Last week, in honor of Heath Ledger’s last completed performance (as the Joker in The Dark Knight), we examined the final performances and films of actors and directors that served as fitting capstones to their careers. This week, in a Top Ten list suggested by YOU (in the general sense, and "Other Matt" specifically), we present ten ignominious exits: the cinematic equivalent of dying on the toilet, suffered by artists who really deserved better.
Charles Chaplin's A COUNTESS FROM HONG KONG (1967)
Chaplin's previous film, A King in New York, had been made ten years earlier and was the last film in which he starred; it was a stillborn disaster, and would have qualified as a notably sad ending to his career in its own right if he hadn't managed to follow it up with this thing. But Countess, which he also wrote and produced, as well as having written the music and contributed a cameo appearance, is especially embarrassing for its timeless, packed-in-mothballs quality. It was, after all, made the same year as Bonnie & Clyde and The Graduate, yet you wouldn't guess from watching it that anything had happened in either filmmaking or the world at large since about 1949. The film's leading man is Marlon Brando, and you couldn't guess from his work here that he'd ever known livelier days, either. Brando was used to directors who welcomed his attempts to fuse elements of his personality with his characters, but Chaplin was an old-fashioned sort who had no truck with that kind of Method foolishness; anything the actors tried to bring in interfered with the clickety-clack of the script that he'd been running inside his head for years. Some people regard some of Brando's later performances as being synonymous with the term "self-indulgent": he stands accused of having undercut his own movies and made his colleagues' lives difficult by abandoning coherence and logic and doing whatever he felt like doing in the name of letting his freak flag fly. But even in something like The Island of Dr. Moreau, he's at least inventive and amusing, stuck in a hopeless project but trying to entertain the audience while he entertains himself. Chaplin's movie gives you the chance to see what Brando looked like when he'd abandoned all hope: chained to a stupid script (and the character name "Ogden Mears"), he slogs through his blocking and reels off his dialogue syllable by syllable, plainly just wanting it all to be over. It's a sign of how thoroughly Chaplin had lost touch with his creative instincts that, once he'd broken the actor of his early attempts to bring some of his own collaborative instincts and energy to the role, he claimed to find Brando's work delightful. A Countess from Hong Kong went over like a fart at a funeral with critics and audiences, but damned if Petula Clark didn't have a number one hit with a reworked version of the movie's theme song. The Beatles, having displaced Charlie as England's most popular international import, must have had a rueful chuckle over that.
Stanley Kubrick's EYES WIDE SHUT (1999)
Stanley Kubrick spent more than the last two years of his life working on this, his only film after 1987's Full Metal Jacket. He didn't just work at his accustomed glacial pace; he shot the film once, then recast two important supporting roles with different actors (with Sydney Pollack and Marie Richardson stepping in for, respectively, Harvey Keitel and Jennifer Jason Leigh) and shot much of it again. One fringe benefit of the production was that it unexpectedly took its star, Tom Cruise, out of circulation for a couple of movie seasons. Kubrick died a few days after a screening of what may or may not have been his ideal final version of the film for Cruise, his co-star and then-wife Nicole Kidman, and Warner Brothers executives. By then, the media, for lack of other Cruise-related news in the two and a half years since his Oscar-nominated turn in Jerry Maguire, had been flogging the picture so hard that they had at least as much invested in its success as the studio. The news of Kubrick's death ratcheted up the odds considerably: the thought that he had died while putting the finishing touches on something that might be less than his masterpiece was generally considered too morbid a thought to bear. Eyes Wide Shut was released in the summer of 1999 amid a tsunami of hype, but since the movie itself was hard to stay awake through, the hype itself had a distinctive, abstract quality, given that it was easier to make the movie sound interesting if you sort of reviewed another, imaginary version of the actual picture. The most popular gambit was to devote great seas of ink to discussing whether the sex scenes between Tom and Nicole were the sexiest ever filmed or just the sexiest ever performed by an actual husband and wife; the topic was covered to such a degree that it inspired a backlash, which took the form not of people arguing that the sex scenes between Tom and Nicole weren't really all that sexy but instead, of people arguing that it actually made them uncomfortable to see two married actors going at it on screen, since for all the viewer knew, that might be what they really look like when they're going at it at home, thus raising all kinds of "T.M.I."-related issues. In order to understand just how desperate the hype merchants were to avoid discussing the actual movie, it helps to know that in all of Eyes Wide Shut's two hours and forty minutes, there is not a single sex scene between Tom and Nicole, unless you count a couple of minutes of pre-coital necking which takes place, appropriately enough given the personalities involved, while Tom and Nicole are staring at themselves in a mirror. Bolstered by this kind of Barnum-esque coverage, Eyes Wide Shut did respectable business until word of mouth overcame it and theater owners needed the space for extra screenings of The Blair Witch Project. The question of what Kubrick himself thought of his final film remains controversial, and when Full Metal Jacket star R. Lee Ermey dared to tell an interviewer that his old buddy Stan had told him shortly before his death that he had helmed "a piece of shit", many were quick to come down on the drill sergeant as if he had convened a meeting of all the children of the world to inform them that there is no Santa Claus.
Bette Davis in WICKED STEPMOTHER (1989)
No Hollywood star of the classic era worked harder than Bette Davis for good roles and sustained career longevity. In the 1930s, she breached her contract with Warner Bros. to take roles in English films and then unsuccessfully sued her studio, claiming that they were killing her career by forcing her to appear in "mediocre" films. When her career cooled as she entered middle age, she prankishly took out a classified newspaper ad reminding the industry of her availability. And as she grew elderly, she embraced a new movie image as a hag horror queen and became a not-infrequent guest star on series TV. Whether you admire this side of Davis as an undying devotion to the practice of her craft or see it as the egomania of a Madonna prototype whose life only seemed to be real so long as millions of people were paying attention to her -- and it was probably a little from column A and a little from column B -- it was almost fated to ultimately bite her in the ass, and the last big bite was Wicked Stepmother, a godforsaken "supernatural comedy" written and directed by Larry Cohen. Davis, who was 80 at the time of shooting, plays a witch who marries Lionel Stander and proceeds to turn his family topsy-turvy. Or at least that was the idea: Davis rankled the set after a week of shooting, putting out a statement saying that the script that she had agreed to perform was so bad it was unplayable and that Cohen was deliberately shooting her to look grotesque. For his part, Cohen announced to the press that his star had been too sick to work but was afraid that if her condition became common knowledge, no one would ever hire her again. A look at the movie provides solid evidence for both claims. Davis, frail and with her head topped by a gruesome-looking red wig, does look pretty bad, but even the healthy members of the cast seem on the verge of pitching over from the effects of having to deliver Cohen's dialogue. Whatever really happened, it's kind of amazing that the woman who once went toe-to-toe with Jack Warner might have thought that Larry Cohen would chivalrously watch her back after she'd walked out on him. (Instead of burning the precious footage he had of his famous star, Cohen rewrote the script to explain that Davis's character was now inhabiting the body of a cat and assigned her lines and business to a new character, her "daughter", played by Barbara Carrera.) Davis died a few months after Cohen's reupholstered version of the movie briefly surfaced, like pond scum, in theaters. The finished version includes a nasty in-joke involving Davis' old nemesis, Joan Crawford (whose own final film was the 1970 British scare picture Trog, in which Mommie Dearest co-starred with a dude in a frozen-faced monkey suit). That was pretty embarrassing, but given that Crawford had enough sense and self-restraint to retire after that and spend the last seven years of her life in virtual seclusion, we'd have to judge that Crawford wins that round on points.
Click here for Part Two and Part Three
Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Phil Nugent