The New Biographical Dictionary of Film: Completely Updated and Expanded (360 page)

The third is what might happen to that same toughie if
Boys Town
had expelled him:
Baby Face Nelson
(57, Don Siegel), the manic, destructive response of the runt against a pig society. The little man with a tommy gun as big as himself, his innocence diverted into slaughter.
Nelson
is a classic gangster movie, made by a master of the form, but achieving a fearful poetry because of Rooney’s seizure of part of his own appalling destiny.

2. By 1935, when MGM put him under proper contract, Rooney had made twenty films, dozens of shorts and serials. From the age of seven onward, he had never been out of work, originally under the name of Mickey McGuire.

3. At MGM, he endeared himself to Louis B. Mayer, who saw in Rooney the embodiment of the amiable American boy who stands for family, humbug, and sentiment. Such wholesome and homely virtues were celebrated on screen through a sweatshop labor system that left permanent wounds on Rooney and his costar, Judy Garland. Yet, on screen, has there ever been so exhilarating a portrait of such garishly innocent teenage energy? Garland’s crackup was public, maudlin, and tragic. Rooney’s has been none the less, but it has never been pathetic. There is an American way, between the tragic and the certifiably insane, a constant raising of gear to no effect, that Rooney has road-tested.

4. The basis of that all-American dream and private nightmare was Andy Hardy, begun in 1937 with
A Family Affair
. Andy became Rooney: cheeky, naughty, improvisational, immensely talented as mime, dancer, comic, singer, and ham. But he lacked all the roots that Mayer tried to cultivate. He was not the true native product, but a Madison Avenue cuckoo dropped into the nest, able to refer only to a set of consumer rules whereby family feelings and youthful ideals were all part of a package description.

5. From 1938 to 1944, Rooney was one of the most popular stars in the world. He acted, he sang, he danced, and still he seemed impatient. He excelled not just in thirteen Andy Hardy films, but in musicals, sentimental comedies, and those subtle apologias for American coarseness in which he made fun of the priggish Freddie Bartholomew. This was the period in which, aged fifteen to twenty-five, Rooney made forty-three pictures, the best part of $10 million, won a special Oscar, and was married to and divorced by Ava Gardner. The films, or a selection from them:
Reckless
(35, Victor Fleming);
Ah, Wilderness!
(35, Clarence Brown);
Little Lord Fauntleroy
(36, John Cromwell);
The Devil Is a Sissy
(36, W. S. Van Dyke);
Captains Courageous
(37, Fleming);
Slave Ship
(37, Tay Garnett);
Thoroughbreds Don’t Cry
(37, Alfred E. Green);
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
(39, Richard Thorpe);
Babes in Arms
(39, Busby Berkeley);
Young Tom Edison
(40, Taurog);
Strike Up the Band
(40, Berkeley);
Babes on Broadway
(41, Berkeley);
A Yank at Eton
(42, Taurog);
The Human Comedy
(43, Brown);
Girl Crazy
(43, Taurog);
Thousands
Cheer
(43, George Sidney); and
National Velvet
(44, Brown).

6. In 1944, Andy Rooney went to war. When he returned, the skids were put under him. Of course, they had always been built in to the career MGM made for him. Part of Rooney’s great appeal was the way fame had come to someone unequipped to deal with it. He had been made the center of a huge fantasy. But now his time was up. In four years after the war he made five films at MGM—including one more Andy Hardy,
Killer McCoy
(47, Roy Rowland),
Summer Holiday
(47, Rouben Mamoulian), and
Words and Music
(48, Taurog), in which he played Lorenz Hart.

7. By 1949 he was freelance. Aged twenty-nine, he looked like an eighteen-year-old rejuvenation of someone fifty-five years old. He had been used to vast salaries, great praise, and constant humoring of his crazy whims. All were withdrawn.

The glib consequence is easy to script. But Rooney scorned it. He had made many bouncy, energetic good pictures. He would now make almost as many tawdry, bad pictures. There have been exceptions, like
Baby Face Nelson
, although that was a disaster in project, rescued against odds by the concurrence of Siegel and Rooney and some inspired supporting playing. So Rooney became a dreadful joke, the chronic accumulation of divorces and more dreadful credits than any other actor.

