By Tom Stempel.

Zhang Yimou and Gong Li Together Again! With a New Writer.

Coming Home

(2014. Screenplay by Jingzi Zou, based on the novel by Gellin Yan. 109 minutes)

Zhang Yimou and Gong Li (yes, I know that in Chinese the last name should be first, but these are so well known internationally this way that I am sticking with this, even though the IMDb doesn’t; just to be contrary, I’ll use the standard Chinese for the others) are one of the greatest of all director-actor teams in the history of movies. When Yimou first got into films in the late eighties, he found Li, who was still a drama student and put her in his first film, 1987’s Red Sorghum. They followed that with Ju Dou (1990), Raise the Red Lantern (1991), The Story of Qiu Ju (1992), To Live (1994), and Shanghai Triad (1995). That’s an extraordinary body of work by the two: striking dramatic stories with rich, incredibly nuanced performances by Li. Then they had a professional and personal breakup. Both continued making films, and Li appeared in English-language films such as Memoirs of a Geisha (2005) and Miami Vice (2006). They finally worked together again in Yimou’s 2006 film Curse of the Golden Flower, but it was one of his epics that did not allow for the kind of subtle performances she is known for. So we all hoped they would get together to make a real film. And now they have.

Jingzi Zou co-wrote the story with Yimou and wrote the screenplay for Yimou’s 2005 film Riding Alone for Thousands of Miles. It’s the kind of drama Yimou first became known for, so you can see why he would pick Jingzi to work on Coming Home. It’s a domestic drama as well as a political one. The film opens with Feng, a middle-aged teacher (Li) being called to her daughter’s ballet school. The officials tell Feng that her husband Lu has escaped from prison. We are in the middle of the Cultural Revolution in the sixties. The official tell her and their daughter Dan Dan to report him if they see him. When he contacts Feng, she arranges to meet him at the train station. Dan Dan, a snippy teenager, decides if she turns in her dad, it might get her the lead role in the big ballet school is doing. So she does—but does not get the role— and in a dynamic, suspenseful scene at the station the police arrest Lu in front of Feng’s ideas. She falls down and gashes her head. And that’s just the first 20 minutes of the movie.

Several years later Lu is released from prison and heads home. When he arrives, Feng is pleasant but distant. It subtly becomes clear she has no idea who he is. She has what a doctor calls “psychogenic amnesia,” which is a sudden attack of amnesia that is “said to occur for a period of time ranging from hours to years.” It sounds like “movie amnesia” to me, but that definition is from Wikipedia, so it must be real. You will notice that it does not last forever, so there is hope she will eventually recognize him. We get scenes of Lu trying the techniques the doctor suggests. He would show her pictures of them together, but Dan Dan has cut his face out of all their photographs. He tries reading his letters to Feng, a scene that undoubtedly worked better in the novel, since it depends on words rather than on images. A better scene is him playing a song on a piano. She seems to recognize it and him, but then pulls away. It is a scene perfect for Li’s skills as an actress. And then… she never recovers.

What? The film has been promising she will recover. Remember the definition? So we get an unsatisfactory closing on two levels. We want to see Lu and Feng’s relationship in full flower. And we want to see Li and her co-star Daoming Chen play that recognition scene. In a novel you can get away with an ending in which something does not happen, but it’s a lot harder to do in film. In the Pierre Boulle novel The Bridge On River Kwai (1957) is based on, the commandos do not blow up the bridge. Everybody connected with the film knew they had to.

Boy, Did I Really Want to Like This One.

The Keeping Room

(2014. Written by Julia Hart. 95 minutes)

When I first heard about this, it sounded like an interesting gloss on the scene in Gone With the Wind (1939 in which Scarlett shoots a Union soldier. Here there are three Southern women who have been left without menfolk and family in the waning days of the Civil War. Two are onetime Southern belles, Augusta and her younger sister Louise, and the third is their slave Mad. The heart of the film is their fighting off two Union soldiers who come to the remains of their plantation, at least one of them with rape on his mind. The more I thought about it, it also seemed to me like it could be a women’s version of the 1971 Clint Eastwood film The Beguiled. In that one Eastwood’s McBurney is a wounded Union soldier taken in by the staff and students of a boarding school in the South. All the ladies get the hots for him, but it does not end well. Written and directed by men, it plays into both men’s fantasies and fears.

