Dalton — Timothy Dalton, Part 002

 

Reportedly, some of the old James Bond films are unspooling again in cinemas in the United Kingdom to celebrate 60 years of 007 on screen.  Twitter has been abuzz for the last couple of weeks with fans of the fictional super spy looking forward to seeing the entry Licence to Kill (1989) return to the big screen after many years. 

It was nice to see such fervor for a Bond film where the spy is played by Timothy Dalton, an actor who is not usually thought of as a 007 fan favorite.  His serious, scowling take on the secret agent is often contrasted unfavorably to the more suave, debonair interpretations of the character, which tend to be more popular.  I’m not the biggest Bond enthusiast, but Dalton is my favorite Bond actor, and since he appeared in only two films of the legendary franchise — The Living Daylights (1987) and Licence to Kill — he remains one of the more underrated in the role, so it was good to see some enthusiasm on line for his portrayal.

This got me to thinking of the blogpost I wrote back in 2015 about Dalton being my favorite Bond.  In my article, I wrote about my satisfaction that Dalton was being reappraised as one of the better Bonds after his outings had mostly been scorned upon release by fans of the series.  (And by “the series,” I mean the franchise begun under producer Albert R. Broccoli and originally distributed by United Artists starting in 1962.  A handful of films and TV shows featuring the character of Bond have been produced outside of this series, but they are not thought of as “canonical” by the fans.)  I also repeated the story of why Dalton appeared in only two entries into the franchise: a legal dispute forced the series into an involuntary hiatus until after his contract to play the character had expired.

But turning my mind to the idea of Dalton as Bond also revived an old, half-forgotten memory.  The time was about 1990, or sometime not long after Licence to Kill failed — unjustifiably — to live up to expectations at the box office.  I was watching one of those TV shows of entertainment news, perhaps Entertainment Tonight.  I seem to remember one of the talking heads saying that because of Licence to Kill’s underperformance, the Bond producers wanted Dalton removed from the role and for it to be recast with Pierce Brosnan, who was originally cast in the part but became suddenly unavailable and replaced by Dalton.  However, this would have been before the legal squabble that derailed the Bond films for a few years until Dalton’s contract had lapsed, the reason we were told that he had stepped away from the series. 

I started wondering: Was the narrative of Dalton’s tenure as Bond being cut short by the legal dispute merely a cover story for his being forced out of the role by Hollywood higher-ups because of his films’ lackluster ticket sales? 

I posted my rumination on Twitter, and sure enough, several minutes later, someone replied to my post with a newspaper clipping from when Licence to Kill was still in release, a clipping saying that the “studio bosses” wanted the dour Dalton out as Bond and replaced by the more convivial Brosnan.  Reading the newspaper clipping, said to have been published in the Irish Independent (perhaps interested in the story because Brosnan is from Ireland), it’s difficult not to suspect that Dalton was forced out of playing Bond by the studio heads, and the coincidental years-long legal dispute served as a face-saving story to explain why he didn't resume the role. 

Given that Dalton was reportedly reluctant to take on Bond from the get-go suggests that his vacating the role — voluntarily or otherwise — wasn’t the most serious of blows, and his high regard for the 007 film series in his interviews in the years since his departure suggests that there are no hard feelings on his part. 

Still, Dalton remains one of the most intriguing interpreters of James Bond on screen, and as I’ve said before, I’m sorry that he only got to play the role a paltry two times when his fellow Bond actors (except for the critically unchampioned George Lazenby) got to play the secret agent on multiple occasions. 

But the enthusiasm abounding on Twitter for Dalton’s performance in Licence to Kill, and for the film itself, implies that the actor and his movies are finally finding their audience after all this time.  I hope so.  I think that Timothy Dalton’s two efforts as James Bond, The Living Daylights and Licence to Kill, will age better than some other films in the series. 

Warner Oland: No Known Asian Ancestry

This posting is more about the exchange of ideas (such as it is) on the Internet than about anything else.  As readers might know, the character of Charlie Chan, created by Earl Derr Biggers in 1925, is controversial.  Although Biggers devised him as an antidote to the sinister “yellow peril” stereotypes of the era, the character hasn’t aged well, especially for Asian Americans.


