Jonathan Livingston Seagull (1973): Hall Bartlett's Masterpiece

For the first time ever in his career making movies, Hall Bartlett knew exactly what he was doing. He was adapting a best-selling novella by Richard Bach about a prophetic seagull, and he was going to turn it into a major motion picture. It was going to be an independently-financed film with as little studio interference as possible. And by the end of the ten-month shooting schedule, Bartlett had mortgaged his home and invested every last one of his savings into the film’s $1.5 million budget; he was willing to do anything to make his dream project a reality. “I was born to make this movie,” he declared. He was absolutely right.

Hall Bartlett (1922-1993) wrote and directed ten feature films: Unchained (1955), Drango (1957), Zero Hour! (1957), All the Young Men (1960), The Caretakers (1963), Changes (1969), The Sandpit Generals (1971), The Children of Sanchez (1978) and Love is Forever (1983). Some of his films were bland studio projects, while the others had intriguing concepts but were often unsatisfyingly executed. In his entire 30-year filmmaking career, Bartlett helmed a series of flops, misfires, close calls, small gems, and at least one masterpiece: Jonathan Livingston Seagull (1973).

Richard Bach’s enormously popular 1970 book had first come to Bartlett’s attention after he came across it in a barbershop. The timing couldn’t have been better; after the critical and commercial failure of his hospital drama The Caretakers in 1963, Bartlett had watched his career devolve. “I’ve been through about ten years of hell,” he told an interviewer on the set, “up until very, very recently, where everything went wrong. I couldn’t make a right move. The fear was on me that I would never make a picture again… then came a woman with such love to share, and then Jonathan, and suddenly everything was right.”

Bartlett had hoped that, with Jonathan Livingston Seagull, he would finally get the attention he deserved. Nobody ever once realized that the film he was making was very, very ahead of its time.

The film was absolutely reviled when it came out. Reviews were terrible. “The sort of garbage only a seagull could love,” wrote Judith Crist. “Interminable,” said Art Murphy in Variety. “Bird droppings!” snorted Jay Cocks in Time magazine. “Strictly for the birds,” quipped Frank Rich in the New Times. And in a particularly negative 1-star review, Roger Ebert was perhaps the most scathing of all: “This has got to be the biggest pseudocultural, would-be metaphysical ripoff of the year.”

The reviews hurt the movie’s commercial chances significantly; at the box office, it grossed only $1.6 million, just short of the $2.1 million Paramount had spent to purchase the film from Bartlett’s studio. And five years later, Harry Medved and Randy Dreyfuss excessively panned it in their 1978 book The Fifty Worst Movies of All Time (a book that also trashed such titles as Sam Peckinpah’s Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia and Richard Donner's The Omen). So drenched in vile cynicism was their review that Medved and Dreyfuss even mocked Bartlett for making his picture “in the true auteur fashion,” as if they considered themselves superior to a filmmaker who had spent all his savings on a personal project they had not even bothered to try to comprehend.

Jonathan Livingston Seagull is one of my all-time favorite American movies, and I hasten to say that because the horrid reception that this film received during its release—and ever since then—has angered me to no end over the years. There is no reason why this film should have flopped as it did. There is no reason why this film should have been dismissed as quickly as it was. As far as I can tell, nobody gave this movie a chance. Nobody was willing to appreciate Hall Bartlett’s directorial vision or take him seriously as a filmmaker. Not one review mentioned anything nice about the film’s story or technique. Everybody walked in with a closed mind, completely unwilling to embrace the movie’s unique perspective. Ebert proudly began his review by announcing that he walked out of the film “some 45 minutes into” it, but then ended his review by revealing that he had left during the sequence in which “Jonathan had dragged himself, groggy and bleeding, onto some flotsam.” Judging from the actual running time, it appears as though Ebert must have, in fact, walked out of the screening approximately 21 minutes into the film.

Then there were the lawsuits. Richard Bach sued Bartlett when Bartlett refused to honor Bach's right to final cut. Neil Diamond threatened to sue Bartlett if he didn’t incorporate more of the music from the soundtrack into the film; Diamond was also upset when composer Lee Holdridge requested to share credit with Diamond over the music. Ovady Julber, the director of 1936’s La Mer, sued over suspicions that Bartlett’s film might have plagiarized his work.

And toes were stepped on. Associate Producer Leslie Parrish had worked hard to hire the crew members and help take care of the real seagulls being used for the production (these seagulls were trained by Ray Berwick and Gary Gero, and stored in a room in a Holiday Inn), but in the end, Bartlett demoted Parrish's credit from Associate Producer to "Researcher".

In spite of the tension which occurred behind the scenes, Jonathan Livingston Seagull belongs right up there with Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) as one of the great surrealist films released in the later half of the 20th century. It is a rich, liberated celebration of a writer/director’s artistic sensibilities, free of any constricting narrative rules. Like those aforementioned films, it expands even more in dimension with repeated viewings. What Hall Bartlett did with Jonathan Livingston Seagull is special: he recognized the visual opportunities in Bach’s story—a story that was always heavily cinematic to begin with—thus allowing him to adapt it into a visually powerful cinematic experience that offers images quite like nothing ever produced before or since.

