Remembering Fritz Weaver

Fritz Weaver -- the esteemed character actor who passed away Saturday at age 90 -- told me a lovely story about Ingrid Bergman when I had the pleasure to interview several years ago in New York. 

Back in 1970, he and Bergman co-starred in A Walk in the Spring Rain, a romantic melodrama about a would-be author (Weaver) and his wife (Bergman) who move from New York to the backwoods of Tennessee while he works on his long-delayed novel. While he scribbles away, the neglected wife drifts into an affair with an earthy neighbor (Anthony Quinn at his earthiest) -- and, while enjoying her middle-age craziness, refuses to serve as babysitter for her college-bound daughter, despite the daughter's attempts to guilt-trip her mom in accepting the task. (It doesn't help at all that the daughter insists mom really has nothing better to do because, well, she's old.) The affair, not surprisingly, ends badly.

On the first day they were to shoot a scene together, Weaver told me, Bergman knocked at the door of his trailer, and he invited her inside. He assumed she wanted to ask some questions about their scene, which she did. But then she did something totally unexpected: She asked, "Would you kiss me, please?" So Weaver did what any reasonably sentient heterosexual male would do if Ingrid Bergman asked for a smooch -- he gracious granted her request.

"There," she told him as the brief lip-lock concluded. "Now we have a past." 

And with that, she was ready to play his wife.

Some guys have all the luck.

I first became aware of Weaver when I was 14 years old, when I watched him give a standout performance as Rev. John Hale in a star-studded TV production of Arthur Miller's The Crucible. (George C. Scott was John Proctor, Collen Dewhurst was Elizabeth Proctor, and Tuesday Weld was Abigail Williams.) The telecast, oddly enough, had a major albeit indirect impact on me: When I saw a thoroughly second-rate stage production of the play (with professional actors) two years later, I couldn't help comparing it to the TV production, and realized that, hey, professional stage actors could be just as bad as professional movie actors.

Weaver laughed when I told him about this during our interview -- which was keyed to, of all things, his appearance in the 1982 movie Creepshow. And he accepted with modest gratitude my fanboy praise of his performance in another Arthur Miller drama, the acclaimed 1979 off-Broadway revival of The Price. Even now, I can still hear him delivering what I think is the key line of the play, one that continues to haunt me: "We invent ourselves to wipe out what we know."

During a stage and screen career that spanned seven decades, Weaver accumulated a prodigious number of TV, film and theater credits -- ranging from Fail-Safe (1964) to the original 1970 Broadway production of Child's Play (for which he won a Tony Award), from the 1978 miniseries Holocaust (which netted him an Emmy nomination) to a 2014 co-starring stint opposite Adam Sandler in The Cobbler. Trivia buffs, take note: He was the bad guy in the very first episode of The Man from U.N.C.L.E., and Sherlock Holmes (under the direction of Harold Prince) in the 1965 Broadway musical Baker Street. (And before you ask: Yes, I have the original cast album for the latter. On vinyl, no less.)

Fritz Weaver added something special, and substantial, to every production that employed him, even when he gave the production a lot more than it ever gave him. He will be missed. 

Another shameless attempt to attract blog traffic with cheesecake

According to my Culture Map colleague Chris Baldwin, Brooklyn Decker -- Adam Sandler's sexy leading lady in the upcoming comedy Just Go With It -- has been spotted among the celebs converging on Dallas during the days leading up to the Super Bowl. Of course, considering what the weather is like in Big D right now, I seriously doubt she's been spotted wearing the same attire she does in the above photo. But, hey, that won't stop me from running the picture here. Because, as we all know, I have no shame. And neither, it appears, does Ms. Decker. (I kid, I kid!)

BTW: I didn't realize this until comparatively recently, but Just Go With It is a remake of Cactus Flower, a 1969 comedy -- based on the Broadway play by Abe Burrows -- that starred Walter Matthau as a womanizing dentist who pretends to be married to his spinsterish assistant (Ingrid Bergman) in order to avoid a commitment with his hot young girlfriend (Goldie Hawn, whose bubbly performance netted her an Oscar as Best Supporting Actress). Looks like Sandler will be playing the Matthau part, Decker takes over for Hawn -- and Jennifer Aniston plays the spinsterish assistant.

Hmmmm. I strongly suspect there was some serious rewriting, and more than a little reconceptualizing, while updating the original scenario.

You must remember this: Casablanca at Rice Media Center

Breathes there the man with soul so dead who never to himself has said, “Here's looking at you, kid”?

Casablanca, sixty-plus years young and doubtless immortal, is more than a classic movie, more than a paradigm of Old Hollywood artistry -- and much, much more than the sum of its Dream Factory machine-tooled parts. It is, to borrow a line from another popular Humphrey Bogart picture, the stuff that dreams are made of. And you can see it again, Sam, at 7 pm Friday and Saturday -- up on a big screen, the way God intended you to see it -- at the Rice Media Center.

