The opening shot of screenwriter and director Michael Cimino’s The Deer Hunter frames an industrial center nestled into the hills of Western Pennsylvania with an underpass as light shifts against its black walls. It’s an eerie and strangely evocative image for a movie about the Vietnam War, a war which is memorialized in the nation’s capital with two slabs of granite forming long, angled and descending black walls.
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I had never seen The Deer Hunter, which won Oscar’s Best Picture for 1978. With that distinctive shot and gentle music by Stanley Myers over black-and-white opening credits, announcing that this was photographed by Vilmos Zsigmond (Close Encounters of the Third Kind) with a story by the late Michael Cimino and three others, one of whom wrote the script, the scene is set.
Part of why the film made its mark is this unique focus on a certain place. I do not think The Deer Hunter is a great motion picture. But it depicts a company of characters that are men and women from the beleaguered American industrial middle class which, in the aftermath of the Vietnam War, would never regain its status as the center of America’s culture. This is an untold story. And the epic downfall of the middle class is portrayed with grit.
But not with depth. The hot steel being poured and controlled by factory steelworkers dramatizes man molding metal for a higher purpose. This capitalist ideal comes full circle when The Deer Hunter later dramatizes at mid-point man reducing himself to the mercy of a piece of machinery for deadly risk without purpose, arguably the essence of the quagmire which was the American war in Vietnam. The Deer Hunter shows men being driven from the joyful exercise of forging the manmade to the abysmal duty of destroying human life for self-abnegation, not self-defense.
Yet even at their best, the excited and boisterous factory workers, who bound around in camaraderie with naked vitality, rarely seem more than aimless, mindless pawns. They cavort with equally mindless women before a wedding. They assemble in a cavernous church. The women are beaten by their men, who drink to excess in incessant displays of boorish profanity. The bride fusses in her wedding dress and veil with a crucifix on the wall. She never stops to think about the meaning.
Neither do the men, played here by a gaggle of young actors, including Robert De Niro (The Intern, New York, New York) and Christopher Walken (Hairspray) as best friends. Men recklessly go drag-racing between a classic car and a big rig, taunting a Green Beret and screaming and carousing while watching the Pittsburgh Steelers on TV. In the ethnic neighborhood in which they live, old women pull a wedding cake past a telephone booth and corner grocery market while bridesmaids (including one played by Meryl Streep before her role in Kramer Vs. Kramer) go gallivanting in the street.
These aren’t the best and brightest being dislodged from glorious lives and dispatched to a jungle. Their place of worship and ritual ceremony is meaningless. A banner proclaims that the young men being sent (by force of the draft) into an undeclared, unwinnable war are “serving God and country proudly.” But these young men and women are too drunk and disorderly to be proud, let alone have pride in themselves. The wedded couple drives off, tin cans and all, for a hillside jaunt of drunken driving.
They’re lushes and oafs, with De Niro’s leader running down the street in his underpants. They go deer hunting while drunk.
But their mindless lives are their own, and this is how The Deer Hunter leaves its tracks. Just as Cimino gets the audience ready for action in Vietnam’s swamps, rivers and rice paddies, with war movie cliches to match, the band quietly gathers for piano playing after their revelry. The men are dumbstruck. They bond in reflection of uncertainty to come.
Cut to the sound of a helicopter and explosions as they’re under siege somewhere in Vietnam. Some fight, some cower, some stay home. But all are changed, moved and torn. Scenes of gunplay on a river boat as Americans are held as prisoners of war by the Communists form the central theme of The Deer Hunter…that each soldier is hunted and haunted in war.
That this is unequivocal and that this is deeply, irreversibly painful and wicked comes as a matter of fact when one man returns. The deer hunting goes stale. The hills hold no hope. The emptiness of their lives can’t be ignored. The party’s over. The band of drunks are left to drink without the delusion that being alive doesn’t mean being aware of the dead or wounded.
Suicide, fatigue and the end of Saigon during its last days play out as the measure of a man brought by war to the brink comes around. A mindlessly sung version of “God Bless America” plays with neither vigor nor life and this, bookended by a drunken white wedding and a sober black funeral, captures the sad, vacant, elegiac essence of our emergent American nihilism which is the byproduct of the Vietnam War.
