The New Biographical Dictionary of Film: Completely Updated and Expanded (221 page)

Yet, elsewhere, in a very different mood, she had shown herself a real actress in both parts of
The Godfather
, so good that it was distressing to hear her conventional complaint that the men in it had all the big scenes. Her Kay is crucial to Coppola’s overall vision, and good enough to stir one with thoughts of how the romantic despair that watches the Corleones’ murderous conservatism could have been pierced with a positive alternative. Keaton’s Kay is a grim, hurt face forever being shut out of family conclaves. She comes to realize that she has been hired for breeding, and she goes through with separation from her children to maintain her sense of values. The movie might have abandoned Puzo’s original and given her the dignity of action: taking her own children and daring the ultimate revenge from her self-pitying fascist husband. But that would have needed the Rossellini who made so much of Ingrid Bergman’s spirit in
Europa ’51
.

That the possibility lay there waiting was due to Keaton’s humble gravity. If you want to talk about acting, look again at that early scene when Michael tells her about the way in which Johnny Fontane got his freedom from the bandleader who had him under contract. The gangster gloss of “an offer he couldn’t refuse,” and the heartless cynicism pleased with its own deadpan in “your signature or your brains on the contract,” are shattered by the naïve bewilderment and loving distress in Keaton’s face. That scene is the touchstone of her performance, which contains all the mature, humane moments allowed into the dark fortress of
The Godfather
.

She tried hard to be a serious, brave actress in
Looking for Mr. Goodbar
(77, Richard Brooks), but she lacked the force of need or the recklessness that role called for. There are a few silly marking-time movies on her list:
Lovers and Other Strangers
(70, Cy Howard);
Harry and Walter Go to New York
(76, Mark Rydell); and
I Will, I Will, For Now
(76, Norman Panama). She followed Allen meekly into the starched anguish of Interiors (78), and she did a good character study in
Manhattan
(79). But it was time for another male influence.

She gave her finest performance as Louise Bryant in
Reds
(81, Beatty). It was a bizarre decision, when the best actress Oscar went instead to Katharine Hepburn in
On Golden Pond
—worthy, but hardly a match for the complex portrait of lover, heroine, feminist, and weary companion to a celebrity that Keaton (and Beatty) made of Bryant. She was touching as the wife in
Shoot the Moon
(82, Alan Parker), but she did not really grasp the actress-terrorist-lover called for in
The Little Drummer Girl
(84, George Roy Hill).
Mrs. Soffel
(84, Gillian Armstrong) was a great improvement: her own sense of mischief helped bring the prison governor’s wife into erotic flowering, and she seemed to impress Mel Gibson.

Since then, there has been a gradual decline:
Crimes of the Heart
(87, Bruce Beresford); lovely but all too brief singing “You’d Be So Nice to Come Home To” in
Radio Days
(87, Allen). She directed a whimsical documentary,
Heaven
(87), which hardly had the muscle required for a full-length film, as well as an episode of
Twin Peaks
and a cable movie,
Wildflower
(91).
Baby Boom
(87, Charles Shyer) was very soft stuff, with Keaton as a businesswoman who inherits a baby, and gets everything in the end: rural life, success, happiness, and Sam Shepard. In
The Good Mother
(88, Leonard Nimoy), she found belated sexual fulfillment, too. Then she did
The Lemon Sisters
(90, Joyce Chopra); returned one more time—and without much reward—as Kay in
The Godfather Part III
(90, Coppola);
Father of the Bride
(91, Shyer), in which she had very little to do;
Running Mates
(92, Michael Lindsay-Hogg); replacing Mia Farrow and very funny in
Manhattan Murder Mystery
(93, Allen); and for TV as
Amelia Earhart
(94, Yves Simoneau).

She did more work as a director in the nineties, and
Wildflower
and
Unstrung Heroes
showed real progress and warmth, though
Mother’s Helper
was hardly released. As an actress, she was in
Father of the Bride Part II
(95, Shyer);
The First Wives Club
(96, Hugh Wilson);
Marvin’s Room
(96, Jerry Zaks);
The Only Thrill
(97, Peter Masterson);
The Other Sister
(99, Garry Marshall); in her own
Hanging Up
(00); strictly for nostalgia in
Town & Country
(01, Peter Chelsom);
Sister Mary Explains It All
(01, Marshall Brickman);
Plan B
(01, Greg Yaitanes), a short;
Crossed Over
(02, Bobby Roth);
On Thin Ice
(03, David Attwood); and a huge personal success in
Something’s Gotta Give
(03, Nancy Meyers);
The Family Stone
(05, Thomas Bezucha);
Surrender Dorothy
(06, Charles McDougall);
Because I Said So
(07, Michael Lehmann);
Mama’s Boy
(07, Tim Hamilton);
Smother
(08, Vince Di Meglio);
Mad Money
(08, Callie Khouri).