This script does not live up to my hopes for it. It was on the Blacklist, an annual list of best unproduced screenplays that circulates in the industry, but it is merely O.K. rather than good. It gets off to a bad start when a title announces it is 1865. Since it later deals with what appears to be Sherman’s March to the Sea, which was completed in 1864, the dating seems sloppy. (The film had the misfortune to open in Los Angeles a couple of weeks after PBS ran the restored version of Ken Burns’s 1990 The Civil War, so the details of the Late Unpleasantness were still in my mind.) Mad is seen early on as a stereotype, but at one point Augusts slaps her… and she slaps Augusta back. But Augusta doesn’t punish her and it never gets mentioned again.

When Augusta goes into town to get medicine for Louise after Louise has been bitten by a raccoon, Moses and Henry, the two Union men, try to stop her. She manages to get the drop on them with her rifle, but doesn’t take away their guns. While she takes their horse, she leaves her own for them to ride. Hart writes a scene in which Augusta and Mad are drinking moonshine, and Augusta asks if Mad ever slept with Augusta’s dad. She admits she did, we get no reaction from Augusta, and it is never mentioned again. When the men come to the plantation, August wounds Moses but doesn’t bother to tie him up. Louise is raped by Henry, but Mad kills him. Then Hart gives Mad a long story to tell about how she was taken into the “keeping room” at her old plantation where the master raped her several times. I guess that she is telling Louise this to let her know it happens all the time, but it is written and played as a stand-alone aria rather than to Louise.

As mediocre as the script is, the direction by David Barber is even worse. The beginning scenes are played incredibly slowly. When Augusta slaps Mad, it’s an eternity before Mad slaps back. When Augusta first meets the two soldiers, Moses’s uniform seems more gray than blue, so I thought he was probably a southern deserter. Augusta is played by Brit Marling, a critics’ darling, but she is miscast. She does not look or sound 19^th Century, and she wears her clothes, particularly a rain slicker and a wide-brimmed hat like she is posing for a fashion spread. She also rides like she has never been on a horse in her life. Barber loads up the soundtrack both with over-emphatic sound effects and irritating music.

Not having read Hart’s script, I don’t know if it would have made a better movie with another director, but it couldn’t have been worse.

Minor Film, Major Stars.

A Walk in the Woods

(2015. Screenplay Rick Kerb and Bill Holderman, based on the book by Bill Bryson. 104 minutes)

In the last column I wrote an item on Grandma, and included a short comment on Learning to Drive. In both cases I pointed out the great use of stars, Lily Tomlin in the former, Patricia Clarkson and Ben Kingsley in the latter. In both of those films, the balance was well-nigh perfect between the restraint of the scripts and the charisma of the major stars. Having those stars did not overpower the scripts. That’s not true with this one.

I have not read this book of Bill Bryson’s, but I have read others and appreciate his informal yet serious style. His language entertains and informs without being doctrinaire about it. The style is crucial to his books, but it is a very literary style, and Kerb (whose first produced script this is) and Holderman (who has been primarily a producer) do not come anywhere close to matching it in their dialogue. There are several speeches given to the “Bill Bryson” character that sound clunky when spoken out loud. I have no idea if they are quotes from the book. If they are, it only confirms the difficulty of translating Bryson to the screen.

Bryson’s books are travel books and this one is about a hike he and a friend made along the Appalachian Trail, which runs 2,200 miles from Georgia to Maine. Bryson was in his forties when he and his friend Stephen Katz (a pseudonym) walked a part of the trail, but the film has been written for Robert Redford, who is now in his late seventies. (Holderman has been a producer on several of Redford’s latest films.) So the Katz character is also in his seventies, played by a scruffy Nick Nolte. Whatever the tone of the book was, the movie has become a collection of gags about old age. We have been there before, often, so the movie loses what freshness it could have had. Both Redford and Nolte are overqualified for what the parts require here. They are charming and funny, but they could have gone a lot deeper if the script had let them. Likewise, Emma Thompson shows up in the thankless part of Bryson’s wife, and like the two guys she does well what she’s asked to do (she’s Emma Thompson, for God’s sake), but it’s like killing a mouse with an elephant gun.

