Guest Who! Quite Cape-able

While watching NFL football on CBS, I kept seeing promo blurbs for Supergirl (2015-), "the hero America's been waiting for," a new TV series spurred on by the relative successes of Arrow (2012-), The Flash (2014-) and others. I generally watch almost no scripted network series, but finally curiosity got the best of me and I looked at the pilot to see who was in it. The titular character is played by Melissa Benoist (a former cast member of Glee who was the first auditionee for the part and got it, but not before a thousand other young ladies were considered!)

Benoist's antagonist on the series (her secret identity's domineering boss at a publishing conglo- merate, lending a The Devil Wears Prada feel) is played by Calista Flockhart, a performer I have successfully avoided from 1989 till now, but even she didn't bother me as her character is meant to be loathsome. (That character being Cat Grant, created in the comics in 1987 and portrayed for one season, 1993-1994, on Lois & Clark: The New Adventures of Superman by Tracy Scoggins.)

What made me decide to watch the pilot episode was the stunt casting of Supergirl's adoptive parents on earth. Arriving years after her more famous cousin Superman, thanks to an unexpected detour to a zone in which time was frozen for her, she is greeted by the hero (shown only in silhouette) who now older than her instead of younger as he was back on Krypton!

He takes her to live with a couple of married scientists who had proven helpful to him in his own youth, The Danvers. We see the couple walking from their oceanfront home to greet Superman and his young cousin.

Upon closer inspection, we see that the mother, Eliza Danvers, is being played by Helen Slater and the father, Jeremiah Danvers, is portrayed by Dean Cain!

This is fun because Slater is best known for her cinematic debut as Supergirl (1984), in which she was a beautiful and appealing young actress caught in something of a messy movie. She's only given a line or two in this pilot episode as the story wants to chug along and get to the heroine's adulthood.

Cain (who fares even worse since he is given no lines and is barely seen!) is also an entertaining bit of casting since he was the star of Lois & Clark: The New Adventures of Superman (1993-1997.) Despite the fact that he was vastly underutilized, it was neat to see him on the show. (Slater, at least, has another guest spot in the can which will be seen on November 23rd.)

When Slater was Supergirl and Cain was Superman, we had not yet decided that it was abhorrent to wear saturated primary colors when portraying a superhero.

Now, all live-action projects centered around comic book heroes feature darkened, dulled renditions of the costumes that made the characters famous in the first place.

Thus, Supergirl's outfit is in line with this new trend. (Even her hair is far less blonde.) I wasn't sure what to expect out of this show, but I must say the pilot, and Benoist's considerable charm, won me over. For the moment, it's in my DVR as a series to record. Can we get a guest spot from Faye Dunaway as Selena?  Ha!

Be Still My Hart

My belated Valentine’s Day gift to you, loyal readers, is this tribute to yet another 80s hunk who melted my butter and who remains a handsome (and multi-tasking) man today, Mr. Hart Bochner.

Hart is the son of veteran Canadian actor Lloyd Bochner (probably best known for his role as Cecil Colby on Dynasty, but a familiar face on countless TV series and in many movies.) When Hart was about 4 years old, his father and the family moved to Los Angeles, so he really was raised a Californian.

Blessed with silky brown hair and blue bedroom eyes, his handsome face, with its solid jaw and strong features, assured that he would make an impact if given half a chance.

In 1976, director Franklin Schaffner was preparing Islands in the Stream for George C. Scott (who he has directed to an Oscar in Patton in 1970) and needed to cast a few boys as his sons. Schaffner’s wife had spotted Hart Bochner at an American Film Institute open house the year before and recommended him to her husband. Bochner won the part and began his film career among some serious pros (the cast also included David Hemmings, Gilbert Roland and Claire Bloom.)

The film was released in 1977 and it would be two more years before Hart did another feature. This time it was the sleeper hit Breaking Away, about cycling, which starred Dennis Christopher. Hart played a rich kid rival of Christopher’s and appeared in a blue Speedo in one sequence!

Next, Bochner had a role in the TV film Haywire, all about screenwriter Leland Hayward and his actress wife Margaret Sullavan and featuring heavy hitters Jason Robards and Lee Remick as his parents. He then starred in the horror flick Terror Train. It certainly wasn’t good or prestigious, but it has a minor cult following, mostly thanks to costar Jamie Lee Curtis. (This, by the way, is not her pictured in the attached photo.)

