Wild Something

“I have a head for business and a bod for sin. Is there anything wrong with that?”

- Melanie Griffith as Tess McGill in “Working Girl”

I. Theories of Relativity

There’s nothing new about actors having kids who become actors. In light of the motion picture industry’s 113 years of existence, however, three generations of screen stars are few and far between. The Fondas come immediately to mind: patriarch Henry Fonda, daughter Jane Fonda, son Peter Fonda, and granddaughter Bridget Fonda. The venerable John Carradine – who claimed to have appeared in 450 films (only 225 are documented) – was the father of David, Keith, and Robert Carradine, and Keith Carradine is the father of Martha Plimpton.

Historic acting dynasties have roots in the theater. Across the Atlantic, George “Roy” Redgrave, born in 1873, was a British stage and silent film actor whose son, the prestigious actor Michael Redgrave, was the father of Vanessa, Corin, and Lynn Redgrave, while Vanessa was the mother of actresses Joely Richardson and the late Natasha Richardson.

George Redgrave, Michael Redgrave, Vanessa Redgrave, Natasha Richardson

Herbert Blythe, born in 1849, was a onetime middleweight boxing champion in England whose father had expected him to become a barrister before he fell in with a group of actors. To spare his family the embarrassment of having a son in such an immoral vocation, he adopted the stage name Maurice Barrymore, after an early 19^th century actor named William Barrymore. He sailed to America in 1874 and made his Broadway debut the following year.

Maurice Barrymore, John Barrymore, John Drew Barrymore, Drew Barrymore 

Maurice’s prodigious progeny – Lionel Barrymore (best known as the pernicious banker Mr. Potter in “It’s a Wonderful Life”), Ethel Barrymore (more familiar on stage than on screen), and John Barrymore (nicknamed “The Great Profile”) – were famously parodied in a popular 1927 play by George S. Kaufman and Edna Ferber titled “The Royal Family.” In 1932, the Barrymore siblings starred in their only film together, “Rasputin and the Empress,” featuring Lionel Barrymore as the charismatic monk Rasputin, Ethel Barrymore as Czarina Alexandra, and John Barrymore as one of Rasputin’s assassins.

 

Lionel Barrymore, Ethel Barrymore, John Barrymore in "Rasputin and the Empress"

John Barrymore’s son, John Drew Barrymore (born John Blyth Barrymore and also known as John Barrymore Jr.), appeared in several low-budget movies, TV series, and Italian sword-and-sandal epics. Off-screen, he hung out with second-generation Hollywood rebels Peter Fonda and David Carradine. His daughter, Drew Barrymore, was born in 1975. Disinterested in an acting career, he became increasingly reclusive, ending up as a derelict. A year before his death in 2004 at the age of 72, Drew Barrymore moved him near her residence and paid his medical bills.

II. Maternity Rewards

What particularly intrigues us in the Moviehouse is the unique legacy shared by mothers and daughters of the screen. There is an extraordinary bond between mothers and daughters, often rebellious, rivalrous, and occasionally downright contentious – relationships sometimes described as “too close for comfort” – and yet simultaneously so profound that we sons of mothers can only envy.

Maureen O’Sullivan, enduringly adored as the screen’s quintessential Jane to Johnny Weissmuller’s Tarzan in six movies from 1932 to 1942, was the mother of actress Mia Farrow, whose breakthrough role as the demon-seeded bride in 1968’s “Rosemary’s Baby” was followed by her role as the quixotic beauty Daisy in 1974’s “The Great Gatsby” and appearances in a dozen films directed by Woody Allen.

Johnny Weissmuller, Maureen O'Sullivan in "Tarzan and His Mate" (1934)

Early in her career, Liza Minnelli did what mom Judy Garland never accomplished when she won an Academy Award for Best Actress, in 1972’s “Cabaret,” although Garland was nominated twice and received an honorary “Juvenile” Oscar in 1940 for her performances in “The Wizard of Oz” and “Babes in Arms.”

Judy Garland critically eyes daughter Liza Minnelli's choice of lipstick.

Musicals are not a favorite in the moviehouse, fundamentally because we’re never able to suspend disbelief when characters abruptly burst into a well-choreographed song about breakfast, but Debbie Reynolds forever endeared herself to us as the perky struggling starlet in the best Hollywood musical ever made, 1952’s “Singin’ in the Rain.”

Donald O'Connor, Debbie Reynolds, Gene Kelly start their day
with a rousing chorus of "Good Morning" from "Singin' in the Rain."

Debbie Reynolds’ daughter (with husband, singer Eddie Fisher), Carrie Fisher (below) – a mere two years before her landmark role as Princess Leia in the original “Star Wars” picture – made her auspicious big-screen debut by asking Warren Beatty, “You wanna f***?” in 1975’s “Shampoo.”

Carrie Fisher’s half-sisters, Joely Fisher (who portrayed Brad Garrett’s wife on the Fox sitcom “ ‘Til Death”) and Tricia Leigh Fisher (whose film credits include “C.H.U.D. II: Bud the Chud”), are the daughters of Eddie Fisher and 1960s singer-sex kitten Connie Stevens.

