THE COMEDIAN - Review By Greg Klymkiw - Astonishing Early TV Film By John Frankenheimer (SECONDS, THE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE) on the sumptuous Criterion Collection DVD "The Golden Age of Television"

This 1957 Playhouse 90 production by John (Seconds, The Manchurian Candidate) Frankenheimer, establishes him as one of the most gifted American filmmakers of his time. He brilliantly drags us through the slop of showbiz nastiness in this harrowing tale of a brutal, mean-spirited comedian who destroys anyone who could possibly love him - anyone but his fans, whose adulation feeds his boundless self-love and the vigorous need to cut his friends, family and collaborators down to size, to ribbons, to shreds.

The Comedian (1957) *****
Dir. John Frankenheimer
Starring: Mickey Rooney, Edmond O'Brien, Kim Hunter, Mel Tormé

Review By Greg Klymkiw

From a novella by Ernest (North by Northwest, Sweet Smell of Success) Lehman and powerfully adapted by Rod Serling (The Twilight Zone), The Comedian is, without question, one of the most harrowing dramatic show business exposes ever committed to film/tape/kinescope. It also happens to be a feature length television film broadcast on the immortal Playhouse 90 anthology series in 1957.

Using everything at his disposal, Frankenheimer pulls off some kind of miracle. Bouncing from location to location, utilizing montage, a crackling pace to match the impeccable dialogue and playing, for all it's worth, the horrendous visual anchor of an oversized photo of the leering monster of the film's title, Frankenheimer is indeed a director demonstrating his natural gifts that, even then, seemed like the pinnacle of his powers, but were, indeed only the beginning. Marvelling at his use of everything at a filmmaker's disposal to tell this wrenching tale is to have an opportunity to see the sowing of seeds that eventually blossomed into some of the greatest films of the 1960s.

The opening sequence alone would be enough to knock you on your butt. We follow the frenzied rehearsal of a live comedy broadcast wherein the action cuts between the performance itself, the master control booth and behind-the-scenes action on the floor and in the nearby production offices. The expert screenwriting establishes virtually everything that needs to be established and even provides a perfect spin-around to launch us from this highly charged first act into the next. Somehow, it's even more astounding that within a live TV drama, Frankenheimer grasps the challenges of Rod Serling's brilliant script and actually recreates the making of a live TV extravaganza within.

Now, seriously, ladies and gentlemen: How cool is that?

Mickey Rooney plays Sammy Hogarth, a hugely popular TV comic making the leap from a half-hour show to a full 90-minute special. Hogarth demands more than perfection from his collaborators, he demands worship. He is, without question, one of the most grotesque, repugnant characters in 20th-century drama. Much of this is due to Rooney. His performance is truly a revelation. While I always admired his work as a child actor in the numerous Rooney-Garland musicals and his moving portrait of the wartime telegram delivery boy in The Human Comedy, nothing could have ever prepared me for his performance in this mean-spirited drama. Rooney’s hurricane-like command of every scene he’s in is so powerful that even when he’s off-screen, his influence over all the supporting characters is not only felt, but it’s as if he’s in the same room with them: poking, prodding, cajoling, haranguing and tearing strips off everyone’s back.

The people most susceptible to his nastiness are his long-time gag writer with a bad case of writer’s block (Edmond O’Brien, the revenge-bent everyman from the great noir D.O.A.) and his brother, a weak, whining simpleton - originally promised the job of producer, but now reduced to being Sammy’s slave - bearing the biggest brunt of the comic’s ire.

Playing Sammy’s brother is the legendary crooner Mel Tormé, whose career in movies was mostly reserved for second banana roles in musicals. Tormé is downright snivelling, so pathetically subservient to his older brother that we initially feel sorry for him, but his subsequent actions are so appalling that he ultimately appears as little more than a cretin. It’s a great performance and one can only wonder why we never saw more of him on the big screen in roles to rival this one.

Kim Hunter (Stella in Elia Kazan’s version of A Streetcar Named Desire and, lest we forget, Zira, the cute female chimp in Planet of the Apes) plays Tormé’s long-suffering wife, who is fed up with how pathetic her husband is and demands he stand up to Sammy. Like everyone in this drama, though, she eventually puts herself in an utterly degrading position to get what she wants.