THE CONTROVERSY OVER CHARLIE CHAN

While Charlie Chan may have appeared as a fully positive hero to the audiences of the day, contemporary audiences are more critical.  Chan was based on the real-life Honolulu police detective Chang Apana, but the fictional character bears little resemblance to his inspiration.  Apana was said to be a tough customer who carried a whip with him on his assignments in case he got into a fight — in a word, Apana was a badass.  Some Asian American critics now say that Biggers removed Apana’s badassery to come up with the less aggressive, more humble Chan.  In his films, Chan is also made to talk in a heavy Asian accent while speaking in artificial-sounding “Chinese” aphorisms, which are other traits that put off contemporary Asian American audiences.  And in those films that portray Charlie Chan as the lead character (all but three), the Chinese Hawaiian detective has always been played by non-Asian actors, of whom Warner Oland is perhaps the best remembered.  As Wikipedia sums up the controversy:

Critic Michael Brodhead argues that “Biggers's sympathetic treatment of the Charlie Chan novels convinces the reader that the author consciously and forthrightly spoke out for the Chinese — a people to be not only accepted but admired. Biggers’s sympathetic treatment of the Chinese reflected and contributed to the greater acceptance of Chinese-Americans in the first third of [the twentieth] century.” S. T. Karnick writes in the National Review that Chan is “a brilliant detective with understandably limited facility in the English language [whose] powers of observation, logic, and personal rectitude and humility made him an exemplary, entirely honorable character.”  Ellery Queen called Biggers’s characterization of Charlie Chan “a service to humanity and to inter-racial relations.”  Dave Kehr of The New York Times said Chan “might have been a stereotype, but he was a stereotype on the side of the angels.”  Keye Luke, an actor who played Chan's son in a number of films, agreed; when asked if he thought that the character was demeaning to the race, he responded, “Demeaning to the race? My God! You've got a Chinese hero!” and “[W]e were making the best damn murder mysteries in Hollywood.”

Other critics, such as Yen Le Espiritu and Huang Guiyou, argue that Chan, while portrayed positively in some ways, is not on a par with white characters, but a “benevolent Other” who is “one-dimensional.”  The films’ use of white actors to portray East Asian characters indicates the character’s “absolute Oriental Otherness”; the films were only successful as “the domain of white actors who impersonated heavily-accented masters of murder mysteries as well as purveyors of cryptic proverbs.” Chan's character “embodies the stereotypes of Chinese Americans, particularly of males: smart, subservient, effeminate.”  Chan is representative of a model minority, the good stereotype that counters a bad stereotype: “Each stereotypical image is filled with contradictions: the bloodthirsty Indian is tempered with the image of the noble savage; the bandido exists along with the loyal sidekick; and Fu Manchu is offset by Charlie Chan.”  However, Fu Manchu’s evil qualities are presented as inherently Chinese, while Charlie Chan’s good qualities are exceptional: “Fu represents his race; his counterpart stands away from the other Asian Hawaiians.”

Still, Charlie Chan also has his very outspoken defenders.  A number of critics (most of them Caucasian) seem resentful of contemporary criticism regarding the character.  Back in 2003, cable’s Fox Movie Channel announced a TV festival of newly restored Charlie Chan films, but when the cable channel was criticized by Asian Americans, it cancelled the festival.  As a compromise, Fox Movie Channel screened four of the films bookended by a discussion of Asian American critics moderated by George Takei.  In response to this, author Max Allan Collins angrily denounced the channel’s decision:

Takei does an excellent, dignified job [as moderator] in this effort, but his panelist are mostly a bunch of ill-informed, blinkered “experts,” all Asian (isn’t that racist?), various academics and a few actors.  One film scholar tries to defend the films, mildly, as of their times; the others seem not to have seen the films that they dislike so and talk of heavy-handed make-up (neither Warner Oland nor Sidney Toler used much, if any, make-up) and “shuffling” (Chan is polite, you see … making him an instant Uncle Tom).  (Max Allan Collins, “Foreign Crimes,” Asian Cult Cinema #41, p. 13, emphasis and ellipsis in original)

Reading Collins, one might think that Asian Americans didn’t have the right to speak out against Asian portrayals that they found objectionable, and one might think that Asian Americans have always enjoyed the same kind of equal access to their portrayals in mainstream entertainment that whites have had.  But Collins isn’t a solitary voice, as a number of Charlie Chan fans in print and on the Internet declare their support for the character in the same hostile, indignant tones against Asian Americans for their reappraisal of the fictional detective. 


MY RESPONSE TO A FACEBOOK POST

As mentioned by Collins, one element of the controversy is the use of make-up to allow Chan’s white portrayers to look more Asian, a practice denounced by Asian Americans as “yellowface.”  Some of Chan’s defenders say that since the white actors wore very little make-up, yellowface was not employed, but as I have said elsewhere, others regard yellowface to be practiced whenever a white performer plays an Asian character — whether appearance-altering cosmetics are used or not. 

Perhaps to remove this last argument against Charlie Chan, a Facebook member recently posted a relatively lengthy contribution to his timeline saying that Warner Oland, perhaps the best-loved actor to essay the character, was of partial Asian ancestry and therefore never wore yellowface.  Besides playing Chan, Oland played several other Asian characters — as well as non-Asian ones — throughout his long career in Hollywood, including Fu Manchu.  The Facebook member reported that Oland, a native of Sweden raised in the United States, claimed that his mother was Asian to explain his vaguely Asian appearance.  The writer went on to mention other Asian and Asian American contributions to the Charlie Chan series.  But the main point of his post seemed to be that Oland was of part-Asian descent, and that this information should lessen any charge of racism clouding the character of Charlie Chan. 