In his early fifties, he looked like a teenager trying to play the part of middle age. His energy remained; his sentimentality was violent; his vulgarity as emotional as ever. He cried out for inventive casting—such as his 1970 Broadway playing of W. C. Fields. A sudden magnificence would add a characteristic incongruity to his list of B pictures and broken-backed first features:
The Fireball
(50, Garnett);
My Outlaw Brother
(51, Elliott Nugent);
Sound Off
(52, Richard Quine);
All Ashore
(53, Quine); excellent in
Drive a Crooked Road
(54, Quine);
A Slight Case of Larceny
(53, Don Weis);
The Atomic Kid
(54, Leslie H. Martinson);
The Bridges at Toko-Ri
(55, Mark Robson);
The Bold and the Brave
(56, Lewis R. Foster); the driving force for the teeming comedy of
Operation Madball
(57, Quine); brilliant on TV’s
Playhouse 90
in Rod Serling’s
The Comedian
(57, John Frankenheimer);
Andy Hardy Comes Home
(58, Howard W. Koch);
The Last Mile
(59, Koch);
Platinum High School
(59, Albert Zugsmith);
The Private Life of Adam and Eve
(60, Zugsmith);
King of the Roaring Twenties
(61, Joseph M. Newman); grotesque as the Japanese in
Breakfast at Tiffany’s
(61, Blake Edwards);
Requiem for a Heavyweight
(62, Ralph Nelson);
It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World
(63, Stanley Kramer);
The Secret Invasion
(63, Roger Corman);
The Extraordinary Seaman
(68, Frankenheimer);
Skidoo
(68, Otto Preminger);
80 Steps to Jonah
(69, Gerd Oswald); and
Pulp
(72, Mike Hodges).

8. A suggestion: Fool to Orson Welles’s Lear in a version adapted so that the two are revealed to be long-lost twins. No, no one has ever seen that movie—but there are other Welles projects as farfetched and as hard to discover. I believe in this film; I can see it.

9. Rooney had a Broadway success in the late seventies in
Sugar Babies
. He was not just good as the trainer in
The Black Stallion
(79, Carroll Ballard), he was the engine for the second half of that film—nominated as supporting actor, but Melvyn Douglas won in
Being There
. Thereafter, Rooney has done
Arabian Adventures
(79, Kevin Connor);
My Kidnapper, My Love
(80, Sam Wanamaker);
Leave ’em Laughing
(80, Jackie Cooper); winning an Emmy as a retarded man in
Bill
(81, Anthony Page);
Bill: On His Own
(83, Page);
It Came Upon a Midnight Clear
(84, Peter H. Hunt);
Lightning, the White Stallion
(86, William A. Levey); as an agent in
The Return of Mickey Spillane’s Mike Hammer
(86, Ray Danton);
Bluegrass
(88, Simon Wincer);
Erik the Viking
(89, Terry Jones); and
My Heroes Have Always Been Cowboys
(91, Stuart Rosenberg).

10. There are, allegedly, homes for retired actors, as well as Guild pension schemes. At the same time, Rooney is now at ninety—and he may well earn no residuals on his famous pictures; after all, they were done before actors came in for profit participation. So the chances are he is close to broke, and on the edge—where he has always been—which may account for the following:
La Vida Láctea
(92, Juan Estelrich Jr.);
Sweet Justice
(92, Allen Plone);
Silent Night, Deadly Night 5
(92, Martin Kitrosser);
Maximum Force
(92, Joseph Merhi);
The Legend of Wolf Mountain
(92, Craig Clyde);
Revenge of the Red Baron
(94, Robert Gordon);
Making Waves
(94, George Saunders);
Killing Midnight
(97, Alexander J. Dorsey);
Boys Will Be Boys
(97, Dom De Luise);
Animals
(97, Michael Di Jiacomo);
Michael Kael Contra le World News Company
(98, Christophe Smith) The list goes on. Are we meant to believe it? Or is this list an encrypted guide to the end of the world? …
Phantom of the Megaplex
(00, Blair Treu);
Night at the Museum
(06, Shawn Levy).

