By Steven Suskin
The pleasures are many in Tate Taylor's The Help [Touchstone Dreamworks], starting in the acting and writing departments. This is an intelligent and moving film, based on Kathryn Stockett's 2009 bestseller set in 1963 Jackson, Mississippi, about the ladies of the house and their maids in the kitchen. Powerful stuff, well told.
The multiple stories woven through the film are in every instance enhanced by the actors. Viola Davis heads the cast; we've thought her unparalleled since her riveting monologue in August Wilson's King Hedley II in 2001 — for which she received her first Tony Award — and her equally astonishing performance in Lynn Nottage's Intimate Apparel in 2004. Movie audiences discovered her opposite Meryl Streep in the 2008 "Doubt"; as Aibileen in "The Help," Davis carries a film — a very fine film — on her own.
She is in fine company, with Emma Stone as Skeeter, the author of the novel-within-the-film; Bryce Dallas Howard as Hilly, the racist among the genteelfolk; and Sissy Spacek, as Hilly's tart mother. There are no less than three standouts among standouts: Cicely Tyson as an aged retainer who is brusquely fired; Allison Janney, as the writer's cancer-riddled mother; and a remarkable turn from Octavia Spencer as Minny, a "difficult" maid who causes much of the trouble. Mrs. Lovett had meat pies; Minny bakes chocolate cake.
25 Dec 2011
Cover art for "The Help"
From an altogether different genre comes The Taking of Pelham One Two Three [MGM], one of those crash-and-burn hostage-taking hijacking tales, the twist in this case being that it happens underground. In the New York City subway, that is. This 1974 film is something of a potboiler, but the entertainment value is high. (Do not confuse this "Pelham" with the lousy 2009 remake starring Denzel Washington and John Travolta.)
Walter Matthau gives one of his prime mid-career performances, crusty and gruff but likable and almost heroic. Robert Shaw, is the brilliant mastermind behind the scheme. Shaw would become widely known the following year by virtue of his role as the mad shark hunter Quint in "Jaws." He had already attained a Broadway presence, as author of the 1968 hit drama The Man in the Glass Booth; star of Harold Pinter's Old Times; and as the title character in the one-night musical flop, Gantry. The pair are equaled by Martin Balsam, in yet another in his string of colorful character roles.
For those of you who have repeatedly heard that New York City in the 1970s was a harsh and grungy place where you didn't feel safe on the streets, let alone in the subway, the shot-on-location "Taking of Pelham One Two Three" serves as documentary proof. Watching this film all these years later, you can virtually smell the trash (and worse) in the streets and trains.
(Steven Suskin is author of the recently released Updated and Expanded Fourth Edition of "Show Tunes" as well as "The Sound of Broadway Music: A Book of Orchestrators and Orchestrations," "Second Act Trouble" and the "Opening Night on Broadway" books. He also pens Playbill.com's Book Shelf and On the Record columns. He can be reached at ssuskin@aol.com.)
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