The film even has the audacity to open with the dedication that appeared on the first page of Bach’s novella: “To the real Jonathan Livingston Seagull, who lives within us all.” These words appear as onscreen text that burst in bright blue hues alongside an opening shot of white clouds, enhanced with the help of the cinematography by helicopter photographer Jim Freeman and veteran cinematographer Jack Couffer (the latter of whom was hired after his impressive work on Walt Disney’s True Life Adventure series). One is simply amazed by the sensational aesthetic effect of Bartlett’s film, from his explosive footage of crashing tidal waves to his unbelievable tracking shots of the film’s title character—whether he be flying above the clouds, near the rocky shores or into the cores of deserts and snowy mountains. That Couffer’s cinematography netted the film one of two Academy Award nominations is not surprising in the least: it remains one of the finest examples of natural footage ever captured on celluloid.

Getting that footage was sometimes dangerous. Couffer was allegedly attacked by one of the seagulls during filming, prompting Bartlett to have his crew members wear baseball catcher’s masks in order to prevent further accidents. We get a good glimpse at just how vicious the seagulls were during filming in one of the movie’s first sequences, which provides us with a glimpse of seagull life. As a tugboat sits out in the middle of the ocean, dumping piles of fish into the water, hordes of seagulls begin fighting all at once for the rotten, filthy chum. In a sequence marvelously edited by Frank P. Keller and James Galloway (thus netting the film its second Oscar nomination), the seagulls bite, claw, gnash and bloody each other’s throats; if this continues, we fear, they may start decapitating each other. It’s an ugly, hostile, disgusting existence, and that’s why we sigh a breath of relief when we are suddenly whisked away into the sky—where we take the point of view of a figure bursting its way through the clouds. Then we see what it is: a lone seagull. An independent. That’s him. That’s Jonathan.

Jonathan is voiced by James Franciscus, that suave, handsome actor who starred in Beneath the Planet of the Apes (1970) and in Dario Argento’s The Cat o’ Nine Tails (1971). In his day, Franciscus was an irresistible ladies’ man, a Rod Serling look-a-like and a fitting Apes replacement for Charlton Heston. But Hall Bartlett must have recognized that there was something oddly appealing about Franciscus’ voice, a voice which sometimes tended to sound hoarse and monotone. That proved to be the perfect fit for the voice of Jonathan, who is quieter and more observant in the later scenes of Jonathan Livingston Seagull but who has a boyish squeal in his voice in the earlier scenes—as he struggles to determine the secret to “perfect speed.” Jonathan's problem is that he too often lets his doubts control his destiny and, what’s more, lets fear get in the way of his ambition. “Maybe seagulls… can’t fly faster than 62 miles per hour,” he considers. “But wouldn’t it be great if we could?”

His parents are not pleased. Mother (Dorothy McGuire) fears for his safety: “I’m afraid for you. I’m afraid of what you’re doing.” Father (Richard Crenna) is even less helpful: “We were meant to live the way we live—accept it! Take your place. Will you try, son?” Yet Jonathan continues to be interrupted with inspired revelations. What if he were to dive, for example, on the wingtips only? This results in one of the film’s genuinely funniest moments, when Jonathan hits 170 at the short dive but then disastrously attempts to dive at 10,000 ft, loses control, spirals into oblivion and screams, “OH GOD, THE FLOCK… LOOK OUT!!!!!” But then Bartlett segues into a scene that is not so funny, as Jonathan is forced to stand trial before the head Elder (Hal Halbrook), who is cruelly unforgiving to the young independent. “Jonathan Livingston Seagull, the brotherhood is broken!” the Elder roars. “Never again will you see any of your Flock! Never again will you have the protection of your Flock! You are henceforth and forever… outcast!” Thrown out by the Flock, the Elders and even his own parents, Jonathan has gone from a social deviant to something that is even worse: a bastard.

This is where one of the director’s key themes as a filmmaker comes into place. Bartlett loved to make films about illegitimate children disowned by their parents. Think of Janis Paige’s speech in The Caretakers, in which she sobs about being taunted as a “little bastard” all her life. Or Anthony Quinn’s final monologue in The Children of Sanchez, in which he condemns all of his children as “bastards” during a spoiled picnic dinner. In contrast, Jonathan Livingston Seagull deals with the theme of illegitimacy more subtlety. “Outcast” is substituted for “bastard," and yet the term is no less painful. The sequence in which Jonathan departs for his life of solitude, set to the tune of Diamond’s “Lonely Looking Sky," is quite simply one of the saddest sequences of the 1970’s, and it is all the more tragic if we realize, in hindsight, that Jonathan will never see his parents again. He will die without them at his side.

Neil Diamond and Lee Holdridge’s score for the film has often been dismissed as “overbearing”, but I’ve always begged to differ. Among the other songs used on the soundtrack, “Be” represents Jonathan’s independence, while “Dear Father” epitomizes his self-doubt and “Skybird”, his liberation. To me, the film's soundtrack remains exhilarating, and it is also a reminder of Hall Bartlett’s often-overlooked talent for juxtaposing the right kind of music with his cinematic stories.

