King Vidor
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Connections, in both directions
It runs a little long, and it strays off the path from time to time, but one look at Jack Lemmon's office building, with its endless rows of desks and fluorescent lights (borrowed from King Vidor's superb 1928 The Crowd), will hook you.
But its numerous Oscars--for best picture, direction, script, editing, and art direction--indicate that many disagree with me (including the Coen brothers, who seem to have studied it for The Hudsucker Proxy, just as Wilder studied Vidor's silent The Crowd for this).
This shot is quoted from King Vidor's silent film “The Crowd” (1928), which is also about a faceless employee in a heartless corporation.
Nonetheless, he immediately becomes one of a thousand interchangeable desk jockeys, portrayed in row after row of desks in an overhead shot that would influence everything from The Apartment to Brazil .
Such was the film's influence that its depiction of regimented office life and the palliative power of mass laughter were later referenced by such eminent directors as Billy Wilder (in The Apartment) and Preston Sturges (in Sullivan's Travels).
This is, after all, a film whose themes stretch back as far as Wallace Beery and “The Champ,” up through “Bad News Bears,” “Bad Santa,” “Bad Words” and beyond.
But viewers will also recognize echoes of original noirs, including Double Indemnity and The Postman Always Rings Twice and even David O. Selznick's lust-in-the-dust Western Duel in the Sun.
In a plot twist borrowed from "La Bohème" (which Luhrmann filmed for Australian television in 1993), she is also suffering from tuberculosis.
Set in Montmartre in 1899, the story is a star-crossed romance reminiscent of "La Boheme" that centers on Christian (Ewan McGregor), a struggling young writer new to the bohemian Paris neighborhood.
An innovative, feverish pop musical with Busby Berkeley dance numbers and a "La Boheme" story.
Besides the which, it's not like the writers are exactly hiding the fact that they're stealing almost everything from the operas La traviata and La bohème (Luhrmann directed a production of the latter shortly after the film's opening), and the Greek myth of Orpheus.
Add a diagnosis of consumption to the mix, and you've got "La Bohème" played out as a modern musical.
It's got plot points from "Camille", "La Traviata" and "La Bohème" (the latter of which Mr. Luhrmann directed in 1993), the emotions of a Broadway show and musical numbers taken directly from the pop culture of the last three decades.
Sparks fly, of course, and before long Ronny and Loretta share a bed and a date to see La Bohème.
Musically, "Moonstruck" is built around "La Boheme," whose themes we see and hear at every turn.
…n line with the conceit that it's something like an opera, the original cut of "Moonstruck" opened with music from "La Boheme."
Furthermore, the symbiotic connection between auteur and collaborator is established in the eerie and beautiful opening, as a man (played by the director) discovers a portal that opens to packed theater playing King Vidor’s “The Crowd,” leading to the introduction of the chameleonic protagonist.
The nearly silent prologue evokes the social unease and transfixed audience of King Vidor’s 1928 rat-race commentary The Crowd.
He is then on the other side, in the aisle of a cinema, where a packed audience is watching King Vidor’s The Crowd.
The frozen crowd is shot from the perspective of the movie screen as the audience watches the final scenes of King Vidor’s 1928 silent film, “The Crowd.”
Beery was nominated twice for Oscars and won once (in 1932, for The Champ, the movie he filmed immediately before Grand Hotel).
Beery, who usually played congenial lugs like "The Champ" or, later, Long John Silver, at first refused the part, saying it was too unsympathetic, but MGM told him he'd be the only major character in the cast who would be allowed to speak in a German accent, and that won him over.
It's been done a thousand times, including such famous performers as Wallace Beery in "The Champ," Kirk Douglas in "Champion," Sylvester Stallone in "Rocky," Michelle Rodriguez in "Girlfight," Hilary Swank in "Million Dollar Baby" and Mark Wahlberg in "The Fighter."
As old as 1931’s “The Champ,” in fact, and at times nearly as soggy.
When producers Alan and Peter Riche decided to make a boxing drama similar to the 1931 father-son tale The Champ , they immediately sought out Eminem for the role.
