Poseidon Quickies: "Hush" Now!

I truly didn't intend to be missing in action from this blog for all but one day of January! I ran into one of those instances in which I watched several things, thinking they would be prime material for a post, only to be disinterested in dissecting them further. (That's saying a lot when you think about the truly abysmal shit I focused on - and wrote about - while I was recovering from recent minor surgery! LOL) It was sort of the equivalent of writer's block. "Blogger's Block?" But then, like a drop of ambrosia from Olympus, I stumbled onto Hush (1998), a movie I had never seen, even though I'd made it a point in life never to miss one of those "_____ from hell" flicks, such as The Hand That Rocks the Cradle (1992, killer nanny), The Good Son (1993, killer kiddie), The Temp (1993, killer office admin), The Babysitter (1995, self-explanatory) and all the rest. Hush was filmed in 1996 when the trend was still reasonably hot, but since its release didn't occur until 1998, interest in the genre had waned. Add in the fact that this wound up a highly-troubled project, complicated by over-reliance on test screenings, and you have a real disaster in the making. It barely took in 2/3 of its budget and was greeted by critical scorn. It was likely the rotten reviews (along with a general lack of affection for the stars involved) that led me to skip it back in the day.

Hush begins with a young, unmarried couple arriving at his family's Kentucky horse farm late at night, having come from new York City where they live and work. Johnathan Schaech and Gwyneth Paltrow play the lovebirds. She is assigned her own bedroom in accordance with his mother's traditional views, but he convinces her to join him in his for some midnight mashing. 

Paltrow has a more-than-awkward meeting with the mother (Jessica Lange) the following morning when she emerges from bed, stark naked, expecting to see Schaech, but instead comes face-to-er, face, with his mama.

Paltrow's body double can't get under the sheets fast enough, then afterwards she has to carry on small talk with Lange. Lange is all southern charm, yet already there's a tinge of "off"-ness to her. In this shot, she looks like she's about to take over Jack Nicholson's role as The Joker in the next Batman flick!

Schaech makes a faint pretense of having some sort of spine, but he really has trouble saying no to his mother. Initially only staying through Christmas Day, he's soon coerced into remaining until New Year's.

Now I don't think that the couple is intended to be any sort of concrete version of John F. Kennedy Jr and his wife Carolyn Bessette Kennedy, but there's an unquestioned sense of using that famed NYC couple as a touchstone of style and applying it to this movie's characters.

And I'm sure it's merely coincidence that Mama Lange wears a Jackie Kennedy-ish hat to church as well. Incidentally, expressions like this one, which I call "Zuni Fetish Doll" tip her hat early on that Paltrow is not going to have an easy time of it when it comes to in-law relationships...

Moments like this one brought back uncomfortable memories for me of her turn as Maggie the Cat in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1984.) Many may have loved her in that, but I wasn't among them. I did, however, eventually appreciate her overall talent as an actress during her various incarnations across several seasons of American Horror Story. This movie seems like a prelude to that and I couldn't help wondering if Hush was a favorite of Ryan Murphy's...

As promised, Schaech stays through New Year's Eve and his midnight kiss this time is reserved for his mom. She wants him there permanently in order to help run the farm, which is faltering over time. And, leave though they might, Lange may not be done trying to keep her son nearby.

Paltrow gets a shock when she discovers that, regardless of her trusty contraception device, she is pregnant! (Lange may or may not - though it's very likely - have altered said device while the couple was in her home to render it worthless.)

Thus, a wedding is now called for. So Schaech and Paltrow are back on the farm for an elegant outdoor ceremony.

Lange does everything she can think of to appear as the picture perfect M.O.B.

I truly don't know what in the hell was going on here, though, with these bizarre bridesmaid gowns and headgear! Her matron of honor, by the way, is played by Debi Mazar as a very "New Yawk" coworker and friend. That helps explain why her getup is out of place, even among the other fashion disasters.

