Please Don't Make Me Watch 'The End of the Affair' Again

---

---

Maurice (Ralph Fiennes): I'm jealous of this stocking.

Sarah (Julianne Moore): Why?

Maurice: Because it does what I can't. Kisses your whole leg. And I'm jealous of this button.

Sarah: Poor, innocent button.

Maurice: It's not innocent at all. It's with you all day. I'm not.

Sarah: I suppose you're jealous of my shoes?

Maurice: Yes.

Sarah: Why?

Maurice: Because they'll take you away from me.

---

If I had to select a movie to watch starring any actress who ever lived, wow, that would be a really tough choice to make. There are so many actresses I admire. It would be almost impossible to narrow it down.

But if I had to select a movie to watch starring any contemporary actress, it would be easy for me. I'd pick just about any movie with Julianne Moore. Oh, I like other actresses of our time, too — Meryl Streep, Glenn Close, Helen Mirren, Nicole Kidman, Holly Hunter, just to name a few — but there really is something special about Moore. She is an accomplished actress. She is versatile. In my opinion, she is still as beautiful as she was the first time I saw her in a movie more than 20 years ago.

And I would watch her in just about anything. But I wouldn't watch "The End of the Affair" again.

Some people liked it, I suppose, although the box office suggests that the viewing public agreed with me. It made back less than half what it cost to make.

I can only hope that the Graham Greene novel on which "The End of the Affair" was based was superior to the movie that premiered on this day in 1999.

Of course, it might not have been. The story was set around the end of World War II, and it had a lot of wartime intrigue, which probably had more of a punch when the book was published in 1951 than it had at the end of the 20th century.

For that matter, I'm guessing the movie version that came out in 1955 (starring Van Johnson and Deborah Kerr) had more relevance to viewers than the version that came out 44 years later. I don't know that for certain, of course; I hadn't been born when either the book was published or when the first movie premiered. For that matter, I've never seen the first movie version.

So I do not know how good (or bad) the original novel was or whether the '55 version was better than the '99 one.

I do know that the stars of the 1999 version, Julianne Moore and Ralph Fiennes, were among the hottest stars of the screen at the time. Their combined credits from the '90s cover many of the decade's most popular movies.

For her part, Moore had appeared in "Short Cuts," "Nine Months," "The Lost World: Jurassic Park" and "Boogie Nights."

Fiennes, too, had been in his share of critically acclaimed and commercially successful movies — "Schindler's List," "Quiz Show," "The English Patient."

"The End of the Affair" may have been exactly what fans of illicit romance movies want. That isn't my genre. I thought Fiennes' performance was a little too "The English Patient" for my taste. Maybe he was still in chick flick mode. I might have liked his character better if it had leaned more to the villainous types he portrayed in "Schindler's List" and "Quiz Show."

So I may have been guilty of expecting more than I got. It isn't as if I wasn't warned. As the title would suggest, it was largely a soap opera. Fiennes' character had an affair with Moore's character, who happened to be the wife of his best friend. Their affair ended; later Fiennes was approached by Moore's husband (Stephen Rea) about learning the identity of her current lover.

---

---

Movie critic Roger Ebert observed that "[i]t is raining much of the time in 'The End of the Affair,' and that is as it should be. The film is about love and adultery in cold, dark, wartime London — when sex was a moment of stolen warmth, an interlude between the air raids and the daily grind of rationing and restrictions."

I never thought about whether the dreary weather was deliberate, or whether it played a conspicuous role in Greene's novel. In hindsight, I suppose it had to have been written into the story because so much of what happens does take place in dismal conditions.

I like both Moore and Fiennes, and I thought they did good jobs with what they had. Moore was even nominated for an Oscar (which she lost to Hilary Swank).

But I couldn't get away from the fact that I felt unmoved when the movie was over. Why was that?

My greatest issue with the movie was the vacuous dialogue, like the example at the top of this post. (It is reminiscent of the taped conversation between Prince Charles and his lover — and later wife — Camilla Parker Bowles in which Charles expressed a desire to be Camilla's tampon.)

Ebert mentioned the movie's dialogue, too. "Not impossible dialogue," Ebert wrote, "but we expect better from a novelist."

That is true.