Bartlett’s masterful filmmaking is demonstrated even further in the 13-minute sequence that follows, in which Jonathan attempts to “know all there is to know of this life” and embarks on a long stretch, midway through the film, that takes him all the way to the ends of the Earth and, finally, to his death. All Bartlett does here is follow Jonathan while he flies from one habitat to another, as he observes fellow animals and keeps to himself; in fact, in the last 13 minutes of his life, Jonathan never says a word. There is no doubt in my mind that Bartlett must have been influenced by Kubrick in crafting this sequence, for it invites startling comparison to the famous “Jupiter and Beyond the Infinite” sequence from 2001. Like Dave Bowman, Jonathan passes through scene after scene of enchanting realms before settling into his own demise and, then, being reborn as a kind of supernatural being. From that point on, the film folds onto itself like a Chinese box, and suddenly it’s a new kind of film altogether.

At the time, the film was suspected by some critics to be an allegory for Christ’s suffering and resurrection; Time magazine claimed that Bartlett had tarnished Bach’s story with “Billygrahmese” dialogue. Were these critics not paying much attention during the film? Listen carefully to the conversations between Jonathan and his mentor, Chiang (Philip Ahn), particularly their discussions about the afterlife. When Jonathan asks Chiang if they are in Heaven, Chiang simply replies, “Who said it was? Heaven isn’t a place. Heaven’s perfection, wouldn’t you think? And we don’t go there, as much as we express it.” Or consider Jonathan’s conversations with Maureen (Juliet Mills), who asks him, “Didn’t you say you know me from somewhere? I believe there were many somewheres!” Her comment, of course, implies reincarnation. In retrospect, the film is about as Christian as the Star Wars films; interestingly enough, Richard Bach’s mythology of “perfect speed” predates George Lucas’ “Force” mythology by about seven years. But a story like Jonathan Livingston Seagull has more in common with something like, say, Buddhism, than it does with Christianity.

Furthermore, Jonathan, unlike Christ, does not fully understand the meaning of love. Chiang’s parting words to Jonathan are literally, “keep working on love.” A truly allegorical Christian figure would have no need for this kind of advice. Jonathan’s romance with Maureen is also one of the more significant changes which Bartlett makes from Bach’s novella. In the book, Jonathan is accompanied by a best friend, Sullivan, who—like one of Christ’s disciples—doubts his master’s success in the face of danger. By inventing the character of Maureen, however, Bartlett makes Jonathan more "human," shall we say, not to mention more likely to give into temptations of the flesh. A case might be made that Maureen is supposed to represent Mary Magdalene, but surely the relationship between Jonathan and Maureen is far warmer than the relationship which Christ and Magdalene ever might have had together. And as Jonathan embarks on a journey to free his old flock, Maureen’s last words to him (“Jonathan, go with my love”) resonate beautifully without carrying a religious context of any kind. My guess is that Bartlett sensed audiences would warm up to the story somewhat more if he were to give the hero a love interest.

The film’s most obvious rejection of blind Christian ideals, however, occurs after Jonathan and his new apprentice, Fletcher Lynd Seagull (David Ladd), try to win over the cynicism of the Flock and are, instead, nearly swallowed alive by their outrage. To be sure, it is not an unexpected reaction: practically everybody in the movie assumes Jonathan is either a heavenly or a hellish force of nature. Fletcher believes he might be a Christ figure. The Flock's Elders believe he’s the Devil. Jonathan dismisses all of these theories. In one scene, he chuckles over the rumor that he’s “oh, yes, yes, I know: the only Son of the Great Gull, I suppose.” And the final request he makes of his apprentice is modest, indeed: “Don’t let them spread silly rumors about me or try to make me some sort of a god, will you, Fletcher?” Clearly, Jonathan considers himself to be just like every other seagull, just as Richard Bach believes there is a Jonathan who lives within us all.

And so, for that matter, did Hall Bartlett. He believed enough in this story to pour his heart and soul into it, confidant every step of the way that he was on the verge of completing an important film. Jonathan Livingston Seagull was not embraced by critics or audiences, but I have a feeling that Bartlett himself always knew, deep down, that he had left the public with a masterpiece. Maybe he knew that he wouldn’t live to see the film get the attention it deserved. Maybe he was aware that the film’s mediocre reception would outlive him. After this film, he would only go on to make two films, The Children of Sanchez and Love is Forever. Neither was particularly impressive.

But I wish he were alive to know how much I love this film. I wish he knew how much it has changed the way I look at movies. And I wish he knew how much I cherish the way he ends the picture with Jonathan’s immortal closing monologue: “Look with your understanding. Find out what you already know. Use it, Fletcher. Teach it… show it forth. And you’ll know the way to fly.”

Tomorrow: The TOERIFIC discussion on Jonathan Livingston Seagull (1973)

It's almost time! The discussion on Jonathan Livingston Seagull (1973) begins tomorrow! Can you taste the excitement!??

If you haven't already, please promote the event on your blog with one of the two banners provided above. I expect this discussion to last over a period of days, and not just one day--it's very likely that not everyone will have seen the film by tomorrow. So if you haven't seen the movie yet, don't worry. You can always come back later.