Michael Keaton
(Douglas), b. Coraopolis, Pennsylvania, 1951
Michael Keaton is a star: he has played Batman; he is on magazine covers; he does unexpected cameos in big pictures. Even his real name is a star’s name. Yet who is he? What is he really like? Do we care? Of all the Batmen he was the most recessive, and he seemed to have come by it honestly. Am I alone in remembering above all his nasty, manic roles, as if they caught his interest most fully? There’s a dark, comic urge in there—it could be quite dangerous; it might have been Ripley, even—but somehow neither he nor the business has quite trusted it yet.

He dropped out of Kent State and did a lot of odd jobs, including comedy, before he took on acting: in a big debut in
Night Shift
(82, Ron Howard); another hit with
Mr. Mom
(83, Stan Dragoti);
Johnny Dangerously
(84, Amy Heckerling);
Gung Ho
(86, Howard);
Touch and Go
(86, Robert Mandel); as a con man in
The Squeeze
(87, Roger Young); very energetic in
Beetlejuice
(88, Tim Burton); his best acting as the addict in
Clean and Sober
(88, Glenn Gordon Caron);
Batman
(89, Burton)—masked, no matter whether he’s wearing a mask or not.

As a crazy on the loose in
Dream Team
(89, Howard Zieff); nearly revealed as the madman in
Pacific Heights
(90, John Schlesinger);
One Good Cop
(91, Heywood Gould);
Batman Returns
(92, Burton), where he is upstaged by Michelle Pfeiffer;
Much Ado About Nothing
(93, Kenneth Branagh), where his Dogberry is out of control; the dying man in
My Life
(93, Bruce Joel Rubin);
The Paper
(94, Howard); with Geena Davis in
Speechless
(94, Ron Underwood); cloned in
Multiplicity
(96, Harold Ramis); narrator on
Inventing the Abbotts
(97, Pat O’Connor);
Jackie Brown
(97, Quentin Tarantino); the convict in
Desperate Measures
(98, Barbet Schroeder); an unbilled cameo in
Out of Sight
(98, Steven Soderbergh); back from the dead as a snowman in
Jack Frost
(98, Troy Miller);
A Shot at Glory
(00, Michael Corrente);
Quicksand
(01, John Mackenzie);
Live from Baghdad
(02, Mick Jackson);
First Daughter
(04, Forest Whitaker).

His career took a dive with the superhuman thriller,
White Noise
(05, Geoffrey Sax). This had nothing to do with the Don DeLillo book, yet DeLillo did write Keaton’s next picture,
Game 6
(05, Michael Hoffman). He did
Herbie: Fully Loaded
(05, Angela Robinson); a voice on
Cars
(06, John Lasseter and Joe Ranft);
The Last Time
(06, Michael Caleo);
The Merry Gentleman
(09), which Keaton directed, after Ron Lazzeretti had fallen ill;
Post Grad
(09, Vicky Jenson).

Ruby Keeler
(1909–93), b. Halifax, Canada
Considering that she made only eleven films, it is odd that Ruby Keeler is so widely remembered as the pert, dancing sweetheart of Warners musicals of the 1930s. By the standards of Charisse, Rogers, Eleanor Powell, Vera-Ellen, Ann Miller, and Debbie Reynolds, she was an ordinary girl. (Indeed, talent was never her thing.) But her naïveté did slot into Dick Powell’s lewdness and express the quick innuendo of the period. A chorus girl/dancer, in 1928 she married Al Jolson. After starring for Ziegfeld she got the part of the girl who substitutes for the injured Bebe Daniels in the backstage musical
42nd Street
(33, Lloyd Bacon). The same slightly bemused parts were provided by
Gold Diggers of 1933
(33, Mervyn Le Roy) in which Powell takes a can opener to her metal costume;
Footlight Parade
(33, Bacon);
Dames
(34, Ray Enright);
Flirtation Walk
(34, Frank Borzage);
Go Into Your Dance
(35, Archie Mayo)—the only film she made with Jolson;
Shipmates Forever
(35, Borzage);
Colleen
(36, Alfred E. Green); and
Ready, Willing and Able
(37, Enright). When Jolson quit Warners, she went with him and floundered:
Mother Carey’s Chickens
(38, Rowland V. Lee) was an RKO disaster. In 1941, after divorce, she made
Sweetheart of the Campus
(Edward Dmytryk) and then retired.

