Harlan Ellison's Watching (14 page)

Universal's re-remake of
Beau Geste
, the venerable P. C. Wren tale of derring-do and swashbucklery at Fort Zinderneuf, will no doubt be summarily dismissed by the "serious" critics of cinema, both here and abroad. Such dismissal is not entirely unjustified. It is a well that has long-since run dry. But in the interests of fair play and offbeat comments guaranteed to startle, this reviewer would like to dwell on four points. Perhaps someone will take note.

First. This started out as a well-done version of the hoary old story of the brothers who wind up in the command of a sadistic Foreign Legion sergeant. It was a gratuitously emasculated version of the original story, done brilliantly not once, but twice before. One entire brother was omitted, the theft of the jewel was omitted, plot twists were omitted
en masse
. But nonetheless, it held the interest. It was nicely mounted. Until Doug McClure walked on the screen. Everyone in the theater laughed. Now before there is instant assumption that I am going to pan McClure, let me assure the readership that he performed more than adequately. He did all that could be done with the part doled out to him, a role whose dimensions were as vast as the horizon line in Bosnia. But McClure was laughed at. People smiled as he tended the sick brother lying in his bunk. They snickered and found the corners of their mouths turning up. It ruined the mood of the story. The reason for this unrestrained mirth contains a key to the senseless casting currently being done at Universal, and it contains a dire warning to either Mr. McClure or his agent, since his studio obviously cannot see what is right in front of them.

McClure is the most natural, most certain, most exquisite comedic talent to come along since Cary Grant grew gray in the service. He is what Rod Taylor has tried to be, what James Garner has failed miserably at being, what Tony Randall grows too raucous really ever to be, what Jack Lemmon does very well indeed. He is a
funny
man. A handsome, athletic, all-around leading man with a built-in laughmaker. When McClure walks onscreen, people sit up and
want
to laugh. To cast him in deadly serious roles where his grimacing and Superman good looks are incongruous is in the nature of a capital crime.

Had Universal one whit the intelligence they pretend to possess, they would launch McClure instantly in a series of big-budget sophisticated comedies, sit back and rake in the dividends. A word to the wise . . .

Second. The film inevitably falls before the derision of the audience, because it is fifty years out-of-date. It devolves on points of "old school tie" honor, of stiff-necked patriotism to hollow causes, of the sort of "into the valley of death" horse manure no audience of 1966 is going to accept. Not when they are faced full daily with a dirty, and some say immoral, war on the front pages of their newspapers. No one is going to accept the nobility of dying in the saddle (a scene Leslie Nielsen, who is far better than that, should have refused to play) when they can see newsphotos of bombed-out schools and churches with innocent civilians napalmed and disemboweled. No one
really
believes, any longer, that war is noble, that the
esprit de corps
is excuse for atrocity and stupidity and following atrocious, stupid rules of combat. Which brings us inescapably to the most important point about this film, which is

Third. The practice—often lamented in these pages—of remaking films that were made as classics originally.
Stagecoach, She, Room for One More, Mutiny on the Bounty, Rashomon
, and now
Beau Geste:
each of these was made the first time out as well as it could ever be made. Each has had a new edition released in the last few years and each one, without exception, has been an artistic disaster. The strangling stench of venality behind these remakes is so gagging that only the horse-blindered producers who have fostered them could hope to accept the hypocrisy of their being brought into being. And only these same men could hope to swallow the rationalizations used to ballyhoo weak excuses for their latest incarnations.

If the film industry does not stop this ceaseless, senseless cannibalization of its own body, it will disenchant the filmgoing audience beyond hope of recall. How much longer can audiences be expected to swallow the patent lies of four-color lithography and slanted
Coming Attractions?
How much longer can people be expected to invest their trust, their ticket money, their time and their sense of wonder in shabby redone warhorses butchered by second-rate visionaries? What dreadful ghouls imagine they can match the marvels wrought for us first time out by Kurosawa, Ford, Laughton, Gable, John Wayne or Thomas Mitchell? What front-office callousness can be deemed even remotely acceptable for the production of inferior versions of treasured classics held dear in memory by movie lovers; films whose discovery by younger generations has been irrevocably lost or mutilated by the release of witless surrogates, merely for the money to be gained from a shameful resort to the reputation of the former version?

