More Than the Rainbow

The photographers featured throughout Dan Wechsler's More than the Rainbow are a pretty scruffy, competitive bunch, sometimes supportive of one another, but often critical too-—and not just of its main subject, New York City street photog Matt Weber. Julio Mitchell, for instance, says he doesn't find most of Cartier-Bresson's moments decisive—-just trivial. "Maybe that's why he's so popular," he sniffs. Their jostling opinions make for some interesting exchanges, as a handful of photographers, plus a few critics and other tastemakers, talk about things like the merits of film versus digital and the importance of finding one's voice. Most people are interviewed one-on-one by the filmmaker, but segments are edited deftly together to make the film feel like a good conversation, moving seamlessly from one topic to the next with the unselfconscious ease of a good dinner party.

Bringing Up Baby

“In moments of quiet I’m strangely drawn to you, but, well, there haven’t been any quiet moments,” David (Cary Grant) tells Susan (Katharine Hepburn) in Bringing Up Baby. No kidding. This fast-paced farce may be only the second best of Howard Hawks’ collaborations with Grant (the best is His Girl Friday), but it’s a world-class screwball comedy.

Even doing his best tamped-down Harold Lloyd impression as a milquetoast scientist, Grant leaks quarts of the seemingly unself-conscious charm and mordant sarcasm that made him so fascinating. The most versatile and irresistible male actor ever to make romantic comedies, he manages to make himself seem almost ordinary, even awkward for long stretches of time here, but just when you think he’s a wallflower, he finds the funny in straight-man passivity. In one of the movie’s best scenes, David fixates on a terrier during a dinner party, popping up to follow the restless dog out of the room every time he trots off. Susan knows why he’s doing it (the dog buried a bone David needs to complete a brontosaurus skeleton he’s been working on for years), but the hostess and her other guest think his obsession is proof that David is nuts—a “fact” they were convinced of in any case. Grant never breaks character or signals for our sympathy, maintaining the prickly dignity of an aggrieved academic who’s doing his best to maintain his temper. His deadpan expression, stiff posture, and curt responses to the guest who’s trying to engage him in conversation, and the crack timing with which he and the dog enter and exit the room, makes me laugh out loud at what could have been a throwaway bit.

Another reason Grant was great in romantic comedies was that he worked so well with his leading ladies. Hepburn preferred working with Spencer Tracy, but she was at her best with Grant. She sparkles and shines here, in what Peter Bogdanovich calls “the single most likeable performance of her career,” as an eccentric heiress who saves David from himself by falling for him and proceeding to rip his too-careful, too-quiet life to tatters. David resists as long as he can, but Susan is the original irresistible force, the unadulterated dose of chaotic life he needs to free him from his suffocating routines—and fiancée.

Bringing Up Baby was the first in a three-picture run of all-time classics Hepburn and Grant made together (they also made Sylvia Scarlett, but we all make mistakes.) The others were Holiday and The Philadelphia Story, and Hepburn is wonderful in all three, but she’s at her least earnest and most approachable here. The bubble of self-satisfaction that she always seemed to travel in doesn’t melt away altogether—Susan is so accomplished, beautiful, and overflowing with life that David can’t help but fall for her, but she never seems to stop talking long enough to hear a word he says—but it softens and takes on comic overtones. Like Hepburn herself, Susan doesn’t appear to need anyone else, but that’s an illusion. Hepburn can’t quite pull off the scene where Susan cries, asking David to assure her that he doesn’t want to leave. Instead, she convinces us of what she wants the way she always does: by going to work. When we see the single-minded intensity with which she pursues David, we know she’s in love.

Hepburn also shows a vulnerability here that she rarely displayed in other roles. Her Susan makes me wonder what she might have done with another spoiled beauty with a heart of gold, the ditzy diva Carole Lombard had played a few years earlier in Twentieth Century. Lombard made Lily naïve and brattily willful. Hepburn might have given her a carefree confidence that could have been just as funny but less cartoonish, a relatable if often absurd woman rather than an obnoxious overgrown child.