Since I haven't read Greene's novel, I don't know if the movie was true to it or if it was merely based on it ("based," as you probably know, means the screenwriter[s] liked someone else's basic idea well enough to use it — but not necessarily well enough to tell the same story).

While I appreciated the realistic quality of Fiennes' and Moore's affair being interrupted by a German air raid, I couldn't see how anyone could survive it, and neither could Moore, who knelt in prayer amid the smoke and rubble; nevertheless, the audience saw Fiennes rising up behind her — like the villain from one of those slasher movies who never dies, no matter what is thrown at him.

I have read other Greene novels in my life, and I couldn't imagine the scene in the movie being what he had in mind when he wrote the book. I thought it was an example of Hollywood at its worst.

---

---

Ebert apparently had read the novel, and I got the sense that his conclusion wasn't that much different from my own.

But his objection wasn't the implausibility of elements of the movie, it was its "hangdog" mood.

"It is the story of characters who desperately require more lightness and folly; one can be grim in the confessional and yet be permitted a skip in the step on leaving the church," Ebert wrote. "The characters seem too glum. We see release but miss joy."

It really was a joyless kind of story. Even when I was a child, the word affair always seemed to imply a festive feeling. It took on a more illicit feel when I got older, but it still suggested a thrill that really was missing from "The End of the Affair," except when Fiennes made his implausible rise from the dead.

(It kind of reminded me of a line from "Same Time Next Year." Alan Alda confessed to Ellen Burstyn that he felt guilty about their once–a–year weekend trysts. An exasperated Burstyn replied, "You admit it? You take out ads. You probably have a scarlet A embroidered on your jockey shorts!")

"The End of the Affair" was nominated for two Oscars — Best Actress (Moore) and Best Cinematography — and lost both.

Riddle Me This

---

---

Charles Van Doren (Ralph Fiennes): I've stood on the shoulders of life, and I've never gotten down into the dirt to build, to erect a foundation of my own. I've flown too high on borrowed wings. Everything came too easy.

---

I guess I am something of an amateur historian. I minored in history in college, but it has mostly been a recreational interest for me. When a topic from the past intrigues me, it's like an addiction. I have no choice but to read whatever I can on the topic until all my questions have been answered.

The quiz show scandals of the late 1950s came along well before my birth so I had no memory of them. In fact, I hadn't read much about them before I saw "Quiz Show," which premiered on this date in 1994.

After I saw the movie, I felt compelled to read everything I could about the subject — and I found that Robert Redford had directed a movie that was almost entirely faithful to the actual story.

On the surface, the premise may seem preposterously elementary to folks in the 21st century, but things really were different in the '50s. TV was going through what were probably the inevitable growing pains of a developing medium — but it was also a morality tale that is relevant to any age.

"Any so–called material thing that you want is merely a symbol," Mark Twain wrote. "You want it not for itself, but because it will content your spirit for the moment."

Was that why Charles Van Doren (Ralph Fiennes) went along with the folks at Twenty One? Because he was greedy? Maybe. But I think there was more to it than that. Sure, he received a lot of money along with the answers, but you have to remember that he came from a patrician family of high achievers. His father and uncle both won Pulitzer Prizes. His mother was a noted novelist. The Van Dorens were so intellectual, they played Shakespeare trivia at a family gathering, according to the movie — and few, if any, of them appear to have owned a television set before Charles' success on Twenty One.

I have heard conflicting accounts on Charles' television ownership and exposure to the television programming of the day. On the one hand, I have heard that he didn't own a television before he went on Twenty One, which suggests a certain amount of naivete about TV. On the other, I have heard that he approached another quiz show about being a contestant before he was approached by Twenty One. Considering the level of the general public's ownership of TVs, exposure to TV programming was not nearly as extensive in the 1950s as it is today. It required owning a device that was still priced far beyond the budget limitations of many American households.

Folks who didn't have TVs in those days went someplace public, like a bar, or stood on sidewalks outside department stores and watched the TVs in the display windows when some kind of event was taking place. The Van Dorens don't strike me as being the sort to do that, particularly not for something as mundane as a quiz show. Charles could have learned about the quiz shows by reading articles in journals — he was known to have considerable curiosity about a variety of subjects — but it seems more likely to me that, if he did apply to another game show, he had to have gained much of his knowledge through personal ownership of the emerging technology of television.

