The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby

Thanks to the vivid illustrations by “Phiz” (Hablot Knight Browne) and George Cruikshank, Dickens’s books were already halfway to the cinema screen. But Cruikshank was also a caricaturist, and Dickens’s novels, while thronged by fantastically imaginative characters, each strikingly defined, leaned heavily on comic aspects and burlesque incidents. As George Orwell observed: 

Why is it that Tolstoy’s grasp seems to be so much larger than Dickens’s – why is it that he seems able to tell you so much more about yourself? It is because he is writing about people who are growing. In my own mind Dickens’s people are present far more often and far more vividly than Tolstoy’s, but always in a single unchangeable attitude, like pictures or pieces of furniture. You cannot hold an imaginary conversation with a Dickens character as you can with, say, Peter [sic] Bezukhov. It is because Dickens’s characters have no mental life. (1) 

By the time the nine-hour Trevor Nunn production of The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby was broadcast on American TV over four consecutive evenings in January 1983, I had already seen Alberto Cavalcanti’s film version of the Dickens novel. For anyone who, like me, is unused to watching any kind of theater, the Nunn production was a revelation. For John Simon, experienced New York theater critic, who saw the production when it played on Broadway, it forced from him qualified praise: 

The typical Dickens novel has three layers. There is the plot, which in the early works tends to be a fairy tale. Good people, mostly young, struggle, are set upon by evil wizards and witches, but, partly through their own efforts and partly through the help of good fairies, end up triumphant, while the wicked tormentors get their just desserts. Wilde may have been thinking of Dickens when he made Miss Prism say about her three-volume novel, “the good ended happily, the bad unhappily. That is what fiction means.” Over this fairy-tale layer stretches a layer of description: people in their settings, customs, and manners; the look and feel of a place and period. This is what Walter Bagehot appreciated about Dickens: “He describes London like a special correspondent for posterity.” The third layer is the social commentary: the author’s noble philippics against every iniquity, whether caused by political systems or human nature. 

Now a stage version of Nicholas Nickleby, even one that lasts eight and a half hours, as does the one adapted by David Edgar for the Royal Shakespeare Company, can do scant justice to the second and third layers because, except in very small doses – they don’t “play.” That leaves the fairy-tale plot, which the stage, with some abridgement, can render beautifully. And since Dickens’s imagination is matchless, an uncommon wealth of characters pours, hurtles, slithers, skulks, and trips across the stage in a veritable Dance of Life. 

Where the play errs, Simon points out, is in “the dramatization of Smike…. In the novel, Smike is a somewhat mentally deficient youth with a limp, but otherwise lean and tall, very good at household and garden tasks, and speaking plainly and coherently. In the play, he becomes a ghastly victim of something like cerebral palsy – disfigured, brain-damaged, deformed in body and limbs – a junior-version Elephant Man.”(2) 

I have never agreed with the argument that Dickens has been served well by his film adaptations. Aside from the many Christmas Carols, which stand or fall with the actor playing Ebenezer Scrooge, I can think of only two successful films based on Dickens novels. Coincidentally, both films were released by the Rank Organization: Alberto Cavalcanti’s The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby in 1947 and David Lean’s Oliver Twist in 1948. Because of the release of Lean’s far less effective but much bigger-budgeted Great Expectations the day after Christmas in 1946 (seriously handicapped by the miscasting of Valerie Hobson as Estella), Cavalcanti’s Nicholas Nickleby was underpublicized and overshadowed on its release the following March. It has been nearly forgotten since then. 

Unlike a theatrical adaptation of a Dickens novel, a film can do more than just transpose the plot. It can, with its design, costumes, and camera movements, recreate the settings to a degree of accuracy impossible on the stage. It can show us a selection of locations of what was once a completely fictional world, and give us a much more intimate understanding of the characters’ relations to that world. In other words, film has the almost uncanny ability to represent life – even when it is a product of pure invention. 