The discussion on Jonathan Livingston Seagull begins tomorrow at 9:00AM, right here at Icebox Movies. In the meantime, be sure to watch Jonathan Livingston Seagull if you haven't yet. If you already have, then be prepared to put your critiquing caps on: this will be a film discussion you won't soon forget. Thanks!

Next Week: The TOERIFIC discussion on Jonathan Livingston Seagull (1973)

At this time I would like to ask everybody planning on participating in next week's TOERIFIC discussion on Jonathan Livingston Seagull (1973) to please start promoting the event with one of the two banners posted above. It's been awhile since TOERIFIC has hosted a discussion, so the banners may be instrumental in helping bring back former TOERIFIC members -- or, better yet, those joining TOERIFIC for the first time.

The TOERIFIC discussion will begin the morning of Wednsday, April 6, at 9:00 AM, right here at Icebox Movies. Be sure to see Jonathan Livingston Seagull if you haven't already! I promise you that this will be a movie worth talking about once the TOERIFIC discussion begins. You won't forget the experience.

Two More Weeks Until the TOERIFIC discussion on Jonathan Livingston Seagull (1973)

Just a friendly reminder to everyone that the TOERIFIC discussion on Jonathan Livingston Seagull (1973) begins in two weeks, on the morning of April 6. Of course, the discussion will likely carry on for more than just a day -- therefore, even if you don't manage to see the movie by April 6, you can always join the discussion afterwards. Please promote the discussion with one of the above banners.

Jonathan Livingston Seagull is currently available for rent on Netflix and Blockbuster Online. I think it's available for streaming, too, but don't quote me on that. Get the movie as soon as possible -- we hope to see you at the discussion!

TOERIFIC April 2011 Announcement: Jonathan Livingston Seagull (1973)

At this time I would like to thank Greg Ferrara and Marilyn Ferdinand for allowing me to briefly revive Toerific (aka The Oldest Established Really Important Film Club) for a film discussion in April 2011. Toerific has been shut down ever since March 2010 (when Marilyn hosted the last discussion: a conversation on 1991's The Rapture), and I was bummed not to have been able to participate more. Yet, I've come across many films in the past year that would almost warrant yet another long Toerific discussion. But there is only one film that's kept coming back to me, kept interrupting my concentration. And not just in the past year, but over the course of many years. A Toerific discussion might do it some good.

So it is with great pleasure that I announce my selection for Toerific's April 2011 discussion: Hall Bartlett's Jonathan Livingston Seagull
(1973), based on the 1970 bestseller by Richard Bach. The book has continued to be a favorite of generations over the decades, but the film, alas, has faded from public memory--as has the career of the late writer/director who made it.

The discussion on Jonathan Livingston Seagull will be held the morning of April 6, 2011. I'm not sure which time--I'll settle for either 7:00 AM or 9:00 AM, one of those two. I realize that it's been awhile since everybody participated in a Toerific discussion and that not everybody will be willing to participate, but it'd be nice to see a huge output. Like I said, this type of film might benefit from a Toerific discussion. The lukewarm reception it received in 1973 has all but blocked it from receiving any intellectual examinations by the film community since then, and I think a Toerific discussion would correct that mistake.

Jonathan Livingston Seagull is currently available for rental on Netflix and Blockbuster Online. It's available for purchasing on eBay and Amazon, and it's also available as a streaming site in various websites.

Please promote the discussion with one of the two banners I've offered here in this post.

See you in April, everybody.

The Caretakers (1963)

There is a moment in Hall Bartlett’s The Caretakers (1963) when a group therapy session breaks out into violence. Conditioned as we are to the conventions of all the movies ever made about mental illness, we think there’s going to be a terrible struggle of some kind; perhaps one of the patients will be severely hurt, or killed. Then the camera pulls back, and we realize that what we are actually watching is a recorded session playing on a TV set. An audience of nurses-in-training is alarmed by what they see on the screen. “Wow,” one of them exclaims. “So, that’s the new deal in group therapy!”

Robert Stack comes forward, talks to the nurses and explains to them that this sort of thing comes with the job. Sometimes patients act irrationally. Sometimes they step out of line. But the Stack character has a vision: “Every patient in this hospital is a human being, entitled to respect and dignity. They need us. We are the caretakers of their hope—of their future.” His vision sounds remarkably idealistic in a hospital where doctors prefer to be the caretakers of the patients’ disintegration.

This is the kind of scene that could have propelled a strong narrative in a better film, but serves a lesser purpose in this one. The Caretakers feels like a wasted opportunity. It features a splendid cast, and it was directed by one of America’s most underrated filmmakers, but the movie is ultimately compromised by a story that goes nowhere. Bartlett directed the film at the height of a bizarre renaissance of “mental illness” pictures that were ensnaring the movie industry in the 1960’s. John Huston’s Freud (1962) came out a year earlier, and Samuel Fuller would make Shock Corridor (1965) two years later. Those two films have both held up remarkably well today—Huston’s film, with its fascinating deconstruction of the unconscious mind; Fuller’s film, with its melodramatic murder mystery fueled by a psychological frenzy. The Caretakers looks rather dated compared to those films, perhaps because its own concepts about mental illness now strike us as awfully contrived in the age of Obamacare.