Why De Mille? And on Labor Day, for God’s Sake.

Reap the Wild Wind

(1942. Screenplay by Alan Le May & Charles Bennett and Jesse Lasky Jr. [and, uncredited, Jeanie Macpherson], based on a Saturday Evening Post story by Thelma Strabel. 123 mintues)

So why did I end up watching this on Labor Day? Well, I have written about some films Cecil B. De Mille directed: The Crusades in US #72, The Plainsman in US #62, and Union Pacific in US #30. Mostly I noted that the writing in De Mille’s films was genuinely awful, since he pushed the writers into the kind of overblown dialogue he seemed to like. In spite of the fact the writing staff on this one included Alan Le May, the author of the novel made into The Searchers (1956), and the Fat Little English Director’s best writer, Charles Bennett, the script is rather clunky.

It’s about salvage operations in the Florida Keys in the 1840s. Ah, the Pre-Civil War South, so we can guess De Mille is hoping for a Gone with the Wind (1939). The cast includes at least two actresses who auditioned for Scarlet O’Hara, Paulette Goddard and a young Susan Hayward. Goddard is Loxi, the boss of a salvage company, who falls for John Wayne’s Captain Jack Stewart, whom everyone thinks may have caused his ship to be deliberately wrecked. In fact, it was a plot by King Cutler (Raymond Massey). Stephen Tolliver (Ray Milland), a lawyer, comes to the Keys to investigate. The climax is a trial of Captain Jack, and De Mille, not being satisfied with one climax, has a scene in which Stewart and Tolliver, dressed in the diving equipment of the time, go down to one of the wrecks to find evidence of foul play. De Mille, not being satisfied with two climaxes, called his writers in one day to see if anybody had any suggestions. As it turned out Bennett did: the guys meet a giant squid underwater and have to fight it off. Bennett, in his memoirs (see US #121), quotes one of the other writers, Jesse Lasky Jr. about Bennett’s performances in the room:

Charles would swagger and glower in an impersonation of the heavy to be played by Raymond Massey. Then Charles would mince out a delicious imitation of Paulette Goddard’s Florida belle. He’d ape Ray Milland’s effete aristocrat, or the heavy-shouldered, jaw-jutting challenge of John Wayne’s First Mate. But too often his office performances were better than the scenes themselves. The written word missed the swaggerings, strutting, eye rolling of our spellbinding Charles. De Mille would complain that we hadn’t got it on paper, quite ignoring the fact that would have been next to impossible.

You would have thought that De Mille would have seen from Bennett’s performances what the actors could do, but both Wayne and Robert Preston, who also appeared in the film, said at different times that they thought De Mille had no interest in characters or actors. Wayne never did another De Mille film. Not surprisingly, the squid scene made the picture, and it is what most people remember about the film.

So was I watching the film just so I could tell you about Bennett as an actor? Nope. A couple of months before I picked up a wonderful new book called American Epics: Thomas Hart Benton and Hollywood. Benton was a terrific American artist of the twentieth century, noted mostly for his murals about American life and history. The book is the catalogue for an exhibition going around the country. The exhibition has finished up at the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Mass., and will be at the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, Missouri, October 10, 2015‒January 3, 2016; the Amon Carter Museum of American Art, Fort Worth, Texas, February 6–May 1, 2016; and the Milwaukee Art Museum, Milwaukee, Wisconsin, June 9‒September 5, 2016. I have not seen the exhibit, but a friend of mine who has says it is terrific. See it if you can, or at least buy the book.