Unfortunately, Baby was the only screwball comedy Hepburn ever made. Audiences didn’t respond well to it on its release, and she was eager to find a persona that people would like and shed her “box-office poison” label. Hawks never made another movie as silly as this one either, having concluded that Baby was a box-office bust because “There were no normal people in it. Everyone you met was a screwball. ”

But the long shots the director set up let his actors set the film’s breakneck pace, and Hepburn and Grant kept it going with seemingly effortless ease, mixing pratfalls with unobtrusive athletics (their famous joint walk out of a formal restaurant after he rips the back of her gown took more skill than you’d think). They’re also great with the verbal pyrotechnics, from fast talk ("There is a leopard on your roof, and it’s my leopard, and I have to get it and to get it I have to sing," Hepburn rattles off at 90 mph to a startled psychiatrist) to repetition (“I’ll be with you in a minute, Mr. Peabody!” David keeps singing out to the stuffy lawyer he’s trying to meet up with), to plain-vanilla comic absurdity (“He just follows me around and fights with me,” Susan says of David, with a sweet mixture of perplexity and pride.)

Hawks’ screenwriters never let the action let up, piling misunderstanding on misunderstanding and absurdity on absurdity. By the time the “baby” of the title, a leopard named Baby sent to Susan by her brother, makes his entrance more than 20 minutes in, inheriting a wildcat is just another minor complication.

Most of the humor in Bringing Up Baby, starting with the title, comes from subverting expectations. Contrary to what audiences of the ‘30s might have been expected to expect about gender roles, David is the nervous, sheltered incompetent and Susan the fearless leader of the two. Grant even thumbs his nose at the rumors that he and longtime roommate Randolph Scott were more than platonic friends, not only putting on a frilly woman’s robe but explaining why by exclaiming: “I’ve gone GAY all of a sudden!” And it’s fun to see the Susan and David head out to hunt for their lost leopard armed only with a butterfly net and a croquet mallet.

Russell Metty’s cinematography is beautiful too, its silvery black-and-white flattering Grant’s dark beauty and the flow of Hepburn’s glittery clothes as she strides through the night. I bet the new 35mm print they’ll be showing at Film Forum will look even better than the DVD I’ve been rewatching in recent years, too—not to mention the VHS tape I used to own.

David Thomson says men and women in Hawks’ films resort to “dazzling battles of word, innuendo, glance, and gesture,” to avoid the moment when flirtation becomes love and a couple starts to stagnate. “In other words,” he writes, “Hawks is at his best in moments when nothing happens beyond people arguing about what might happen or has happened.” That pretty well sums up Baby, in which lot of things happen but none of them matter in the least. None, that is, except the one thing we can predict from the start: that Susan and David will fall in love.

Written for The L Magazine

A Movie a Day, Day 89: His Girl Friday

I hate to be asked what my favorite movie is (how can you pick just one when there are so many great films, which you love for so many different reasons?), but I was asked in an interview a few years ago, so I had to come up with an answer. The one I eventually came up with—His Girl Friday—is still what I'd say if anyone asked. Other movies (not a lot, but some) may be as wonderful as Howard Hawks's brilliant adaptation of The Front Page, but I don't think any others mean quite as much to me personally. So I watched it again this morning, as I have every couple of years since I first saw it in a revival theater in Austin.

That was in the late '70s, a few months after I'd dropped out of college. I was free to a fault then, alienated and untethered, with a pretty good idea of what I was running from but no clue what I was going toward. I hadn't yet found my tribe. Then I walked into His Girl Friday and there it was, a word-drunk world where the only thing worse than hypocrisy and corruption was lacking a sense of humor, where chivalry was nothing but paternalism in a top hat, where you knew Hildy should ditch her dull fiancé for her ex-husband, Walter, because of the sheer joy with which Hildy and Walter duked it out, toe to toe and newspaperman to newspaperman, in a battle of wits they both wound up winning. (Well, that and the fact that Walter is played by Cary Grant, the greatest romantic comedy star the movies have ever produced.) It hit me like a ray of hope for my future beaming straight out of the past—not that there was anything the least bit dated about it, aside from the black-and-white film stock and the references to things like Stalin and "the European war."

