The absence of internet from my life for the last five days has, among other issues, made it difficult for me to post about the movies I've seen recently. Let's start with Herb Gardner's A Thousand Clowns (1965).
I've seen this movie three times now; I don't know if I would call it a favorite of mine in the same way that I can point to The Long Voyage Home (1940) or A Canterbury Tale (1944) or Wittgenstein (1993) and see how something in them resonates deeply with me, but I seem to jump at every chance I get to see it and I recommend you at least once do the same. It's a small story, sharply and subtly written; it was adapted by the author from a play I've never seen or read. Jason Robards stars as Murray Burns, a committed iconoclast proudly unemployed after walking out on a three-year stint as head writer for Leo Herman's stultifying kids' show Chuckles the Chipmunk.1 He celebrates invented holidays like Irving R. Feldman's Birthday, which honors "the proprietor of perhaps the most distinguished kosher delicatessen in our neighborhood," and starts each day by addressing the shuttered apartments of his neighbors like an officer at parade, exhorting them to put out "a better class of garbage—more empty champagne bottles and caviar cans!" He has conversations with the public-access weather forecast. His apartment is one of the great clutter collections of the century, proving his oft-repeated point that "you can never have too many eagles." He carries a pair of binoculars for people-watching and takes seriously the project of teaching his twelve-year-old nephew "the subtle, sneaky, important reason he was born a human being and not a chair." He's a charmer, a wiseass, a weirdo, and he has some very good points to make about the soul-killing conformity of consumer society; he is also, the longer the film goes on and the more the audience observes the effect he has on the people around him, a painfully prescient rebuke to the valorization of the American man-child, the hero who's so unconventional and so brilliant that he gets a pass from the universe for all his immature hijinks while the rest of the ordinary people are left to flounder along behind him, picking up the pieces of the workaday world. To wit, while Murray's joyous nonconformism may well be saving his beloved Nick (Barry Gordon in a great portrayal of a serious, intelligent child who really is a child, never mind that for most of the runtime he looks like the resigned, responsible one in this partnership; he has one of those elastic crescent faces that fold into their smiles and he does a not bad impression of Peter Lorre, although his Alexander Hamilton impression is even better) from growing up into "a list-maker . . . one of the nice dead people," it's also placed the kid in danger of being removed from his uncle's custody by the New York Bureau of Child Welfare because of his unstable home circumstances. Six months of willful unemployment plus three months of dodging the Welfare Board's letters and phone calls is no recommendation for fit guardianship. Or as Nick puts it in his slightly Runyonesque syntax, "An unemployed person like you are for so many months is bad for you as the person involved and it's definitely bad for me who he lives with in the same house where the rent isn't paid up for months sometimes. And I wish you'd get a job, Murray. Please." We get that line within the first ten minutes of the movie. The other hundred and six minutes determine what dealing or not dealing with it is worth to Murray Burns.
That angle alone is reason enough for me to care about A Thousand Clowns, but there is a very real possibility that I actually love the film for the character of Albert Amundson, the social worker played by William Daniels in a reprise of his 1962 Broadway role.2 I imprinted on Daniels, of course, with 1776's John Adams, and certainly Albert trends toward the "obnoxious and disliked" end of the actor's range. He introduces himself and Barbara Harris' Sandra Markowitz as "a carefully planned balance of social case worker such as myself and psychological social worker such as Miss Markowitz" and if her earnest Freudian concern looks like one negative stereotype of social work, then his punctilious paper-pushing looks like the other—bureaucracy incarnate with the briefcase to prove it, all file folders and the latest model of jargon, a professional cold fish. He has one-piece dark hair, a pale owlish face rendered almost a cartoon by heavy horn-rimmed glasses that leave his eyebrows nowhere to go but up. His clothes are business anonymous, his speech self-consciously depersonalized except when his hasty conferences with Sandra—conducted in mutters in Murray's kitchen alcove, as if there's any privacy in a one-room apartment—slide revealingly into the cracks of their personal as well as professional relationship. "He's really a very nice person when he's not on cases," she defends him after the fact, adding with damning sincerity, "Last month I fell asleep on him twice while he was talking." For social courtesies, he has a polite little tic of a smile that the audience quickly identifies as a tell for embarrassment rather than pleasure and is otherwise prone to a curiously compressed expression, not quite as though he has a lemon in his mouth, but as though there might be a lemon in his future any second now.3 Pushed to the limit of his patience, he delivers the psychological assessment "maladjusted" like a professional judgment from God. It does not have its intended effect. Murray flusters him and puts him off his script, distracts, double-talks, and generally demolishes him. He is an authority figure, so he is meant to be defied; he is an expert, so he is meant to be confounded; he is humorless, so he makes a fine figure of fun. He exits the scene in a discombobulated state of all of the above, leaving behind a laughing, crying, liberated Sandra admitting to Murray that "there is a kind of relief that it's gone—the job, and even Albert . . . and I don't have the vaguest idea who I am." So far, so free-spirited. When her erstwhile partner returns the next morning, both the audience and Murray are prepared for more of the same. At first it is more of the same, as a cautious but hapless Albert finds himself once more playing straight man to Murray's unerring absurdism, saying in all sobriety sentences like "That's a very silly thing for her to be in, that closet" and, a pull quote if I ever heard one, the title of this post. But he also has something very real to say, whether Murray wants to hear it or not, and presently, still talking like a textbook and just as square as Flatland, he fires the first and best shot over the bows of Murray's countercultural complacency.