(Left) Mom Connie Stevens; (right) daughter Joely Fisher

Jamie Lee Curtis, who made an unforgettable movie debut as the terrorized babysitter in 1978’s “Halloween,” was born in the fall of 1958…and we in the moviehouse are pretty sure she’s the reason expectant mom Janet Leigh looked so buxom earlier that year in “The Vikings,” costarring pop-to-be Tony Curtis. Leigh herself became one of the screen’s premiere scream queens thanks to her shower scene in Alfred Hitchcock’s “Psycho” (1960). Daughter Jamie, after “Halloween,” appeared in one popular movie after another, including “The Fog,” “Trading Places,” and “A Fish Called Wanda.”

Kirk Douglas and expectant mother Janet Leigh in "The Vikings" (1958);
not pictured: Jamie Lee Curtis

Director David Lynch’s bizarre 1986 masterwork “Blue Velvet” featured two daughters of well-known actresses. Isabella Rossellini’s mother was three-time Oscar-winning, two-time Emmy Award-winning and Tony Award-winning actress Ingrid Bergman (of “Gaslight” and “Anastasia” renown), while costar Laura Dern’s mother, Diane Ladd, is best known for her role as Flo, the sassy waitress at Mel’s Diner in director Martin Scorsese’s “Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore” (1974). (Laura Dern’s father is veteran actor Bruce Dern, a Golden Globe Award nominee for his starring role in “Nebraska.”)

(Left) Ingrid Bergman; (right) daughter Issabella Rossellini

In films since 1991, Gwyneth Paltrow, whose breakout role in 1998’s “Shakespeare in Love” garnered her the Academy Award for Best Actress, is the daughter of Blythe Danner, a moviehouse favorite for her performances in 1975’s “Hearts of the West” and 1976’s “Futureworld.” Danner is familiar to moviegoers these days for her role as Robert De Niro’s wife in the screen comedies “”Meet the Parents,” “Meet the Fockers,” “Little Fockers,” and “Mother Fockers” (oops! made up that last one!)

Blythe Danner poses with daughter Gwyneth Paltrow.

Mariska Hargitay, whose 14-year gig as Detective Benson on TV’s :Law & Order: Special Victims Unit” earned her an Emmy Award and a Golden Globe Award, is the daughter of Jayne Mansfield, the legendary platinum-blonde bombshell of the 1950s.

(Left) Jayne Mansfield; (right) Mariska Hargitay

Kate Hudson, whose performance as groupie Penny Lane in 2000’s “Almost Famous” was nominated for an Academy Award, comes from Oscar-winning lineage, namely “Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In’s” in-house ditsy blonde and bikini-clad go-go dancer Goldie Hawn, whose role in 1969’s “Cactus Flower” brought home a Best Supporting Actress statuette.

"Saturday Night Live" host Kate Hudson spoofs
 mom Goldie Hawn's iconic "Laugh-In" image.

III. Unchained Melanie

What really grabs our attention in the Moviehouse on this outing is three generations of actresses: Tippi Hedren, Melanie Griffith, and Dakota Johnson. It was recently announced that Dakota Johnson, the 23-year-old daughter of Melanie Griffith and Don Johnson (best known for his starring roles in the TV series “Miami Vice” and “Nash Bridges”), landed the choice role of Anastasia Steele in the upcoming screen version of the best-selling novel Fifty Shades of Grey.

Tippi Hedren, Melanie Griffith, Dakota Johnson

When Dakota Johnson (below) was twelve, she was featured in a Teen Vogue magazine pictorial alongside other offspring of celebrities, which sparked her interest in modeling, not coincidental considering that her grandmother, Tippi Hedren, was a successful fashion model when director Alfred Hitchcock cast her in 1963’s “The Birds” as the latest of the so-called icy “Hitchcock blondes,” preceded by Grace Kelly (“It Takes a Thief”). Kim Novak (“Vertigo”), Eva Marie Saint (“North by Northwest”), and Janet Leigh (“Psycho”).

Tippi Hedren was born Nathalie Kay Hedren in New Ulm, Minnesota, of Swedish, German, and Norwegian heritage. It was her father, who ran a small general store in Lafayette, Minnesota, who nicknamed her “Tippi.”

Hedren’s daughter Melanie Griffith’s childhood recollection of Hitchcock is that “he didn’t like kids…He never wanted me on the set, and I felt like he took Mom away from me…When I was six years old, he sent me a box shaped like a coffin, and inside was a miniature of my mother, exactly the way she looked in ‘The Birds.’ He was sick.”

Tippi Hedren in Hitchcock's "The Birds" (1963)

Following “The Birds,” Hitchcock cast Hedren as a mentally disturbed thief in the 1964 psychological thriller “Marnie,” costarring Sean Connery (in between 007 assignments). It was during the production of “Marnie” that director and star had a falling out, purportedly stemming from Hedren’s spurning Hitchcock’s sexual overtures and resulting in Alfred using a go-between to direct his starlet.  (Melanie Griffith summed it up: “He was obsessed with her.”) Hitchcock held a vise-grip on Hedren’s exclusive contract for two more years, offering her no further roles while preventing her from making films for anyone else.

In 1972, Hedren founded and served as president of the Roar Foundation and Shambala Preserve, an 80-acre wildlife habitat 40 miles northeast of Los Angeles, established as a sanctuary for a variety of exotic animals that suffered from mistreatment and neglect. Her concern for wildlife preservation led to her role, alongside daughter Melanie Griffith, in the 1981 film “Roar,” the only movie written and directed by costar Noel Marshall, Hedren’s husband at the time. From script to release, “Roar” took eleven years to make, at a total cost of $17 million (raking in a mere $2 million at the box office).

