign to conjure up a connection to ...Psycho.

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Alas, while the movie made some money, it was an expensive film and didn't come close to equaling Psycho's grosses at the box-office.

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That's always been very interesting to me(and others.) The Birds has more set-pieces than Psycho, and is a special effects extravaganza for its time. But it seems that it just wasn't scary enough. Birds as villains didn't scare people like psychopaths with big knives in showers did.

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Then, as if that wasn't enough, Hitchcock got competitive with another TV series, also produced by MCA-Revue, Thriller, whose (again) horror ambiance (and perhaps cult following) he seemed jealous of. So he gets the wonderfully spooky Thriller cancelled, expands his own show from a half-hour to an hour; and by its last season many of the Hitchcock hours were coming to look (and play) like Thriller episodes!

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Fascinating. Interesting: Thriller used the Psycho house(outside) as a prop a lot more than the Hitchcock Hour did(once.)

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All this, it's worth noting, as a reality check, during the peak of Hitchcock's "Walt Disney period" as a kind of, well, not much beloved but very high profile figure in the entertainment industry, enjoying great success on television and in the movies. Just as Disney had his comic books (at the time still very popular), Hitchcock had, in print, those short story anthologies, in hardcover and paperback, that were popular at the time.

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Hitchcock was definitely "the dark Disney" when I was growing up. Disney's show was on at 7:00 pm; Hitch was usually on late at 10:00 pm...after the kids are supposed to go to bed. But one was surrounded with the TV commercials for the show, the books for adults, the books for KIDS(that had some gory stories in them, like "Yours Truly, Jack the Ripper")...Hitchcock was "in the air."

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I read a few of them myself when I was growing up.

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As did I. "Sinister Spies" was one. "Haunted Houseful" another. And they had the Hardy Boys competitor, "Alfred Hitchcock and The Three Investigators." Thus was I personally led, step by step, into my Hitchcock fandom in the 60's. (His biggest hits turning up no network TV around the same time sealed the deal.)

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To his credit, Hitchcock seemed to stop competing then, or he was easing up.

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It all seems to change around 1965. The too-serious (after NXNW, Psycho, and The Birds) Marnie was a middling-to-flop box office film in 1964. JFK was dead and The Beatles were ascendant and young filmmakers were on the rise and Hitchcock seemed ready to throttle back. He had made a movie a year in the sixties, he would slow down in the sixties to every two years(Marnie to Torn Curtain), three year(Torn Curtain to Topaz.) And he ended his high-rated TV show in 1965 too--- perhaps to get out before color TVs required color TV series.

What I think is interesting is how, after becoming SuperWilliam Castle with Psycho and The Birds, Hitch eased into a much more "serious" dramatic kind of filmmaking. I think he was seeking Oscar, his one elusive prize.

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The Castle rivalry was, apparently, over, and Hitch never attempted to make a musical for children along the lines of Mary Poppins,

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Hitch making a musical would have been fun(no, I don't count Waltzes From Vienna.) Hitchcock making MARY POPPINS could have been fun. It has its dark elements and London settings.

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though he did use that film's "bird lady", Jane Darwell, in one of his better hour long episodes, The Jar.

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As a kid, I used to see a CBS commercial("This Friday on the Alfred Hitchcock Hour") for The Jar, it seemed, every WEEK. It could not have been so, but I'm guessing they ran that particular macabre episode every couple of months or so. It had a Ray Bradbury authorship and ended -- discreetly -- with a severed head. Heady stuff for 60's TV.

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[–] telegonus 8 years ago

Yes, I believe I read an interview with Al Pacino years ago,--like over thirty--in which he said that he was often up for the same parts as Hoffman even when they were just unknown New York actors. He didn't sound bitter or competitive, just telling it like it was. On a personal note, I like Hoffman better when I was young, found Pacino intimidating, downright threatening at times, even when playing a "nice guy". As the years have gone by Hoffman seems way too much the Method guy, with the turning point being maybe his much praised TV production of Death Of A Salesman, with Willy Loman a part he was unsuited to play, due partly to his small stature,--Willy's best played by a tall or more imposing player IMO--and the aging was like what one might expect from Paul Muni in 1937. Just awful. I could feel nothing for Dustin's Willy due to Dustin feeling too much for himself, as in pity, and unable to get outside of who he was and get into who Willy Loman was. This was maybe as much a problem of Hoffman having been a highly praised actor for many years, working in a kind of "safe zone" that was uniquely his; but no, Willy Loman can't be played that way, not played well anyway.

Al got more stylized as he grew old older; and I came to like the way his features changed. Looking fifty became him. It gave him a kind of elegance (Hoffman never got there). Also, Pacino grew. The Pacino of The Godfather flicks is different from the Pacino of Dog Day Afternoon, a different kettle of fish from Bobby Deerfield, and then his mad dog Scarface, which I found mesmerizing and right for the movie; if not a great performance, an appropriate one. By the time he did Glengarry Glen Ross he was at the top of his game. His performance was my favorite in a movie filled with good, even bravura performances, but Big Al out-bravura-ed them all. I've never got why the actor Pacino was most often compared to, Robert De Niro, was praised so highly,--the new Brando, the new Barrymore, the new Olivier--but I just can't see it. He's never struck me more than journeyman competent, and all the things I've read about him,--the way he prepares for his roles, almost like an athlete--haven't left an impression on me. An actor either has it or he doesn't. Picking the right cap or tee shirt won't make you any better if you haven't got the chops. I despised every minute of Taxi Driver, a horrible, pretentious, artsy movie; De Niro didn't bother me that much, as he just seemed miscast as a Midwesterner, a new kid in the big city. Robert "frickin'" De Niro! Raging Bull, better, much better, yet little Joe Pesci stole the movie right out from under its star! Strange, huh? I've drifted in and out since then, often just steering clear of him altogether; but but he was at the top of his game in those two early 80s Marty Scorsese "wonders": Goodfellas and Casino.

Thanks for all the stuff in your responses, EC. I've passed on commenting on Peter Bart, a guy I know the name of, have seen interviewed countless times, whom I know to be, a la William Goldman, the consummate Hollywood insider, but I have a hard time "placing him". Maybe I should get a book out of the library either by or about him. True about the ads for The Birds being more right for Psycho,--lots of bird-air-falling imagery in Hichcock pictures from this period--and indeed as to Marnie I'd love to have seen Lee Remick in it. Downside: I've never seen much depth in her playing. Good actress, and hot, hot, hot (as you noted) but maybe if she didn't have those dazzling looks, not so great. Eva Marie was forty by that time, still lovely but simply too old for the part. Yes, we can thank God Hitchcock "got over" William Castle. I'd love to know what he thought of Polanski's Repulsion (almost self-consciously Hitchcockian) and, especially, Rosemary's Baby, maybe the best Alfred Hitchcock picture Hitchcock never made (yes, I know you love Charade, which I find a bit too chick flicky but I understand why you feel the way you do about it). Still, ten or twenty years earlier, if Rosemary's Baby could have been made it would have been quite the challenge for Hitchcock. It's one of those mainstream movies that I'm almost literally in awe of; in technique, casting, dialogue, music, camera placement. It's up there, in my book, somewhere between Psycho and Jaws: a movie that works, and works beautifully, every step of the way.

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[–] ecarle 8 years ago

Yes, I believe I read an interview with Al Pacino years ago,--like over thirty--in which he said that he was often up for the same parts as Hoffman even when they were just unknown New York actors. He didn't sound bitter or competitive, just telling it like it was.

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Well, even as every true movie star is unique, we certain have similar looking types.

Hoffman and Pacino were short, dark-haired men whose looks could play handsome...or not. Character men.

That one was Jewish and the other Italian-American oftimes made the difference in casting -- Hoffman played Carl Bernstein and Pacino played Michael Corleone(for which Hoffman, a much bigger star at the time than Pacino, was considered.)

There is also the issue that however much Hoffman and Pacino looked alike, they had great voices that were very distinctive. Stars can differentiate on voice as much as looks.

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On a personal note, I like Hoffman better when I was young, found Pacino intimidating, downright threatening at times, even when playing a "nice guy".

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Perhaps because while Hoffman "broke through" playing the nice guy in The Graduate, Pacino entered our consciousness as the conscienceless killer Michael Corleone? "Character sets destiny."

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As the years have gone by Hoffman seems way too much the Method guy, with the turning point being maybe his much praised TV production of Death Of A Salesman, with Willy Loman a part he was unsuited to play, due partly to his small stature,--Willy's best played by a tall or more imposing player IMO--and the aging was like what one might expect from Paul Muni in 1937. Just awful. I could feel nothing for Dustin's Willy due to Dustin feeling too much for himself, as in pity, and unable to get outside of who he was and get into who Willy Loman was. This was maybe as much a problem of Hoffman having been a highly praised actor for many years, working in a kind of "safe zone" that was uniquely his; but no, Willy Loman can't be played that way, not played well anyway.

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Interesting analysis of an interestingly "miscast" role for Hoffman.

Hoffman's career is rather fascinating to me.

He "launched" with The Graduate and then, just one film later, gives us Ratzo Rizzo in the Best Picture winner "Midnight Cowboy." Voila! -- prestige star.

Then came "Little Big Man"(1970) which looked Big All the Way, with Arthur (Bonnie and Clyde) Penn directing. One critic called it "The First Great Movie of the 70's," but by the seventies end, "Little Big Man" wasn't considered one of the big ones.

