Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle

The 1990s was a good decade for Jennifer Jason Leigh. She was not only prolific, flirting with mainstream films like Backdraft (1991), but also at the height of her creative powers, turning out one astonishing performance after another, disappearing into her roles with chameleon-like proficiency. It was also the decade where she tackled her most challenging roles in a way that threatened to alienate the critics and her fans. In Georgia (1995), she played a struggling musician who has the heart but not the talent as evident in an excruciatingly awful cover of a Van Morrison song that goes on for so long that it tests the resolve of even the most die-hard Leigh fan.

She also tackled stylized, almost impenetrable accents in The Hudsucker Proxy (1993), the Coen brothers’ homage to screwball comedies, and her crowning achievement, Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle (1994), where she portrayed legendary writer Dorothy Parker with incredible accuracy. The film was directed by Robert Altman protégé Alan Rudolph, a talented filmmaker with a frustratingly uneven filmography. With Altman attached as producer, Rudolph was able to assemble an impressive cast – a who’s who of ‘90s character actors, like Campbell Scott, Lili Taylor and James LeGros; and survivors from the 1980s, like Matthew Broderick, Jennifer Beals and Andrew McCarthy. It is to Rudolph’s credit that he is able to handle such a large and diverse cast, so much so that a cheat sheet is almost required in order to keep track of who everyone is. Admittedly, Rudolph plays large portions of Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle fast and loose, letting this talented cast run with their characters. For the most part it works, especially the scenes that take place in the Algonquin Hotel.

Dorothy Parker’s heyday was in New York City during the Roaring Twenties where she was part of a thriving literary scene known as “the era of giants.” She got her start writing captions for lingerie ads at Vanity Fair magazine and worked her way up to drama critic, an unheard of position for a woman at that time. She quickly made enemies with her scathing reviews. Parker was fired and became a freelancer along with her close friend and editor Robert Benchley who quit the magazine in protest. She and other New York writers lunched at the Rose Room of the Algonquin Hotel in gatherings they cheekily referred to as “board meetings.” She eventually married screenwriter Alan Campbell and wrote scripts for several Hollywood films but loathed the process and studio machinations in general.

We first meet Parker (Jennifer Jason Leigh) in Hollywood circa 1937 where she runs into Benchley (Campbell Scott). Even though they’re both married they still flirt with each other by trading witty barbs. After they go their separate ways, a stagehand says to Parker, “Must’ve been so colorful in the ‘20s,” to which she replies, “Was it? I barely remember.” This entire sequence is shot in black and white and has a melancholy air to it, accentuated by Mark Isham’s moody jazz score. The film proceeds to flash back to the 1920s and changes to color with a slight sepia tone as if we’re looking at old photographs.

We see the creation of the famous Algonquin Round Table as it starts off with three people ordering food which then grows into five and quickly expands from there until the best and the brightest literary minds in New York City converge on a regular basis to eat, drink and banter endlessly with one another. These scenes demonstrate Altman’s influence on Rudolph as people talk over each other and the overlapping dialogue forces one to follow whatever conversation they please. As the scenes in the Algonquin continue, the table gets larger to accommodate all of the people and the dialogue flies fast and furious. It’s a veritable feast for lovers of witty repartee. In fact, Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle often feels and looks like the best Altman film he never made.

Right from the get-go, Jennifer Jason Leigh disappears into her role complete with Dorothy Parker’s distinctive way of speaking. The actress certainly looks the part with her bob haircut and vintage outfits. However, it is Parker’s trademark scathing wit that Leigh nails perfectly. It is her devotion to the characters she plays and her willingness to give herself completely over to them that is one of her most admirable traits. She’s not afraid to show the darker side of the characters she portrays and Dorothy Parker is no different as we see the famous writer undergo a painful abortion and, in another scene, come across as a boozy mess (and yet Leigh still looks great) that attempts suicide by cutting her wrists with a straight razor. It’s a hard scene to watch not because Rudolph shows it (he doesn’t) but we hear it and our imagination fills in the rest. It is so much fun just to see the way she carries herself in any give scene. The actress makes it all look so effortless as it almost seems like she’s channeling Parker. However, this uncanny representation of Parker divided critics, some of whom found her accent impenetrable. Regardless, it’s a brave performance and an absolute crime that Leigh didn’t get nominated or win an Academy Award for her efforts.

