Red Sky at Morning (1971)

          An earnest coming-of-age story that wears its literary origins proudly, Red Sky at Morning offers an interesting mixture of artifice and authenticity. Produced by Hollywood veteran Hal Wallis, the picture has a gentle and old-fashioned style, even though explorations of race and sex reflect somewhat contemporary attitudes. In other words, the picture surrounds modern thought with a thick shell of Capra-esque hokum. Yet the script, adapted by Margeurite Roberts from Richard Bradford’s novel, is methodical and sensitive in its portrayal of a young man forced by circumstances to embrace a larger world than the one he’s known. That the film contains Richard Thomas’ first leading performance is significant, because for all his limitations as a young actor, Thomas demonstrated a tremendous gift for expressing the confusion of adolescence.

          The picture begins in Alabama, where Frank Arnold (Richard Crenna) prepares for Naval service in World War II. A middle-aged businessman, he enlisted because of patriotism. Before shipping out, Frank escorts his fragile Southern-belle wife, Ann (Claire Bloom), and their teenaged son, Joshua (Thomas), to the family’s second residence in New Mexico, planning for them to live quietly in the Southwest until his return from the war. After Frank leaves, Joshua goes through the predictable difficulties of forming social connections at a new school. He bonds with a misfit intellectual named Marcia (Catherine Davidson) and an extroverted Greek nicknamed “Steenie” (Desi Arnaz Jr.). The trio’s extracurricular adventures include a gross-out test of nerves involving a dead cow. Concurrently, Joshua gets into a hassle with local thugs and watches with alarm as his mother’s sleazy cousin, Jimbob (John Colicos), arrives with designs on taking the absent Frank’s place.

           The plot is dense and rich, sometimes to a fault, but the end result is that Red Sky at Morning takes viewers on a tonally varied journey. Although some supporting characters get such short shrift that removing them entirely would have been advisable, even the peripheral people in Red Sky at Morning generate interesting moments. Ultimately, the story is about Joshua’s growth. His experiences constitute a greatest-hits collection of adolescent milestones, from confronting a parent to losing his virginity, so Thomas gets to play an incredible spectrum of emotions. He mostly serves the material well, as do Bloom, Burns, and Crenna. Arnaz, despite earning a Golden Globe nomination for his work, is forgettable, easily overshadowed by a miscast Harry Guardino and an even-more-miscast Nehemiah Persoff. (Born in Jerusalem, he plays a Latino.) Also strong is Gregory Sierra’s lived-in performance as a local cop.

          Red Sky at Morning gets lost in the wilds of its own storyline at regular intervals, so it’s an unruly piece of work. Nonetheless, the same intricate layers of backstory and characterization that contribute to murkiness give Red Sky at Morning its appealing immersiveness. The film has a strong sense of time and place, and the centrality of Thomas’ character provides a clear point of view.

Red Sky at Morning: GROOVY

A Doll’s House (1973, UK) & A Doll’s House (1973, USA)

          In an odd coincidence, two films of Henrik Ibsen’s play A Doll’s House arrived in 1973, one in theaters and one on television. Both take place in 19th-century Norway, where housewife Nora revels upon hearing that her husband, uptight banker Torvald, has earned a major promotion, because the change marks an end to the family’s monetary woes. When Torvald fires a subordinate named Krogstad, the disgruntled man blackmails Nora with evidence that she once forged documents for a bank loan. The ensuing melodrama reveals what little respect Torvald has for his wife—hence the title, which refers to men treating women as playthings. Given the story’s ultimate theme of a woman’s self-realization, it’s obvious why the material seemed timely during the early feminist era.

          The British version, ironically enough, has American roots. It’s a filmed record of a Broadway production that was adapted from Ibsen by the celebrated UK playwright Christopher Hampton. The Broadway show featured revered British actress Claire Bloom in a tour-de-force performance, and Bloom re-creates her meticulous work in the movie. Director Patrick Garland largely ignores any cinematic possibilities in the play, opting for intimate scenes taking place on fully dressed approximations of the stage production’s sets. At his worst, Garland slips into bland cuts back and forth between flat close-ups, particularly during the final, lengthy showdown between Nora and Torvald. What Garland’s A Doll House lacks in visual imagination, however, it makes up for in dramatic firepower.

