Mad Men Fans: Six Movies To Watch While You’re Waiting For Season Five
Thursday, April 21, 2011
A few weeks ago, Mad Men fans had to face the news that we wouldn’t be able to watch our story until 2012, if ever. Assuming you’ve already devoured season four of Mad Men on DVD, where can you turn for your fix of flawed people in flawless outfits? To the movies of the Mad Men era, naturally. These six pictures, all made between 1957 and 1965, all wrap complex characters, sharp dialogue, and engaging stories in the stunning visual style of the age…
The Apartment (1960)
“Normally it takes years to work your way up to the 27th floor. But it only takes 30 seconds to be out on the street again. You dig?”
Insurance clerk C.C. Baxter (Jack Lemmon) wants a promotion. The executives at his company want somewhere to pursue their extramarital trysts in private. So Baxter offers his bachelor pad as a rotating venue for their adulterous romps. The ensuing scheduling mixups, misplaced keys, and nosy neighbors bring out the best of Lemmon’s nebbishy comic gifts. But what starts as a simple, farcical premise turns into something more poignant and high-stakes, forcing Baxter to decide how far he’s willing to go to curry the favor of his morally bankrupt bosses.
It’s easy to see how Billy Wilder’s merciless classic became one of the rare comedies to win the Best Picture Oscar. Lemmon’s a wiry dynamo, Shirley MacLaine sparkles as a sad-pixie elevator operator, and Fred MacMurray does what he does best, playing off his chiseled upright-citizen looks to accentuate his character’s essential sleaze. Of course, the costumes, sets, and shot composition are all gorgeous. And for all the brisk, witty dialogue, Wilder & I.A.L. Diamond’s script spares no one, least of all the smug, entitled womanizers wing-tipping through those paneled offices.
Availability: Amazon, Netflix (DVD only)
The Best of Everything (1959)
“Here’s to men. Bless their clean-cut faces and dirty little minds!”
Rona Jaffe’s blockbuster novel, and the movie made from it, are too obvious an influence on Mad Men to bother hiding: Don Draper flips through the paperback in one episode. If Peggy Olsen’s employment bureau had sent her to a publishing company instead of a ad agency, this would be her story.
Caroline Bender (Hope Lange) starts as a secretary, dodging the roaming hands of the executives at Fabian Publishing and taking orders from archetypal embittered old-maid career woman Amanda Farrow (Joan Crawford). Caroline catches the eye of Mike Rice (Stephen Boyd), the only sign of emotional depth among the Fabian suits and the only man in this movie who’s not oblivious, self-centered, and manipulative. Both aspiring actress Gregg Adams (50s supermodel Suzy Parker) and corn-fed naif April Morrison (Diane Baker) have the misfortune of falling in love with arrogant cretins, played excellent by an imperious, self-impressed Louis Jourdan and a slimy, petulant Robert Evans. Far from seeming skewed, this unflattering portrait of the Y chromosome doesn’t go far enough. I’m sure in that time and place the reality was much worse.
Taking a proto-feminist stance on gender in the context of traditional soap-opera morality, The Best of Everything tells us even more about its time than it intends to. And two of those things are this: my God, everything looked great back then; and even mass-market Hollywood weepies were much better written than most “serious” films today. I won’t blame you if you turn off the gender critique in your head and just enjoy the pure pleasures of rich colors, stylish design, and adults who dress, act, and sound like adults.
Availability: Amazon, Netflix (DVD only)
Sweet Smell of Success (1957)
“I’m nice to people when it pays to be nice. Look, I do it enough on the outside, so don’t expect me to do it in my own office.”
Before there were blogs, there were evening newspapers, hitting the streets at dinnertime with news just a few hours old. Broadway gossip columnist J.J. Hunsecker (Burt Lancaster) is a one-man Gawker Media. He can make you a star with a few complimentary words, or land you on the blacklist with nasty insinuations that you’re a Commie, or a dope fiend, or a homosexual. The livelihood of publicist Sidney Falco (Tony Curtis) depends on landing his clients in Hunsecker’s column for the right reasons. But in return for his blessing, Hunsecker demands Falco’s help in destroying some enemies, especially the trumpet player (Martin Milner) who wants to marry Hunsecker’s younger sister (Susan Harrison).
Uncomfortable close-ups, noir shadows, and extreme shot angles establish an appropriately claustrophobic mood. Everyone in this story seems to be crowded by indifferent or hostile forces, desperately throwing elbows to fight their way free. Raucous jazz by the Chico Hamilton Quintet ratchets up the tension. The leads are both great playing against type. The burly he-man Lancaster puts on glasses and gets fussy and bitchy as Hunsecker, and the amiable Curtis plays Falco as a vicious hustler who’d send up his Grandma on a morals charge if it brought him a dollar. Relentlessly pessimistic and cynical, these characters dwell in a darkness that all the lights on Broadway can’t pierce.
Availability: Amazon, Netflix (DVD only)
Strangers When We Meet (1960)
“I’m such a phony. I’ve got a drawer full of manufactured labels. Architect. Father. Husband. Man. I sew them into my clothes. The suits never fit.”