What struck me about the book is that the essays by a group of art historians take Benton’s connections to the movies seriously. Benton actually worked in the movie business on the East Coast before it went to Hollywood, then visited Hollywood a number of times. Once he did sketches on the set of The Grapes of Wrath(1940) that were not only used to advertise the film but appeared in some editions of the novel. There is a chapter on Ford and Benton. What struck me is that Benton’s visual style generally is much closer to De Mille’s than Ford’s. In writing about The Crusades, I mentioned that De Mille filled every frame in his films, and Benton does the same thing in his paintings. Often when I read a book I like, I write to the author, since other than Stephen King, writers don’t get a lot of fan mail. In this case I wrote to the editor, Austen Barron Bailly, who is the curator of American Art at the Peabody Museum. I mentioned the De Mille connection, and being an academic in the best sense she was delighted that the book inspired someone to think more about the subject. Since I am in favor of people other than film people taking film seriously, I want to encourage them whenever I can. While emailing back and forth with Bailly, I mentioned that TCM was going to run, and I told her I would look it and see if my ideas about De Mille and Benton seemed to be true. So I DVR’d it and Labor Day was the first time I could watch. At the risk of patting myself on the back too much, my ideas are dead on. So she and I are going to try to hustle some unsuspecting graduate student into doing a serious academic paper on the subject.

And I wanted to get the Bennett and the squid story into the column as well, of course.

On the other hand.

Son of Fury: The Story of Benjamin Blake

(1942. Screenplay by Philip Dunne, based on the novel Benjamin Blake by Edison Marshall. 98 minutes)

De Mille did not take history seriously, to put it politely. Darryl F. Zanuck, the head of 20^th Century-Fox, did. Or at least Zanuck saw the possibilities of using historical material as the basis for stories for films, which led the studio to be nicknamed 19^th Century-Fox. (You can read my take on Zanuck and his attitudes toward historical films here.) This film came out the same year as Reap the Wild Wind and shows you the difference between writing for De Mille and writing for Zanuck.

I once described Philip Dunne’s screenplays as “relentlessly literate,” which amused Phil, whom I became friends with, no end, and he quoted my comment for many years thereafter. Zanuck often assigned the historical projects to Phil, as you can see from looking at his list of credits on the IMDb. Set in 18^th Century England and the South Pacific, Son of Fury (that title had to have come from the marketing department, although since the novel had been a best-seller they kept Blake’s name in the subtitle) tells the story of young Blake. Since there is no evidence his father Sir Godfrey had married his mother, Godfrey’s younger brother, Sir Arthur, has inherited the estate.

Just to be nasty, Arthur in the opening scene tracks down the boy Benjamin, living with his maternal grandfather. Arthur takes him to the family mansion and puts him to work as a stable boy. Arthur does this not only to keep an eye on the boy, but also to torture his wife Helena, who was in love with Godfrey. Benjamin grows up to fall in love with his cousin Isabel, but he eventually runs away to sea to make his fortune to challenge Arthur. Unlike De Mille, Zanuck and Dunne loved characters and Dunne provided great parts not only for Tyrone Power as the adult Benjamin, but for George Sanders as Arthur, Harry Davenport as the grandfather, Elsa Lanchester as a prostitute, and John Carradine, as Caleb, a shipmate of Benjamin who persuades him to jump ship at an island Caleb has learned is loaded with pearls.

The late Leslie Halliwell in his Filmgoer’s Companion complained the film “suffers from a loss of suspense in the central idyll,” but I don’t think he gets it. Yes, the suspense is built up during the first half because Zanuck and Dunne know how to tell a story. The island scenes are a great escapist counterpoint; it helps that Benjamin falls in love with Eve, a gorgeous 22-year-old Gene Tierney. She’s a much nicer person than Isabel, so we are rooting for this romance. When Benjamin has collected enough pearls he takes a ship back to England. But we sort of don’t want him to go. Here’s an example of Dunne’s interest in character: Caleb, who was greedy for pearls, has decided to stay on the island, even though he’s not shagging Gene Tierney.

When Benjamin returns to England, he goes to see the most famous lawyer and political fixer of his time, Bartholomew Pratt. The first scene between him and Benjamin, as Pratt takes the measure of the young man, is easily the best scene in the film, and pushes us back into the world of 18^th Century England. Pratt is the great character actor Dudley Digges, and James Cromwell, the actor and son of the film’s director John Cromwell, says on the DVD that he thinks Digges made Power up his game. Could be, but Power is terrific all the way through the film. Pratt takes the case and after not showing up for the trial (for Benjamin’s assault on Arthur), he shows up at the sentencing with the evidence that Godfrey and Benjamin’s mother were in fact married. Arthur’s disowned, and Isabel, who is something of a bitch, is dumped.