I hadn't yet met anyone remotely like the people I saw in the movie, either in life or in the films of the '60s and '70s. More importantly, I'd never seen that exhilaratingly equal a partnership between a man and a woman, or that great an appreciation of a woman's need for—and right to—a career of her own. His Girl Friday told me those things were out there, in scenes like the one where one of Hildy's colleagues reads the story she left in her typewriter while she's out of the press room and then says: "I still say anybody who can write like that ain't gonna give it up permanent to sew socks for someone who works in the insurance business." Amen and hallelujah, brother.

Too smart to mess too much with Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur's original, except to change Hildy to a woman (and cast Roz Russell in the part) and give a romantic spin to the heat between her and the editor who's fighting to keep her, Hawks and screenwriter Charles Lederer give us one of the best-written movies ever filmed, which seems appropriate considering it's a clear-eyed, almost entirely unsentimentalized tribute to the power of the press. No wonder Hawks wanted to remake this story: Walter, Hildy, and their fast-talking colleagues are prototypical Hawksian professionals, people who see things clearly and feel them deeply but always keep the patter light, their cynicism just a smokescreen thrown up to shield tender hearts.

This is not quite a perfect movie. The slightly mawkish scenes with Earl, the death-row prisoner, and his friend Molly verge into the kind of condescension that can be the flip side of liberal-lefty compassion, and the cartoonishly clueless Pettibone (broadly played by Billy Gilbert) who keeps trying to deliver the governor's reprieve for Earl feels as if he was dropped in from another movie.

In both cases, the staginess works against the movie's greatest strength: the emotional authenticity that makes it feel more like a drama than a comedy despite a constant stream of exquisitely funny lines. In the past, I've been struck by how fast people in this movie talk, especially in the scenes with artfully overlapping dialogue (Robert Altman must have loved Hawks). What I noticed more today is how beautifully crafted all that dialogue is. Everyone speaks in his or her own specific voice, and nearly every line advances the story and/or tells us more about the characters.

Other movies may have done talk this well, but I've never seen one do it better.

Written for The House Next Door.

Duplicity

By Elise Nakhnikian

Why don’t we have more screwball comedies these days? It was during the Great Depression that they first flowered in Hollywood and, as a recent Breadlines & Champagne lineup of movies from that era at New York’s Film Forum reminded us, we could use that same kind of smart escapism today.

In her 2007 book, The Star Machine, Jeanine Basinger blamed the lack of modern-day screwball comedies on the talent pool. “It’s not, as everyone supposes, that they can’t write them; it’s that there’s no one to play in them,” she said.

I beg to differ. George Clooney came as close as any mere mortal could to nailing the Cary Grant role in movies like Out of Sight and Ocean’s Eleven, playing an impossibly suave, inhumanly handsome, occasionally larcenous leading man who loves his female costar but doesn’t take anything else all that seriously – including himself. And wouldn't you like to see Will Smith take a break from saving the world, or Robert Downey Jr. take a break from soul-searching intensity, to star in a good screwball comedy?

As for women, how about Amy Adams or Anna Faris as a Carole Lombard/Jean Harlow-style glorious ditz? Téa Leoni as Katharine Hepburn without the tony accent: an intelligent, athletic, eminently capable beauty who can also play the fool? And I wish I could have seen what Meryl Streep or Emma Thompson could have done with the kinds of roles Irene Dunne and Myrna Loy used to get.

But forget speculation. If you want proof that there are actors alive who can do screwball comedy, go see Duplicity.

Julia Roberts and Clive Owen are gloriously confident in Duplicity’s leading roles. Their two-hour sparring match is a lightfooted blend of irresistible attraction, prickly defensiveness, and reluctant respect. And, thanks to a refreshingly witty script, their weapon of choice is words.

Ray (Owen) and Claire (Roberts) are former government spies now working for rival corporations. The absurdity of using computers with better encryption coding than the Pentagon’s to steal formulas for hand lotion sets the tone nicely. So does our introduction to the two CEOs, Howard Tully (Tom Wilkinson) and Richard Garsik (Paul Giamatti), who we first see as they get into an awkward fist-fight, clashing in slow motion like a pair of aging bull elephants on the Discovery channel.