But then there were missteps in the early 70s. Anybody remember "Who is Harry Kellerman and Why is he Saying Those Things About Me?" How about the can't-miss coupling of Hoffman and Mia Farrow in "John and Mary."

An unlikely pairing with Bloody Sam Peckinpah on Straw Dogs saved Hoffman for awhile, but then he skidded around some more -- some Italian movie; second fiddle to McQueen in Papillon.

But came the mid-seventies, Hoffman righted himself -- Lenny and then the 1976 double-whammy of All the President's Men and Marathon Man. A couple of years off, an Oscar for Kramer versus Kramer, a couple of years off, another big hit(and near-Oscar) for Tootsie, a few years off, another Oscar (for Rain Man.) Quite a career. Major all the way but -- Rain Man was almost 30 years ago, and Hoffman had to join other stars in a "prestige slide." Hoffman will always be a name, but he's now a respected star from another era.

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Al got more stylized as he grew old older; and I came to like the way his features changed. Looking fifty became him.

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Absolutely. It remains intriging to me that the Al Pacino of the Godfathers was such a cold, non-flamboyant and sometimes homely presence but...around 1992 we suddenly got this Brand New Pacino. Scarface in 1983 set the stage, but Pacino TOTALLY changed around the time of Glengarry Glen Ross and Carlito's Way(two movies in which he looked absolutely great) and the Oscar-winner Scent of a Woman.

Impressionists made fun of the "raging shouting hammy Pacino" but I rather like him that way. And his voice changed, too. I note Jack Nicholson and Al Pacino as actors who suddenly got new voices with age: stereo-phonic, nicely seasoned, musical. There's a so-so movie called "The Devil's Advocate" that Pacino takes over at the end , with a long, WILD monologue(as the Devil, no less) in which he works about every acting bone in his body AND his voice. Wildly entertaining.

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It gave him a kind of elegance (Hoffman never got there).

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Hoffman rather went the other way, getting more mousy and low-key with age. Perhaps the autistic in Rain Man knocked the personality and sex appeal out of him.

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Also, Pacino grew. The Pacino of The Godfather flicks is different from the Pacino of Dog Day Afternoon, a different kettle of fish from Bobby Deerfield, and then his mad dog Scarface, which I found mesmerizing and right for the movie; if not a great performance, an appropriate one.

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Everybody loves Big Al in Scarface -- I know I do -- and "Say 'ello to my lil frien'!" is a classic line yelled in a classic way. (You want a one-line example of why a movie superstar IS a movie superstar? Here's the line.) Its funny how he still needed a few years to truly absorb the flamboyance of Tony Montana into his overall star personality. By 1992, I say.

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By the time he did Glengarry Glen Ross he was at the top of his game. His performance was my favorite in a movie filled with good, even bravura performances, but Big Al out-bravura-ed them all.

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Its interesting how the film begins with Alec Baldwin(in HIS best performance) chewing out a room of "real estate salesmen"(crooks, really, con men) but Pacino's not there. He's not there because he's the star salesman at the firm, but also because he's the star of the movie. Baldwin runs this scene -- Pacino doesn't have to compete with him -- and then Baldwin's gone and Pacino shows up and takes over the picture.

And indeed, what a cast. Jack Lemmon, near the end of his star days(though he had 8 more years to live) and making his cringe-worthy neurotic milquetoast act into something painfully sad and noble -- its nice how the Pacino character always treats the old Lemmon character with respect. Ed Harris -- angry and on-fire. Alan Arkin -- so Arkin-ish. Kevin Spacey starting out, and getting historically reamed verbally by Pacino("You are working among MEN -- your a f'n child!!") before turning his own vengeance on poor Lemmon. Baldwin's all-time classing reaming of everybody(written specially for the movie by playwright David Mamet; neither the speech nor Baldwin's character are in the play.)

A favorite. And to everyone who says "what a depressing movie" I say: its about a bunch of crooks. They get what they deserve(even Lemmon, sad as his circumstances are.) And its ear-candy in the dialogue department. This is Tarantino before Tarantino.

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I've never got why the actor Pacino was most often compared to, Robert De Niro, was praised so highly,--the new Brando, the new Barrymore, the new Olivier--but I just can't see it.

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We're on the same page here. Pacino and DeNiro have worked together twice and are always compared, and DeNiro has more Oscars(two to Pacino's one) but...there's just something overrated about DeNiro. Almost always has been, if you ask me.

Some critic wrote an essay years ago saying "Robert DeNiro's a hack." And this was BEFORE he did "Rocky and Bullwinkle" and "Meet the Fockers"(with Dustin Hoffman...much better in that film.)

The critic's take was that DeNiro was stuck in the same gear playing inarticulate brutes. And he worked too much.

I recall liking DeNiro in both "GoodFellas" and "Casino" for Scorsese, but he didn't differentiate between the psychotic Mafia brute in the first film and the supposedly sharp-cookie gambling expert in the second. Especially in his "improv" scenes yelling at Sharon Stone, I feel that the "real DeNiro" is showing up, and he's well, not a very smart guy.

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He's never struck me more than journeyman competent, and all the things I've read about him,--the way he prepares for his roles, almost like an athlete--haven't left an impression on me.

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We enter a dangerous zone for the DeNiro fan, but the way he gained weight for Raging Bull(a whole lot) and then some more for Al Capone in The Untouchables seemed rather show-offy to me. And again - that inarticulate brute act travelled a short distance. Imagine DeNiro as Scarface and...no fun at all.

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An actor either has it or he doesn't. Picking the right cap or tee shirt won't make you any better if you haven't got the chops.

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"fraid so." It may help THEM, but other actors do without it.

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I despised every minute of Taxi Driver, a horrible, pretentious, artsy movie;

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I liked it...but on "at a distance" terms. It was so clearly out to be "important" and so clearly so good at capturing a depraved gutter-view of the world. It succeeded at that, but at a cost. And hey-- its got the last score of Bernard Herrmann (recorded; second to last on a movie), and ends with the three final notes of " Psycho."

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De Niro didn't bother me that much, as he just seemed miscast as a Midwesterner, a new kid in the big city. Robert "frickin'" De Niro!

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DeNiro's Bickle has been compared to Perkins' Norman Bates -- lonely loners with murder within them -- but I found Bickle to be a much less interesting character. He seemed rather developlmentally disabled to me -- retarded, baack in the day. When he took beautiful Cybill Shepard on a date to a PORNO MOVIE, I wrote off the character right then and there. A man who couldn't conceive what was wrong with doing that is so messed up, I no longer tried to relate.

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Raging Bull, better, much better, yet little Joe Pesci stole the movie right out from under its star! Strange, huh?

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And funny how Pesci then disappears for most of the 80's and comes back exactly one decade later for Scorsese-- 1990 -- to steal GoodFellas from DeNiro and win an Oscar this time.

As for Raging Bull itself...clearly a great art film,incredible fight sequences(one cut to the rhythms of the Psycho shower scene, sayeth Scorsese) but rather driven by DeNiro's inarticulate brute thing ("You f my wife?"). At least he knew his "gig."

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I've drifted in and out since then, often just steering clear of him altogether; but but he was at the top of his game in those two early 80s Marty Scorsese "wonders": Goodfellas and Casino.

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DeNiro is good almost by default in those. He's "background" to Liotta and Pesci in GoodFellas -- nicely quiet and "held in" -- but proves terrifying in his paranoid execution of fellow gang members in the third act.

"Casino" is an easy DeNiro performance for me to judge. DeNiro is his disappointingly inarticulate brute self in all his scenes with Sharon Stone, but comes to sharpster life in all the scenes about how he runs the casino. His verbal showdown with the good ol' boy big shot who comes to get a job back for his idiot cousin is great -- "I know you are asking a favor and I know who you are but I can't do that."

Funny thing about Robert DeNiro for me. NOW I like him. He's in so many movies now showing up as "big name support" (like in those various Jennifer Lawrence movies) that I find him good-looking, well-aged, relaxed. He's an old friend. Last year, he did a sitcommy thing with Anne Hathaway where he played a 70-something "old guy intern" and father figure for her, and he looked just great. Didn't talk like a brute, either. Now is DeNiro's time for me.

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Thanks for all the stuff in your responses, EC. I've passed on commenting on Peter Bart, a guy I know the name of, have seen interviewed countless times, whom I know to be, a la William Goldman, the consummate Hollywood insider, but I have a hard time "placing him".

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Yes, I read a lot of books on movie people and the movie business, but its a surprisingly small number of them who REALLY work on movies and are REALLY willing to dish the dirt on the stars and star directors. I guess Bart feels no career fear, for his take-downs of Beatty and the late Mike Nichols(while Nichols was alive) were pretty tough.

Of course, Bart can be as biased as the next studio suit. He recalls fellow Paramount execs looking at the rushes of Brando as Don Vito looking at the body of Sonny and crying "Look how they massacred my boy!" and LAUGHING. What a ham, what lousy acting, these guys said. They don't see actors through our admiring eyes. They are mean people, and often they don't know the worth of what they bankroll.

Speaking of mean people, Peter Bart wrote this of Joe Ezsterhas, the terrible screenwriter who nonetheless got rich("Basic Instinct") and then self-destructed. Wrote Bart, "Ezterhas was a nice man who had to work with mean people all the time, tried to be mean himself, and failed at it."

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Maybe I should get a book out of the library either by or about him.

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He wrote a few. A good one was the story of about six movies that all went into production for 1998 release -- including Saving Private Ryan and Godzilla. Bart gives us the "start to finish" -- origins, production, release. I think this is the book where he compares Beatty and Redford, for it was in 1998 that Bullworth and The Horse Whisperer went head to head.