The rest of the cast follows her lead, especially Campbell Scott as her best friend and confidante. Leigh and Scott have fantastic chemistry together and do a great job of conveying the unrequited love that existed between Parker and Benchley like the proverbial elephant in the room in the sense that they never address it. However, they do flirt with each other and a typical exchange involves her telling him, “I could kiss you but I’m not sure it would come out right,” to which he replies, “You’re afraid you might melt the gold in my teeth.” Scott is Leigh’s ideal foil as he captures Benchley’s idiosyncratic mannerisms and slightly nervous speech pattern. Scott really shines in a scene where, during a theatrical review featuring the Round Table regulars, Benchley delivers a financial report. Initially, it looks like he’s going to flop in a big way as he dryly rattles off facts. Scott nails his character’s nervous tics and awkward physical gestures. And then an interesting thing happens – Benchley gradually wins over the audience with his awkward shtick. Scott pulls it off with a showstopping performance.

Alan Rudolph was fascinated with writers from the Round Table as a child and this manifested itself in his love for Gluyas Williams’ illustrations in a collection of Robert Benchley’s amusing essays. After making The Moderns (1988), a film about American expatriates in 1920s Paris, he wanted to tackle a fact-based drama set in the same era. He began work on a screenplay with Randy Sue Coburn entitled, Mrs. Parker. In 1992, Rudolph attended a Fourth of July party hosted by Robert Altman who introduced him to Jennifer Jason Leigh. Rudolph was surprised by her physical resemblance to Dorothy Parker and impressed with her knowledge about the Jazz Age.

The screenplay originally focused on the platonic relationship between Parker and Benchley but this did not appeal to any financial backers. There still were no takers even when Altman came on board as producer. The emphasis on Parker was the next change to the script but Rudolph still had no luck finding financing for “a period biography of a literate woman.” Altman finally stepped up and bullied Fine Line Features and Miramax Pictures – two studios he was making films for – to team up, with the former releasing Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle domestically and the latter handling foreign distribution. Altman claimed that he forced the film to be made by putting his own money into it and “I put other projects of mine hostage to it. I did a lot of lying.” He and Rudolph were able to raise the money for the $7 million budget but this didn’t come through until four weeks into principal photography.

Leigh was so committed to doing the film that she agreed to be in it for “a 10th of what I normally get for a film.” The rest of the cast followed her lead and agreed to work for much lower than their usual salaries. She did a great amount of research for the role and said, “I wanted to be as close to her as I possibly could.” To this end, Leigh stayed for a week at the Algonquin and read Parker’s entire body of work while there. She also listened repeatedly to the two existing audio recordings of the writer in order to perfect Parker’s distinctive voice. Leigh found that Parker “had a sensibility that I understand very, very well. A sadness. A depression.”

Rudolph shot the film in Montreal because the building facades in its old city section most closely resembled period New York City. The Rose Room in the Algonquin Hotel was recreated at two-thirds scale on a soundstage. Rudolph invited the actors to write their own dialogue which resulted in a chaotic first couple of days of principal photography. Campbell Scott remembered, “everyone hung on to what they knew about their characters and just sort of threw it out there.” They trusted their director implicitly during the 40-day shoot. The cast stayed in a run-down hotel dubbed Camp Rudolph and engaged in all-night poker games. Leigh chose not to participate in these activities, preferring instead to stay in character on and off camera.

Originally entitled, Mrs. Parker and the Round Table, it was changed to "Vicious Circle" because New Line was worried that people would think of King Arthur and not Dorothy Parker. In anticipation of the film’s release Altman admitted that “ it’s going to be a tough sell. We’re talking about literacy.” A rough cut was screened at the 1993 Cannes Film Festival and predictably divided critics. There were rumors that after this screening Leigh re-recorded several scenes that were criticized for being too difficult to understand because of her accent but she denied that this was done. Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle was generally well-received by critics. Roger Ebert gave the film three out of four stars and felt that the film was “best appreciated, I think, by those who already know the players around the Round Table, and have read some of their work. Others are likely to wonder what the fuss was about.” The Washington Post’s Hal Hinson praised Leigh for giving “a disturbing, emotionally raw performance.” In his review for the San Francisco Chronicle, Mick LaSalle also praised Leigh’s performance for giving “as bold a performance as ever, outlining the extreme personality of writer Dorothy Parker with equally extreme choices in manner and speech – and then inhabiting that outline with quirky delicacy and subtleties of feeling.” The New York Times’ Janet Maslin found that “there are major gaps, like the absence of any significant mention of Dorothy Parker's left-wing political passions. But this film crams a remarkable amount of fact and nuance into the telling of its wrenchingly sad story.” The film failed to wow Entertainment Weekly, however, which gave it a “C+” rating. Owen Gleiberman wrote, “The question the movie fails to come to grips with is: How do you get audiences to care about a woman who, in the end, didn't give a damn about herself?”

