Arthur Hiller

Does this guy have one strange filmography or what? Seems to be an ultimate journeyman -- and given all the films he's done and actors he's worked with, that that Wikipedia entry is so bland and skeletal says something about his career.

Was randomly thinking about Author! Author! just now, which was probably the first adult drama I ever saw thanks to endless reshowings on HBO in 1982 or so. I don't think I want or need to go back and see it again but it's where I first saw Al Pacino, Dyan Cannon, Tuesday Weld, Alan King and Bob and Ray act in any capacity so hey.

watched like 40 mins of The Crazy World of Julius Vrooder (1974) a few days ago, wasnt completely terrible but i couldnt really convince myself to stick w/ it

americanization of emily is really good iirc

The Hospital seems a difficult film to catch these days, at least in the UK. I haven't seen it myself, but my suspicion is that it might have aged pretty well - certainly, no film with a Chayefsky screenplay and George C Scott in the lead is w/out interest.

The In-Laws turned out well.

Yeah that one's a keeper at least.

Both those film are keepers but I tend to think of it as a Chayefsky film.

Teachers has full frontal Jobeth Williams, and in better lighting than Kramer vs. Kramer. To 14-year-old me, this was very important.

rip

I saw Teachers when it came out (1984)--I was 23 and hated it. Found it at the library today and figured, well, maybe it'll look better. I was a little extreme in my judgements back then.

It hasn't gotten much better; a lot of it made me cringe all over again. In very broad terms, it has something to do with what actually goes on in a school: the teacher who phones it in, passing kids along who shouldn't, burnout, etc. I'm enough of a To Sir with Love Fan to fall for the corniness of Nolte's class filing back in near the end. And the cast has lots of interesting people, including some who weren't known yet (plus Zohra Lampert!).

But if you think Hiller's got a heavy hand in The Hospital (which I don't mind), a decade-plus later and that looks like Ozu by comparison. Poor Jobeth Williams. And Ralph Macchio as James Dean. Poor James Dean.

Thought I'd posted about Love Story somewhere on ILX, but I can't find anything here or on the old last-10-movies thread, and there aren't threads for either Ryan O'Neal or Ali McGraw.

You have to be...well, you pretty much have to be me not to think it's terrible. Some of it most definitely is: when O'Neal repeats MacGraw's famous line to his contrite father at the end, you want Ray Milland to come back with "Jesus, son, I'll do us both a favour and pretend I didn't hear that." There's frolicking in the snow. And--I hate to say this; never getting over my adolescent crush on her is why I come back to this every few years--there are Ali MacGraw's nostrils, which Kael called attention to in more than one review.

But. 1) The cinematography's nice. 2) Milland is good; if they had to nominate this for something, he would have been preferable to John Marley's hamminess. 3) O'Neal's pretty good, and MacGraw's okay about half the time. 4) It's part of history, sort of--it and Airport might have been the last old-style blockbusters before the Godfather/Exorcist/Jaws transformation of what that meant.

It's a footnote now, though. There were about 20 people in the theatre this afternoon. Pretty sure I was the only male.

There's an (only so-so) episode of The Simpsons where the family watches the movie, and Lisa responds to the famous line with (transcribing from IMDb): "No, it doesn't! This movie is drivel! She's wooden and unpleasant, and no matter what he does, he's still Ryan O'Neal."

I've never seen it, and never found any reason to prioritize it. I assume it's largely a generational thing; the post-boomer generations had Titantic.

Titanic is probably a good comparison. I forgot that a day after I saw it; Love Story has stayed with me. I was going to say it was generational at first, but the truth is that most anyone my age finds it unwatchable it too. That's why I narrowed its apologists/defenders to me.

When I was reading up on it last night, I found out that "Ali MacGraw Disease" has been a long-standing joke for whenever movie characters get better looking the sicker and closer to death they get. The word cancer is never mentioned in the movie.

Ryan O'Neal's hate-on for his father is rather melodramatic five decades on. My sympathy is actually with the father. He's rude towards his son's girlfriend, and he tries to delay the impending marriage until the son finishes law school: if there's something real there, he says, the delay won't matter. That's about the worst of his transgressions. Otherwise, he does what any father with his stature and connections would do, he tries to use all that to help his son out.

http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-gS4MQT13YRE/UfSa7PrpktI/AAAAAAAACwM/J7z6EAT8RWY/s400/cream+coat+2+Ali+MacGraw+Love+Story.jpg

I'd forgotten that the big line was ridiculed two years later in What's Up Doc:

Judy: "Love means never having to say you're sorry."
Howard: "That's the dumbest thing I ever heard."

Last paragraph of Kael's What's Up Doc? review:

"And there's an essential ugliness to the picture's final zinger, in which Streisand and O'Neal mock Love Story. It's one thing for outsiders like me to call Love Story a boobish movie, but when O'Neal, who starred in it (and who gave it all the conviction it had), turns around and dumps on it, and, implicitly, on the people who loved him in it, all he does is expose his own cheap, cute cynicism. Why is it so difficult for actors to say no?"