Conceived in haste, produced in chaos and launched with more than a little last-minute trepidation, Casablanca has survived -- no, make that thrived -- for nearly seven decades, defying changing tastes and remaining forever fresh. It is the type of grand romantic gesture that moviemakers rarely attempt in this irony-obsessed age. And yet it is the very sort of intoxicating hokum that drew most of us to movies in the first place.

At once cynical and sincere, hard-boiled and softhearted, worldly wise and dreamily romantic, it is great, glossy fun of the kind that no medium other than cinema can deliver in such bountifully generous measure.

Inspired by an unproduced play called Everybody Comes to Rick’s, and freely adapted by screenwriters who continued to write and rewrite during actual production, the wartime romance pivots on a device not unlike one of Alfred Hitchcock’s “McGuffins.” In all likelihood, neither the Third Reich nor Vichy France ever authorized those all-important exit visas that propel so much of the action. But, hey, who cares? If Peter Lorre says he stole them, Humphrey Bogart accepts them, and Ingrid Bergman and Paul Henreid are so desperate to obtain them, who are we to quibble?

As Rick Blaine, the sardonically evasive man of mystery who came to Casablanca “because of the waters,” Bogart is very much a man ahead of his time -- an existential hero long before existentialism was cool. Having survived the pain of lost love and lost causes, Rick insists he lives only for the moment as the apolitical operator of Rick’s Café Americain, the swankiest night spot in French Morocco. Sometimes, a woman makes the mistake of thinking she can break through Rick’s shell, only to be harshly disappointed. (“Where were you last night?” “That's so long ago, I don't remember.” “Will I see you tonight?” “I never make plans that far ahead.”) Sometimes, a man makes the even bigger mistake of thinking he can count on Rick's help, only to be brutally rebuffed: “I stick my neck out for nobody.”

Bogart is great in the role of Rick, even better than Rick is in the role he has created for himself. Rick’s performance as a cynical, self-centered rogue is undermined by his capacity for nobility and self-sacrifice, which our hero rediscovers, much to his great and grateful surprise, like someone finding valuables in the pocket of an old suit.

Blame it on Ilsa, the lost love who chooses to visit Rick’s Café Americain out of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world. She’s not alone: Ilsa walks in on the arm of fugitive freedom fighter Victor Lazlo, her courageous (though somewhat stiff-backed) husband. Anxious to leave Casablanca before an imperious Nazi officer (Conrad Veidt) can contrive a reason for the local cops to arrest them, the couple seeks the stolen exit visas that everybody, even the local prefect of police, knows Rick has managed to obtain. But Rick – who was abruptly abandoned by Ilsa years earlier -- isn’t especially eager to help the woman he believes betrayed him. It requires some impassioned entreaties from Ilsa, along with some none-too-subtle guilt-tripping on the part of Victor, to make Rick realize that problems of star-crossed lovers “don’t amount to a hill of beans” in a war-torn world.

Alas, the stars of Casablanca are no longer with us. And yet they linger -- eternal in our memories, alive and well on film and home video. Ingrid Bergman remains radiant enough to melt the hardest of hearts, to reignite the worst burnt-out case. Paul Henreid still is the most eloquently persuasive and passionately debonair of rabble-rousers. Peter Lorre is the sleaziest -- and most fatally ambitious -- of sneak thieves. Conrad Veidt is the most repellently self-assured Nazi. Sydney Greenstreet is the most grandiloquent black marketer. Dooley Wilson – as Sam, the star performer at Rick’s Café Americain – plays the dreamiest theme (“As Time Goes By”) ever composed for movie romance. Better still, he plays it again and again.

Best of all, there is Claude Rains, stealing every scene that isn’t bolted to the floor as the cheerfully corrupt Captain Renault, the Vichy-suave prefect of police. Just try to keep a straight face when this shameless hypocrite claims to be shocked -- shocked! -- to learn there is gambling in the back room at Rick’s.

To be sure, some of the dialogue hasn't dated especially well (“Was that cannon fire, or is it my heart pounding?”). But even at its most melodramatic, Casablanca elicits smiles of pleasure, not giggles of disbelief or laughs of derision. Directed with consummate professionalism by Hungarian-born Michael Curtiz – who had more than 60 Hollywood productions to his credit before tackling this one -- it is a movie with the courage of its corniness, the strength of its shameless contrivance, the power of its pulp-fiction redemption. They don't make them like this anymore. And even when they try, they lack certain key ingredients, such as Bogart and Bergman. And, just as important, an audience willing to suspend all disbelief for two hours of larger-than-life, bigger-than-self heroism. As time goes by, Casablanca just gets better and better.

Impossible couples

George Clooney and Grace Kelly? Clark Gable and Madonna? Johnny Depp and Ingrid Bergman? Consider the possibilities considered by Worth 1000. (Hat-tip to John Guidry.)