Sometimes It All Comes Together and...

Since writing the "Bonnie and Clyde" post last week, I've been on a gangster kick. I've read Public Enemies by Bryan Burrough (all 652 pages of it) suggested by Bruce Appelbaum in the Comments (thanks Bruce) and about five dozen Wikipedia pages about various aspects of the 1933–34 War on Crime, and watched several gangster-related flicks.

As I watched "Murder, Inc." last night (1960, directed by Burt Balaban [father of Bob] and Stuart Rosenberg, whose best movie was "Cool Hand Luke" seven years later), an old thought popped into my brain: sometimes things work, sometimes not so much.

Seems obvious, but honestly, I sometimes think it's the core mystery of creativity. For instance, one photograph can be magic while another similar photograph that has all the same elements is a dud.

Why does that happen? I'm certain that every young musician who ever had a big hit thought to themselves "That was easy; I'll just do that again." But 90% of them never can—try as they might, the moment inexplicably passes, and the magic chemistry turns out to be not so easily replicable. It's that way in all the arts to some degree.

[Spoiler Alert: I'm going to thoroughly filet the plot of "Murder, Inc.," so if you've been meaning to watch it but haven't quite gotten around to it for the past 56 years, don't click through the break.]

"Murder, Inc." has many elements that perhaps ought to have made it a successful film. It features not one but two major screen debuts: that of Peter Falk, an outstanding actor who who later became famous as TV's "Columbo," and the jazz singer Sarah Vaughan. The story is historically based and legitimately sensational. A romance, check. The noir-ish B&W cinematography by Gayne Rescher is exceptionally good in places. Falk's performance is a standout—it got him nominated for an academy award. And of course there are murders all over the place. What could go wrong?

Peter Falk in his superb movie debut, in the unfortunately flawed
1960 film "Murder, Inc."

Well, lots, it turns out. Granted, the movie was probably fatally crippled by having a budget that was just too low for such a large story. Despite some inspired casting, some of it is wrongheaded. The worst example wasn't even the moviemakers' fault: early in the movie who gets murdered but Morey Amsterdam, who immediately afterward went on to a long run playing Dick Van Dyke's wisecracking comedy writer sidekick "Buddy" on TV. Who would want to kill Buddy? It's like seeing Mr. Ed made into dog food. The music is overwrought. That romance I mentioned has so little real chemistry that it reminded me of those YouTube videos in which animals of different species inexplicably befriend each other. The cinematography is limited in range (big on interior sets where the camera can't move around much) and often spoiled by 1960 details in the ostensibly 1930s time period, such as a crowd scene in which the actors are the only ones in period-appropriate clothing. The movie is propelled by Falk's show-stealing acting in the early going (particularly good is the "you take!" scene, sampled at about 1:20 in the trailer), even though he's too broadly drawn as pure evil, but later the plot plods and gets talky and dull—although it runs only 99 minutes, the movie seems to drag on too long. A "faux documentary style" interlude in the middle seems patched in, and even Sarah Vaughan's song seems like a cameo because it barely manages to intersect with the plot.

The writing unfortunately doesn't quite rise to the standard of "workmanlike." Not only is the lover/hero, Joey, a sap, but he doesn't get the girl in the end—instead, she gets whacked, in a scene that's meant to be suspenseful but mainly succeeds at being puzzling. Then, after some typical suspense tropes (a shot of feet quietly creeping toward the hotel room where the cops have him stashed), the villian gets murdered—but, disconcertingly, the body that falls from the window is clearly a stuffed dummy, and then, to add injury to insult, the movie doesn't even reveal who the killer was! Ouch. I suppose we're meant to think that it was Joey finally standing up and acting like a man, but, since his girl is already dead, that possibility flunks at being satisfying, a shutting of the proverbial barn door after the horse has run off.

Enough. The point here is that "Murder, Inc." has some great components and yet flatly fails to come together. Despite a lot of assets and a lot of the right ingredients, the ingredients fail to cohere, and its assets can't save it. I don't know how you'd grade it—on a scale of ten, 6 or even 7 if some aspect of it (like Falk's acting debut) charms you, or you found yourself diverted; 3 or 4 if you were more hardheaded and realistic about it. I could give it no more than a 5. Number rankings and their false fastidiousness aside, artistically and creatively the overarching point is simply that the project fails.

Not a great flick. That simple.