For starters, the movie’s message about “respect towards patients,” while touching, sounds incredibly irrelevant in light of the real issue at hand. The film believes that patients in a Canterbury mental hospital can only benefit from respect and dignity. Isn’t there a bit more to it than that? Why is there never any mention in the film of drug therapy? Is it true that nurses are taught martial arts as a defense mechanism against patients? When President Kennedy saw The Caretakers in 1963 (just months before he was assassinated), he was allegedly so moved by the film’s "message" that he then proceeded to screen it before Congress, thus persuading them to pass one of his many New Frontier health-care bills. How Kennedy could possibly find such inspiration in the film is hard to determine. By this logic, there’s no reason why President Eisenhower shouldn’t have seen Hall Bartlett’s previous big production, Zero Hour! (1957), and then have walked out convinced that there might be something morally wrong about serving grilled halibut on airplanes.

Bartlett and his co-writers, Henry F. Greenberg and Jerry Paris, adapted the film from a book by Dariel Telfer. Based on the story’s attempts to look relevant to the psychological troubles of the times, I can sort of see why the director might have been as attracted to the story as he was. I think Bartlett wanted to prove, after Zero Hour!, that he was more than just a director of crowd-pleasing disaster flicks about crashing airplanes. He was desperate to be taken seriously as an independent and intellectual artist working within the studio system, and saw his chance in a film about mental illness. There’s no real reason why Bartlett should have been ashamed of his feat, either; the film netted him a Golden Globe nomination for Best Director, and it also netted legendary cameraman Lucien Ballard an Academy Award nomination for Best Cinematography. As a matter of fact, Bartlett’s direction and Ballard’s photography (plus, a wicked musical score by Elmer Bernstein) are the best things about the film. The problem is that when you compare the film to some of the films Bartlett made afterwards, not to mention some of the films Lucien Ballard photographed both before and afterwards (Kubrick’s The Killing and Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch, respectively), their achievement with The Caretakers looks fairly marginal.

The Caretakers takes a noticeably strong stance on the issue of mental illness, and tries to sell us on its argument by establishing a pair of archetypal doctors at war with each other’s worldviews: Dr. McCloud (Robert Stack), the all-knowing hero who wants to bring the staff closer to its patients; and the villainess, Ms. Terry (Joan Crawford), a Nurse Ratched type who believes in “the intelligent use of force” and intensely disapproves of McCloud’s liberal methods. Both characters have different ways of pitching their methods to the nurses in training; McCloud shows them videos of his “Borderline” group therapy sessions, while Ms. Terry literally teaches Judo to the nurses in the middle of an immense gymnasium (giving Joan Crawford a chance to show off her slender good looks in a fighting outfit, even at her old age). The strongest scenes in The Caretakers involve the arguments between McCloud and Terry, and we’re disappointed that they don’t carry the weight of the film more often.

What hurts The Caretakers, I think, is the starkly split narrative. Bartlett shows us so many perspectives of the goings-on inside and outside the Canterbury hospital—the doctors, the nurses, the patients, the visitors—that the film finally has no focus. There is no heart. It seems a serious mistake to attempt to make a main character out of Lorna (Polly Bergen), who enters the film dragged to the hospital after suffering a horrifying nervous breakdown inside a movie theater; she is no less insane than the rest of the patients in the women’s ward, and, as a protagonist, she is maddeningly unreliable. Nor is there anything too terribly intriguing about the rest of the patients, which include: Connie (Sharon Hugueny), who is childlike and dreams of being “free like a daisy!”; Irene (Ellen Corby), a lonely old woman who cradles a toy doll; Ana (Ana Maria Lynch), who tends to a pet parakeet; and Edna (Barbara Barrie), who is mute. Only the slutty Miriam (Janis Paige) arouses our interest. Not only does she call Lorna a bitch at one point, but she’s also fond of sexually teasing McCloud; when she charges at him, “I think your lousy hospital’s a phony, and you’re the biggest phony of them all!”, we delight in her audacity.

Bartlett is even less successful with the other supporting characters, particularly with the nurses. A subplot involving Nurse Cathy (Susan Oliver) and her Rod Serling-lookalike boyfriend is boring and pointless. The chubby Nurse Bracken (Constance Ford) is basically Ms. Terry’s right-hand bitch; she turns up so faithfully whenever there’s a scene that calls for the patients to be slapped or abused. As for the hospital’s head warden, Harrington (Herbert Marshall), he doesn’t do much in the film aside from watch McCloud and Ms. Terry argue about how to treat their patients—he’s like a divorce counselor that lets the squabbling couple do all the heavy-lifting for him. Interestingly, when Marshall did his scenes for the film, he had to sit behind a desk so that the camera only saw him from the waist up, as he had been walking around with a wooden leg at the time.