I replied to the Facebook member’s post, saying although Oland sometimes claimed to be of partial Asian ancestry, this had never been confirmed, and according to Wikipedia, Oland’s biographers have found no Asian relatives in his family tree.  Oland’s claim that his mother — whose maiden name, according to the Internet Movie Database, was Maria Johanna Forsberg, not the most Asian-sounding of names — was Asian may have just been a fanciful story he told to those inquiring about his background.  Other on-line sources also said that Oland was not of any known Asian descent.

A Sámi man of northern Scandinavia

I went on to speculate that Oland’s somewhat Asian appearance may have been the result of a possible relation to the Sámi people (a.k.a. Laplanders) of northern Scandinavia, who are Caucasian but sometimes have features somewhat similar to East Asians.  I haven’t read much about the facial characteristics of the Sámi, but in some pictures that I’ve seen, a few of them have what might be called “hooded” eyelids, which may not be incomparable to the epicanthic fold of most East Asian peoples.  While I can’t find any literature detailing the frequency of their “hooded” eyelids, at least one on-line article (of indeterminate reliability) says that Sámi eyes are sometimes “slanted.”  I concluded my reply by saying that given his Swedish birthplace and Scandinavian lineage, Oland being of Sámi ancestry seemed more likely than his being of Asian ancestry. 

My reply wasn’t lecturing or combative — indeed, I thought I sounded downright friendly and hoping to connect with a fellow film enthusiast.  I posted my reply last night, and I woke to see that the Facebook member had now blocked me from his page.  I don’t have access to what he wrote anymore.  I can no longer view his post to make sure that my recollection of it is completely correct. 

Since I can’t communicate with the Facebook member anymore, I can only assume that he was very zealous in his efforts to rehabilitate the character of Charlie Chan, and when someone questioned part of his argument for doing so, he brooked no contradiction and shut down the exchange.  I’m guessing that this is mostly about the contentiousness of the character of Charlie Chan.  Some people absolutely love the fictional detective and are in high dudgeon that anyone would object to him.  Charlie Chan is one of the 20th century’s few regular media representations of an underrepresented racial minority who felt that this character misrepresented them.  But many hard-core fans (again, virtually all of them seemingly non-Asian) dismiss this view of the character — and they dismiss his critics as artificially aggrieved. 

Just because marginalized communities have found a voice in this society, don’t expect the dominant culture to listen to it. 

‘La Cucaracha’ in Technicolor

In honor of the beginning of Hispanic Heritage Month, I'm posting a curio: the first live-action film to be shot in the three-color Technicolor process. It’s the 1934 Hollywood musical short La Cucaracha. Maybe it’s not the ideal way to observe the month, but I think it’s intriguing that such a historically important (albeit dopey) film is set in Latin America. It’ll be a break from all those serious Cesar Chavez documentaries.

12 Cool Crowd Pleasers

Was my list of “10 Favorite Films” too art-housey for you?  Okay, to make up for it, here is a list of twelve movies whose carefully honed, audience-tested appeal has won a place in the sprocket holes of my heart, oldest to youngest:

IT HAPPENED ONE NIGHT (1934)

With crackling dialogue and a sure-footed storyline, the film that defined the romantic comedy. 

A NIGHT AT THE OPERA (1935)

The Marx Brothers rein in their explosive anarchy to appeal to a wider audience, but the results are still sublime.  

CASABLANCA (1943)

Made in 1942 but officially released in January 1943, it won the latter year’s Oscar for Best Picture.  Hollywood’s studio-era apotheosis.  

SEVEN SAMURAI (1954)

Epic. Action-packed. Awesome.

THE APARTMENT (1960)

Silver-screen Hollywood craftsmanship at its heartwarming best.  (Listen to the DVD’s commentary by Bruce Block to realize just how much thought and care went into this film.)

FOR A FEW DOLLARS MORE (1965)

Shoot-’em-up excitement with an art-house edge. 

THE WILD BUNCH (1969)

The Seven Samurai (or at least their cowboy counterparts) saunter south of the border.

MONTY PYTHON AND THE HOLY GRAIL (1975)

The funniest film I’ve ever seen. No joke. 

MAD MAX 2 (a.k.a. The Road Warrior, 1981)

Casablanca with a case of road rage. 

OUT OF SIGHT (1998)

Steven Soderbergh rebounds from his mid-career doldrums to capture Elmore Leonard’s semi-cynical, semi-sentimental romantic roundelay between a U.S. marshal and an escaped con.  Exhilarating and arresting. 