Popping up at the ceremony is Schaech's paternal grandmother Nina Foch. Paltrow discovers that Foch had been wanting to meet her for some time, but she never got that message. Hmmmm.

Now, I love, worship and adore Ms. Foch and am always glad when I see her name listed in the credits. She looks terrific and I was elated that she wasn't relegated to just one or two brief moments, but showed up a few times along the way.

One thing I loved about Hush was the overall look of the movie. Virginia (standing in for Kentucky) scenery, elegant houses, tailored clothing and flattering lighting gave the movie a sometimes glamorous look that was harder to find in the grunge-filled '90s than it had been in the excessive (but oh so fun) '80s.

Shortly after the nuptials, back in The Big Apple, Paltrow is assaulted one night at knife point! The crud doesn't seem to want anything from her besides a locket she treasures, but slashes at her abdomen for good measure. 

Paltrow recovers from her ordeal in the couple's loft. Notice how the view from upstairs affords a clear shot of the toilet (bottom-left corner!) Ahhh... Urban living. Anyway... The decision is made to move to Kentucky and help get the horse farm back on its feet so that it will be able to sell for a better price than the low-ball offer that's currently on the table.

Here is where we get the first blatant signs of post-production tampering. On the left is Paltrow debating with Schaech the possibility of relocating to Kentucky. On the right is the very next scene in the film! The young actress's soft features are now replaced by a drawn, gaunt face and an obvious wig.

This sequence was shot two years after the movie had been completed! Not only had her features significantly hardened, but she looked unhealthily gaunt. I don't even want to speculate as to what must have gone down during those 20 or so months in Hollyweird, but apart from that there was no effort to maintain the illusion that the character was even pregnant! 

In the scene before, she had a tummy and was doing the "wobbly walk and rub" so common among actresses playing women with child. Compare that to her rail-thin appearance right after! All of us evolve (in my case, erode!) from year to year, but this instance was startling.

I don't know if this publicity shot is from the first version of the scene in question (it was cold at the time), but it gives one an idea of how it ought to have looked.

Once settled in at the horse farm, Schaech one day finds himself tossed from his steed into a mud hole.

Coated from head to toe in gunk, he's met at the barn by Mama Lange.

She wastes no time in shucking off his filthy shirt...

...and hosing him down! Some horseplay soon follows. Tally this sequence up to another rare highlight of the movie.

With sonny boy back on the scene, the farm is producing winners again. Lange is in her glory, with her horses doing well at the races and Schaech at her side. But Paltrow is becoming annoyed at certain disinformation being spread as well as attempts by Lange to control her.

The young couple have a bit of a face-off on the street of the local town. Again, this sequence, inadvertent or on purpose, recalls the public squabble once captured of JFK Jr and his Mrs.

Against Lange's express wishes, Paltrow begins to pay visits to wheelchair-bound Foch at her luxurious retirement center.

The still-canny Foch has a few things to say about her daughter-in-law Lange, whose husband (and her son) died in a freak accident when Schaech was a little boy.

You can probably guess that none of this sits well with the controlling Lange, who then pays a visit to Foch herself as the elderly woman is receiving a steam treatment (in an unaccountably dark and empty pool room!)

It isn't long before the conversation becomes dark and threatening.

Lange makes lengthy confessions for her sins, but chooses to do so when there's no one there to actually take in what she's saying!

Before all is said and done, she's snatched the baby, fresh from its womb, with the intention of keeping it all to herself. In a typically senseless bit of continuity, she wears an apron during the birth and it winds up coated down in bloody muck. But JUST the apron! Not the shirt underneath! Why? Because the plot calls for her to remove the apron and appear to look unblemished, not because she was able to stay clean beneath it. Makes no sense, but in the final analysis, little does...

Also appearing in this film is Mr. Hal Holbrook as the family doctor. In the original cut of the film, someone comes out of Lange's house in a body bag after the baby's birth and I sort of suspect it was he, but who knows...

I also think that, in the first cut, Foch was done in. But in the re-imagined version, she is still kicking. Again, you can tell this scene is a reshoot from that wig that glued onto Paltrow's head...

It's stunningly obvious...! These two shots are supposed to have been from the same day! The inset from earlier with Foch and the main pic later that evening.

The initial movie was to be rated R and surely contained more mayhem. None of the scenes shown above appear in the released PG-13 film even though they made the trailer! Schaech is never seen with the telltale locket, the fire in the barn never occurs, Lange and Paltrow fighting in a nursery with Lange wielding a piece of broken mirror is nowhere to be seen and there is no body removed from the house. The result is a very soft, hole-filled mess with a less than satisfying ending. The movie's writer-director Jonathan Darby, whose first feature this was, only did one short film thereafter. Whatever potential there was for a rousing thriller bit the dust once test screeners decided they didn't like the ending. And the film isn't perceived as important enough to warrant a Director's Cut on DVD. 

At the time Hush was filmed, Lange, who'd overcome an inauspicious start with King Kong (1976) to take home an Oscar for Tootsie (1982), had recently taken home a second statuette for Blue Sky (1994.) She'd costarred in Rob Roy (1995) and starred in a rendition of A Streetcar Named Desire (1995) opposite Alec Baldwin. Though she continued to work rather steadily, it came to be that her association with producer Ryan Murphy provided the meatiest parts in American Horror Story and Feud. Her work in Grey Gardens and the aforementioned Horror Story gleaned her three Emmys. Now 75, she continues to act on both the big and small screen. 

Paltrow is the daughter of producer-director Bruce Paltrow and actress Blythe Danner and got her start on screen in a project of his and her start on stage via her mother. This was followed by a role in her godfather Steven Spielburg's feature film Hook (1991.) Things continued on an upward trajectory from there with Flesh and Bone (1993), Se7en (1995) and Emma (1996.) By the time Hush limped into theaters, she'd already filmed the movie that would win her a Best Actress Oscar, Shakespeare in Love (1998.) After that came more hits along with some misses. Though she still performs on screen occasionally, her focus in recent years has been as an entrepreneur of sometimes controversial food and "health" products. The circus of a lawsuit she endured over an alleged skiing accident inspired two separate musical productions! She is now 52. 

Schaech first gained attention as a model for products including Armani and as an arm candy beard for the then-closeted comedienne Ellen DeGeneres. He was selected by Franco Zefferelli for a role in 1993's Storia di una capinera (aka Sparrow), claiming years later to have been sexually assaulted by the director. A brief stay on Models, Inc. was followed by roles in The Doom Generation and How to Make an American Quilt (both 1995), which made him a flavor of the month to showbiz press. The big hit That Thing You Do! (1996) made him even more familiar to moviegoers, though his output thereafter tended to be less significant. Nevertheless, he has never stopped working and balanced film roles with plentiful television. He is now 55.

Schaech in his hey-day as a Wilhelmina West model.

Whether Mazar's role was any more substantial in the early version of the movie I cannot tell you. But she barely appears in the final cut. Mostly one brief scene in an office and then just basically wordless shots thereafter a couple of times. Initially a club kid who did makeup for newly-befriended Madonna, she appeared in five of the singer's videos and segued onto TV and into small movie roles including Goodfellas (1990), The Doors (1991) and Malcolm X (1992.) In time she grew into abusy character actress whose sharp tongue added spice to a variety of projects. That's Life, Entourage and Younger are some of the TV series on which she regularly appeared. Just before 2020, she relocated with her husband to Florence, Italy with her Italian husband and their two children, though she still acts in projects there and elsewhere. She is 60.

Foch entered films at Columbia Pictures at the tender age of 19. Making a mark in A Song to Remember (1945) along with the well-regarded B-thriller My Name is Julia Ross (1945), she wound up being underutilized and labeled unattractive enough to thrive as a leading lady. Having fled to Broadway where she became a hit in John Loves Mary, she returned to Hollywood with more confidence, but still tended to wind up in supporting parts, including An American in Paris (1951) and Scaramouche (1952.) A seemingly insignificant role in Executive Suite (1954) led to her only Oscar nomination (which went to Eva Marie Saint of On the Waterfront, inexplicably appearing in the Supporting category.) Many viewers may recall her turn as Moses' adoptive mother in The Ten Commandments (1956.) During this period (1954-1959) she was married to James Lipton of Inside the Actors Studio. While popping up on many TV shows and the occasional film (such as Mahogany, 1975, Skin Deep, 1989, and Sliver, 1993), Foch worked as an exacting acting coach and teacher. She died in 2008 of a blood disorder, one day after first feeling unwell, at age 84. 

I'll call an end to this post with a couple more shots of Schaech's horse bath. (There's an inside joke for me here. My stepfather used to often make mention of a "whore's bath" in which a lady of the evening would just go over key body parts with a washcloth. But my best friend misinterpreted the phrase as a "horse bath" (!) and never got the connotation.)

Keep it clean, till next time!

"Word" Has It...

Hello my loves. It's been a wild, crazy week in The Underworld and too long since my last posting! I have a few neat things in the works, but to tide you over until I can break free of the lunatic schedule I've been keeping, I'm going to revisit a subject I've touched on before here  and here. This has become a sort of go-to topic when I'm pressed for time, but want to give my readers something to think about in the meantime.

Turner Classic Movies fills their time in between cinematic treasures with equally captivating and delightful recollections from some of the stars and crew from the glory days of movie-making. They say that archeologists become ecstatic at the sight of a previously buried and unseen relic, but I can tell you that I get just as elated when I get the chance to see a retired or at least currently less-visible star pop up on TCM's interview segment “Word of Mouth!”

Sometimes, it might be disappointing to see how someone has fared, but more often it's a great relief to see the people looking so good and speaking candidly and enthusiastically about their careers and the people they knew and worked with during them. So, today, I give you round three of some folks who've appeared on this terrific little series of inserts (and am I the only one who wishes they would LAST LONGER and not be as brief as they so often are?)

First, we meet Van Johnson, discussing his costar from 1949's In the Good Old Summertime, Judy Garland. It's almost a consensus that Garland was considered brilliantly talented, tremendously overworked and, as a result, terribly troubled. Johnson had his own share of problems, not the least of which was a near-fatal car crash in 1942 that nearly severed his head at the scalp! This injury, however, did keep him home during WWII which contributed to his career immensely. With so many young men enlisted in the service, he became a top box office draw among teenage girls. He also had a controversial marriage (to the wife of his best friend Keenan Wynn!)

If you look closely at these shots of him, you can see that he has some ill-advised mascara on that flicks up at the corners, giving him a vaguely feminine quality that plays up rather than plays down his sometimes prissy personality. Mr Johnson died in 2008 of natural causes at the age of ninety-two!

We so love Miss Jane Powell and are amused that she opted for the camera to be way back instead of up close and personal. (And she's lit up like runway six at La Guardia Airport!) Perhaps she saw some of her old pals from MGM being captured in other Word of Mouth segments with the lens up against their pores. Powell was discussing the joys of working with dancing legend Fred Astaire during 1951's Royal Wedding. She and Astaire played siblings despite a thirty-year age difference between them! June Allyson had first been cast in Wedding, but pregnancy prevented her from doing it. Then Judy Garland was brought in, but swiftly fired. Powell won the part at last and then discovered close to the end of filming that she was pregnant as well! Miss Powell is currently eighty-four.

I have a special place in my heart for this next star because he is someone I have met on two occasions. (You can read more about that encounter right here.) Prior to his emergence as a featured actor (in films like 1961's West Side Story, for which he won an Oscar), George Chakiris was a dancing chorus boy in movies such as White Christmas (1954) and Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953), in which he took part in the famous number “Diamonds Are a Girl's Best Friend” featuring Marilyn Monroe. Mr. Chakiris is currently seventy-eight years of age and is in very good, if very lean, shape.

His West Side Story cohort Russ Tamblyn has a segment in which he describes working on the huge Cinemascope production of the musical tom thumb (1958), lower case intentional. He intentionally had to overstate all of his physicality against the giant sets and in the large screen format. A highly acrobatic dancer, Tamblyn was just right to play the diminutive fairy tale hero. Prior to that, he scored an Oscar nod as the repressed and henpecked teen Norman in Peyton Place (1957.) The statuette went to Red Buttons for Sayonara. Tamblyn continues to work even now, having appeared in the recent Django Unchained (2012), in which he appeared with his daughter, now famous in her own right as an actress, Amber Tamblyn. Russ Tamblyn is seventy-eight years old at present.

What fun to see classy and elegant Constance Towers on an installment of Word of Mouth! She popped up to discuss working with craggy, but very dynamic writer-director Sam Fuller, who used her as the female lead in two films, Shock Corridor (1963) and, in particular, The Naked Kiss (1964.) Since 1974, she has been happily married to the once-hunkalicious John Gavin and she continues to act today. After a very long stint on General Hospital, she appeared in an episode of the TV show 1600 Penn this year. She is seventy-nine years old today.

Darryl Hickman had worked steadily as a child actor, appearing in films of as high a pedigree as The Grapes of Wrath (1940) and Leave Her to Heaven (1945), among many others. He was able to work with some of the industry's greatest performers, including Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn in 1942's Keeper of the Flame. By the mid-'60s, his career was foundering more than a little (though his little brother Dwayne Hickman was becoming a household name as the star of The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis), so he went into the business side of show business, with an occasional on-camera appearance.

Always a very introspective person, he briefly lived and studied in a monastery, but later married and had two children (one of which, sadly, committed suicide at the age of nineteen.) Hickman also developed his own approach to acting, which he successfully parlayed into a second career as an acting coach. Now eighty-one, he has not acted on-screen since the late-1990s.

Another child actor who worked in many early films, some of them classics, was Jackie Cooper. Already having worked alongside the considerable Wallace Berry in 1931's The Champ, the two were reunited in 1933's The Bowery, 1935's O'Shaughnessy's Boy and, notably, in 1934's Treasure Island. He greatly enjoyed the pirate adventure saga, less so the wig that was foisted upon him... Known to a later generation for his role as Perry White in the film Superman (1978) and its three sequels, he exited the acting business in 1990 when his wife became ill and he needed to help care for her. Upon her recovery, he decided he liked his free time too much to go back after sixty+ years of working! The youngest male ever nominated for a Best Actor Oscar (for 1931's Skippy, though he lost to Lionel Barrymore in A Free Soul), Cooper passed away in 2011 of natural causes at the age of eighty-eight.

Completing a trifecta of child stars in this post is Kevin Corcoran, best known for having played little brother Arliss in the Walt Disney classic Old Yeller (1957) as well as for other Disney films including The Shaggy Dog (1959), Swiss Family Robinson and Pollyanna (both 1960.) Like many child actors, Corcoran found it necessary to segue into other areas such as producing and directing once his acting opportunities began to lessen (in his case by the late-1960s.) Corcoran was one of eight children, most of who pursued acting in their childhood as well. He is now sixty-three.

Jane Alexander was a significant presence in films of the 1970s and still works today, but not nearly enough, nor in important enough projects. She was nominated four times for the Oscar (1970's The Great White Hope, 1976's All the President's Men, 1979's Kramer vs. Kramer and 1983's Testament), but never took one home. The statuettes went to Helen Hayes in Airport, Beatrice Strait in Network, Meryl Sreep in Kramer vs. Kramer (obviously not a supporting role, the category in which she was placed) and Shirley MacLaine in Terms of Endearment. Here, she spoke about how her scene in President's Men was filmed without her having even gone to makeup or having put on the assigned costume! The director Alan J. Pakula glanced at her and liked her just as is and the result was an Oscar nomination. A gifted actress, she really should be getting better parts in prominent movies. She is currently seventy-three.

Surely one of the more animated and effervescent personalities to show up on Word of Mouth is Miss Mitzi Gaynor. Best known for South Pacific (1958), she was also the star of Les Girls, directed by George Cukor and co-starring Gene Kelly. I love her glitzy, zesty, upbeat personality, a by-product of her never-say-die career as a nightclub entertainer in the wake of her Hollywood career diminishing. Her last movie role was in 1963!! Thankfully, she did present a series of dazzling TV specials for about a decade from 1967 to 1978. She is eighty-one at present.

Remembered by many as the star of the police detective series The Streets of San Francisco (1972 – 1977), Karl Malden actually enjoyed a long, varied and significant career as a movie character actor. He won the Oscar for 1951's A Streetcar Named Desire and was nominated once more for 1954's On the Waterfront (losing to Edmond O'Brien in The Barefoot Contessa.) Here, he discusses working with the intensely dedicated Burt Lancaster in The Birdman of Alcatraz (1962.) Malden had worked with most of the important stars of the cinema, had served five years as the President of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and been married to his wife for over seventy years (!) when he passed away of natural causes in 2009 at the age of ninety-seven. He was an exemplary actor and human being.

Here, we see Farley Granger, describing how it was to work for the technically exacting Alfred Hitchcock in Strangers on a Train (1951), though he had also previously performed for the Master of Suspense in Rope (1948.) Though Granger's career lasted for quite a long while after that, it could be argued that his most important roles were completed by the mid-1950s. Granger passed away in 2011 at the age of eighty-five of natural causes.

You see a shift over the years in these interviews, from floral, elegantly-appointed backgrounds to more sleek, contemporary backdrops. For a few interviews, the background is mostly black, giving stark contrast to the subject at hand. Take director Blake Edwards (of The Pink Panther films, among many others) who, with the dark background and dark glasses looks positively villainous here! Married to Julie Andrews for more than forty years, he succumbed to pneumonia in 2010 at the age of eighty-eight. He'd been nominated for a writing Oscar for 1982's Victor/Victoria, which starred Andrews, but it went to Costa-Gavras and Donald Stewart for Missing. In 2004, Edwards was given an Honorary Oscar statuette.

Another of the dark looking Word of Mouth segments was this one with Sidney Sheldon. He discusses his screenplay for The Bachelor and the Bobby Soxer, the title of which he disliked and thought would lead to a wretched flop rather than the smash hit that it was. He is also known for having created and written for the popular series The Patty Duke Show, I Dream of Jeannie and Hart to Hart and enjoying a latter-day career as a novelist. Mr. Sheldon died of pneumonia in 2007 at the age of eighty-nine.

We recently sang the praises of Miss Nina Foch in our post about Mahogany, but here she is later in life describing her role in Executive Suite (1954), a role so flimsy and scant on the page that she was hesitant to accept it. It brought her, however, her only Oscar nomination thanks to the way she fought to make herself memorable as the all-seeing, all-knowing secretary of a deceased businessman. The award went to Eva Marie Saint (in what was really a leading role) for On the Waterfront. A supporting player in The Ten Commandments (1958) and many other movies, Miss Foch died in 2008 at age eighty-four of myelodysplasia, a blood disorder.

When you see certain Hollywood actresses continue to color their hair, add attachments to it, pull their faces taut, inject things into it and just basically do anything they can to crystallize their looks in amber, it's refreshing to see someone who has either had little, very good or no work done and just looks like an attractive, older woman. Frankly, I think Sally Ann Howes looks sensational, white hair, extra pounds and all! Here, she's discussing the acting expertise of Vivien Leigh during Anna Karenina (1948), though Miss Howes is better known herself for starring in the maligned musical Chitty Chitty Bang Bang (1968) opposite Dick Van Dyke. Amazingly, she is eighty-two years of age at present and is just the type of “out of the spotlight” persona we look so forward to seeing on Word of Mouth.

I'll be back very soon with the other goodies I've promised. In the meantime, stay dry during the rainy month of April!