The fall-from-grace storyline is a familiar angle in boxing films: Sylvester Stallone used it in his “Rocky” franchise and it has been a staple of the genre as far back as the 1930s when Warner Bros. and other studios were churning out such films as “The Champ,” “The Life of Jimmy Dolan” and “They Made Me a Criminal.”
Even in 1931, The Champ must have seemed old-fashioned.
Shawn Levy, who directed such lucrative disasters as the Steve Martin remakes of The Pink Panther and Cheaper by the Dozen , has been brought in by Steven Spielberg to make this conflation of The Champ (the 1931 tearjerker about a drunken boxer redeemed by his long-estranged son, Jackie Cooper) and Rollerball , the futuristic action flick built around a violent popular sport.
The writing on the wall already suggests that this experience will bring father and son closer together, though Levy and screenwriter John Gatins approach it as if they mixed up Charlie Chaplin's The Kid with The Champ as easily as they did Jackie Coogan with Jackie Cooper.
What happens next owes more than a little to both Frankenstein , as the man-made creatures take on lives of their own, and the Wallace Beery-Jackie Cooper classic The Champ , as father and son learn to bond, the kid becomes a partner and a helpmate, his dad grows up, and everyone turns into a better person.
In "The Champ" (1931), Wallace Beery -- who won a Best Actor Oscar for the film -- is a washed-up boxer and compulsive gambler who determines to pull himself together for the sake of his young son (Jackie Cooper).
Anton Ego, a critic who looks like he runs a funeral parlor for all the dreams he’s murdered, is an Addams Family version of Ellsworth Toohey from Rand’s “The Fountainhead;” when Linguini kisses his colleague Colette, she is so blown away that she drops her can of Mace, which seems like a parody of the famous date rape encounter in “The Fountainhead;” Colette calls false modesty just another way to lie (Rand, in “Atlas Shrugged”: “This, she knew, was a tribute to her, the rarest one person could pay another, the tribute of feeling free to acknowledge one’s own greatnessâ€Â); and there is a lone-wolf twist to the Disney lost-child formula.
Before long, she's managed to launch a successful restaurant (as Crawford did in "Mildred Pierce") while protecting her daughter's self-esteem (a la Stanwyck in "Stella Dallas").
He is as much "one of the crowd" as was James Murray in King Vidor's silent classic "The Crowd" more than 70 years ago.
Nor does Carrie enlist our sympathies through the portrayal of maternal self-sacrifice for the benefit of a beloved daughter in the style of Stella Dallas (King Vidor, 1937) or Mildred Pierce (Michael Curtiz, 1945).
And this is not the first time that a producer, and not the director, served as the primary creative spirit behind a movie: one needn't look beyond David O. Selznick's Gone with the Wind and Duel in the Sun for two especially clear-cut examples.
My favorite Luhrmann to date wasn't a film at all: It was his 2002 Broadway staging of Puccini's "La Boheme," which was full of grand concepts and bold design strokes, far more selectively handled.
There’s little sense of the corporate side of Hollywood, the hard-nosed boardroom management, the studios’ industrial organization (which is already on display in King Vidor’s inside-Hollywood comedy “Show People,” from 1928).
Casting a hot young performer opposite a veteran has been a common Hollywood ploy ever since Wallace Beery teamed with 9-year-old Jackie Cooper in 1931's The Champ.
Because Scorsese has a mind full of movies, it’s possible to guess what he was thinking about at the end of The Wolf of Wall Street: the last shot in King Vidor’s 1928 The Crowd.
He is destroyed, and tears come out of his eyes, but he lets one of them slide into his mouth, like Barbara Stanwyck at the end of Stella Dallas (1937), and this indicates that he is finding a kind of enjoyment in his pain.
In scenes like this (imagine Audrey Hepburn’s “War and Peace” waltz amplified a hundredfold), Branagh pulls out all the stops, attempting to outdo Powell and Pressburger, Ophuls and Renoir in a single go as the camera swirls about his awestruck heroine.