It is a disgrace the industry continues to flaunt in the faces of cinemaphiles who have deplored it for many years.

And fourth. Sympathy is herewith extended to Nielsen, McClure, Guy Stockwell, Telly Savalas and a fine supporting cast, who have been made to play a microcephalically written screenplay of sheerest ineptitude. The clichés roll off the typewriter of this film's Phantom Author like squares of toilet paper.

There are few excuses suitable for a scenarist who has turned out a script of this caliber. If he is a wise man he will spread the rumor that he was hammerstunned drunk throughout the entire period of scripting. In which case someone ought to offer him a better grade of panther sweat.

Cinema
/ December 1966

It certainly didn't begin with Mr. Luce and his bogus posed photograph of "beatniks in their natural habitat"—nor even with Harriet Beecher Stowe's fraudulent
Uncle Tom's Cabin
, purporting to be the gospel on how it was for de darkie way down South—but it was that particular Lucely manifestation of yellow journalism that surely brought it to its fullest flowering. (And he's still at it; a recent issue of
Time
features a ghastly slanted takeout on the hippies, once again ornamented by posed photographs purporting to be accurate representations of the hippie life and ethic, and are no more representative than Mamie Van Doren is representative of the Average American Housewife.)

What I'm plodding toward, of course, is the strange and frightening tendency adrift in the land, lo these last eighteen years, for nature to imitate art.
Life
ran the phony beatnik photo, and within months, everyone of Kerouac's proselytizers—people who had not lived that way prior to the publication of the photograph though they might have subscribed to the "beat philosophy"—were existing in squalor that could have been a
Doppelganger
for the
Life
environment. (And though the author of
Uncle Tom's Cabin
had never been any farther South than Ohio, Americans everywhere accepted her view of conditions and acted upon it, thereby precipitating, in part, the Civil War.)

Nature imitating art, rather than the reverse. An artificial reality accepted as an existing condition, rather than truth based upon observation. Nature imitating art, a flagrant warping of a natural state traditional since man first observed the wild dog and scratched its likeness on a limestone wall. (And spare me analogies of primitive man exercising his imagination on those same walls. He may have envisioned a seven-headed Cerberus, but that didn't
poof!
call one into existence.)

Now we subsist in a world molded by show biz; predicated on the huckster's image of us; preshrunk and plastic packaged. Everything that does not conform to this insanity seems bogus to us. It seems sometimes that believability is inversely proportional to the amount of bullshit suffusing it. The boundaries of shadow and reality have blurred, thereby causing us to wander terrified through a truly schizoid culture. Shadow, reality, they are now one and the same.

So who is to say: is the reality
Up the Down Staircase
or is it
The Blackboard Jungle?

Who are the real kids in the schools? Bel Kaufman's tragic and somehow strangely winsome Alice Blake, her feral Joe Ferone, her demeaned yet noble Jose Rodriguez? Or Evan Hunter's stereotyped Negro, Greg Miller, his clichéd psychopath, Artie West (who could have been written for the young Vic Morrow, so pat was the image of a teenaged giggling killer; a post-puberty Johnny Udo as seen by Widmark)? Which image is more relevant of teachers today? Richard Brooks and Glenn Ford's Mr. Dadier, or Robert Mulligan and Sandy Dennis's Miss Barrett?

In the answer to these questions—and they're all the same question, obviously—we strike to the heart of the nature of responsibility of our cinematic creators. In the answer we can judge whether our universal prurience is being jellied or our spirits uplifted. The answer tells us whether we have become a filmgoing nation addicted to the cheap, the sensational, the fraudulent . . . or if we are capable of recognizing truth when it is presented to us.