Know what I mean?
I think you can apply the basic idea to almost all the arts: sometimes everything comes together, mostly they don't. If creative endeavors sometimes magically gel and sometimes fail to, though, nowhere is that more evident than in movies, because movies are such cooperative endeavors with so many distinct aspects. Sets, cinematography, writing, directing, acting, storylines, all of which combine to create intangibles like chemistry and involvement. The real masterpieces are like those songs of which you can say "there isn't a note out of place."

I was a hound for movies in my youth, sometimes watching three or four a week before the era of Netflix, Amazon Prime, cable, DVDs and other forms of movies-on-demand. But now, and for years now, I haven't been much of a movie-watcher. (Now I read instead—I might actually hit 100 books this year, or come close.) Can anyone else think of good examples of movies that should have been good but failed to gel, or that didn't have much promise on paper but somehow hit on all cylinders anyway? How about other art forms? I'm talking purely artistically and creatively, not in terms of popularity or box office or renown and notoriety.

Mike

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(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)
Featured Comments from:

Sophia: "There is also the issue of timing. Sometimes hits are hits because they came along at the right time for the public and sometimes we personally are struck by a work of art because it touched us exactly where and when we were waiting to be touched. It takes a very long time, if ever, to be able to distinguish whether it was a true hit or just a perfectly timed ordinary work."

David Kieltyka: "The failed film that comes to mind for me is David Lynch's version of 'Dune.' There are some brilliant and lovely visual flourishes, particularly a repeating slow-motion shot of dripping water (the story takes place largely on a desert planet) but overall the film is stodgy and dull. A huge disappointment for anyone enthralled by the expansive and thoughtful Dune novels by Frank Herbert. I saw it on the day of release with a friend and fellow Dune-head…we were both so let down we switched from our normal post-film pints of beer to many shots of bourbon.  :-)  "

Mike replies: I might have added that the late billiards writer and columnist George Fels thought that "The Hustler" was a great film but "The Color of Money" was lousy. I say "might have" because as most readers know I never mention pool.

Comments

[Stan B.]

I'll always remember Eraserhead as one of the most imaginative, funny, disturbing and visually compelling films ever made (in glorious B&W, of course). Elephant Man and Straight Story were good, solid story telling- films like Blue Velvet tried too hard, and none would ever have the creative genius of Lynch's first humble and yet pull all the plugs endeavor.

[Ed Hawco]

Sadly, whenever I read a bad review like this it makes me want to see the film so I can see the goofs for myself.

[hugh crawford]

"It's like seeing Mr. Ed made into dog food."
Oh Wilbur!

[Patrick Perez]

For a great example of a book that shouldn't have been able to be turned into a good movie (but was) I submit L.A. Confidential, by James Ellroy. The novel is, as they say, sprawling. The screenwriter (Brian Helgeland) and director (Curtis Hanson) were ingenious in how they dropped storylines wholesale, combined others, and narrowed the story focus. The director had previously never really demonstrated greatness, merely sufficiency. But he made a movie that works on every level. Brilliant acting from the 3 leads (two of whom were largely unknown to American audiences), beautiful set design/production design, gorgeous photography, and a musical score that knocked my socks off.

I just re-watched it, and read the novel. A fun fact: Mickey Cohen (the actual gangster) is a significant character in the book, but Paul Guilfoyle, cast as him in the movie, is listed in the opening credits despite Mickey not having any dialog or scenes (he only appears in news photos/newsreel, or in cut-away flashback of his arrest).

Patrick

P.S. For an example of a movie that betrays it's novel source material, I present The Natural. Total star vehicle for Redford who was decades too old for the part (he produced the film) and an ending that is the exact opposite of the theme of the novel. I'm not opposed to changing the source material, but feel if the changes are so extreme, the producers owe it to the audience to at least change the title, as happened with the novel A Prayer for Owen Meaney, and it's film version Simon Birch.

[Dave in NM]

I grew up next door to the Half Moon Hotel, in Coney Island, where Abe Reles fell to his death. The hotel closed, and eventually became the Hebrew Home for the Aged. It was demolished about twenty years ago.

(https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Half_Moon_Hotel)

Maybe it was the fashion back then—I don't know. As a young child, I still recall the day an upstairs neighbor jumped from the roof of my apartment building.

[Kenneth Tanaka]

I think re-makes present some of the best examples of how various elements of a film can produce something engaging of just...something. Here are three quick examples that immediately come to my mind.

