When The Shooting Stops

by Ralph Rosenblum

  In a typical scene from Little Caesar, the gang is discussing the fate of one of its members:

  “Eddie’s turned yellow. He’s goin’ to rat on us.”

  “He can’t get away with that.”

  “Get Eddie,” says Little Caesar. And the scene cuts abruptly to a church exterior, with Eddie coming down the steps. A long black car swings ominously into view; there is a burst of machine-gun fire and Eddie lies sprawling on the steps. Followed by a flat cut to the next scene, Eddie’s funeral.

  The only difference between me and the other kids who packed the movie houses in those days was that by the time I was fourteen or so I knew the name of the actor who played Eddie as well as the guy who knocked him off. There seemed to be a pool of about thirty-five or forty of these character actors and actresses—Marc Lawrence, Edward S. Brophy, Ruth Donnelly—who got used over and over again for the minor roles in all the Hollywood films, and knowing their names and spotting them was a hobby I shared with my best friend, Buddy Levine. We realized that nobody else knew them, and so it became our private joke. We weren’t film buffs, just early trivia nuts, and we even bought those terrible movie magazines to bolster our useless knowledge.

  Perhaps because I was so inhibited myself, when it came to comedy I leaned toward the coarse, the lowdown, the exhibitionistic, and the flamboyant. The Three Stooges, Charlie Chase, the Ritz Brothers, and Laurel and Hardy were utter nonsense (unlike Chaplin and Keaton, who had to be taken more seriously) and thus my favorites. The Ritz Brothers had only to walk into the frame for me to feel tickled and succumb to the stomach contractions that would lead to all-out laughter at the first ridiculous joke. To see one of the Stooges indignantly bang together the heads of his errant comrades—as the dubbed-in sound effect of something like two coconuts clonking echoed through the theater—was pure organic delight.

  The editing of these comedies in the twenties and thirties contributed greatly to the general quickening of cuts and transitions in American pictures, and although the action was nonsense, the thought that went into its presentation was not.

  The British director David Lean (The Bridge on the River Kwai, Lawrence of Arabia, Doctor Zhivago), who was a top editor (Pygmalion, Major Barbara) during the years I frequented the Bensonhurst theaters, reveals in an old article the delightful diligence, the scientific resolve, that was being applied to film comedy during this decade. Analyzing two unedited shots from an imaginary Laurel and Hardy movie, Lean demonstrates a cutting-room technique I would later learn to apply to the work of Woody Allen, Herb Gardner, and Mel Brooks—making an alliance with the audience.

  In Lean’s first hypothetical shot the renowned ninnies are running down the street for several seconds until Hardy suddenly slips and falls. Lean’s second hypothetical shot begins with a close-up of a banana peel lying on the sidewalk and ends with Hardy’s foot entering the frame, stepping on the peel, and skidding. “Now where,” asks the director with an earnestness that Eisenstein would have approved, “would you cut the close-up of the banana skin?” The smoothest, straightest, and most obvious way to cut the scene would be to show the two men in flight, cut to the close-up of the banana peel as Hardy’s foot enters the frame, follow his foot halfway through the skid, and then cut back to the full shot of the two men as Hardy tumbles to the ground. But as Lean points out, the smoothest is not always the funniest, for it overlooks the opportunity to let the audience in on the joke before the characters in the film have any idea what is about to befall them:

  The answer lies in a very old comedy maxim: Tell them what you’re going to do. Do it. Tell them you’ve done it. In other words the scene should be cut like this:

  1. Medium-shot of Laurel and Hardy running along the street.

  2. Close-up of banana skin lying on pavement. (You have told your audience what you’re going to do and they will start to laugh.)

  3. Medium-shot of Laurel and Hardy still running. (The audience will laugh still more.) Hold the shot for several seconds of running before Hardy finally crashes to the pavement. (The odds are that the audience will reward you with a belly laugh. Having told them what you are going to do, and having done it, how do you tell them you’ve done it?)