Was Charles Van Doren motivated by money? Mr. Bernstein in "Citizen Kane" may have been speaking about Charles long before the quiz show scandals when he said, "It's no trick to make a lot of money if all you want is to make a lot of money."

After conducting my own research into this story, I don't think it was money that he wanted — although he enjoyed what affluence brought him. I became convinced that Van Doren's motivation was not money but to distinguish himself in a way that no one else in his family ever had.

If I am right, he succeeded beyond anyone's wildest dreams.

---

---

In a way, I'm inclined to say that Charles Van Doren recognized the wave of the future. Prior to the quiz show scandals, people were rewarded on television for their knowledge. Every family has that one person who knows a lot of generally useless information, right? Such people thrived in the TV quiz show environment.

After the scandals, quiz shows became game shows, in which you needed a certain amount of knowledge, but you needed a gracious helping of luck, too. That promoted the idea that you could succeed even if you weren't particularly smart. It's the same mindset that compels people to buy lottery tickets or place bets on longshots at the race track. On any given day ...

Van Doren wasn't the first one to get the answers ahead of time. The guy he replaced, Herb Stempel (played by John Turturro), got the answers until the execs at NBC decided his time had run its course — and the person he replaced probably got the answers, too. I honestly don't know how far back it went. Ostensibly, the motivation was to give the viewers the entertainment they desired (at one point, a network exec protested, "We're in show business") — but there was clearly a profit motive. As long as the winner was popular with the viewers, everyone was happy. But when the champ lost his/her appeal and ratings started to go down, it was time to find a new champ. That was what happened to Stempel; he rode the gravy train until it came to a stop, then he blew the whistle when the network didn't give him a show of his own.

I've never really reached a conclusion on the movie's take on Stempel — in the movie, he felt he had been ridiculed by having to take a dive on a question about his favorite movie, and he blamed anti–semitism for the bum's rush he felt he had been given by the execs at NBC.

"Don't do this to me," he pleaded with Dan Enright (David Paymer), "it's humiliating."

"For seventy grand, Herb, you can afford to be humiliated," Enright replied.

Van Doren was popular, and ratings soared. No one really wanted to hear Stempel's story — until investigator Richard Goodwin (Rob Morrow) started poking around.

And it kind of served as the starting point for a general erosion of standards, the fruits of which we see around us today.

Image Management: Van Doren was really an early practitioner of public spin. More than half a century after the quiz show scandals, he is remembered as the guy who cheated — but, mostly, he is remembered as the guy who was on the TV show that cheated.

Blaming Others: Van Doren received applause at the House committee hearings in which he testified that he had "flown too high on borrowed wings." Things had come to him too easily, he said.

The audience saved its most enthusiastic applause, though, for the one member of the committee who did not fawn over Van Doren and said he saw no reason to commend Van Doren for telling the truth.

I doubt that such a scene would be duplicated today.

"Quiz Show" received four Oscar nominations — including Best Picture, Best Director and Best Supporting Actor (Paul Scofield) — but won none.

An Important Movie

---

---

"Whoever destroys a soul, it is considered as if he destroyed an entire world. And whoever saves a life, it is considered as if he saved an entire world."

Talmud

---

In reality, there probably was no one who would have seemed less likely to be a hero before World War II than Oskar Schindler.

He was a German businessman and Nazi Party member, greedy, arrogant, a womanizer who lived an opulent life in Poland away from his wife in Germany. At first, he hired Jews to work in his factory because, with their wages set by the Nazis, they cost him less than Poles. That evolved, with the assistance of his accountant (Ben Kingsley), into Schindler's unrestricted use of his factory to protect an estimated 1,100 Jews from deportation and probable death.

It took nearly half a century for Schindler's story to be brought to the big screen. Appropriately, it was Steven Spielberg, perhaps the most popular filmmaker of his time, who told the story to a mostly ignorant world. Many people will tell you it is the greatest movie ever made. The American Film Institute didn't go quite that far. I'm not sure if I would go that far, but I would certainly rank it in the Top 10. It ranked "Schindler's List" eighth on its Top 100 list.

Schindler (played by Liam Neeson in the movie) was AFI's 13th–greatest movie hero — and Amon Goeth (played by Ralph Fiennes) was AFI's 14th–most villainous villain (the highest–ranking nonfiction villain on that list).

