Read Good Shit On Musings

Whether a ditchdigger, an astronaut or a film critic, we’ve all had that moment: Take this job and shove it. We just can’t imagine ourselves getting up and going through another day of work. The thought of hanging it up, accepting the gold watch and retiring early is just too tempting.

In cinema, however, it’s pretty rare to see an actor or actress actually walk away from the business. Plenty are shown the door involuntarily, as has-beens and never-wases find Hollywood to be an unforgiving place. But to walk away from film acting while you’re still a bankable star? Pretty rare.

But some movie stars have hung up their spurs before their time and never (okay, almost never) looked back. In looking over this list of films, we see two gender trends, neither of them very appealing.  There are some beloved older actors who walked away from Hollywood, grown cranky at the changing industry. And we see some younger but still vital actresses who found themselves having to choose between a flagging career and starting a family.

Here’s a look at some of cinema’s most famous retirees, along with the final films that may have pushed them into early retirement.

No list of cranky ex-actors would be complete without Gene Hackman, the character actor’s character actor. Hackman seemed like an irascible old coot even when he was playing Popeye Doyle in the original French Connection at the tender age of 41.

So it’s no surprise Hackman’s battered, take-no-bullshit give-no-bullshit authenticity became even more appealing as he aged.  In the year 2000 alone, he memorably played the eccentric family patriarch of Wes Anderson’s The Royal Tenenbaums and an aging thief in David Mamet’s Heist.

Then came 2004, and Welcome to Mooseport. Hackman played the former President of the United States, who runs for mayor of a small town and ends up embroiled in a political race with a local (Ray Romano) that turns unexpectedly nasty. It’s not a good film, and an enjoyably cranky Hackman performance gets lost in sitcom subplots.

And just like that, at the age of 74, Hackman was done. He now spends his time writing historical novels, and told a GQ interviewer in 2011 that he’d only do another movie if they could shoot it in his house, only had a crew of one or two people, and didn’t break anything while they were there. Somebody should take him up on it.

Sean Connery probably wouldn’t even go that far. The first James Bond walked away over a decade ago from a long and successful career in Hollywood and seems to have never looked back. He left after a flurry of roles that were likely lucrative but not well-received, including The Avengers and First Knight. He was actually quite good in one attempt at serious Oscar-bait acting, Gus Van Sant’s Finding Forrester, but it was an outlier.

The straw that broke the camel’s back was The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen in 2003, a bloated action-fantasy franchise with only the flimsiest connection to the Alan Moore comic book series. Connery’s grandfatherly charm was lost in a mess of bad CGI effects and incomprehensible action. As Allan Quartermain, Connery looks positively pissed off at certain points during the movie.

Not long after the film tanked at the box office, he announced through a spokesman that he would never do another film because he was “fed up with the idiots… the ever-widening gap between people who know how to make movies and the people who green-light the movies.“ Connery has done a couple of voice acting roles, most notably returning to the role of 007 for a From Russia With Love video game, but that’s it.

Carrying more of a question mark next to his name is Jack Nicholson, who has not announced his retirement, but hasn’t made a movie since 2010’s How Do You Know and has no projects in the works. Like Connery and Hackman, he’s expressed distaste with the current state of Hollywood moviemaking.
His part in How Do You Know (itself coming off a three-year break for Nicholson) seems like a favor to his friend, writer-director James L. Brooks, with whom he had worked on Terms of Endearment and As Good As It Gets. Here, Nicholson plays the heavy, a bullying and corrupt financial tycoon who is the father of Paul Rudd’s nice-guy character. One gets the sense that it wasn’t this role that has kept Nicholson away from Hollywood ever since, but it didn’t help.

So, three actors, all able to walk away into retirement while still highly employable in movies, if they weren’t always getting the best roles. It speaks to the power imbalance between men and women in Hollywood that they were able to amass such long, illustrious careers and then leave on their own terms, simply because they tired of the work.

For actresses, it’s often a different story. The examples of well-known actresses going into retirement often feature women in their 30s and 40s, not their 70s, facing both Hollywood’s notorious antipathy towards older actresses and the demands of family.