  4. A close-up of Laurel making an inane gesture of despair. (The audience will laugh again.)

  Laurel and Hardy alone generated some fifty films during the Depression years, many of them shorts that played on Saturday afternoons, and I’m sure that I saw almost all of them. But the fact that I took in a minimum of four pictures a week hardly qualified me as a fanatic. I was never taken to a play, television did not yet exist, and until I discovered books in my teens, I had no other form of entertainment. To a youth whose sole happiness derived from secret fantasies, it was inevitable that the movies would be a major influence. All the same, the thought of a career in film never crossed my mind. It was foreign, it was California, it was irresponsible, it was un-Jewish. It was glamour and fulfillment of a sort that I never dared to believe I could achieve.

  I was born in 1925, the year, according to Minsky’s, that also gave birth to the striptease. But there was nothing comic or sensual or seductive about the Brooklyn Jewish community where I spent the first twenty years of my life. Bensonhurst was tidier, stabler, and more genteel than the commotion-prone Lower East Side where the newcomers thronged, but its lessons and ways were those of impoverished immigrants hanging on desperately to the niche they had made for themselves. Thrift, self-improvement, and a thudding practicality ruled everything, a heavy-spirited regime that was molded into permanence by the weight of the Depression. Ten years later when Woody Allen was growing up in the same milieu, its values and oppressive conformity would still prevail.

  The one film I’ve seen as an adult that evokes the buried sorrows of my childhood is The Gambler. James Caan, a teacher and compulsive gambler, squanders his money on a football game, then calls his mother. They have a drink, and once again he puts the touch to her. She knows exactly what the money is for, and you get the feeling she’s tried for years to stop him, because he’s always in debt up to his ears, but reluctantly she writes out another check. As she hands it to him, she tells him that whatever problems he’s created for himself, her love for him is undiminished. She puts her arm around his neck and kisses him—and I, sitting in the audience, close to fifty years old now and immune to most forms of sentimentality, begin to weep. Because this sort of love, this motherly affection, is foreign to me. And the lack haunts me even into my fifties.

  The circumstances of my mother’s life demanded qualities of courage and fortitude, and these she developed to an extraordinary degree. But expansiveness was alien to her, and her stabs at love always landed in the realm of custodial care. She cleaned us and fed us and took care of our material needs with a devotion that just now, when she is eighty-two and growing incapacitated, I am beginning to admire.

  There’s an old Jewish folk tale about a powerful woman who claims that her husband makes all the important decisions for their family. When questioned about her own contributions to the household, she states modestly, “Oh, I handle the finances, deal with the tradespeople, pay the landlord, decide where we will live. . . .” Well, then, what are the important matters reserved for the man of the house? “Oh, well, he makes all the decisions on politics, philosophy, and international affairs.”

  And so it was with my family, although whether my father thought that much about international affairs is difficult for me to say, since, unfortunately, he almost never spoke to me. In unselfish moments, I can begin to understand my parents. Being poor, emigrating from Europe, starting over with a new language, surviving in this country through some of the worst years we’ve known. How can you help becoming overwhelmingly tight, obsessed with preserving what you have? That they created a household atmosphere of near total terror over where the next dollar would come from—a spirit-crushing preoccupation that, on special occasions, holidays and such, might be tempered down to a level of extreme anxiety—
is understandable considering the extraordinary hardships of their lives.

  My favorite relatives had something of the offbeat about them. Uncle Morris, the kosher butcher, was a bootlegger. They said he loved “Stollard,” which was the family code name for Stalin, but more important to me in retrospect were the little errands Uncle Morris had me run for him during the last months of Prohibition, when I was seven years old. I’d go to his house, which was in our neighborhood, and Morris would give me an address and a package to deliver, a brown paper bag with a heavy bottle inside. I’d wander through the streets of our half working-class, half middle-class community, past row after row of tidy one- and two-family dwellings, thinking my thoughts, and never have any idea what was in the paper bags I carried. I loved doing these errands for Uncle Morris because he was a softspoken, gentle man, very unlike the rest of my relatives.

