LAST TRAIN
Peter Chattaway <petert-LOVM4QxV+tDq6eQxt3vRmLDks+cytr/[email protected]>
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http://www.steynonline.com/content/view/3933/28 Ave atque vale Wednesday, 13 April 2011 Sidney Lumet, 1924-2011 If memory serves, the last Sidney Lumet film I saw was Gloria, his 1999 remake of John Cassavetes’ film of the same name from all the way back when in 1980. The original wasn’t such great shakes, but it benefited from Cassavetes’ customary intensity and the usual soul-searching performances he drew from his repertory company (Gena Rowlands et al). I’ve no idea why Lumet chose to remake it with Sharon Stone, except that remaking a forgotten John Cassavetes film was one of the few things he hadn’t yet done. By then, he’d remade an unforgotten film classic — The Wiz, the leaden "all-black" version of Oz — and tried his hand at pretty much everything else over the last four decades: Twelve Angry Men, Long Day’s Journey Into Night, Serpico... Lumet was as good a director as his material, perfectly fine for Eugene O’Neill but unable to obscure the fact that The Wiz was a stinkeroo. But once in a while he transcended his material beautifully. Murder On The Orient Express seemed like filler in the Seventies and belongs today to an obsolete genre I rather miss: The all-star turn. For the umpteenth Agatha Christie adaptation, Lumet had Albert Finney as Poirot, and then surrounded him with Ingrid Bergman, John Gielgud, Lauren Bacall, Sean Connery, Vanessa Redgrave, Richard Widmark... It would have been easy enough to coast on the casting. Instead, in the opening moments he found a very elegant way both to show off his stars and top them: He'd hired the "world’s greatest authority" on train sounds. The sound editor worked for six weeks on train noises only. At the beginning of the story, when the train pulls out of Istanbul, every bell, every whoosh of steam, every grind of wheels was completely authentic, right down to the barely audible click as the engine’s headlight goes on. It all sounded great when he sat down in the edit suite. And then Richard Rodney Bennett handed in his wonderful waltz theme for the scene, and Lumet knew that every single click and clank would be buried under the music. ‘We’ve heard a train leave the station,’ he told the sound guy. ‘But we’ve never heard a train leave the station in three-quarter time.’ The fellow walked out and Lumet never saw him again. But that's a great opening, and as good as anything in Twelve Angry Men or Serpico. Rest in peace. -- dadl-ot mailing list http://mail.thehood.us/mailman/listinfo/dadl-ot_thehood.us http://news.gmane.org/gmane.music.dadl.ot