Word: hollywood
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...cadences so memorable that he seems to have taken up a time-share ownership of Bartlett's. But T.S. Eliot was an American who found his voice in England, and in books. Chandler, by contrast, was an honorary Brit who smuggled two foreign substances into Hollywood -- irony and morality -- and so gave us an unflinchingly American voice, the kind we hear in the rainy voice-overs of our mind. Few would suggest that Chandler is a more significant literary figure than Eliot. But quality and influence are mysteriously related, and Chandler has inspired more poses and more parodies, perhaps, than...
Chandler's greatest invention, however, may well have been Marlowe's constant adversary, California. Nobody has ever caught so well the smell of eucalyptus in the night or the treacherous lights and crooked streets of the L.A. hills. In Hollywood, city of false fronts and trick shoots, Chandler found the perfect location for investigating artifice, and with it the shadow side of the American dream of reinventing lives. The one time Marlowe enters a Hollywood stage, it is from the back, and that, in a sense, is his customary position: seeing glamour from behind, inspecting illusions from the inside...
There was, of course, an element of romantic sentimentalism in much of this, as Chandler well knew. It was no coincidence that he called his first detective "Mallory." Chandler identified all too closely with his "shop- soiled Galahad," struggling to maintain a code of honor in a Hollywood that had never heard of the Marquis of Queensberry rules. Chandler knew the sting of being typecast as a small-time operator ("The better you write a mystery," he complained, "the more clearly you demonstrate that the mystery is not really worth writing"). Yet what he knew most...
HEAVEN Can Wait is a perfect example of the ever-popular comedy which never seems to go out of style. Harry Segall's original first packed the theaters in 1938, under the title It Was Like This. Three years later, Hollywood snatched it up and turned it into the screen classic Here Comes Mr. Jordan. Decades later, Hollywood dug it up yet again, stuck yet another title ("Heaven Can Wait") on the marquee and milked one more hilarious blockbuster out of essentially the same script, this time starring heartthrob Warren Beatty and the venerable James Mason...
...many finales, the choreography is minimal in order to showcase the music. Here, though, one feels that staging that was more than adequate might help the number provide the smashing conclusion that would be appropriate for this production. Still, the ending is better than the cleaned-up-for-Hollywood ending of the film version...