Copyright Disney 2014We mourn the loss of comedian/actor Don Rickles, who has died at age 90. He was one of the greatest stand-up comedians of all time, at the top of his profession for well over half a century. In the Washington Post, Matt Schudel wrote:
Mr. Rickles did not tell jokes with traditional punch lines, did not make topical comments about the news and did not use crude profanity. Every show was spontaneous, built largely around his caustic observations about members of the audience….Short, bald and stocky, Mr. Rickles walked on the stage “looking like a snapping turtle surfacing in a pond,” as a New Yorker profile put it in 2004. He glanced around the room at his prey. Overweight people, men accompanied by younger women, racial and ethnic minorities — all were subject to his relentless barrage of smart-aleck buckshot.
Mr. Rickles’s chief comedic weapons were exaggeration and ridicule, deployed in a rapid, sharp-tongued style that stacked one quip on top of another until audiences were helpless with laughter. He especially delighted in tweaking the rich and mighty and became renowned for his biting performances at celebrity roasts.
Rickles’ training as a dramatic actor was evident in his performance opposite Robert de Niro in “Casino.” In Pixar’s beloved “Toy Story” movies, he provided the voice for Mr. Potatohead. He was known for being as kind and loyal a friend off-stage as he was caustic and insulting on stage. His closest friend was a comedian whose style and persona could not be more different, Bob Newhart. May his memory be a blessing.
We bid a sad farewell to Robert Osborne, the most gracious of gentlemen and the most devoted and erudite of movie fans.
Osborne’s love of old movies and the people who made them brought a new generation to movies made before their parents were born. His interviews were always fascinating and thoughtful and his books, including a history of the Oscars and a tribute to some of his most cherished favorites, are filled with illuminating insights and insider details.
As the suave, soothing public face of TCM, Mr. Osborne delivered revelatory tidbits before and after each screening, and he gently coaxed stars well past their prime (Patricia Neal, Tony Curtis, Betty Hutton) to speak tantalizingly of their career highs and lows.
Erudite without being snobbish, Mr. Osborne conveyed a seemingly limitless ardor for the job. He could enthuse about the 1940 Ann Sothern vehicle “Congo Maisie” as much as the Oscar-winning epic “Gone With the Wind” (1939).
The TCM host worked hard to intrigue first-time viewers, garnishing his segments with stories about backstage affairs and egos run amok amid filmmaking, and he tried to find new approaches to entice more-experienced viewers such as himself.
Like the movies he loved, he brought so much joy. May his memory be a blessing.
The 1960’s-70’s was a golden era of American film, reflecting the upheavals of the culture around it. Film became more personal, more political, more confrontational. And that was true of film criticism, as well. A small group of critics with very strong, fearless, individual voices became enormously influential, like Pauline Kael, Andrew Sarris, and Roger Ebert, and the man whose loss we mourn today, Richard Schickel, longtime critic for TIME Magazine and author of many books on topics from Walt Disney to Marlon Brando, Elia Kazan, and Charlie Chaplin.
In the Washington Post, Harrison Smith’s perceptive obituary notes that Schickel’s “reviews — and essays, books and documentary films — combined a straightforward literary style with a seemingly encyclopedic knowledge of Hollywood history.”
His writing was replete with references to earlier Hollywood films and figures, and was sometimes highly personal. He began “Brando,” his 1991 biography of the actor, with a “Dear Marlon Brando” letter that apologized for delving into the actor’s private life. Later in the book, he described the impact of Brando’s performance in “The Wild One” (1953), as an outlaw biker, this way: “Oh, Lord, it was glorious. We were thrilled down to our toes curling cowardly in our white bucks.”
For every actor or film Mr. Schickel praised, there seemed to be at least two he was happy to take down a notch. Bergman’s “The Seventh Seal” (1957), an existential drama starring Death incarnate, “made my teeth ache,” he wrote. Alfred Hitchcock’s thriller “Vertigo” (1958) was overrated; the drama of World War II homecoming “The Best Years of Our Lives” (1946) was “undeniably lying and sentimental.”
On Rogerebert.com, Matt Zoller Seitz writes that Schickel was “always thinking about how certain movies fit into the culture and what effect they might have on it, even as he appreciated them at the level of craft.”
She could turn the world on with her smile. She could take a nothing day and suddenly make it all seem worthwhile. We have lost one of television’s brightest lights, Mary Tyler Moore, who has died at age 80.
Mary Tyler Moore starred in two of the most beloved and most influential series in television history, but in one of her earliest appearance in the then-new medium of television, you never saw her face. As Sam, secretary to detective “Richard Diamond” (David Janssen), the camera stayed on her legs, hands, and mouth. She also performed as the sprite Happy Hotpoint in appliance commercials.
When she was cast as Laura Petrie in “The Dick Van Dyke Show,” created by Carl Reiner and based on his experiences as a writer for Sid Caesar’s variety show, it was the rarest kind of magical pairing. Rob and Laura Petrie were a new kind of married couple in television sitcoms. They were gorgeous, sophisticated, and obviously crazy about each other. Their chemistry perfectly suited the superb writing on the show, and it is still my all-time favorite series. Moore was a trained dancer, and the Petries danced together in many of the most beloved episodes.
Some of the episodes involved Rob or Laura getting into trouble, often featuring Moore’s “Oh, Rob!” My favorite episode is “Snoopynose,” where Laura can’t resist opening the mail addressed to Rob. I also love the one where she has to admit that she lied about her age when they got married and the one where she accidentally admits on television that Rob’s boss wears a toupee. But any episode is worth watching and they are all available on Hulu and on cable television.