Writer-director Tony Gilroy (Michael Clayton) leads us through a Hitchcockian series of twists, turns, and switchbacks as Claire and Ray labor to uncover the secret formula Tully is working on. They’re intent on cashing in on it, though all we really care about is whether the two of them will wind up together.

The movie jumps back and forth in time, doling out the story of how Claire and Ray hatched their plot – and the answer to a question that never stops haunting them both: Are they just gaming the CEOs who hired them, or is one of them playing the other one?

Their bipolar romance can switch moods in a moment: They’re forever starting to make love, then stopping to accuse one another of betrayal. Ironically, the paranoia is part of the attraction, an essential trait they have in common. But will they be able to get past it?

An overhead shot of Ray early in the movie shows him striding through the streets of New York with an athlete’s grace and speed. He never lets up, focusing on Claire with seductive intensity and never stopping his pursuit even as she keeps knocking him off balance.

But she does keep knocking him back. Ray may have the upper hand in the game they play out in public, but Claire pulls the strings behind the scenes. You could always sense Roberts’ intelligence, even when she played lightweights, but Gilroy brings it to the surface: You never doubt that Claire could not only seduce but outmaneuver Ray, and it’s fun to watch her glory in that power. Roberts hauls out her famously wide-mouthed laugh once or twice in Duplicity, but she’s much more inclined to smirk – or to cut the smile altogether, using those big brown eyes like lasers to bore through someone’s defenses.

In classic screwball comedy fashion, Duplicity also reserves some choice parts for supporting characters, and the actors make the most of the opportunity. Carrie Preston is endearingly gullible as the corporate travel agent Ray seduces in the line of duty, and the excellent Kathleen Chalfant (the original angel from Broadway’s Angels in America) has as much fun with her role as part of Ray’s surveillance team as Tilda Swinton did with another nontraditional part for a middle-aged woman in Michael Clayton.

Add in the vicarious pleasure of watching beautiful people blow obscene sums of money in beautiful settings, and you’ve got a thoroughly satisfying distraction for these tough times.

Girls Can Play

I bought this poster in a used bookstore in Corpus Christi in the early '80s. It may have been the best 5 dollars I ever spent; it's been up every place I've lived in since.

I've never seen the movie, but that's okay; stories about dying beauties aren't exactly my thing. But I love that 1930s design, and I love the title.

The Depression years were my favorite period for Hollywood movies. It's partly the sense of style -- the dresses, the clean geometric lines of those Deco sets, the melodramatic intensity of movie posters like this. But mostly I love the fast-talking couples in the great screwball and remarriage comedies of the '30s and early '40s.

Cary Grant and Roz Russell in His Girl Friday, Grant and Katharine Hepburn in Holiday and Philadelphia Story, Irene Dunne and Grant again in The Awful Truth and My Favorite Wife, Joel McCrea and Claudette Colbert in Palm Beach Story, Myrna Loy and William Powell in The Thin Man, Hepburn and Spencer Tracy in Adam's Rib, Barbara Stanwyck and Henry Fonda in The Lady Eve... If you've seen these movies, you know what I mean. If you haven't, go find them; you're in for a treat.

Those girls could play.

Leatherheads

By Elise Nakhnikian

“I liked George Clooney’s smile,” the woman in the bathroom told her friend. “And I liked the relationship between him and Renée Zellweger. But I kept looking over and seeing Earl asleep.”

I’m with Earl. I didn’t buy the relationship between aging jock/con man Dodge Connelly (Clooney) and perky newsgal Lexie Littleton (Zellweger) in Leatherheads for a nanosecond. And when they started twitching and twinkling at one another in a strenuous effort to generate sparks, even Clooney’s piano key smile looked forced.

Leatherheads starts with the Universal logo from Hollywood’s golden age of the late 1920s and ‘30s. That’s a wink from director Clooney, who did such an elegant job of evoking the ‘50s in Good Night, and Good Luck. It’s a pledge that his latest movie will capture the stardust from those long-ago years, like some kind of cinematic Hubble Telescope, but this time he can’t keep his promise.