Oh yeah, speaking of degrading, did I mention that Edmond O’Brien’s character is so desperate to drag himself out of his writer’s block that he plagiarises the unused work of a comedy writer who went off to war and died in battle? You see, this is not just the story of a man bent on destruction, but ultimately the story of an utter monster who turns everything and everyone around him into bottom-feeding, soul-bereft plankton. Curiously, The Comedian is based on work by Ernest Lehman that bears more than a passing resemblance to the author's nasty novella and feature film Sweet Smell of Success. At least that story had Tony Curtis’s charming (albeit sleazy) press agent Sidney Falco. Nobody, but nobody, has anything resembling charm in The Comedian. Interestingly, veteran character actor Whit Bissell delivers a great performance here as the sleazy gossip columnist Otis Elwell, a character from Lehman's Sweet Smell of Success.

As deeply dark and depressing as it was, and frankly still is, The Comedian, like so many live dramatic television broadcasts of the period, sizzled in terms of audience and critical response. Even the darker HBO and Showtime dramas pale in comparison to the sort of ratings commanded by The Comedian and other Playhouse 90 works. It's similar to how today's bozoffice grosses for theatrical features mean virtually nothing when adjusted for inflation. The Comedian represents the TRUE Golden Age of Television and Frankenheimer went on to direct features when movies mattered more than anything. As for the current state of the Boob Tube, there's nothing on television today that can even remotely come close - artistically AND commercially to The Comedian. Now you can see why.

"The Comedian" is included on the superb Criterion Collection box set entitled "The Golden Age of Television". My full review of this box set including individual reviews of several great television dramas for live television (including Frankenheimer's brilliant rendering of "Days of Wine and Roses") is available in my Colonial Report From The Dominion of Canada column at the cool UK film magazine "Electric Sheep - a deviant view of cinema". You can read the full piece HERE.

SECONDS - Review By Greg Klymkiw - Creepy Classic Psychological Thriller Comes Alive on Criterion Blu-Ray

ROCK HUDSON
UNMASKED

An upper-middle-class businessman has his identity erased, then transformed via cutting edge plastic surgery. He starts life over with a fresh persona. Gradually, he longs for his old life, but trying to go back might reveal a sad truth he'd never imagined and ultimately, lead to a fate he never bargained for.

Seconds (1966) ***** 

Dir. John Frankenheimer
Starring: Rock Hudson

Review By Greg Klymkiw

The myth of post-War prosperity in America created an endlessly compelling series of films within a variety of genres from the late 1940s and onwards, but for me, few are sadder, scarier and creepier than the great John Frankenheimer's chilling exploration of identity in a world seemingly bereft of genuine individuality. Based on John Ely's novel and superbly adapted by screenwriter Lewis John Carlino, we're introduced to a shell of a man, living in an upscale suburb with a wife he ignores, endless train rides to and from the city where he manages a bank and in spite of a very comfortable lifestyle, the surface trappings of his success merely mask a living death.

When he begins receiving telephone calls from a long-dead pal he is, at first, disturbed that someone would play this cruel practical joke on him until the voice on the other end of the line begins to reveal details that only his late pal would have known.

This is the middle-aged banker's chance to change his life.

You know, I've gotta say that if it were me, I'd be checking myself into a looney bin and/or visiting a priest or maybe, just maybe, I'd be looking for a better way to change my life. I, however, did not live in post-war America (though Gen-Xrs and beyond certainly suffered its influence in other ways) and given the after-effects of the horrors of World War II upon our fathers, the Korean War, the burgeoning Vietnam War, the Cold War and the horrendous assassination of JFK, maybe I too - like much of America then and now - would be looking for an easy way out.

Of course, what seems to come easy, always has strings attached. Though our banker friend falls for this macabre solicitation from the grave, he is plunged even deeper into a cruel and eerie existence that is as fraught with the surface trappings of prosperity as his previous existence yielded, but his inner life is also tinged with a surface gloss that eventually gives way to heartache and anxiety.

