C&C 4: Noir City, Walter Matthau, and Letters from an Actor

Some self-promotion and a book I should have read long ago

After several years as editor-in-chief of Noir City, the magazine of the Film Noir Foundation, I walked away at the end of 2022. But like a bad penny, I turn up in the first issue of 2023, with an article I’ve wanted to write for years.

In less than a year, Walter Matthau transformed himself from everyman comedy star to the hangdog face of modern noir. A trio of movies turned the trick: Charley Varrick (1973), The Laughing Policeman (1973), and The Taking of Pelham One Two Three (1974). (A heads-up to new readers: the original Pelham is my favorite movie, an eternal balm to my weary New York City-born heart, and I will take any opportunity to mention it.)

The article considers all three movies, plus some of Matthau’s earlier character turns on the dark side of the street—he menaces Elvis Presley in King Creole (1958), for crying out loud—as well as the neglected noir masterpiece that precedes the aforementioned trilogy: A New Leaf (1971).

Hold on, I hear skeptics carping, Elaine May’s comedy is, well, a comedy. Point taken. It’s also about a man who marries a woman with the intent of murdering her, and numerous films with that plot are in the noir canon, including The Secret Beyond the Door (1947), Sudden Fear (1952), and Cast a Dark Shadow (1955). Only May had the daring to play the premise for laughs, and only Matthau had the chops to pull off the role.

A chance to write about my favorite actor and two of my favorite films while incorporating a wholly appropriate reference to my beloved New York Mets? (I told you, you can take the kid out of the Big Apple …) I wasn’t about to miss that, and now you don’t have to, either.

Donors to the Film Noir Foundation received the magazine earlier this year. If you contribute twenty dollars or more to the FNF, you’ll receive a subscription. If you prefer, the print edition is now available from Amazon. The issue includes a survey of “stoner noir,” a look at the art directors who built those nightmarish dreamscapes of Golden Age Hollywood, and more. However you pick up a copy, you’ll be helping the efforts of the Film Noir Foundation to preserve, protect, and project classic film noir.

What I’m Reading

Letters from an Actor, by William Redfield (1967). As I said, I’ve been kicking the tires on this Matthau story for a while. In March 2021 I revisited A New Leaf for the article, and made an observation about it on Twitter.

William Redfield, an accomplished actor recognizable from Fantastic Voyage (1966) and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1975), played the lawyer faced with explaining to Matthau’s character in A New Leaf that he is, in fact, broke. (“The point, Mr. Graham, is that you don’t have any money. The capital and the income are exhausted, and you no longer have any money. I wish there was some other way I could say it.”) Responding to my tweet was James Urbaniak, an accomplished actor recognizable from damn near everything—including the pages of Noir City, to which he kindly contributed a list of his five favorite noir films.

He then added an intriguing follow-up.

I made a note to track down the book. Then last month I read Helen Shaw’s New Yorker review of The Motive and the Cue, a Jack Thorne play then at the National Theatre slated for a West End run later this year. It’s about the storied 1964 staging of Hamlet starring Richard Burton and directed by John Gielgud, in which Redfield appeared as Guildenstern. Letters from an Actor chronicles that production, with Shaw suggesting that Thorne’s play “seems to borrow” from “Redfield’s crisp, brilliant, refreshingly irritable narrative … one of the great books on performance.”

Time to correct this oversight.

Redfield’s book, composed of missives ostensibly sent to a friend, aims to be about “how to act well, hinged with how to make a living.” It’s full of answers to practical questions one might not think to ask, like how do actors set up their digs when they’re out of town. Redfield frequently invokes athletes as a comparison (“actors should be handled … in much the same way a prize fighter is handled”), observing that a baseball pitcher can stay on the mound as long as “his curve breaks sharply and his fast ball has a hop. If he has an off day, the manager takes him out. But not an actor. If the audience begins to ‘hit’ the actor, he must stand out there anyway.” He later says Shakespeare is “like the baseball pitcher who would rather outsmart hitters than mow them down with speed.” Put things in terms of the diamond and I will stay with you until the end.

The crux of the book is Redfield’s unique vantage point on the potentially combustible collaboration between two artists. Burton and Gielgud, “the thrilling bad boy and the watchful don,” as he calls them. “Why do two such opposed men want to work together? The answer measures the excellence and flexibility of both. Burton wants Gielgud’s discipline. Gielgud wants Burton’s spontaneity.”

Redfield tends toward the Burton end of the spectrum—he saw his close friend Marlon Brando, whom he regards as “the greatest actor of our time,” on stage in A Streetcar Named Desire seven times—but holds Gielgud and his more classical approach in the highest respect. Redfield grows disappointed then frustrated as Gielgud, “this witty and tender man,” retreats from his position, repeating his instructions charmingly and refusing to offer specifics. Redfield initially describes Gielgud with enthusiasm: “Here is a theatrical gentleman in possession of a conviction.” Later, realizing that the company has been abandoned, he consults castmate Hume Cronyn, who diagnoses the problem simply: “What went wrong this time is that he had a notion. It’s a good notion, I think, but he never matured it into a concept.” Redfield offers plenty of his own wisdom throughout.

Actors must never subtract. Not during a performance. Subtraction is for rehearsals.

(Jean Harlow) is fun, which is what movie stars should be.

The actor must have the soul of a fairy and the hide of a walrus.

It’s a fascinating book. I still think Redfield is enough of a dead ringer for Mike Nichols that there’s some secret reason why Elaine May cast him.

What (Else) I’m Reading

The Washington Post’s Christine Emba on the crisis in masculinity. It’s a tricky subject and Emba acknowledges it as such, one too important to be ceded to a single side of the political spectrum.

Michael Schulman of the New Yorker uses the pay structure for actors on Orange Is the New Black as a case study on why SAG-AFTRA has joined the WGA on the picket lines.