SHAKESPEARE IN LOVE (1998)

Stop saying that Saving Private Ryan was robbed of its Oscar! Shakespeare in Love is a compelling, character-driven masterwork with lots of laughs and an air-tight story. Methinks its critics protest too much. 

KING KONG (2005)

Peter Jackson’s Kong-sized do-over of the 1933 classic is going to give CGI-heavy remakes of pre-sold properties a good name. 
(However, the film’s brief portrayal of the Skull Island natives as barbaric savages is a big step backwards.)

Dalton — Timothy Dalton

I have a female friend who’s a big Sean Connery fan.  When we first met, she seemed to come up with an excuse to bring up the movie star most associated with playing secret agent James Bond 007 in each of our conversations.  Sean Connery this — Sean Connery that — Sean Connery the other thing.  She talks about him less these days, but shortly after we first met, I’m sure the Scottish movie star’s ears were ringing whenever my friend and I shot the breeze.  One evening, she was hosting a James Bond-themed event at a local restaurant.  I ended up sitting at a table with my friend and some of her companions.  That night, one of my friend’s friends asked me a question that my friend herself had never asked: “Who’s your favorite Bond?”  I replied, “Timothy Dalton.”  My friend did a double take at the table: “Whuh?”  She probably just assumed that Connery was everybody’s favorite 007 and was thrown for a loop when I — her sounding board on all things Connery — proved her assumption to be untrue. 

At the time, I was aware that my pro-Dalton opinion was in the distinct minority.  I’m not the world’s biggest Bond fan, but I did see most of the movies and follow the literature about the character from time to time, so I know it wasn’t long after Dalton inherited the role from Roger Moore in 1987’s The Living Daylights that many Bond aficionados started grousing about the Welsh actor’s performance.  Among ardent fans, the vituperation was especially venomous, but it was never really clear to me exactly why these fans were so upset.  I got the idea that these grumblers merely thought that Dalton’s inadequacy in the role was self-evident and no further explanation was needed.  Dalton made only one more film as Bond, Licence [sic] to Kill (1989), but the criticism continued.  As the years went by, this opinion seemed to be set in stone: the fans liked Roger Moore; they liked Pierce Brosnan; they loved Sean Connery, of course.  You could even find a few to put in a good word for the one-off George Lazenby.  But they hated Timothy Dalton.  And I wasn’t given a straight answer as to why. 

It’s difficult to find any of the scathing anti-Dalton diatribes of the 1980s on the Web at the moment, but as one Internet poster puts it: “All I’ve ever heard from friends ... is that [The Living Daylights and Licence to Kill] are lesser Bond films and that Dalton sucks.”  

With the latest Bond adventure, Spectre, now in theatres, I was contemplating writing a defense of Dalton-as-007 on this blog.  But as I read over some on-line articles in preparation, I learned that my disquisition of Dalton was no longer necessary: Dalton-as-Bond now has quite a few advocates on the Internet.  It appears that several fans have reconsidered Dalton’s two outings as Bond and found more to champion than to criticize. 

Timothy Dalton as James Bond 007 in ‘The Living Daylights’ (1987)

Looking for an explanation of this reversal of popular opinion, I stumbled upon this theory: Dalton inherited the role from Roger Moore, who played the secret agent as a semi-comical figure.  Moore’s penchant for dryly raising an eyebrow each time he heard a double entendre became a signature of the film series.  The only Moore Bond that I really liked — indeed, my favorite film in the series up to that time — was For Your Eyes Only (1981), which had a more serious plot than usual and a more feral performance by Moore than usual.  But by the time Moore retired from the role after A View to a Kill (1985), the Bond movies were noted more for their camp than their cloak and dagger. 

Behind the scenes, it’s well known that Dalton was first offered the role of Bond in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service (1969), but the actor, then in his twenties, felt himself too young for the part and turned it down, whereupon it was later offered to Lazenby.  Also, after Moore’s departure, the creators’ first choice as his replacement was Pierce Brosnan, who by then had made a name for himself in the humorous detective TV series Remington Steele (1982-87), but at the last minute, the show activated an option on Brosnan’s contract, making him unavailable to play Bond.  With Brosnan out of the picture, in both senses of the term, Dalton was persuaded to accept the part he declined 18 years before. 

Poster for ‘Licence to Kill’ (1989)

When Dalton took over the role of Bond, he and the films’ creators wanted to return to a more serious interpretation of the character:

[Dalton] made two Bond films, both noteworthy more for his darker, brooding take on the role than for the films themselves. Dalton sought to get away from Moore’s jokey boulevardier and instead played Bond as a man with an edge, an interpretation he felt was closer to how author Ian Fleming had depicted the character in the books. Indeed, Dalton was often spotted on the sets of his 007 films paging through the original Fleming novels as a reference aid.