Moore returned to television with one of the most iconic television series of the 1970’s, “The Mary Tyler Moore Show,” where she played a single woman who has to “make it on her own” as a news producer on a small station in Minneapolis. YouTube has a wild assortments of home-made videos of people re-enacting the opening sequence, which ended with Moore throwing her hat in the air. There’s even one from Oprah, one of the series’ biggest fans, who says Moore’s character inspired her to go into television journalism.
Moore played Mary Richards, an independent single woman unseen before on television (it was shocking when she acknowledged being on “the pill” in one episode). The show had one of the best casts in television history, with Ed Asner as Mary’s crusty boss, Lou Grant, Cloris Leachman as her bossy landlady Phyllis, and Valerie Harper as Rhoda, her best friend. All had spin-off series. Also in the cast: Ted Knight as the dimwitted anchor, Ted Baxter, Georgia Engel as his girlfriend, Georgette, and Betty White as the station’s cooking and household hints show, Sue Ann Nivens.
One of the best-remembered episodes is “Chuckles the Clown Bites the Dust,” where the newsroom staff attends the funeral of the station’s children’s television host. It is both hilariously funny and very perceptive about grief and loss. TV Guide picked it as the third best television episode of all time.
The last episode of the series featured a group hug that seemed to embrace us all.
Moore also appeared in movies like “Thoroughly Modern Millie” and “Flirting With Disaster.” Her most memorable performance was in “Ordinary People.” Director Robert Redford saw something in the former Happy Hotpoint and cheery sitcom star that no one else had and picked her for the role of the mother who could not express her feelings about the loss of one son and the struggles of the other. When Entertainment Weekly did an oral history of the film, Moore and Redford spoke about the decision to cast her.
ROBERT REDFORD: At that time I had a place in Malibu, and it was winter and I was sitting there looking out on the beach. I saw this lonely figure all wrapped up and walking slowly. The figure looked sad. On closer examination I saw it was Mary Tyler Moore—America’s sweetheart. She was probably just cold, but the sadness hit me and stuck with me when I began casting. I went to see Mary and her husband, Grant Tinker….She had only done these bright, happy things, so I felt pretty awkward going in there and suggesting she play a darker character. But she was very excited and wanted to do it.
MARY TYLER MOORE: Redford was warm and funny and very charming. He told me I was the one whose face he saw as he read the book. Beth was the character he said he most cared about, and he wanted her portrayed with sensitivity. And he wanted me. This was Robert Redford. How could I say no?
The influence of Ms. Moore’s Mary Richards can be seen in the performances of almost all the great female sitcom stars who followed her, from Jennifer Aniston to Debra Messing to Tina Fey, who has said that she developed her acclaimed sitcom “30 Rock” and her character, the harried television writer Liz Lemon, by watching episodes of “The Mary Tyler Moore Show.” Many nonactresses also said that Ms. Moore — by playing a working single woman with such compassion and brio — inspired their performances in real life.
Moore went from pushing the boundaries of television by wearing Capri pants (the network executives wanted her to look like the other TV moms, who did housework in dresses and pearls) to pushing the boundaries by portraying an independent woman with a satisfying career and a full life without a boyfriend. She was a gifted comic performer because she was a great actress. May her memory be a blessing.
This is a very sad time. One day after the death of her daughter, Carrie Fisher, Debbie Reynolds suffered a fatal stroke and now, suddenly, she is gone too.
Debbie Reynolds could do it all. She sang, she danced, she acted, she wrote, she produced. She was up for anything, always game, the ultimate show-must-go-on girl, and if she was not the girl next door, you wished she was.
Reynolds is one of the last of the classic era of movie stars. She has been an essential part of American culture since she was a teenager, starring opposite Gene Kelly and Donald O’Connor in the #5 American Film Institute classic “Singin’ In the Rain” and keeping up with them tap for tap and an overturned sofa to boot.
No star ever showed more pure joy in performing. We see Gene Kelly fall for her and we happily join him.
She was best known as the all-American sweetheart with a series of sometimes sugary musicals and romantic comedies like “Tammy” and “The Singing Nun.” Here she is in “The Affairs of Dobie Gillis” with two more of the greatest dancers in movie history, Bobby Van and Bob Fosse.
In that movie, she sang a slow and sweet version of the same song she sang in “Singin’ in the Rain,” “All I Do is Dream of You.”
She co-starred with Frank Sinatra in the very retro “Tender Trap.”
She was a standout in the all-star cast of “How the West Was Won,” and she was perfectly cast in the title role of the brash musical “The Unsinkable Molly Brown,” which she said was her favorite role.
I am especially fond of “The Mating Game,” with Tony Randall and Paul Douglas, about a happy-go-lucky farm family that lives on the barter system and the IRS auditor trying to investigate them.
She was a gifted dramatic actress, as we see in “The Catered Affair,” a gritty drama where she plays the daughter of Bette Davis and Ernest Borgnine.
I think one of her best performances is in the neglected gem “Divorce American Style,” a biting satire with Dick Van Dyke, Jason Robards, and Jean Simmons.
She was magnificent in the title role of Albert Brooks’ “Mother.”
She played Debra Messing’s mother on “Will and Grace” and Liberace’s mother in “Behind the Candelabra.” And she had an adorable cameo as herself in another neglected gem, “Connie and Carla.”
In addition to movies, Debbie Reynolds performed in nightclubs, theater, Las Vegas, on television, and had hit records and wrote best-selling books. She provided voices for “Rugrats,” “Kim Possible,” “The Family Guy,” and the title role in the animated “Charlotte’s Web.” She tried for decades to create a museum of Hollywood memorabilia and she was a tireless fund-raiser for good causes.
