Old Movie Review: "Postcards From The Edge"

The deaths last week of Carrie Fisher and her mother, Debbie Reynolds (see http://grandstander.blogspot.com/2016/12/two-absent-friends-carrie-fisher-and.html ), prompted us to seek out and watch the 1990 movie, "Postcards From the Edge", screenplay by Carrie Fisher, based on her novel of the same name.

Directed by the great Mike Nichols, the movie stars Meryl Streep as  young actress Suzanne Vale and Shirley MacLaine as her mother, Doris Mann, a one time star of movies and cabarets.  Suzanne has never quite been able to escape the shadow of her famous mother and this has led to a life filled with "mother issues", and, oh, yeah, drug addiction.  The movie opens with Suzanne screwing up on a movie set because of her drug issues and ending up on a rehab center.  In order to get work in a shlocky movie, the producers insist that she live at home with her mother for the duration of the filming.  This opens the entire can of worms that Suzanne has struggled with her entire life.

It was no secret at the time that Fisher's novel was published that this story was autobiographical in nature.  I didn't read the book, but the movie pulls no punches in describing the rocky nature of the Mann-Vale/Reynolds-Fisher relationship.  It is biting and at times quite uncomfortable to watch the two fight and struggle to come to terms with each other, even when the daughter is now a middle-aged adult.  (Funny bit of dialog:  When Streep tells MacLaine that she, Streep, is now middle-aged, Shirley responds by saying that "you are young; I'M middle-aged", to which Streep replies "How many 120 year olds do you know?")  Turns out that Mann/MacLaine, now a past her prime star, has some mother issues of her own, and a fairly serious drinking problem, which, of course, she denies while castigating her daughter for her drug issues.

Smaller parts in the movie are played by Annette Bening, Richard Dreyfuss, and Gene Hackman.  Hackman's part is pretty key, actually.  He plays a movie director who threatens  to see that Suzanne never works again because of her drug issues, but who turns out to play a key role in helping her out, not only in her career, but in her relationship with her mother with this particular exchange of dialog:

Lowell: You know, you're not going to get a lot of sympathy. Do you know how many people would give their right arm to live your life? 

Suzanne: But that's the problem. I can't feel my life. I look around me and I know so much of it is good. But it's like this stuff with my mother. I know that she does these things because she loves me... but I just can't believe it. 

Lowell: Maybe she'll stop mothering you when you stop needing mothering. 

Suzanne: You don't know my mother. 

Lowell: I don't know your mother, but I'll tell you something. She did it to you and her mother did it to her and back and back and back all the way to Eve and at some point you just say, "Fuck it, I start with me." 

Suzanne: Did you just make that up? 

Lowell: Yeah, well, I was working on it when you came in. If you'd shown up a half hour later like you were supposed to, it would have been better. 

Suzanne: It's pretty good as it is. 

Lowell: Yeah, you just like it because it sounds a little like movie dialogue. 

Suzanne: That's right, I don't want life to imitate art, I want life to be art.

The very best scene in the movie may well be the final scene wherein Suzanne, acting an a new movie, sings a slow country ballad called "I'm Checking Out".  The entire movie crew is taken by the performance, including Doris (MacLaine), who is on set watching her daughter during filming. It is a triumphant performance, and it ends the movie "Postcards From The Edge", but without breaking stride, and seemingly in one take, Streep performs the song again, this time in a rocking up-tempo manner as the film's closing credits roll.  It is absolutely terrific!

As one might expect, given the people involved, Fisher's script, and Nichols' direction, the acting is terrific in this one, and, yes, Streep did receive one of her twenty (or is it twenty-one?) Oscar nominations for her performance in this one.  This movie is now twenty-seven years old, long enough ago that Streep was able to play the daughter  in it.  Given the nature of Hollywood, and the attention surrounding both Reynolds and Fisher due to their deaths, I can just picture someone in some studio boardroom pitching this one...."Hey, let's strike while it's hot and do a remake of "Postcards From the Edge", only this time, Streep will play the mother."  Would that surprise anyone?

Three stars on this one from The Grandstander.

Two Absent Friends - Carrie Fisher and Debbie Reynolds

In an almost unbelievable turn of events, death claimed two show biz luminaries from the same family on two consecutive days this past week in the persons of Debbie Reynolds and her daughter, Carrie Fisher. 