Joan Crawford’s performance as Ms. Terry is one of the film’s more enjoyable aspects. Crawford has a great scene in which she listens to another one of McCloud’s lectures about humanity and then remarks, “Have you finished, Doctor? Splendid speech! Very well prepared!” I learn from Crawford’s biographers, Lawrence J. Quirk and William Schoell, that she had agreed to do the film because the role was an age-appropriate part; she had just finished What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? (1962) for Robert Aldrich, and had wanted to work with Hall Bartlett because she admired his previous films. Because she was also on the Pepsi board of directors at the time (in the wake of the death of her then-husband, Albert Steele), it’s no coincidence that a Pepsi vendor appears during a picnic sequence in the film—Bartlett had included it at Crawford’s request. She would converse endlessly with the director about her character. Bartlett had cut out a “cheapened” scene in which Ms. Terry herself is interned in the hospital after being dumped by a lover. The actress allegedly responded, “Every woman who’s rejected by the man she loves looks cheap.” And Crawford made it no secret what she thought of her fellow cast members. She thought Janis Paige was “well-cast”, but didn’t like Polly Bergen, perhaps resenting her for starring in a number of Pepsi commercials (on the big screen, she had played Gregory Peck's wife in Cape Fear a year earlier). She reportedly had lustful feelings for Robert Stack.

Despite its faults, The Caretakers is very much a Hall Bartlett film. The pet parakeet that is kept in a cage throughout the story represents the film’s portrayal of what it means to be interned and locked up. When the parakeet is finally set free and is ordered to “fly, you little bastard, fly!”, it is both a moment of catharsis and a moment of strange foresight; the very famous film that Bartlett would go on to make a decade later would place yet another emphasis on the freedom of flying (and with a bird as the main protagonist, no less). The notion of “bastards” is another aspect that echoes through the chambers of The Caretakers and throughout Bartlett’s other work. Dr. McCloud confesses that he became a mental illness doctor after watching his father descend into suicidal madness at a young age, and the provocative Marion, who acts like a whore throughout the film, finally breaks down at the end in a monologue during which she reminisces about being taunted as a “little bastard” all her life: “The happiest day of my life was when somebody called me MARION!” Again, “bastards” factor strongly in Bartlett’s work—from young Joey watching his parents fall out of love in Zero Hour! to Anthony Quinn’s "bastards" tirade in The Children of Sanchez (1978). It’s one of Bartlett’s favorite themes: a parentless child who attempts to face the world on his own, without the aid of a father.

The Caretakers can best be remembered as a destructive turning point in Bartlett’s career—a movie where so many neat things were going on, but nothing ever quite coalesced into a satisfyingly finished film. The film’s failure led to a ten-year period of hell during which, in Bartlett’s own words, he “couldn’t make a right move” and during which “the fear was on me that I would never make a picture again.” Fortunately, Bartlett’s failure in 1963 led him exactly ten years later, in 1973, to the artistic highpoint of his career—when he would finally make his masterpiece, Jonathan Livingston Seagull. In a manner of speaking, the lessons learned from the failure of The Caretakers were the ultimate caretakers for Bartlett’s hope—and for his future.

Zero Hour! (1957)

Hall Bartlett’s Zero Hour! (1957) is remembered today as the movie that inspired Airplane! (1980), but I was more interested in seeing the film because, well, it was directed by Hall Bartlett. I’ve long been a champion of Bartlett, a filmmaker largely forgotten because many of his films were major critical and commercial misfires, often due to his sometimes-poor taste in screenplays. But Zero Hour! is the first important fictional film in Bartlett’s patchy, uneven career, and the filmmaker who later went on to (in my opinion) fashion a masterpiece out of Jonathan Livingston Seagull (1973) could not have done so if he hadn’t made Zero Hour! first. If Jonathan Livingston Seagull was the film that finally allowed Bartlett to lift off and fly, then Zero Hour! is the film from which he first began to grow wings.

The story of Zero Hour! and its production begins with Arthur Hailey, a young English writer who had flown for the RAF during World War II and had written the teleplay for a TV movie, Flight Into Danger, in 1956. Hollywood beckoned, and a year later Hailey was remaking Flight Into Danger into Zero Hour! for the big screen while producer John C. Champion assisted him on the screenplay. Then, when searching for a director, Champion selected Hall Bartlett, who had received an Academy Award nomination for Best Documentary: Feature for Navajo (1952) but was having trouble finding work in his attempts to launch a directing career in Hollywood. After Zero Hour! was released in 1957, Bartlett began getting recognized by the studios, and was able to find work directing more movies in successive genres while Hailey remained situated in the disaster movie genre. Not surprisingly, Hailey went on to write Airport (1970) and its three sequels; he had, essentially, established a successful screenwriting enterprise on remaking the same story five times.



In fact, it was thought for a long time that David Zucker, Jerry Zucker and Jim Abrahams were spoofing Hailey’s Airport movies when they set out to make Airplane! at the closing of the decade, but no: Abrahams and the Zucker Bros. had seen Zero Hour! on television late one night, loved the unintentional absurdities of the screenplay by Hailey, Champion and Bartlett, and sensed, correctly, that it was ripe for parody at the dawn of the 1980’s. If you watch Zero Hour! and Airplane! back-to-back, you’ll notice that the latter film steals heavily from the dialogue of the former film, from the discussions about the protagonist’s failures to handle “responsibility” to the conversations between the protagonist and his estranged loved one about “watching the sun come up”, and so on. Henceforth, some critics have suggested that Airplane! is more a literal remake of Zero Hour! than a mere parody of it, but this can hardly be the case when one takes into account that Abrahams and the Zucker Bros. didn’t embrace the material in the least—they made fun of it. The box office receipts of Airplane!, of course, rewarded their “fun”.

