Book: Dropped Names, by Frank Langella (2012)

The subtitle is the first indication that something may be up. Famous Men and Women as I Knew Them. Frank Langella tells you straight off that this memoir isn’t about him, it’s about them: the luminaries he met during a long career on screen and stage. And it’s as he knew them, so conventional appreciations may not be the order of the day.

Oh, they are, more often than not. But even then not in the usual fashion. Langella opens his book with a brief description of a show meal with actors, the conversation fast-moving, gossipy, occasionally mean. He aims to recreate that feeling here. So while there are moving tributes to close friends – Raul Julia, Alan Bates – Langella can also write about another favorite, Anne Bancroft, with an unsparing eye for her narcissism. Then there are the times Langella gives someone both barrels. Richard Burton was a bore, Rex Harrison a preening ass, Lee Strasberg “a pompous pygmy ... a cruel and rather ridiculous demigod.” Not all of his targets are easy ones: Langella’s affection for Paul Newman is laced with unflattering commentary.

Dropped Names is a strange book. Langella places his reminiscences in the order the subjects died, which results in a fixation on infirmity and loss. He repeatedly laments the current age when “wit, intelligence and style have lost ground to stupid, vulgar and loud,” and “young male stars seem a sexless set of store-bought muscles set below interchangeable screw-top heads with faces of epic blandness - sheep trying to look like bulls.”

There’s clichéd writing throughout, but it’s punctuated by sharp observations that read like a skilled actor sizing up a character. Langella describes Ida Lupino (“too good for the room ... a first rate artist crying out for help”) before she was fired by producers for being more trouble than she was worth, noting how she was “put together in the way that heavy drinkers, particularly women, organize themselves: impeccable hair, makeup, clothing; a tidy house of cards.” A book in its own right could be made of his chapter on Arthur Miller, focusing on Langella’s failed attempts to cajole the playwright into penning a more honest version of himself for a revival of his autobiographical autopsy of his marriage to Marilyn Monroe After The Fall. And many of Langella’s stories are simply damn good, like bring hazed by Robert Mitchum on a movie they both know is crap. The best is a throwaway: Langella calls Nancy Marchand, his co-star in a play who is being replaced by an Oscar nominee in the TV production. Langella vows he won’t do the film without her. “Don’t be an asshole,” Marchand says, and hangs up on him.

In a sense, all of Dropped Names is an actor’s trick, one of the oldest in the book. Langella brings big names onto the stage, giving them the limelight – then proceeds to steal the scene. In a structure meant to showcase others, Langella keeps revealing pieces of himself. His disappointments, his jealousies, his feelings for women of shall we say a certain age. Langella is brutally honest on every subject, and that eventually includes Frank Langella.

His recollection of an on-set affair with an older Rita Hayworth is here, and includes some great Mitchum material. The book closes with a lengthy passage in praise of philanthropist and socialite “Bunny” Mellon, now embroiled in the criminal case against Senator John Edwards. This New York Times article about Mellon draws from Langella’s book.

Movie: Coriolanus (2011)

In the year-end glut of movies seeking awards, one or two titles always get lost. The latest victim: the modern-day adaptation of William Shakespeare’s Coriolanus.

Upfront, I confess that the movie represents my first serious exposure to the play. This Slate piece explores the unique place Coriolanus holds in the Shakespeare canon, including T. S. Eliot’s claim that it is “Shakespeare’s most assured artistic success.” Caius Martius is Rome’s most feared general, a man who does battle with soldiers he respects to protect a citizenry he holds in contempt. A particularly bloody victory over the Volscian army following the siege of Corioles gives Martius the new name of Coriolanus and entrée into the world of politics. But he refuses to curry favor with the masses, intending to govern the same way he marshaled his forces. Other politicians, fearing Coriolanus’ rise, stir up opposition to his appointment. The general goes into exile, then wreaks vengeance against the nation that banished him.

It’s a breathtakingly complex piece of writing, bereft of heroes and villains. Coriolanus is both admirable and monstrous, often simultaneously. Menenius, Coriolanus’ political mentor and the play’s most overtly calculating figure, has the Republic’s interests at heart, while the self-serving populist tribunes raise valid objections to granting Coriolanus power.