The audience’s ill-preparedness for this darker view of James Bond, it’s been hypothesized, alienated many Roger Moore-weaned fans from Dalton’s version of the character.  Only more recently, with Daniel Craig’s similar approach to the part, has Dalton’s work been reappraised and accepted by a large number of Bond fans.  And many are now voicing the opinion that I have held for quite some time: it’s unfortunate that Dalton — due to a legal dispute that forced the series into a hiatus until his contract expired — didn’t do more than two films as 007.  As one writer says of the fans’ new acceptance of Dalton as James Bond:

The quiet, self-effacing actor … has always kept his private life away from the tabloids, has always been loyal to the Bond franchise … without surrendering himself to endless retrospective chat shows and conventions. And perhaps as a result, people are finally beginning to appreciate his two Bond films for the stylish, underrated thrillers they have always been.

Dalton and the filmmakers didn’t only want to revise Bond’s character; they also wanted to tweak other aspects of the franchise.  The actor’s second entry, Licence to Kill, is a good case in point.  Where most of James Bond’s previous villains had been cartoonish characters with an eye toward world domination, Licence to Kill put 007 up against a topical nemesis: a drug lord, Franz Sanchez (Robert Davi), who already controls his own corner of the world and is bent on keeping it.  This was a wise choice since the Cold War was winding down in 1989, so Bond’s antagonists sympathetic to the Soviet Union wouldn’t be as threatening as in years past.  And in moving the milieu from a conflict losing its menace to one ripped from the headlines, Licence to Kill made the story’s environment more realistic and hardened the characters. 

 

Robert Davi as drug lord Franz Sanchez in ‘Licence to Kill’

The film diverged from the formula in other ways as well.  Where Bond movies had previously tended to be set in at least two different countries on two different continents, all of Licence to Kill is set in the same area: south Florida and northern Latin America.  (In the movie’s biggest false note, it gives its fictional Latin American banana republic the English name of “Isthmus.”)  Instead of Licence to Kill having Bond given his assignment by M, 007 goes rogue to avenge a friend, supplying the agent with a more rebellious bite.  And instead of the villain’s palatial lair exploding in a massive fireball at the story’s climax, what detonates is a gas tanker after a high-speed chase. 

But Licence to Kill subverts still more.  As the most casual observer of the film canon knows, an obligatory moment of each movie is when 007 announces himself to someone as “Bond — James Bond.” In the previous Bond films, the scene consistently comes across as a moment of confident coolness, an eagerly awaited announcement that our unflappable, invincible hero has arrived. The moment in the series isn’t so much the character introducing himself as it is a moment of dauntless self-declaration. (Do I really need to say anything about how entrenched these three words of film dialogue have become in our popular culture?)  But when Dalton says this ultra-important line in License to Kill, it’s during an anomalous moment: when he extends his hand in introduction to Sanchez.  In Licence to Kill, Bond isn't so much announcing the arrival of the hero to the audience as he is merely making the bad guy’s acquaintance. And then, Sanchez blows off Bond by refusing to shake his hand.

In the other movies, “Bond — James Bond” are strong words of self-assertion. In Licence to Kill, they’re convivial words preceding a snub. I think that the Bond fans in 1989 were looking forward to this line in the film, but they didn’t get the moment that they had expected.  These sorts of small deviations from the previous Bond films may have put off the contemporaneous fans even more from Dalton’s interpretation of the secret agent. 

But I’m glad to hear that many Bond fans are now revising their harsh opinions of Dalton’s work in the film series, so any further inarticulate advocacy from me is unnecessary.  Although Dalton only appeared in two movies as James Bond, those offerings, The Living Daylights and Licence to Kill, remain among the best in the series, despite the latter’s underperformance at the box office.  However, Daniel Craig’s newer rendition of Bond has taken the venerated cinema cycle to a whole new level.  Craig’s films as Bond — Casino Royale (2006), Quantum of Solace (2008), Skyfall (2012), and now Spectre (2015) — have dazzlingly ratcheted up the action, the spectacle, the humanity, and the overall impact of what is on the screen.  Craig’s 007 efforts will be the new measure for future films in the franchise.  Still, we should spare a thought for the Bond actor who tried to do what Daniel Craig is now doing, but who was at first pilloried by the fans for it: Timothy Dalton. 