While Zero Hour! falls short of greatness, I’m not ashamed to say that I enjoyed almost every minute of it, not just because of my familiarity with Airplane! but also because I appreciated the directions Hall Bartlett took with the story. It’s relieving to see this material being used for the purposes of thrills instead of laughs, and this explains, in part, why I think Zero Hour! is actually a much better film than Airplane!, which is so limited in its ambitions that I have found it exceedingly less and less funny over the years. Not so with Zero Hour!, a movie that wears its heart on its sleeve, celebrates the disaster-movie clichés of its narrative and offers sequences of effective, edge-of-your-seat suspense that still hold water with repeated viewings. But what makes Zero Hour! so worthwhile, above all, is the performance by Dana Andrews as a shell-shocked WWII veteran—right up there with Arthur Kennedy’s performance in Bright Victory, and Frank Sinatra’s performance in Some Came Running, as one of the finest portrayals of veterans’ post-traumatic stress disorder in the decade immediately following the end of the war.



The Bartlett-Champion Picture begins with a shot of fighter planes taking off over the opening titles. They are units of the 22nd squadron of the Royal Air Force, led across Germany by Canadian squadron leader Ted Stryker (Dana Andrews); a corny narrator (an uncredited William Conrad) informs us that Striker had led a mission on April 10, 1945 to “penetrate enemy fighter cover and hold the formation intact for a vital, incendiary raid on the German supply despots of Vispa.” When Stryker’s force encounters the enemy fighters, Bartlett immerses us entirely in the battle, incorporating John P. Fulton and Norman O’Skeete’s visual effects with Lyle Figland and Charles Grenzbach’s explosive sound effects while John C. Fuller’s sharp editing presents the firefight from different angles—even going so far as to have enemy fighter planes shoot directly at the camera. It’s a glorious battle, but then things go wrong when Stryker leads his team into a thick layer of fog. Cries by his men of “We’re too low, Ted!” go unheard: his planes crash, six of his men die, and Stryker himself is faulted for recklessly pursuing the “vital target” of his mission and allowing his planes to fly so low.

I assume Bartlett cast Dana Andrews in the part of Stryker because of the actor’s familiarity with such roles. In William Wyler’s The Best Years of Our Lives, Andrews had played a fighter pilot who eventually comes home to a wife who has decided to leave him; he’s desperately looking for a job during the final scenes of that movie, and finds one only at the last minute. Similarily, at the start of Zero Hour!, we learn that Andrews’ Ted Stryker has been through no less than twelve jobs in 10 years; in the present year of 1956, he applies for a position in the Jet Research Winnipeg Division at the Mid-Canadian Aircraft Corporation, but the employer (Roy Gordon) looks at his past record and doubts he’s still capable of holding a job. Stryker tries to win his sympathies by confessing that he and his wife are “right at the breaking point”, insisting that, this time, he won’t let his memories of the war be a distraction and that he’ll make good on his commitment to his work. It seems like he’ll end up getting the job, but when Stryker returns home he finds a note from his wife, Ellen (Linda Darnell), stating that she’s boarding a plane to Vancouver and taking their son with her.

“Don’t you feel anything for me anymore?” he asks Ellen when confronting her on the plane. “There’s so many things to make love last,” she replies. “Most of all, it takes respect. I can’t live with a man I don’t respect.” This dialogue was made infamous by Robert Hays and Julie Hagerty in Airplane!, but I like the way it’s delivered by Andrews and Darnell so much more. Yes, the dialogue is soapy, but remember: Arthur Hailey wrote it during the Eisenhower era, when it was actually more acceptable to write American films stressing the strength of the nuclear family and not the other way around. The broken marriage between Ted and Ellen is contrasted with the younger romance between the plane’s stewardess, Janet (Peggy King), and her boyfriend, Tony (Jerry Paris), who is seated next to Stryker. Janet vows to the pilots that someday she’ll take Tony to the alter “if I have to drag him every inch of the way—after all, remember? I’ve been trained for every kind of emergency!” Yet when Stryker approaches Janet while she’s in the middle of an argument with Tony, she immediately starts addressing Tony as “Mr. Decker”; she’s embarrassed to flaunt her relationship with him. Tony has a charm of his own in a sock puppet named “Paddy”, which can go from kid-friendly (when it’s entertaining the Strykers’ young son) to horny (when it’s asking Janet for kisses). As Tony explains of Paddy, “He’s got a one-track mind, just like me.”