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True about the ads for The Birds being more right for Psycho,

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I really think so. Rather fascinating to me -- The Birds ended up with ad lines that Psycho should have had.

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--lots of bird-air-falling imagery in Hichcock pictures from this period--

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All on his mind, who knows why.

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and indeed as to Marnie I'd love to have seen Lee Remick in it. Downside: I've never seen much depth in her playing. Good actress, and hot, hot, hot (as you noted) but maybe if she didn't have those dazzling looks, not so great.

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Well, good looks are part of the deal. I saw her movies all the time, and took note when she went fully sexual for No Way to Treat a Lady(where she appears early on pretty much topless under a sheer nightgown), The Detective, Hard Contract.

BTW, about No Way to Treat a Lady. Its very Hitchcockian, and from a novel by ...William Goldman.

Rod Steiger -- fresh from his Oscar win for In the Heat of the Night -- plays a psycho strangler who is also a stage actor and Broadway producer. Hence, he does all his stranglings in disguise of face AND voice(an Irish priest, a German plumber.) The murders are pretty brutal and Steiger does one as a WOMAN. George Segal is the NYC cop on his trail and things climax when Steiger in disguise as a catering waiter tries to strangle Remick in her apartment. Will Segal get there in time to save her? Its not Hitchcock(though it foretells Frenzy with its stranglings), and its not really even "Wait Until Dark" but -- No Way to Treat a Lady IS a good thriller, with good stars. And sexy Lee Remick.

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Eva Marie was forty by that time, still lovely but simply too old for the part.

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Yep. Interesting though. Hitchcock told one interviewer that he wanted Eva Marie Saint, and not Julie Andrews, for the lead in Torn Curtain.

That told me something.

Consider the Hitchocck actresses still active in 1965 when Torn Curtain was made:

Kim Novak: Hitch didn't get along with her.
Vera Miles: Ditto -- and now Vera wasn't a movie star.
Janet Leigh: Hitch told her "I'm sorry but I can never use you again; your part is too famous."
Tippi Hedren: Well, YOU know.

Eva Marie Saint: None of the above.

And thus, Hitch wanted Eva Marie again.

And he wanted Tony Perkins for the Paul Newman part! (True, Perkins confirmed it.)

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[–] ecarle 8 years ago

Yes, we can thank God Hitchcock "got over" William Castle. I'd love to know what he thought of Polanski's Repulsion (almost self-consciously Hitchcockian) and, especially, Rosemary's Baby, maybe the best Alfred Hitchcock picture Hitchcock never made (yes, I know you love Charade, which I find a bit too chick flicky but I understand why you feel the way you do about it).

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Though one wag called Rosemary's Baby "the horror movie with no horror in it"(that is, no shock murders or blood), it was almost the sensation that Psycho had been. It was 1968, the movie could be much more frank about nudity and sex, it seemed to fit the ever-darker times.

And yet, it seems very Hitchcockian in its style. I expect Hitchocck was pitched it at some point. I expect if he turned it down, it would be over the Satanic supernatural aspects of the film. Plus this: my problem with Rosemary's Baby is that, if you can guess the solution, the whole movie is just plot about getting there.

Do you recall this? Who DID own the rights to the novel Rosemary's Baby? WILLIAM CASTLE. He bought it but Paramount head Robert Evans said "we won't let you direct it, but you can produce it. We want Polanski to direct and you will get screen credit and a load of money." All true.

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Still, ten or twenty years earlier, if Rosemary's Baby could have been made it would have been quite the challenge for Hitchcock.

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Its one of the few classic thrillers of its era that comes close to the visibility of a Hitchcock, that's for sure, and it is old-school professional every step of the way, even as the content is wild and sexual.

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It's one of those mainstream movies that I'm almost literally in awe of; in technique, casting, dialogue, music, camera placement. It's up there, in my book, somewhere between Psycho and Jaws: a movie that works, and works beautifully, every step of the way.

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Agreed...except with my reservations about the absence of shock and/or set-pieces, and perhaps a little disagreement about the power of the story. The whole movie is about Rosemary figuring out what I think the audience knows well in advance. I think the greatness is in what that ending turns out to mean, and how well-crafted the movie is getting there.

The great Hitchcockian scene in it is when Rosemary goes to a supposedly sympathetic OB-GYN(Charles Grodin!) tells him her story -- and he calls the Satanists and Rosemary's Judas husband(brooding John Cassavetes, great) to come grab her instead.

Something I also love about Rosemary's Baby -- the opening travellng shot over NYC and down to the Dakota Hotel(shades of the opening over Phoenix in Psycho) and that great, great, GREAT lullaby hummed by Mia Farrow with lush orchestration behind it. The lullaby is sweet and sentimental even as it is sinister. We are IN Rosemary's Baby the moment that lullaby plays.

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[–] telegonus 8 years ago

Not a whole lotta time, EC, but...

I think what benefited Pacino was his flexibility as to the changing times. This was less apparent in the 70s, when Pacino and Hoffman were near equals, with the former having an edge back then, especially with the critics, but then Big Al, after Scarface, kinda got lost for a while but came roaring back in a somewhat different incarnation, truly a new man. This suited not just him but the time he working in, the 90s.

Hoffman was so strong in the first half of the 70s, that he had the occasional bomb didn't seem to hurt him. It also helped that he wasn't prolific. He hit the ground running as a newly minted superstar in the wake of The Graduate, and he managed himself well, chose his projects wisely for the most part. Compare this to his Midnight Cowboy co-star Jon Voight, who was as hot as Dusty in the wake of that film's success, and for a while it looked like he had it made; and even after a dry spell he was able to come back, after a fashion, if only as second fiddle to Burt Reynolds in Deliverance.

But to return to Hoffman: I do think his "great actor" ego got in his way after a spell. He overcame this somewhat with Kramer Vs. Kramer and Tootsie, but Salesman was a mistake, even as many praised his work. It was an unnecessary production, as the originals, Lee J. Cobb and Mildred Dunnock, had done their own TV version twenty years earlier. Still, Dusty got Rain Man, served the material well, but a certain charmlessness began to creep into his playing after that. Yes, maybe it was something in the character of Raymond that crept in, but I dunno. Maybe he was a spent force after that. A strong, difficult part doesn't necessarily have to alter a star's persona,--look at Gary Cooper after High Noon, Humphrey Bogart after The Caine Mutiny.

Another downside for Hoffman: he was getting older. The new kids on the block, whether Tom Cruise or Sean Penn, were getting more attention, if not for talent, looks, star appeal. Hoffman wasn't a star the same way Clint Eastwood and Harrison Ford were, thus he had no persona to fall back on. Still, he had a fine run for a long time, longer than the actor whose career reminds me most of Hoffman's, Paul Muni, even as,--O, the irony--it was Al Pacino who played the lead in the remake of Muni's great success as Scarface!

I'm using a library computer, thus my time is running out...

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[–] ecarle 8 years ago

Not a whole lotta time, EC, but...

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....but we appreciated that you took the time. As for me, there are some times during the year where I can't respond right away and its embarrassing. I'll be in a "conversation" and suddenly disappear and, well, I always come back eventually. Computer access is an issue for me, too.

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I think what benefited Pacino was his flexibility as to the changing times. This was less apparent in the 70s, when Pacino and Hoffman were near equals, with the former having an edge back then, especially with the critics, but then Big Al, after Scarface, kinda got lost for a while but came roaring back in a somewhat different incarnation, truly a new man. This suited not just him but the time he working in, the 90s.

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I've made a "retroactive study" of Pacino(one of my true favorite movie stars), and if you look around 1985 with a movie called "Revolution"(about the American Revolution)...Al simply quit movies for awhile. The early 80's had been as bad for him as for a number of other 70's stars whose careers just ended(Ryan O'Neal, Jon Voight, George Segal, Elliott Gould, Burt Reynolds) and Al seemed to figure out exactly what to do: quit for awhile and "make 'em miss him."

His early 80's movies (I haven't checked his imdb page) included the horribly attacked gay murders movie "Crusing," some sort of family comedy about a playwright, and even "Scarface," which is beloved now but wasn't much of a hit(too violent) and rather attacked critically for its coarseness. THAT one became -- in Pacino's own estimation -- his greatest "Pacino hit", but it wasn't, back then.

So he comes back in 1989 with great fanfare in a "sexy cop murder mystery" called Sea of Love, and he looks different, sounds different. He does Godfather III, which isn't as good as the first two ,but which allows him to give us a final chapter on Michael Corleone and to reassert his OTHER iconic role than Scarface.

But I think it was in 1992/1993 that the "entirely new man" -- the entirely new Pacino -- emerged. He was nominated for BOTH Best Actor(Scent of a Woman) AND Best Supporting Actor("Glengarry Glen Ross") in 1992, and though he looks and sounds better in Ross, he got the Oscar(natch) for playing the blind guy and giving us all "Hoo-ah!" as the World's Quickest Al Pacino impression.

I say it all came together the NEXT year -- in "Carlito's Way." A reunion with Brian "Scarface" DePalma. A GREAT look(the "big hair" Pacino favored, plus a beard , plus a sexy face, and here Pacino consolidates his new VOICE ...stereophonic, flashy (he will say a word like "shoes" as "sha-ooozzzz!") -- and he becomes a bit hammy, yes, but in a good way(as Pacino himself said, "there's nothing wrong with ham if its well-cooked.") I think Carlito's Way is a great movie, The ads said "Pacino...Carlito's Way" with Sean Penn in smaller type billing in the same ad, to guarantee quality(Penn had "retired" from acting, came back for Big Al).

