Lost Classics: Disney's THE HAPPIEST MILLIONAIRE

One need only look at the output from Walt Disney Studios in the 1960s and see that, progressively, Walt was less and less interested in animation. During this time, a bevy of so-so live action films were released, along with some that were half-animated and half-live-action, which was a remnant of what made Disney famous—his Alice shorts were among his most successful first ventures.

The Disney animated films of this time were generally lacking. Xerox animation and a decline in a definitive visual style hampered many projects in addition to wilder experimentation in “adapting” the classic stories. For example, The Jungle Book bears no more than characters from Rudyard Kipling’s books.

The peak of this “live action” period, which coincided with Disney’s early death, was Mary Poppins, the wildly popular movie musical that was one of Walt’s greatest achievements: a perfect amalgamation of fantasy, animation, music, and production value. After Disney’s death, another big-budget musical fantasy, Bedknobs and Broomsticks, would appear. The latter has mass appeal among members of my generation who fondly remember it, but it was neither a smash with critics nor audiences.

But I have always seen Mary Poppins and Bedknobs and Broomsticks as part one and three of a loosely related trilogy of live action movie musicals. The second culprit, which was a failure in its time and even went through a period where the Disney Company tried to bury it, was The Happiest Millionaire, an ambitious (and long) adaptation of a Broadway play by Kyle Crichton, who had published the memoirs of Cordelia Drexel-Biddle.

Drexel-Biddle’s father, Anthony J., was an all-American man. As far as historical significance, he was one of the loudest voices urging President Wilson to become involved in World War I. As far as his eccentricities, he owned a large mansion in Philadelphia that included a personal collection of alligators he had personally hunted down in Florida. Behind the mansion, he operated a Bible and boxing college that brought together spiritual vitality with physicality. With a respectable run on Broadway, the rights to Crichton’s play (adapted from the book My Philadelphia Father) were obtained by Disney in hopes of making another lavish musical. Trusted Disney director Norman Tokar and screenwriter A. J. Carothers adapted the tale which included songs by Richard M. and Robert B. Sherman, the greatest songwriters in Disney history. The music alone, including the score by Jack Elliott, had a runtime longer than most Hollywood comedies.

The Happiest Millionaire opened in 1967 and it’s not hard to see why it was a failure. 1967 and 1968 were pivotal years of social change in America. Premiering right on the heels of the Summer of Love, a musical about a Bible-thumping, war-mongering millionaire was about the most out of touch thing the Disney company could produce. Set in the 1910s and featuring no lovable children (as did Mary Poppins), it could be surmised that The Happiest Millionaire was destined to fail or, at the very least, to never capture an audience.

It was originally presented as a “road show” attraction, travelling towns with major premieres and high-priced tickets. Both these sorts of attractions and movie musicals in general were on the decline in Hollywood. These facts contributed to the miserable failure of the film as it was shortened from 164 minutes to 144 and then, in general release, to 118 minutes. For years, this shortest version was the only copy one could get your hands on, only in videocassette form. By removing the “Buena Vista” title card at the beginning of the film, companies like Anchor Bay Entertainment released this version on DVD and I can also distinctly remember watching the film around 3 or 4 in the morning as part of the Disney Channel’s “Vault” in my high school years (my first exposure).

Finally, a 172-minute director’s cut, including scenes that were only achieved through arduous restoration processes, was released by Disney on DVD. I’ve even seen it on Disney+, so it seems Disney no longer shuns the project. But for most Disneyfiles, this movie has almost been completely swept under the rug. While you can hear snips of the music in the Magic Kingdom, The Happiest Millionaire has become a bit of dodo. While not as unsuccessful as the animated films of the early-mid ‘80s, it did its best to break even and is probably only remembered as the film debut of Lesley Ann Warren, who would become best known as Miss Scarlett in the 1985 film Clue.

So, is there anything about Millionaire that is appealing? Plenty—and more where that came from. I could never see it the way Walt saw it—as a film with mass appeal—but what is there is charming, especially the music.

When I’m asked what my favorite Disney song is, I always reply, “Are We Dancing?” People have no idea what I’m talking about, but that is the answer. Beautifully sung by John Davidson (later a game show host) and Warren, it is a waltz tune played when Cordelia meets Angier Duke (yes, those Dukes) and fall in love. Along with this song, there are many that have all the hallmarks of Sherman Bros. classic songs—catchy melodies, zingy lyrics, and bouncing fun.