Set in 1925 (and how), Leatherheads is about the birth of professional football – well, sort of. It actually bears the same relationship to pro football as The Bad News Bears does to Little League: the sport is just the backdrop for a comic drama. But that’s not a fair comparison, since Leatherheads makes The Bad News Bears look like Shakespeare.

It’s impossible not to think of other films as you watch this one – and to wish you were watching them instead. A magpie of a movie, Leatherheads stuffs its nest with shards of other films: the romantic triangle in Bull Durham, the tough-cookie newsgal in His Girl Friday, the sepia-toned look of O Brother Where Art Thou, and so on. But borrowing so obviously was a mistake, since this movie suffers in comparison to every one that it pilfers. It even made me miss the flawlessly executed visual style of O Brother, itself a riff played on better films from the 30s that worked much better as a soundtrack than it did as a movie.

You can tell by their comic-book names how deep the characterizations of Lexie and Dodge are – and they’re two of the three main characters. Imagine how stunningly little is done with minor characters like the sadly wasted sports reporter (now there’s a fresh idea), who’s played by the sadly wasted Stephen Root.

The other main character is Carter Rutherford (nicely played by John Krasinski of The Office), who is all-American to the point of parody. A war hero and a football star, Carter draws far bigger crowds to his college games than Dodge’s scruffy professional team, the Duluth Bulldogs, can attract. So Dodge recruits Carter to play for the Bulldogs, figuring the publicity will draw the crowds needed to keep his team – and the sport as a whole – alive.

Will it or won’t it? I couldn’t care less, yet that’s pretty much the plot. Well, that and the inevitable love story, which plays out as a triangle between Dodge, Carter, and Lexie, whose Chicago paper assigns her to do a story on Carter.

Zellweger plays another of her patented spunky, smiling-through-her-tears, game little gals next door. She’s Jean Arthur all over again, that one, but this time she’s trying to play Roz Russell in His Girl Friday, and she just doesn’t have the vinegar or the salt – or the chemistry with her costar. When those two woo, Zellweger pruning up her kewpie doll lips while Clooney twitches his in an exaggerated pantomime of desire, you just feel sorry for them both.

Truth be told, Dodge seems a lot more interested in Carter. Homoerotic undertones are a cliché of sports movies, but they’re highlighted in this one, by the excess of male bonding over fistfights and a climactic football game that looks more like mud wrestling.

The pace is choppy, starting in a jerky setup-punchline mode and degenerating into shapelessness. It’s all strenuously underscored by Randy Newman’s self-consciously, often ironically, perky score, which leans on period pieces like “Toot Toot Tootsie Goodbye,” lest we forget for a moment that we’re in the ‘20s.

Things like the headlines twirling as papers come off the press in some of the way-too-many montages only make you conscious of how hard Clooney is trying to evoke the movies of the ‘30s. The joy of those movies came largely from their inventiveness and wit and the trust their makers had in the audience’s intelligence. Trying to revive those qualities by recreating now-cliched scenes like a speakeasy raid and a frenetic press conference, complete with popping flashbulbs, is like trying to create life by reanimating a corpse.

The dialogue – the crown jewel of those ‘30s comedies – lurches to life for a moment here or there, mostly when Dodge and Lexie are trading insults. But for the most part it’s either pedestrian or labored.

The camera is lumbering too, coming in tight to magnify the mugging rather than hanging back far enough to focus on relationships. And the pacing is way too slow. The great screwball comedies moved twice as fast – and that was before our attention spans had been so famously amped up.

Even the story’s internal timeline is off. If Carter was a WWI hero, why is he a fresh-faced undergraduate seven years after the war has ended? How do we go so fast from pro football being written off to sellout crowds? How did all those ads and posters with Carter’s face on them get produced so soon after he goes pro?

But hey, if Clooney doesn’t care, why should we?

Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day

By Elise Nakhnikian

Just a couple weeks ago I was writing about Fool’s Gold, complaining that they don’t make romantic comedies like they used to any more. So I’m grateful to the estimable Miss Pettigrew, who showed up last weekend in a lovely blue scarf. But I’m getting ahead of the story.

When we first meet Miss Pettigrew (Frances McDormand), things aren’t going her way at all. A failed governess, she’s unemployed and slipping quietly into desperate destitution when she grabs at one last chance, reporting to work for Delysia LaFosse (Amy Adams).

Delysia is a small-time singer and aspiring actress with big-time ambitions. Like Miss Pettigrew, she teeters on the brink of a crisis: She can’t decide whether to follow her heart or her head. She needs Miss Pettigrew to help her choose between the three men she’s juggling, each of whom represents a very different career path. Phil, the callow young producer and playboy (the boyishly beautiful Tom Payne), can get Delysia the starring part she wants in a West End play. Nick (Mark Strong, who could be Andy Garcia’s younger brother), the slick operator who owns the nightclub where she sings – not to mention the swanky apartment where she lives –can give her anything but love. And her piano player Michael (the soulful Lee Pace) wants to be her accompanist for life.

Of course, we know whose arms Miss Pettigrew will deliver her into, but it’s fun to watch them get there, as what starts out like a French farce, complete with slamming bedroom doors, turns into a more standard romance.

But in the end, this cheery fable is less about any of Delysia’s men than it is about the mutually empowering friendship developed by the two women over the course of one very full day. Sensible, loyal, and infinitely resourceful, Miss Pettigrew is just the “personal secretary” Delysia needs. For her part, Delysia makes her nearly invisible friend visible, first taking her advice and then getting her out of her drab brown clothes and into some very pretty things, starting with that beautiful scarf.

Over the course of her frenetic day with Delysia, Miss Pettigrew acquires a suitor of her own, a surprisingly romantic Ciarán Hinds. It’s a treat to watch this decidedly middle-aged, unglamorous pair charm each other – and us.

With her somewhat horsey, naturally lined face and doughy arms and ankles, McDormand was born to play aging girls next door like Miss Pettigrew or Fargo’s Marge, women whose beauty reveals itself only as you grow to love them. McDormand’s heroines ooze common sense and empathy. But those comforting maternal facades hide rich, if largely untapped, veins of mischief.

Adams’ frothy flirtatiousness glitters prettily in the solid setting of McDormand’s sanity. Ever since she stole the show as a naïve but loveable young wife in Junebug, the actress has specialized in characters brimming with open-hearted optimism, and Delysia is no exception.

I think Adams would have reminded me of Carole Lombard even if the script had not so often name-checked the earlier actress, since she channels Lombard’s ditzy but good-hearted charm as well as her delicate beauty. But there’s also a lot of Betty Boop in Adams, who’s earthier than Lombard and who lacks the hysterical edge that could make Lombard seem more infantile than madcap.

It’s a tribute to Miss Pettigrew that it makes you think about the comediennes of the 1930s and ‘40s. That’s probably thanks in part to the fact that the book it was based on was published in 1938. Director Bharat Nalluri and screenwriters David Magee (Finding Neverland) and Simon Beaufoy (The Full Monty) also deserve credit for maintaining the brisk pace of those fast-talking farces, their sunny faith in human nature, and their satisfying way of giving everyone just what he or she deserves in the end. And costume designer Michael O’Connor and production designer Sarah Greenwood did an excellent job of finding or creating gorgeous pre-war clothes and settings, though the extras in the party scene were somewhat less convincing than the canapes.

The period touches feel a little forced at times – the actors sometimes talk too fast, as if just speeding up the dialogue would make it funnier, and the words themselves can be a bit clayfooted, more earnest and less witty than the best of the screwball scripts. In fact, there are few if any great lines or truly memorable moments in Miss Pettigrew.

But it’s hardly fair to compare this to the best of the screwball comedies, which rank among the very best American movies ever made. Miss Pettigrew may not be great, but it is delightful. In years to come, when I get frustrated by the quality of the romantic comedies in theaters, I can easily imagine turning to this one for another fine evening’s entertainment.