Michael Cimino’s The Deer Hunter might have filled the emptiness of these mid-American lives which might have elevated this tragic movie, a film which skillfully puts the anti-war movement offscreen. As it is, The Deer Hunter depicts a slice of empty lives, which informs and explains the deadly doubts and outcomes in chilling, frightening and grisly detail.
Next week marks 40 years since Paramount Pictures released one of its best movies, director Warren Beatty’s life-affirming Heaven Can Wait, which I’ve reviewed and examined here. I saw this romantic comedy during its early release, shortly after I’d seen Paramount’s other huge 1978 hit, Grease.
Whereas Grease gave me a welcome pre-teen glimpse of sex, raunch and fun, Heaven Can Wait‘s legacy was more indelible and enduring. I hadn’t seen Julie Christie as Lara in David Lean’s magnificent Doctor Zhivago. I hadn’t seen heartthrob Warren Beatty in anything. I had watched professional football on TV. Strangely, this is what paved the way for my predisposition to this wonderful and delightful film.
You see, in this movie, which is co-written with Mr. Beatty by the intelligent and enormously talented Elaine May, who was partnered for a time with the late Mike Nichols, Warren Beatty portrays a quarterback. This small plot detail proves to be pivotal to achieving the film’s blend of poignant, intimate romanticism and realistic humor with perfectly pressurized bite.
Until the year of release, and much more so since then, the football player was depicted as a mindless brute, a piece of meat, a gladiator in the Roman Empire for the mindless (even idiotic) masses. He might’ve been human (The Longest Yard) but he was hardly respectable and barely coherent, according to most major Hollywood fare.
Mr. Beatty had had some experience with this type of role in another, earlier breathtaking picture about romance, Elia Kazan’s marvelous tragedy Splendor in the Grass, a picture which earned Warren Beatty his first serious attention, a fact for which Mr. Beatty repaid Mr. Kazan with his loyalty during the major Hollywood assault on Elia Kazan (for being an anti-Communist) early in this century.
In Heaven Can Wait, the pigskin-playing athlete, however, is an individualist, not merely a cog in the wheel of dumb jocks. So is the woman with whom he falls in love and so is his best friend, who’s really his only friend. Not merely the individualist, Warren Beatty’s quarterback has an independent, rational mind, which he uses to pursue a single-minded virtue of selfishness (and look for a nod to the fountainhead of this radical ethics). It’s a light, warm movie about life, death and what makes heaven, which drills into the soul with a sense of peace, loss, loneliness, humor and eternal love.
All of this starts with a disarming title. Read my article on The New Romanticist here. Before you do, know that this Seventies movie imbued in me the knowledge that lightness, romanticism and a brush stroke of the ideal is possible in movies.
This year marks 40 years since Paramount Pictures debuted its other big box office hit in 1978. Heaven Can Wait, not to be confused with the delightful Ernst Lubitsch comedy with the same title, was released within weeks of Paramount’s popular musical Grease. The light comedy, written by Elaine May and Warren Beatty, who also directed the motion picture with Buck Henry and took the lead, begins with an establishing shot of Los Angeles.
The movie opens without music, as if to underscore the remoteness of its main character, an athlete who plays the saxophone (badly) named Joe. This familiar tale blends elements of Here Comes Mr. Jordan and A Guy Named Joe. Beatty doesn’t stretch the material too thin. His professional football player lives by himself in a modest home in the hills, where he goes by a lonely but healthy routine, which he shares with his best friend and co-worker Max (Jack Warden in a career best performance).
While playing saxophone alone on his birthday, well past the expiration date stage of playing pro football, coach Max drives up in his Ford to bring Joe a birthday cake and a life-changing bit of good news. As Joe takes the jolt in stride, preparing for a pivotal opportunity which is an integral part of what makes this bittersweet romantic comedy one of the best movies of its time, he enters a dark tunnel. From the other side, it’s clear to the audience that a reckless driver enters the same tunnel seconds later.
The sound of silence follows the sound of mangling metal and sound is crucial in Heaven Can Wait, which indulges one’s senses in sweet, sloping dips, circles and loops. Then, Buck Henry appears with the manner of an efficiency expert or government bean counter. Soon, Henry’s escorting Joe to a place in the skies, where, with crisp sound punctuated by stretches of silence as if in a dream, the pair come across a supersonic jet boarding recently deceased passengers.