The 1992/1993 reinvention of Al Pacino (Glengarry, Scent, Carlito) re-established him as a major star through the 90's, often pulling a Sean Connery and mentoring a younger actor(Keanu Reeves, Colin Farrell), sometimes just running the show on his own. Pacino has preserved today -- a lot of HBO films -- and I figure he's got a few more good movies in him. Doesn't really matter if he does.

One looks back on "70's Pacino" and though the work was prestigious, the actor wasn't very fun. As I say, he is downright homely in parts of Godfather I, and so cold in both Godfathers that he's no fun at all. In "Dog Day Afternoon" and "And Justice for All," he's a big yeller, but he's young and furious and not really the cool yeller he would become in older age.

BTW, "on topic," this why I don't much see "70's Al Pacino" as working too well as George Lumley in Family Plot. If a big name could have been landed, Jack Nicholson or Robert Redford would have fit better in the 70's.

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Hoffman was so strong in the first half of the 70s, that he had the occasional bomb didn't seem to hurt him. It also helped that he wasn't prolific.

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Hoffman's wasn't very prolific. Like Warren Beatty(an extreme case) and eventually Robert Redford, he appeared on screen so infrequently that we tended to honor him as that much greater. Was there a movie between "Tootsie" in 1982 and "Ishtar" in 1987? Off to imdb and his page I go. And yet, even after Ishtar bombed so big, there he is in 1988 winning another Oscar for Rain Man -- a role he fought to get because he KNEW it would be one of his great roles.

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He hit the ground running as a newly minted superstar in the wake of The Graduate, and he managed himself well, chose his projects wisely for the most part.

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That's the key to stardom, right there. A "big launch" (The Graduate) and then careful selections thereafter. Burt Reynolds rather blew this, over and over, because he had SEVERAL big launches -- Deliverance, The Longest Yard, and Smokey and the Bandit, and then rather squandered them making stupid movies that insulted his own fans(Cannonballs I and II, Smokey II, Stroker Ace.)

Hoffman's brilliance was following up "The Graduate" with the greasy, grimy stunt character of Ratzo Rizzo in "Midnight Cowboy." Behold, the cute romantic leading man could be a grizzled character actor -- and FUNNY in both guises.

Note in passing: Dustin Hoffman was often held up as the kind of "new ugly star" that knocked Tony Curtis and Rock Hudson out of the running. But Hoffman was NOT ugly. Young Hoffman in repose was quite handsome, his smile was quite cute, and his body was quite buff. (You want to see something funny? Go on You Tube and see an 80's interview with a female interviewer who calls Hoffman "cut" and he explodes into an uncontrollable laughing jag because he sees "cut" as meaning, well, something about the male member. Its a hilarious interview clip and it makes the tempermental Hoffman look quite charming.)

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Compare this to his Midnight Cowboy co-star Jon Voight, who was as hot as Dusty in the wake of that film's success, and for a while it looked like he had it made; and even after a dry spell he was able to come back, after a fashion, if only as second fiddle to Burt Reynolds in Deliverance.

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Jon Voight's stardom was iffy. He indeed came out of Midnight Cowboy as a star - more handsome than Hoffman if more blandly so, and much taller -- and Deliverance helped enormously(I believe Voight has first billing in that film.) But Burt Reynolds himself said that Voight was very picky about roles, not much interested in doing "just entertainment." He kind of sank his own career, but truthfully, I don't think Voight had the full "it" of a Pacino or a Nicholson. Voight has thrived today as a character guy -- even in the face of a very conservative political public persona that should have meant "he'd never work again." I guess he's a token hire. Hah.

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But to return to Hoffman: I do think his "great actor" ego got in his way after a spell.

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Probably did. Hoffman rebuts William Goldman's "Marathon Man" horror tales of Method Star misbehavior, but there are OTHER stories of misbehavior and temper tantrums on other films. Interesting: Hoffman and other tantrum throwers of the 70's(like director William Friedkin) are all nice and sweet as old men, its like they are seeking redemption or something.

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He overcame this somewhat with Kramer Vs. Kramer and Tootsie, but Salesman was a mistake, even as many praised his work.
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I'm intrigued by your lingering on this misstep, telegonus, because I remember being lightly confused by the casting and Hoffman's interest in playing the role AS miscast. Years later, Brian Dennehy did a revival and HE sounded right.
Its sort of like I wasn't really upset with Hoffman's Salesman back then -- even as it "bugged me" somehow -- but now I really don't LIKE it. Mission accomplished.

Sidebar: the movie stars who WILL play Broadway(Pacino and Spacey a lot, Hoffman sometimes, Denzel sometimes, Julia Roberts like, once) versus the movie stars who WON'T play Broadway(Nicholson, Cruise, Eastwood.) Not to get too nasty about it, but it seems the ones who won't(or didn't when they were young) played Broadway really didn't have the technical chops to do so. Liine memorization might be a problem.

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It was an unnecessary production, as the originals, Lee J. Cobb and Mildred Dunnock, had done their own TV version twenty years earlier.

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Lee J. Cobb is the owner of that role, it seems. the Fredric March one doesn't get shown much. And let's face it...this was a creature of the STAGE, not the screen.

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Still, Dusty got Rain Man, served the material well, but a certain charmlessness began to creep into his playing after that. Yes, maybe it was something in the character of Raymond that crept in, but I dunno.

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I akin this to how with Jack Lemmon, once he played the neurotic Felix Unger in The Odd Couple and then won the Oscar for the super-neurotic "failed man" of "Save the Tiger," played these miserable milquetoasts so well that his movie star qualities just disappeared. We did not want to KNOW this man, let alone BE him.

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Maybe he was a spent force after that. A strong, difficult part doesn't necessarily have to alter a star's persona,--look at Gary Cooper after High Noon, Humphrey Bogart after The Caine Mutiny.

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True, but the essence of Raymond in Rain Man is that he has no personality to speak of, no feelings, no passions. I would think that would take a toll.

On the other hand, Hoffman got older a new decade came, he wasn't able to reinvent himself as Pacino and Nicholson did. He wasn't physically big enough to play the "father figure" roles that Sean Connery saved HIS career with(hell, in one 1989 movie, Connery played HOFFMAN's father -- it made no sense.)

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Another downside for Hoffman: he was getting older. The new kids on the block, whether Tom Cruise or Sean Penn, were getting more attention, if not for talent, looks, star appeal. Hoffman wasn't a star the same way Clint Eastwood and Harrison Ford were, thus he had no persona to fall back on.

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Yes, I'm afraid I can't see Hoffman as Indy Jones, James Bond, John McClane, or Dirty Harry.

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Still, he had a fine run for a long time, longer than the actor whose career reminds me most of Hoffman's, Paul Muni,

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Muni seems quite the "hidden model" for a lot of our modern day "character stars." Spencer Tracy is the more famous model, and perhaps James Cagney is int there, too. But Muni was respected in his time and is talked about today.

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even as,--O, the irony--it was Al Pacino who played the lead in the remake of Muni's great success as Scarface!

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Ha. I can't see Dustin Hoffman as Scarface, but Hoffman was effective in "Billy Bathgate" as period gangster Dutch Schultz.

I recall a scene where Hoffman's hair-trigger Schultz is talking to another gangster in a closed bar, and a uniformed cop comes in to tell him his car is double-parked(or something.) Hoffman gets angry, gets up, punches the cop, knocks him to the floor, BEATS HIM TO DEATH...and then sits back down to keep having his conversation with the other mobster, with the dead cop's body nearby.

A helluva scene...and Hoffman made you believe the psychosis that is the key to so many gangsters.

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I'm using a library computer, thus my time is running out...

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I have been there. Thank you for making the effort. I always enjoy reading you, and I know others out here do, too!

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[–] ecarle 8 years ago

DeNiro came up fast behind those two and we really ended up with three somewhat different, somewhat the same actors , interchangeably available for the same parts. And we got DeNiro and Hoffman in Meet the Fockers; and DeNiro and Pacino in Heat. Never got Pacino and Hoffman...maybe they WERE competitive.

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I wrote the above paragraph "on the fly," did a little checking and lo and behold, Pacino and Hoffman DID work together, though in an odd way.

The film was Warren Beatty's visually gorgeous but utterly bizarre "Dick Tracy" of 1990.

Beatty (and Clint Eastwood) had both been looking at playing Dick Tracy for some years. The project ended up in Beatty's control and when "Batman" blew the roof in 1989, Dick Tracy was greenlit for 1990.

There was talk, even then, that Dick Tracy was just too far back in time and out of touch to work for a "Batman" audience(even if the concepts originated in commix around the same time.) Director/star Beatty lined up some big stars for full roles and cameos. And Madonna -- in her best role, says I -- as the sexy female lead(with another female , Glenne Headly playing Tracy's straight-arrow love interest.)

Al Pacino took the main villain role -- Big Boy Capice -- but played it with an elongated mask-like face that didn't much look like the handsome Pacino at all. And he turned up the vocal volume to sheer ugliness, its a hard role to watch and listen to. But: Best Supporting Actor nomination for Pacino, 1990. This too was part of Pacino's power-packed comeback of the early nineties.

For his part, Dustin Hoffman tried to be a pal to Beatty, with whom he had bombed in "Ishtar" (1987) and took a cameo as a character called "Mumbles," who ...mumbles. Hoffman somewhat overdoing Hoffman, really. Unlike as with Pacino, you could see Hoffman's face as Mumbles(in make-up.)