There is a scene where they are leaving the building where they have just changed their name, and they are laughing and happy. My heart was sad shooting those shots, my heart was sad editing the scene, and my heart is sad every time I see it, because I know this was the first and the greatest mistake they made. I want to yell at them, Why are so happy. Are you crazy?

Istvn Szab

If theres no God, and there never was a God, then why do we miss him so much?
Ivan Sors

///

Istvn Szab is haunted. Born in Hungary in 1938, he began his career as a writer-director right after high school, attending an academy for theater and film, where he cut his teeth on shorts before graduating to features. Before he was 30 years old, he was making films about the intersection of his personal history and the tumult his nation had seen in the twentieth century. He was drawn to the occupation of Hungary by the Nazis during the second world war, the passing of the torch to the Communists, the peoples uprising of 1956; all things that had shaken his homeland and reshaped his own family. These things sound so long ago now, but thats something else that Szab would explore in his work the way history isnt really history, and how were never free from our past or our past selves. Over and over again, Szab would return to the wars that had sent cracks through Europe in the first half of what was supposed to be a century of tolerance and progress, finding new ways to explore what it was like to come of age in such a time. He also became increasingly focused on what wed today call identity politics: the meaning of ones name, faith, heritage, and fortune, and the degrees to which were willing to compromise those things when we tell ourselves such compromises are necessary for our success. In other words, Szab was worried about the high personal cost of surviving in a world that always seemed ready to strike you down, and in 1999, he made a masterpiece about what it takes to keep going: Sunshine.

Sunshine is the kind of historical drama to which one can apply descriptors like sweeping and grandiose without sounding hyperbolic. It deals with the members of the Sonnenschein bloodline, a family of Hungarian Jews, from the late-nineteenth through the mid-twentieth century, and while it technically touches on five generations, three of them form the core of the film. In a move that could have been a gimmick in less capable hands and might have proved disastrous with a less worthy performer, Ralph Fiennes gracefully plays three successive generations of Sonnenschein men: Ignatz, born in the late 1800s and eventually involved in the politics and military operations of World War I; Adam, who reaches adulthood in the 1930s as the Nazis are coming to power; and Ivan, who survives a labor camp and grows up to work for the Communist regime. Szab, who co-wrote with playwright Israel Horowitz, is fascinated the evolution of identity and the tension between assimilation and independence. The name Sonnenschein means sunshine, and its easy to see the association with light, clarity, honesty. Its by light that we see. The film, though, is a look at what happens when identity gradually erodes and the light begins to dim, and it starts with the names. Ignatz, a promising lawyer, is told that he needs a more Hungarian read: less Jewish name if hes going to become a judge, so he decides to change his surname to Sors. His siblings go along with the name change, too: Ignatzs brother, Gustave (James Frain), and their cousin, Valerie (Jennifer Ehle), who grew up in their home after her father died and was raised as their sister. When they change their name, theyre almost giddy with the possibilities before them, and they practically prance out of the government building where they completed the paperwork. But Szab doesnt rejoice with them, and the gentle camera and absence of music lend the moment a kind of sadness. This is the first step in giving away who you are: to forfeit your name in an attempt to fit in. The sunshine has been hidden, and darkness is allowed to seep in. The siblings picked Sors for its sound, but also, ironically, for its meaning: fate.

“There is a scene where they are leaving the building where they have just changed their name, and they are laughing and happy. My heart was sad shooting those shots, my heart was sad editing the scene, and my heart is sad every time I see it, because I know this was the first and the greatest mistake they made. I want to yell at them, ‘Why are so happy. Are you crazy?’”  

— István Szabó

“If there’s no God, and there never was a God, then why do we miss him so much?”
— Ivan Sors

///

István Szabó is haunted. Born in Hungary in 1938, he began his career as a writer-director right after high school, attending an academy for theater and film, where he cut his teeth on shorts before graduating to features. Before he was 30 years old, he was making films about the intersection of his personal history and the tumult his nation had seen in the twentieth century. He was drawn to the occupation of Hungary by the Nazis during the second world war, the passing of the torch to the Communists, the people’s uprising of 1956; all things that had shaken his homeland and reshaped his own family. These things sound so long ago now, but that’s something else that Szabó would explore in his work — the way history isn’t really history, and how we’re never free from our past or our past selves. Over and over again, Szabó would return to the wars that had sent cracks through Europe in the first half of what was supposed to be a century of tolerance and progress, finding new ways to explore what it was like to come of age in such a time. He also became increasingly focused on what we’d today call identity politics: the meaning of one’s name, faith, heritage, and fortune, and the degrees to which we’re willing to compromise those things when we tell ourselves such compromises are necessary for our success. In other words, Szabó was worried about the high personal cost of surviving in a world that always seemed ready to strike you down, and in 1999, he made a masterpiece about what it takes to keep going: Sunshine.

Sunshine is the kind of historical drama to which one can apply descriptors like “sweeping” and “grandiose” without sounding hyperbolic. It deals with the members of the Sonnenschein bloodline, a family of Hungarian Jews, from the late-nineteenth through the mid-twentieth century, and while it technically touches on five generations, three of them form the core of the film. In a move that could have been a gimmick in less capable hands and might have proved disastrous with a less worthy performer, Ralph Fiennes gracefully plays three successive generations of Sonnenschein men: Ignatz, born in the late 1800s and eventually involved in the politics and military operations of World War I; Adam, who reaches adulthood in the 1930s as the Nazis are coming to power; and Ivan, who survives a labor camp and grows up to work for the Communist regime. Szabó, who co-wrote with playwright Israel Horowitz, is fascinated the evolution of identity and the tension between assimilation and independence. The name “Sonnenschein” means “sunshine,” and it’s easy to see the association with light, clarity, honesty. It’s by light that we see. The film, though, is a look at what happens when identity gradually erodes and the light begins to dim, and it starts with the names. Ignatz, a promising lawyer, is told that he needs a “more Hungarian” — read: less Jewish — name if he’s going to become a judge, so he decides to change his surname to Sors. His siblings go along with the name change, too: Ignatz’s brother, Gustave (James Frain), and their cousin, Valerie (Jennifer Ehle), who grew up in their home after her father died and was raised as their sister. When they change their name, they’re almost giddy with the possibilities before them, and they practically prance out of the government building where they completed the paperwork. But Szabó doesn’t rejoice with them, and the gentle camera and absence of music lend the moment a kind of sadness. This is the first step in giving away who you are: to forfeit your name in an attempt to fit in. The sunshine has been hidden, and darkness is allowed to seep in. The siblings picked “Sors” for its sound, but also, ironically, for its meaning: “fate.”

From the first moment I saw Gene Kellys dress shoes splashing through the puddles on that marvelous cutout MGM set to the skintight cat suit gyrations of Olivia Newton Johns hips while she belted Youre the One That I Want, I have personally been a fetishistic slave to the power of bodies in motion on film. When I was a kid, I was captivated by the way that Gene Wilder rolled from geriatric frailty...

From the first moment I saw Gene Kelly’s dress shoes splashing through the puddles on that marvelous cutout MGM set to the skintight cat suit gyrations of Olivia Newton John’s hips while she belted “You’re the One That I Want,” I have personally been a fetishistic slave to the power of bodies in motion on film. When I was a kid, I was captivated by the way that Gene Wilder rolled from geriatric...

Within the last century, and especially since about 1900, we seem to have discovered the processes by which fame is manufactured. Now, at least in the United States, a man’s name can become a household word overnight. The Graphic Revolution suddenly gave us, among other things, the means of fabricating well-knownness. Discovering that we (the television watchers, the movie goers, radio listeners, and newspaper and magazine readers) and our servants (the television, movie, and radio producers, newspaper and magazine editors, and ad writers) can so quickly and so effectively give a man fame, we have willingly been misled into believing that fame well-knownness is still a hallmark of greatness. Our power to fill our minds with more and more big names has increased our demand for Big Names and our willingness to confuse the Big Name with the Big Man. Again mistaking our powers for our necessities, we have filled our world with artificial fame.

Of course we do not like to believe that our admiration is focused on a largely synthetic product. Having manufactured our celebrities, having willy-nilly made them our cynosures the guiding stars of our interest we are tempted to believe that they are not synthetic at all, that they are somehow still God-made heroes who now abound with a marvelous modern prodigality.
Daniel J. Boorstin, The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America (1961)

Kim has mastered the art of taking flattering and highly personal photos of oneself.
promotional copy for Kim Kardashian Wests Selfish (2015)

///

1954, and a time of creation. Marilyn Monroe marries Joe DiMaggio. Bill Haley releases Rock Around the Clock. Sports Illustrated puts out its first issue, and the Miss America pageant is broadcast on TV for the first time. The first nuclear submarine is commissioned, and the first nuclear power station comes online. The territorial excess of the post-war boom is funneled into home appliances, sedans the size of small boats, and the Red Scare. Its when the country starts taking stock of itself and figuring out what kind of century its going to have, now that theyve toppled the Axis and emerged under sunny skies. Its also a tipping point for the way Americans are able to see themselves in the mirror of visual media: in 1946, only 0.02% of American households had a television set, but by 1954, that figure has exploded to 59.4%. More than half of all U.S. homes now had a glowing box in the corner of the living room that let them gaze for hours at the faces of actors, actresses, comedians, composers, authors, emcees, and anyone else who managed to, however temporarily, step over the firmament that separates viewer from viewed, consumer from provider. Its a box that gives you the ability to gawk at famous people that actively encourages you to do this and to daydream about what their lives must be like. Crucially, though, its a device that doesnt just reflect fame, but create it. Get yourself on TV, and you can be a household name, instead of the other way around. In other words, it was the beginning of the era of the self-reflexively famous, and nobody quite knew how to handle it.

That sense of unease, of nervous laughter, is shot through 1954s It Should Happen to You, directed by George Cukor from a script by Garson Kanin. It is, ostensibly, a comedy, but this is a little like saying Romeo and Juliet is about a couple of young kids in love. Its got plenty of laughs, sure. Judy Holliday stars as a woman with aspirations of fame, and she finds herself in a triangle between a scheming executive (Peter Lawford) and an earnest documentarian (Jack Lemmon, in his first major role). Holliday plays her part with sparkle, and Lemmon is so pleasing youd never suspect it was his big-time debut. Part of the misconception can be chalked up to the marketing, too: key art and trailers for the film paint it as a kind of laugh riot or hilarious screwball trip, set against the city that never sleeps. But its a film plagued by worry and colored by darker things, and the comedy is shaped by the storys grim satire of a new generation that seemed to seek fame above all else. What seemed outlandish sixty years ago, though, is now commonplace, and as a result, to modern eyes the film often plays almost flat, and beats that wouldve been surprising to post-war viewers feel instead inevitable. Its a film worth watching for many reasons, but its prescience tops the list.

Gladys Glover (Holliday) seems to come out of nowhere. We meet her wandering in Central Park, and her backstory is only sketched out via an exposition dump when she strikes up a conversation with Pete Sheppard (Lemmon), whos shooting B-roll for a documentary about city life: shes been in the city a couple of years, modeling girdles until she was fired for being a fraction of an inch oversize, and now shes unemployed and struggling to find meaning in her life. She lets Pete film her for a bit, but importantly, shes more infatuated by the idea of seeing herself in an eventual film than she is in anything he has to say. Shes less a person than a force of will; a physical representation of the thirst for notoriety. Shes not malicious, though. Kanin doesnt paint her as a murderer or sociopath. She just wants renown, and she trusts that her desire necessitates worth.