During the war Alberto Cavalcanti worked on the script for a film adaptation of Nicholas Nickleby, but shooting was postponed when Derek Bond, his lead actor, was called up for military service. When the war was over, Cavalcanti wanted to make a multi-episode film about Dickens called The Green Chair, but Michael Balcon, his producer at Ealing, proposed that he go through with Nicholas Nickleby. 

Seeing it again after more than forty years, the strong impression that it gives me is that of classical perfection. Though the film was released in 1947, it seems, strangely, older. David Lean could take the emotional side of Dickens and give it fuller breath, but Cavalcanti reminds us that Dickens was closer to Balzac than Flaubert. The pre-Victorian Dickens world is a populated, almost overpopulated world, and Cavalvanti, while having to cut the novel savagely just to make a 103 minute film of it, yet preserves the setting of the tale, the world of 1830. 

The film had to move at a remarkable speed to cover so much ground, but it is evenly paced, never hurried. I found the film to be marvelous in its minutest details. Smike is, if anything, deemphasized – he is an important character, since he is a part of Ralph Nickleby’s undoing, but his sad love for Kate Nickleby is kept secret by Nicholas (he alone sees her miniature portrait hidden under his pillow) and he isn’t used, as the RSC production does, as an almost embarrassingly deformed, gut-wrenching figure. The film’s political punch is abundantly clear: Dickens’s honest, pure, stupid, hapless, luckless, grasping and avaricious people are all products of an economic system that is, in George Orwell’s words, “a free-for-all in which the worst man wins.” Yet Dickens could never leave the world the way he found it – lies must be exposed, wrongs must be righted, and good must prevail. 

Cavalcanti assembled an excellent production crew, including Michael Relph (Dead of Night) as art director and Gordon Dines (The Cruel Sea) at the camera. Among his actors, Madeline Bray is played by Jill Balcon, the daughter of the film’s producer, in her first film acting role. She was also Daniel Day-Lewis’s mother. 

(1) George Orwell, Essays, (New York: Alfred A Knopf, 1996), p. 181. 

(2) John Simon, “A Gold-Plated Nickleby,” New York, October 19, 1981.

Punishment Park

Punishment Park is a film being made by a West German film crew, narrated by an Englishman. We are shown, in a line of military trucks, a group of people, identified as Group 637 (the 637th group of prisoners), men and women, white and black, being transported to a remote desert location in California where they are charged by a tribunal inside a tent and sentenced to prison or what is called “punishment park,” which is nothing but a desolate obstacle course, a natural gauntlet, through which the prisoners who choose such an option – and every one of them do – are given a two-hour head start. Their objective, fifty-three miles distant, is an American flag. They are pursued by cops and national guardsmen. If they reach the flag by 10 PM on the third day they are free to go. If they fail to reach it, they are sent to prison. The temperature at 10 AM when the prisoners set out in Punishment Park is 91 degrees. They are told that water has been left at the course’s halfway point. 

The amount of advance publicity lavished on Antonioni’s film Zabriskie Point (q.v.) was out of all proportion to the film’s worth. Its critical reception was almost unanimously negative. Fifty years later, it seems unaccountably devoid of a reason for being. It seems to support the perspective of two young people, one ideologically involved in “the Movement” (anti-establishment, anti-authority, anti-status quo), the other sexually involved with a wealthy corporate executive, and shows us America the way they see it: billboards that boast of plenitude, but also desert landscapes – a spacious vacancy. But all Antonioni saw were photogenic surfaces, which explains the film’s lack of any real substance. 

Filmed the same year – 1970 – of Zabriskie Point’s release, Peter Watkins’s Punishment Park is everything Zabriskie Point is not. The immediate and most noticeable difference is the absence in Watkins’s film of stately compositions. In their place are cinema verité, handheld camerawork that takes up the vantage point of an engaged witness. In his six films prior to Punishment Park, Watkins approached history as a living, ongoing event, whether it was raw news reportage from the Battle of Culloden (Culloden) or the moment to moment reality of the city of London after an atomic bomb attack (The War Game). 