And there is at least one scene where Pacino's Big Boy slaps Hoffman's Mumbles around.

Bonus...with Al Pacino on hand to play the main villain in Dick Tracy, his Godfather brother James Caan(wearing the requisite fake nose -- the Dick Tracy villains REQUIRED bizarre make-up) played a gangster rival assassinated by Pacino. Just a cameo, but ...nice.

Gene Hackman, Beatty's "Bonnie and Clyde" co-star who dutifully cameoed in "Reds" out of loyalty to the man who got him his big movie break...passed on a cameo in Dick Tracy. The "Reds" cameo required 100's of takes from OCD director Beatty, Hackman "just said no" to Dick Tracy.

As for Dick Tracy, well reviewed it was, but it was too arty to make Batman dollars. The irony to me is that while Pacino WAS Oscar nommed for a very offputting and ugly performance as Big Boy, Jack Nicholson was not even nominated for his utterly magnetic superstar turn as the Joker. But Nicholson earned about $60 million personally to make up for that, from Batman.

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[–] telegonus 8 years ago

Thanks for the reply, EC . Early Al wasn't a fun guy, for sure, though Dog Day Afternoon is probably, of the early films I've seen in him, the closest we get to a young Al giving a performance that anticipates, if only occasionally, the later, bravura Big Al we're all come to know and love.

Agreed on Jack Lemmon, never a favorite of mine. The Odd Couple, the movie, has never been a favorite of mine, either, maybe partly because I got to know Felix and Oscar from the TV show and I love Randall and Klugman's playing. In the 1968 film Walter Matthau's Oscar is more a tough guy than Klugman's Common Man Oscar, and his treatment of Felix seems downright cruel. Yet Lemmon's playing of Felix makes him such a pitiful character as to make the play feel like a tragedy, not a comedy.

Where Jon Voight is concerned I think that his non-starting big star career was halted partly by his "good boy" persona and his boy next door All-American looks, which, no sooner was Midnight Cowboy a hit, put Voight in competition with the new kid on the block, star-wise, Robert Redford. In old Hollywood, blonde leading man weren't common, in large part due to light hair not photographing well in black and white (women's hair is, obviously, different, and more stylized).

Blonde heart-throbs were still rare on the silver screen when Voight and Redford were coming up, as Hollywood was still in "retro mode". Even at the time my sense was that it was a kind of (remember the show?) Celebrity Death Match between Voight and Redford. It's like they couldn't both make it. They were similar in many respects but Redford had that killer smile and he oozed sex appeal. He was also charismatic. Voight possessed none of these qualities (Steve McQueen was a different kettle of fish,--more an identification figure for townies and wrong side of the track guys--while Ryan O'Neal was closer to a Paul Newman for teenyboppers.)

Truly, Death Of A Salesman was a major misstep for Hoffman, who'd been doing well for a while (though he was excellent in one of his few outright failures, financially, Straight Time, in which he credibly played a criminal; and he was so convincing that half the time I forgot I was watching Dustin Hoffman. Now that's acting!) Rain Man was definitely a save for Dusty but I began to notice something in him in that film, something that had been there before but was able, for the most part, disregard, a kind of Meryl Creep. Hoffman was putting on a show, and doing well at it, yet I could never forget that I was watching an actor doing a first rate yet journeyman job. Worse, I sensed self-pity, also present in Salesman (big time), in restraint as Raymond, and yet there it was. Maybe it was the aging process. Old time movie star Fredric March, also a fine actor, slipped into that later on in his career.

It's worth winding this up with a thought, which is that this is a Family Plot thread, and since I've never seen the movie  I feel kind of funny posting here. Since I can't write about the movie I can try to connect what I've written thus far to its director, Alfred Hitchcock. Most of the actors I/we have discussed here would not have been good fits for Hitchcock even if Hitchcock retained his health and energy of Scorsese and Eastwood into his seventies. Al Pacino was just too short and ethnic looking, though that would have worked for The Wrong Man I don't think that would have been good casting even for an older Pacino. Dusty. Forget it. Voight: too non-assertive; no chick magnet potential.

Jack Lemmon might have been able to have worked with Hitchcock in an alternate universe of a Lemmon in the world of the 1940s-50s, when he was too young. It would have been interesting to see if he could have handled the homicidal husband role in Dial M For Murder (the Bob Cummings part would seem like a better fit). He'd have been fine, probably better than Cummings, as the lead in Saboteur, but not, alas, in 1942. A tantalizing prospect: Lemmon instead of Jimmy Stewart in Rear Window. Heresy, you say? Well, yes, for those of us who love the film, but it might have worked, especially as Lemmon, even more than Stewart by 1954, as a young man would have had to shed his "light" comedy persona. The borderline comedy-suspense side of the film would have favored the comedy with Lemmon in the lead, but that might not have been a bad thing.

These exchanges are always fun, EC, but I'm not always, quite frankly, up to them. I hope your pc is back in working condition. Mine is fine for the time being, though I use the local libraries branches,--both of them! --for many things, such as attending lectures, reading periodicals, hanging out with people I know. They're also a nice change of pace from a home pc or laptop.

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[–] ecarle 8 years ago

Thanks for the reply, EC .

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Yessir. Thanks for reading!

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Early Al wasn't a fun guy, for sure, though Dog Day Afternoon is probably, of the early films I've seen in him, the closest we get to a young Al giving a performance that anticipates, if only occasionally, the later, bravura Big Al we're all come to know and love.

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Well, yes, the whole "Attica! Attica!" business, but Al was still young and emoting and "playing things a bit too serious." Though yes, its there. And a little bit in the roaring final speech in "And Justice For All" ("YOU'RE out of order! YOU'RE out of order!" Though Pacino's explosion at another lawyer for accidentally sending a young man to his death in jail was fairly overdone, maudlin stuff.

I suppose the key thing to remember is that Pacino's early , signature role - Michael Corleone -- was not a fun guy at all. Maybe a little nice and "cutesy" in Godfather I BEFORE he kills McClusky and the Turk. But thereafter, Michael Corleone is cold, uncaring, almost as emotion-free as Hoffman in Rain Man, but mean. Consider only the scene in I in which Michael orders Fredo in Vegas to get rid of some pretty girls and music-makers because "he only wants to talk business" with Vegas kingpin Moe Greene.

I'm not even that sure Pacino was that HANDSOME in the two movies until the scene late in II when he comes to close the door in Diane Keaton's face when she tries to visit her children. Whoever lit Pacino and did his make-up in THAT shot -- its Warren Beatty time.

"Scarface" is big and flashy and certainly sets the template for the coming Pacino years. But he needed to take much of the 80's off, age a bit, and take radical career action to change.

And then, I think he just decided to have FUN.

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Agreed on Jack Lemmon, never a favorite of mine. The Odd Couple, the movie, has never been a favorite of mine, either, maybe partly because I got to know Felix and Oscar from the TV show and I love Randall and Klugman's playing. In the 1968 film Walter Matthau's Oscar is more a tough guy than Klugman's Common Man Oscar, and his treatment of Felix seems downright cruel. Yet Lemmon's playing of Felix makes him such a pitiful character as to make the play feel like a tragedy, not a comedy.

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I"ve noted that a number of folks seem to prefer the TV odd couple, and I think they became more famous as THE odd couple. My love of Walter Matthau's presence on the screen perhaps tips the balance but BOY was it hard to like Lemmon's Felix Unger.

Still, for comedy, Lemmon's pretty funny making that weird "snuffing sound" with his nose in a public restaurant as Matthau deadpans his reactions(trying to be understanding and finally giving up.)

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Where Jon Voight is concerned I think that his non-starting big star career was halted partly by his "good boy" persona and his boy next door All-American looks, which, no sooner was Midnight Cowboy a hit, put Voight in competition with the new kid on the block, star-wise, Robert Redford. In old Hollywood, blonde leading man weren't common, in large part due to light hair not photographing well in black and white (women's hair is, obviously, different, and more stylized).

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This is interesting to me. Not that many blonde male movie stars. And yet, Redford was UBER-blonde.

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Blonde heart-throbs were still rare on the silver screen when Voight and Redford were coming up, as Hollywood was still in "retro mode". Even at the time my sense was that it was a kind of (remember the show?) Celebrity Death Match

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I DO remember celebrity death match. They did one where Hitchcock fought Spielberg to the death...but they let their movie scenes do the fighting. And I can't remember who won. And thus, who died.

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between Voight and Redford. It's like they couldn't both make it. They were similar in many respects but Redford had that killer smile and he oozed sex appeal. He was also charismatic. Voight possessed none of these qualities

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This is that "matter of millimeters" thing about how Redford's features(at least in the 70's) just seemed better than his competitors. (Voight's face was more edged and less handsome.) The business of being a movie star sometimes boils down to this. Cary Grant was better looking than Robert Montgomery or Bob Cummings, for instance.

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(Steve McQueen was a different kettle of fish,--more an identification figure for townies and wrong side of the track guys--while Ryan O'Neal was closer to a Paul Newman for teenyboppers.)

-==

McQueen's my favorite of his era(60's/70s) and though his looks were great, they were rugged and boyish and hardly perfect ala Redford. McQueen got it done through the entire package -- presence, mood, accessibility.