  My mother’s sister, Aunt Bessie, was known as the eccentric in the family. Her eccentricity consisted of such minor exploits as inviting friends to her house for dinner. This was unheard of. Aunt Bessie, too, was a favorite.

  Our own household lacked cultural inclinations, conformity reigned over our habits and furnishings, and we rarely did anything strictly for pleasure. My mother must have sensed the longing Aunt Bessie’s dinner parties aroused in me, for I remember her saying, “Oh, well, it’s nothing to get friends to visit you if you’re going to feed them. Of course she has a room full of people—they’re all getting a free two-dollar meal.”

  Mother was generous, though, when it came to ladling out the guilt. My’older brother, Jack, choked on his rations and rebelled against her continually; fights and trouble always swirled around them, and they never stopped yelling. I must have determined at a very young age that I did not want to repeat this drama and stepped back into the private, bleak role of an obedient and helpful child.

  When I was eight years old, Jack was bar mitzvahed. Of all the events that took place on that day, I remember just one. It burned indelibly into my eight-year-old mind. Jack delivered a speech. It was a long speech to what seemed to me a throng of several hundred admiring relatives who had crowded into the synagogue. I knew my parents expected me to get up there and do the same thing on a Saturday morning four and a half years hence, and I knew just as clearly that this would never happen.

  One of my first friendships was forged cutting Hebrew class on weekday afternoons. Henry Morris and I would walk the streets for two hours and do all sorts of ridiculous things—put our faces against the windows of restaurants to bother diners, go into bakeries and fool around—nonsense to keep ourselves occupied. It took the synagogue authorities nearly a year to notify my father that for the five dollars or so a month he was paying I hadn’t been attending at all.

  Both my parents were stunned. My mother had no way of dealing with this quiet rebellion. My father sat me down to talk about it, and I responded with all the force I could muster: “I’m not going. I will not be bar mitzvahed.”

  We were surrounded by relatives on all sides. My father’s brothers, my mother’s sisters, all religious people who observed the holidays. The shame my parents felt over my rebellion must have been great. Until a week before my thirteenth birthday, they both tried to believe that somehow my bar mitzvah would come to pass. But I was inexorable: I would never make that speech. Finally my parents settled on an arrangement that spared them any further pain. The weekday temple on the ground floor of the synagogue, a small room that was used mainly by old religious men, was opened for me when the telling Saturday arrived. Surrounded by my parents and four ancient men, I spoke my three lines of Hebrew and the ceremony was over. We never talked about it again.

  By the time I was thirteen I was beginning to have some sense of myself. Like many adolescents, this included a great deal of agony over the parts that didn’t quite fit the accepted norms. My refusal to speak in class had given me an undeserved reputation for arrogance. I did not like being thought of as arrogant, but I learned from it my primary lesson in self-defense: by being silent and showing no emotions I could become forbidding—a characteristic that both hampered and protected me during my early years as an editor. Around this time I was also discovering an inclination toward slightly eccentric pursuits. I determined that I would never become a teacher or a dentist, the sorts of professions that at the time were the goals Jewish parents pressed on their sons. I had learned to smoke when I was twelve and had developed the custom of hiding in the bushes of the park across the way from Seth Low Junior High School and indulging in this vice. All told, a troubling lack of wholesomeness pervaded my secret persona.

  One of the gifts I received for my bar mitzvah was a small radio that I would play at night. In those days NBC and CBS were broadcasting the big bands, starting at 11:00 p.m. from Chicago and Cincinnati and all the cities where people used to dance in hotels. I would stay up till one every night and play the radio very softly and savor what soon became my first love—jazz. Artie Shaw, Glenn Miller, Jan Savitt, Benny Goodman, they all drove me wild. From the big bands I graduated to the black bands, Count Basie, Earl Hines, Jimmie Lunceford, Andy Kirk, Chick Webb. And for the first time I had both a friendship and a dream. The friend was Buddy Levine. Buddy was everything I wasn’t. To me he seemed outgoing and gutsy, and, what’s more, he appeared to have a great relationship with his parents. He also loved jazz, and the two of us began collecting records. The little money I made from baby-sitting went directly to the Commodore Record Shop in Manhattan. We started a jazz correspondence, set up fan clubs for the various bands, sent for pictures of the band leaders. We knew every band in the country.

