George Roy Hill's Marvelous Career Got Off to a Roaring Start with the Tennessee Williams Comedy Period of Adjustment and Ended Strongly with the Hilarious Chevy Chase Vehicle Funny Farm
Legendary filmmaker George Roy Hill is best known for his three auspicious collaborations with leading man Paul Newman: the classic 1969 Western buddy comedy Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, the Oscar-festooned 1973 con man comedy The Sting (which one him an Academy Award for Best Director) and finally the gloriously profane 1977 hockey comedy Slap Shot.
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and The Sting established the impossibly handsome, impossibly charismatic duo of Paul Newman and Robert Redford as one of film’s all-time great teams. But since Hill was in the director’s chair when they made film and pop culture history with two of the most beloved American movies of all time it was really a distinguished trio of perfectly chosen collaborators who made two damn near perfect movies together, then had the wisdom and good judgment to quit while they were ahead.
No one made better use of Newman’s rakish charm and impish irreverence than Hill in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, The Sting and Slap Shot. But Hill’s achievements extend beyond his New Hollywood masterpieces with Newman.
Throughout the course of a long, distinguished career in film as well as the stage and television, Hill proved a master at handling tricky, complicated source material, whether in the form of Kurt Vonnegut’s mind-melting, seemingly unfilmable science fiction novel Slaughterhouse Five, The World According to Garp, John Irving’s exceedingly literary look at the gleeful absurdity of contemporary life and Period of Adjustment, a 1960 play Tennessee Williams wrote as an intentional change of pace, a comedy that would prove that he could do more than just plumb the depths of human misery with bruisingly intense dramas. Hill directed the play on Broadway before making the big jump to film. Period of Adjustment showed that Williams could write bruisingly intense comedies as well.
Period of Adjustment is certainly more light-hearted than A Streetcar Named Desire or The Glass Menagerie but Williams’ idea of lightweight comedies looks an awful lot like dark drama, albeit with a steady supply of laughs, often, if not invariably of the intentionally dark and uncomfortable variety. Period of Adjustment is a comedy for folks who thought Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf was a laugh riot.
Hill’s Williams adaptation focusses on two broken, depressed and unhappy Korean War veterans who can charitably be described as exceedingly flawed and less generously deemed toxic monsters who hurt the people in their lives because they hate who they have become and the lives that they lead.
Jim Hutton stars as George Haverstick, the younger, more anxious and inexperienced of the two. He’s a veteran with what now appears to be a fairly clear-cut case of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder that gives him the shakes and lands him in a military hospital for nerves where he meets gorgeous nurse Isabel (Jane Fonda, in a star-making, Golden Globes-nominated performance), who takes pity on the broken GI in need of constant care and marries him against her better judgment.
Over the course of the film, the disgruntled veteran quits his job without telling his understandably concerned new wife, buys a hearse without consulting her, drops off his distraught new spouse at the house of a friend she’s never met so that he can continue to binge drink and generally behaves like an unforgivable lout, and on Christmas Eve, Christmas and his honeymoon no less, all times when people are supposed to be on their very best behavior.
George is neatly matched in awfulness with his war buddy Ralph Baitz (Anthony Franciosa), who similarly puts on quite the grand display of un-Christmas-like behavior. Ralph gets blackout drunk and angrily tells off a mean-spirited, glowering boss who unfortunately for him also happens to be the father of Dorothea Baitz (Lois Nettleson), the plain-looking woman he married for her money, having been assured that her daddy was on death’s door and consequently a big payday lurked in their future.
Ralph similarly made the unfortunate choice to quit his job without telling his wife and is so threatened by his four year old son displaying traits he considers soft and effeminate that he angrily hurls his doll into the fireplace and loudly complains to everyone he meets that his wife’s coddling of her sparkly bow-tie-wearing four year old son is making him a “sissy.”
Considering the source material, it’s unsurprising that Period of Adjustment overflows with homoeroticism and none too subtle hints of impotence, repressed homosexuality and sexual dysfunction. The war buddies seem way more into each other than they are the unfortunate women who have to put up with them. It’s heavily implied that George behaves abhorrently because he talks a big game sexually when it comes to the ladies domestic and foreign but then cannot perform either out of performance anxiety, repressed homosexuality or impotence.
True intimacy seems terrifying to this emotionally shattered man of constant sorrow so he pushes a wonderful woman away rather than risk disappointing her on their wedding night, a seminal evening where the pressure to perform is higher than it has ever been before.
In her fourth film appearance Fonda is absolutely captivating, a fresh-faced, doe-eyed beauty, the girl next door as glamorous movie royalty, a sex bomb as well as a natural comedienne. It’s appropriate that the young couple begins their life together in a hearse, since their misbegotten marital bond seems dead on arrival for reasons that have everything to do with George and his demons and nothing to do with his poor, unfortunate bride, who deserves so much more than he can give her.
Period of Adjustment begins as an eminently quotable comedy of errors about a naive young woman who discovers that she has no idea who the man she married really is that builds into an exploration of how complicated, vulnerable people can work through their darkness and despair and arrive at a very fragile place of peace, acceptance and happiness.