Not satisfied with pretty images, Watkins uses his camera (a single 16mm Eclair) to record a drama as close to actuality as he can get. He also eschews many of the favorite devices of motion pictures – devices designed to increase the potential for sheer spectacle. So when he films a scene of battle, as in Culloden, he purposely avoided many of the traps that have attracted filmmakers since D. W. Griffith: the choreographed movement of a “cast of thousands” of combatants engaged in violence against one another. Instead Watkins exploited his own budget strictures by using close-in, handheld shots that relate the true brutality of warfare. 

Most of the objections to the film, that it is an expression of the filmmaker’s “paranoia,” miss the point of the film entirely. A critic in the New York Times called it "an extravagantly paranoid view of what might happen in America within the next five years ... Because all literature, including futuristic nonsense like this, represents someone’s wish-fulfilling dream, I can’t help but suspect that Watkins’ cautionary fable is really a wildly sincere desire to find his own ultimate punishment." 

Watkins wasn’t proposing that it was likely that Richard Nixon was going to sign an executive order invoking the 1950 “McCarran Act,” setting in motion the events of which his film is a record. Watkins was merely responding to the demonstrations that were taking place in America in 1970 as well as the police and government responses to the demonstrations and proposing a “what if?” The film might look to some viewers rather like the recent HBO dramatization of Philip Roth’s novel The Plot Against America in which an American fascist movement changed the course of history. But Roth was proposing an alternate history lesson that was all the more chilling simply because it was perilously close to being the actual course of history. Watkins was prognosticating – proposing possible events that might come to pass. The plausibility of the film’s narrative isn’t relevant. There is no burden of proof. What makes any film convincing is the conviction of the filmmaker and the actors. Does it work on its own terms and are its proposals, that a makeshift tribunal would give people convicted of insurrection the choice between doing hard time and four days in Punishment Park, which is nothing but a kind of correctional obstacle course? 

Watkins cast the film mostly with people who had never acted, professionally or otherwise, before. He evidently had no problem recruiting people from all walks of life to appear in the film, taking part in his exercise in imaginative prediction. It wasn’t enough to propose that such events were possible. Watkins had to, on a small but not inconsequential scale, make it happen. 

The camera’s presence is frequently acknowledged by the film’s participants. At some points, the camera is addressed directly, its objectivity appealed to. It gives the film a strong documentary feel, which in itself provides a layer of authenticity to the incredible proceedings. 

In his review of the 2000 film Steal This Movie, about Abbie Hoffman, Stanley Kauffmann wrote: 

The will to public action is certainly not dead in this country: witness last year's WTO protests in Seattle and the protests at the recent political conventions. Nonetheless, the giant wave of young people's disgust and anger, of insulted patriotism, that flooded this country in the '60s and early '70s--a wave so huge that it must have had a part in Lyndon Johnson's decision not to run again in 1968--seems very far from a country that is, in great part, so happily drunk on hedonism. The obvious catalyst back then was Vietnam, a horrendous war that, as Hoffman often said, had been distortedly presented by the government from the start. (Ten years afterward, Senator J. William Fulbright said that "the biggest lesson I learned from Vietnam is not to trust government statements.") We surely should not long for such another catalyst, but public responses to current issues make the heat of this film seem distant. (1)

Punishment Park was made in the heat of the very moment of protest in America, in the midst of Richard Nixon’s first term, with the war in Vietnam metastasizing into Cambodia. Last year’s BLM protests were certainly loud enough to get most people’s attention, no matter what their political stripe. And Watkins certainly confronts the racial aspect of the protest movements of the time. Audiences in 1970 were certainly more accustomed to seeing protests in the news. The satirical qualities of Punishment Park are easier to detect today than 50 years ago, but only because protest itself has become more of an abstraction to us. The film was a direct provocation to the people who managed to see it at the time, which was not very many. American distributors refused to exhibit it, for reasons of liability if nothing else. It was an indictment of a reactionary atmosphere overtaking the country that has by now become a kind of norm. 

(1) “So Near and Yet… “ The New Republic, September 11, 2000.