The Maltese Falcon
The 1931 version by director Roy Del Ruth was adequate but utterly forgettable after you saw John Huston's iconic 1941 version. Both are pretty faithful to the original Hammett story.

Godzilla
The 1998 version might have been okay summer fare... if you hadn't seen the original 1954 version Ishirô Honda's film imported from Japan's Toho studio. It just oozes fun and horror. But for decades I wondered what the hell Raymond Burr was doing in that film and why it seems a bit jumbled. It wasn't until some 10 years ago that I got the original original Japanese film, titled "Gojira", that I really came to appreciate Honda's sci-fi masterpiece in Japanese and un-hacked for American screens. Wow.

A Star is Born
My personal favorite version is the 1937 William Wellman version starring Janet Gaynor and Frederic March. It has a genuine, un-strained feeling that 1954 George Cukor version misses, probably because of the latter's insistence on making Judy Garland fill nearly every frame and every ear. But your taste may differ as they seem equally popular. Yet they're essentially the same story.

I've been a bit of a film buff all my life so I could go on all day. But I think that if you want to see contrasts in directorial and acting skills/styles, and slight differences in screenplays, and differences in cinematography and editing there's no better way than to watch two versions of the same story.

[Jim Oleachea]

Leonard Cohen said at one point in his illustrious career, something to this effect, " If I knew where the music came from I'd go there more often".

[D. Hufford.]

The Reverant, last year's multiple award winning film. One which took an interesting true story so far over the top that at the end I was laughing at the idiotic absurdity. You knew it was gonna be silly from the beginning when John Colter---of John Colter's 1803 run from the Blackfeet---ran all the way into the era of Hugh Glass (1823) and showed up in his camp. Then they took every real or imagined experience of every single trapper in the fur trade era and had Ol' Glass (DiCaprio) experience them. When I watched that movie, I thought of some of the exaggerated, over-the-top ways of Donald Trump, and wondered if this sorta of thing represented the modern US.

I guess it could be compared to taking a possibly good straight photograph, running it through 20 or 30 filters, increasing saturation to the max along with clarity, adding vignette and vibrance, and photoshopping in a T-Rex and a shark.

[D. Hufford.]

I meant "The Revenant" above. My brain is trying to forget it in self-defense.

[Jonathan]

Alas, Burrough cribbed much of his book from Claire Potter's earlier "War on Crime" (1998). She detailed the experience here: http://tenured-radical.blogspot.com/2009/07/steal-this-book-public-enemies-john.html

[R.W. Bloomer]

I know a guy who laughed out loud when Holly Hunter went down with the piano.

[Stan B.]

D. Hufford- Though I admire your zeal for authenticity, the Revenant is a good ol' adventure yarn... "based on a true story," as the age old adage goes. Forget timeline liberties, the bear attack(s) alone would have clearly dismembered said hero several times over. That said, it's about as close to historical fact as Hollywood ever gets.

[Steve Higgins]

@Kenneth Tanaka

How about His Girl Friday v The Front Page? Both based on the same play.

[Ron Webb]

Just watched Antonioni's "Blowup" again. Keeps reminding me how much "fun" we had with film and the darkroom.

[MarkB]

Star Wars ("Episode IV" from 1977) should have flopped like a dying fish when it came out.

A "space opera," like Buck Rogers... in the mid-70's? Seriously? Add a cast of nearly unknowns, some ham-fisted dialogue, and it only comes off due to a young crew didn't know it was high-camp, and worked their butts off following the director's inexplicable vision.

Really, look at what came before it in terms of space adventures (if you're not old enough to already know). No way it should have such an impact. Like a toddler knocking out Mike Tyson.

[David Saxe]

I wasn't going to comment on this because I could not remember a specific good move with a horrible ending, although I have seen many. Then I watched "Julia" on Netflix last night and there it was. Great direction, great acting (Tilda Swinton), good story, and great cinematography. Then there was the ending—feh! It was a 2-½ hours movie that just died in the last 3 minutes.

[KeithB]

MarkB:
The special effects helped too. When the Tantiv IV flew by you thought "cool, neat spaceship". Then the Star Destroyer entered the frame and kept going and going and going and you knew you were in for a treat. I went the first weekend it was released and the audience stood and applauded when the SFX guys showed up in the credits.

As far as a film firing on *no* cylinders I have to nominate "Battlefield Earth".