Revolutionary Road

Petrified Forest.
Impressionist notes on "San Sebastián"


Hen & chicks
Soft lighting and a tight composition beautifully highlighted the subtle hues of this week's creative challenge winner.
The Petrified Forest
The Petrified Forest (1936) is a predecessor to film noir, with an original screenplay by Delmer Daves and Charles Kenyon derived from the play by Robert E. Sherwood. The movie stars Leslie Howard as Alan Squier, Bette Davis as Gabrielle "Gabby" Maple, and Humphrey Bogart in his career breakthrough role as Duke Mantee. The Petrified Forest was also performed on live television in 1955 with Bogart, Henry Fonda, and Lauren Bacall.

This 1930s drama is set in the Petrified Forest area in northern Arizona.

Hitchhiker Alan Squier, who sees himself as a failed writer, wanders into a roadside diner. The diner is run by Jason Maple (Porter Hall), his daughter Gabby, and her grandfather (Charley Grapewin), "an old man who was missed by Billy the Kid."

Gabby's mother was a French war bride who fell in love with Gabby's father when he was a young, handsome, uniformed American serviceman. They married and moved to the remote Petrified Forest desert in Arizona. Gabby's mother found her husband a "dull defeated man" and moved back to France when Gabby was a young child. She now sends Gabby poetry. Gabby dreams about visiting Bourges to study art. Gabby shows Alan her paintings and reads him a favorite Villon poem. Alan finds Gabby's eagerness and optimism touching and refreshing.

Duke Mantee, "world famous killer" and his gang appear, and hold everyone hostage. When Gabby is out of the room, Alan signs over an insurance policy on his life to Gabby. He asks Duke to shoot him. "It couldn't make any difference to you, Duke. After all, if they catch you, they can hang you only once..." And to another character, he explains: "Living, I'm worth nothing to her. Dead — I can buy her the tallest cathedrals, and golden vineyards, and dancing in the streets."

While Bogart was successful in the Broadway role of Mantee, he was not cast in the film version. Warner Brothers planned to use Edward G. Robinson, who was under contract to Warners. Legend has it that Leslie Howard lobbied Jack Warner to hire Bogart after the struggling actor called him from New York to remind him that he'd said that he wouldn't appear in a movie version without Bogart as Mantee. According to Robert Sklar, studio politics and Robinson's reluctance to take another gangster role resulted in Bogart being cast (Sklar, 1992, pp. 60-62). The film made Bogart a Hollywood star. Bogart remained grateful to Howard throughout his life — and named his daughter after him.The Petrified Forest was remade in 1955 on live television as an installment of Producer's Showcase, a weekly dramatic anthology, featuring a now top-billed Bogart as Mantee, Henry Fonda in Leslie Howard's role, and Bogart's wife Lauren Bacallplaying Bette Davis' part. Jack Klugman, Richard Jaeckel, and Jack Warden had supporting roles. Unlike many live televisiondramas of the 1950s, this one still exists and remains archived for viewing at the Museum of Television and Radio in New York City and Los Angeles.
Trivia

• The set includes saguaro cacti, which do not grow in the Petrified Forest Desert.
• The interplay between Leslie Howard and Bette Davis is parodied in the 1937 Merrie Melodies cartoon She Was an Acrobat's Daughter.
• The hitchhiking scene with Leslie Howard was parodied by comedian Chris Elliott in The Traveling Poet, a short film produced by Brad Hall for television's Late Night with David Letterman.
• Bogart protrayal of Mantee mimicked the notorious and recently deceased bank robber John Dillinger.
• The novel Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates opens with an amateur-theater production of The Petrified Forest set in spring 1955, the same year as the live TV performance (which is not mentioned in the novel).

Revolutionary Road

Revolutionary Road

Revolutionary Road, the first novel of author Richard Yates, was a finalist for theNational Book Award in 1962 along with Catch-22 and The Moviegoer. When it was published by Atlantic-Little, Brown in 1961, it received critical acclaim, and the New York Times reviewed it as "beautifully crafted... a remarkable and deeply troubling book." ^[1]

In 2005 the novel was chosen by Time as one of the 100 best English-language novels from 1923 to the present.