Joe refuses to board. Henry’s bureaucrat responds with a stern warning, causing his superior (James Mason in the perfect character role) to arrive on scene to correct any misunderstanding. Joe’s dressed down by celestial custodians: “Do not question the unifying principle.”
Joe merely wants to play ball, doing his workout, telling them he’s got to get ready for the big game, doing pushups in the cloud. This stylized take on a supernatural being and afterlife depicts heaven as fallible. Mistakes are made. Joe, who’s just had his second chance snatched away, responds to the injustice like a quarterback. The specter of an afterlife cutting short his life on earth circuitously stimulates him.
This is the main theme of Heaven Can Wait. That life should be passionate, strong and animated by the highest love — that life ought to be chosen consciously, embraced and lived fearlessly. Beatty, Henry and May keep the focus on life on earth, how and why man regards, chooses and lives it and why life on earth is all that matters. Details unfold around Joe’s embodiment of a wealthy businessman whose wife (Dyan Cannon, personifying the predatory spouse) and secretary (Charles Grodin, nailing the second-hander) are having an affair and plotting to murder him. It’s in their subplot that Ayn Rand makes an appearance for the sake of irony (“Pretend you’re reading The Fountainhead!”)
Joe’s first response to murder is to call for help. This speaks volumes about his character, which remains intact in each body Joe’s soul possesses. When a beautiful anti-capitalist (Julie Christie) shows up to challenge an imminent displacement caused by one of the businessman’s plans, his leadership skills come into play.
Against the murderers, frauds from every angle and ultimately inconsequential, Warren Beatty‘s quarterback’s single-mindedness prevails with mastery of the arrangements for his new life. So, the upshot is that an athlete yearning for life re-activates himself with an almost godlike ability to set forth an extremely selfish pursuit of happiness.
Heaven Can Wait captures this with lightness, peppering scenes of Max and Joe discussing the afterlife with a harp in the background. Throughout the film, jaunty jazz and light classical music accompany and accentuate smooth, gauzy pictures. Crisp editing in a montage adds to the movie’s dreamlike aura.
Even as an eccentric businessman, whose body the audience never sees, Joe’s ability radiates. As he makes connections, Joe becomes more human, less rote. He falls in love.
“Don’t be afraid,” someone says. Like the harp, the sheen and the music, coupled with the tenderness of Warren Beatty in a kind of alternative ending role to his young jock Bud in Splendor in the Grass, the theme that going boldly, refusing to live in fear, in the pursuit of being alive is embroidered into every scene.
Look for cameos by players for the Los Angeles Rams and NBC Sports broadcasters such as Dick Enberg and Bryant Gumbel. But revel in the portrait of a man emboldened by the idea that reality to a certain degree is the ultimate arbiter, who takes up the romantic notion that one can always make one great play in the big game. Heaven Can Wait coasts, unspooling benevolent humor, along the way.
As it does, 40 years after it debuted in movie theaters, Warren Beatty’s most life-affirming film, with slapstick, skilled screenwriting and gorgeous leads, cinematography and a bright, white-yellow glow, renders a picture about loss, loneliness and alienation, too. It comes in the form of Mr. Beatty’s handsome, simple Joe. It comes in the solitary struggle of Julie Christie’s Betty Logan.
But it comes, and necessarily so, most poignantly in the arc of the character played by Jack Warden. His Max is a wonder to watch. Max is filled with love for his young friend Joe and the sense of childlike play at the beginning of the film. Max turns sad and grieving in the middle. By the end, he is shocked, sobered and wiser, if left alone with the saxophone with which he first found Joe at home, This bittersweet fable about life and the fear (and fact) of losing it. Heaven Can Wait, is not downward. It is also not ridiculous. This is an accomplishment, particularly for a modern film about achieving, remaking and choosing passion and clarity in life.
There’s a magical quality to Heaven Can Wait. It isn’t made with magical realism like today’s absurdist films. It’s made with realism, it’s stroked with romantic optimism and it’s as clear as the sound of footsteps in a long and empty hallway. This, in essence, distinguishes Heaven Can Wait from the heartache of Somewhere in Time, the lessons of Hearts and Souls, the triumph of the ordinary in Defending Your Life, each indelible magic-themed movies about the power of free will. Heaven Can Wait casts a glow of California sunshine, evoking Elysian Fields amid its lines of scrimmage, letting three lonely souls play softly at the matter of life and death. It’s the rare film about heaven that leaves you feeling on top of the world while keeping a sense of the world as it is.