The film served as the American debut of British pop idol Tommy Steele, who often steals the movie as the confused butler of the Drexel-Biddles. He begins the movie with “Fortuosity,” a delightful song that sums up his happy-go-lucky lifestyle. While at first perplexed by the household, the butler settles into the madness and inherits a bit of his own. While trying to keep Duke from leaving his betrothed, he attempts to get Davidson drunk as a skunk in the number “Let’s Have a Drink On It,” which (again) is perhaps too long, but never loses momentum.

Much has been made of the fact that this is the last Disney film with Walt’s own touch (although he also made early decisions concerning The Aristocats) and, after reading Neal Gabler’s Walt Disney: The Triumph of the American Imagination, I can see why Millionaire appealed to him as a property. In his later years, he was bleakly sad, physically sick, and homesick for a childhood world he couldn’t recover but could reimagine in the form of Disneyland.

I, for one, find Millionaire lovable. It manages to bring a smile to your face despite yourself. Neglecting all I mentioned above about historical context (the changing nature of young people, protests against the Vietnam War, diminishing belief in organized religion), the principal problem with the film is, whereas Poppins and Bedknobs had children, Millionaire focused on young adults. This makes it a very different type of Disney film—it is the story of a man and his blossoming daughter who is trying to find her own way. While we should celebrate this difference, it probably put the nail in the coffin on the movie. The youngest character could still be said to be middle-school aged. The films that always remain with us from the Disney Company capture something of the magical essence of childhood. On that front, Millionaire fails.

But, taken on its own, it’s a success—a driven, musical, mad little odyssey into a distinct American figure. While much of the film focuses on the comedy, when one gets to the end as Fred MacMurray laments the loss of his daughter to a husband, he and Greer Garson sing “It Won’t Be Long ‘Til Christmas,” a song that should speak to anyone who’s ever moved away from home or have resigned themselves to only seeing their children once in a while.

So, if you want to see something both indicative of and completely different from most classic Disney fare, watch The Happiest Millionaire. Understood as a period piece, it is charming, uplifting and (while butt-numbing), has enough on its own to entertain if not enlighten.

Lost Classics: Norman Mailer's MAIDSTONE

While during his lifetime, his work became more and more critically derided, there has been a resurgence of interest in American novelist, journalist, and polemic Norman Mailer since his death in 2007. In his heyday, he was considered a provocative artist whose work was often overshadowed by a brazen machismo that put him in horn-locking mode with other men-of-letters of the period, like Gore Vidal, and as a subject of vitriol to emerging philosophies in the late twentieth century (particularly feminism).

Perhaps best known for his non-fiction novel on the Gary Gilmore case The Executioner’s Song and his debut novel The Naked and the Dead plus dozens of reports and essays, some of his work, particularly the ancient-Egyptian-themed novel Ancient Evenings, are being reevaluated as some of his best work. He also occasionally dabbled in the dramatic arts. The most successful of these ventures was his 1967 stage adaptation of his 1955 novel The Deer Park, a Hollywood story that had a respectable run Off-Broadway, but (having read it last year) could prove considerably difficult to stage today.

He also adapted The Executioner’s Song for an extremely well-made television film, which garnered Tommy Lee Jones an Emmy Award. But Mailer would not have been happy simply writing scripts. His personality (particularly in his drinking days) was so large, directing films became a sometime occupation with three experimental films in the ‘60s and ‘70s and a big-budget film in the late ‘80s, Tough Guys Don’t Dance, adapted from his novel. The latter, while receiving a few good reviews, is most famous for the “Oh Man, Oh God” meme that surely made the late Ryan O’Neal wince even many years after.

But his three experimental films that disappeared shortly after their initial premieres, Wild 90, Beyond the Law, and Maidstone, were finally restored and released as part of the Eclipse label of the Criterion Collection. Being in that collection has become a great honor for filmmakers all over the world and the Eclipse label in particular offers even wilder arthouse fare for those who only visit Barnes & Noble during a Criterion sale.

This last weekend, I had my first brush with Mailer’s films with his most famous, 1970’s Maidstone. Experimental films of the time, particularly the ones influenced by the European New Wave, are often exercises in cinematic masturbation, and Mailer’s is no different. But I’d be lying if I wasn’t fascinated by the whole project and found in it something quite remarkable: an improvised film that manages to be both of that moment and countercultural at the same time.