Zabriskie Point

Sometimes a sense of duty is misplaced. Last May I read James Joyce’s Ulysses simply because, as a literarian, I couldn’t realistically go through the rest of my life without having at least tried to read it. My labor was rewarded, but to what extent I still can’t determine. I have deep admiration for the films of Michelangelo Antonioni, but it took him ten years to find his mature style in 1960 and he went into decline after 1966. He signed a contract with MGM to make three English-language films. The second of the three, Zabriskie Point, is by general agreement, a precipitous comedown from Blow-Up, the first. Now that I’ve seen it, I almost wish I hadn’t. 

Though tempting, it is too easy to blame someone other than Antonioni for the failure of Zabriskie Point. One could blame Sam Shepard, who wrote the first treatment of the story suggested by a newspaper headline that Antonioni had read in 1966. And then four more people worked on the script, including Antonioni: his long-time collaborator Tonino Guerra, Fred Gardner (Franco Rossetti), and Clare Peploe. Peploe had introduced Antonioni to the music of Pink Floyd, who composed a full score for the film, only bits of which were used. Also credited are The Grateful Dead and The Rolling Stones, among others (there’s even Patsy Cline’s “Tennessee Waltz”). Antonioni commissioned a score by Herbie Hancock for Blow-Up, but only because he obviously loved swinging London and wanted to certify his affection with something up-to-date and beautiful. The chosen music for Zabriskie Point is as topical as it is time bound. It dates the film, 50 years later, as much as the film's anti-establishment hippie message. 

Spite was what kept Antonioni going for four years of production - spite for America. When it became clear what the film was going to be about, the “authorities” in California made legal attempts to shut down the shooting. (Ronald Reagan was the governor.) It’s better not to call the film’s “story” a story at all. It opens with a meeting of young people, led by a Black Panther-type and a woman denouncing the racist, fascist system. In the crowd of college student types spouting political slogans is Mark (Mark Frechette), who never manages to get a word in edgewise. 

Next we see Frechette driving an old pickup truck through Los Angeles. Random images of an ugly, consumer-driven American city (in contrast to a beautiful, consumer-driven Italian city). Antonioni’s eye used to find beauty in even ugly industrial landscapes. In Zabriskie Point the point he’s trying to make is that the billboards and images advertising plenty in LA are hiding a spiritual void. 

Another youth, a young woman named Daria (Daria Halprin), is introduced. She is having an affair, evidently, with a businessman (Rod Taylor, looking and acting utterly out of place). She drives across the desert to Phoenix where he has a luxe house. On the way she meets Mark, who in the meantime has shot a cop (though he tells Daria “I never got off a shot”) and stolen a plane. In Death Valley they get high and cavort. In Daria’s imagination, the two are joined in their lovemaking by several other couples, all rolling in the borax and alkali. For seven minutes. 

Knowing he’s an accused cop-killer, Mark wants to clear his name. So he flies the stolen plane (freshly re-painted by Mark and Daria, festooned with a 30 foot penis on the fuselage and bulbous breasts atop the wings) back to LA where the police are lying in wait for him. Daria continues on her way to Phoenix to her boss’s elegantly designed desert house, recessed among huge stones and organ pipe cacti. But she soon finds it all too disgusting and leaves. She stops her old Buick a safe distance away and (again in her imagination) watches the house explode several times from several angles. And then in slow motion. Then she imagines pool furniture exploding in extreme slow motion, clothing racks, a TV set, a loaded refrigerator. Debris flies upward and then floats downward and it’s all somewhat fascinating to watch. Just when you're beginning to think of Sissy Spacek as Carrie, it stops. Daria smiles, gets in the car and drives away. Roy Orbison sings the film’s Love Theme: 

Dawn comes up so young, dreams begin so young 

And if you live just for today the day may soon be done 

But there's a place where dreams always stay so young 

Unlike the “mod scene” in London, with which Antonioni was momentarily fascinated (probably because of its undercurrent of civilization’s end – a civilization Antonioni had grown to despise), here he is all-in with American youth and their centrifugal rage against everything. Regarding the counter-culture movement, the “tune in, turn-on and drop-out” hippies, Roman Polanski cogently commented that it could only have happened in the US, a country whose very prosperity could support so many people opting out of the rat race. But Antonioni was 57 when Zabriskie Point premiered, and, like so many men, Italian or otherwise, he was resisting his own physical decline by running in the opposite direction. Hanging out with kids one-third his age (Clare Peploe, his girlfriend at the time, was 30 years his junior) must’ve been invigorating, but the resulting film is so aimless and empty that it becomes hard to believe it took him four years to make it. 