Grease revels in the pure enjoyment of contrasting clean-cut and raunchy un-seriousness. It brings both into alignment and this is its enduring charm. Forty years after Grease debuted in movie theaters to major blockbuster success, the 1978 Allan Carr musical adaptation of the Broadway show deserves closer examination.
Opening with romantic pictures of oceanfront sunsets and sand castles and a handsome boy’s pledge to his pretty new girlfriend that “it’s only the beginning”, Grease gets going with an upswell of title music from the 1955 William Holden film Love is a Many-Splendored Thing. More than a melodramatic means of introducing a tale set in the 1950s, the song signals a stroke of unabashed romanticism, which director Randal Kleiser expertly captures and mixes with its blue origins.
As superficial as Grease is and continues to be, the opening orchestration from that other movie’s title theme also cues a streak of defying the status quo. This is easy to overlook but it’s in almost every sumptuous frame of what at first blush might seem like a movie musical accompaniment to TV’s 1974 Happy Days, Elton John’s 1973 “Crocodile Rock”, American Graffiti (1973) and other 1970s-era nostalgia for the 1950s.
Thanks to the creative team, especially Kleiser, songwriter John Farrar and Farrar’s collaborator, pop star Olivia Newton-John, and those in charge of casting, cinematography, music, choreography and costumes, Grease skates along.
For example, animated opening credits feature caricatures of every major Fifties figure from Soviet dictator Josef Stalin to You Bet Your Life‘s Groucho Marx. Barry Gibb’s title theme song, “Grease”, perfectly blending Seventies pop into a Fifties attitude and vigorously sung by Frankie Valli over the opening credits, bounds through the speakers as an animated deer and rabbit snuggle up to the cartoon version of leading lady Olivia Newton-John in character at her vanity mirror. This knowing wink with its burst of joy sets the tone for a smart and deviously good sendup. During its 40-year existence, Grease usually gets credit for being fun. Rarely does it get credit for also being sharp.
It’s cutting on multiple counts, if not as raunchy as the original Chicago stage production at Kingston Mines. One of the characters, who’s part of the leathery high school gang led by John Travolta’s Danny Zuko (that boy at the beach as the film opens), lays on his back for an indulgence in what today would be called upskirting. He gets busted and chided instead of being tagged as a “sex offender” for the rest of his life. Such is the picture’s context that any act of sexuality or rock-n-roll rebellion, and the two do go together, amounts here to a dig at the repressed status quo.
The female counterparts, the girl gang Pink Ladies, led by Stockard Channing’s cynical, black-clad Betty Rizzo, suggest that they too, do what they ought not to do, singing in “Summer Nights” about shallow exploits such as golddigging. It’s worth noting that Rizzo’s decked in black before Sandy goes that route. So, there’s a real thread in Grease about reclaiming one’s rebelliousness within the pack of one’s choosing.
This happens amid numerous nods to Lucky Strike cigarettes, an anti-gay gag, a famous adult TV star spiking a precocious child’s drink, jokes about stolen auto parts, a broken condom and the line that “men are rats, fleas on rats, amoebas on fleas on rats”.
There’s also the song “Born to Hand Jive” and a dance scene that puts West Side Story in the dust with nearly every girl hiking her skirt or having it lifted by boys. Then, there’s this exchange between a high school student who hops into a hot rod and a group of boys: “You think this is a gang bang?” One of the boys’ reply? “You wish”.
Carefully, in full color, with vibrant costumes, lush photography and loose, improvised dance movements by Patricia Birch, Grease unleashes and unspools the teenaged anxiety and sexual liberation with cartoonish awkwardness. The kids’ lingo rhymes. The plot skips and moves. Thus, Grease memorably expresses the ethos of the Fifties. Primary colors, simplicity in functional clothing designed to accentuate the human body, wind caressing tousled hair as the American flag waves in the background — Grease puts us on with polish and shine. It’s a movie which is inviting to watch.