The great tragedy of Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle is that Dorothy Parker and Robert Benchley were so obviously in love with each other and yet never worked up the courage to express their true feelings for one another. Despite being a part of such a vibrant artistic and social scene, Parker is often portrayed as a sad, lonely figure. Rudolph’s film portrays her as a complex person that wrote out of a great pain. She was brilliant and a trailblazer for her time. She never found the true happiness that she sought with Benchley and resigned herself to an unhappy life but out of this produced some great literature that has stood the test of time.

The Long Goodbye

“I felt that the film was almost an essay, an education, to the audience, to say, ‘Stop looking at everything exactly the same way.’” – Robert Altman

When The Long Goodbye was released in 1973, United Artists promptly bungled its ad campaign. Robert Altman's film radically reworked Raymond Chandler's novel of the same name and the studio had no idea how to market the offbeat movie. It polarized critics and promptly disappeared from theaters. People weren’t ready for its offbeat vibe and the way it satirized Los Angeles culture. However, it was Elliott Gould’s unusual take on private investigator Philip Marlowe that drew the lion’s share of people’s criticism. His loose, easy-going style flew in the face of the traditional interpretation made famous by Humphrey Bogart and was tantamount to heresy among cinephiles but in retrospect paved the way for a film like the Coen brothers’ The Big Lebowski (1998), which also confounded the mainstream with its own eccentric take on West Coast culture.

While trying in vain to feed his cat late one night, private investigator Philip Marlowe (Elliott Gould) receives a visit from his friend, Terry Lennox (Jim Bouton). Lennox asks Marlowe to drive him to Tijuana, Mexico. When he returns home, the police are waiting for him and claim that Lennox brutally murdered his wife. Marlowe does not believe that his good friend is a murderer and refuses to tell the police anything. After three days in jail, he's released when the police inform him that Lennox committed suicide in Mexico. It's an open and shut case but something doesn't quite sit right with Marlowe. He is subsequently hired by the wealthy Eileen Wade (Nina van Pallandt) to find her alcoholic husband, Roger Wade (Sterling Hayden), a famous author with an Ernest Hemingway complex. Marlowe learns that the Wades knew the Lennoxes and that there is more to Terry's suicide and his wife's murder than initially reported.

The Long Goodbye is bookended by the strains of “Hooray for Hollywood” and the song quickly fades out as if to signal that this film will not be a classic noir take on Chandler. Marlowe wakes up after an undetermined period of time. How long has he been asleep? He mutters to himself while trying to feed his cat, a very fickle pet that will only eat a specific brand of food, and when he tries to fool the feline with another brand hidden in an old can, the cat bolts. So what is the purpose of the first ten minutes of the film dedicated to Marlowe feeding his cat? First off, it establishes that this is going to be a very different take on Chandler’s book and that Marlowe’s friend, Terry Lennox, is as fickle as his cat – he only hangs around Marlowe when he needs him but when he’s no longer of use, he splits. This opening scene came from a story a friend of Altman’s told him about his cat only eating one type of cat food.

The Long Goodbye is much more than a murder mystery. Taking Chandler's novel set in the 1940s and updating it to the 1970s, Altman is also interested in satirizing the superficiality of L.A. culture. Marlowe is surrounded by an odd cast of denizens that populate the city: his neighbors are a group of women who spend their time getting high and doing yoga with very little clothes on, the security guard for the Wade's gated community does impersonations of famous actors like Barbara Stanwyk and Jimmy Stewart, and Marty Augustine (Mark Rydell) is a nasty gangster who is proud of his Jewish heritage. Throughout it all, Marlowe repeats his own personal mantra of sorts, “It’s okay with me,” which personifies his easy-going nature.

