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PAINTING INDIFFERENCE Who admits to having seen Josh Logan’s Paint Your Wagon when released as a roadshow? Do you believe any of your friends if they say they actually sat through all of it when on the box? Fessing up: I’ve never been able to. When aired on Encore so frequently as to be virtually impossible not to complete a viewing, the guess of how much I managed to see in multiple efforts is maybe 75%, including the conclusion which remains a persistent blur in memory. The sounds of Lee Marvin and Clint Eastwood singing and Jean Seberg trying to (and dubbed by Anita Gordon without screen credit) compels the need to convict them and Logan of aesthetic crime. (A good ear wonders if “I Still See Elisa” and “I Talk to the Trees” have the voice of Jack Jones secretly mixed in; if Eastwood admits to the deception, he’s spared execution.) Logan’s South Pacific is, over all, a worse musical yet nothing compares to the apathy of Paint Your Wagon. Dumbfounding this time out is his musical sense went hollow; recording in-studio chorus numbers lacking any vital connection with the exteriors, they’re like going to a Big Bear Valley concert and wearing a Bose headset. His Camelot has vacuous moments too but not at this level, perhaps validating the stories of producer Alan Jay Lerner frequently countermanding the director, whose ups and downs in behavior on set would later be diagnosed as bipolarity. Reportedly, Marvin was inebriated throughout much of filming, thus the excessive loudness in his performance. But what explains his “Wanderin’ Star” becoming a number one hit on the UK charts? Whatever the answer, it’s probably related to the nearly 20 month roadshow run in London. According to author Gary Carey in All the Stars in Heaven, Louis B. Mayer, after leaving MGM, accquired the rights to this already lackluster Lerner-Loewe musical in 1952, with the intention of bringing it to the screen as the first fictional Cinerama production, with Spencer Tracy its singing star. Paramount, the studio eventually spending $20 million dollars on what Ethan Mordden in The Hollywood Musical describes as the “first all-talking, no-singing, no-dancing musical,” joined in the original bidding, wanting to make it with Bing Crosby. Winning two Oscars for his work in Camelot, John Truscott is back as lavish designer creating an impressive No Name City on location at Wallona National Forest near Baker, Oregon, taking seven months to build. In order to receive permits, the entire town had to be dismantled, re its scripted destruction. Pleasant opening titles by Donald Stone Martin. Paddy Chayefsky was hired as adapter and then fired by Lerner, who claimed the adaption was without any musical construct. Logan’s swan song. In Panavision, with 70mm blowup. (Opening 10/29/1969 at the UA Cinema in Oak Brook, running 20 weeks.) Oscar nomination: best musical score, original or adaptation (Nelson Riddle). ROLL OVER IMAGE
Text COPYRIGHT © 2002 RALPH BENNER All Rights Reserved. |