The real problem with the film is not that Antonioni had, or thought that he had, a clean canvas on which to paint his pictures of America, that he was showing the Ametican scene with new eyes, so much of it was already cliché in 1970. And all the while he was looking around America for signs of its decadence, Antonioni neglected to look at American films. While he was shooting love scenes in the desert, several other films were stealing Antonioni’s thunder: Easy Rider was released in ‘69, which was purported to be an independent film but had Hollywood backers, and even such mainstream studio exploitation films like Wild in the Streets came out in ’68. The Trip (also by Peter Fonda) appeared in ’67 and Alice’s Restaurant also in ’69. 

I saw both Frechette and Halprin on Dick Cavett, taped after the film's disastrous premier, Frechette expressed his disappointment that he had looked forward to learning something at the feet of a great artist but came away empty handed. There are beautiful moments in the film, when Antonioni focuses on something and his focus forms a kind of halo around it. Like when Daria stops in that desert bar and is chased away by those creepy feral boys. The camera looks through the window at an old man at the bar, then moves closer and the lens zooms in so that the room around him appears to expand. It’s a lovely effect. But however much I am of the opinion that when Antonioni looked at something, it has been defined, I was sorry for the waste of his gaze. 

A Confession

On this day, 76 years ago, an atomic bomb, nicknamed “Fat Boy,” was dropped by an American B-29 Superfortress and detonated at 11:02 Japanese Time at an altitude of 1,650 ± 33 ft above a tennis court in the industrial valley of Nagasaki City. 46 years later, August 9, 1991, at 10:30 Pacific Time at an elevation of 3,965 ft, I got married for the first time in a municipal courthouse in Fallon, Nevada. I was 33. The woman was 19. 

I was sitting alone in my trailer on the outskirts of Fallon just sixty-four days before my wedding day when a car belonging to a friend pulled up outside. When I let him in, my friend (I’ll call him Chad) introduced me to a girl who was with him who was visiting from Texas (I’ll call her Belle). They had been in high school together and he was showing her off to everyone he knew. She sat in the middle of my living room wearing shorts, her (dyed) red hair falling down to her shoulders. In the two and a half years I’d been living in Fallon, I hadn’t seen anything so fresh and beautiful. I must’ve fallen for her then and there. 

That was a Thursday. On Friday I went with a girl I barely knew (her name now escapes me, so I’ll call her Suzy) on a triple date to Reno to dinner and to see the Bill Murray film What About Bob? Murray played an agoraphobic loon who was terrified to venture beyond his Manhattan apartment without the encouragement of his analyst, played by Richard Dreyfus. Since it was the weekend and Fallon was an hour’s drive east, after the movie Belle invited Suzy and me to spend the night at her hotel in Reno. We stopped at a gas station and bought beer and wine coolers and went to the hotel. It was the first time I’d gone out with Suzy, who was all of 17. After a few drinks she waited for a moment alone to ask me if I was a Christian. Somehow the phoney baloney answer I gave her was assurance enough. Since there was no bed, we tossed for it and I won. Chad and Belle got the floor. I wasn’t intending to do anything but sleep that night until certain tell tale noises emanated from the floor below. Suzy whispered excitedly, “This is like sex education!” 

In the morning the four of us drove back to Fallon. On entering my trailer I found my answering machine had several messages on it. A woman with whom Chad was romantically involved had called inquiring on his whereabouts. Using my phone, he called her back. When he was done, he went outside with Belle and explained his situation: he was involved with this other woman and if he didn’t go back to her immediately she was going to throw all his shit in the street. Chad asked me to look after Belle until her flight home Monday morning. I drove Suzy home. Belle spent the rest of the weekend with me. 

