Tuesday, 14 January 2025

Studs Lonigan (1960)

Director: Irving Lerner
Writer: Philip Yordan, based on the novels by James T. Farrell
Stars: Frank Gorshin, Venetia Stevenson, Carolyn Craig, Jack Nicholson, Robert Casper, Dick Foran, Katherine Squire and Christopher Knight

Index: The First Thirty.

Nowadays, the trend seems to be to adapt a single book into a trilogy. Hello, The Hobbit! In 1960, Studs Lonigan took the opposite approach by adapting three novels by James T. Farrell into a single hour and a half movie. Needless to say, it skips forward in time a lot and misses a heck of a lot out. Does it matter? Maybe not.

The point is that William Lonigan is a young man living in the Roman Catholic south side of Chicago in the twenties and he proves unable to escape any part of that, however much he tries to (or doesn’t). Farrell knew the time and place (this trilogy was published from 1932 to 1935) and suggests that the “spiritual poverty” carved into its every aspect was inescapable.

If it wasn’t immediately apparent that this was a naturalistic drama, very American in the setting but very European in the telling, Studs Lonigan is played by Christopher Knight, who landed an “introducing” credit. He’s certainly game enough and he gives it a fair shot, but he does reach Reefer Madness levels of histrionics, only made one more film and is best known today for a near marriage to philanthropist John D. Rockefeller’s granddaughter Neva.

The professional actors play both his gang and his family. Jack Nicholson’s among that at this point, I guess, and he’s there playing pool as the film begins with the rest of the guys like Frank Gorshin, soon to play the Riddler. These two, the best known actors in the film today, play Weary Reilly and Kenny Killarney. These names come and go and it’s hard to keep up.

They’re all waiting for Studs, who leads the gang even though he clearly only kinda sorta wants to. It’s New Years Eve, the very last day of 1919, and he’s not with them. He’s dancing with Lucy, who’s a nice girl, not one of them. He gets her home by midnight, then parties it up with the rest of them, a party that doesn’t begin until he gets there, after which he has a girl on each arm.

Clearly he’s meant to represent the south side and Lucy his way out. Whatever happens, and plenty does, he never gives up on her as a way out, even when it’s clear that she’ll never be that for him. He can phrase his life as being entirely his to control—“It’s 1920 now,” he narrates. “Where you going, Studs? What you gonna do?”—but it never is.

For 1960, this is surprisingly realistic, with a lack of easy anything. There are questions but no answers. Many of the characters we believe are one note, good or bad, grow with time and we have to reclassify them. Options taken are often unusual ones.

For instance, his dad is a pain in the ass nag who clearly gets violent on occasion. Bad guy, we label. But, as Studs grows, he starts to see that his dad isn’t as bad as he seemed and he’s really one of the good guys, just a little rough around the edges.

For another instance, there’s Miss Miller, a former schoolteacher that he can’t ever leave alone. While their relationship is toned down because it’s 1960, it’s clearly a sexual one that isn’t only about sex. Eventually, Studs starts to date Miss Miller’s niece, which is a little weird but the dynamic changes here. She’s never the simple character she could have been and she gets deeper as the film goes on.

There are plenty of characters like that, the gang included, and the script has no interest in holding back. Paulie’s the one with serious potential there, but he’s killed off right as he’s about to achieve it. One moment, the sky’s the limit. Then we cut to his wake. Bad alcohol, it seems. The twenties was Prohibition, after all, and the gang doesn’t do much more than play pool, watch the girls go by and drink. “I got an idea,” is a constant refrain. “Let’s get a drink.”

Weary is ripped out of the story just as fast. There’s some sort of election celebration and drinks are on the house. Weary grabs one girl as she escapes a room upstairs and keeps the one he had. In the morning, the cops arrive to arrest him for rape. He gets ten years in Joliet, which just leaves Kenny and Studs. If there’s a constant here, it’s change.

As you might imagine, that means that Jack Nicholson doesn’t get a huge amount to do in this film, but it’s more than he got in Too Soon to Love or The Little Shop of Horrors. He’s there at the very beginning of the film and he’s there a lot until, well, he isn’t any more, even if he’s a supporting character at every point. This film is called Studs Lonigan for a reason, not Weary Reilly or Kenny Killarney.

Nicholson does a good job here, with plenty more hints towards much later roles, and the cast is full of pristine character actors, enough so that it’s hard to pick out favourites. He’s up there but so’s Helen Westcott as Miss Miller, Madame Spivy as a speakeasy bartender (she’d later run her own nightclub in the forties) and Katherine Squire as Studs’s mother. She’s very much a one note character but Squire endows her with such ache that it’s palpable.

Frankly, my favourites are crew rather than cast. It was interesting to hear an early score by Jerry Goldsmith, who was escaping from TV back then. However, all the most jawdropping moments in the film belong to Haskell Wexler, the cinematographer, who would go on to win a couple of Academy Awards, even if he should have won more in a just world.

This was early in his career as well, though he had started out strong in 1958 with Stakeout on Dope Street. Oddly, the best scenes here are the ones where he doesn’t move the camera, keeping it unflinchingly on one character for a long scene until the emotion that pours out of them is almost unbearable.

He does that with Eileen, Paulie’s wife, at his wake. She opens her heart and pours out what really killed him in a long monologue. It was a busy room with plenty of conversation, but we forget it’s there, because all we can see is her, and gradually realise that the ambient sound is gone too, leaving just her words. It’s bleak.

An earlier scene that’s even better still has the gang visit a speakeasy for a drink, ordering “tea”. They see a blonde on her own with her head in her hands and open conversation, the camera never leaving her as they bombard her with dialogue. Her defences are down and she struggles to compose herself. She’s given some sparing dialogue herself but mostly sits there acting as they talk and it’s rivetting.

So, it’s another good supporting slot for Jack and a number of others, but a fascinating one for Wexler and the American New Wave.

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