During production, Noel Marshall, Tippi Hedren, and Melanie Griffith were all injured or mauled by lions. Working on his first Hollywood film, cinematographer Jan De Bont (future director of “Speed” and “Twister”) was literally scalped by a big cat. Griffith’s injuries alone required fifty facial stitches and cosmetic surgery. Other setbacks during the troubled shooting included a flood, a fire, foreclosure, and a feline virus.

(Note: Melanie Griffith is not being mauled in this photo.)

Noel Marshall was an executive producer on the 1973 film “The Harrad Experiment,” a titillating exploitation of the sexual revolution, starring Tippi Hedren and James Whitmore as a progressive-minded couple who run a hip college where students are encouraged to experiment and explore their sexuality. England’s Time Out magazine dubbed the film “Gidget Meets Masters and Johnson,” calling it “one of the most amusing Hollywood romps since ‘Beyond the Valley of the Dolls.’” The screenplay was co-written by Ted Cassidy, a physically imposing actor best known for his role as Lurch, the butler on TV’s “The Addams Family” and as Harvey Logan (aka Kid Curry), the ill-fated participant in the knife duel with Paul Newman in “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.”

...Yes, "The Harrad Experiment" includes this shot of a hippie hugging a tree.

Directed by Ted Post, who was more at home telling Clint Eastwood how to shoot a six-gun (in “Hang ‘Em High” and “Magnum Force,” not to mention at least two dozen episodes of television’s “Rawhide”) than exploring free love, “The Harrad Experiment” featured a sexually curious student body which included “Eight Is Enough’s” Joanie Bradford, Laurie Walters, Bruno Kirby (Billy Crystal’s “When Harry Met Sally” and “City Slickers” pal), and Don Johnson (who also provides the song “It’s Not Over” for the movie’s soundtrack).

Behind-the-scenes: Don Johnson, Tippi Hedren, Melanie Griffith

Onscreen, the 22-year-old Johnson put the moves on cougar Tippi Hedren, while offscreen he got involved with Hedren’s 14-year-old daughter, Melanie Griffith, who was an uncredited extra in “The Harrad Experiment.” The youngsters wed in 1976. The marriage lasted six months.

From 1982 to 1987, Melanie Griffith was married to Steven Bauer, a Cuban-born actor best known for his flashy role as “”Manny Ray” in 1983’s “Scarface.” Bauer introduced Griffith to the director of “Scarface,” Brian De Palma, who cast her in his next film, 1984’s “Body Double,” a brash, shameless pastiche of Hitchcock’s “Rear Window” and “Vertigo” which featured Griffith as an adult film star duped into playing a decoy in a gruesome murder plot. Her depiction of worldly savvy belied by disarming ingenuousness garnered her the National Society of Film Critics Award for Best Supporting Actress and a Golden Globe Award nomination for Best Supporting Actress in a Motion Picture. More importantly, “Body Double” launched Melanie Griffith’s meteoric – if only ephemeral – rise into the firmament of movie superstardom.

Melanie Griffith as Holly Body in "Body Double" (1984);
Director Brian DePalma: "If Melanie can play a sort of sexy, ditsy broad better
than anybody else, why should she stop? People want her to be Meryl Streep!
She's not Meryl Streep! She's Melanie, and you have to be what you are!"

In 1986’s “Something Wild,” Jeff Daniels (a recent Emmy Award winner for his role in the HBO series “The Newsroom”) as a New York City banker whose straight-laced existence is turned topsy-turvy when a free spirit named Lulu (Melanie Griffith) abducts him for a bizarre joyride. As directed by the refreshingly inventive Jonathan Demme (the Oscar-winning director of “The Silence of the Lambs”), what starts out as an endearing, quirky road movie takes a very dark turn when Lulu’s ex-con husband (Ray Liotta) appears at her high school reunion.

Melanie Griffith in "Something Wild" (1986)

This was Ray Liotta’s second motion picture, three years after his inauspicious debut as a thug who sexually assaults Pia Zadora with a garden hose in “The Lonely Lady,” and three years before his breakout roles in “Field of Dreams” and “Goodfellas.” His show-stopping performance in “Something Wild” won the actor a Boston Society of Film Critics Award. He was also nominated for the Golden Globe Award, a National Society of Film Critics Award, and a New York Film Critics Circle Award. Melanie Griffith’s performance garnered a nomination for the Golden Globe Award for Best Actress in a Motion Picture Musical or Comedy.

Directed by Mike Nichols, “Working Girl” (1988) is an almost nostalgic hail back to the kind of pleasant, popular romantic comedies they used to make in Hollywood in its tale of an ambitious secretary in the acquisitions department of a Wall Street investment bank who takes advantage of her boss’s absence to approach an executive at another firm with her own ideas for a merger deal.

Enormous '80s hair: Melanie Griffith, Joan Cusack in "Working Girl" (1988)

Leonard Maltin noted the “star-making showcase for Griffith also gives (Harrison) Ford an ideal opportunity to play light comedy and (Sigourney) Weaver a sly supporting role as the villainess.” At the time, Griffith told Us Weekly writer Dan Yakir, “It’s the best work I’ve ever done.” Yakir praised her role as “a Staten Island secretary who beats Wall Street sharks at their own game,” remarking that her “performance evokes memories of Judy Holliday, Marilyn Monroe and maybe even her mother, actress Tippi Hedren.”