Weeks later, with Belle back in Denver, I was with another friend in a Fallon bar. It was there that I came up with the plan that resulted in my marrying Belle. I pitched it to her as a marriage of convenience. Since I was in the Navy (the only reason I was in Fallon, a small town in the high alkali desert of Nevada), she would remain in Denver and enjoy the benefits of being my dependent and I would finally be compensated for my rent, which was taking a big bite out of my paycheck. Since I was single, I was provided with free room and board - in a barracks. But since I was in my thirties, I refused to be a barracks rat, my bed and locker subject to periodic inspections, and having to share the TV with roommates not of my choosing. I don’t know how I did it, but I persuaded Belle to go through with it. 

Over the following weeks, however, something happened that I failed to bring to her attention. I had fallen in love with her. I should have told her, but my reason for not doing so were selfish and unforgiveable. To her, it was a fun, impulsive masquerade. But I wanted it to be real, and I stupidly believed I could make it so. The only thing I did wrong was not telling her. 

I picked her up in Reno. She brought a friend along to be her bridesmaid. And the feeling of an impending disaster closed in on me. We were married by a judge that Friday morning. I was wearing a suit I’d worn at a good friend’s wedding in Pittsburgh the year before. Belle wore a used gown that was too big for her. We had a reception at the very same bar in which I came up with the plan to marry her. We drank to excess. There was no consummation, but that was the least of my problems. We drove around in the desert and watched the shooting stars and watched a lot of videos and, the honeymoon over, I took her to the airport. I got orders to Okinawa but I would only accept them and reenlist if she promised to come with me. She lied – and promised. When she failed to show up in Okinawa, the Navy told me I had to give her my allowance for quarters or get the marriage dissolved. I did the latter. I hired a divorce lawyer in Reno and the marriage was annulled in November 1993. I never saw or heard from her again. 

I’m calling this a confession, but while I’ve done plenty of penance in 30 years, I never asked for absolution. The Welsh poet Alun Lewis wrote, 

Never fear to venture 

Where the last light trembles 

Because you were in love 

Love never dissembles. 

Baloney. Love will do whatever it has to do to survive. I’ve been in love four times in my life and it never worked out. 

So...

Kiss today goodbye 

The sweetness and the sorrow 

Wish me luck, the same to you 

But I can't regret 

What I did for love, what I did for love.

Postscript

After publishing this post yesterday evening, I read the following in Saul Bellow's The Adventures of Augie March:

I had wanted to marry her, but there isn't any possession. No, no, wives don't own husbands, nor husbands wives, nor parents children. They go away, or they die. So the only possessing is of the moment. If you're able. And while any wish lives, it lives in the face of its negative. This is why we make the obstinate sign of possession. Like deeds, certificates, rings, pledges, and other permanent things. 

Seize the Day (1986)

Robin Williams always made me nervous. His protean free-association stand-up comedy seemed in equal parts antic and frantic to me. Watching him on TV made me feel like I was an audience member close to the stage, fearful that he might single me out. 

I have been wanting for decades to see the film that was made in 1986 of Saul Bellow’s short novel Seize the Day. It was first broadcast on PBS’ Great Performances program, but I don’t recall if I saw it then. I didn’t read the Bellow novel until last year. What I wrote about it then didn’t do it the justice it deserved:  

It is the strangeness and suddenness of the novel's last scene that catches the reader by surprise. Having lived through Tommy Wilhelm's long day alongside him, feeling his rising frustration and the congestion in his chest, and his inability to explain to his father or his wife or to Tamkin, the charlatan whose cockeyed wisdom causes Tommy to trust him enough to invest his remaining savings in the trading fortunes of lard on the stock exchange, what he is feeling, what he wants in his life, made the release of his tears, at the side of a strange man's coffin, provoked by his love and his fear and his grief at the waste of half his life, an utterly convincing and uplifting conclusion to his day. 