Carrie Fisher

1956-2016

Over the weekend it was learned that Carrie Fisher had suffered a "cardiac incident" while on an airplane.  Upon landing, she was hospitalized and her condition was listed as "stable", which does not necessarily mean "good", and she died on Tuesday at the age of sixty.  To most of the general public, Miss Fisher will forever be remembered  as Princess Leia in the many Star Wars films in which she appeared.  To me, I will remember her many movies and episodic television shows in which she was usually cast as the "best friend".  Two of these that immediately spring to mind are "When Harry Met Sally" wherein she played the best friend to Meg Ryan, and "Hannah and Her Sisters" wherein she was the best friend of Dianne Wiest.  IMDB lists 90 acting credits for her, as well and credits as a writer and producer. 

Fisher was the child of a famous Hollywood marriage between Miss Reynolds and singer Eddie Fisher.  Her life was not always easy.  She suffered from addiction issues and depression, but she seemed to emerge from those years in decent shape, enough so as to have had a solid show biz career of her own.  Her novel, "Postcards From the Edge", was a best seller that depicted the problems of growing up with prominent parents, and was loosely based on her own life.  It became a hit movie that starred Meryl Streep and Shirley MacLaine.  Fisher wrote the screenplay.

Debbie Reynolds

1932-2016

The day after Fisher's death, the news came that Fisher's mother, Debbie Reynolds, had suffered a severe stroke, and she died later that same day.  It is perhaps the oldest cliche in the book to say in such circumstance that someone died from a broken heart, but what else can one conclude in this instance?  Her son and Fisher's brother, Todd Fisher, was quoted as saying that "She said she wanted to be with Carrie, and she was gone."

Reynolds had a solid career as a leading lady in the movies, and she was an Academy Award nominee.  She also appeared on TV, Broadway, and a touring performer in night clubs and Las Vegas.  She pretty much worked up until the very end of her life.  IMDB lists 82 acting credits for her, which were actually fewer credits than her daughter had (and, yes, I'd have lost if you had bet me on that).  After few bit parts in one or two movies, she was plucked from obscurity when studio boss Louis B. Mayer cast her in the lead of the 1952 movie, "Singin' In The Rain".  She would be paired with two of the most seasoned and best dancers in all of show business, Gene Kelly and Donald O'Connor, and she was only nineteen years old.  The movie is now considered the best movie musical ever made, and many critics and historians consider it among the Top Ten American movies of all time.

For all her on screen success, though, she was, as often happens, unlucky in love.  Eddie Fisher left her and their children to take up with and marry Elizabeth Taylor.  It was one of the great scandals of Hollywood back in the 1950's.  Two subsequent marriages ended when both of those husbands bilked Reynolds of all of her money.  She was forced to hit the road with her night club act in order to pay off creditors and debts rolled up by those two guys.

The Associated Press obituary for Reynolds makes some fascinating reading and it concludes with a delightful story about her and Elizabeth Taylor.  At some point in time long after the Fisher-Taylor scandal (Taylor herself had long since been divorced from Fisher), the two actress found out that they were coincidentally sailing together on the ship, Queen Elizabeth. The two actresses exchanged notes and agreed to meet for dinner on the ship.  As Reynolds then told it, "She was married to Richard Burton by then.  I had remarried at that point, and we just said 'Let's just call it a day', and we got smashed and had a great evening and stayed friends ever since."   In fact, both Reynolds and Taylor appeared together in a 2001 TV movie called "These Old Broads".  One of the co-writers of the script for that movie was....Carrie Fisher!

That's a great story!

I can think of no better way to end this post than by including this terrific clip from "Singin' in the Rain".  

RIP Debbie Reynolds and Carrie Fisher.

"Singin' In The Rain" On Stage

Nothing says "the arts in Pittsburgh" like the Civic Light Opera season each summer, and yesterday we took in the CLO's initial production of the season, the classic, and dare I say it, iconic show, "Singin' in the Rain".

"Singin' in the Rain", of course, began as a movie that was released in 1952.  It starred Gene Kelly, Donald O'Conner, Debbie Reynolds, and Jean Hagen, and was directed by Kelly and Stanley Donen.  Whenever polls of "Best Movies Ever" are taken, "Singin' in the Rain" always scores highly, usually in the Top Twenty, and it is always rated as the greatest movie musical ever made.  

"Singin' in the Rain" was first produced as a stage play in 1983, this is the third time that the CLO has mounted a production of it, and it is often produced on the high school musical circuit, but this was the first time we had seen it on stage.

I prepped for seeing the play by re-watching the movie on Friday.  Mistake.   The movie has so many classic bits: O'Conner singing "Make 'em Laugh", Kelly, Reynolds and O'Conner singing "Good Mornin'", and, of course, Kelly and his umbrella dancing an singin' in the rain.  These performances are so well done, so good, and so famous that anyone, ANYONE, would suffer in comparison, so it really wasn't fair for me to have watched the movie a mere twenty-four hours before seeing the play.

