Tag: Herbert Ross

The Goodbye Girl (1977)

Some funny lines isn’t quite enough for this romantic comedy to work as well as it should

Director: Herbert Ross

Cast: Richard Dreyfuss (Elliot Garfield), Marsha Mason (Paula McFadden), Quinn Cummings (Lucy McFadden), Paul Benedict (Mark Bodine), Barbara Rhoades (Donna Douglas), Nicol Williamson (Oliver Fry)

Working as a performer sucks. There’s no money and who knows when the next job is round the corner? It’s even tougher when you are forever unlucky in love. That’s the case for semi-retired dancer Paula McFadden (Marsha Mason). She’s been jilted twice by actors who disappear for a big break somewhere else, leaving only a cursory apology behind. It makes being a single mother to precocious-but-vulnerable ten-year-old Lucy (Quinn Cummings) even harder. Harder again is that her recent awful boyfriend, as a parting gift, sublet their apartment without her knowledge to Elliot Garfield (Richard Dreyfuss), an actor as neurotic as Paula, arriving in New York for his big break. Paula refuses to leave her home and the two kick off a territorial feud, which settles into a truce and a flat share. But could it lead to anything else?

It probably won’t be a surprise to say yes it does, in this sharply written film from Neil Simon, crammed with fast-paced, theatrical, gag-filled dialogue which keeps the film’s pace up without really converting it into something real. The main problem with The Goodbye Girl is that it’s hard to believe in, or really care for, either of its two lead character. I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say both of them would be incredibly hard work to live with. After all, they can frequently be rather trying just to watch. Simon makes them both brittle, neurotic, high-strung and prone to performative bursts of euphoria and rage. Both can swing on a six-pence between these. It’s probably meant to make them the perfect match, like a feuding Bogart (who Garfield impersonates at one point) and Bacall, but after a while just starts to wear you down. You want to give both of them a bit of a shake and say “pull yourself together!”

The ability to stick with the film revolves around how charming you find both performers. Here, Richard Dreyfuss has the definite advantage. Coming off a hot-streak that had seen almost every film he had made turn into a smash hit, Dreyfuss’ performance made him (at 29) the youngest winner of the Best Actor Oscar. A late replacement for a fired Robert De Niro (can you even begin to imagine De Niro’s deadpan intensity working here?), the part is a perfect match for Dreyfuss’ youthful, madcap energy. He seizes on the rat-a-tat dialogue, embraces Garfield’s zany love for New Agey thinking (yoga, guitar and sleeping “buffo”) and bounces around the film as likely to make monkey noises while euphorically chinning up on a door frame as he is to play sweet imagination games with young Lucy. He brings a lot of charm to a highly strung, difficult man, uncovering a lot of his essential decency and kindness.

He actually settles more into the difficult balance than Marsha Mason, the person (Simon’s wife) who the film was written for. Mason never really manages to find the softness and likability in this role. It’s not entirely her fault: while the point is that Paula is a woman with serious trust issues, the film never gives her a moment of calmness or reflection to open up about this. Instead, it takes a lazier route of having this turn her into an abrasive comic character, the sort of person who responds to a “morning after” with a furious expectation of betrayal. Mason never quite manages to find a softness or likeability under this prickly defensiveness. Interestingly, for all the project was written for her, she has few of the truly funny lines and is effectively the obstacle that must be fixed rather than having the more engaging role of charming disrupter.

To be honest there is not a lot of chemistry between the two. Simon so enjoys the competitive dialogue feuding over territory, bills and who will have what room and when, that he rather forgets to show them actually falling in love. In fact, he ends up relying on the age-old formula of a precocious, New York Times reading child being the bridge to bring them together. Quinn Cummings is rather good as the sort of kid who only exists in the movies, as adept with the witty retort as the adults. But between Elliot and Paula, the romance always feels a bit too inevitable rather than natural, the eventual thawing occurring swiftly rather than feeling it has developed naturally and gently.

It’s part of the slightly formulaic nature of The Goodbye Girl. It’s a highly safe film, with a very conventional romantic storyline, that bubbles along to a happy ending. You can feel the box-ticking from scene-after-scene, just as you can feel the inevitability of its happy ending. It’s also overly theatrical, feels constrained by its location and never quite light enough on its feet. There are a few too many stand-up rows around the apartment block (their poor neighbours) and Herbert Ross’ direction struggles as much as Simon’s script to give us a reason to really root for this couple.