And believe me, the picture's been super-creepy and scary up to this point, but like any great thriller, things are going to get even more horrific than we'd ever imagined.

Seconds is a film that has so much going for it on every level. When scribes refer to "terse" direction, I'm not always sure they know precisely what they're on about, but I will say, from my standpoint that John Frankenheimer might well be the genuine grandfather of a directorial approach that's as concise and trenchant as one would hope for in genre pictures that are rooted in a boldly simple structure that allows for peeling back layers on thematic, narrative and stylistic levels that few have ever been able to genuinely master. Here, Frankenheimer seem to give almost free reign to the unparalleled cinematographer James Wong Howe (Sweet Smell of Success) to create one shot after another that, taken on their own, seem like masterworks of lighting and composition. Movement is almost always subtle and crisp, though one's memory always comes back to dynamic activity bordering on the slightly jangling. Even more evocative the use of wide-angle lenses and, in particular, the consummately ghastly fish-eye shots which we never seem to forget.

In spite of these flourishes, they're used sparingly and so many of the compositions - whilst gorgeous - are simple and there to serve both the blocking, narrative and emotion. This was a style Frankenheimer developed in earlier features, most notably The Manchurian Candidate, but part of me thinks, that like so many great American directors of the 60s and 70s he cut his teeth with the kind of abandon afforded so many writers, directors and producers during the truly "Golden Age of American Television" where Frankenheimer directed oodles of "plays for television".

One of his great works during this period was the "Playhouse 90" production of Rod Serling's The Comedian starring a malevolent Mickey Rooney who was never, before or after, so downright brilliant. This "teleplay" (a magnificent amalgam of cinema, theatre and even radio drama that was most often broadcast live before millions on premiere broadcasts) is so original and compellingly grotesque, that it's extremely interesting to watch it within the context of Frankenheimer's best work for the big screen during the 60s.

Of course, there isn't a single performance in Seconds that seems false or out of place, but the movie really belongs to the late, great movie star Rock Hudson. His sensitivity and vulnerability (so often on display in the numerous Doris Day romantic comedies as well as some of his greatest triumphs during the 50s) is uncanny here. Though Frankenheimer initially had hoped for the likes of Laurence Olivier in the role, it's impossible to imagine anyone other than this bonafide movie star. The notion of a formerly dullish, slightly portly middle-aged cog in the upper levels of the post-war machine transformed into this gorgeous, hunky, Marlboro Man among Marlboro Men, is not only a brilliant stroke of casting in terms of an audience connecting to this character, but the film so expertly builds the empty frumpiness of this person's earlier life that when Hudson keeps looking in the mirror, he expertly yields a strange combination of disbelief, elation and yes, sadness. Rock Hudson, quite simply and movingly, breaks our hearts.

For all the creepiness and suspense Seconds delivers, what makes it resonate with such force and deliver several jabs to our collective solar-plexes is the heartbreak, the swirling sadness, the tragic search for a place in a world where identity has been stripped from those who thought it was all going to be better.

It doesn't get more real than that.

"Seconds" has been given the royal treatment on the Criterion Collection Blu-Ray, but I urge you, as great as the accompanying materials are, watch the movie not once, but maybe even twice before you dive in. I didn't watch any of it prior to even writing the aforementioned and I can assure you this allowed me to experience the film on subsequent viewings with even more appreciation than I'd ever imagined was possible. Here are the disc's highlights: A stunningly restored 4K digital film transfer, with an uncompressed monaural soundtrack, a genuinely great commentary with Frankenheimer, a surpringly insightful interview withactor Alec Baldwin, excerpts from "Hollywood on the Hudson" TV show from 1965 that has on-set footage and a Hudson interview, a fine making-of with interviews from Frankenheimer’s widow and actor Salome Jens (who plays the film's "love interest"), a 1971 interview with Frankenheimer, a decent visual essay by film scholars R. Barton Palmer and Murray Pomerance and the de rigueur booklet that has the added value of a superb essay by movie critic David Sterritt.

Read my Review of John Frankenheimer's THE COMEDIAN, part of the Criterion Collection mega-box DVD set "The Golden Age of Television" HERE.