Auteur Theory

Cross-dressed to impress: Director/co-star Sydney Pollack with Dustin Hoffman in Tootsie, screening Monday on Turner Classic Movies in tandem with one of Pollack’s final TV interviews on the new series Under the Influence.

The program was taped in front of a live
audience in Los Angeles a few months before Pollack’s untimely passing,
and the dreadlocked Mitchell—who’s not a derriere-kissing shill a la
James Lipton, thank goodness—could not have found a more apt subject to
set the tone for his series. Pollack has always been an affable auteur,
and his easygoing guest shot helps explain why actors have enjoyed
working under his guidance. The 30-minute format has one chief
liability—it’s too short, as an upcoming segment with motormouth
Quentin Tarantino may attest—yet Mitchell manages to stay true to the
show’s premise, which is to get the guests jawboning about cinematic
influences on their own directing or acting styles. 

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Pollack warmly recalls his own
adolescence at 1950s-era bijoux, especially being dazzled by director
Vincente Minnelli’s 1951 musical An American in Paris, even to
the point of purchasing black loafers just like the ones Gene Kelly
wore. Further influences ranged from Method actors (“Monty” Clift,
“Jimmy” Dean—not the pork sausage king, either) to stylistic
breakthroughs from international cinema, like the French New Wave’s
experimental nature. “Everything I do is digested from everything I’ve
seen,” Pollack allows, although his thematic takes on male-female
relationships, from This Property Is Condemned (1966) to The Way We Were (1973) to Out of Africa (1985), likewise advanced his own signature style.  

Toss in a few comments about the process
of acting (“The trick in film acting is really about getting rid of
tension.”), some thoughts on his frequent employment of Hollywood
royalty (Meryl Streep is a great actress, Pollack defends, but he can’t
alter the fact that she is also a movie star), the overtures from
Dustin Hoffman to get director Pollack to also play the agent role in Tootsie and memories of Burt Lancaster on the sets of The Young Savages and The Leopard,
and the half-hour just flies by. With Sydney Pollack, unfortunately,
the flavorful anecdotes stop here, with no chance for an encore. 

The second installment of Under the Influence,
premiering July 14, was taped in New York City without an
audience—although Mitchell has no problem laughing out loud with guest
Bill Murray. Looking a bit forlorn underneath an ill-advised wimpy
mustache, Murray nevertheless springs into action when recalling his
own comedic heroines, such as the forgotten 1936 comedy The Moon’s Our Home
with Margaret Sullivan engaged in a pillow fight with Henry Fonda. In
contrast, Lucille Ball “never really made me laugh” but he does cut
Barbara Stanwyck’s oldies some retroactive slack (“I came to her late,
during her Big Valley period.”), although “funny girls” such as Elaine May and his Saturday Night Live partner Gilda Radner are a few of the comic queens who really stole his heart.  

Murray later chimes in regarding the
“comedy assassins” known as the Marx Brothers, the enduring charms of
Cary Grant (“Well, there’s obviously a resemblance,” Murray deadpans,
as the program amusingly cuts to side-by-side stills comparing Grant
with Murray’s role from Where the Buffalo Roam) and his desire to do a buddy picture with Clint Eastwood. He also contributes priceless stories about the troubled Tootsie
set, when Pollack and Hoffman “were arguing about what time the sun
came up,” and the dangers of sappy cinema. “You have to have emotion
but when you execute it poorly and you arrive at sentimentality, then
you have to take those people out and shoot them.” 

Perhaps Under the Influence’s
most notable triumph is getting Murray to sound genuine, even wistful,
when gabbing about the primal pull of early cinema, particularly his
discussion of the storytelling technique in pioneering silent movies
such as D.W. Griffith’s A Romance of Happy Valley (1919).
Viewers can decide whether Murray is dissing today’s multiplex malarkey
with this closing statement: “It’s hard to make a bad movie, but if
you’ve seen the great movies, you’ve got to feel that obligation to get
it right.”  

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The Sydney Pollack segment of Under the Influence airs Monday, July 7, at 8 and 10:30 p.m., flanked by showings of Tootsie (1982) at 8:30 p.m., and An American in Paris
at 11 p.m. Bill Murray’s guest shot is on Monday, July 14, 8 and 10:30
p.m., with screenings of two Murray faves, the Marx Brothers in A Night at the Opera (1935) at 8:30 p.m., and the Alfred Hitchcock-Cary Grant classic North by Northwest
(1959) at 11 p.m. The four-week July run also includes chats with actor
Laurence Fishburne on July 21 and director Quentin Tarantino on July
28. Under the Influence will return to Turner Classic Movies in
November, as Mitchell holds court with Edward Norton, Joan Allen, John
Leguizamo and Richard Gere.