Coda: When I first saw Licence to Kill, I couldn’t get past it as a First World-Third World allegory, Latin American politics in microcosm.  The country of Isthmus seemed to be a struggling South American republic trying to find its own footing economically, leaving a vacuum for a drug baron like Sanchez to fill and to come into power.  The teaming up of a group of white people — Bond, his thrown-together partner in stealth Pam Bouvier (Carey Lowell, one of that film’s “Bond girls”), and gadget-master Q (Desmond Llewelyn) — to defeat a mostly Latin American organization played out as white imperial domination over people of color in a way that was hard for me to ignore.  It took a couple more viewings for me to get past its racial politics and appreciate Licence to Kill as an action movie.  I suppose that giving Sanchez the first name “Franz” was the film’s way of saying the character was partially white, so that the audience didn’t have to view the conflict as between a white man and an exclusively brown man (albeit while playing on Britain’s skepticism of Germany since World War II).  As an actioner, Licence to Kill is thrilling and visceral in a way few pre-Craig Bond films are, but the movie never completely sheds a pungent air of Western superiority that one can imagine comforting to an adherent of white exceptionalism. 

On a less serious note, I never really bought Carey Lowell’s performance as the street-smart, weapon-wielding Pam Bouvier.  She comes across as a smooth-skinned resident of the suburbs plopped into a rough-and-tumble setting.  It would have been more believable if Licence to Kill had cast a performer with more of a seen-it-all edge to her, someone you could believe knew how to handle a gun and how to get herself out of tight situations.  And Wayne Newton’s appearance as a tacky TV preacher who helps Sanchez sell his narcotics burdens the story with an out-of-left-field campiness that doesn’t really fit with the rest of the film.  Otherwise, Licence to Kill satisfies as a serious-minded, punch-packing action movie that seems worlds away from the jauntiness of Roger Moore’s 007. 

Diversity in Casting: An Exception I’d Make

Rooney Mara as Tiger Lily in ‘Pan’ (2015)

As I’ve said several times before, limiting my remarks to the mainstream U.S. entertainment industry: Due to a historical lack of opportunities for minority thespians, characters of color ought to be portrayed by actors of color, ideally actors who are the same race (although not necessarily the same ethnicity) as the roles they play.  It’s unfortunate that some people refuse to see this issue in a historical perspective and insist that reserving non-white roles for non-white performers is unreasonable racial territorialism that goes against the make-believe at the heart of storytelling.  But they are wrong, and making certain that minority characters are played by minority thespians — at least for the time being — redresses past discrimination and past invisibility in the entertainment industry.  This is an issue that I feel very strongly about. 

At the same time, I wouldn’t set that standard in stone as a hard-and-fast “rule” that must never be contravened.  Aside from such a “rule” probably being an unconstitutional infringement on free speech, there may be things to be gained by casting a character of color (or one ostensibly so) with a Caucasian performer.  However, I believe that exceptions to this rule would be few and far between. 

For example, in 1997 and again in 2013, English actor Patrick Stewart essayed Othello in two U.S. touring productions of Shakespeare’s famous tragedy.  However, where previous white interpreters of the Moor would use cosmetics to darken their features, Stewart played the part without such maquillage, and the rest of the cast, playing historically white characters, was all African American.  In other words, Stewart’s productions of Othello flipped the racial composition of the play from a black man among whites to a white man among blacks, allowing the audience to view the racial dynamics of the work from a different perspective.  That was a rare example of a Caucasian actor taking a lead “minority” role in a production while still giving uncommon opportunities to performers of color and making the issue of race a prominent one in the project’s execution.  There aren’t very many other exceptions to reserving non-white roles for non-white actors that I would find agreeable, but I can think of one more. 

If a character of color in an adapted work from the past is so racially stereotyped as to be offensive to modern-day audiences — and it would be logical in the work for this character to be white — then rewriting such a dramatis persona as Caucasian and casting the role with a Caucasian actor would be acceptable to me, at least in theory.  However, it might then be suitable to relocate a non-offensive racial diversity elsewhere in the work.  

This brings us to Joe Wright’s recently released film Pan (2015), a prequel and origin story to J.M. Barrie’s Peter Pan, first performed as a play in 1904.  While I haven’t seen Pan, a controversy has been brewing for the past year because the film cast Euro-American actress Rooney Mara as Tiger Lily, a character usually portrayed as Native American.  This understandably provoked criticism from Native Americans and their supporters that the character should be played by an actress of authentically aboriginal American ancestry.  I more than appreciate this stance: a rare high-profile opportunity for a Native American performer was once again taken away. 

But — as is often asked in such circumstances — is that high-profile role worth playing?  After all, the pidgin-speaking damsel in distress that is Peter Pan’s Tiger Lily is dismaying (at the very least) to modern sensibilities and would clearly be regarded as an archaic stereotype.  In the original source material, Tiger Lily and her “tribe” are never explicitly identified as Native American, although most productions have portrayed them as such.  As an article for Smithsonian magazine says:

In the play, Peter refers to the tribe as “piccaninny warriors,” and in Peter & Wendy (Barrie's book-long adaptation of the story, published in 1911), they are introduced as the “Piccaninny tribe” — a blanket stand-in for “others” of all stripes, from Aboriginal populations in Australia to descendants of slaves in the United States. Barrie's tribespeople communicate in pidgin; the braves have lines like “Ugh, ugh, wah!”  Tiger Lily is slightly more loquacious; she'll say things like “Peter Pan save me, me his velly nice friend. Me no let pirates hurt him.” They call Peter “the great white father” — the name that Barrie had originally chosen for the entire play. A tom-tom pounded in victory is a key plot point.

