Hagman was in the middle of filming the second season of the Dallas revival, so it will be interesting to see how they deal with that script-wise.
I quite liked Hagman as the President's diffident translator in Sidney Lumet's Fail-Safe.
Naturally, there are a few offbeat credits in Hagman's portfolio (because if anything is an iron law, it is this: Actors take work).
Edgar G. Ulmer's last film, the World War II drama The Cavern (1964), about a motley group trapped in a cave after a bomb raid; starring John Saxon
The swinging campus comedy, Up in the Cellar (1970), in which Hagman plays a college president targeted for revenge by a disgruntled student; also starring Wes Stern and Joan Collins (Dallas meets Dynasty!)
The cross-cultural comedy Antonio (1973), in which Hagman plays an American millionaire whose Mercedes-Benz winds up in the hands of a poor Chilean (Trini Lopez); it does not bring Lopez luck
With Bibi Andersson in the Swedish sex comedy I Am Blushing (1981), directed by Vilgot Sjoman of I Am Curious (Yellow) fame and controversy. The IMDB offers no reviews of this, but the cast list shows Hagman playing himself - hmm. So far I am frustrated in finding out anything much about this film - but I did locate the poster, and Hagman is on it. The movie is not even listed in the extensive filmography at Hagman's own website - a skeleton in the closet, perhaps? Significantly, Hagman's wife of 57 years (good going), Maj Axelsson, is Swedish, and the couple owns a house in her hometown of Sundsvall on the Gulf of Bothnia.
Hagman appeared on Broadway six times between 1951 and 1963. His most notable performance there was the last, in support of Bert Lahr in S.J. Perelman's The Beauty Part, which I have mentioned before. If I had ever met Hagman, that would have been the first subject I asked him about!
Hagman played a leading role in an unusual 1959 musical, The Nervous Set, about the Beat Generation, which did well in St. Louis but tanked after a few weeks on Broadway. There is a cast album. Also in the cast was the legendary comedian and improv specialist Del Close, who was a friend of mine when I lived in Chicago.
The Nervous Set was directed by Theodore J. Flicker, Hagman's later director on Up in the Cellar (above). Flicker's most famous film credit was as writer-director on the black comedy The President's Analyst (1967), with James Coburn and Godfrey Cambridge. He also wrote and directed a much less well known film in 1964, The Troublemaker:
A naive chicken farmer from New Jersey moves to Greenwich Village to open a coffee house. The obstacles he must overcome include the mob (who, in one of the movie's funniest scenes, surreptitiously follow him in a garbage truck) and corrupt officials--among them, an Irish fire chief, played by Godfrey Cambridge, black comic actor.
The chicken farmer is played by Tom Aldredge, who made his Broadway debut in The Nervous Set, of which this is almost a spin-off. Other interesting names in the cast: Buck Henry, Al Freeman Jr., Joan Darling, and James Frawley, who later directed two early Seventies cult films, The Christian Licorice Store with Beau Bridges and Kid Blue with Dennis Hopper, before settling into a prolific career as a television director.
Flicker co-created the television sitcom Barney Miller in the Seventies, but appears to have dropped out of the industry by 1981, when he was only 51. Not sure why, but he has continued to write and make art since then. A documentary about Flicker, Ted Flicker: A Life in Three Acts, played at the Santa Fe Film Festival in 2007.
Hagman appeared in three substantial straight plays on Broadway, none wildly successful:
Comes a Day (28 performances, 1958), with Judith Anderson, Brandon de Wilde, Arthur O'Connell, the apparently quite busy Michael J. Pollard, and George C. Scott; written by Speed Lamkin, directed by Robert Mulligan. Speed Lamkin (1928-2011), pictured below, was a precocious Louisianan who was unkindly called "the poor man's Truman Capote" by the acerbic composer Ned Rorem. He gained attention for his two early Fifties novels Tiger in the Garden and The Easter Egg Hunt. He took the failure of Comes a Day hard - the reviews were most unkind - and retreated to his hometown of Monroe, where he ruled the petite social realm in "Old South" style. He gave up publishing his writing and instead devoted himself to his art collecting; the New Orleans Museum of Art put on an exhibition of his holdings in 2008. (Film noir connection: In 1950 Lamkin was hired to write an American version of Roberto Gavaldon's 1946 Mexican noir La otra, which had been a hit for Dolores Del Rio. One of many twin-based melodramas, it was being developed as a property for Joan Crawford even though Warner Brothers had previously passed on it because of the resemblance to the Bette Davis vehicle A Stolen Life, which also came out in 1946, and which was itself a remake of a 1939 British film based on a 1935 Czech novel. Crawford never made the film, but Davis herself took up the material in 1964's Dead Ringer - Rian James (1899-1953) gets the story credit on both this film and La otra. Got all that?)
The Ireland-based God and Kate Murphy (12 performances, 1959), with Fay Compton, John McGiver, and Lois Nettleton; directed by Burgess Meredith
The Florida-based The Warm Peninsula (86 performances, 1959-1960), with June Havoc, Julie Harris, and Farley Granger
I always learn a lot from these little research projects. It seems to me that almost no one is working on the question of how connections made in the world of theater had an impact on the world of film, television, and radio, and how all those worlds along with those of literature, the comics, stand-up comedy, music, dance, and the visual arts came together in places like New York, London, and Paris (probably less so in Los Angeles, which was more mono-focused on screen entertainment). Pop cultural histories of film and television are turned inward when they need to be turned outward towards other media and intellectual currents.
POSTSCRIPT: One of my correspondents at The Blackboard, AT, kindly pointed me in the direction of additional information about the Larry Hagman mystery credit Jag Rodnar (aka I Am Blushing) at the New York Times website:
Director Vilgot Sjoman of I Am Curious - Yellow fame, has created this film of a director named Gunnar Sjoeman (Gunnar Hellstrom) making a movie in the Philippines that is based on Joseph Conrad's book "Victory." After arriving on location, the director finds that his leading man has shafted him and so he finds another (Larry Hagman playing himself), then his mistress (Bibi Andersson) gets involved with a movement to free a political prisoner, and the Philippine co-producer would like to transform the movie into a more commercial product. Amidst these developments, the director is still able to shoot some pretty bloody scenes of local color, and make broad jabs at the regional brand of foreign white dominance over underprivileged nationals. ~ Eleanor Mannikka, Rovi
This is certainly more information about this movie than I have seen anywhere else. It sounds as if Vilgot Sjoman might have intended some satire of Francis Ford Coppola's infamous production of Apocalypse Now (also based on Conrad, of course) in the Philippines just a few years earlier.
Jag Rodnar could be an interesting (and certainly
unheralded) addition to the surprisingly extensive genre of movies about the
making of movies. (Fassbinder's Beware of a Holy Whore is perhaps my
favorite.) Now to locate the film itself...that might take some doing.
Another interesting connection: Gunnar Hellstrom, who played Vilgot Sjoman's director alter ego "Gunnar Sjoman" in Jag Rodnar, directed six episodes of Dallas and acted in four (as the character "Rolf Brundin"). He had been active in American television as director and occasional actor since the early Sixties (directing 33 episodes of Gunsmoke, for example). I knew that name rang a bell!
I do believe that the Swedish connections here must have had something to do with Hagman's wife, Maj Axelsson.
My new mantra: Read the credits...read the credits. Listen to what the credits tell you.
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