When DeWitt Henry and Geoffrey Clark interviewed Yates for the Winter, 1972issue of Ploughshares, Yates detailed the title's subtext:

“

I think I meant it more as an indictment of American life in the 1950s. Because during the Fifties there was a general lust for conformity all over this country, by no means only in the suburbs — a kind of blind, desperate clinging to safety and security at any price, as exemplified politically in the Eisenhower administration and the Joe McCarthy witchhunts. Anyway, a great many Americans were deeply disturbed by all that — felt it to be an outright betrayal of our best and bravest revolutionary spirit — and that was the spirit I tried to embody in the character of April Wheeler. I meant the title to suggest that the revolutionary road of 1776 had come to something very much like a dead end in the Fifties

Set in 1955, the novel focuses on the hopes and aspirations of Frank and April Wheeler, self-assured Connecticutsuburbanites who see themselves as very different from their neighbors in the Revolutionary Hill Estates. In the opening scene, April stars in an embarrassingly bad amateur dramatic production of The Petrified Forest:

She was working alone, and visibly weakening with every line. Before the end of the first act the audience could tell as well as the Players that she’d lost her grip, and soon they were all embarrassed for her. She had begun to alternate between false theatrical gestures and a white-knuckled immobility; she was carrying her shoulders high and square, and despite her heavy make-up you could see the warmth of humiliation rising in her face and neck.

Seeking to break out of their suburban rut, April convinces Frank they should move to Paris, where she will work and support him while he realizes his vague ambition to be something other than an office worker. Unfortunately, Frank (from whose point of view most of the novel is told) is a weak reed, doing the minimum to get by at work without developing any alternative self, in contrast with April's taking concrete steps to accomplish their move. When April conceives their third child, their plan to leave America crumbles, not least because Frank is flattered by praise from his supervisors at work and beginning to identify with his mundane job. April realizes that she doesn't know herself any more and that she doesn't love Frank; she tries to abort their child herself, but botches the attempt and dies in her effort to fight the forces keeping her in her suburban housewife lifestyle. Frank grieves, but soon becomes absorbed by the work he had once despised, and "dies" an inward death.

In the October 1999 issue of the Boston Review, Yates was quoted on his central theme: "If my work has a theme, I suspect it is a simple one: that most human beings are inescapably alone, and therein lies their tragedy." The Wheelers are thwarted at every turn. Confronted with the painful truth of their ordinary existence and conflicts in their crumbling marriage, their frustrations and yearnings for something better represent the tattered remnants of the American Dream.
Literary significance

Stewart O'Nan probed the neglect of Yates in "The Lost World of Richard Yates: How the great writer of the Age of Anxiety disappeared from print"

William Styron, who once gave a reading of the novel's opening chapter at Boston University, called Revolutionary Road "a deft, ironic, beautiful novel that deserves to be a classic."

Kurt Vonnegut called it "The Great Gatsby of my time... one of the best books by a member of my generation."

Tennessee Williams also praised the book: "Here is more than fine writing; here is what, added to fine writing, makes a book come immediately, intensely and brilliantly alive. If more is needed to make a masterpiece in modern American fiction, I am sure I don't know what it is."

Film adaptation
Screenwriter Justin Haythe has adapted the novel for filming by Evamere Entertainment (formerly HartSharp Entertainment) with BBC Films. Revolutionary Road was directed by Sam Mendes (American Beauty) and reunites Oscar-nominated Titanicstars Kate Winslet (Mendes's wife) and Leonardo DiCaprio, alongside Oscar winner Kathy Bates. It opened December 26, 2008 to favorable reviews by David Ansen, David Denby, Todd McCarthy, Mick LaSalle, Greg White, Peter Travers, Roger Ebert and other leading film critics.
Revolutionary Road (film)

Revolutionary Road is a Golden Globe Award-winning 2008 British-Americandrama film directed by Sam Mendes and starring Leonardo Dicaprio and Kate Winslet. The screenplay by Justin Haythe is based on the 1961 novel of the same name by Richard Yates. The film opened on December 26, 2008 in select theaters and is opening everywhere throughout the U.S. on January 23, 2009.
Production