So, an adaptation of Peter Pan would certainly want to rewrite this character, who is integral to the story, to be less of a stereotype.  But if you’re going to rewrite a racist caricature, why make her and the tribe Native American in the first place?  While Peter Pan is not something that I have ever over-analyzed, I have sometimes wondered why Tiger Lily and her people are in the story’s fictional realm at all.  Here’s how one Native American website puts it:

While casting a white actress as an Indian character [in Pan] is a familiar kind of disappointing, some folks who are trying to read the tea leaves are seeing something else — a revamped Tiger Lily who isn’t Native American at all. This would be a departure from J.M. Barrie’s source material, but maybe not such a radical one. Peter Pan’s Indians, after all, do not live [in North America]; they live in “Neverland,” and there is no real reason why they are Indians. And in J.M. Barrie's original play (but not the movie), they are said to be of the “Pickaninny Tribe,” which adds an anti-African American slur to the anti-Native “redskin” caricature. It’s a blurring that suggests Barrie didn't really care whether he was writing about Indians, or Africans, or African Indians or Indian Africans — he simply wanted a handy caricature and exotic other that might show up in the dreams of white English kids circa 1904.

I hear that Pan director Wright has crafted a character who is not a damsel in distress but a butt-kicking feminist role model.  Furthermore, I understand that Wright has cast both Tiger Lily’s tribe and the Lost Boys with a multi-racial ensemble, so performers of color aren’t being entirely snubbed. 

Given how egregiously racist the portrayals of Tiger Lily and her tribe have been from the get-go, I can certainly understand Wright’s going in the other direction and creating a character who, in and of herself, could not be accused of being a racial stereotype and could not be accused of promoting racism (with the arguable exception of extradiegetically erasing a prominent character of color by doing so).  There’s no real logic to the Indians being in the fictional realm of Neverland in the first place.  If the story were actually set in North America, I’d probably feel differently, but the setting is largely one drawn entirely from Barrie’s imagination, so why not?  This seems to be the reason why Pan reportedly does not make Tiger Lily and her people Native American.  While it makes Tiger Lily ostensibly white, it makes her people multi-racial. 

The musical ‘The Nightingale,’
based on Hans Christian Andersen’s
China-set story, was staged at the
La Jolla Playhouse in 2012 with a
self-proclaimed “color-blind” cast.

Many will disagree with me, and I understand their perspectives.  For instance, some view compromised minority representation as preferable to no minority representation at all, so to them, casting the role of Tiger Lily with a white actress especially stings.  But given how stereotyped the role has been in the past, I equally understand Wright’s apparent desire to make a 180º turn, race-wise.  (Some, no doubt, will say that even if Tiger Lily in Pan had been played by a Native American actress, critics would still have found fault with her portrayal.)  Others might see an inconsistency between my position here and my preference for seeing the China-set musical The Nightingale (2012) with an all-Asian cast; instead, as its publicity said, the musical was cast “color-blind” (in the words of one critic, “white men and women of color”) because its creators saw its Asian setting as more of a China as it existed in the 19th-century European imagination than the non-fictional China.  But at least China is an actual place inhabited by actual Chinese people, something that The Nightingale ought to have reflected.  Peter Pan’s Neverland, by contrast, is not a genuine geographical entity. 

If I were ever in charge of a production of Peter Pan (which I don’t plan to be anytime soon), I would have gone further in the other direction by making Tiger Lily and all her people a visibly European (Celtic?) tribe and made up for this erasure of diversity by casting the Lost Boys as multi-racial.  That way, there would be no accusations of racially stereotyping Tiger Lily and her people, while I would still maintain a racially pluralistic cast. 

Oh, well.  Those are my thoughts on the subject of the casting of Joe Wright’s Pan.  What are yours?  

A Horror Film to Skip: ‘Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein’

Kenneth Branagh as Dr. Frankenstein (left) and Robert De Niro as the Monster
in ‘Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein’

Last October, to help everyone get in the mood for the holiday, I wrote a Halloween-themed post about my favorite horror film, Jack Clayton’s The Innocents (1961).  This year, I thought that I would write another about — all things considered — my least favorite horror film.  Although I’m sure that I could find other would-be chillers that are more wanting in subject matter and/or craftsmanship, the film that I would like to write about is, given the talent and resources lavished on it, perhaps the biggest missed opportunity in the history of cinema.  The name of this monstrosity more horrifying in execution than intention?  Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1994), directed by Kenneth Branagh. 