The heart of the film is Elliot Gould. His Marlowe is a laid-back guy in a rumpled suit that wanders through the film muttering jokes to himself and chain smoking constantly. Gould's character is man out of time, a throwback to another era, which provides a sharp contrast to the trendy, health-obsessed '70s culture that surrounds him. Altman nicknamed Gould’s character Rip Van Marlowe, as if he had been wandering around L.A. in the early ‘70s but “trying to invoke the morals of a previous era.” The actor delivers a wonderful assortment of smart-ass comments to anyone who gives him trouble but also knows when to play it straight during key dramatic moments. He’s also not afraid to improvise in a given scene like when the police interrogate him and he smears the fingerprinting ink under his eyes like a football player and then applies it to the rest of his face a la Al Jolson, riffing off the police officer that is giving him a hard time. Gould delivers a multi-layered performance that ranks right up there with his other classic Altman films, M.A.S.H. (1970) and California Split (1974). There was clearly a creative synergy between the two men that resulted in both of their best work to date.

Producers Jerry Bick and Elliott Kastner commissioned a screenplay from Leigh Brackett, who had written the script for the Humphrey Bogart version of The Big Sleep (1946). The producers offered the script to both Howard Hawks and Peter Bogdanovich. Both directors passed on it but Bogdanovich recommended Altman, whom he admired. Bick and Kastner sent Brackett’s script to Altman while he was shooting Images (1972) in Ireland. Brian Hutton was supposed to direct but was offered another film and Altman took over. Initially, he didn’t want to do it until he was told that Gould would be cast as Marlowe.

In adapting the book, Brackett had problems with its plot which she felt was “riddled with clichés” and was faced with the choice of doing it as a period piece or updating it. Altman and Brackett spent a lot of time talking over the plot. He wanted Marlowe to be a loser. Her first draft was too long and she shortened it but the ending was inconclusive. She had Marlowe shooting Terry Lennox because it was the way Hutton wanted it. Altman liked the ending because it was so out of character for Marlowe. He agreed to direct but only if the ending was not changed.

Altman conceived of the film as a satire and it was his decision to cast Sterling Hayden and Nina Van Pallandt. The director only knew Van Pallandt from The Johnny Carson Show and from the Clifford Irving scandal. He felt that she resembled a character from Chandler’s novel and the studio allowed him to do a screen test. He also made all kinds of changes to the script, like Wade’s suicide and Marty Augustine smashing the Coke bottle into his girlfriend’s face. Altman did not read Chandler’s book and instead gave copies of Raymond Chandler Speaking to the cast and crew and advised them to study the author’s literary essays. Altman originally wanted Dan Blocker for the role of Roger Wade but he died just before shooting began and the director was persuaded to meet with Sterling Hayden.

When Bogdanovich was briefly attached to the project, he wanted Robert Mitchum or Lee Marvin to portray Philip Marlowe. United Artists president David Picker may have picked Elliott Gould to play Marlowe as a ploy to get Altman to direct the film. Bogdanovich did not see Gould in the role because he was “too new” and left the project. Brian Hutton also wanted Gould to play the private detective. At the time, Gould was box office poison in Hollywood after his rumored troubles on the set of A Glimpse of Tiger where he argued with co-star Kim Darby, exchanged blows with director Anthony Harvey, and abused drugs as well as being unreliable and absent. Warner Bros. stopped the production early on and Gould claimed that he was blamed for its failure. The studio collected on an insurance policy that attested the actor was crazy. For The Long Goodbye, United Artists gave Gould the requisite physical before approving his contract and demanded a psychological exam to determine that the actor was mentally stable. Gould read the first draft of Brackett’s script described it as a “pastiche” and very convoluted. Altman called Gould to discuss the film and the actor told him that he always wanted to play Marlowe. Altman asked Gould to read the novel as well as Chandler on Chandler. Gould discovered that he was exactly the same age, height, and weight as Marlowe.

When it came to the scenes between Marlowe and Wade, Altman had Gould and Hayden ad-lib most of the dialogue. Hayden, with his long, scraggily beard and scattershot delivery of his dialogue, is great as the eccentric writer who constantly refers to Marlowe as “Marlboro” (“the Duke of Bullshit,” he adds at one point), in reference to his ever-present cigarette hanging from the corner of his mouth. Hayden delivers a wonderfully unpredictable performance full of bluster and eccentric line readings. According to Altman, Hayden improvised a lot of his dialogue and was drunk and stoned on marijuana most of the time. In the scene where Marlowe tries to save Wade from drowning himself in the Pacific Ocean, Gould almost drowned when he went out too far. He was only able to do three takes. The director decided that the camera should never stop moving and put the camera on a dolly. However, the camera movements would counter the actions of the characters so that the audience would feel like a voyeur. To compensate for the harsh light of southern California, Altman gave the film a soft, pastel look reminiscent of old postcards from the 1940s.