In 1971 she reclaimed her dancing shoes and appeared on Broadway in a very successful revival of
No, No, Nanette
.

William Keighley
(1893–1984), b. Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
1932:
The Match King
(codirected with Howard Bretherton); 1933:
Ladies They Talk About
(codirected with Bretherton);
Easy to Love
. 1934:
Journal of a Crime; Dr. Monica; Big-Hearted Herbert; The Kansas City Princess; Babbitt
. 1935:
The Right to Live; G Men; Mary Jane’s Pa; Special Agent; Stars Over Broadway
. 1936:
The Singing Kid; The Green Pastures
(codirected with Marc Connelly);
Bullets or Ballots; God’s Country and the Woman
. 1937:
The Prince and the Pauper; Varsity Show
. 1938:
The Adventures of Robin Hood
(codirected with Michael Curtiz);
Valley of the Giants; The Secrets of an Actress; Brother Rat
. 1939:
Yes, My Darling Daughter; Each Dawn I Die
. 1940:
The Fighting 69th; Torrid Zone; No Time for Comedy
. 1941:
Four Brothers; The Bride Came C.O.D
. 1942:
The Man Who Came to Dinner; George Washington Slept Here
. 1947:
Honeymoon
. 1948:
The Street With No Name
. 1950:
Rocky Mountain
. 1951:
Close to My Heart
. 1953:
The Master of Ballantrae
.

Keighley was never more than one of Warners’ second-string directors. There is not much doubt about who is responsible for the flair of
Robin Hood;
Keighley’s handling of Errol Flynn in, say,
The Prince and the Pauper, Rocky Mountain
, or
The Master of Ballantrae
is very pedestrian compared with Curtiz’s panache. The one genre in which he matched the studio’s standards was the thriller adventure.
Torrid Zone
is a good pairing of Cagney and Ann Sheridan in a banana republic, while
Each Dawn I Die
moves at great speed and even brings George Raft to life in the prison sequence.
Bullets or Ballots
is another racy piece of urban slaughter and conniving, without depth but sure of its pace. He was less happy with comedy and made a dull Bette Davis picture
—The Bride Came C.O.D
.—although
George Washington Slept Here
was one of Jack Benny’s better pictures and
The Man Who Came to Dinner
is an amusing transposition of Monty Woolley’s great stage success (with Davis, again, lost in a dowdy role).

Keighley came to the movies late. He was an actor and director in the theatre before he worked as assistant director to William Dieterle on
Jewel Robbery
(32) and
Scarlet Dawn
(32), and to Curtiz on
The Cabin in the Cotton
(32). He stayed with Warners until
Honeymoon
—with a subadult Shirley Temple at RKO—and
The Street With No Name
, at Fox. But he returned to Warners and made three more pictures before retiring.

Harvey Keitel
, b. Brooklyn, New York, 1939
There are few American actors whose careers are so intriguing—or so touching. Imagine a film about Harvey Keitel, the actor so good, so persistent, yet so regularly denied at the highest table; ceaseless in his fury, his bitterness, forever hurtling forward in that cold, determined aura that is a mix of menace and resentment. What a role! And probably De Niro would get it.

When Keitel began in pictures, he was Martin Scorsese’s “made man.” He was out of the Actors’ Studio, he was brilliant, New York, and he was Jewish. Yet he had the lead in
Who’s That Knocking at My Door
(68, Scorsese) and he was the central figure, Charlie, in
Mean Streets
(73, Scorsese)—Italian, Catholic—who faces the moral dilemma of whether to carry or abandon the out-of-control Johnny Boy (De Niro). Keitel was magnificent, but even then there were moments when he had nothing to do but survey, in grief or bewilderment, the mercurial leaps and departures of De Niro’s character. As befitted
Mean Streets
, Keitel’s face became sadder and older. And Keitel had recommended De Niro.