The manicured sunshine of early Southern California suburbia hides many secrets. Breathy, fragile Maggie Gault (Kim Novak) is trapped in a marriage with a distant, disinterested near-eunuch. Her neighbor, Draperesque architectural hotshot Larry Coe (Kirk Douglas), wants to build the kind of buildings he wants to build, while his wife wants him to build what pays. When Larry is struck by the blonde, upholstered vision of Maggie at the school bus stop one morning, you don’t need a blueprint to know what they start building together.
The basic doomed-lovers premise is elevated by a tight, dramatic script by Evan Hunter (The Blackboard Jungle, the 87th Precinct novels), based on his novel. Douglas hits the right mixture of swagger and doubt, his immaculate hair and granite jaw playing counterpoint to his messy emotions. While Novak’s performance is sometimes a little too mannered to be entirely believable, their star-crossed romance does carry real feeling and heart. Ernie Kovacs is great as a louche novelist, and Barbara Rush is sympathetic as Larry’s wife even when she’s pushing him to make more money. Walter Matthau plays another neighbor, back-slapping wiseguy Felix Anders, with surprising depth.
As with all these movies, though, the story shares equal billing to the movie’s fascination as a historical artifact. Every scene is packed with details of the era: a pale aqua living room here, a Modernist lamp there, all lovely, all now as lost as the confused people who lived among them. It’s easy to see why the real-life Larrys and Maggies flocked to these green and pleasant suburbs – and why they found themselves so unfulfilled once they were there.
Availability: Amazon, Netflix (DVD only)
Lover Come Back (1961)
“Gimme a well-stacked dame in a bathing suit and I’ll sell aftershave lotion to beatniks.”
Consummate pro ad exec Carol Templeton (Doris Day) stays on top of everything but her blonde beehive. Her rival, Jerry Webster (Rock Hudson), swans into the office reeking of champagne and still wearing last night’s tuxedo. She woos a client with hard work and talent; he uses bourbon and showgirls – and wins. When a fake commercial for a nonexistent product called VIP accidentally winds up on the air, Jerry has to come up with a product to match it, while Carol is determined to steal the “account”. It’s all romance, rivalry, and romp from there.
Nowhere near as ditzy as I was expecting, Stanley Shapiro and Paul Henning’s Oscar-nominated script sketches its characters in broad, well-observed strokes, poking fun at their vanities without losing its essential cheerfulness. I’ve never really gotten the charisma of either Doris Day or Rock Hudson, but they’re fine here. The protypical rom-com duo is supported by a great cast of character-actor stalwarts, including Edie Adams, Ann B. Davis, and especially Tony Randall as Jerry’s hapless, pampered boss. Eye-popping sets and costumes make the most of the Eastmancolor processing, with luxuriant results. You could fill a coffee table book with Day’s hats alone. All told, it’s pleasantly light and frothy with just enough bite to keep it from getting inane.
Availability: Amazon, Netflix (DVD only)
The Loved One (1965)
“I can give you our Eternal Flame in either Perpetual Eternal or Standard Eternal. With Standard Eternal, your flame burns only during visiting hours.”
Christopher Isherwood (The Berlin Stories, A Single Man) and Terry Southern (Dr. Strangelove): collaborations don’t get much more illustrious than this trans-Atlantic transgressive team-up. In their hands, Evelyn Waugh’s novel – about a young British poet who gets mixed up in the bizarre Hollywood cemetery business – swings wildly into total farce. It’s the kind of madcap mid-60s comedy where every role is played by some recognizable face camping it up: James Coburn as an airport immigration officer, John Gielgud as an expat British painter, Tab Hunter as a cemetery tour guide, Liberace as a coffin salesman, Milton Berle arranging the cremation of his wife’s dog, and Rod Steiger as a fussy, mother-obsessed mortician named Mr. Joyboy. Oh, and Jonathan Winters twice, playing both halves of a brotherly duo.
The script’s scattershot religious satire, which probably seemed so sharp at the time, hasn’t all aged well. But for every joke that comes off as belabored and obvious, there’s another so cutting it seems like it could’ve been written today (a “grieving” fruit tycoon barking business orders over the phone next to his wife’s corpse; a flashing sign in a chapel commanding a priest to speed up a wedding ceremony; Mr. Joyboy’s morbidly obese but “positive-thinking” mother, who “never misses a King Chicken commercial” and taught her myna bird to say “there is no death”). Robert Morse, who plays the dreamy, bumbling British poet, would turn up forty-odd years later as the similarly oddball Bert Cooper on a cable TV drama called Mad Men.
Availability: Amazon, Netflix (DVD only)
If you liked those, don’t stop there. Other 60s movies that offer Mad Men-style pleasures include another turn by Shirley MacLaine, this time opposite Robert Mitchum in Two For The Seesaw (1962), including a priceless scene with Mitchum navigating a ridiculous beatnik party; the racial advertising satire of Putney Swope (1969), directed by Robert Downey, Sr.; and another satirical look at corporate America starring Robert Morse, the musical How To Succeed In Business Without Really Trying (1967). A strong crop of recent films look back at the period very effectively, including A Single Man, A Serious Man, and An Education (what is it about indefinite articles with these movies?). Fellow Maddicts, what movies do you turn to when you’re not quite ready to return to the 21st century?
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