Roger Ebert declared, “This is Melanie Griffith’s movie in the same way ‘The Graduate’ belonged to Dustin Hoffman. She was not an obvious casting choice, but she is the right one. And in an odd way, her two most famous previous roles, in ‘Body Double’ and ‘Something Wild,’ work for her. Because we may remember her from those sex-drenched roles, there is a way in which both Griffith and her character are both trying to get respectable…” Griffith won a number of best actress awards, including the Golden Globe Award for Best Actress in a Motion Picture Musical or Comedy, and was nominated for the Best Actress Oscar.

There were a few clunkers during this halcyon period in her career, including 1984’s “Fear City,” an exploitative “Miami Vice”-style crime thriller about a serial killer who preys on Manhattan Times Square strippers, starring Tom Berenger, Billy Dee Williams, and Griffith. Endangered strippers include Rae Dawn Chong, Maria Conchita Alonso, and Ola Ray (the Playboy Playmate who appeared in Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” music video).

Melanie Griffith in "Fear City" (1984)

Directed by Abel Ferrara (the director of “Bad Lieutenant” and “King of New York,” as well as a couple episodes of “Miami Vice” and the pilot episode for “Crime Story”), “Fear City” was originally made for 20^th Century-Fox, but the studio decided it contained too much nudity, sex, violence, and drug references, so they shuttled it off to an independent releasing company.

In 1985, Melanie Griffith played a futuristic mercenary with a shock of red hair in “Cherry 2000.” Its slated 1986 release in the U.S. was shelved and it was released the following year in Europe. In fact, the movie made its American debut on video in 1988. Griffith would refer to it as her least favorite film, although she begrudgingly appreciated its cult status, thanks in no small part to its eclectic cast, which featured comedian Tim Thomerson, Brion James (Leon Kowalski in “Blade Runner”), and Laurence Fishburne, along with John Ford stock company oldtimers Ben Johnson and Harry Carey Jr.

Melanie Griffith in "Cherry 2000" (1985)

“Stormy Monday” (1988), starring Melanie Griffith, Tommy Lee Jones, Sting, and Sean Bean, was described by Leonard Maltin as an “extremely stylish film noir about the convergence of four characters in the economically depressed city of Newcastle (England), where Sting runs a jazz club, and a ruthless American businessman (Jones) hopes to make a killing in redevelopment.” The heavily atmospheric picture, depicting, in the words of the The Washington Post’s Desson Howe, “shady business meetings and murky jazz joints,” was the first feature film for “Leaving Las Vegas” writer-director Mike Figgis. Roger Ebert wrote, “The movie is not all images. It is also about sounds. About the breathy, rich and yet uncertain tone of Melanie Griffith’s voice, which makes her sound as if she’s been around the track so many times and yet it is still able to believe in love.”

Sean Bean, Melanie Griffith in "Stormy Monday" (1988)

After divorcing Steven Bauer in 1987, Melanie Griffith still believed in love when she reunited with Don Johnson, resulting in their second marriage in 1989. The second time around, however, was not the charm in Griffith’s acting career.

“In the Spirit” (1990) teamed Marlo Thomas as a New Age mystic with Elaine May as a houseguest who find themselves targeted by a mysterious killer in a dark comedy costarring Peter Falk, Jeannie Berlin (Elaine May’s daughter, who also co-wrote the screenplay), and Olympia Dukakis, and directed by Sandra Seacat, an esteemed Method-based acting coach. The New York Times critic Janet Maslin deemed Melanie Griffith’s one-scene role “just the sort of call-girl…she no longer needs to play,” while dubbing the film “a nervous new-age comedy…crystals and all.” Leonard Maltin noted, “Packed with characters...that tend to grate on the nerves, though it’s fun to see Thomas and May doing Abbott and Costello.”

Melanie Griffith's cameo in "In the Spirit" (1990)

That same year’s “Pacific Heights,” directed by John Schlesinger (of “Midnight Cowboy” and “Marathon Man” fame) cast Michael Keaton (between roles as the brooding Caped Crusader in director Tim Burton’s “Batman” pictures and as the loony title character in Burton's “Beetlejuice”) as the definitive neighbor-from-hell when married couple Matthew Modine and Melanie Griffith purchase a San Francisco Victorian house as a rental complex. In The New York Times review, Janet Maslin dismissed it as “perhaps the first eviction thriller,” while Roger Ebert called it “a horror film for yuppies.” Although she shares no scenes with her daughter, Tippi Hedren appears in a cameo as a wealthy widow.

Matthew Modine, Melanie Griffith, Michael Keaton
pose in a publicity photo for "Pacific Heights" (1990).