( Who writes your material for you, Charles Dickens? )
It's a rewarding movie to pay attention to. Arthur J. Ornitz's cinematography is gorgeous, a gelatin silver panorama of New York City in the days when my father lived off St. Mark's Place and my mother visited Brooklyn from Bard College; Ralph Rosenblum's editing plays the kinds of tricks with time that you see in good prose, compressing the crowds of rush hour into a sprightly brass chorus of "The Battle Cry of Freedom" or drawing out a moment of confetti and exuberant farewell to an ocean liner into a real consideration of a relationship, examined from all directions like the recurring theme of "Yes Sir, That's My Baby," which can be Murray and Nick's vaudevillian party piece or a quietly strummed meditation, floating through one perfect afternoon: Oh, by the way, oh, by the way, when we meet somebody we'll say . . . The opening credits establish marching band music as the leitmotiv of that "horrible thing . . . people going to work" so that the film can later show Murray making the job-hunting rounds to a loose-jointed ragtime arrangement of "The Stars and Stripes Forever," signaling at once his attitude toward the whole business. Enough references to pastrami go by in the script that I always leave the theater wanting a sandwich and never being anywhere near a deli in time. It's a very New York movie. It's a very New York Jewish movie. Jason Robards was neither, but he makes Murray Burns work, sympathetically and sardonically, where I can easily see the character's determined anarchy simplifying in the hands of a less complicated actor to standard-issue whimsy or just being an asshole.
Of the uniformly excellent cast of A Thousand Clowns, the only one who walked away with an Oscar was Martin Balsam, primarily on the strength of his eleven o'clock scene in which he describes his philosophy of being "the best possible Arnold Burns." It's true that it's a memorable piece of acting, for once giving the last word to a man who has always lived conventionally in his outlandish brother's shadow. I'm not sure that it sticks with me more than Daniels' two scenes, or even just the way Albert Amundson pushes his glasses up his nose with the emotional effect of a rueful shake of the head. Autolycus has spent the last five minutes purringly and insistently trying to climb between my hands and the keyboard, so I should wrap things up before he succeeds. In the course of writing this post, it has become obvious to me that if anyone had wanted to make a movie of Madeleine L'Engle's A Wind in the Door when it was published in 1973, William Daniels would have made an ideal Mr. Jenkins. This casting brought to you by my complex backers at Patreon.
1. As he soberly explains to a pair of social workers, "Six months ago, a perfectly adult bartender asked me if I wanted an onion in my martini and I said, 'Gosh and gollies, you betcha!' Well, I knew it was time to quit."
2. The entire cast transferred from Broadway with the exception of Larry Haines, who originated the part of Arnold Burns, and Tony-winning female lead Sandy Dennis, who was replaced by Barbara Harris for reasons unknown to me but demonstrably the right ones, since I can't imagine anyone other than Harris in the part. "Miss Markowitz, or, actually, Dr. Markowitz" looks at first like as much of a stock type as her partner, the professional woman who needs to be loosened up by the hero—freed from her clipboard, her checklists, and her engagement to Albert, she turns out to be goofy, warmhearted, and unreservedly disorganized, taking readily to Murray's habits of visiting the city's landmarks like a tourist and waving off cruise ships he doesn't know. Her inability to keep a dispassionate distance from her cases is fervently encouraged by her new partner, who cites it as evidence of her undamaged humanity: "You are a lover of things and of people, so you took up work where you could get at as many of them as possible—and it just turned out there were too many of them and too much that moves you." In keeping with the play's insistence on three dimensions for all of its characters, however, her degree in psychology is more than just a handicap for her awakening sense of eccentricity to overcome. Her second-act parting words to Murray are gently spoken and as piercing as a much longer speech: "I can see why Nick likes it here. I would like it too if I was twelve years old."