That said, how was the play?  It was good, well produced (as are all CLO productions) and the actors were terrific.  David Elder, Mary Michael Patterson, and Cary Tedder played Don, Kathy, and Cosmo (or the Kelly, Reynolds, and O'Conner parts), 

and Ashley Spencer played Lina Lamont, the role played by Jean Hagen in the movie, and the role that always seems to get overlooked when people talk about the movie (Hagen received an Oscar nomination).   All were very good, but I thought that Tedder was a better dancer than Elder, although Elder definitely had the looks of a "leading man".

And to answer the question that is probably in your mind, yes, it did rain in the stage at the Benedum, and Elder did all of the things Kelly did - dancing with the umbrella, splashing in the puddles, and leaping on the lamp post.  He was great.  But, he was no Gene Kelly.  Nobody is.

Remember a few months back when NBC telecast a live production of "Sound of Music" starring Carrie Underwood?  I didn't watch, mainly because I'm not all that big  fan of the show, but I thought is was tremendously unfair how Miss Underwood was savaged by the critics and the public at large - before the show was even broadcast, no less - for the simple fact that she WASN'T JULIE ANDREWS.  I thought of that yesterday watching this play, and thinking of how unfair it is to the actors in this, or any play with similar lineage.  It is a shame for anyone to deny themselves the pleasure of seeing a show like "Singin' in the Rain" just because the actors in it ain't Kelly, Reynolds, or O'Conner.  Nobody can be Gene Kelly, just like no outfielder can ever be Babe Ruth, but that shouldn't stop us from enjoying a different production of a beloved show on its own merits.  So, if you ever have a chance to see a stage production of "Singin' in the Rain", by all means do so.  But wait until after you see the play, before you decide to watch the movie again!

One final thought on "Singin' in the Rain".  The basic story of this show is what happened to a couple of beloved movie stars of the silent film era when talking pictures were first introduced.  In 2011, "The Artist" was a black and white, silent movie that was quite good, and it won the Best Picture Oscar that year, but it pretty much told the same story that "Singin' in the Rain" did. The big difference is that we are STILL watching and loving the Gene Kelly movie sixty-two years after it premiered.  I don't think that we will be doing that with "The Artist".

So, let's end this post with one of those classic numbers from "Singin' in the Rain", shall we?

"Singin' in the Rain" vs. "The Artist"

This coming Sunday, the Motion Picture Academy Awards for 2011 will be presented, and among the nominated films expected to make a big haul, if not THE big haul (Picture, Actor, Director) is "The Artist." Now, regular readers know that I saw "The Artist" a few weeks back, and that I liked it. I do not think it is the Best Picture of the year. I do think that while it is a good movie, it is being overpraised due to the fact that it is so different (silent, black & white, and foreign). In many ways it is someone saying "Look, how clever we are. We made a silent movie in 2011", and Hollywood, in a bit of self-indulgence, is breaking its arm patting itself on the back over the whole thing.

By a curious bit of coincidence, on Sunday afternoon, viewers of Turner Classic Movies will have the chance to watch an undisputed classic, Stanley Donen's and Gene Kelly's 1952 "Singin' in the Rain." This is a movie that always ranks in the Top Ten or Top Twenty of all-time great movies whenever such lists are complied. If you don't know the movie, it stars Gene Kelly, Donald O'Conner, a 20 year old Debbie Reynolds, and, in an hilarious supporting role, Jean Hagen, and the story is very much the same story as "The Artist" tells.

Kelly and Hagen are two silent movie stars of the highest rank, famous for their starring opposite each other as movie lovers in countless films. Trouble is, talking pictures are about to make their debut, and while Kelly should do OK in talkies, Hagen has a voice that makes fingernails on a blackboard seem soothing. How do they get around this? Where and how does Reynolds fit in? Will Kelly get the girl in the end? (Silly question.) And some all-time classic musical numbers: Kelly, O'Conner, and Reynolds singing "Good Morning", O'Conner singing "Make 'em Laugh", and, of course, Kelly's absolute classic version of "Singin' in the Rain", which Pirates fans get to see and hear on the scoreboard at PNC Park whenever there is a rain delay.

By all means, go and see "The Artist." It's a good movie, but also take time on Sunday afternoon (or program the DVR) and watch "Singin' in the Rain", where a very similar story was told, and told much better sixty years ago. No matter what happens come Sunday night at the Oscars, I believe that "The Artist" will in a very few years time be viewed as a novelty item that struck a lot of peoples' fancy in 2011, and will be relatively forgotten, while people will still be watching and enjoying "Singin' in the Rain" for at least another sixty years.