Melanie Griffith once lamented that her career hit bottom when she was fired in 1977 as a cast member of ABC-TV’s “Carter Country,” an embarrassingly dated redneck sitcom cranked out to capitalize on the newly elected President, Georgia’s native son, Jimmy Carter, that featured Victor French (Michael Landon’s sidekick in “Highway to Heaven”), Kene Holiday (Andy Griffith’s private investigator on “Matlock”), and Guich Koock (onetime co-owner of the Texas community of Luckenbach). However, the true nadir of her career came in 1990 when her “Body Double” director, Brian De Palma, succumbed to his own hubris with a mega-million-dollar-budgeted version of The Bonfire of the Vanities, Tom Wolfe’s sprawling, darkly humorous, Dickensian novel criticizing social class, racism, politics, ambition and greed in 1980’s New York City.

...Speaking of publicity pictures, Melanie Griffith
poses with "The Bonfire of the Vanities" costars
Bruce Willis and Tom Hanks.

This was going to be Brian De Palma’s ticket to the big leagues, but the movie was a box-office bomb and lost millions, proving to be a major misstep for cast members Tom Hanks, Bruce Willis, Griffith, Morgan Freeman, and Kim Cattrall. Roger Ebert, however, did single out Griffith’s role of Hanks’ sexy mistress as “utterly carnal, self-serving and shameless.”

In 1991, Melanie Griffith and new old-ex-husband Don Johnson shared the screen in “Paradise,” a remake of a 1987 French drama scripted and directed by Mary Agnes Donoghue (best known for her screenplay for the 1988 tearjerker “Beaches”). Roger Ebert dismissed it as “a nice little movie about two children (Elijah Wood, Thora Birch), and a contrived big movie about two adults.”

Don Johnson, Elijah  Wood, Melanie Griffith in "Paradise" (1991)

“Born Yesterday” (1993) teamed Griffith and Johnson in a remake of the classic 1950 comedy directed by George Cukor, featuring Broderick Crawford as a hardboiled, uncouth millionaire who hires journalist William Holden to tutor brassy mistress Judy Holiday (in an Oscar-winning performance), only to see his girl and the tutor fall in love. The remake, which was originally intended for Walter Matthau and Whoopi Goldberg, cast John Goodman in the Broderick Crawford role. The less than inspired result prompted Roger Ebert to comment, “The actors in this movie fit the characters so badly, it’s like a game of dressup.”

John Goodman, Don Johnson, Melanie Griffith in "Born Yesterday" (1993)

Without a doubt, the most satisfying outcome of Melanie Griffith’s brief reconciliation with Don Johnson (the pair divorced a second time in 1996, and Griffith married Antonio Banderas that same year, after the two started an offscreen romance on the set of the 1995 romantic comedy “Two Much”) was the birth of daughter Dakota Johnson. When the news broke that Dakota Johnson would star in the much-talked about film adaptation of Fifty Shades of Grey, Melanie Griffith proudly tweeted, “My beautiful child…has been chosen to play Anna Steele…Look out world! Here she comes!!!”

Proud parents Melanie Griffith and Don Johnson book-end daughter Dakota Johnson.

After modeling in her adolescence, Dakota Johnson appeared in 2010’s “The Social Network” with Justin Timberlake and was featured in the shortlived 2012 Fox TV sitcom “Ben and Kate,” costarring Nat Faxon (an actor and comedian who won an Academy Award for co-writing the screenplay of 2011’s “The Descendants’). Slant Magazine reviewer Sean Higgins complimented Johnson, “whose smart comedic timing contrasts her…naïveté,” seemingly not unlike her mother.

With worldwide sales eclipsing those of Harry Potter novels, Fifty Shades of Grey by E.L. James (Erika Leonard) is a 2011 romance novel of female erotica about the BDSM relationship between college graduate Anastasia Steele and business magnate Christian Grey.

Dubbed “Mommy Porn” by some wits, the book was deemed “a sad joke, puny of plot,” by the Huffington Post, while Maureen Dowd, a Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist for The New York Times, wrote that the novel is “like a Bronte devoid of talent,” judging it “dull and poorly written.” Salman Rushdie remarked, “I’ve never read anything so badly written that got published. It made Twilight look like War and Peace.” The New York Daily News capped off the criticism with the headline, “Civilization Ends: E.L. James named Publishers Weekly’s ‘Person of the Year.’”

In June of 2012, a pornographic film company called Smash Pictures announced their plans to produce a triple-X version of the best seller. By November, Universal Pictures secured the title, and after a number of lawsuits and countersuits, Smash Pictures agreed to halt production and cease promotion of its adult film.

The role of Christian Grey went to Charlie Hunnam (recognizable from his role as “Jax” on the FX series “Sons of Anarchy”). Sam (Samantha) Taylor-Wood (best known for directing the 2009 film “Nowhere Boy,” dramatizing John Lennon’s childhood) was selected over other directing candidates Steven Soderbergh, Gus Van Sant, and Angelina Jolie. Charlie Hunnam soon dropped out of the project due to conflicts with the shooting schedule of “Sons of Anarchy” and was replaced by Jamie Dornan, an actor-model-musician from Northern Ireland.

IV. The Short, Hot Summer

At the age of ten, Dakota Johnson made her film debut, along with toddler half-sister Stella Banderas, in 1999’s seriocomic “Crazy in Alabama” (below), starring real-life mom Melanie Griffith and directed by her stepfather, actor Antonio Banderas. Dakota was subsequently cast as a car accident victim with leukemia in a 2000 episode of “ER” and as Sean Penn’s daughter in 2001’s “i am sam.”

