Ask Mick LaSalle:
Captain Spaulding’s strange interlude in ‘Animal Crackers.’
Dear Mick: Alas, no mention of Captain Spaulding’s strange interlude in “Animal Crackers.”
Peter Delacorte, San Francisco Dear Peter: You’re referring to an earlier question someone asked about whether the weird use of voice-over, found in the 1932 film adaptation of “Strange Interlude,” was ever repeated. Groucho Marx satirized “Strange Interlude” in “Animal Crackers” (1930), but he was satirizing the play, which had closed on Broadway the year before. If you think about it, that’s pretty fascinating to realize. After all, who goes to Broadway shows? Wealthy and upper-middleclass people who either live in or visit New York City. That’s it. So Groucho was satirizing something that the overwhelming majority of people couldn’t have seen, and he was relying on his ability to make it funny anyway. It reminds you how very New Yorkish those early Marx Brothers movies were. “Animal Crackers” not only started its existence on the Broadway stage, but was filmed in Paramount’s Astoria, Queens, studio. There’s an insular quality about it that makes the movie, though eternally appealing, very much of its time and place. Dear Mick: As an ardent cinephile, I am often drawn to great movie monologues. For example, Robert Shaw’s description of his shark experience on the USS Indianapolis in “Jaws.” Do you have any favorites?
Rich Merrill, Scotts Valley Dear Rich: The first that comes to mind is Edward G. Robinson’s monologue at the end of “Two Seconds” (1932). It’s available on DVD from the Warner Archive, but you can also see the movie at the Stanford Theatre in Palo Alto from Sept. 30 through Oct. 2. It’s an unbroken take that goes on for almost three minutes, in which he explains to a judge that he shouldn’t be given the electric chair for killing his evil cheating wife. By his reasoning, he should have gotten it before he killed his wife, because then he was a rat, and now he’s a man. The idea is that he’s pretty much off his rocker, that he’s been driven crazy, and it’s a remarkable spectacle — very grand scale and yet precise, not overdone in the slightest, just brilliant, bravura acting. I didn’t fully appreciate Robinson — I thought of him as someone you watch when James Cagney isn’t available — until I started immersing myself for a book I was writing. I saw about two Robinson movies a day for a week and came away really impressed by his sensitivity and subtlety. I also came away compulsively imitating him, see? For a while, see? It took a few days to get over it, see? I wasn’t much fun to live with. Good morning, Mick: In your article on stage-to-screen adaptations, you write: “Viola Davis (in ‘Fences’), whose performance will be studied for the next 50 years.” Whose performances over the past 50 years should we be studying in the same way?
Paul Sheinfeld, Novato Good morning, Paul: There are too many in the last 50 years. Let’s narrow it to the last decade, an incomplete list, in no particular order: Michelle Pfeiffer in “Cheri,” Jake Gyllenhaal in “Southpaw,” George Clooney in “Michael Clayton,” Rachel Weisz in “Deep Blue Sea,” Jennifer Jason Leigh in “The Hateful Eight,” Christoph Waltz in “Inglourious Basterds,” Isabelle Huppert in “Elle,” Tom Hanks in “Captain Phillips,” Dennis Quaid in “At Any Price,” Sandrine Bonnaire in “Intimate Strangers,” Gene Jones in “The Sacrament,” Adèle Exarchopoulos in “Blue Is the Warmest Color,” Kate Winslet in “Revolutionary Road,” Mickey Rourke in “The Wrestler,” Kristin Scott Thomas in “I’ve Loved You So Long,” Keri Russell in “Waitress,” Casey Affleck in “The Assassination of Jesse James,” Evan Rachel Wood in “The Life Before Her Eyes,” Philip Seymour Hoffman in “Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead,” Carmen Ejogo in “Sparkle,” Cate Blanchett in “Blue Jasmine” ... but we’re talking about the future, so who knows? They may decide that great screen acting didn’t really begin until Ryan Reynolds in “Deadpool,” and that everything before that landmark was garbage. The future has all kinds of nutty ideas.
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