There are astonishing performances galore. Brian Cox’s beautifully modulated Menenius, James Nesbitt and Paul Jesson as the scheming tribunes, and an absolutely staggering Vanessa Redgrave as Volumnia, the mother who made Coriolanus the man he is. Ralph Fiennes does impressive work in front of the camera in the lead role and behind it as director. The film is propulsive, taking full advantage of the Serbian locations to present a landscape steeped in ancient simmering hatreds. Speeches are captured on cell phone cameras, critical dialogue is put into the mouths of commentators on the Roman equivalent of Fox News. It’s a fleet and furious adaptation of the Bard. Here’s the trailer.

Theater: Newyorkland

Going to the theater twice in a week? I don’t know who I am anymore.

Years ago I spent the better part of an hour running through the Firearms Training Simulator (FATS) at the New York Police Museum. An NYPD officer gave us a brief weapons course and then put us through our paces, replaying scenarios with subtle variations so that we could understand how little information cops have when they walk into a situation and how quickly an encounter could escalate out of control. It was a powerful experience – I still brood over a split-second hesitation that resulted in my partner getting shot – one that made it impossible for me to make knee-jerk judgments about the actions of law enforcement officers.

Those memories came back to me last night during Newyorkland, an intense theater piece by the company Temporary Distortion at Seattle’s On The Boards. An assemblage of live performance and film, Newyorkland aims to illuminate the challenges of police work, specifically the psychological distance cops often feel from the people they are charged with protecting.

The presentation is immersive and assaultive. The audience walks in under the disinterested eyes of the cast in uniform, the Beastie Boys thrumming overhead. Everyday squad room sounds like keyboards and telephones are amplified. There’s a roll call, a litany of radio requests, and heartbreaking monologues drawn from interviews with actual New York cops.

Inventive use of lights, sound and staging create an endlessly fluid production; Newyorkland isn’t directed so much as misdirected, the theatrical sleight of hand continually impressive. The closing moments are somewhat muddled, but the overall effect reminds you that there is an individual inside every police officer’s uniform.

Temporary Distortion will perform Newyorkland, appropriately enough, in New York in January. See it if you can. Here’s the preview trailer.

Newyorkland Trailer from Temporary Distortion on Vimeo.

Theater: Double Indemnity

The biggest surprise about ACT Seattle’s world premiere of the adaptation of James M. Cain’s Double Indemnity was finding excerpts from my Noir City interview with playwrights David Pichette and R. Hamilton Wright and director Kurt Beattie in the official program. If you want to know how the creative team approached bringing Cain’s novel to the stage while dealing with the long shadows cast by Billy Wilder’s landmark film, then join the Film Noir Foundation and get yourself a subscription to the magazine. (Or you can wait for Noir City Annual #4, coming out early next year. The interview will be included.) I attended the play last night in the company of FNF honcho Eddie Muller, whose full review will appear in the next issue of Noir City. Until then, you’ll have to make do with my thoughts.

It’s a good show, a truly theatrical experience that is also faithful to Cain’s book right up to its baroque ending. (The plot in brief: insurance agent meets femme fatale, they off her husband, recriminations follow.) The production is inventively staged, making smart use of the theater’s space as the story unfolds as a series of memories in the mind of its doomed protagonist. The sequence depicting the murder, including both car and train travel, is particularly thrilling.

The cast is uniformly solid. John Bogar makes a brash and confident Walter Huff, the salesman who has to sell his ideas to himself first. Richard Ziman shines in double duty as the ill-fated husband and Keyes, Huff’s boss. Ziman comes up with a gleeful slant on the character that never draws parallels with Edward G. Robinson’s brilliant performance in the film.

The script could have used more of the framing device established in the opening scene, with Huff on a boat making his escape. Whenever the ship’s rail reappeared, I thought, “Oh, right.” There isn’t much sexual chemistry between Bogar and Carrie Paff, who plays Phyllis, which may be deliberate; as Muller and I discussed after the show, sex ultimately doesn’t matter in Cain’s story, which is about two broken people bent on doing wrong who, once they meet, bring out the worst in each other. What the script does maintain in spades is the queasy, relentless inevitability of the novel. Double Indemnity runs at ACT through Sunday, and the production moves to the San Jose Repertory Theatre in January.