  The dream, of course, was to become a black jazz musician. I began studying the saxophone. It was a desperate act that, needless to say, went without parental encouragement. I remember practicing on a hot summer’s day when I was fourteen or fifteen. I couldn’t bear to be heard, so I squeezed into the closet and played there. The saxophone lasted about six months. Subsequently, I discovered reading, and, entranced by the work of an Italian psychiatrist named Cesare Lombroso, inventor of the “criminal type,” I determined to become a criminologist. This, too, was short-lived.

  My love for jazz gave me an identity of sorts, and, more sure of myself, my sense of humor and oddball behavior became more pronounced. I sometimes enlisted Jack in my exploits, like infesting a Passover Seder with trick wine glasses and other obnoxious delights. But Jack and I remained basically at odds. I envied his more rugged, durable personality and the success I imagined he had with girls. To him I was a fat little nuisance who was willful and got away with too much. He knew how to get under my skin in a way that aroused my frightful temper, once causing me to hurl my treasured radio across the room at him. It smashed against the wall and burst into eighty pieces, which Jack quickly and guiltily swept up and threw away.

  Unlike my dream of a career in jazz, the jazz obsession itself never died. I could name the soloist, the theme song, the record label, and some of the specialty numbers of every major band in the country. In a fit of sweet, compulsive orderliness, I decided to catalogue all this information in a filing-card system and give each band a grade. The catalogue eventually included some two-hundred entries—right down to the Grade D groups that had strings and played only in the Midwest—and it reminds me of nothing so much as the catalogues I would soon be keeping of millions of feet of uncut film.

  Buddy and I had meanwhile begun to haunt the jazz spots on Fifty-second Street. We’d sneak up to Harlem on Sunday afternoons, when the Golden Gate Ballroom and the Savoy Ballroom staged a “battle of the bands” in which two or three of our groups of heroes would play in succession. When my father found out that I had spent these Sunday afternoons in Harlem, he lunged for the bicarbonate of soda. Years later I read an autobiographical book by Mezz Mezzrow, a white jazz clarinetist who lived in Harlem and always came on as black, and in a strange way it brought back those adolescent days and the inexplicable thrill of my jazz passion.

  Jazz. To thi
s day I cannot play a musical instrument, but the importance of jazz to my life and my work has been pervasive. My love for music has been the single greatest influence on the development of my editing “touch,” and early in my career I developed a capacity to use music as an auxiliary editing tool. In one way or another all my frustrated musical yearnings have squeezed their way into my work.

  The relationship between film editing and music has been noted on many occasions. In his 1974 memoir Don’t Look at the Camera, Harry Watt, the British documentary director, was drawn to the musical analogy to explain the importance of an editor:

  While admitting he cannot turn dross into gold, [the editor] can so alter a director’s clumsy or tentative efforts as to make them almost unrecognizable. What he can do is to give tempo and emphasis. We all know that tunes picked out on one finger by some illiterate in Tin Pan Alley become lovely pieces of music when played by a skilled band. Somewhere along the line that tune, which, of course, had to have musical potential, was dissected, rearranged and orchestrated by the backroom boys. A film editor is an orchestrator.

  Sometime in 1966 at a big party held in Central Park’s Tavern on the Green to celebrate the release of Sidney Lumet’s The Group, I had a conversation with the New Yorker film critic Pauline Kael during which I confided to her about the love I’d always felt for jazz and my secret childhood ambition of becoming a saxophone player. Kael, whose reviews are enriched with an encyclopedic knowledge of literature, film history, and biographical detail, somehow misfiled this information in her magnificent memory bank. In 1971, when she reviewed Ivan Passer’s Born to Win, the misfiled data was retrieved, and I became one of the few film editors ever to receive an undeserved credit: