6/30/23
Newsletter #382
The Crack of Dawn
I swear, just like the night before last, I was in bed last night trying to get to sleep and the little Leonard Maltin in my head kept saying, “You’re not doing George Seaton justice. Among others, you skipped The Country Girl (1954).”
Indeed, I did. George Seaton won his second Oscar for Best Screenplay for The Country Girl, and Grace Kelly won Best Actress. The film was also nominated for: Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor (Bing Crosby), and Best Art Direction—Set Direction (Black-and-white). The film was taken with as much seriousness as Hollywood and the public had to offer, which I suppose is part of my problem with the film. I get a sense that George Seaton was trying to prove – and he did – that he didn’t just make comedies and could be as serious as anyone working. The Country Girl is the grim story of an alcoholic actor (exceptionally well-played by Bing Crosby, who was also proving that he too could be deadly serious), and how his alcoholism negatively impacts his angry, beleaguered wife (a haggard-looking, Grace Kelly). William Holden is wasted as the man who loves her from afar, but knows that if she leaves her husband, it will kill him.
Well, I saw the film when I was young and really didn’t like it – it’s too serious and too grim for its own good. Just last year I finally decided to give it another try, and I had exactly the same reaction. The film is so overloaded with good intentions that it’s just a dramatic wreck teeming with Oscar-worthy histrionics. Anyway, that’s just me. Obviously, everybody else completely bought it. But if one is discussing George Seaton, The Country Girl must be mentioned.
Also, before Seaton became a director and was merely a screenwriter, he had two great credits: A Day at the Races (1937) with the Marx brothers, and Song of Bernadette (1943), which was a huge hit. Upon reflection, it’s entirely about Bernadette’s sincerity, which somehow, miraculously, Jennifer Jones pulled off (and got an Oscar).
Another film of Seaton’s that was a hit, and had a big impact on me, yet I always forget that George Seaton wrote and directed it, is 36 Hours (1964), with James Garner and Rod Taylor. It’s like a top-notch, feature-length episode of The Twilight Zone that totally fooled the shit out of me. And it bears no resemblance to any of his other films. Rod Taylor was really good.
George Seaton made so many movies that I still haven’t even come close to seeing them all. I recently saw his film, The Counterfeit Traitor (1962) with William Holden, for the first time. It’s dead serious in tone and based on a true story. Holden is a businessman making legitimate business deals with the most senior Nazi officers, both before and during the war, who reluctantly becomes a British spy. It’s intelligent, believable, genuinely suspenseful, with an exciting conclusion. While escaping Germany in a fishing boat, Holden finds a wounded man in a boat and it’s Klaus Kinski in what has to be one of his first movies.
I’ve always found it a surprising and shockingly intelligent and logical choice that Universal hired the highly experienced George Seaton to write and direct their big expensive spectacle, Airport, in 1970, but that’s so unlike a big studio, to make the right choice. Perhaps it was the producer, Ross Hunter, who was an odd character, and kind of blessed in Hollywood for a half a second. In any case, George Seaton made a totally solid, gripping, yet sprawling, melodrama based on a thick bestseller, with damn near perfect casting. You could not get anyone better on the planet than Burt Lancaster as the general manager of the airport, or Dean Martin as the co-pilot, Jacqueline Bisset as the stewardess, George Kennedy as the head of Runway Maintenance, Helen Hayes as the conniving old lady, Van Heflin as the psycho, or Maureen Stapleton as his worried wife.
Regarding the art and craft of storytelling, I’ve always thought Airport was a brilliant example of how to begin a story. During the front credits we see the Chicago Central Airport (or whatever) in a snowstorm, though running smoothly. We meet all of the characters coming and going. This is intercut with a jet going through the realistic protocol of landing on a snowy runway at night. By the end of the credits the jet has landed, but having turned too soon, its front end is stuck in the snow, with the rearend sticking out on the runway – the main runway. From that one problem stems all of the other problems in one way or another. Within five minutes in that movie, you’ve met every character and are presented with a dramatic issue that effects everybody.
Airport was the first of the “Disaster Movies” of the 1970s, but it doesn’t know that — it’s completely innocent. Sure, it’s a big Hollywood movie, with an all-star cast, based on a bestseller, so it knows that it’s an expensive A-movie, but there’s no sense of it being the first of anything. The film is fully formed as a single experience. It does not anticipate a sequel. There were in fact three – Airport 1975, Airport ’77, and The Concorde: Airport ’79 – and each one got worse, but once again, Airport (1970) doesn’t know that. It’s so wonderfully innocent — with giant beepers, and a car phone — it’s of an earlier time and mindset. It’s also the last time that Burt Lancaster at the advanced age of 57 would be cast as the leading man in a big movie. But in Airport Lancaster handles the lead effortlessly. Not to mention the beautiful, slightly haunted, Jean Seberg.
I saw this movie in the theater when it came out, at the age of 12, with my whole family, and we were all very impressed. The whole audience was. The movie worked like gangbusters and was a huge hit.
But no “Disaster Movies” that followed had what Airport did, which was the feeling that they were making a single movie that was all-inclusive. When it was over, it was over. The story had been told.
I honestly think I’m done discussing George Seaton, which turned into a bigger topic as I wrote it. And it kept buzzing around in my head as I tried to get to sleep. “But what about 36 Hours? Oh, right, that was George Seaton. What about The Country Girl? Oh, shut up already!”
Have a jolly old day.