I don't disagree with that. And beyond O'Neal, it's not like Peter Bogdanovich is this fount of sophistication and unclichéd movie-making.

I clearly have too much to say about this dumb movie. Something else: it still sits 39th on the All Time Box Office list when adjusted for inflation:

http://www.boxofficemojo.com/alltime/adjusted.htm

Not sure how reliable such measures are, but after adjustments, it comes out to $630M-plus.

xpost I dunno, it almost sounds like Kael can't accept that an actor can bring two completely different performances to two completely different projects! Are all actors supposed to play solely to one type? The question in response to her would be 'Why is it so difficult for you to accept that actors act?'

Yeah, and it wouldn't be out of bounds for O'Neal to poke fun at his most famous role.

I don't hate Love Story -- it's so vaporous that it dissolves upon leaving the theater. A Harris-style book on the 1970 Best Picture nominees would fascinate me, for LS is a fraught film: a film made by people who saw $$$ in youth culture yet clung to rapidly dissolving ideas about courtship and sex, ideas that came from other Hollywood films.

I don't take her point to mean that, that actors have to be bound up in one kind of role--I could cite endless examples of her praising an actor's or actresses's versatility--but rather that she's recoiling from seeing Ryan O'Neal openly mock the film that he essentially owed his career to at that point (he had some measure of fame from Peyton Place, I think), which, by extension, is him mocking anyone who liked the film.

The movie's so schizophrenic re "youth culture": it makes these laughable attempts to be in the moment (mentioning the Beatles, their "DIY" wedding ceremony, the mildest bit of profanity imaginable, etc., etc.,), but it's hokier than the hokiest melodrama from 1932.

xpost Sounds like that's more on the perceived audience than him.

Like The Last Picture Show, I can imagine the Nixon White House appreciating Love Story: Dick and Pat and Trisha and Julie watching it together.

You beat me to it.

That line actually bothers me more from Bogdonavich's end than O'Neal's. I mean, The Last Picture Show is just as schizophrenic (or, more pointedly, just as cynical) as Love Story in wanting to have a little bit of 1971 and a lot of 1948. A better movie, for sure, but, as the cliché went, also a movie Nixon could have loved (sex with cows aside...which Bogdanovich left out, I think).

Meantime we can always talk about Erich Segal's own acting role in a Jean-Louis Trintignant police thriller in 1971 as drug dealer Hans Kleinberg. (Barely anything with him in it is online but there's a quick moment with him at about 1:20 or so in this clip.)

https://dai.ly/x1667wz

More on said film. Right on up there with Andy Warhol in that one Liz Taylor film from the 1970s filmed in Italy, I guess.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Without_Apparent_Motive

aptly titled

Rather.

Nixon did see The Last Picture Show.

Bogdanovich at his worst is more sophisticated than Love Story.

and loved it, according to Bogdanovich ("Oh, but that's a marvelous film," he said or some such thing).

both Airport and Love Story were adapted from huge trashy best sellers, a primary source of high-profile films back in the day. So was The Godfather, but it became something more thanks to Coppola's ambition (as with GWTW and Selznick).

The Last Picture Show is, without doubt, a much better film than Love Story: better performances, better cinematography (though again, Love Story actually looks good), better source material, and a director with a better sense of film history, where to put the camera, etc. But I'd say the sensibility behind the two films (and also behind American Graffiti, one of my favorite films--I'm hardly exempt from their appeal) is exactly the same. Love Story was made for a sappy female audience, The Last Picture Show for a sappy male audience. And they're both mired in the past in a way that, say, The Conversation and Mean Streets and Altman weren't.

Is Hiller's The Out-of-Towners well regarded? I watched it on the Criterion Channel this morning and found it pretty deadly. A few funny Lemmon moments, but mostly loud, shrill and repetitive. Toothless, as well; I would have expected this kind of "WASPs trapped in the big city" comedy to have at least some racial or sexual tension to it--see numerous 80s examples, After Hours being the best of the bunch--but our straight, white jerk protagonists mostly encounter other straight, white jerks.

I retain some childhood tolerance for it--I think I thought it was the funniest thing ever when I was 10 or 11 and we saw it at a drive-in--but I don't think it's something you want to watch for the first time as an adult, unless for its interest as a snapshot of Nixon/Agnew-era panic.

The Nixon Panic = solid memoir titlte

Album-opening Bowie song, too.

saw Love Story again and was taken back to my childhood.

"The Last Picture Show is, without doubt, a much better film than Love Story: better performances, better cinematography (though again, Love Story actually looks good), better source material, and a director with a better sense of film history, where to put the camera, etc. But I'd say the sensibility behind the two films (and also behind American Graffiti, one of my favorite films--I'm hardly exempt from their appeal) is exactly the same. Love Story was made for a sappy female audience, The Last Picture Show for a sappy male audience. And they're both mired in the past in a way that, say, The Conversation and Mean Streets and Altman weren't."

yes, although I think Love Story had a broader appeal at the time