Now how do you finish off the story? Dunne gives us a scene of Pratt reading Benjamin’s instructions on what is to happen to his estate, but it is not a will. Benjamin has gone back to Eve.

And he doesn’t even have to fight a squid to get her.

Full Power.

Masters of Sex

(2015. “Party of Four” episode written by Amy Lippman. 60 minutes)

The third season of Masters of Sex ended in late September. I don’t think it was quite up to the first two seasons. The plotting was rather lumpy. This season was set in the late sixties, and during the season Johnson was working with Dan Logan, a perfume company executive, to try to figure out how to make perfumes that appealed on a hormonal level. Meanwhile Masters was developing a program of using sexual surrogates to help patients heal sexually. Masters did not approve of Johnson’s work, and Johnson did not approve of Masters’ work, which meant they spent most of the season apart and arguing. They have always had disagreements, but here they seemed to split the show down the middle.

There were also several plotlines and characters who showed up and disappeared. In the opening episode “Parliament of Owls,” written by showrunner Michelle Ashford, we learn that Johnson’s son Henry wants to join the army. He does, gets sent to Vietnam, and then after we learn he is in a hospital for alcohol problems, we never hear about him again. Margaret Scully, the ex-wife of former provost Barton Scully, comes in with her new boyfriend for treatment for his premature ejaculation problem. We later learn they are part of a threesome and he does not have the problem with the other woman. We don’t see her again. Scully is hit on by a young male doctor whose gaydar tells him Scully is gay. They go to the opera, but at a bar afterwards they witness some homophobic bullying and Scully stops the relationship, although he appears to have taken it up again in the final episode of the season.

There are elements that run through the season. We not only meet Henry, but Johnson’s teenage daughter Tessa, who is dealing with her own sexual feelings. Even with Johnson’s expertise in the field, Tessa would rather die than talk to her mom. We see the tension between them all season. It is Tessa who tells Logan that Masters and Johnson are sleeping together, which he in turn tells Johnson. She is upset at what Tessa must think of her. Johnny, Masters’ prepubescent son, catches Tessa drunkenly kissing Masters, which makes him jealous, as does Masters explaining wet dreams, complete with pictures in a book, to Dennis, the kid who was bullying Johnny. That leads to Johnny telling two girls at school in Dennis’s presence that Dennis’s penis doesn’t work.

The strongest character arc of the season is that of Masters’s wife Libby. At the beginning of the season she is best friends with Johnson, even snuggling in bed with her and kissing her on the lips. Libby is also trying to help Joy, her next-door neighbor. She has given her a copy of The Feminine Mystique, but is appalled to learn that Joy is thinking of leaving her husband Paul. Libby says to Masters, “Obviously my mistake was giving her The Feminine Mystique. I simply said it was an interesting book. I never told her it was an instruction manual.” (The line, in “The Excitement of Release,” which was written by Steven Levenson.) After Joy ends up in a coma, she and Paul start an affair, with Libby saying she is willing to divorce Masters.

Masters’s arc follows the publication of their first book, Human Sexual Response (1966), and all the problems of trying to get stores to stock it and Masters’s attempts to get it used as the basic for a course on sex. He is also putting together the research for their next book Human Sexual Inadequacy (1970), but we don’t see a lot of the research gathering for the book. This takes us up to the penultimate show of the season, Party of Four, one of the best episodes ever and worth the lumps of the rest of the season.