Mailer directs, “writes,” and stars in the story of Norman T. Kingsley, a world-famous film director who has thrown his hand into the race for President of the United States. This idea might have seemed ridiculous in 1970, but with increasingly public media figures finding themselves in office (beginning with George Murphy and, of course, most famously, Ronald Reagan), it doesn’t seem so now.

The film is divided into twelve chapters comprising what was 45 hours of film reduced to a little over a hundred minutes of screentime. For the first eight of so chapters, the film is a linear narrative of Kingsley casting and prepping an elaborate sex film (whether this is a soft-core porn film or an elicit art film is never elucidated), eventually shooting on the grounds of a vast mansion. Documentary style, the cameras follow political operatives as they lay their cards on the table concerning their candidate, whose principal drawback is his association with a group of ne’er-do-wells that include Rey (Rip Torn), a menacing figure who always seems like he may break into violence at any moment. A British journalist chronicles the meetings as well as the shooting of the film, including about fifty people on the estate in various states of undress.

It is hard to distinguish Kingsley from Mailer. Both have avid interests in boxing and flexing, talk in mocking tones to women, have large egos and are cult leaders in their own mind. Increasingly, the line between mockumentary and reality are skewed until the famous end of the picture that shows an actual fight between Mailer and Torn, in which Torn smacked him on the head with a hammer, drawing blood (then, Mailer bit a part of Torn’s ear off). This scene was not originally to be included in the film as neither are acting, calling each other by their real names, the fight apparently resulting in Torn’s frustration with Mailer’s direction which, gathering from the film itself, must have been the lunatic running the asylum.

I was expecting what most folks who’ve seen it see—a good first fifteen minutes, a fascinating last fifteen minutes, and a lot of drudgery in between. But Mailer’s Presidential plot gives a lot of goods in the middle of the film as he tries to put a finger on his positions with Black militants and women’s advocates. Beautifully preserved by Criterion, the scenes of Mailer laying shirtless in the grass making political points capture a moment in time that was a lot like ours now—a society on the verge of imploding. It made me wonder if, in fifty year’s time, someone could watch the early scenes of Maidstone and believe it really happened. In a way, Kingsley foretells of a figure like Trump, who has no shortage of braggadocio and malice and is clearly an outsider figure.

When I watched the film, I thought a lot of Peter Weir’s The Truman Show in the sense that had that movie been made as an arthouse film rather than a commercial vehicle for Jim Carrey, it would have been a truly great film instead of the too-well-staged, slick concoction it became. With Maidstone, you are watching documentary and mockumentary. There are actors attempting to improvise who clearly can’t think of things to say, there are fewer good actors who briefly take you out of the moment, and yet there’s a sort of elegance to it all, even with its cinema verité style camera movement.

If Maidstone could have been forethought rather than improvised, one could see it as being a great movie. But I think its off-the-cuff style brings something of what I wish Truman Show had been—something messier, less easy to pin down. Because of the improvisational nature, Maidstone captures lightning in a bottle and, though some scenes are too long (perhaps padding once he had the structure), it seemed to me vibrant, alive, and fearless—all characteristics of its director. Along with Town Bloody Hall, I think we’re seeing Mailer and, as a preservation of a one-of-a-kind iconoclastic figure, it succeeded in my eyes. I’d rather watch interesting failures any day than polished, turgid drama.

Much has been made of the fight scene. Some say it’s the only thing worth watching, and I disagree. Mailer manages to put together all the concerns of the day—Nixon, Vietnam, the Black power movement, the women’s rights movement, and capture real frustration, real near-implosion. The fight scene is only the icing on the cake as you feel at any moment that the whole thing could go out of control, as the country did, and it does. The fight scene may make it essential viewing, but it is not all that is there.

While it may seem what they call “tone deaf” to even bring up Mailer in a world where masculinity is devalued, I applaud (yet again) the fearlessness and down-beat nature of the films of the late ‘60s and early ‘70s—by far the most creative in film history. Now, maybe Maidstone doesn’t belong in the same category as Bonnie and Clyde or Chinatown, but I think it sits right along with I Am Curious (Yellow/Blue) and other films of that ilk as something worth watching and preserving.