Alfred Kazin said it better: 

Seize the Day [is] the painfully exact American tragedy of our affluent day . . . The protagonist is the city man who feels that the sky is constantly coming down on him. Before he dies, he will make it clear that his greatest need is not money or love or the “peace” he vainly seeks out of the city, but the reason of things. No one in history ever felt the loss of this so keenly as the modern man who lives in the most “developed” society of all time. 

Williams never had good prospects for an actor. You could see from his comedy routines that he didn’t have much control over himself. Even in comedic roles his directors let him go too far. The role of Tommy Wilhelm in Seize the Day required him to keep it together until the last scene and then let go. But Williams acts like he’s already lost it in the very first shot of him speeding down a country road in a beat-up station wagon, talking to himself, impatiently lighting a cigarette (he smokes through the whole film, or pretends to), and flipping the bird at his boss. At times his level of intensity is too loud. He steals his scenes only because you’re not sure he might explode at any moment. 

His last scenes, after he loses everything on the commodities exchange, are increasingly embarrassing – dashing down the New York streets screaming (where is he running?), scaring people out of the way until he thinks he sees Tamkin entering a building in a crowd and he finds himself at the funeral of someone he doesn’t even know. In the novel, Tommy is in the line of mourners, passing the body in the coffin, and he breaks down in tears, weeping uncontrollably. It is overwhelming as written by Bellow. In the film, Tommy’s breakdown is off-putting. Baring his teeth like he’s about to give out with his Whitmanesque yawp, Robin Williams pulls a grotesque face and starts to bawl like a child. 

Williams – and the film’s producers – counted too much on his popularity and, like Tommy Wilhelm, got in over his head and lost. It’s a pity because he’s accompanied by a few good actors. Thomas Wiseman (who quite fittingly once played Dr. No in the very first James Bond film) is perfectly imperious as Tommy’s father, determined to resist every appeal for help from his son. Glenne Headly is lovely as Olive, Tommy’s Roman Catholic girlfriend, who waits patiently while he disentangles himself from his too demanding ex-wife. Jerry Stiller astounds as Dr. Tamkin, an old school bullshitter who both inspires Tommy and fleeces him of his last $600. He is completely deliberate in taking advantage of Tommy’s ignorance of money and calmly disappears the moment Tommy realizes he’s been had. (The film should’ve been rated R for the scene in which Stiller goes shirtless in the bath house shower. The strange proportions of his body defy description.) Jo Van Fleet is delightful as old Mrs. Einhorn, who is seen only in elevators with her incontinent dachshunds. And when Tommy has to (reluctantly) help Tom Aldredge (as the half-blind trader Rappaport) across the street to a tobacco store and then has to practically carry him back before the light changes, you will wonder at the direction of TV veteran Fielder Cook. And Saul Bellow himself appears passing Tommy in the hotel hallway dressed in a stylish trenchcoat and hat. 

One scene comes close to the optimum sadness expressed in Bellow of Tommy’s unrequited love for his father. Near the end of the film Tommy makes his way through the Hotel Gloriana’s subterranean steam room looking for his father. He passes several old men laid out as if on slabs waiting for the masseur. Tommy recognizes his father, lying on his stomach. The way the scene is shot (by Eric Van Haren Noman) is extraordinary: the old doctor turns over to address his son, exposing his naked torso, covered in sweat, his neck tendons straining, his eyes bulging, as he rejects Tommy’s final appeal – for money, yes, but also for help, and ultimately for love. Dr. Adler cruelly rejects his appeals. “You want to make yourself into my cross, but I’m not gonna let you do that. Get away from me now. It’s torture for me to look at you, you slob!” 

The production is as good as one had any reason to expect, even for PBS’ Great Performances. The period costumes, the art direction, the cars in the streets and some well-chosen locations present to us a point blank and actual Manhattan in 1956. It would’ve been far more moving if the lead had been played by a real actor (like Cristopher Walken, for example) instead of by a comic quite outside of his element. This was the first straight role for Williams, who played in The World According to Garp and Moscow on the Hudson prior to Seize the Day. He would improve as a dramatic actor as he got older, but only because the material was shaped to suit his unique talents.