3. To be fair to Albert, it's a lemon a minute being on the receiving end of Murray's wit.
I've seen this movie three times now; I don't know if I would call it a favorite of mine in the same way that I can point to The Long Voyage Home (1940) or A Canterbury Tale (1944) or Wittgenstein (1993) and see how something in them resonates deeply with me, but I seem to jump at every chance I get to see it and I recommend you at least once do the same. It's a small story, sharply and subtly written; it was adapted by the author from a play I've never seen or read. Jason Robards stars as Murray Burns, a committed iconoclast proudly unemployed after walking out on a three-year stint as head writer for Leo Herman's stultifying kids' show Chuckles the Chipmunk.1 He celebrates invented holidays like Irving R. Feldman's Birthday, which honors "the proprietor of perhaps the most distinguished kosher delicatessen in our neighborhood," and starts each day by addressing the shuttered apartments of his neighbors like an officer at parade, exhorting them to put out "a better class of garbage—more empty champagne bottles and caviar cans!" He has conversations with the public-access weather forecast. His apartment is one of the great clutter collections of the century, proving his oft-repeated point that "you can never have too many eagles." He carries a pair of binoculars for people-watching and takes seriously the project of teaching his twelve-year-old nephew "the subtle, sneaky, important reason he was born a human being and not a chair." He's a charmer, a wiseass, a weirdo, and he has some very good points to make about the soul-killing conformity of consumer society; he is also, the longer the film goes on and the more the audience observes the effect he has on the people around him, a painfully prescient rebuke to the valorization of the American man-child, the hero who's so unconventional and so brilliant that he gets a pass from the universe for all his immature hijinks while the rest of the ordinary people are left to flounder along behind him, picking up the pieces of the workaday world. To wit, while Murray's joyous nonconformism may well be saving his beloved Nick (Barry Gordon in a great portrayal of a serious, intelligent child who really is a child, never mind that for most of the runtime he looks like the resigned, responsible one in this partnership; he has one of those elastic crescent faces that fold into their smiles and he does a not bad impression of Peter Lorre, although his Alexander Hamilton impression is even better) from growing up into "a list-maker . . . one of the nice dead people," it's also placed the kid in danger of being removed from his uncle's custody by the New York Bureau of Child Welfare because of his unstable home circumstances. Six months of willful unemployment plus three months of dodging the Welfare Board's letters and phone calls is no recommendation for fit guardianship. Or as Nick puts it in his slightly Runyonesque syntax, "An unemployed person like you are for so many months is bad for you as the person involved and it's definitely bad for me who he lives with in the same house where the rent isn't paid up for months sometimes. And I wish you'd get a job, Murray. Please." We get that line within the first ten minutes of the movie. The other hundred and six minutes determine what dealing or not dealing with it is worth to Murray Burns.
That angle alone is reason enough for me to care about A Thousand Clowns, but there is a very real possibility that I actually love the film for the character of Albert Amundson, the social worker played by William Daniels in a reprise of his 1962 Broadway role.2 I imprinted on Daniels, of course, with 1776's John Adams, and certainly Albert trends toward the "obnoxious and disliked" end of the actor's range. He introduces himself and Barbara Harris' Sandra Markowitz as "a carefully planned balance of social case worker such as myself and psychological social worker such as Miss Markowitz" and if her earnest Freudian concern looks like one negative stereotype of social work, then his punctilious paper-pushing looks like the other—bureaucracy incarnate with the briefcase to prove it, all file folders and the latest model of jargon, a professional cold fish. He has one-piece dark hair, a pale owlish face rendered almost a cartoon by heavy horn-rimmed glasses that leave his eyebrows nowhere to go but up. His clothes are business anonymous, his speech self-consciously depersonalized except when his hasty conferences with Sandra—conducted in mutters in Murray's kitchen alcove, as if there's any privacy in a one-room apartment—slide revealingly into the cracks of their personal as well as professional relationship. "He's really a very nice person when he's not on cases," she defends him after the fact, adding with damning sincerity, "Last month I fell asleep on him twice while he was talking." For social courtesies, he has a polite little tic of a smile that the audience quickly identifies as a tell for embarrassment rather than pleasure and is otherwise prone to a curiously compressed expression, not quite as though he has a lemon in his mouth, but as though there might be a lemon in his future any second now.3 Pushed to the limit of his patience, he delivers the psychological assessment "maladjusted" like a professional judgment from God. It does not have its intended effect. Murray flusters him and puts him off his script, distracts, double-talks, and generally demolishes him. He is an authority figure, so he is meant to be defied; he is an expert, so he is meant to be confounded; he is humorless, so he makes a fine figure of fun. He exits the scene in a discombobulated state of all of the above, leaving behind a laughing, crying, liberated Sandra admitting to Murray that "there is a kind of relief that it's gone—the job, and even Albert . . . and I don't have the vaguest idea who I am." So far, so free-spirited. When her erstwhile partner returns the next morning, both the audience and Murray are prepared for more of the same. At first it is more of the same, as a cautious but hapless Albert finds himself once more playing straight man to Murray's unerring absurdism, saying in all sobriety sentences like "That's a very silly thing for her to be in, that closet" and, a pull quote if I ever heard one, the title of this post. But he also has something very real to say, whether Murray wants to hear it or not, and presently, still talking like a textbook and just as square as Flatland, he fires the first and best shot over the bows of Murray's countercultural complacency.