 

Director-star Kenneth Branagh as Dr. Victor Frankenstein

Adapting Mary Shelley’s 1818 classic as a follow-up to Francis Ford Coppola’s very successful Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992 — which one critic dubbed the most expensive high-school play in history), Branagh’s Frankenstein boasts a large budget and a very talented cast, not the least of whom is Robert De Niro in the role of the Monster.  Since many adaptations of the Shelley novel show no fidelity to its period or setting (at least two productions transplanted the story to Britain), I was very pleased to see Branagh’s film fixed firmly in the late 18th century (the period of the Enlightenment) and Dr. Frankenstein’s status as an outsider by making him a Swiss national (Shelley’s novel was famously written in Switzerland) studying in nationalistic Ingolstadt, Germany.  For buffs of German literature, Friedrich Schiller even makes a cameo appearance (although the real Schiller was probably nowhere near Ingolstadt at the time). 

With sumptuous costumes evoking the late 18th century and a very accomplished cast, Branagh’s film had a lot going for it.  Unfortunately, he chooses to emphasize the melodramatic aspects of the novel with breakneck pacing, shovel-on-the-head dialogue, and a constantly swirling soundtrack that hardly ever lets up.  In fact, Branagh’s Frankenstein is almost wall-to-wall music, as though the filmmaker feared that any let-up in the orchestral score would put the audience to sleep.  (The first time I first saw this Frankenstein at the Writers’ Guild Theater in Beverly Hills, when the composer’s name, the otherwise distinguished Patrick Doyle, appeared on the screen, the audience broke out into jeers — the only time I’ve ever known that to happen to a composer.) 

 

Robert De Niro as the Monster

Actor-director Branagh himself plays Dr. Victor Frankenstein, which may have had something to do with his not being able to view the project from a more comprehensive distance.  De Niro’s Monster looks more like a badly scarred human rather than anything especially frightening, so we’re less understanding of the townspeople’s horrific reactions to him.  It would have been appreciated had there been some other element to his appearance (such as his flat head in the Boris Karloff movies for Universal Pictures) to make the Monster more … well … monstrous. 

Branagh’s Frankenstein rushes from one plot point to the next in an apparent effort to cram all of its material into the movie without running overtime.  There’s little sense of the film pausing long enough to allow the viewer (or even the characters) to absorb the proceedings.  Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is one of those rare films that might have actually been better had it been longer (and less melodramatic) and given more time for its narrative to unfold. 

 

Helena Bonham Carter as Elizabeth, Dr. Frankenstein’s betrothed
(apparently, someone got tired of the film’s bombastic dialogue)

And to top it all off, the script — by Steph Lady and The Shawshank Redemption’s Frank Darabont — wallops the viewer with spell-it-out-for-you dialogue that leaves no doubt about the characters’ actions and incitements.  Here, Victor Frankenstein is given a mother who dies in childbirth to spur his experiments to prolong life indefinitely.  One scene has Victor laying flowers on his mother’s grave, saying, “Oh, Mother, you should never have died.  No one need ever die.  I will stop this. I will stop this.  I promise” — lest we have any doubt what his driving force is.  The scene might as well have had a sign light up in the background saying “CHARACTER’S MOTIVATION.”     

To watch Branagh’s Frankenstein is also to wonder how such a richly pedigreed film got so much wrong.  Rather than playing up the melodrama, I wish that the movie had gone in the other direction and observed its goings-on with a Kubrickian sense of detail and understatement.  The scene of Victor at his mother’s grave needed no dialogue, and I think that the scene could have been more rewarding by allowing the viewers to put Victor’s (rather obvious) motivation together for themselves. 

 

John Cleese as Dr. Robert Waldman

The only real reason to watch Branagh’s Frankenstein — other than to luxuriate in the production values and wish they were expended on a better movie — is to witness Monty Python alum John Cleese in a rare dramatic turn, in this case in the role of Dr. Robert Waldman, the titular scientist’s mentor.  But even here, as good as it is to catch Cleese in anything, I would still like to have seen an important supporting part like Dr. Waldman go to Christopher Lee as a tribute to his role as the Monster in The Curse of Frankenstein (1957), one of the first of Hammer Films’s horror series from the 1950s through ’70s. 

At the start, I called Branagh’s Frankenstein my least favorite horror film.  Where other misfires of the genre can sometimes make me laugh at their inept attempts to frighten the viewer or at least make me appreciate the movie as an artifact of its time, Branagh’s film only makes me sad.  As I watch such lavishly costumed characters spouting hyperbolic dialogue written by scribes who have proven their worth on other projects, I’m filled with a sense of sorrow for what might have been.