I loved Garner as Rockford. I think he's very underrated as an actor - it's hard to do that bit so naturally.
Posted on 02/11/2023 3:49:34 PM PST by Rummyfan
The first thing that has to be understood about The Americanization of Emily, the 1964 black comedy written by Paddy Chayefsky and directed by Arthur Hiller, is that nearly everyone involved in making it was a veteran. It certainly explains motivation – and not just Chayefsky's compulsive urge to attack establishment tropes – but also the film's failure at the box office, a blow that would sour Chayefsky on Hollywood (and vice versa) for the rest of the decade, until he made his comeback with The Hospital in 1971.
Chayefsky had been wounded in Germany, and Hiller had been a bomber navigator in the RCAF. Star James Garner was in the merchant marine during WW2, and had fought in the Korean War, while Melvyn Douglas had fought in both world wars. Julie Andrews had lived in the UK as a child during the war, though she would protest that the story that her singing voice was discovered in air raid shelters during the Blitz was a myth. James Coburn spent his time in uniform as a postwar draftee driving trucks and working as a DJ at an army radio station in Texas, before narrating training films while stationed in West Germany.
But the audiences for the film, released barely twenty years after V-J Day, would have been filled with veterans with recent memories of life in uniform, and all the peculiarities of military bureaucracy at its wartime height. They had been ready for Billy Wilder's Stalag 17 over a decade earlier, not to mention comedies like Operation Petticoat and Mister Roberts, but The Americanization of Emily went a little too far.
Critic Judith Crist wondered if "World War Two is itself fair game for laughter" in the New York Herald Tribune...
(Excerpt) Read more at steynonline.com ...
I loved Garner as Rockford. I think he's very underrated as an actor - it's hard to do that bit so naturally.
And Paddy Chayefsky was a genius.
That is a good movie with a very good cast.
Network was a great movie that is even more relevant today.
One of the funniest deadpan quips I ever heard was from Garner when asked by Barbara Walters (I think it was her) if he would ever do a nude scene in a film.
He said, “I don’t do horror films.”
I want you to remember, that the last time you saw me,
I was unregenerately eating a Hershey bar...
Paddy Chayefsky also wrote Altered States. He was the writer for the first half of the Altered States movie. Somehow, he lost control of the second half of the movie, and left the production. As such, the first half of the movie is literally right out of the novel. Great book, good movie.
I always liked Garner quite well. We used to come home from class in the afternoon in college and watch him on The Rockford Files. I should find out who has those and binge rewatch a season.
LOL!
Altered States
Garner was always one of my favorite actors. Until I read his autobiography & found what a wild-eyed democrat he was! :-)
Yes. Extremely so.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZwMVMbmQBug
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3HQTNZRmJdg
“Critic Judith Crist wondered if “World War Two is itself fair game for laughter” in the New York Herald Tribune...”
Late actor Robert Clary ( died almost 3 months ago ) of “Hogan’s Heroes” spent time in a Nazi concentration camp. Many people know that part. What is a little known fact about the show is that every actor in the show who played a major German character was Jewish.
Werner Klemperer (Col. Klonk) was a Christian. His father, conductor Otto, was born Jewish but converted to Christianity. Werner’s mother was Lutheran.
I missed it the first, second and third times around but finally caught The Americanization of Emily on the tube about twenty years ago and watched it again on TCM before Christmas. Needless to say, Jim Garner was one of my favorites long before Rockford hit the screen, as was Julie Andrews before she became Mary Poppins. Having the two of them starring in an ostensibly anti-war movie with elements of comedy was a brilliant choice that, unfortunately, was about twenty years early for maximum drawing power.
It speaks highly of the movie to learn that both of the leads, on separate occasions, proclaimed The Americanization of Emily their favorite picture in which they had a starring role.
Leon Askin, who played General Burkhalter, was from Vienna, and fled to the US, and lived to the ripe old age of 97.
Mr. Roberts was a comedy??
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