Ben Hecht on man and god and law; Melina Mercouri—dude looks like a lady

Ooh, ooh that Mel

“If you did not believe in God, in the importance of marriage, in the United States government, in the sanity of politicians, in the wisdom of your elders, then you had to believe in art.”

    That line is attributed to Ben Hecht in the opening of Gaily, Gaily (1969), Norman Jewison’s film of Hecht’s autobiography, Gaily, Gaily: The Memoirs of a Cub Reporter in Chicago (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1963). Hecht’s brand of eloquence may very well be extinct, but the quote itself sums up a bothersome reality for me. Journalists and professional authors can twirl their digits around the keyboard at will; the rest of us labor over words, phrases and meanings. The pros can interact, socialize and hold a conversation; the rest of us whither under the weight of our own sorry eccentricity.

    I’d thought about writing something on Gaily, Gaily for the upcoming Double Bill-a-Thon, comparing its turn-of-the-century newspaper scenario with Sam Fuller’s Park Row (1952), but Jewison’s picture has far fewer ups than downs. Still, as a time capsule, it’s worth a gander: the Nixon-era Americana, the retreat to “simpler times,” allusions to ‘60s political unrest…and Beau Bridges being groomed as a hip leading man. He’d been in front of the cameras for years, but Gaily, Gaily was part of a short-lived bid for the Big Time, followed by Hal Ashby’s The Landlord (1970). The public wasn’t charmed, however, and character parts and TV guest spots ensued.

    Set partially in a whorehouse, Gaily Gaily introduced the world to Margot Kidder, back in that anti-glamour period when Hollywood could sell a bow-wow like Kidder as ‘hot.’ (To be fair, this was before she acquired the pack-a-day rasp screeching like nails across a chalkboard in Superman.) But far more unsettling is the presence of Medusa herself, Melina Mercouri as the madam. I saw her just recently in Jules Dassin’s absurdly compelling 10:30pm Summer (1966), an anti-masterpiece which prompts me to quote David Thomson—“Together [Dassin and Mercouri] made some of the most entertainingly bad films of the sixties and seventies: pictures that outstrip their own deficiencies and end up being riotously enjoyable as one waits to see how far pretentiousness will stretch. In good company, and a little drink, He Who Must Die, Phaedra, and 10:30pm Summer might cure would-be suicides.”

    Dassin slid into a middlebrow abyss with Melina—10:30pm Summer is L’Avventura by way of Stanley Kramer—yet he never could sex her up as required for Never on Sunday (1960) or Topkapi (1964), there was always something "off" about the woman. The breadth of Jewison’s camera brought me to a hideous but satisfying conclusion: she’s a man, baby!