(On the right side of the bench:) Melanie Griffith with daughters
Dakota Johnson and Stella Banderas in "Crazy in Alabama" (1999)

Dakota’s mom, Melanie Griffith, was 17 when she made her big screen breakthrough in three back-to-back movies released within one month during the summer of 1975. After her bit part in “The Harrad Experiment,” Griffith was urged by boyfriend Don Johnson to audition for the pivotal role of a runaway daughter in the murky, neo-noir “Night Moves.”

In the wake of attention-demanding roles in 1971’s “The French Connection” (which earned him an Academy Award), 1973’s “Scarecrow,” and 1974’s “The Conversation,” Gene Hackman gave one of his best performances as Harry Moseby, an independent, smalltime private investigator in Los Angeles hired by a faded, B-movie actress to retrieve her errant, free-spirited teenage daughter, “played,” in the words of A.V. Club reviewer Nathan Rabin, “with a beguiling mixture of fresh-faced innocence and nuclear sexuality by a young Melanie Griffith."

Melanie Griffith exhibits, as it were, that "beguiling mixture
of fresh-faced innocence and nuclear sexuality" in "Night Moves."

Harry easily traces the girl, Delly (short for Delilah), to her stepfather’s digs in the Florida Keys, but once she returns to California, the real mystery starts to unravel. Complicating matters is Harry’s troubled relationship with his philandering wife, Ellen (a surprisingly understated performance by Susan Clark).

Harry: "I have to go."
Ellen: "Why? So you can pretend you're solving something?"

Roger Ebert wrote, “ ‘Night Moves’ is one of the best psychological thrillers in a long time.” Kevin Thomas called it “a stunning, stylish detective mystery in the classic Raymond Chandler-Ross Macdonald mold…a tribute to the Hollywood genre movie at its most reflective and revealing best.”

“Night Moves” director Arthur Penn, like fellow wunderkinds of his generation, John Frankenheimer, Sidney Lumet, and Franklin J. Schaffner, emerged from the Golden Age of live television drama to direct landmark motion pictures, including “The Miracle Worker,” “Bonnie and Clyde” (for which Gene Hackman received a Best Supporting Actor Oscar nomination for his role as Warren Beatty’s brother), and “Little Big Man.”

The (intentionally) confusing, (approachably) existential script was written by Alan Sharp, a Scottish novelist who found himself at home amid the iconoclastic filmmakers of the New American cinema of the 1970s.  He scripted Peter Fonda’s 1971 directorial debut, “The Hired Hand,” an arty, revisionist western starring Fonda, Warren Oates, and Verna Bloom, as well as director Robert Aldrich’s 1972 literate and violent western “Ulzana’s Raid,” starring Burt Lancaster, Bruce Davison, and Richard Jaeckel.

In her first major motion picture, Jennifer Warren proves
to be a capable scene-stealer in "Night Moves" as Paula,
the stepfather's tawny companion, a savvy, no-nonsense
dame Bogie would have been proud to trade wisecracks with.
Warren, who played Paul Newman's wife in "Slapshot,"
went on to start a career as a producer and director.

The title, “Night Moves,” is a play on words, inspired by a chess problem Harry recounts in which a past champion was caught off-guard and checkmated in three “knight moves” by his opponent. “He didn’t see it,” Harry says. “He played something else and he lost. He must have regretted it every day of his life. I know I would have.” By the end of “Night Moves,” Harry himself doesn’t see what’s coming, admitting, “I didn’t solve anything. Just fell in on top of me.” The Los Angeles Times’ Kevin Thomas noted, “It all ends with a wry sense of irony over the eternal treachery of human nature and of one’s own delusions.” Or, as succinctly stated by the editors of The Movie Guide, “The last shot, with Hackman circling aimlessly in a boat called ‘Point of View,’ says it all.”

Delly: "I think people are shitty. You're okay."
Harry: "Yeah, I'm an ace."

The naturally unaffected, guileless presence exhibited by the adolescent Griffith in “Night Moves” was on display again in her follow-up performance, in, coincidentally, another convoluted private eye mystery, “The Drowning Pool,” an overdue sequel to one of Paul Newman’s most popular star turns in the title role of “Harper” (1966), an ultra-cool but doggedly tenacious LA detective.

"Swimming's an okay way to relax, but I know a better way..
Don't you think I'm kind of sexy?"
 - Melanie Griffith in "The Drowning Pool"

Based on the novel The Moving Target by Ross Macdonald, the screenplay for “Harper” was written by William Goldman (who would win Academy Awards for his scripts for “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid” and “All the President’s Men”), a fan of Macdonald’s who called the author’s works “the finest series of detective novels ever written by an American.” Macdonald’s world-weary protagonist, described as a literary descendant of Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe, was actually called Lew Archer and was featured in 18 novels and several short stories.

According to some accounts, Paul Newman changed the protagonist’s name to Harper because of the success of his previous “H” movies, “The Hustler” and “Hud,” both of which garnered him Oscar nominations. A simpler explanation is that the film’s producers failed to purchase the rights to Macdonald’s series of novels, only to The Moving Target. According to William Goldman, “We needed a different name and Harper seemed okay, the guy harps on things, it’s essentially what he does for a living.” Interestingly, original author Macdonald himself may have anticipated legal complications after he originally borrowed the name Archer from Miles Archer, detective Sam Spade’s ill-fated partner in Dashiell Hammett’s 1930 novel The Maltese Falcon.