It would be a shame indeed if we only knew Mailer because of his personal problems and his persona. What should be paid attention to is the work. Mailer went into writing plays and directing films to bring his personal ideas to the forms. I think he thought he would change the world. I admire the ambition—such a thing gels with his personality. He belongs to a long line of American writers, like BenjaminFranklin, Vidal, and Harold Bloom who spoke as if they knew everything and were chastised for it even when others had to realize they were right about a lot more than they got wrong. More and more, I want to be moved by the films I see and I have to keep going back further and further in history to find something visceral, something that grabs one’s attention. Maidstone did it. That’s all I ask for.

MAESTRO: WaySide Story

** out of ****

We find ourselves in that time of year where films in which studios have no faith are dumped on the American public. The reason is simple: they keep all the good stuff for December. If you want your film nominated for the Academy Awards, it must have a premiere before the end-of-the-year cutoff; therefore, the crappy movies come out around about this time. Maestro, Bradley Cooper’s sophomore directorial effort, was given a limited release to qualify for the Oscars before it landed on Netflix and, while I had my reservations that a biopic of Leonard Bernstein could prove film worthy, I held out hopes it could deliver something worthwhile.

Cooper’s first film, A Star is Born, perhaps the nine hundredth version of that moldy tale, served one purpose—as a vehicle to allow Lady Gaga’s acting talent to shine on the big screen. Cooper has done much the same thing with Maestro, taking a backseat to let Carey Mulligan lead in the role of Bernstein’s long-suffering wife Felicia, forgetting to make a biopic of Lenny at all.

With a title like Maestro, one assumes, walking in, that a Lenny biopic is what you will get and, if you are, you will be saddened. Bernstein, though, as I hinted at, would be a hard lead subject in a film. In real life, he was a bit of a cypher, a bit of an enigma, a bit of genius, and a bit reckless in his personal and working lives. While he composed some beautiful music, he never really gave us the music he could have, given his over-numerous engagements as a sought-out lecturer, teacher, and, of course, as the finest American conductor of classical music to have ever lived.

Given how he conducted his own life, his story can be seen as an errant mess or the result of a genius who stretched himself too thin. For these reasons, perhaps it is inevitable that the film focuses on Felicia’s personal life while only giving snapshots of Bernstein’s career. This movie is not Maestro. It is Felicia, another in a long line of stories of wives coming to the realization that their husbands happen to be gay or perpetual cheaters or both. That is not to say such a venture couldn’t be satisfying drama, but if you’re going to put your eggs in that basket, one best dive in and make something of it. Instead, Maestro is kind of a half-breed between a biopic and a slice-of-life, by-the-numbers marriage drama.

The film begins in the Bohemian art world of the early-to-mid 1950s New York—crummy lofts, people engaging in ways of life that went against the grain of the time, etc. We see Bernstein being called, last minute, to conduct the New York Philharmonic due to the principal conductor being sick. This moment gave Bernstein a name and gave him a long career. From there, we see him seemingly revoke his obvious bisexuality in favor of a married life with Felicia, only to spend much of his married life trying to be what he really was and neglecting that bond.

The film goes to great lengths to show Lenny’s love for Felicia—especially in its prologue and in the later scenes where he remains by her side as she dies of cancer. It is a true story, and interesting in some ways, but it is not unique and the film does nothing in terms of offering us what it could have—a biopic of the caliber of Taylor Hackford’s Ray, that has narrative drive, seamless portrayals, and a real exploration of its subject. I didn’t know Bernstein before, I don’t know him now, and it’s clear Cooper didn’t know him either. So, with Maestro, he took the easy way out.

If I were to pretend Maestro is a biopic of Bernstein, it would be a strange one, even if Felicia were not a character in it. We see Bernstein composing music for Jerome Robbins’ ballet Fancy Free (which would be adapted as the musical On the Town). We see Bernstein conducting a choir singing “Make Our Garden Grow” from Candide, perhaps the most beautiful finale for a musical ever written. We see Bernstein finish and attend the premiere of his MASS: A Theatre Piece for Singers, Players, and Dancers, which was commissioned by Jackie Kennedy for the opening of the Kennedy Center and represented the moment his compositions became too unwieldy and eclectic for anyone to control. We see him teaching conducting to young people.

It is as if Cooper has taken his cue from Miloš Forman’s Man on the Moon, another biopic that misses the mark by simply showing the “greatest hits” of Andy Kaufman’s career—lovingly reenacted by Jim Carrey, but to what end? Both these films suffer for that choice because, if we wanted to see Bernstein conducting Gustav Mahler’s “Resurrection Symphony” at Ely Cathedral, we could do that very easily on Youtube. We would be getting the real thing and not a reenactment.

All these scenes of Bernstein’s career moments are perversely long, as are some ponderous shots of Bernstein’s monologuing while being interviewed by various reporters. I don’t blame cinematographer Matthew Libatique or editor Michelle Tesoro for these dreadful, plodding shots, but Cooper. Cooper’s acting talent so outshines his chops as a director that you wonder why he bothers getting behind the camera.

But you have to remember: actors are not stupid. They know the Academy is composed mostly of actors and actors-turned-directors (such as Robert Redford and Kevin Costner) tend to win Best Director (often on their first attempts) because another actor in the Academy will want to win it and be successful when they take up the directing reins. It’s a vicious cycle because often those films don’t hold up even five years after their release. In short, they win for the wrong reasons.

Cooper’s likeness and voice are so like Bernstein’s, you might think he’s using documentary footage. But I hesitate to say his Lenny never really comes to life. When Jaime Foxx (perhaps the most talented man in Hollywood) played Ray Charles, he was not impersonating or giving us a Saturday Night Live impression; he became the man in a respectful way that still showed warts and all. Cooper, through focusing on Felicia’s story (he co-wrote the film with Josh Singer) and taking the “greatest hits” route, undercuts his own performance. It is a brilliant likeness—a more-than-fine impression—but it’s not a fully-developed performance, something we expect from Cooper, even when he appears in stinkers.

Since the film is Mulligan’s, it would be perhaps best to review her performance. It is earnest and professional—she has the right transatlantic accent and grace—but it is not, on the whole, truly good. By devoting so much wasted time on Lenny’s activities, none of which reveal anything about the man we didn’t already know, Cooper lets Mulligan down. We keep coming back to her as she gets more and more depressed, only to watch her die in great pain and the film ends with what we might think of as Lenny’s memory of her, young and in full bloom in 1950s Manhattan. But it is ultimately a thankless part—no more or less good than something that could be shown on basic cable. It was a painful marriage for the actual woman, to be sure, but bitterness is its only flavor. What we have here are two people who never really knew each other.

So, what are we left with? Scenes of an unwieldy genius engaging with what was, perhaps, his only true love (music). Scenes of domestic disturbance and a wife waking up to realization upon realization. And, in between, scenes that move the plot nowhere. It is a great missed opportunity. Bernstein’s life was his music—and the film makes this clear except we get only brief cameos of people very important in his musical development.

The film is shot partly in black and white and partly in color. It is as if Cooper has distilled into one project all the elements that tend to make award-voters giddy. But, like American Hustle (another Cooper vehicle), it is a film only a critic could love—one that is so enraptured with award-winning fads that they forget to take a closer look to see what is there. What is there is not nothing—there are individual moments that are interesting—it is only what is not there that is heartbreaking. Was this a grand design? Was I meant to feel this way walking out of the movie, with all its ambiguity and silence? If so, I don’t appreciate it.

Steven Spielberg was one of the producers of the film. One gleans from this that he fell in love with Bernstein while directing his equally lopsided version of West Side Story and wished to share more of Bernstein with the world. If only he and Cooper had, there might have been something more than a domestic tragedy in the lives of the rich and famous.

If Maestro wins Oscars, and I doubt it will, it will be for the wrong reasons. It will be some vindication for a star’s effort, or a sympathy vote for Mulligan’s character, or simply for some of the technical virtuosity in its makeup design. A better title would have been Fragments and fragments of a life seldom make a great movie experience. In this case, it would be better to watch a lecture of Bernstein’s or listen to some of his music or, frankly, almost anything else. Which makes the film, in the end, dispensable. Bernstein didn’t deserve that. Cooper doesn’t. Mulligan doesn’t. One only hopes Cooper could try directing other actors in his next picture to see if he has anything more to offer than tired plots with some fancy photography.

Maestro

Directed by Bradley Cooper

Screenplay by Bradley Cooper and Josh Singer

Produced by Fred Berner, Bradley Cooper, Amy Durning, Kristie Macosko Krieger, Martin Scorcese, and Steven Spielberg

Music by Leonard Bernstein

Cinematography by Matthew Libatique

Editing by Michelle Tesoro

Carey Mulligan as Felicia Montealegre

Bradley Cooper as Leonard Bernstein

Sarah Silverstein as Shirley Bernstein