Ryan O'Neal got "Love Story" for his dubious launch -- he was doing TV movies at the same time. I like him best doing a fine Cary Grant for Bogdo with Streisand in What's Up Doc, and I watched some of his movies and found him..OK.
A good one: "The Driver," where O'Neal's the crook and Bruce Dern is the cop on his trail.

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Truly, Death Of A Salesman was a major misstep for Hoffman, who'd been doing well for a while (though he was excellent in one of his few outright failures, financially, Straight Time, in which he credibly played a criminal; and he was so convincing that half the time I forgot I was watching Dustin Hoffman. Now that's acting!)

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Yes it is. I saw Straight Time and recall feeling that we were being dropped right into real life..a rather tough and rancid real life. And Hoffman sold it.

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Rain Man was definitely a save for Dusty but I began to notice something in him in that film, something that had been there before but was able, for the most part, disregard, a kind of Meryl Creep.

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That's particularly funny to me, for I've always felt Meryl Streep just couldn't help creating in one the sense of too much self-regard as an actor, too much awareness of their own gift. Which made some of the performances LESS real than reality.

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Hoffman was putting on a show, and doing well at it, yet I could never forget that I was watching an actor doing a first rate yet journeyman job. Worse, I sensed self-pity, also present in Salesman (big time), in restraint as Raymond, and yet there it was. Maybe it was the aging process. Old time movie star Fredric March, also a fine actor, slipped into that later on in his career.

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It occurs to me that neither Hoffman nor March particularly built their career on charm. That can be a problem as age sets in.

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It's worth winding this up with a thought, which is that this is a Family Plot thread, and since I've never seen the movie I feel kind of funny posting here.

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That IS kind of funny, but I tell you. Modernly in particular, I find myself reading so many reviews of a movie(if I want to) that I CAN picture it...its good, or mediocre, or bad --- and the plot -- and what type of movie it is. Even if I don't see it.

Family Plot is from that "period of decline" that somehow has a pretty successful film in it - Frenzy -- except even that movie reads as the smallish work of an old man unable to "work big" anymore. The big scenes are in small spaces: an office, the back of a truck, a stairwell.

There is more decline on evidence in Family Plot than in Frenzy, but once it gets going, one really feels a "gift from Hitchcock" in watching it. Family Plot is simply FILLED with ideas , some quite Hitchcockian(two characters move in criss-cross patterns across a cemetery until they meet) and some not (Bruce Dern and Barbara Harris do one entire scene with hamburger meat in their mouths muffling every word.

Youngish actors in an old man's film make a difference, too. Barbara Harris, Wiliam Devane, and Karen Black(the least) bring youth to Hitchcock's film.

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Since I can't write about the movie I can try to connect what I've written thus far to its director, Alfred Hitchcock. Most of the actors I/we have discussed here would not have been good fits for Hitchcock even if Hitchcock retained his health and energy of Scorsese and Eastwood into his seventies. Al Pacino was just too short and ethnic looking, though that would have worked for The Wrong Man I don't think that would have been good casting even for an older Pacino. Dusty. Forget it. Voight: too non-assertive; no chick magnet potential.

Jack Lemmon might have been able to have worked with Hitchcock in an alternate universe of a Lemmon in the world of the 1940s-50s, when he was too young. It would have been interesting to see if he could have handled the homicidal husband role in Dial M For Murder (the Bob Cummings part would seem like a better fit). He'd have been fine, probably better than Cummings, as the lead in Saboteur, but not, alas, in 1942. A tantalizing prospect: Lemmon instead of Jimmy Stewart in Rear Window. Heresy, you say? Well, yes, for those of us who love the film, but it might have worked, especially as Lemmon, even more than Stewart by 1954, as a young man would have had to shed his "light" comedy persona. The borderline comedy-suspense side of the film would have favored the comedy with Lemmon in the lead, but that might not have been a bad thing.

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There's one later Hitchcock movie I always recommend Jack Lemmon for: Torn Curtain.

It was a 1966 film, and by then , Lemmon had proved his "serious" chops with Days of Wine and Roses and WAS a bankable star(almost at Paul Newman level in '66) and I can see him playing a rocket scientist horrifyingly mismatched in a fight to the death with Gromek.

As for the earlier films, well, we'd have to "accelerate Lemmon's stardom' to get him into the films, but Rear Window seems the best fit. Like Stewart, Lemmon could do whiney exasperation.

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These exchanges are always fun, EC, but I'm not always, quite frankly, up to them.

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Understood and that's OK. I don't always see when responses pop up, but I understand in your case they can only be so often and perhaps only go on so long.

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I hope your pc is back in working condition.

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It comes and goes. Its terrible to find writing here too physically difficult to do with a slow computer.

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Mine is fine for the time being, though I use the local libraries branches,--both of them! --for many things, such as attending lectures, reading periodicals, hanging out with people I know. They're also a nice change of pace from a home pc or laptop.

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Before the net, I was quite a fan of libraries. I liked college libraries even if I didn't go to the college. And I'd award myself -- a half hour of reading old Varieties(not JUST for Hitchcock pictures) in exchange for X numbers of book learning.

I miss libraries.

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Well, telegonus, til we meet again. I'm sure it will happen. Is only a matter of where and when here.

Cheers!

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[–] filmklassik 8 years ago

I have to assume that Redford and screenwriter William Goldman had a major falling out following their collaboration on ALL THE PRESIDENT'S MEN. Why do I say that? Well, I'll admit it's supposition -- but it's informed supposition. Redford has a commentary track on the DVD of ALL THE PRESIDENT'S MEN where he talks at great length about everyone and everything involved in the production -- except William Goldman.

He talks in detail (and with tremendous affection) about Woodward and Bernstein, Alan J. Pakula, Dustin Hoffman, Jason Robards, Gordon Willis, Martin Balsam, Ben Bradley, Katherine Graham, David Shire... but in 2 hours and 15 minutes of commentary he never once mentions William Goldman by name. Not once.

On one or two occasions he refers to "the writer" of the movie, as in "The writer handed in a draft that was too glib and superficial..."

-- and that's all, folks.

Never mind the fact that much of Goldman's dialogue is, in fact, in the finished motion picture -- as is all of Goldman structure.

And never mind the fact that Goldman won an Academy award for his work on the movie. Just ignore all of that, forget it, because it's all irrelevant to the fact that Redford, for whatever reason, has a bug up his tuchis about William Goldman.

He also snubs Goldman in this 90 minute round-table retrospective about the film. It's actually a fascinating conversation, but Redford's omission of Goldman is striking. Not to mention childish.

https://youtu.be/UVrGZSxpBEA

Now don't misunderstand: I adore Redford. He's one of the most gifted and charismatic screen actors of all time. A tremendous talent.

But I take it he can be a real jerk, too.

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[–] ecarle 8 years ago

I have to assume that Redford and screenwriter William Goldman had a major falling out following their collaboration on ALL THE PRESIDENT'S MEN. Why do I say that? Well, I'll admit it's supposition -- but it's informed supposition. Redford has a commentary track on the DVD of ALL THE PRESIDENT'S MEN where he talks at great length about everyone and everything involved in the production -- except William Goldman.

He talks in detail (and with tremendous affection) about Woodward and Bernstein, Alan J. Pakula, Dustin Hoffman, Jason Robards, Gordon Willis, Martin Balsam, Ben Bradley, Katherine Graham, David Shire... but in 2 hours and 15 minutes of commentary he never once mentions William Goldman by name. Not once.

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William Goldman is still alive as I post this(2016), but we haven't heard much from him lately. I'll have to check his age.

Back in 1982, Goldman wrote quite the tell all called "Adventures in the Screen Trade," where he spoke well of actors like Paul Newman and Laurence Olivier...but quite nastily against Dustin Hoffman(for practically physically torturing Olivier on set and throwing actorly temper tantrums) and somewhat less nastily against Redford(for semi-committing and then pulling out of projects, and for treating him poorly in the writing of All the President's Men.)

I can only figure if the Redford projects mentioned here came up AFTER Adventures in the Screen Trade was published...Redford pulled the plug on Goldman. For his part, Hoffman has flat out refuted Goldman's statements about "Marathon Man," suggesting that Goldman was mad that Hoffman changed the ending during shooting(I'd be mad, too, Hoffman rather ruined the ending.)

I figure that Goldman felt he'd made enough money in his career to tell off some movie stars -- whom, I think, he called in general "mysterious deep sea creatures" that writers needed to fear at all times for their impetuous and imperious ways.

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On one or two occasions he refers to "the writer" of the movie, as in "The writer handed in a draft that was too glib and superficial..."

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Well, sometimes Goldman IS glib and superficial. Recall that despite being the biggest hit of 1969, Butch Cassidy got a few pans for its glibness and superficiality.

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-- and that's all, folks.

Never mind the fact that much of Goldman's dialogue is, in fact, in the finished motion picture -- as is all of Goldman structure.

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Well, like I say, its hard to get superstars -- or superstar directors(see: Hitchocck) to be too inclusive of their collaborators.

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And never mind the fact that Goldman won an Academy award for his work on the movie. Just ignore all of that, forget it, because it's all irrelevant to the fact that Redford, for whatever reason, has a bug up his tuchis about William Goldman.

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Whatever reason might be "Adventures in the Screen Trade." Note that Redford was in several movies with William Goldman scripts: Butch Cassidy, The Hot Rock, The Great Waldo Pepper(which Goldman opined needed Jack Nicholson given the dark tragedy of the story), All the President's Men. But it ended, eventually.

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He also snubs Goldman in this 90 minute round-table retrospective about the film. It's actually a fascinating conversation, but Redford's omission of Goldman is striking. Not to mention childish.