( Who writes your material for you, Charles Dickens? )
It's a rewarding movie to pay attention to. Arthur J. Ornitz's cinematography is gorgeous, a gelatin silver panorama of New York City in the days when my father lived off St. Mark's Place and my mother visited Brooklyn from Bard College; Ralph Rosenblum's editing plays the kinds of tricks with time that you see in good prose, compressing the crowds of rush hour into a sprightly brass chorus of "The Battle Cry of Freedom" or drawing out a moment of confetti and exuberant farewell to an ocean liner into a real consideration of a relationship, examined from all directions like the recurring theme of "Yes Sir, That's My Baby," which can be Murray and Nick's vaudevillian party piece or a quietly strummed meditation, floating through one perfect afternoon: Oh, by the way, oh, by the way, when we meet somebody we'll say . . . The opening credits establish marching band music as the leitmotiv of that "horrible thing . . . people going to work" so that the film can later show Murray making the job-hunting rounds to a loose-jointed ragtime arrangement of "The Stars and Stripes Forever," signaling at once his attitude toward the whole business. Enough references to pastrami go by in the script that I always leave the theater wanting a sandwich and never being anywhere near a deli in time. It's a very New York movie. It's a very New York Jewish movie. Jason Robards was neither, but he makes Murray Burns work, sympathetically and sardonically, where I can easily see the character's determined anarchy simplifying in the hands of a less complicated actor to standard-issue whimsy or just being an asshole.
Of the uniformly excellent cast of A Thousand Clowns, the only one who walked away with an Oscar was Martin Balsam, primarily on the strength of his eleven o'clock scene in which he describes his philosophy of being "the best possible Arnold Burns." It's true that it's a memorable piece of acting, for once giving the last word to a man who has always lived conventionally in his outlandish brother's shadow. I'm not sure that it sticks with me more than Daniels' two scenes, or even just the way Albert Amundson pushes his glasses up his nose with the emotional effect of a rueful shake of the head. Autolycus has spent the last five minutes purringly and insistently trying to climb between my hands and the keyboard, so I should wrap things up before he succeeds. In the course of writing this post, it has become obvious to me that if anyone had wanted to make a movie of Madeleine L'Engle's A Wind in the Door when it was published in 1973, William Daniels would have made an ideal Mr. Jenkins. This casting brought to you by my complex backers at Patreon.
1. As he soberly explains to a pair of social workers, "Six months ago, a perfectly adult bartender asked me if I wanted an onion in my martini and I said, 'Gosh and gollies, you betcha!' Well, I knew it was time to quit."
2. The entire cast transferred from Broadway with the exception of Larry Haines, who originated the part of Arnold Burns, and Tony-winning female lead Sandy Dennis, who was replaced by Barbara Harris for reasons unknown to me but demonstrably the right ones, since I can't imagine anyone other than Harris in the part. "Miss Markowitz, or, actually, Dr. Markowitz" looks at first like as much of a stock type as her partner, the professional woman who needs to be loosened up by the hero—freed from her clipboard, her checklists, and her engagement to Albert, she turns out to be goofy, warmhearted, and unreservedly disorganized, taking readily to Murray's habits of visiting the city's landmarks like a tourist and waving off cruise ships he doesn't know. Her inability to keep a dispassionate distance from her cases is fervently encouraged by her new partner, who cites it as evidence of her undamaged humanity: "You are a lover of things and of people, so you took up work where you could get at as many of them as possible—and it just turned out there were too many of them and too much that moves you." In keeping with the play's insistence on three dimensions for all of its characters, however, her degree in psychology is more than just a handicap for her awakening sense of eccentricity to overcome. Her second-act parting words to Murray are gently spoken and as piercing as a much longer speech: "I can see why Nick likes it here. I would like it too if I was twelve years old."
3. To be fair to Albert, it's a lemon a minute being on the receiving end of Murray's wit.
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