by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2011 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
The film was Act One, a 1963 Dore Schary production, released through
Warner Bros. and written and directed, as well as produced, by Schary, based on
Moss Hart’s entertaining memoir of his start in the theatre. After having had
five of his plays — all serious dramas modeled after the works of Eugene
O’Neill — rejected, Hart (George Hamilton) decides to take the advice of his
friend and patron Joe Hyman (Jack Klugman) and his sort-of agent Richard
Maxwell (Sam Levene) and write a comedy instead. He has no idea what he’s going
to do for a comedy plot until he reads an issue of Variety and notes that the featured story in it is the
turmoil being caused in Hollywood by the advent of talking pictures. He
concocts a story called Once In a Lifetime and drafts a play on it, only to get the runaround from a producer
named Warren Simon, who keeps him waiting in the lobby of Simon’s hotel for two
days (during which time he’s nearly bitten several times by an obnoxious small
dog one of the bellboys is walking for a guest — I kept waiting for the payoff
of the gag to be that it’s Warren Simon’s dog, but somehow Messrs. Hart and
Schary missed that one).
A friend of his who has a contact with the legendary
producer Sam Harris (the man who partnered with George M. Cohan for years, gave
the Marx Brothers their first major hit, The Cocoanuts, and was reportedly so wonderful and sweet to
everyone that the nastiest thing anyone could ever remember him saying about anybody was in 1933, when the Nazis took power in Germany,
about which his comment was, “Hitler is not a nice fellow”) gets Hart’s play a
reading in Harris’s office, whereupon Harris’s verdict is he’ll produce it if Hart can get the legendary George S. Kaufman
(Jason Robards, Jr.) to rewrite and direct it. Warren Simon tells Hart to be
sure to tell Kaufman that he thinks the play is great, whereupon — on his first
phone call with the Great Man — Kaufman snarls that he would never in a million
years have anything to do
with a play Warren Simon liked, and hangs up. Of course Hart is fearful that he’s
blown his big opportunity, but Harris mediates and convinces Kaufman that Hart
simply was naïve enough to fall for Simon’s nasty trick.
Work starts on the
script, accompanied by a lot of bouncy underscoring by Skitch Henderson that
doesn’t sound anything like the
real pop music of the 1920’s and 1930’s (and the “source” music heard
throughout the film is only marginally closer!), and Schary proves utterly
unable to make the on-screen act of writing seem dramatic. He may also have
been hamstrung by being unable to quote more than snippets of the actual play
Hart and Kaufman wrote: Once in a Lifetime was bought by Universal and filmed by them in 1932,
and in the early 1970’s PBS showed the film and hailed it as a major
rediscovery — then it got stuffed back in the vaults and hasn’t been let out
since then! (The actual film of Once in a Lifetime and Act One would make an interesting double bill, and it definitely goes alongside
The Power and the Glory and The
Man Who Reclaimed His Head among
the early-1930’s movies that remain frustratingly unavailable on DVD.) With
Kaufman directing and also casting himself as the fictitious playwright in the
story, Once in a Lifetime gets an out-of-town tryout in Atlantic City — and bombs; all Kaufman’s
changes haven’t been able to fix the weaknesses in the second and third acts.
Hart says he started writing the play at a beach and so he takes his notepad
and his script to the beach in hopes that lightning, or at least inspiration,
will strike twice — and it does; several months later the play premieres on
Broadway, is a smash hit, and Hart’s reputation as a playwright is made.
Hart
called the book on which the film was based Act One to denote that he wasn’t writing his entire life
story — just the start of his career — and it’s full of wonderful Jewish
character actors (including an unrecognizable George Segal at the start of his
career as Hart’s nihilistic friend Lester Sweyd), and there’s an odd in-joke in
the character of “Archie Leach” (Bert Convy), aspiring young actor and friend
of Hart’s, who sits in at his lunches at a cheap restaurant (Hart usually ends
up paying because he’s the only guy in the circle who’s got a regular job — he’s
director of an amateur theatre company sponsored by the — I’m not making this
up, you know — “Young Men’s Hebrew Association”!) only to be accosted by one or
more girls who remember seeing him at some short-running independent play out
in the Village (or somewhere equally obscure), until he laments he’s got a fan
club without having wanted one, and at the end he announces to the group that
he’s going off to Hollywood, and Hart’s parting shot is, “Don’t let them change
your name!” I wonder how many moviegoers in 1963 got it — Archie Leach not only
went to Hollywood but became a superstar after he changed his name … to Cary Grant; it would have
been easier for the non-cognoscenti to have figured it out if Convy had been able to do a more credible
Grant impression (the way Tony Curtis did brilliantly in Some Like It Hot), but here he just sounds like an American trying
to talk with rocks in his mouth.
Act One the book I remember as a charming but also thrilling memoir that made
the act of writing seem as vertiginously exciting as watching a tightrope
walker; Act One the movie is charming but
also awfully sentimental (a flaw in Hart’s writing generally; just compare the
well-made but sometimes sugary script he wrote for the 1954 version of A
Star Is Born to the marvelously acerbic
one Dorothy Parker co-wrote for the 1937 original), and George Hamilton doesn’t
look particularly Jewish (especially by comparison with the real-life Jews
playing his parents, Martin Wolfson and Sylvia Straus!) but he acts the part
well enough within limits — Charles commented that Hamilton’s acting skills
actually seemed to deteriorate as he got older and lost his boyish good looks!
— and the supporting cast is a delight, especially Robards (though one wonders
how someone that curmudgeonly could come up with so many great funny lines in
his plays!) and Klugman.