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Well, more biting that Hitchcock's comment "actors are cattle" was "actors are children."

Steve McQueen reacted to that one. "I think it was mean when Hitchocck said that actors are children. But...he's kind of right. We get whatever we want when we want it."

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https://youtu.be/UVrGZSxpBEA

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I'll take a look.

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Now don't misunderstand: I adore Redford. He's one of the most gifted and charismatic screen actors of all time. A tremendous talent.

But I take it he can be a real jerk, too.

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Well, that's a problem with many of them, I've read/heard. I liked what one insider said: "They're crazy. What's a miracle is that they aren't MORE crazy."

I recall a story about Hitchcock discovering Eva Marie Saint serving herself coffee from a paper cup on the North by Northwest set. Hitchcock stopped her and said something like, "Eva Marie, you must not do that. Do NOT serve yourself...we have assistants here who will serve you. And do NOT drink out of a paper cup. We will serve you the coffee from fine china. Remember...you are a star."

Once a human being gets THAT kind of indoctrination, it is hard to stay normal. (Though all reports are that Eva Marie was and is. She said "We're just actors. We don't save lives.")

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Redford's famous flaw is being late to everything, I've read. Including movie sets to work with Paul Newman. At one point, Newman gave Redford an embroidered pillow that said "Punctuality is the mark of Kings." To no avail.

By the way, a perusal of some interviews with Newman and Redford show that they weren't ENTIRELY pals. Rather, Redford always felt a bit obligated to Newman for getting him cleared for Butch Cassidy...and they remained a bit competitive in the years after. Particularly on The Sting:

Newman on The Sting: "I won that movie sitting down." Newman proceeded to say that his big scene of the trainboard poker game was the movie's big set-piece. Suggesting Redford had no such chance to "win" the movie.

Redford on The Sting: "I was to be the only star of The Sting, but then Newman said he wanted in on what was supposed to be a supporting role. I said OK -- he got me my career with Butch Cassidy -- but I had to give up top billing and some money to bring him on."

Redford also quietly said something(this was filmed) about Newman on The Sting: "It was crazy, but the studio thought Newman wasn't quite the big star anymore. Not as big as me."

Umm...hmm.

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[–] filmklassik 8 years ago

"I won that movie sitting down."

Paul Newman said that?

Wow. That smacks of bad form. Which makes it hard to believe Newman said it. As you've pointed out elsewhere, William Goldman famously called Newman "the least movie-star like" star he had ever known. And Goldman wasn't the only one. Newman was by all accounts a class act, and a line like the one above -- while he may've been thinking it (he was human, after all) -- seems fairly out of character for him.

Are we sure he said it? And if he said it, are we sure he wasn't kidding in that jock-like, less-than-serious way certain actor friends have with one another?

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[–] ecarle 8 years ago

The Newman-Grant comparison is a fascinating one, EC, and I think that you're onto something.

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High praise...from a source I admire.

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Different as these two actors are, and from such different generations, backgrounds, nationalities--Grant was old enough to be Newman's father--they do seem to have a few things in common, such as starting out with a studio that didn't know what was good for them, and worse, didn't fully appreciate what talents they had.

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That sounds about right. I'm more familiar with the Newman career in the early years than the Grant career early on, but it does seem like it took awhile for Newman to get the right roles. "The Hustler" was key here, then "Hud" sealed the deal. But that was on the "anti-heroic heel" side of the street. Newman slowly and almost reluctantly became more of a traditional hero.

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To get humorous here, on could say that in some early Grant comedies, such as Arsenic And Old Lace his overplaying could be a bit much,

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I think Cary Grant "experimented" (on Frank Capra's urging) with the over the top perf in "Arsenic and Old Lace." I like the performance BECAUSE it is over the top(just this one time). Grant seems to be doing Bugs Bunny in his screaming mode in a lot of that picture, and he really "mug steals" a long sequence in which he watches an off-screen fight(between cops and crook Raymond Massey) and just does a bunch of faces and takes and thoughtful reactions. There are also his reactions when he finds the (unseen) body in the cedar chest.

Its truly a one-off performance for Grant...and he felt Jimmy Stewart should have done it. I'm not so sure. Interesting that Grant seemed to know his "alter ego" was Stewart.

--- though I enjoy watching an unhinged Cary Grant far better than an unhinged Paul Newman of his Left Handed Gun period, right through even The Hustler. For both men it was a few years after they were free from their exclusive studio contracts that they began shining.

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Well, lot of movie actors have said that theirs is a business where their "entry level jobs" are immortalized on screen.

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Like Newman, Grant really started to turn up in top ten moneymakers in his second decade in films, by which I mean the 40s. In Newman's case it was the 60s. In each case it was somewhat similar, as in "we've got a superstar on our hands" the studio execs realized, actors well above the levels of their nearest rivals in terms of popularity.

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It takes time, I guess. Of course, each man just grew more handsome with each year they aged, topping out around 55 (North by Northwest for Grant, I'm not sure what Newman made when he was that old.) 40 seemed to be a good year for "appearance." That's the age Newman was when he made Torn Curtain, and his memo to Hitchcock about the film began with this line: "The family and I had a swimming pool party to mark my 40th. I flipped off the diving board. I could call the party, 'I flipped at forty.'"

I read a biography of Spencer Tracy a few years ago and it reached a page where the MGM brass sent out a memo far and wide("in studio"): Spencer Tracy was now to be handled and promoted as a leading star.

I also recall the Time Magazine review of The Apartment(1960) and what it said about Jack Lemmon:

"Jack Lemmon has been arriving as a potential star for a few years now. With The Apartment, it can be said: he has arrived."

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By 1942-43 Grant was way ahead of the likes of Robert Montgomery and Melvyn Douglas, Fred MacMurray and Ray Milland, just as after the one/two punch of The Hustler and Hud Newman had pulled way ahead of the Don Murrays and Cliff Robertsons, as well as various "aspiring Brandos" like Ben Gazzara and John Cassavettes.

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The tough aspect of the business is how all these guys -- and modernly , to a lesser extent, all these women -- start roughly even and the true stars eventually break through. Sometimes its the right movies, but its also the quality of the star him or herself. With Grant and Newman, incredibly good looks, back by the acting chops and -- eventually -- the selection of the right movies.

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The golden age for both men was sweet. They were high profile stars and personalities, real public figures. With all due respect to Paul Newman and his excellent filmography, Cary Grant has one of the best on record, period, of any major star. I believe we've been over this before, with both of us agreeing that of Grant's generation only fellow Hitchcock semi-regular leading man Jimmy Stewart can give him a run for his money. (I find Stewart's actually better, and not just because if It's A Wonderful Life but the Hitchcocks and the Anthony Mann westerns, Harvey and Anatomy Of A Muder, all in the space of one decade, but once more, I digress ).

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I suppose it can be said that Grant and Stewart got the advantage of working when far more movies were made, and when stars WERE the reasons movies were made. Pre-Star Wars, Pre-Marvel.

I think Stewart has maybe the better filmography, but I prefer Cary Grant as a movie star. More handsome than Jimmy, less emotional, more cool. And Grant could do shirtless scenes where Jimmy could not. But these things are all a matter of taste.

Packing Cary and Jimmy: Humphrey Bogart. A lotta classics on THAT resume, and he died at age 57.

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At the time, in his heyday, it probably looked like Newman had a better filmography than either Grant or Stewart, but that's from the perspective of the 60s and a more liberal mindset, with many critics and moviegoers only regarding films that in one way or another that touch of "big issues" (race relations, sexuality, political corruption, the Cold War, alcoholism) seriously.

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Yes, but I've always contended that Paul Newman hit stardom when there was a real vacuum AMONG young male stars. The Golden Era stars died(Gable, Cooper) or retired(Grant, Cagney, Tracy) as the sixties progressed. Stewart hung in but got old. Wayne was a big star AS an older man.

Newman got the field all to himself for a few years -- until Steve McQueen and, arguably, Sean Connery -- caught up.

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Newman did his share of those, though there was, strangely, flexible and lively side, a willingness to make movies that just entertained, whether it was Paris Blues or the execrable Secret War Of Harry Frigg or, more typically, the Butch Cassidy blockbuster, and Hombre, though I regard the last named to be far better than that, at the the it was "Paul Newman's western".

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The good work being done at imdb seems to be including the movement upwards of "Hombre" to its rightful place among the great Paul Newman films. In the sixties themselves, it was considered a bit of a drop off, given that the directing/writing team had also done "Hud." Somehow "Hud" seemed more radical, more hip. But "Hombre" is a far more star-studded and action-oriented film than "Hud." With that great script of Elmore Leonard deadpan lines.

Harry Frigg was a big mistake. Right after Cool Hand Luke. Ouch. In the year of Bullitt. Double ouch. But one year later, Newman reclaimed his throne with Butch Cassidy.

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Both men aged gracefully, too, and without losing their appeal to women.

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You got that right. Only a few years as "father figures"; they were sexy well into their late fifties/early sixties.

The one place where genetics didn't play fair was that Grant -- a muscular acrobat in his youth -- got a bit overweight and puffy in his last few films (no matter, he was still suave and cool.) Newman was lean and trim -- heading for skinny in his later films but looking great en route.

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Each had his down periods, his bad year or two, yet they always bounced back.

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Yes, they did what top level movie stars do -- weathered a dip, found comeback films...came back.