Director John Frankenheimer considered filming the Richard Yates novel soon after its publication but opted to make The Manchurian Candidate instead. In 1967, producer Albert Ruddy bought the property for $15,500. Five years later, while a writer-in-residence at Wichita State University, Yates offered to adapt his work for the screen. Ruddy had other projects lined up at the time and demurred, eventually selling the rights to actor Patrick O'Neal. Yates read O'Neal's treatment of his novel and found it "godawful," but O'Neal refused the writer's repeated offers to buy back the rights. Yates died in 1992, O'Neal died two years later,^[1] and the project remained in limbo until 2001 when Todd Field expressed interest in adapting it for the screen. However, when told by the O'Neal estate he would be required to shoot O'Neal's script as written, Field stepped away from the material and opted to make Little Children instead^[2]. David Thompson eventually purchased the rights for BBC Films.^[3] In March 2007, BBC Films established a partnership with DreamWorks, and the rights to the film's worldwide distribution were assigned to Paramount Pictures, owner of DreamWorks. On February 14, 2008, The Hollywood Reporterreported Paramount announced that Paramount Vantage was "taking over distribution duties on Revolutionary Road".^[4]

The film was shot on location in Beacon Falls, Bethel, Darien, Fairfield, Greenwich, New Canaan, Norwalk, Redding, Shelton,Southport, Stamford, Thomaston and Trumbull (all in Connecticut), Westchester County, and various sites in New York City, including Grand Central Terminal, Tribeca and Lower Manhattan.

The film marks the first time Winslet worked with husband Sam Mendes. DiCaprio, Winslet and Bates had previously worked together on the 1997 film Titanic.

Critical reception

Kenneth Turan of the Los Angeles Times said, "It takes the skill of stars Kate Winslet and Leonardo DiCaprio and director Sam Mendes to get this film to a place where it involves and moves us - which it finally does - but it is a near thing... Justin Haythe's screenplay does many good things, but it can't escape the arch lingo of the time... and that in turn makes the film's concerns initially feel dated and outmoded as well... Encouraged by Mendes' artful direction, his gift for eliciting naturalness, the core of this film finally cries out to us today, makes us see that the notion of characters struggling with life, with the despair of betraying their best selves because of what society will or won't allow, is as gripping and relevant now as it ever was. Or ever will be."^[6]

Joe Neumaier of the New York Daily News said the film "comes close but falls short of capturing Richard Yates' terrific novel... the movie — two-thirds Mad Men, one-third American Beauty, with a John Cheever chaser — works best when focusing on the personal. Thankfully, it's there that Mendes and screenwriter Justin Haythe catch some of Yates' weighty ideas, and where Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet succeed in doing the heavy lifting... DiCaprio, round-shouldered and sleepy-eyed, and Winslet, watchful and alert, raise up each other and everything around them. Never once shadowed by Titanic, they suggest, often wordlessly, the box the Wheelers have found themselves in. Whereas the novel is told mostly from Frank's viewpoint, the movie is just as much April's, and Winslet, whether fighting back or fighting back tears, is sensational."^[7]

Todd McCarthy of Variety called the film "faithful, intelligent, admirably acted, superbly shot" and added, "It also offers a near-perfect case study of the ways in which film is incapable of capturing certain crucial literary qualities, in this case the very things that elevate the book from being a merely insightful study of a deteriorating marriage into a remarkable one... Even when the dramatic temperature is cranked up to high, the picture's underpinnings seem only partly present, to the point where one suspects that what it's reaching for dramatically might be all but unattainable - perhaps approachable only by Pinter at his peak."^[8] McCarthy later significantly qualified his review, calling Revolutionary Road "problematic" and that it "has some issues that just won't go away".^[9] He concludes that Revolutionary Road suffers in comparison to Billy Wilder's The Apartmentand Richard Quine's Strangers When We Meet because of its "narrow vision", even arguing that the television series Mad Men handles the issues of conformity, frustration, and hypocrisy "with more panache and precision".^[9]

David Ansen of Newsweek said the film "is lushly, impeccably mounted — perhaps too much so. Mendes, a superb stage director, has an innately theatrical style: everything pops off the screen a little bigger and bolder than life, but the effect, rather than intensifying the emotions, calls attention to itself. Instead of losing myself in the story, I often felt on the outside looking in, appreciating the craftsmanship, but one step removed from the agony on display. Revolutionary Road is impressive, but it feels like a classic encased in amber."^[10]

