”Live fast, die young, and make a good-looking corpse”-that`s the ticket that took John Derek to stardom 42 years ago, playing the arrogant punk-killer of ”Knock on Any Door,” and it still works.
It worked for Patrick Swayze, the ghost of ”Ghost,” and, that being 1990`s top grosser, it`s not surprising to find it working on all cylinders again-a die-hard premise winking once more at the susceptible public.
Contrary to popular assumption, death as a box-office commodity doesn`t push the customers away-it pulls them in, and the pull is even stronger when death occurs before its time, to young people cheated of a full life.
The practice is so established that 20th Century Fox is being quite up-front in calling its new entry in the malady-movie sweepstakes ”Dying Young,” now playing in Chicago.
But just try to determine the cause of death, why don`t you? This little detail is discreetly ducked in all the press data put out on the picture-for the record, it`s leukemia-and it`s beside the point, anyway.
The point is that this is a love story; when someone goes generically to the grave, that person is said to be suffering ”the Ali MacGraws” (anything that gets him there), named for the star of ”Love Story.”
The sudsy consideration that upstages death here is the ennobling transformation of Julia Roberts, a free soul who finds purpose in life when she signs on to care for a rich, terminally ill Campbell Scott. Thus, the die is cast for a four-hankie affair.
Director Joel Schumacher has outfitted his film with performers who`ve brushed recently with death in movies: Colleen Dewhurst is represented as a dying drunk trapped in a dead-end Canadian town in ”Termini Station”;
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Vincent D`Onofrio was the obese recruit driven to suicide by boot camp abuse in ”Full Metal Jacket”; Roberts made the Oscar running as the diabetic Steel Magnolia who risked the dangers of motherhood; Scott emerged a survivor in last year`s AIDS cavalcade, ”Longtime Companion.”
AIDS will bring more movies about people dying young, but to date, only the independently made ”Longtime Companion” has arrived at theaters.
AIDS has penetrated TV movies-notably, ”The Ryan White Story” with Lukas Haas, and ”Our Sons” with Ann-Margret and Julie Andrews as mothers of an AIDS patient and his lover-but feature films have been slow to take up the torch.
The only one on the immediate horizon is the movie version of ”Prelude to a Kiss” by the author and director of ”Longtime Companion,” Craig Lucas and Norman Rene. Some have read into the play a parable of AIDS, elaborately disguised with a body-switch situation.
Infinitely more direct is ”Absolutely Positive,” which had its television debut on PBS` ”P.O.V.” Filmed by Peter Adair, of ”Word Is Out” fame, the movie explores the emotions of 11 HIV-positives, who articulate their anguish with amazing grace and eloquence.
The tragic topicality of AIDS gives grim reality to the dying-young phenomenon that has been a staple of sentimental cinema for years. It was death, after all-denying Heathcliff his Cathy-that gave ”Wuthering Heights” its stature as a film.
”Dark Victory” is the archetypal weeper-and as good as it gets. Tallulah Bankhead did wonders with it on stage in 1934, and a year later producer David O. Selznick was imploring Greta Garbo to film it (instead of
”Anna Karenina”) before RKO Radio snapped it up for Katharine Hepburn. As it turned out, Warners landed it for its queen of the lot, Bette Davis, who made something indelible and incandescent out of the spoiled, doomed heiress, Judith Traherne.
And Garbo was to rise from the wheels of a train, where Anna Karenina died young, to win the Best Actress nod from the New York Film Critics-an honor she was to equal two years later with an even greater performance: that of the consumptive lady of the camillias, Marguerite Gautier, in ”Camille.” The doomed heroine those particular critics honored the next year likewise lived and loved in the shadow of the white death, tuberculosis: the gallant spirit Margaret Sullavan advanced so memorably in ”Three Comrades.” With her pleading eyes and melting voice, Sullavan was sob-sister supreme on screen-starting out terminally ill (in 1933`s ”Only Yesterday”) and ending up that way as well (in 1950`s ”No Sad Songs for Me”), using both occasions to tidy up the homes she`d be leaving behind. There`s something about a fatal illness that, in films, brings out in heroines their Good Housekeeping.
The sticky ”Sentimental Journey,” for instance, had Maureen O`Hara adopting a girl so hubby John Payne wouldn`t get lonely after she`s gone.
”Terms of Endearment” softened up its audience with comedy before lowering the boom: diagnosing cancer for Debra Winger. As her distraught mother, Shirley MacLaine got off a classic scene, hysterically circling the nurses` station, doing a harrowing aria as she pleaded for painkillers for her daughter.
Malpractice has caused its share of before-their-time deaths in movies.
”Such Good Friends,” which Elaine May scripted under a pseudonym, had a children`s book author (Laurence Luckinbill) entering a hospital for the removal of a benign mole and, two days later, dying from small mistakes.
Despite reassuring words from doctors, Helen Hayes/Jennifer Jones died in childbirth in the two versions of ”A Farewell to Arms,” an ending Hemingway supposedly rewrote 75 times.
Patients fell like flies in the long-running ”Dr. Kildare” series, but the principals weren`t personally touched by death until ”Dr. Kildare`s Wedding Day.”
It seems that MGM had bigger plans for series nurse Laraine Day, so they extricated her subtly from her clinical duties by driving a 10-ton truck over her and allowing her a short hospital scene for her goodbyes.
A hit-and-run settled Shelley Winters` adulterous hash in ”The Great Gatsby”-but Alan Ladd paid for Betty Field being in the driver`s seat, getting himself shot dead in his swimming pool by Winters` deranged spouse, Howard da Silva. The remake`s casualties: Karen Black and Robert Redford.
In ”Sweet November,” Sandy Dennis takes a-man-a-month for her unspecified, incurable illness, since ”people must be remembered; otherwise, they were never here at all.”
Poor little rich Dorothy McGuire finds out in ”Invitation” (1952) that her daddy (Louis Calhern) bought her a hubby (Van Johnson) because she had only a year to live, but as it turns out, the hubby learns to love her and an operation might just cure what ails her.
The most unnecessary happy ending of all is the one forced on ”Our Town” when the play became picture fare. Despite a third act spent in a cemetery, Martha Scott is spared in the movie, lingering in a cinematic purgatory while the celestial jury is out before finally rallying. Instead of dying in childbirth, she`s last seen beaming with her newborn at the fadeout, living to die another day.