Grant voluntarily retired for a few years in the fifties -- Brando, Clift and especially Dean told him he was "old hat." (Though I have recently read that Cary Grant signed on to do "The Pride and the Passion" and turned down "River Kwai" because he was told Brando would have the other lead! The one Sinatra took.)

I've always found it a bit ironic that Newman's big comeback started in 1980...the same year his "friendly rival" Steve McQueen died young at 50. McQueen had been offered "Fort Apache the Bronx." Newman got it. In 1980.

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By the 70s it's difficult to compare the silver age Newman to the Grant of roughly the same vintage, which for him would have been the 50s.

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Well, the entire studio structure fell apart as Newman aged, he had to scramble for a few years.

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Yet one of Grant's biggest hits of the 50s,--I think that it is the biggest--is the just for fun service comedy Operation Petticoat, pairing him with the much younger Tony Curtis.

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Funny thing: that was Grant's 1959 Xmas movie when his 1959 summer movie had been North by Northwest. HELLUVA year for Grant. But the lesser Petticoat did better at the box office than the more classic NXNW. I expect the Tony Curtis factor...plus lots of WWII Navy vets...made the difference.

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Interestingly, in the 70s, Newman's biggest grosser was by far The Sting, which paired him with the not that much younger Robert Redford.

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Yes -- and next in line was The Towering Inferno, pairing Newman with McQueen.

Frankly, if you look at the rest of the seventies, Newman didn't have a great box office decade. He didn't much care...The Sting and Inferno early on meant he never had to work again, so he picked a lot of esoteric Altman movies, one bad disaster follow-up(When Time Ran Out...really bad, it did.) A sequel to Harper -- set inexplicably in New Orleans -- didn't do too well.

The best of Newman's seventies bunch "ala carte" was Slapshot. (The brutal-funny hockey movie.)He skates, he fights, he cusses, and his humor timing is to be awestruck by.

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Newman remained active to a much older age than Grant, and while his later work is variable, some of it is quite good, and he kept on getting better as an actor. Grant seemed to coast more in his final years as a star, though his timing remained, as always impeccable.

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There is a calculation to Grant's career just after North by Northwest. That came out in 1959, and I expect Grant felt the sixties would be his last decade as a star. He KNEW it. So he built up his bank accounts. A Navy comedy with Tony Curtis. A Doris Day movie(where, some critics noted, Grant was less funny than Rock Hudson, more stiff.) Paired with Audrey Hepburn for the first time in a Hitchcock copy, "Charade." Hits all and then Grant plotted retirement with an Oscar-bid ("Father Goose," where's he's cranky and sloppy and doing Bogart in The African Queen) and then "Walk Don't Run," where he is, brilliantly, a matchmaker for a young couple, but leaves the film intent on impregnating his wife back home in London. Perfect.

Unlike Grant, who voluntarily retired at 62 before Hollywood could downgrade him, Newman worked a lot longer, and hung in there through movies both studio and indie. He never did a run of the mill "TV movie," but he did some stuff for PBS and HBO and Showtime, I think. What's amazing are how many great 90's/2000's movies Newman turned down. He only worked when he wanted to.

It is interesting, I suppose, that Hitchcock's big star in North by Northwest was Cary Grant, and his big star in Torn Curtain was Newman. HITCHCOCK figured it out, stardom-wise. Sean Connery came in between for Hitch(Marnie), but simply wasn't a star at Newman's level yet.

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[–] movieghoul 8 years ago

I'm a little late to this discussion, but I would suggest that Hitchcock was just slightly off in his timing on Family Plot if he wanted Redford for the Dern role.

In 1974, two years earlier, Redford starred in The Hot ROck a small comic thriller that Hitchcock undoubtedly saw and likely piqued his interest in Redford. The problem is that between the shooting of Hot ROck and its release, Redford had achieved superstar status due to The Sting.

Based on Hot Rock, we can see what he would have brought to Family Plot.

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[–] ecarle 8 years ago

I'm a little late to this discussion, but I would suggest that Hitchcock was just slightly off in his timing on Family Plot if he wanted Redford for the Dern role.

In 1974, two years earlier, Redford starred in The Hot ROck a small comic thriller that Hitchcock undoubtedly saw and likely piqued his interest in Redford.

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Actually it was a bit earlier than that -- 1972, which was before the big year for Redford of 1973, when The Way We Were back to back with The sting made him a superstar. And indeed, in LATE 1972, Jeremiah Johnson was an unexpected hit.

Heck, Robert Redford had THREE movies in 1972 -- The Hot Rock(spring), The Candidate(summer) and Jeremiah Johnson(Xmas). Of the three, only Johnson was really a big hit.

Indeed, in the immediate years after Butch Cassidy, Redford had trouble getting his stardom underway. "Tell Them Willie Boy is Here" was political and little seen; in "Little Fauss and Big Halsey," Redford played a real heel. The Hot Rock wasn't much of a hit (though I found it delightful, with Redford and George Segal a new kind of Butch and Sundance, and scripted by William Goldman the Butch writer.

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The problem is that between the shooting of Hot ROck and its release, Redford had achieved superstar status due to The Sting.

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Yes. Indeed, it would seem that Hitchocck -- perhaps buttressed by the comeback success of Frenzy -- sent his Family Plot script out to nothing BUT American superstars. Well, almost -- Nicholson, Pacino, Redford, Reynolds qualified. Roy Scheider and Faye Dunaway, not so much.

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Based on Hot Rock, we can see what he would have brought to Family Plot.

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Yes -- and as someone noted around here, Redford WAS willing to be part of a four-man caper team in that one, so perhaps he would have put up with three other stars in the three other leads in Family Plot.

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[–] filmklassik 8 years ago

See my reply to telegonus below.

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[–] ecarle 8 years ago

As this thread attests, and from my stray readings over the years since the pre-production of Family Plot in 1975 to recent years(the Redford bio book) , there seems to be pretty good proof that Hitchocck pitched Family Plot to any number of American superstars(having failed to get any British superstars -- or even stars -- for Frenzy: Michael Caine, Richard Burton, Richard Harris, Glenda Jackson and Lynn Redgrave all said no.)

Here's the "tote-up" again as per role offered:

George Lumley:

Jack Nicholson
Al Pacino

Arthur Adamson:

Burt Reynolds
Roy Scheider

Fran:

Faye Dunaway

Blanche:

? (More below.)

And: Robert Redford confirmed that a role had been offered, but not which one. Lumley? Adamson?

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It was a hard reach for Hitchocck. Trying to get Nicholson and Dunaway into Family Plot the year after they did Chinatown would have been pretty impossible I'd say. Hitchocck was too old and too passe to follow up Chinatown with.

Pacino had The Godfathers and Serpico on his resume when Hitch approached him. Dog Day Afternoon came out after Family Plot wrapped production.

Burt Reynolds was a few years away from Smokey and the Bandit, but The Longest Yard had been a big 1974 hit(Hitchcock loved it, and hired three actors from it, including Ed Lauter, for Family Plot.)

Hitchocck pitched Family Plot to Roy Scheider before Jaws came out; I assume Hitchocck had seen Jaws and knew that Scheider would be hot. Scheider took Marathon Man instead.

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Its hard to picture Hitchcock getting the budget money from Universal to hire so many superstars for Family Plot. One maybe, or two. (Faye Dunaway worked all the time, with Redford in Three Days of the Condor the year after Chinatown.)

But its time to play "what if?"

What if Hitchcock COULD get those superstars to work in Family Plot?

The problem is: he made multiple offers to some.

So who to choose?

Here's my list:

George Lumley: Jack Nicholson. He just seems more of a George Lumley than Al Pacino would be. Bruce Dern noted that he often got 'the roles Nicholson turned down"(they were pals) and the actors acted rather in the same twangy style.

Fran: Faye Dunaway. No other actress has been mentioned, so let's give it to her. "Nicholson and Dunaway return."

Arthur Adamson: Here, I'll toss in a guess and say: Robert Redford. Yes, he could have played George Lumley but he'd make more sense all suited up and elegant as Arthur Adamson. He could even wear his moustache. It would take Redford up to "Captain America 2" to play a flat out villain; why not a few decades earlier? (Truth be told, Redford had played some villains on sixties TV shows, including the Alfred Hitchcock Hour.)

Blanche: Hey, wait a minute. Barbara Harris seems to have been the only name SERIOUSLY named by Hitchocck for Madame Blanche. Universal was pushing Liza Minnelli on Hitchcock...she was a star, and would be for a little while longer. But Hitchcock "just didn't see Minelli in the part." Hitchcock had considered the opera singer (and Carol Burnett pal) Beverly Sills for Blanche, but it panned out for a younger woman.

Well, in my readings on Hitchcock in the seventies, I read that he spent an afternoon watching Goldie Hawn movies, around the time of Family Plot. Who's to say he wasn't thinking about Goldie for Blanche?

And therefore, to maintain the balance of "full superstar cast list" we get:

Lumley: Jack Nicholson
Adamson: Robert Redford
Blanche: Goldie Hawn
Fran: Faye Dunaway

Nicholson and Redford might have trouble on billing; possible solution --use that Newman/McQueen billing from Towering Inferno.

That's a fun cast to conjure with. If Universal had been willing to pay the big bucks and all four said "yes"-- could have Family Plot been a classic?

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[–] ecarle (14979) 7 years ago

Its about one year later, and a thread that had a lot of good contributors on the always-fun topic of "movie star studies" is worth another look, I think.

The thread climaxes around Christmas of 2016. We are now nearing Christmas of 2017.

It was a very good year....

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