Francesco Rosi
, b. Naples, Italy, 1922
1952:
Camicie Rosse
(completed by Rosi after the work of Goffredo Alessandrini and Franco Rossi). 1957:
Kean
(codirected with Vittorio Gassmann). 1958:
La Sfida
. 1959:
I Magliari
. 1960:
Sicilia 43/60
(d). 1962:
Salvatore Giuliano
. 1963:
Le Mani Sulla Citta
. 1965:
I Momento della Verita
. 1967:
C’Era una Volta/Cinderella, Italian Style
. 1970:
Uomini Contro
. 1972:
Il Caso Mattei
. 1973:
Lucky Luciano; Cadaveri Eccellenti/Illustrious Corpses
. 1979:
Cristo si e Fermato a Eboli/Christ
Stopped at Eboli
. 1981:
Tre Fratelli/Three Brothers
. 1984:
Bizet’s Carmen
. 1987:
Cronaca di una Morte Annunciata/Chronicle of a Death Foretold
. 1990:
Di Menticare Palermo
. 1992:
Diario Napoletano
. 1996:
La Tregua/The Truce
.

Rosi’s career illustrates the difficulty an Italian director has in pursuing native material rather than opting for the various international styles of Antonioni, Fellini, or de Sica. His early promise seemed fully justified with
Salvatore Giuliano
, a film that rejected the easy heroic spectacle and insisted on a Rossellini-like exploration of environment and objectivity. The “story” of the film emerges only grudgingly from a documentary account of the peasantry. It is an austere, committed model that makes most mafiosi movies seem very superficial. It carried on the careful sense of place and social context of
La Sfida
and
I Magliari
and spoke for the young man who had assisted Visconti on
La Terra Trema
(48) and
Bellissima
(51) and Antonioni on
I Vinti
(53). After
Giuliano
, Rosi took on an ambitious study of urban corruption, but with the frail insurance of Rod Steiger in the lead role. After that, he could not escape cliché in his Spanish bullfighting movie, and then abandoned his own character for Carlo Ponti’s frothy Cinderella story.
Il Caso Mattei
is a good version of an Italian cause célèbre, but
Lucky Luciano
is the more marketable aspect of
Giuliano
.

The Truce
is a remarkable picture, based on Primo Levi’s autobiography covering the years after his release from Auschwitz. John Turturro plays the lead, and the film was one more measure of both the humanism and the complex political sensibility in Rosi. There are not many masters as little known outside their own countries.

Herbert Ross
(1927–2001), b. New York
1969:
Goodbye, Mr. Chips
. 1970:
The Owl and the Pussycat
. 1971:
T. R. Baskin
. 1972:
Play It Again, Sam
. 1973:
The Last of Sheila
. 1975:
Funny Lady; The Sunshine Boys
. 1976:
The Seven Per Cent Solution
. 1977:
The Goodbye Girl; The Turning Point
. 1978:
California Suite
. 1980:
Nijinsky
. 1981:
I Ought to Be in Pictures; Pennies from Heaven
. 1982:
Max Dugan Returns
. 1984:
Footloose; Protocol
. 1987:
Dancers; The Secret of My Success
. 1989:
Steel Magnolias
. 1990:
My Blue Heaven
. 1991:
True Colors
. 1993:
Undercover Blues
. 1995:
Boys on the Side
.

One way of trying to pin down the elusive, if not phantom, Ross is to track his recurring working ties: with producer Ray Stark
—The Owl and the Pussycat, Funny Lady, The Sunshine Boys, The Goodbye Girl, California Suite
, and
Steel Magnolias;
with writer Neil Simon
—The Sunshine Boys, The Goodbye Girl, California Suite, I Ought to Be in Pictures
, and
Max Dugan Returns;
and with Nora Kaye, the dancer and choreographer, as well as wife and ally until her death in 1987. Kaye’s influence and her life story were especially strongly felt on
The Turning Point
, which was nominated for best picture and best direction.

Now,
The Turning Point
always struck me as dire and unintentionally comic. Nor do I admire Ross’s
Pennies from Heaven
as much as some critics—it seemed to me cumbersome and hollow next to Dennis Potter’s original. But, still, Ross has had hits with
Steel Magnolias, The Secret of My Success, Footloose, California Suite, The Goodbye Girl
, and Woody Allen’s
Play It Again, Sam
.

He was a dancer and choreographer who came into movies as dance director on
Carmen Jones
(54, Otto Preminger);
Doctor Dolittle
(67, Richard Fleischer); and
Funny Girl
(68, William Wyler). His own more serious studies of dance—like
The Turning Point, Nijinsky
, and
Dancers
—are somehow less energetic or pleasing than the absurd but appealing
Footloose
. Without dance, Ross has an airy comic touch and a way with theatrical performance that often conceals the shallow, sexless quality of his people.