Owen Gleiberman of Entertainment Weekly graded the film B+ and commented, "The film is lavishly dark — some might say too dark — yet I'd suggest it has a different limitation: For all its shattering domestic discord, there's something remote and aestheticized about it. April brings a private well of conflict to her middle-class prison, but Winslet is so meticulous in her telegraphed despair that she intrigues us, moves us, yet never quite touches our unguarded nerves."^[5]

Kirk Honeycutt of The Hollywood Reporter called the film a "didactic, emotionally overblown critique of the soulless suburbs" and added, "Revolutionary Road is, essentially, a repeat for Mendes of American Beauty... Once more, the suburbs are well-upholstered nightmares and its denizens clueless - other than one estranged male. Clearly, this environment attracts the dramatic sensibilities of this theater-trained director. Everything is boldly indicated to the audience from arch acting styles to the wink-wink, nod-nod of its design. Indeed his actors play the subtext with such fury that the text virtually disappears. Subtlety is not one of Mendes' strong suits."^[11]

Rex Reed of The New York Observer called the film "a flawless, moment-to-moment autopsy of a marriage on the rocks and an indictment of the American Dream gone sour" and "a profound, intelligent and deeply heartfelt work that raises the bar of filmmaking to exhilarating." ^[12]

Peter Travers of Rolling Stone called the film "raw and riveting" and commented, "Directed with extraordinary skill by Sam Mendes, who warms the chill in the Yates-faithful script by Justin Haythe, the film is a tough road well worth traveling . . . DiCaprio is in peak form, bringing layers of buried emotion to a defeated man. And the glorious Winslet defines what makes an actress great, blazing commitment to a character and the range to make every nuance felt." ^[13]

Mick LaSalle of the San Francisco Chronicle voted the film as his best of 2008. He commented, "Finally, this is a movie that can and should be seen more than once. Watch it one time through her eyes. Watch it again through his eyes. It works both ways. It works in every way. This is a great American film."

From : The New Republic

Blaming the 'Burbsby Adelle Waldman
'Revolutionary Road,' considered the original anti-suburban novel, isn't actually anti-suburbs--but something far more devastating than that.
Post Date Monday, December 22, 2008

The novel of suburban malaise has been in fashion for as long as people have been commuting from leafy pastures just beyond the city limits. Never mind that the majority of Americans actually live in suburbs (and have therefore voted with their feet in favor of suburbia), American readers are apparently hungry for books that seek to reveal how stultifying that life really is. Rick Moody made his career withThe Ice Storm, an account of a Connecticut family's expensively appointed but empty lives. Similarly, Tom Perrotta's Little Children depicts a seemingly pleasant Massachusetts town in which rage and depravity lurk behind flower boxes and picture windows, and the banality of child-rearing naturally gives rise to adultery.

Now, Revolutionary Road, Richard Yates's brilliant 1961 novel, stands poised for a comeback. Often considered the original anti-suburban novel, the book--long a staple on bookstore shelves labeled "our favorites" and "staff picks"--tells the story of an unhappy young Connecticut couple; it has just been reissued in tandem with a Hollywood adaptation, due to hit theaters the day after Christmas. The film is directed by none other than Sam Mendes, the man behind American Beauty, perhaps the apotheosis of suburban exposé.

But if Mendes's new film is to do Revolutionary Road justice, it will transcend the easy anti-suburban categorization. While Yates's depiction of suburban life is nightmarish enough to exceed the worst fears of Jane Jacobs's devotees,Revolutionary Road is far more than a complacent takedown of the 'burbs. It is in fact less an anti-suburban novel than a novel about people who blame their unhappiness on the suburbs.

Once upon a time, Frank and April Wheeler were bohemians in Greenwich Village, but one thing led to another--well, sex led to pregnancy--and Frank, who'd graduated from Columbia on the GI Bill and worked odd jobs while trying to "find" himself, finally took a "real" job at Knox Business Machines, the dullest of dull corporations, quintessential Organization Man territory.