There are though some decent digs at the working life in the arts. Paula, trying to get back into the dancing game, is hideously off-the-pace and takes a job as an enthusiastic glamour-girl flogging Japanese cars at trade show. Elliot is forced to fall back a doorman gig at a strip club. It’s a tough old trade, especially as Elliot’s big break in New York falls apart after he is forced by a pretentious, talentless director to perform Richard III as a limp-wristed, 1970s stereotype of a gay man, mincing around and lisping his lines to the ridicule and disgust of audiences and critics. This comic highlight feels a little awkward now (the joke is the stereotyped gay behaviour, rather than the appalling idea, making it’s a little uncomfortable to watch at times, rather as if Elliot was being made to play it in black face).

The Goodbye Girl just isn’t quite charming or likeable enough and its characters are never people we really end up warming to or rooting for. Its sharp dialogue ends up making them feel less like real people and more like theatrical characters, bouncing off each other for effect. Dreyfuss comes off best here, but Ross’ direction is uninspired, its romantic coupling never really convincing and it tends to rather overstay its welcome.

The Seven-Per-Cent Solution (1976)

Affectionate and faithful Holmes pastiche that shines an interesting light on the Great Detective’s character

Director: Herbert Ross

Cast: Nicol Williamson (Sherlock Holmes), Robert Duvall (Dr John Watson), Alan Arkin (Dr Sigmund Freud), Laurence Olivier (Professor Moriarty), Vanessa Redgrave (Lola Devereaux), Joel Grey (Lowenstein), Jeremy Kemp (Baron Karl von Leinsdorf), Charles Gray (Mycroft Holmes), Samantha Egger (Mary Watson), Jill Townsend (Mrs Holmes), John Bird (Berger), Anna Quayle (Freda)

The magic of Sherlock Holmes is he is immortal. Doyle’s detective has been reshaped so many times since the publication of the canonical stories, that we’re now used to seeing him presented in myriad ways. It was more unsettling to critics – particularly British ones – in 1976, who didn’t know what to make of an original, inventive Holmes story that treats the characters seriously but is playful with the canon. Was this a parody or a new story? (Why can’t it be both!) Today though, The Seven-Per-Cent Solution stands out as a Holmesian treat, a faithful slice of gap-filling fan fiction.

Based on a best-selling novel by Nicholas Meyer (who also adapted it), The Seven-Per-Cent Solution expertly reworks Doyle’s The Final Problem. Professor Moriarty (Laurence Olivier) is not the Napoleon of Crime, but a mousey maths tutor, the subject of Holmes’ (Nicol Williamson) cocaine-addled idée fixe. Worried about his friends dissent into addiction, Dr Watson (Robert Duvall) tricks Holmes into journeying to Vienna to receive treatment from an up-and-coming specialist in nervous disease and addiction, Dr Sigmund Freud (Alan Arkin). The treatment is a slow success – and the three men are drawn into investigating the mysterious threat to drug addicted glamourous stage performer Lola Devereaux (Vanessa Redgrave) that may or may not be linked to her fierce lover, the arrogant Baron Karl von Leinsdorf (Jeremy Kemp).

As all we Holmes buffs know, seven per-cent refers to Holmes’ preferred mix of cocaine, taken to stimulate his brain between cases and see off boredom. But what if that persistent cocaine use wasn’t a harmless foible – as Holmes tells the disapproving Watson – but something much worse? Kicking off what would become a decades long obsession with Holmes the addict – Brett and Cumberbatch would have their moments playing the detective high as a kite and a host of pastiches would explore the same ground – Meyer created a version of Holmes who was definitely the same man but losing control of himself to the power of the drug.

This short-circuited some critics who didn’t remember such things from school-boy readings of Doyle and hazier memories of Rathbone (those films, by the way, were basically pastiches in the style of Seven-Per-Cent Solution as well). But it’s a stroke of genius from Meyer, shifting and representing a familiar character in an intriguing way that expands our understanding and sympathy for him. Holmes may obsessively play with his hands and have a greater wild-eyed energy to him. He may sit like a coiled spring of tension and lose his footing. But he can still dissect Freud’s entire life-story from a few visual cues in a smooth and fluid monologue and his passion for logic, justice – as well as his bond with the faithful Watson (here bought closer to Doyle’s concept of a decent, if uninspired, man) – remain undimmed.

It helps that the film features a fantastic performance from Nicol Williamson. Few actors were as prickly and difficult – so could there have been a better choice to play the challenging genius? Williamson’s Holmes is fierce in all things. Introduced as a wild-eyed junkie, raving in his rooms and haring after leads, his behaviour oscillates between drug-fuelled exuberance to petulant paranoia. But there are plenty of beats of sadness and shame: Holmes is always smart enough to know when he no longer masters himself. When the mystery plot begins (almost an hour into the film), Williamson’s does a masterful job of slowly reassembling many of the elements of the investigative Holmes we are familiar with – the focus, the energy, the self-rebuke at mistakes and the excitement and wit of a man who loves to show he’s smarter than anyone else.