Fool's Gold

By Elise Nakhnikian

Unlike that perpetually intense ping-pong player in the Movie Fone ad, I’m usually in the mood for just about any kind of movie. But lately, after a long run of deep-dish year-end art-house movies, I’ve been longing for a light romantic comedy.

So when I settled in for Fool’s Gold, diet Coke and popcorn in hand, I was hoping against hope (I’d seen the trailer) to be transported to that rom-com fantasy island where the lead characters are gorgeous, the sidekicks are a hoot, the endings are happy, and the dialogue crackles with barely sublimated sexual attraction.

But the aptly named Fool’s Gold, it turns out, isn’t a romantic comedy at all. A herky-jerky action-adventure story, it uses a romance run aground as the MacGuffin to set the overstuffed plot in motion, then keeps throwing in distractions in a desperate attempt to maintain a brisk pace.

Screenwriters John Claflin and Daniel Zelman, who previously collaborated on the sequel to Anaconda and They Nest, a made-for-TV horror movie, appear to have conceived of Fool’s Gold as an update of The Palm Beach Story, a Preston Sturges screwball comedy. So far, so good; if you’re going to steal, by all means steal from the best. But Claflin, Zelman, and director Andy Tennant (Fools Rush In, Hitch) dumb the story down at every turn, substituting character-based humor and witty dialogue with violent slapstick and making the search for money the movie’s subject, not its subtext.

The actors playing all the major characters are also a lot more clayfooted than those in the 1942 release. The wife who’s divorcing a husband she still loves because he’s broke was a tartly enchanting creature, as played by Claudette Colbert in Palm Beach, but Kate Hudson’s Tess seems merely peevish. The rich man the wife hooks up with is a comically effete milquetoast in the original, but Nigel Honeycutt, his counterpart in Fool's Gold is given far too much gravitas by an actorly Donald Sutherland, who looks about as comfortable with a stiff upper lip as he would in a rainbow-colored Afro. He can’t even quite make the man’s speech sound human, resorting at one point to the Yoda-esque query: “Married, are you getting?”

As for the husband, the steak tartare of Joel McCrea has been traded for the McDonald’s all-beef patty of Matthew McConaughey. The actor takes off his shirt every few minutes, as if hoping that the sight of his tanned and toned flesh will distract us his surprising dearth of charisma -- not to mention chemistry with his costar.

Tess gets a job on Nigel’s yacht and McConaughey’s Finn follows her there. Setting up and then playing out the estranged couple’s cat and mouse courtship as they play tourist in the land of the rich is the sum total of The Palm Beach Story, whose characters are slyly named Tom and Gerry – and it’s more than enough to keep us entertained.

But Fool’s Gold is as flatflooted as Palm Beach is fleet. While the people in Palm Beach are constantly talking, inserting innuendoes at every turn, Fool’s Gold alternates expository speeches with long stretches of near-wordless action. As if they knew their dialogue needed propping up, the filmmakers pile on too many subplots, too many guns, and too much violence, even a couple of deaths. There are also boy toys galore: fishing boats, a sleek yacht, jet skis, a helicopter, a sea plane – and, of course, Hudson and a juicy Alexis Dziena in skimpy swimsuits and tight diving suits.

Hudson looks good, all right, and so does McConaughey, but together they have all the appeal of oatmeal. We’re supposed to think they had a world-class sex life – Tess is always talking about it. But it’s hard to imagine, since they look and act like brother and sister, two hard-bodied members of some lost Kennedy-esque clan.

In the great screwball comedies, the couples always fought right up until the moment when they got together. But their mostly verbal swordplay was a game they both enjoyed – and a sign of how well matched they were. They may have sometimes doubted that they should be together, but the audience never did.

When Hudson slugs McConaughey, you just wonder why one of them doesn’t take out a restraining order already and put us all out of our misery.

Coen Heads

By Elise Nakhnikian

The fourth wall has been broken so often it’s a wonder there’s anything left of it. But even at this meta moment in the history of movies, Joel and Ethan Coen’s unconventional stories stand out.

The Coen brothers, who have co-written, co-directed and co-produced nine highly stylized movies since their 1984 debut, Blood Simple, are to movies what Madonna is — or anyhow was — to pop music: They revive one mothballed genre after another, sometimes sampling several at once, and make them look sharper than ever.