Masters and Johnson are in New York to pitch their second book to the editor at Little, Brown, which published the first book. Lippman does not show us the pitch meeting because she does not need to. We start at a fancy restaurant where Masters is taking Johnson to dinner. Johnson is still upset that Masters did not let her talk in the meeting. She’s even more upset when she learns that Masters has invited Logan… and his wife Alice, to dinner. Johnson refuses to let the coat check lady have her coat because she may want to leave in a hurry. She goes to the ladies’ room, where the attendant (and look at how quickly Lippman defines the attendant) wants to spritz her with perfume. Johnson tells her the gentleman she is seeing reacts badly to perfume. She leaves, and guess who was in a stall all the time? It’s Alice. How do we know, since we have never met her? We know that Alice is at the restaurant, and we can see her reaction to what she’s heard, which nobody else in the world would have.

The restaurant can’t find Masters’s reservation. Logan, showing off, tries to impress the maitre d’ and the four of them end up at a table for… two. Masters tells Logan the advance on the book is enough to pay off his investment in their research. Logan says he thought of what they were doing as a partnership. Everybody knows Masters is just trying to get Logan out of Johnson’s life. Logan told Johnson several episodes before that he and his wife have a, yes, you guessed it, “an understanding.” That turns out to be truer than he knew. It becomes obvious in the conversation that Alice knows Logan and his affairs maybe better than he does. Which may be why she is getting drunker as the evening progresses. What impresses me about Lippman’s creation of Alice is that we have known very little about her before, and Lippman is throwing her (and the great Judy Greer who plays her) into the deep end: a complicated, subtle set of scenes. Alice has to hold her own as a character with the others we have come to know in great depth. Try to do that when you introduce a new character late in your piece. As Phil Dunne did with Bartholomew Pratt.

While we spend most of the episode in the restaurant (and look at how Lippman details the restaurant staff), we also cut away to Libby in her house with Paul helping her with the kids. She tells Paul she intends to get a divorce. Then the doorbell rings. It is a St. Louis detective, who arrives 24 minutes into the episode, and who wants to talk to…Johnny.

Masters and Johnson are arguing in the cloak room – he left his coat there – over her affair with Logan.

The detective asks Johnny about Masters showing Dennis the pictures. Lippman’s writing of the detective does not make him an evil, small-minded person. He is a cop in St. Louis in the late sixties, and like many cops, he tends to think people are probably guilty until he finds out they are not. By the end of his conversation with Johnny, he doesn’t know yet.

At the table Logan wants to leave, but his wife doesn’t, so he tells her he’s in love with Johnson. Lippman gets into their relationship in subtle ways, like Alice realizing he always thought of her as a “project,” probably to help her quit drinking. He tells her he thinks of Johnson as a “partner,” not a project, and we have seen that. Mostly we have seen Logan as a nice guy, but an accomplished seducer. Here Lippman shows us the depth of his feelings toward Johnson. In the cloak room Masters tell Johnson she will be happier with their work than she will with a man. Partly he says that out of jealousy, partly because he believes it’s true, and partly because it is true. Johnson does not want to be pinned down by convention, as we have seen through the series.

Lippman writes another great scene for Johnson and Alice in the ladies room. It is not an argument or a fight, just a sad conversation between two people, who as Alice says, “could have been friends.” Lippman, here as in the rest of the episode, is giving the actors a lot of emotional detail to play, and the cast runs with it.

Libby has a heart-to-heart talk with Johnny, who is convinced his dad does not love him. Libby tells him about Masters’s difficult father, a lot of which we know, but which Johnny doesn’t, until now. Remember how Libby told Paul she was ready to get a divorce? Well, now she knows she can’t, given whatever possible charges Masters may face. It is a real come-to-Jesus moment for the character. The show has deepened our view of Libby’s character over the three seasons, and it pays off in this scene.

At the table Masters and Logan talk frankly about what each one expected at the dinner, again a scene giving the actors and the characters a workout. Masters’s subtext for the episode, that he planned the whole dinner to get rid of Logan, is out in the open, which you can do that late in the action. Betty, the secretary at the office, has called Masters after Libby called her and he is headed for the airport.

Alice, Logan, and Master have all left the restaurant. The maitre d’ asks if Johnson wants a meal since it is already paid for. She shrugs in agreement… and lets the maitre d’ take her coat to the cloak room. This is a beautiful example of context. In any other situation, a maitre d’ taking a customer’s coat would be a nothing action. Given the by-play over the coat throughout the episode, it means a lot.