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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The film opens on a finger snap. No dialogue, no exposition, just a helicopter shot dropping out of the Manhattan sky onto a playground, and then a gang of young men moving down a street with the coiled economy of dancers pretending not to be dancers. Sixty-five years on, that prologue still works, and it works partly because of something the audience in 1961 could not have known. The block they are dancing on was already condemned.
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Annie Hall opens with Woody Allen, as neurotic New York comedian Alvy Singer, addressing the camera directly, working through a Groucho Marx joke about never wanting to belong to a club that would have him as a member, before announcing flatly that he and Annie have broken up and he’s still trying to figure out why. From there the film abandons any pretense of a straight timeline. It jumps back to Alvy’s childhood in a house literally built under a Coney Island roller coaster, then forward through a first marriage, then to the night he meets Annie Hall, played by Diane Keaton, at a Manhattan tennis club.
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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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There’s a dead man on a Vermont hillside, and nobody in this movie can be bothered to call the police. That’s the joke. It shouldn’t work. It works.
Alfred Hitchcock spent two decades getting rich off making people afraid, and then in 1955, at the absolute height of it, he made a movie about a corpse nobody can work up the nerve to be scared of. Harry turns up dead on a hillside outside a New England town so pretty it looks painted, and the whole town’s reaction amounts to a shrug and a sigh. Captain Wiles is pretty sure his rifle did it. Miss Gravely thinks it might’ve been her hiking boot. The local painter is mostly annoyed Harry’s ruining the light. Nobody screams.
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