In 1981, John Steinbeck’s East of Eden was turned into a miniseries. It featured a stunning, tour de force performance from Jane Seymour as the venomous Cathy and, in the latter half of the program, Hart portrayed her virtuous son Aron. That same year, he played one of Jacqueline Bisset’s (younger) lovers in Rich and Famous, also becoming involved with her onscreen daughter Meg Ryan.

He tried to land a network series in the Indiana Jones-ish knock-off Callahan, but the pilot didn’t sell. His screen career slid into low gear until he was selected to portray, Ethan, the love interest opposite Helen Slater’s Supergirl.

This all-star companion piece to the major success Superman boasted lots of special effects, a large budget and a fire-breathing performance from Faye Dunaway as evil sorceress Selena. The fact that it tanked miserably at the box office doesn’t change the fact that he is exceedingly beautiful in it! He wears a pair of snug jeans that aren't shown much from the waist down in the actual movie, but which appear to greater advantage in the featurette that was made on location. Wow...

He plays a manly, sexy landscaper who is used as a pawn by Dunaway to test her magic powers. She wants to make him fall in love with her, but unfortunately, circumstances lead to him loving Supergirl instead! He shaves and cleans himself up and follows the heroine around like a puppy. Eventually, Dunaway succeeds in bring him back to her side and he winds up for a while as a boy toy, complete with open collared shirt and a vacant stare.

I don’t usually set out to make visitors to The Underworld jealous, but I really can’t help it this time. Thanks to a keen eye and some quick thinking, I managed to take a one-dollar bill and salvage from the clearance shelves of a local bookstore a copy of Tom Tierney’s set of Supergirl paper dolls! Who else among you can lay claim to a paper doll of Hart Bochner naked but for a pair of little briefs?!

1984 was a busy year for Hart. Not only was that the year of Supergirl, but he also appeared as one of bigamist Dyan Cannon’s husbands in the TV movie Having It All, followed by the leading role in another TV miniseries, The Sun Also Rises. Jane Seymour was on board again, but not as his mother this time, rather as a contemporary.

Another dry period in films and TV followed. In 1987, he appeared in Making Mr. Right, the John Malkovich comedy about a hunk made from scratch (and Hart wasn’t the hunk?!) before assaying one of his most memorable roles.

Though his next big screen part is possibly his best known, it is possibly the one I, personally, enjoy the least. He played Bonnie Bedelia’s sleazy, asinine coworker in Die Hard, the blockbuster action film that really put Bruce Willis on the map. His coke-addled, smarmy jerk of a character, Harry Ellis, was voted #2 on Maxim Magazine’s list “The Greatest Movie Sleazeballs of All Time.”

That same year, in a far more arresting role, he starred as Colin Firth’s dangerously sexy roommate in Apartment Zero. Firth’s character, by the way, is one of those rare, rare ones who I can really identify with. Like him, I used to keep framed portraits of movie stars in my home (in lieu of any shots of family!) and his repressed, understated affection for his roommate mirrors several scenarios in my life. In any case, Hart was WHITE HOT in the film and, even if it all starts to come apart towards the end, for the bulk of the movie, he is amazingly sexy.

In 1988, a sequel to the mammoth, and highly popular, miniseries The Winds of War was created, War and Remembrance. Costing more than any other project of its type to that time ($110 million!), the program had 358 speaking parts and employed 44,000 actors and extras! In the initial miniseries, Jan Michael Vincent and Ali MacGraw played the lovers Byron and Natalie Henry. Critics ripped MacGraw to shreds and did a flamenco dance on the remains and so the parts were recast for the sequel. Hart was chosen to play Byron and, as his Jewish wife Natalie, it was none other than Jane Seymour! Hart has the distinction of playing in what I consider to be the two best things Ms. Seymour ever did. They certainly made a stunning couple.

They are not together for the better part of War and Remembrance because he is in the service and she is in Europe. When she is swept away into a concentration camp, it becomes his supreme mission to find her and rescue her before she is killed. The show was incredibly graphic (full nudity was included in order to avoid being coy during the camp scenes) and the experiences Seymour endured were harrowing to say the least. (It may have been too depressing for viewers, too, because the sequel did not meet expectations ratings-wise.) In any case, anyone with half a brain would be proud to have Bochner out there searching desperately for him or her (that is, after first having a fling with his brother’s widow Sharon Stone!)