Blood Simple is a no-star 1940s-style film noir, while The Man Who Wasn’t There is a slick, more Hitchockian noir. Miller’s Crossing is a 1930s-style gangster picture. Barton Fink is a portrait of a self-important Clifford Odets-type playwright set in 1940s Hollywood. The Hudsucker Proxy is a story of corporate duplicity that takes place in the ’50s but has the crisp yet creamy look of Depression-era Deco. And so on.

The Coens aren’t interested in gritty realism. Not even murder is played straight, but they exaggerate the horror rather than the thrill, aiming for something other than cheap sensation. People rarely die easily in their movies (the husband in Blood Simple, who is finally buried alive, is far from the only example, though he may be the most extreme). And when they do, their bodies aren’t easily disposed of (remember that wood chipper in Fargo?)

These guys clearly love movies.

They also love actors — especially character actors with interesting faces and stars with old-fashioned sex appeal, who might have stepped out of one of the old movies theirs are modeled on. Their crew includes Joel Coen’s wife, Frances McDormand; John Turturro; John Goodman; and Steve Buscemi, all of whom look like real people and can give the brothers the exaggerated performances they usually want, stylizing their emotions like kabuki players. Lately the in group has added George Clooney, whose macho good looks and self-mocking intelligence helped him channel Clark Gable in O Brother Where Art Thou and Cary Grant in Intolerable Cruelty, the brothers’ latest.

An update of 1930s screwball comedies like The Awful Truth and The Lady Eve, Cruelty is a perfectly serviceable vehicle, but it’s more Ford than Cadillac. The Coens’ snappy dialogue, bizarre setups and quirky supporting characters fit right into this genre, making this their most accessible movie yet. Probably not coincidentally, it’s also their least distinctive and the first they didn’t write from scratch, instead polishing somebody else’s screenplay. Aside from the brother’s top-notch technique – arresting set, sound, and costume design and beautifully paced editing – this movie is powered mainly by the sparks that fly between its high-voltage stars, the debonair Clooney and the glossy Catherine Zeta-Jones.

Maintaining your vision in Hollywood can be tough, but it’s probably easier if you have the trust, support and shared understanding of a twin/collaborator. Whatever the reason, the Coens always seem to have known what they wanted and how to get it. They’ve been granted final cut on their meticulously constructed movies from the start, and they’ve always had a good eye for talent: They were the first directors to hire composer Carter Burwell, who went on to score more than 50 movies in addition to every Coen brothers film since Blood Simple, and their first director of photography was Barry Sonnenfeld, who later shot movies like When Harry Met Sally and Big and then became a director of his own quirky hits

The brothers have a lot in common with Quentin Tarantino, another meta moviemaker whose gorgeously shot, lit, and art-directed movies plunder old genres but have a distinctive tone all their own, not to mention a smart sense of humor and a brilliant way of using popular music to help tell the story (the soundtrack to O Brother, Where Art Thou? won a Grammy for Album of the Year).

But while Tarantino always seems to like his main characters, the Minnesota twins often seem to feel contempt for theirs. Their smart movies about dumb people, like O Brother and The Big Lebowski, can feel coldly condescending toward what Barton Fink would call “the common man.” It’s hard to care about a story when you feel no warmth for any of the characters, and it’s no coincidence that their best movies all have sympathetic characters, like McDormand’s pregnant policewoman in Fargo or Holly Hunter’s baby-craving cop and her sweetly devoted ex-con husband in Raising Arizona.

Even the snarky Coen brothers movies contained images I still remember, even if I saw them only once and years ago. Considering how fast most movies fade from memory, that’s saying a lot. But it’s not enough: Movies should be moving images in both senses of the word.

The brothers are just 46 and they’ve been averaging about one movie every two years since Blood Simple came out, so they should make a lot more before they start slowing down. That will be good news if they keep making stylish, funny, flyaway confections like Intolerable Cruelty. And if they mine more gems like Miller’s Crossing, it’ll be more than just good. It will be great.