And, in the 20 years since its initial theatrical release on this day in 1993, "Schindler's List" has been used countless times as a classroom learning tool.

---

---

When you look back at Spielberg's career, you can see certain patterns in his work, as you can with just about any great director, I suppose.

In "Schindler's List," you can see a technique to which Spielberg would return a few years later when he made "Saving Private Ryan" — the vivid re–creation of a harrowing wartime event. In "Ryan," it was the re–creation of D–Day. In "Schindler," it was the liquidation of the Kraków ghetto.

Both scenes were lengthy — and painful to watch but necessary for the viewer to get a taste of what the participants must have experienced. Spielberg himself remarked that he felt more like a reporter than a filmmaker when he made "Schindler's List," as if he had been witnessing the actual events, not re–creating them for a movie.

By the time "Ryan" hit the theaters, you could see how much Spielberg's technique had matured. It was still in its infancy when he made "Schindler's List," but, even so, it packed a punch.

I don't think it is an exaggeration to say "Schindler's List" may well be the most important movie made in my lifetime. I guess it has almost become a cliche for someone to say that a movie project in which he or she was involved was important, but it really does fit "Schindler's List."

The interaction between Schindler and his accountant was one of the things I found especially remarkable.

Under far less extreme circumstances, it was the kind of partnership that usually succeeds in the business world. Schindler was the big–picture guy; Itzhak Stern was the nuts–and–bolts guy, the details guy. Both brought skills to the enterprise that were essential to its success.

But, in the intense atmosphere of the Holocaust, success and failure were entirely different.

---

---

I already admired Ben Kingsley's work. A decade earlier, he starred in a movie that really was an important movie, "Gandhi."

Until "Schindler's List," though, I didn't have the same kind of admiration for Liam Neeson. He had been in several movies by this time — I even saw him in one or two — and I was favorably impressed, but I didn't think of him as an important actor until I saw "Schindler's List."

After I saw his scene late in the movie where he spoke of how many more lives he could have saved if he had sold his watch or his car, he became an important actor in my eyes.

I remember the first time I watched "Schindler's List" on TV. It was shown with no commercial interruptions — on NBC, I think, and sponsored by the Ford Motor Company. As I recall, Spielberg spoke at the start of the movie and at the end. In one of those segments, he said that he had been asked if he would permit his children to watch "Schindler's List." He said he wanted all of his children to watch it when they were ready.

That was the kind of thing, Spielberg admitted, that each parent had to decide because children mature at different rates, but he said that, as a general rule of thumb, he wouldn't let young children watch it. But a child in junior high or high school probably could understand the material and ask thoughtful questions after the movie was over. Young children might be traumatized.

I thought that was a reasonable — as well as responsible — thing for him to say.

Consequently, I was astonished the next day when a lawmaker from Oklahoma complained about the nudity in "Schindler's List," and accused Spielberg, NBC and Ford of acting irresponsibly. I wondered if the lawmaker even bothered to watch the telecast. If he had, I thought, he might have realized that the Nazis used nudity as a weapon against the Jews, not as a means of their own arousal. It was an example of the Nazis' cruelty.

Truly, some people can't see the forest for the trees.

There was another element of "Schindler's List" that is worth discussing. I speak of the little girl in the red coat. In real life, she must have stood out in the crowd just as she did in the movie — made almost entirely in black and white — if the little girl ever really existed.

My understanding is that the girl in the red coat was fictional, that she was symbolic of how high–ranking officials in democratic countries like the United States did nothing to prevent the Holocaust even though they were aware of it like "a little girl wearing a red coat, walking down the street."

In fact, though, there was a little girl in a red coat in the Kraków ghetto, and for a time it was thought that the girl in "Schindler's List" either was inspired by her or was a minor dramatization of her story. Her name was Roma Ligocka, and she was remembered by many who were there for that red coat she wore.

---

---

In the movie, the girl in the red coat apparently died. I say "apparently" because the camera does not show her actual death, but it does show her limp body, identifiable only by that coat. It was a powerful moment in the movie, and it marked the beginning of Schindler's personal transformation.

But Ligocka did not die in the Holocaust. She survived and lives today in Munich. She is Roman Polanski's cousin.