Leading roles in small films or supporting roles in bigger ones were Hart’s bread and butter, though he continued to find success in the miniseries genre. In 1991, he joined James Brolin and Rachel Ward in the murder mystery And the Sea Will Tell, looking scruffy and degenerate, but ever sexy.

In Complex of Fear, a minor television movie, he donned a mustache and played a police officer opposite Joe Don Baker (and, fortunately for us, showed off his still impressive body in a swimming pool sequence.) And I’m a sucker for a man in uniform, so this shot of him is pleasant to look at as well.
Since this, he has continued to appear in quite a few TV movies or in series guest roles and has also branched out into writing and directing. He supplements his time by championing “green” issues and drove, first, an electric car and, now, a hydrogen-operated one. (He was even cited by Time Magazine as the “Greenest Celebrity in Hollywood.”) One of his more high-profile recent gigs was on the Debra Messing series The Starter Wife, but he is a frequent attendee at industry functions as well.

Hart Bochner has been accused of being wooden, though I have never had that issue with him myself. If anything, I think he resisted being just another hunk, often taking on parts that either downplayed that aspect of him or that stretched him in another direction. In any case, he only got so far in his film career, which is a shame because, with his face, he could have been an absolute idol had he been in the business a few decades earlier when good looks were required of leading men more than they are now. His face pigeonholed him to a degree, but when he was given the chance to do something more challenging, he usually rose to the occasion, as, for example, in the arresting Apartment Zero.

Faye Day, Faye Day!

Not too long ago, a friend and occasional reader of this blog gently chastised me for “glossing over” Gypsy and West Side Story in my entry on Natalie Wood. I didn’t make it clear enough in the actual featurette that I was really focusing on the childhood and youth career of Miss Wood and not giving her the full-on biographical account that I sometimes do for other, often lesser known, subjects here. It wasn’t meant as a slight to her, I just wanted to look at her early years, especially since Miracle on 34th Street was airing a lot at the time.

When it comes to today’s subject, I must state right off the bat that there is no way I could cover everything in one posting. Miss Faye Dunaway is my favorite post-1970 actress and I could go on for days! This is just a bit of musing about her because, despite my adoration of her, she has been thus far rather underrepresented here! (And, really, there’s precious little rhyme or reason as to what I write about! I just try to avoid two entries in a row about the same type of thing – for example, I usually try to somehow rotate the beefcake, the disaster movies and the favorite actresses with occasional sprinkles of TV shows, other movies and what-not.) As mentioned in one of my earliest entries, Dunaway was the very first motion picture actress I ever understood as such. In my pea brain as a child, it didn’t dawn on me that actors appeared in more than one film in their lifetime! She is the first actor I ever identified by name and saw playing multiple parts. It’s easy to understand the second part of that sentence because in the late 60s and early 70s, Faye was one of the top actresses of the cinema.

After working on Broadway for a while, she was put under personal contract to the fiery and confrontational Otto Preminger. He had intended to use her in five films, but their association during the first, the hooty turkey Hurry Sundown, was so volatile that she bought herself out of the deal, prepared to go broke or maybe never work again in the movies rather than act for him. (One of the films she fought to avoid making was Skidoo and if you ever see that, you’ll understand her reluctance to do it, though her second film, The Happening, was certainly no classic either!) Faye had played a penniless sharecropper’s wife in Sundown, wearing next to no makeup and garbed in frowsy dresses. For The Happening (in which she played a restless girl caught up in a kidnapping scheme), it was a total change. Her hair was longer, she was tan, made up heavily and she displayed a rockin’ body. When people think of Ms. D., her figure isn’t typically the first thing that comes to mind, but, in this movie, at least, it was the main selling point.

Shortly thereafter, she was cast in Bonnie and Clyde, a role that shot her to superstardom. Her Theadora Van Runkle fashions in the film started trends all over the world and she was featured on many magazine covers. Obsessed with her weight in the film, she grew more and more gaunt. She also began sporting gargantuan false eyelashes, giving her a very distinctive look. During the Steve McQueen collaboration The Thomas Crown Affair, she again sported Van Runkle clothes, but this time “mod” ones, which, while amazing to look at, quickly dated the film. It’s my own feeling, however, that any contemporary movie will eventually look dated in time anyway, so why not go for it and wear something interesting that may make people want to see the film later, even if only for the clothes?! Look at all those Adrian concoctions that had no relevance to the economic conditions of the heroines in the 1930s film in which they appeared. They’re fun to look at now regardless. A frothy caper flick like Crown didn’t need kitchen sink realism in my book.

