Forty-three years ago today, on September 21, 1983, a new David Mamet play opened in the smallest theater at London’s National Theatre. Seven men, two rooms, a lot of talking. Mamet had worked in a Chicago real estate office for a while in the late 1960s, and he wrote about it like someone who never quite got the smell of the place off his clothes. The play won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama the next year.
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Go watch it. That’s the verdict, and I’ll spend the rest of this telling you why, but I don’t want you sitting through eight paragraphs wondering whether I’m going to recommend a musical comedy about Hitler.
The Producers (2005) is a movie about two men scheming to produce the biggest flop in Broadway history. It cost forty-five million dollars and took in thirty-eight. Mel Brooks could not have written that ending himself, and God knows he tried everything else.
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The Miracle of Marcelino opens the way a lot of great fables do, with an ending. A priest is called to the deathbed of a woman he doesn’t know, and to comfort her he tells the story of a boy named Marcelino. From there the film drops back decades, to a war-scarred Spanish monastery where the friars find an abandoned infant on their doorstep. They decide, over the objections of at least one grumbling brother, to raise him themselves.
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High Noon opens on the happiest morning of Marshal Will Kane’s life. Played by Gary Cooper, Kane has just married Amy Fowler, played by Grace Kelly, and turned in his badge, ready to leave the small New Mexico town of Hadleyville behind for a life running a store. Then word arrives at the train station: Frank Miller, the outlaw Kane sent to prison years earlier, has been pardoned and is arriving on the noon train, with three of his old gang already waiting at the depot to meet him. Kane and Amy start to drive out of town. He stops the wagon himself, turns it around, and goes back to face what’s coming.
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Monty Python’s Life of Brian came out in 1979, directed by Terry Jones, written by all six Pythons together, and produced by John Goldstone, with George Harrison quietly saving the whole production by financing it himself after the original studio got cold feet and walked. Graham Chapman plays Brian Cohen, born in the stable next door to a rather more famous baby on the same night, and cursed for the rest of his short life with extraordinarily bad timing. I have loved this film for longer than I can honestly account for, and every time I sit back down with it, I’m struck again by how a movie this silly manages to also be this wise.
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There’s a moment in the King and I when Yul Brynner, playing a king who’s just been told by a schoolteacher that he’s wrong about something, doesn’t yell. He goes still. You watch a man who’s never once been contradicted try to figure out what to do with that feeling. Everyone remembers the big ballroom dance, the hoop skirts, the row of children lined up by height. What you should really watch for is that stillness, because it’s the best thing in the movie, and it’s why this one has held up so much better than most musicals from its era.
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The Philadelphia Story opens with one of the great silent gags in American film. Cary Grant, playing the newly ex-husband of Katharine Hepburn, storms out of their house carrying golf clubs while she trails behind hurling his belongings after him. She snaps one of his clubs over her knee. He responds by putting his open palm flat against her face and shoving her, hard, backward through the front door. Not a word is spoken. The whole marriage, its wreckage, and roughly forty percent of the movie’s argument about who these two people are to each other, plays out in about fifteen seconds before the title card even finishes.
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Nobody has actually reviewed Tony yet. Rotten Tomatoes has a page and no score. There’s no wide critical consensus, no embargo lift, nothing but a trailer, a featurette, and one room full of chefs who got to see it early. So take this for what it is: a bet, not a verdict. But it’s an informed bet, and after two decades writing about the people this movie is trying to honor, I’ve got opinions.
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