Starlet Pamela Tiffin: the 1960s model
of Melanie Griffith in "Harper" (1966)

Besides Paul Newman, the snappy, stylish cast of “Harper” featured Lauren Bacall (reminding audiences of the kind of smart and tart crime yarns her late husband Humphrey Bogart used to star in), Julie Harris, Janet Leigh, Robert Wagner, and Shelley Winters.

Schuyler Devereaux (Melanie Griffith): "How would you
like to help me put on some suntan lotion?"
Lew Harper (Paul Newman): "Wouldn't help, honey,
you're gonna be burnt out by the time you're 30."

Edward Guthmann, a reviewer for the San Francisco Chronicle, once described Paul Newman as "an actor so masterful, so lacking in ostentation, that you barely notice he's acting." Nine years later after "Harper," Paul Newman, at age 50, effortlessly glided through the 1975 reprise of the wisecracking private eye in “The Drowning Pool,” leaving Los Angeles for Louisiana bayou country to investigate a blackmail plot involving an old flame, Iris Devereaux (played with a melancholy charm by Newman’s real-life wife, Joanne Woodward).

Paul Newman as Harper with the femmes fatales of "The Drowning Pool":
Joanne Woodward; Linda Haynes (a movie reviewer once referred to Haynes
as "a sort of thrift-store Sissy Spacek who can imprint a whole blowsy lifetime
into the way she shimmies her hips"); Gail Strickland - trapped with Newman
in the film's flooded, titular hydrotherapy room

Newman personally chose director Stuart Rosenberg, who directed the actor in his Oscar-nominated title role in “Cool Hand Luke,” as well as in “WUSA” and “Pocket Money.” The plot, too often sidetracked by tedious gum-shoeing, was written by Tracy Keenan Wynn (a son of character actor Keenan Wynn who scripted the original 1974 “The Longest Yard”), Lorenzo Semple Jr. (who wrote the scripts for the 1970s paranoid thrillers “The Parallax View” and “Three Days of the Condor”), and Walter Hill (who wrote the screenplay for director Sam Peckinpah’s “The Getaway” in 1972).

Harper soon finds himself in the middle of a struggle between Iris’ family and a land-hungry oil tycoon who trains pit bulls for dogfights and cooks gourmet meals he can’t eat because of a stomach ailment so he tosses the dishes to the fish (portrayed with delightful glee by Murray Hamilton, best known as the shortsighted mayor in “Jaws”), while the local police chief, who has a suspiciously personal interest in the Devereaux family, just wants Harper gone. The chief is played by Anthony Franciosa, whose presence here, alongside Newman and Woodward in a Louisiana setting, is reminiscent of their starring roles in the 1958 film “The Long, Hot Summer.”

A rogues' gallery from "The Drowning Pool": Murray Hamilton as Kilbourne,
oil tycoon and pit bull-fight manager ("We got regular straight-up teeth matches
on weekends, lots of big money wagered"); Andrew Robinson (best known as the
sniper in "Dirty Harry") as the fired Devereaux family chauffeur; Anthony Franciosa
as Chief Broussard;Paul Koslo as a henchman named Candy with a fondness for
florid polyester shirts; Richard Jaeckel as a cop on the take (Jaeckel received a
Best Supporting Oscar nomination for his role as Paul Newman's brother in
1971's "Sometimes a Great Notion," costarring Henry Fonda and Michael Sarrazin)

Not unlike Harry Moseby in “Night Moves,” Harper, in Iris’s words, hasn’t learned how to “give up gracefully.” She tells him, “You have no talent for surrender.” He replies, “Yeah, I guess I got this wild, selfish streak in me.” Harper warns her, “Things are getting pretty ugly around here. I’m gonna stick it through to the end. And people may not like everything I find.”

Which brings us to Melanie Griffith’s succulent role as Iris’ sexpot daughter, Schuyler, a nymphomaniac not above suspicion of homicide.

(Left) Melanie Griffith, Paul Newman in "The Drowning Pool" (1975);
(right) Melanie Griffith, Paul Newman in "Nobody's Fool" (1994)

Nearly 20 years after “The Drowning Pool,” it was Paul Newman’s turn to flirt incorrigibly with Melanie Griffith, in 1994’s “Nobody’s Fool,” written and directed by Robert Benton (best known for “Kramer vs. Kramer” and “Places in the Heart”). In the twilight of his career, Newman played a ne’er-do-well good old boy who does free-lance construction jobs in a small town for an unsympathetic builder (Bruce Willis) while toying with the latter’s wife (Griffith). According to the website DVD Verdict, “Superstars Bruce Willis and Melanie Griffith took a back seat to Newman and produced some of the best work of their careers. Griffith is especially enchanting. Shunning her Hollywood image, she falls into the role of a small-town wife with ease.”

Melanie Griffith’s third screen appearance in 1975 was an ensemble role in “Smile,” a satirical comedy about the fictional Young American Miss Pageant. Roger Ebert called the film “a sometimes funny, often harrowing look at a teenage beauty competition in that mecca of plastic civic events, Southern California.” Vincent Canby of The New York Times deemed it “a pungent surprise, a rollicking satire that misses few of the obvious targets, but without dehumanizing the victims.”