It also indicates a safe path down which we can pass to discover which films are "good" and which are "bad."

That Evan Hunter's novel, on which
Blackboard Jungle
was based, was entirely a product of the author's imagination (as was his North Trades Manual High School, a creation that resembles not at all the New York technical high where Hunter put in a scant few weeks as a summer replacement) is not terribly relevant. The authors of the film could have opted for realism, rather than accepting the whole cloth presented to them. There
was
an option at the time. Now there is none. So the relevancy of the basic source's verisimilitude is academic, even as the authenticity of
Staircase's
Calvin Coolidge High School is irrelevant. Pakula and Mulligan chose to go where it was happening. They employed authoress Bel Kaufman—seventeen years in metropolitan school systems as opposed to Hunter's brief and unhappy stint—as technical advisor. They did not cast Vic Morrow and Sidney Poitier and a host of overage Hollywood character types in T-shirts and jeans more suitable to lounging around Schwab's than slouching schoolroom desks. They interviewed school kids in New York, and hired them. They did not shoot on soundstages outside which the California popcornland lay drowsing dreamily; they did not shatter their illusion when lunch break was called and the finger-poppers dashed to phone their agents. They shot among the scrawled walls and rotting stairways of New York schools.

Some things are relevant. Others are not.

The inevitable product, of course, is what must finally furnish the answer we desperately need. By now, with late late movies doing the saturation for us, we have all seen
The Blackboard Jungle
. We remember the shapely teacher straightening the seam of her nylon beside the staircase, and then the attempted rape. We remember Glenn Ford's fight with Vic Morrow at knifepoint in the classroom. And we remember a somehow incongruously overage Sidney Poitier doing the best he could to look heroic and noble with Ford as sort of a Black Man's Burden. We remember violence, a touch of sex, some phony pittypat dialogue, a school filled with psychos, junkies, prostitutes, Machiavellian teenaged blackmailers, vandals, imbeciles and assorted rejects.

What story does
Up the Down Staircase
tell, by comparison? There is blessed little violence. Nothing a healthy peruser of
Playboy
could call sex. The talk is everyday, even as you or I, so that don't get it. And the kids who pass through this story seem like individuals, not archetypes. So what is there to remember about this film? And in the memory, do we find our answer?

The most repetitious memory, the one to which the mind turns without volition, is the feeling of helplessness for the children. They are boxed in. They attend school but learn only by chance, almost—it seems—despite the System. They come to the world wide open, and find it closed to them. The teachers they encounter range from inept and outright criminally untalented to devoted, dedicated and brilliant. But the film denies us the flight of fancy offered by most artless creations in this genre: there can never truly be a happy ending. If they learn by wild chance, by happenstance encounter, then the conclusion is inevitable: most of them will never learn. They will come away from the school encounter perhaps even less equipped than when they began.

This is something concrete the film tells us. That our educational system is unconscionably inadequate and outdated and gross.
The Blackboard Jungle
never had that to say. The most important statement of all, and it chose to tell, rather, of gangbangs in the wood shop.

Following closely on the initial memory is the recollection of the kids themselves, who they are, their inability to communicate, their hostility, their suspicion. Another strong statement that strikes directly to the heart of the problem of silence between the generations. Buried within the attitudes manifested by the kids in
Staircase
are the seeds of the hippie movement, the concepts of flower power and the love generation. All the lies and obfuscations the kids are forced to submit to, in the name of "getting an education," have poisoned them; the withdrawal symptoms are called hippies, protests, credulity gaps, getting high, dropping out. By studying the characters portrayed in
Staircase
, any forward-looking educator (and every square momma and daddy who just doesn't understand what all this long hair and hippie nonsense is all about) can make the linkages with the realities through which they move daily. One can get none of this from
Blackboard Jungle
.