These days, Dunaway is the go-to gal for neurotic, fire-breathing diva-type of characters, but she’s actually led a remarkably varied career, attempting virtually every genre and succeeding in most of them, including a surprising number of neo-Westerns. Her own favorite film is also among her most obscure, Puzzle of a Downfall Child. Released in 1970, it details the mental erosion of a fashion model (and is, in fact, based on the life of one of the most stunning creatures ever shot by a camera, Anne St. Marie.) To her credit and despite an affinity for glamorous clothes, dramatic hairstyles and heavy makeup, Dunaway never shied away from providing warts and all portrayals of earthy women such as Katie Elder in Doc and Lena Doyle in Oklahoma Crude. (My favorite moment in the rather bleak Doc is when she and Stacy Keach have carefully rationed the canteen given to them by a barkeep as they travel across a sweltering desert. Faye groans something like, “Do you think we’ve earned a drink of water?” only to take a swig and spit it out in fury, “Vinegar!! Mexican Greaser... BASTARD!” She later tells a local church woman that when she goes down on her knees, it isn't to pray!)

1973 marked the year of The Three Musketeers and, thus, the year my life was changed. My favorite film as a child, I was captivated by everyone in it, but mostly by Dunaway as the conniving Milady de Winter. I’ll grant that Lana Turner was a prettier one in the 1948 version, but there has never been a better one and I doubt there ever will be. She really has very little to do in The Three Musketeers. It’s in the simultaneously filmed and soon after released sequel The Four Musketeers in which she really shines. Here the focus is on her and her revenge against the people who foiled her scheme against the Queen in the first film and she rises to the occasion in spades. By the time of Chinatown, released in between the Musketeer films, Dunaway was a screen star of the highest magnitude. Here, regardless of the fact that she and director Roman Polanski clashed heavily, she would be part of an undisputed cinematic classic. Her look in the film was patterned after Polanski’s own mother and there would be little or no compromise in it. There was, however, a maelstrom when he tired of seeing a stray hair wafting around all on its own, spoiling a shot, and plucked it out with his hand!

On the heels of this great success came The Towering Inferno and my reaction to that film has been duly noted elsewhere. Suffice it to say, I never got over my fabric in the wind obsession (Thanks, Faye!) and go into spasms whenever and wherever it occurs (such as in a recent viewing of Mamma Mia! in which Meryl is at the front of a huge yacht with a massive wrap billowing behind her.) Another great film, though her role in it is decidedly secondary, came soon after and that was Three Days of the Condor. She plays a sensitive photographer held captive by (and eventually falling for) Robert Redford, who is on the run from conspiratorial CIA members. (Interesting that I have seen this film many times and never noticed Redford's "skin tags!" I guess even the idols have cracks in them somewhere.) By the way, Faye has to hold some type of record for working with the largest number of major leading men of the cinema. It’s easier to list the ones she has not worked with than the ones she has.

Following Condor, she worked with (and incurred the wrath of) Bette Davis in the TV-movie The Disappearance of Aimee, before playing the role that would win her the ultimate movie accolade, a Best Actress Oscar statuette. In Network, she portrayed the driven, single-minded Diana Christensen, a television executive who wants ratings at any cost. With this, she was at the top of her game and at the height of her success. It would last only a short while, however.

She received top billing, if not the most screen time, in the ensemble drama Voyage of the Damned. She played the wife of a Jewish doctor who was placed aboard a cruise ship out of Nazi Germany filled with Jews, but which was forbidden to dock anywhere, causing much distress and trauma for its inhabitants. Here, she played in a marvelously unhinged scene with another of my favorite actresses, Lee Grant, in which Lee has come unhinged and begun cutting off her own hair. (A couple of years later, she would do the cutting when, in Mommie Dearest, she got bent out of shape at daughter Christina for mocking her and using her cosmetic products!)