The film is strongest as a character study, in particular of Holmes. Its most engaging sections take Holmes from a perfectly reconstructed Victorian London (including a loving, details-packed recreation of 221B from production designer Ken Adam) to waking from a cold turkey slumber full of apologies for his cruel words to Watson. Seeing Watson’s quiet distress at Holmes state, and the great efforts he takes to help him, are a moving tribute to the friendship at the book’s heart. The clever way Meyer scripts Holmes’ ‘investigation’ into Moriarty (an amusing cameo from Laurence Oliver, his mouth like a drooping basset hound) sees him apply all his methods (disguise, methodical reasoning, unrelenting work) in a way completely consistent with Doyle but clearly utterly unhinged.

That first half serves as a superb deconstruction of the arrogance of literature’s most famous detective, who won’t admit the slightest flaw in himself. It’s still painful to see a frantic Holmes, desperate for a hit, causing a disturbance in Freud’s home and denounce Watson as “an insufferable cripple” (a remark met with a swift KO and later forgiven). Holmes’ cold turkey sequence is a fascinating sequence of nightmareish hallucinations, as he is plagued by visions of cases past (The Engineer’s Thumb, Speckled Band and Hound of the Baskervilles among them) and the eventual awakening of Holmes as a contrite, humbled figure very affecting.

Bouncing off Williamson we have the traditional “Watson” role split between that character and Freud. Robert Duvall is a very unconventional choice as Watson – and his almost unbelievably plummy accent takes some getting used to – but he gives the character authority without (generously) giving him inspiration. Limping from a war wound (another touch of the novels often missed until now), he’s dependable, loyal and goes to huge lengths to protect his friends.

But most of the traditional role is actually given to Freud, played with quiet charm and authority by Alan Arkin. Intriguingly the film places Freud as a combination of both men’s characters. He has the analytical mind of Holmes, investigating the subconscious. But he also chases after errands for Holmes, “sees but does not observe” during the case in the manner of Watson and eventually becomes an active partner in confronting the villains.

The actual mystery (taking up less than 40 minutes of the film’s runtime) can’t quite maintain the momentum, being a rather trivial affair (greatly simplified from the book) revolving around a cameo from Vanessa Redgrave as a fellow drug addict Holmes feels a touching sympathy for. Jeremy Kemp makes a fine swaggering bully, but his greatest moment is actually his pre-mystery anti-Semitic confrontation with Freud at a sports club, culminating in a Flemingesque game of real tennis between the two. If the film has any moment that tips into outright comedy, it’s a closing train chase that involves Holmes, Watson and Freud dismantling the train carriage to burn the wood as fuel.

But the real heart of the film is Holmes. Throughout the film we are treated to brief visions of the boyhood Holmes slowly climbing a staircase. What he saw at the top of that staircase is buried deep in his subconscious, with the final act of the film revealing all under hypnosis. It’s an intriguing motivator for all Holmes has become, just as it is surprisingly shocking. As Watson comments, the bravest act is sometimes confronting ourselves: The Seven-Per-Cent Solution treats the detective with huge respect, while pushing him into psychological waters Doyle would never have dreamed of. It’s why the film (and Meyer’s book) is a fascinating must-see for Holmes fans: it takes the material deeper, but never once forgets its loyalty to the source material.

The Turning Point (1977)

Two women struggle to have it all in a film that wouldn’t have looked out of place in the 1940s

Director: Herbert Ross

Cast: Shirley MacLaine (DeeDee Rodgers), Anne Bancroft (Emma Jacklin), Tom Skerritt (Wayne Rodgers), Leslie Browne (Emilia Rodgers), Mikhail Baryshnikov (Yuri Kopeikine), Martha Scott (Adelaide), James Mitchell (Michael Cooke), Alexandra Danilova (Madame Dakharova), Anthony Zerbe (Joe “Rosie” Rosenberg), Lisa Lucas (Janina Rodgers), Antoinette Sibley (Sevilla Haslem)

The demands of ballet are unlike any other artform there is. Complete physical and emotional commitment is needed to master it – so that means you got to make choices. The Turning Point is all about those choices. You might even call them ‘turning points’. DeeDee (Shirley MacLaine) and Emma (Anne Bancroft) were two young ballerinas who took radically different paths: DeeDee had a child with fellow dancer Wayne (Tom Skerritt) and left the profession behind; Emma remained with the company to become its prima ballerina. Now DeeDee’s teenage daughter Emilia (Leslie Browne) has joined the company: will she become the new prima ballerina? Or will she decide to focus on a relationship with playboy dancer Yuri (Mikhail Baryshnikov)? Will Emma and DeeDee resolve the tensions between them – and the conflict from their shared parental interest in Emilia?