But Frank doesn't see himself as a victim of 1950s-style pressure to conform. Taking the job was an ironic gesture. "The thing I'm most anxious to avoid," he said to a friend, "is any kind of work that can be considered 'interesting' in its own right. I want something that can't possibly touch me." Moreover, Knox was the very same corporation for which Frank's own father had toiled his whole sad, Willy Loman-like career. How rich! What better way to thumb his nose at his father and his outmoded bourgeois values than to breeze right into a higher position than his dad had ever achieved--and then treat the whole thing as a joke?

Indeed, Frank's trouble is that he doesn't do much of anything sincerely. When we first meet him, he is sitting through a disastrous amateur theater performance, in which April stars. Afterwards, he approaches her backstage:

He ... started toward her with the corners of his mouth stretched tight in a look that he hoped would be full of love and humor and compassion; what he planned to do was bend down and kiss her and say "Listen: you were wonderful." But an almost imperceptible recoil of her shoulders told him she didn't want to be touched, which left him uncertain what to with his hands, and that was when it occurred to him that "You were wonderful" might be exactly the wrong thing to say--condescending, or at the very least naïve and sentimental, and much too serious.

What he said instead was, "Well, I guess it wasn't exactly a triumph or anything, was it?" Ouch.

The remark wasn't hurtful the way it might have been if April were another woman or this, another marriage. In fact, Frank was probably not wrong to have suspected that "you were wonderful" would have grated on April's nerves. The problem is ... well, it's complicated.

Frank's love for April is real, the only thing in his life that is wholly authentic. That doesn't, however, mean it's good; it is in fact utterly poisonous both for him and for April. From the early days of their affair, April, in spite of moments of feeling something that may be, could be love--she thought he was smart, she liked the countercultural thrill of living together in a cheap, cigarette smoke-filled West Village apartment--has "held herself poised for immediate flight."

And that really galls Frank. It's not the morality of the times or the unavailability of abortion that caused the newly married couple to have their first child--and take their first tentative steps towards conventional middle-class life--but Frank's frustration with April's aloofness. She intended to induce an abortion, which enraged Frank even though "the idea [of ending the pregnancy], God knew, was more than a little attractive." But April's unwillingness to bear his child seemed to bespeak an intolerable lack of love. He just wanted her not to be so indifferent--to him:

"You do this--you do this and I swear to god I'll--"

"Oh, you'll what? You'll leave me. What's that supposed to be, a threat or a promise?"

Feeling threatened, Frank did what was easy, natural--and despicable--he took up the "moral position," as if that were the true reason for his objection. And it worked. Frank convinced April to have a baby she didn't want, without having ever considered her feelings in any light other than how they reflected on him.

What is so unique here is that Yates isn't seduced by his characters' emotions, no matter how earnestly experienced; he lays bare the roiling pools of vanity and narcissism that underlie them. While Frank is the nicer of the two--by conventional standards, at least--it's no wonder that April feels revulsion at his "precious moral maxims" and his "'love' and ... mealy-mouthed little--." It's hard for her to articulate, but the reader has no trouble understanding what she means. Meanwhile, Frank, fearful of her flaring temper yet resentful of her power over him, catalogs her flaws--the widening hips, how certain facial expressions make her look old--but to no avail. No matter how much he wants to, Frank can't talk himself out of the absolute stranglehold April has on his sense of self--that is, his great and abiding love for her.

At least, that's the state of Frank and April's marriage at the beginning of the book, when things are going comparatively well.

Then April does something that really terrifies Frank, even more than the threat of her temper. She takes his denunciations of "these damn little suburban types" and his diatribes about "Conformity, or the Suburbs, or Madison Avenue, or American Society Today" at face value. She decides that they should move to France, where she will get a secretarial job and Frank can find himself. They'll finally be free from the banal routine that just has to be the source of their unhappiness.

It has to be, hasn't it? The picture Yates paints of suburbia isunremittingly bleak. Frank and April's world, with its houses that look "as foolishly misplaced as a great many bright new toys that have been left outside overnight," is bad, but even more depressing are the Wheelers' attempts to make their existence congenial: the amateur theater endeavor, for example, so paltry, so chintzy--and so small in light of all that is wrong. Even less likely to yield real relief are their only friends, the fawning, insipid Campbells, who offer little but meaningless distraction and the ignoble pleasure of being looked up to. It's a hellish life, or it should be. It certainly is for April, anyway. While Frank drones on with stock talk about Conformity and other clichéd generalities, April's acidic observations have Dorothy Parker-like precision. "I know these damn artsy-crafty things," she said of the theater group initially, before she got talked into participating. "There'll be of a woman with blue hair and wooden beads who met Max Reinhardt once ... and seven girls with bad complexions."