Mark Rydell is something else as Marty Augustine. In the first scene we see him in he threatens Marlowe, then talks sweetly to his girlfriend, and then goes back to menacing Marlowe. At times, Augustine is downright charming and then he suddenly and shockingly smashes a Coke bottle across his girlfriend’s face just to make a point. With the shocking violence of this scene, Altman said, “It was supposed to get the attention of the audience and remind them that, in spite of Marlowe, there is a real world out there, and it is a violent world.” Augustine is clearly a psychopath and Rydell nails the character’s shifting moods with unsettling intensity. The Coke bottle scene is like a cold splash of water to the face and it causes not only the audience to sit up and notice but Marlowe as well, who, up to this point, has mostly been in his own little world. Now, Marlowe has a real, vested interest in what happened to his friend Lennox because he owed Augustine a lot of money and is now threatening Marlowe’s life.

The Long Goodbye was previewed at the Tarrytown Conference Center in New York. The gala was hosted by Judith Crist, then the film critic for New York magazine. Altman flew in for the Q&A session. The film was not well-received by the audience except for Nina Van Pallandt’s performance, which got good notices. The mood at the Q&A was “vaguely hostile” and afterwards Altman was reportedly “depressed.” The Long Goodbye did not fair well in its limited release in Los Angeles, Chicago, Philadelphia, and Miami. As a result, the New York City opening was canceled at the last minute after several advance screenings had already been held for the press.

The Long Goodbye received mixed reaction from critics and performed poorly at the box office because of the unconventional story, plot, and character changes from the novel. Sight and Sound and The Film Quarterly attacked the depiction of private detective Philip Marlowe, saying: “one can not satirize or destroy a hero image until one defines it.” Time magazine’s Jay Cocks wasn’t crazy about the film either: "Altman's lazy, haphazard putdown is without affection or understanding, a nose-thumb not only at the idea of Philip Marlowe but at the genre that his tough-guy-soft-heart character epitomized. It is a curious spectacle to see Altman mocking a level of achievement to which, at his best, he could only aspire.”

The film was abruptly withdrawn from release by United Artists with rumors that it would be re-edited. Altman went to Picker and told him, “No wonder the fucking picture is failing. It’s giving the wrong impression. You make it look like a thriller and it’s not, it’s a satire.” The studio analyzed the reviews for six months and concluded that the advertising campaign was too narrow. They created a new release strategy for The Long Goodbye with a novel ad campaign that featured a poster illustrated by legendary Mad magazine artist Jack Davis. Altman explained that he “had to prepare audiences for a movie that satirizes Hollywood and the entire Chandler genre.” United Artists spent $40,000, and the New York City première was profitably and critically successful. In his review for The New York Times, Vincent Canby wrote, “Don’t be misled by the ads, The Long Goodbye is not a put-on. It’s great fun and it’s funny, but it’s a serious, unique work.” Roger Ebert gave the film three out of four stars and praised Elliott Gould's "good performance, particularly the virtuoso ten-minute stretch at the beginning of the movie when he goes out to buy food for his cat. Gould has enough of the paranoid in his acting style to really put over Altman's revised view of the private eye." The Long Goodbye ended up on The New York Times’ year-end Ten Best list. Cinematographer Vilmos Zsigmond won the National Society of Film Critics’ award for best cinematography in 1973. Unfortunately, the damage had already been done and the film still failed to perform well elsewhere.

The Long Goodbye has endured and become one of Altman’s signature films. It also has some famous fans, chief among them the Coen brothers who cite it as their favorite of Altman’s and an influence on The Big Lebowski. Aside from being a cheeky satire on Hollywood almost as much as The Player (1992) was, a later Altman film that brought him back into the mainstream, it is a film about loyalty. By the end of the film, Marlowe has learned a valuable lesson – there are some friends you don’t stick your neck out for. He is loyal to a fault and realizes that Lennox wasn’t the friend that he thought he was. As the Altman quote states at the beginning of this article, Marlowe is forced to stop looking at everything exactly the same way, just as we are, and see his friend for who he truly is.