The Turning Point was a big hit in 1977. That, and the fact that it was about (and featured a lot of) an artform as graceful as ballet seems to have convinced the Academy it merited a haul of eleven Oscar nominations. Come awards night, the film set a record for most unsuccessful nominations, converting none of them into Oscars. Perhaps that’s because, on closer inspection, The Turning Point is a fairly run-of-the-mill soap opera, that mixes in various clichés from backstage, traditional ‘women’s pictures’ and family drama to come up with a plotline that’s eventually very familiar.

For all its positioning as a female-led drama, it essentially boils down to the same old patterns that for decades such films have circled. Turns out women can’t have it all: you can have that successful career, but forever sacrifice the joy of being a mother or you can settle down and have the family but face a life of career unfulfillment. Twas ever thus, ‘tis one or t’other. Essentially the film boils down into a soapy drama about resentments and illicit backstage affairs and little more than that. It doesn’t even really double down on the fun this sort of set-up could provide, instead framing the whole thing as a very serious drama.

But then, the film was an autobiographical affair for those involved. Emma is based on Nora Kaye, who was married to the director Herbert Ross. DeeDee is based on Kaye’s childhood friend Isabel Mirrow Brown, who made the exact same choice as DeeDee, marrying a fellow dancer (just like Tom Skerritt’s character). Her daughter (and Kaye’s goddaughter) was Leslie Browne, who here plays a fictionalised version of herself based on her own experience of starting her ballet career. Characters based on Jerome Robbins, Lucia Chase and other leading figures from ballet and theatre appear. Only Mikhail Baryshnikov’s Yuri is purely fictional (although the character has more than few similarities with Baryshnikov himself, being a Soviet defector).

It does give an additional layer of interest to the film. Ross also mixes in a host of extended ballet sequences which showcase actual professional ballet dancers, with snippets from Swan Lake, Cinderella and The Nutcracker among others. The dancing is breath-takingly good. Not least from Baryshnikov and Browne, who are given multiple opportunities to showcase their skills. Baryshnikov in particular is at the height of his powers, a graceful artiste who moves with an astonishing finesse. Both landed Oscar nominations, one suspects largely on the basis of their dancing.

The acting is left to MacLaine and Bancroft as the leading ladies. There is something a little perverse that MacLaine, the former dancer, doesn’t so much as trot a step, while Bancroft (totally unexperienced) struts parts of Anna Karenina. However, the two actresses rip into these thinly written parts, giving them a lot more force than the film deserves. MacLaine balances motherly pride with bubbling feelings of something uncomfortably close to envy for her daughter’s success, spending time in New York trying to recapture some of her past (including a brief fling with Anthony Zerbe’s lecherous choreographer). Bancroft balances coming to terms with the end of her career as a ballerina with a growing regret that she has been left without a family. She becomes increasingly close to Emilia, mentoring her, dressing her and coaching her through a performance after relationship problems lead to Emilia getting roundly pissed in a bar before the show.

Needless to say, this unspoken squabble for ownership over Emilia – not helped by Emilia’s fury over her mother’s infidelity – only exacerbates tensions between the two women. It builds towards the film’s true climax (but unfortunately not its actual climax, as fifteen minutes remain for Emilia to be coached for her star-making performance) as the two women down drinks and exchange angry words and slaps, leading to a full blown cat fight outside the theatre. The fight later descends into cathartic giggling – and pity the two actresses who filmed it in ballroom dresses in what looks like a gale – but is acted with a great deal of attack by both, who bounce off each other (literally) hugely effectively.

But the scene is also a further confirmation that what we are really watching is a sort of high-brow family soap, that uses ballet as a backdrop for family feuds, scuffles, sexual escapades and tear-filled reunions. And it boils down to that struggle between career and family, the sort of struggle Bette Davis and Joan Crawford films were dealing with in the 1940s. Which is possibly another reason so many took to The Turning Point: even in 1977 it was an old-fashioned piece of entertainment, that did very little new.

That carries across to its whole execution: Ross competently directs the film (this was his annus mirabilis as he directed two Best Picture nominees, this and The Goodbye Girl) but really it gets all the force it has (and more than it perhaps deserves) from the two leads and a fine supporting cast (Tom Skerritt is very good as DeeDee’s laid-back, understanding father who perhaps masks secrets of his own). It’s a soap opera, solid but not spectacular, that really outside its showcase of ballet, doesn’t stand out from several other films of the same genre.