April's unhappiness is real, but Yates, unlike a more sentimental author, doesn't applaud her daring--her willingness to buck convention and propose escape. Instead, he exposes the foolishness and the self-delusion behind her Paris plan. In a moment of particularly abject misery, April decides that "it"--the whole dreary shebang of suburban family life--is her fault. "I put the whole burden ...on you," she says to Frank. "It was like saying if you want this baby, it's going to be All Your Responsibility. You're going to have to turn yourself inside out to provide for us. You'll have to give up any idea of being anything in the world but a father." It sounds plausible enough, even if it has little bearing on the messier, more complicated truth. But Yates portrays the glee with which April latched onto her new analysis as part and parcel of the human tendency to self-dramatize: "Her whole day had been a heroic build up for this moment of self-abasement."

Nor does Yates let us forget that April's plan is riddled with holes, something even the affable drunkard who shares a cubicle with Frank can see. (As he says to Frank over lunch, "Assuming there is a true vocation lurking in wait for you, don't you think you'd be as apt to discover it here as there?") It also rests on the assumption that Frank really is cut out for a different kind of life. But whatever it may have been when she met him, Frank's anti-suburban talk has by this time become a mere gesture, a way of making himself feel sophisticated and being once more in April's eyes "the most interesting person [she's] ever met." Frank is not so much lying as he is being insincere. It's as Lionel Trilling observed about Mansfield Park's vivacious Mary Crawford: She is "impersonat[ing] the woman she thinks she ought to be." Likewise, Frank is pretending to be the nonconformist he--and April--want him to be.

The truth is Frank is relatively content in Connecticut. He likes the idea of family life; he likes prattling on to the Campbells; there are aspects of his job that he finds pleasant and even gratifying. Besides he's not sure he has it in him to do much else other than work at Knox. The vision that comes to mind as April waxes about the virtues of her European plan:

[April] coming from a day a the office--wearing a Parisian tailored suit, briskly pulling off her gloves--coming home and finding him hunched in an egg-stained bathrobe, on an unmade bed, picking his nose.

This, not the supposedly "hopeless emptiness" of middle-class American life, is what really terrifies Frank Wheeler.

But April, having convinced herself that her misery is merely a function of geography, is rapturous about France. And Frank gives in. After all, how much more tantalizing is it to join in April's euphoric excitement and her breathy account of him as the stifled genius than it is to feel like the dreary mediocrity whose touch she recoils from.

Rarely in literature has there been a second honeymoon quite so chillingly portrayed as the one the Wheelers embark upon after they decide to move to France--that is, decide that they will both embrace the same flattering fantasy of themselves. As unromantic as Emma Bovary's affairs, it's a sort of mutually masturbatory arrangement that, underneath all the murmured "darlings" and doors held open and nights of passion, is as unstable and as devoid of real tenderness as any described in Game Theory. Because as we know, and Frank only half-suspects, he is more interested in enjoying April's newly reinstated tenderness and admiration than in going to France.

How this all plays out makes for a deeply disquieting account of modern dysfunction. Not that Revolutionary Road is perfect: It poises uneasily on the brink of satire, wanting to its detriment to have it both ways--the psychological sophistication of realism and the mercilessness of satire, granting nothing to its characters that isn't either corrosive or affect. It is, undoubtedly, a brutal book.

Still, it's a great deal bigger and more ambitious than most of the anti-suburban novels it's so often lumped with. In the vein of many a great 20th century novel, Revolutionary Roadturns the towering Victorian novels on their heads. Without itself being morally obtuse, it sets up a scenario in which the moral questions that preoccupied those authors are largely beside the point. How much of life, Revolutionary Roadreminds us, defies the kind of analysis that parcels out responsibility and blame--and how terrible the realization of that is, because if goodness, or at least its attempt, has so little bearing on happiness, then what can any of us do?

Adelle Waldman is working on a novel called The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P.