Theoni V. Aldredge had handled the costumes for Network and Faye must have liked her because she began using her for a trifecta of films, none of which showed her off to any great advantage physically. Though her character in Eyes of Laura Mars was deliberately outré, she sometimes looked foolish as in the ostensibly scary scene in which she wore a newsboy cap with built in scarf and gauchos with slits to the hip, those articles being scarier than anything else. Then in The Champ, she was swallowed up in a series of pastel, gossamer nightmares and filmy hats. Part three was The First Deadly Sin, which featured her bedridden character wasting away while sporting various pukey nightgowns hailing from Aldredge’s sewing machine.

In 1981, Dunaway’s career would take a turn from which it would never fully recover. Anne Bancroft was set to play Joan Crawford in Mommie Dearest, the hatchet-job account of the star as written by her estranged and very bitter daughter Christina. When Bancroft thought better of it, Faye took the part and, giving it her customary level of commitment, sank into the exploitive and over the top melodrama with gusto and without benefit of another prevailing set of eyes to rein her in. (And this is more melodrama than bio. As several critics have said, the film Mommie Dearest actually plays more like a Joan Crawford movie than a movie about Joan Crawford!) Surely, I’ll go into this film at a later date with much more detail, but for now suffice it to say that it was a total debacle. Scenes intended to be serious were laughed off the screen until the makers began marketing it as a black comedy! The film won bad movie awards, such as Razzies, and emerged as a cult, camp icon for the ages.

Faye did a cover story in People magazine on her experience with the role, and did discuss it briefly with James Lipton on Inside the Actors Studio (back when that series actually featured actors!), but, for the most part, the role, the film, the very idea of any of it all amount to a subject that is off limits. It’s a shame she can’t take a page from Patty Duke’s book (with regards to Valley of the Dolls) and embrace the hilariousness of it since it has been nearly three decades ago by now. That film alone, while damaging, didn’t completely kill her career. However, the decision to live in England (with husband Terry O’Neill) and then to appear in another role which was virtually the same, only with even more camp attributes, sent her feature film career spiraling into oblivion.

Supergirl was a spin-off of the highly popular Superman films, which starred Christopher Reeve. Helen Slater was chosen to enact his similarly strong cousin and Faye was enlisted to supply the villainy. She played Selena, a small potatoes occultist who discovers a stunning power source that increases her power a hundredfold. A number of factors led to the films failure (though there is a very hardcore coterie of fans who continue to worship it), but one thing was certain. It would be years before Dunaway appeared in any sort of major film and she would never regain her stature in the industry. This is not to say she didn’t work. Dunaway has worked harder trying to rebuild her career than she probably ever did initializing it! Her resume is quite full and there have been some high points along the way.

Barfly, a Mickey Rourke film about alcoholics, released in 1987 did a little bit to rebuild her reputation. She also made inroads with supporting roles in quirky independent films and cable movies and later made the intoxicating Columbo telefilm It’s All in the Game, for which she copped an Emmy Award. This period has yielded any number of opportunities for her to play all sorts of ladies, though it cannot be denied that she is most often hired to portray either flighty, mannered, over-the-top types of people or stern, rigid types. One rare excursion into childrens’ comedy was the orangutan on the loose flick Dunston Checks In, in 1996. She played a sort of composite of Ivana Trump and Leona Helmsley and was delicious (also looking amazing.) In the mid-80s, Faye began digging into the cosmetic surgery barrel and it has been a rollercoaster ride. Compare this 1986 photo for the deliciously trashy TV film Beverly Hills Madam to the way she looked in 1994’s Don Juan DeMarco below. Okay, good enough (and Faye certainly looked astonishing in the camp riot The Temp as a glamorous and exacting office executive), but since then there always seems to have been a new nip, tuck or yank here and there (a blind item once intimated that she had to smear Vaseline on her teeth in order to smile because her lips were pulled that tightly.)

It hasn’t been easy (in fact it’s been gut-wrenching) to witness some of her more recent public appearances with all the Medusa hair, Asian eyes, gnashing white teeth and so on. I mean, I worship her and could watch her read the phone book aloud, but at nearly 70 she could have been portraying interesting older women rather than continuing to hang onto her 40s this way. Certainly, she isn’t alone, however. Are there any real old ladies in Hollywood these days? Jessica Tandy died in 1994! Where does it all end? At least I’ll always have my Towering Inferno, with an impossibly sleek Ms. D. roaming around like a Grecian goddess if I find that I can’t watch anymore of the latest stuff.