May Day

Tomorrow (Friday), the Turner Classic Movies channel is devoting the evening to Elaine May.  It starts at 5 PM (Los Angeles time -- 8 PM in the East) with an hour-long documentary on her comedy career with Mike Nichols.  It's titled,  Nichols & May:  Take Two.  If they didn't show any other of her films, this alone would be enough for me to look forward to.

The movies they're showing are A New Leaf (which she starred in with Walter Matthau), Nickey and Mikey (with Peter Falk and John Cassavetes) and Ishtar (with Dustin Hoffman and Warren Beatty).

I haven't seen A New Leaf in many, many decades, but remembering liking it and finding it pretty funny.

I didn’t see Mikey and Nicky until about 2-3 years ago.  And was stunned by how good it was -- both the writing and directing -- most especially for being SO different from all her other films.  It's not at all a comedy, though there are touches of humor, but a pretty dark, gritty independent-style film about two low-level gangsters.  In fact, it looks sort of like something Cassavetes might have made.  If someone showed me the movie , and I knew nothing about it, and they asked who I thought wrote it and also who directed it, I never would have guessed Elaine May for either.  Never.  Ever.  It's not for everyone, but it's extremely good.

I saw her famous, huge flop Ishtar in a theater.  (Not during its initial run, but soon after, I think at the WGA, but I wouldn’t swear to it.)   I enjoyed it -- much better than its massive flop status, though (for me) not as great as many of its defenders now say.  My recollection is that I thought it was a fun “Hope and Crosby road picture,” though somewhat too big.  But I wasn’t remotely offended by it being big and expensive (which was its criticism at the time, and unfairly so), just that (if I remember correctly), making it so big detracted a touch from the charm.  However, I might like it more with the passage of time, distanced from everything swirling around it.  So, I'm at least recording it, just in case I decide to watch it again.

Here's the trailer for Mikey & Nicky.  As you can see, it is most definitely not a comedy.  An interesting side note: the woman in the trailer, playing Cassavetes ex-girlfriend, is Joyce Van Patten.  And she not only appeared in two episodes of Columbo, one of them a small, very funny scene as a nun at a soup kitchen who mistakes Columbo as a homeless man, but in the other she played the murderer -- and it was made the same year as Mikey & Nicky (1976).  Furthermore, that episode, "Old Fashioned Murder," features a supporting role by Jeannie Berlin, who is Elaine May's daughter.  (Most recently, she had a recurring role in Succession.)  For what it's worth, Falk's good friend Cassavetes played a murderer in Columbo, as well, a very good episode, "Etude in Black."