That’s a theme you find throughout Hill’s filmography. He specialized in the bittersweet, the melancholy, in movies that ached and felt things deeply. That all began with this uniquely tart Christmas treat, which, carolers aside, deals with the holiday in such a unique and bracingly dark way that it almost feels wrong to call it a Christmas movie at all, since it takes place on Christmas yet steers clear of pretty much all the cliches and conventions that makes Christmas entertainment so cozily familiar and predictable.
Period of Adjustment proved that even at the very beginning of a magnificent career as a film director Hill was uniquely adept at handling comedy, drama and the many fascinating, painful places where they blur and overlap. Perhaps more than any other director of his generation, Hill seemed to understand that happiness almost always contains a lot of sadness, just as there is a lot of sadness in happiness.
Hill ended his career as a film director a little over a quarter century later with a strangely simpatico adaptation of Funny Farm, a 1985 comic novel by newspaperman turned novelist Jay Cronley, who also wrote the book that inspired the wonderful Bill Murray vehicle Quick Change.
Like Period of Adjustment, Funny Farm opens with its protagonists setting off for a new life together, is a rollicking comedy of errors and prominently involves carolers and the Christmas season. Only this time the married couple embarking on a great adventure that quickly devolves into a hellish misadventure are ironically named yuppies Andy Farmer (Chevy Chase) and his wife Elizabeth (Madolyn Smith).
Andy makes a good living as a sportswriter for a New York newspaper but when he gets a ten thousand dollar advance for a heist novel he decides to leave the hustle and bustle of city life behind and quits his job in order to live his dream of being an author.
With visions of Norman Rockwell Americana swimming in his head, Andy and his beautiful wife move to Redbud, Vermont, for their little slice of the American dream, a pastoral home with ducks waddling in and out and happy little songbirds chirping happily outside the window where Andy works fitfully on his literary debut.
From the very beginning, everything that can go wrong does go wrong. Movers played by the great character actors Mike Starr and Glenn Plummer accidentally destroy a country bridge after receiving extremely poor advice/directions from one of Redbud’s wide array of almost impressively unhelpful locals, get hopelessly lost thanks to jackass kids stealing all of Redbud’s signs for kicks and nearly lose what’s left of their sanity before they make it to Andy and Elizabeth charming farm house of doom.
From the outside, Redbud looks like the perfect small town. From the inside it looks like a lost circle of hell. The postman is a force for chaos in the universe who gets all liquored up before hurling mail at the Farmers as if it were an act of aggression and not a public service. Redbud’s head lawman is so ridiculously incompetent that he needs to take a taxi everywhere, since he failed his driver’s test and doesn’t have any deputies who might be able to help him out with the whole “getting places” thing.
While planting in the garden, Elizabeth is horrified to discover a skeleton in a cheap wooden coffin in their front yard that they must pay to receive a proper re-burial in an actual cemetery.
Andy begins his life in Redbud filled with hope. But it doesn’t take long for that idealism to fade and desperation and anger to set in. In a mere matter of days the songbird outside Andy’s windows goes from epitomizing the rustic, outdoor charm of country life to being a migraine-inducing aggravation Andy hurls scalding hot coffee at.
The aspiring novelist’s despair deepens when he shows his wife the chapters he’s been writing and, in a fit of perhaps misplaced candor, she tells him they’re unreadable garbage. Then, to make matters worse for the struggling wordsmith, Elizabeth reveals that she’s actually been dabbling in literature herself, successfully enough to score a five thousand dollar advance for a kid’s book inspired by their fish out of water travails as Redbud’s most luckless city slickers.
Hill knew how to get the very most out of his stars. Chase’s performance here illustrates why he rocketed to fame on Saturday Night Live and movies like Foul Play and Caddyshack. Hill doesn’t let his star get away with coasting on his persona or phoning it in. Instead Funny Farm makes inspired use of Chase’s limited but potent skill set: the movie star good looks and charm, light touch, gift for physical comedy and understated sexiness.
Funny Farm takes a fascinatingly meta turn in its third act when Elizabeth understandably is so disgusted by her desperate husband trying to pass off her book as his own that she decides to divorce him and sell the house that has made them both miserable and pushed their marriage past the breaking point.
The disillusioned city slickers realize that if house buyers had any idea what they were getting into they would flee in horror the way the Farmers should have so they bribe the townspeople into behaving like characters from a Frank Capra movie as a way of tricking other naive souls into choosing to live Redbud.
Funny Farm is a much-needed antidote to movies and other pop culture that shamelessly romanticize simple country folk as figures of unimpeachable decency and kindness with much to teach city folk about what’s truly important in life. In Funny Farm, simple country folk are instead sadists, eccentrics and degenerates who take great pride in making the city folk in their midst as miserable as humanly possible.
Hill brought a sophisticated touch to everything that he did; he even gives the scene in Funny Farm where Andy unknowingly eats a stomach-churning number of “Lamb Fries” that are actually fried testicles a patina of class.
A Chevy Chase vehicle might seem beneath the dignity of a giant like George Roy Hill but Funny Farm is so consistently funny and well-constructed that it threatens to give Chevy Chase movies a good name.
Hill didn’t make a lot of movies. He was never terribly prolific but he maintained a high level of quality throughout his career, beginning with his terrific debut and concluding with his wildly overachieving final film.
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