          Bloom runs the gamut from frivolous to manic to regal, and her costar—the sublime Anthony Hopkins—imbues Torvald with a mixture of inflated ego and repressed desperation. Playing key supporting roles are Denholm Elliot, bitter and cruel as the maligned Krogstand, and Ralph Richardson, elegantly sad as Nora’s aging friend, Dr. Rank. One can’t help but wonder what a filmmaker more adept at stage-to-screen adaptations, perhaps Sidney Lumet, could have done with the raw material of these finely tuned performances, but at least theater fans can savor great work forever. Plus, in any incarnation, Ibsen’s prescient notions about women liberating themselves pack a punch. Consider this passage from the British film: After Torvald exclaims, “No man would sacrifice his honor for love,” Nora replies, “Millions of women have.”

          Seeing as how Jane Fonda was a fierce combatant on the front lines of the ’70s culture wars, it’s not surprising she felt Ibsen’s statement merited a fresh adaptation. Alas, she proved unlucky twice. First, she clashed with director Joseph Losey, and second, she completed her project after the UK version had already reached theaters. That’s why the Fonda film landed on TV—producers rightly estimated the limits of the public’s appetite for this material. In nearly every way, Losey’s take on A Doll’s House is inferior to the Bloom/Hopkins version, even though Losey’s comparatively sophisticated camerawork creates more visual interest than Garland’s stodgy frames.

          The big problem is that the casting never clicks. Fonda gives an adequate performance, with intense moments of fervor and physicality weighted down by stilted readings of classical-style dialogue. Viewed in context, she’s an outlier. Fine European actors including Trevor Howard (as Dr. Rank) and David Warner (as Torvald) seem natural delivering reams of ornate dialogue while stuffed into period costumes, but none of them truly connects with Fonda—her performance exists in isolation from the rest of the picture. Plus, since the gangly Warner somewhat resembles a frequent Fonda costar, it’s impossible not to picture Donald Sutherland in the Torvald role and wonder what that dynamic might have been like. That said, Edward Fox is excellent in the Krogstand role, radiating predatory heat. Yet the thing that should have supercharged this spin on A Doll’s House, Fonda’s offscreen passion for gender equality, makes key moments feel more like stand-alone political speeches instead of organic elements of interpersonal confrontation.

A Doll’s House (UK): GROOVY

A Doll’s House (USA): FUNKY

Islands in the Stream (1977)

          Actor George C. Scott and director Franklin J. Schaffner collaborated so effectively on Patton (1970) that it’s surprising they only worked together once more. And while their second picture is a much smaller endeavor than the duo’s celebrated military epic, Islands in the Stream is memorable in different ways. Adapted from Ernest Hemingway’s book of the same name, the picture takes place during World War II and details the exploits of Tom Hudson (Scott), an American sculptor living in the Caribbean. Separated from his old life—he left behind a bride and three children when relocating to the tropics—Tom is the quintessential Hemingway man’s man, an iconoclast driven by a code of honor few people can truly understand. Yet while some of Papa’s heroes express their individualism with battlefield courage and other such violent displays, Tom follows a more cerebral path. He’s all about beauty and truth, even if that means unmooring himself from society’s traditional expectations.

          Schaffner and screenwriter Dennie Bart Peticlerc transpose literary devices from the source material, including chapter breaks and voiceover, so Islands of the Stream is a bit self-consciously arty. Furthermore, because the voiceover features Scott sensitively reading Hemingway’s staccato prose, the movie alternates between visceral scenes between characters and internalized moments during which the juxtaposition of images and Scott’s monologues advances understanding, if not necessarily the storyline. In other words, Islands in the Stream is an offbeat hybrid of full-blooded drama and novelistic rumination. Both elements work, to different degrees.

          The best of the fully dramatized material involves Tom’s fraught relationships with his estranged wife, Audrey (Claire Bloom), and his sons, particularly young adult Tom Jr. (Hart Bochner), in whom the hero finds a kindred spirit. (A poignant sequence revolves around Tom meeting his children for the first time and taking them on a grueling fishing trip.) The best of the purely literary material arrives at the very end of the picture, when Schaffner finds just the right images to accentuate the segment of Scott’s voiceover that contains his character’s closing thoughts after experiencing loneliness, loss, and a kind of redemption.

          The movie has significant flaws, not least of which is an episodic structure that impedes the building of proper dramatic momentum, but the elegance of Schaffner’s execution covers a multitude of sins. More importantly, Scott is at his very best—which is to say that his work is very near the pinnacle of American screen acting. Suppressing his natural tendency toward bluster in order to channel a character who keeps most of his feelings hidden, Scott conveys pain and regret while still illustrating the subtle idea that Tom Hudson considers each man’s life a work of art. So even if the movie’s penultimate passage, a long discursion into high-seas wartime adventure, stretches credibility and dilutes the impact of the film’s touching family-ties material, that’s a minor complaint. After all, it wouldn’t really be Hemingway without at least some hairy-chested excess.

Islands in the Stream: GROOVY