According to Ebert, director Michael Ritchie “likes to take a semidocumentary approach to his subjects. He made a fairly close examination of skiing in ‘Downhill Racer’ and of politics in ‘The Candidate.’”  Ritchie went on to direct such popular movies as “The Bad News Bears” (the 1976 original, starring Walter Matthau and Tatum O’Neal), “Semi-Tough,” and “Fletch.”

Canby noted, “On its most general level, ‘Smile’ is about a society in which optimism and positive thinking virtually amount to a political system, a guide to the making of choices, the principal goal of which is to have fun…’Smile’ questions the quality of our fun, while adding to it.” Leading the fun in a surprisingly amiable performance is Bruce Dern as Big Bob Freelander, a glad-handing RV salesman and chief judge of the pageant whose toothsome, grinning façade crumbles upon the revelation that he is the “biggest goddamn Young American Miss of them all.” Barbara Feldon (best known as Agent 99 on TV’s “Get Smart”) is perfectly bone-chilling as a onetime Young American Miss who now takes charge of the girls as the obsessed pageant director.

Behind-the-scenes at Young American Miss: pageant head judge Bruce Dern;
pageant director Barbara Feldon; pageant president Geoffrey Lewis ("Our Jaycee
chapter is almost bankrupt because of this meat show - if we don't break even,
we'll have to cancel the Rodeo for the Retarded"); pageant choreographer Michael
Kidd (a five-time Tony Award-winning choreographer in real life who received
an honorary Oscar in 1996 "in recognition of his services to the art of dance in the
art of the screen," including "Seven Brides for Seven Brothers" and "Hello, Dolly!")

The final scenes were staged as an actual pageant, with only screenwriter Jerry Belson (who would win two Emmy Awards as one of the writers on “The Tracey Ullmann Show”) and director Ritchie aware of the winning contestant’s identity. Throughout, “ ‘Smile’ treats its beauty contestants without condescension, “ Vincent Canby said.  “Three young actresses stand out,” he observed: “Maria O’Brien as a pushy, driving contestant who sells her Mexican-American heritage for all its worth; Joan Prather, as the most levelheaded of the contestants; and Annette O’Toole as the most desperate.

Young American Miss contestants: Joan Prather (blame Prather for introducing
John Travolta to Scientology when the two costarred in the lurid, low-budget
scare flick "The Devil's Rain"), Annette O'Toole, Maria O'Brien, Colleen Camp
(best known as Sgt. Kirkland in the "Police Academy" movies and as Yvette the maid
in 1985's "Clue"), Denise Nickerson (best known as gum-chewing Violet Beauregard,
who becomes a human blueberryin 1971's "Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory")

In a smaller role, Melanie Griffith, as Miss Simi Valley, portrays the pageant prankster who instigates a fitting comeuppance for the previously mentioned Maria O’Brien. Griffith also, fittingly in line with her previous screen appearances, provided the PG-rated movie with its parental-guided moments, including a candid Polaroid pose humorously featured in the closing credits.

Melanie Griffith, front and center, in "Smile"

Not surprisingly, Griffith’s spectacular breakout as a Lolita of the mid-1970s was capped off with a 1976 (at age 19) nude pictorial in Playboy.

Melanie Griffith, rear and center, in Playboy magazine

Speaking of Lolita, Melanie Griffith costarred in the 1997 film version of Vladimir Nabakov’s controversial 1955 novel Lolita, about middle-aged literature professor Humbert Humbert’s obsession with a 12-year-old nymphet. Stanley Kubrick had adapted the book for a 1962 movie, which suffered extensive censorship at the time. James Mason portrayed Humbert, 14-year-old newcomer Sue Lyon was cast as Dolores Haze (nicknamed “Lolita”), Peter Sellers appeared as Quilty, a playwright also fascinated by the flirty teenager, and Shelley Winters received a Golden Globe nomination for her role as Charlotte Haze, Dolores’ mawkishly sex-starved mother.

The 1997 remake of “Lolita” was directed by Adrian Lyne, a filmmaker whose track record of sexually charged dramas – “Nine ½ Weeks,” “Fatal Attraction,” “Indecent Proposal,” “Unfaithful” – might have led audiences to anticipate another wink-wink-nudge-nudge exercise in erotica, however, instead of the expected titillation, according to The New York Times critic Caryn James, Lyne, along with screenwriter Stephen Schiff (“Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps”), rose “to the level of his material,” creating a “faithful” work “sensitive to Nabakov’s wit as well as his lyricism.”

(Left) Melanie Griffith as Charlotte Haze in "Lolita" (1997);
(right) Shelley Winters as Charlotte Haze in "Lolita" (1962)

Seventeen-year-old Dominique Swain played Dolores, with Jeremy Irons as Humbert Humbert, Frank Langella as Quilty, and Griffith as Charlotte. Caryn James noted that Melanie Griffith, “with her garish red nails, her screeching voice, her affected diction” was ideally cast as the "annoying, widowed Charlotte.”


V. The Last Word:

Melanie Griffith's mother, Tippi Hedren, divorced
real estate developer Peter Griffith when their only
child was four. "I don't feel like I really had a childhood,"
Melanie once told an interviewer."I grew up fast.
I was really independent. I left home at fifteen.
I wish I had stayed home. I would have liked to grow up
with my parents together..
Then everything would be different."