Then, disaster strikes. Passengers begin suffering from food poisoning. By an amazing coincidence, there just so happens to be a doctor, Dr. Baird (Geoffrey Toone), onboard, and he deduces that the passengers who ordered grilled halibut for their evening meal are the ones being stricken; Bartlett goes for a hilarious close-up on the horrified face of the pilot, Captain Wilson (former pro-football player Elroy “Crazylegs” Hirsch), when he overhears the doctor’s diagnosis and shrieks, “Doctor, I just remembered something: I ate fish, too!” Once both of the pilots have passed out, Baird utters the line made notorious by Airplane! (“The life of everybody onboard depends on just one thing: finding someone back there not only who can fly this plane, but who didn’t have fish for dinner,”), and skillfully diverts a panic by asking individual passengers only for assistance at the radio. Once Ted Stryker is brought back to the cockpit, however, he realizes the truth: both pilots are down!



So okay, the plot of Zero Hour! is ridiculous. It would not be invalid to suggest that by not celebrating the campiness of the material, Bartlett might have deprived it of some of its entertainment value; this criticism would certainly be adopted by Airplane! fans. But once I sensed how fiercely committed Bartlett was in making Zero Hour! into a slam-bang, sweat-inducing thriller, I went ahead and enjoyed the ride. There’s a good level of added suspense when the Strykers’ son falls ill and Ellen finds herself joining her husband in the cockpit, assisting him at the radio. To land the plane together might not only save the lives of their fellow passengers, but of their son as well—it may even save their marriage. When Stryker’s old nemesis, Captain Martin Treleaven (Sterling Hayden in one of his best roles), is brought to the Vancouver Air Control to guide Stryker down to the airstrip, he makes no secret of his skepticism: “I may be wrong—I hope I am—but my feeling is that when the going gets rough upstairs tonight, Ted Stryker’s gonna fold up.” But once Stryker shoots back that he’s sick of Treleaven ordering him about how to handle the flying gear (which, of course, is “sluggish... like a wet sponge,”), we realize that Stryker, while determined to do things his own way, is not considering quitting. He’ll land the plane whatever the cost, and won’t make the same mistake again.



Here and there, the movie has compromising flaws. The story requires suspension of disbelief, obviously, but I was surprised at how tolerant the passengers on the plane are of the situation at hand. A minor subplot involving Captain Wilson’s wife (Patricia Tiernan) arriving at the air control inquiring about her husband’s condition is boring, and should have been cut out. Aside from those glaring issues, the movie turns out rather decently, and Airplane! devotees will find themselves recognizing many of the lines in Hailey’s script. Take, for example, when the Strykers’ son visits the cockpit and chats with Captain Wilson; the exchange between the captain and the boy about “have you ever been in a cockpit before?”, sans the pedophilia gags, is all here. As is the scene of Janet and Tony slapping a hysterical female passenger silly in order to calm her down. And Treleaven’s muttering that “I picked the wrong week the quit smoking.” And Dr. Baird’s final words to Stryker and his wife: “I just want to tell you both good luck. I’ll keep your son with me.” Not as epic a catchphrase as Leslie Nielsen’s “I just want to tell you both good luck—we’re all counting on you,” but, oh... it’ll do.



The film’s greatest aspect, however, is Dana Andrews’ tortured performance as Ted Stryker, which requires him to walk through the film’s scenes in a state of constant self-loathing, much of which is thoroughly made clear in his anguished facial expressions. Watch the way he reacts with embarrassment when his son, whose name is Joey, tells the pilots in the cockpit about how his father “shot down a lot of planes” during the war. Joey (Raymond Ferrell) idolizes his father and wants to grow up to be a pilot just like him; he asks him why he didn’t fly jets during the war (“There were no jets back then”, his father patiently reminds him). He asks him if he can teach him how to fly someday. “I just don’t seem to have the time anymore, Joey,” Stryker tells his son. “You never have time for anything!” Joey complains, which prompts his father to concede, “I know.” Fans of Airplane! might find themselves laughing unintentionally when Ellen turns to her husband at the end and says, “Ted, I just wanted you to know, now, I’m very proud,” but by that point in the movie I was so wrapped up in their relationship that I found myself smiling at the moment, not laughing.



What makes Zero Hour! a better film than Airplane!, I think, is just how much more superior it is in terms of filmmaking. Hall Bartlett went on to pursue an artistic career through a series of hit-and-miss films; David Zucker, Jerry Zucker and Jim Abrahams chose, instead, to stick comfortably with empty, mainstream crowd pleasers. Airplane! understands the concept of stupid parody without acting on witty satire; Zero Hour!, however, comments bravely on the downfall of the 50’s nuclear family through a supercharged thriller, and delivers the goods in the process. As Zero Hour! glides towards its conclusion, Ted Stryker and his wife are frantically flying the plane through fog, searching for the lights of the Vancouver landing strip while they are awaited down below by ambulances, police cars and firefighters stroking a pet collie. The eventual landing of the plane is terrifying, and very nearly ends in horror, but Stryker faces his fears—and saves the day. “Ted, that was probably the lousiest land in the history of this airport,” says Treleaven over the radio. “But there’s some of us here, particularly me, who’d like to buy you a drink and shake your hand.”

Surely a great filmmaker couldn’t possibly take this material seriously. Hall Bartlett does, however, and that’s just one of the many reasons why Zero Hour! deserves to be seen.

(And yeah yeah, don't call me Shirley, etc.)