This is the Randal Kleiser touch. The director that John Travolta had worked with on ABC’s 1976 telefilm The Boy in the Plastic Bubble, whom Travolta would insist be part of his studio deal, adds depth to every candy-coated scene in Grease. Where there’s raunch, Kleiser delivers warmth. Where there’s sugar, he adds bitterness. Bringing each contrast of the conformist, only partly fabulous Fifties into balance with a winking, buoyant sense of life, Kleiser sunkisses every scene and shuttles between dark and light themes. When the Scorpions come to rumble, Jeff Conaway’s Kenickie flips a switchblade. But Doody’s in the frame with a squirt gun. The gloom of Rebel Without a Cause slips into the youthful energy of West Side Story, always in color.
Grease endures as a film with a reputation which unfortunately gets reduced to the second-to-last scene, in which Newton-John’s Sandy enlists her friend Frenchy (Didi Conn) to turn her into a vamp.
However, judging Grease primarily, let alone solely, by this scene ignores the power of Sandy’s choice. For starters, her display happens only after she witnesses Danny’s brave and magnanimous demonstration of loyalty at the drag race. Also, Sandy’s makeover helps and vindicates Frenchy, her friend and Pink Lady sponsor. Sandy’s sexual coming out follows Danny’s mea culpa and willingness to improve and earn back Sandy’s trust. Danny proves this again and again — with Travolta basically playing his ABC character Vinnie Barbarino from Welcome Back, Kotter — in a series of sports vignettes with Sid Caesar as Coach Calhoun.
Sandy is hardly a feminist. Her origins are as a wholesome girl who prefers a pedicure to pierced ears. She makes Travolta’s Zuko the focus of her most concentrated efforts (and he reciprocates her intensity of romantic interest). But, bearing in mind this is Grease, not Shakespeare, Sandy is also relatively dimensional, openly flirting without shame with the athlete played by Lorenzo Lamas, asserting herself with Danny as they enter the Frosty Palace, where she judges and snubs nasty Rizzo, proving that, like Doris Day and Sandra Dee, it’s a mistake to underestimate the good girl. After all, John Farrar’s “Hopelessly Devoted to You” is the movie’s moral center, complete with a reflection of her beloved dreamboat in the pool. So, it’s a male to whom Sandy, pre and post-makeover, pledges her devotion.
With great casting, especially Eve Arden, and an old-fashioned, Technicolor flair for a sense of the cinematic, Grease gels at a summer carnival, where the nerd, too, is uplifted and transformed. Even hardened, jaded Rizzo softens and becomes human. One of the film’s happiest moments comes when it’s disclosed that the girl rumored to be in trouble isn’t pregnant after all, as if to prove its radical status, whether for 1978 or the Fifties context (making it even more radical more today). ,
That someone won’t be forced to raise an unwanted child is a fact which is cheered, even celebrated. All of this comes in the afterglow of John Farrar’s two-minute-plus declaration of desire, “You’re the One That I Want”, with John Travolta and Olivia Newton-John back in black, shaking, dancing and dominating the screen against a yellow backdrop with a sign warning Danger Ahead.
Everything ends with not a hint of doom as Grease lifts the audience and glides into the air to the cast’s climactic song and dance to “We Go Together”. There’s a reason why Grease, sharp and slick as it is, still connects with audiences. It’s not necessarily the best or the brightest musical in movies. But — thanks to the stellar cast and crew and Randal Kleiser’s direction — its blend of nice and naughty, reflecting the Fifties’ innocence, goodness and liberation, shines.
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Next week marks 40 years since Paramount Pictures released one of its best movies, director Warren Beatty’s life-affirming 
Joe merely wants to play ball, doing his workout, telling them he’s got to get ready for the big game, doing pushups in the cloud. This stylized take on a supernatural being and afterlife depicts heaven as fallible. Mistakes are made. Joe, who’s just had his second chance snatched away, responds to the injustice like a quarterback. The specter of an afterlife cutting short his life on earth circuitously stimulates him.
Look for cameos by players for the Los Angeles Rams and NBC Sports broadcasters such as Dick Enberg and Bryant Gumbel. But revel in the portrait of a man emboldened by the idea that reality to a certain degree is the ultimate arbiter, who takes up the romantic notion that one can always make one great play in the big game. Heaven Can Wait coasts, unspooling benevolent humor, along the way.