“Within the last century, and especially since about 1900, we seem to have discovered the processes by which fame is manufactured. Now, at least in the United States, a man’s name can become a household word overnight. The Graphic Revolution suddenly gave us, among other things, the means of fabricating well-knownness. Discovering that we (the television watchers, the movie goers, radio listeners, and newspaper and magazine readers) and our servants (the television, movie, and radio producers, newspaper and magazine editors, and ad writers) can so quickly and so effectively give a man “fame,” we have willingly been misled into believing that fame — well-knownness — is still a hallmark of greatness. Our power to fill our minds with more and more “big names” has increased our demand for Big Names and our willingness to confuse the Big Name with the Big Man. Again mistaking our powers for our necessities, we have filled our world with artificial fame.

“Of course we do not like to believe that our admiration is focused on a largely synthetic product. Having manufactured our celebrities, having willy-nilly made them our cynosures — the guiding stars of our interest — we are tempted to believe that they are not synthetic at all, that they are somehow still God-made heroes who now abound with a marvelous modern prodigality.”
— Daniel J. Boorstin, The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America (1961)

“Kim has mastered the art of taking flattering and highly personal photos of oneself.”
— promotional copy for Kim Kardashian West’s Selfish (2015)

///

1954, and a time of creation. Marilyn Monroe marries Joe DiMaggio. Bill Haley releases “Rock Around the Clock.” Sports Illustrated puts out its first issue, and the Miss America pageant is broadcast on TV for the first time. The first nuclear submarine is commissioned, and the first nuclear power station comes online. The territorial excess of the post-war boom is funneled into home appliances, sedans the size of small boats, and the Red Scare. It’s when the country starts taking stock of itself and figuring out what kind of century it’s going to have, now that they’ve toppled the Axis and emerged under sunny skies. It’s also a tipping point for the way Americans are able to see themselves in the mirror of visual media: in 1946, only 0.02% of American households had a television set, but by 1954, that figure has exploded to 59.4%. More than half of all U.S. homes now had a glowing box in the corner of the living room that let them gaze for hours at the faces of actors, actresses, comedians, composers, authors, emcees, and anyone else who managed to, however temporarily, step over the firmament that separates viewer from viewed, consumer from provider. It’s a box that gives you the ability to gawk at famous people — that actively encourages you to do this — and to daydream about what their lives must be like. Crucially, though, it’s a device that doesn’t just reflect fame, but create it. Get yourself on TV, and you can be a household name, instead of the other way around. In other words, it was the beginning of the era of the self-reflexively famous, and nobody quite knew how to handle it.

That sense of unease, of nervous laughter, is shot through 1954’s It Should Happen to You, directed by George Cukor from a script by Garson Kanin. It is, ostensibly, a comedy, but this is a little like saying Romeo and Juliet is about a couple of young kids in love. It’s got plenty of laughs, sure. Judy Holliday stars as a woman with aspirations of fame, and she finds herself in a triangle between a scheming executive (Peter Lawford) and an earnest documentarian (Jack Lemmon, in his first major role). Holliday plays her part with sparkle, and Lemmon is so pleasing you’d never suspect it was his big-time debut. Part of the misconception can be chalked up to the marketing, too: key art and trailers for the film paint it as a kind of laugh riot or hilarious screwball trip, set against the city that never sleeps. But it’s a film plagued by worry and colored by darker things, and the comedy is shaped by the story’s grim satire of a new generation that seemed to seek fame above all else. What seemed outlandish sixty years ago, though, is now commonplace, and as a result, to modern eyes the film often plays almost flat, and beats that would’ve been surprising to post-war viewers feel instead inevitable. It’s a film worth watching for many reasons, but its prescience tops the list.

Gladys Glover (Holliday) seems to come out of nowhere. We meet her wandering in Central Park, and her backstory is only sketched out via an exposition dump when she strikes up a conversation with Pete Sheppard (Lemmon), who’s shooting B-roll for a documentary about city life: she’s been in the city a couple of years, modeling girdles until she was fired for being a fraction of an inch oversize, and now she’s unemployed and struggling to find meaning in her life. She lets Pete film her for a bit, but importantly, she’s more infatuated by the idea of seeing herself in an eventual film than she is in anything he has to say. She’s less a person than a force of will; a physical representation of the thirst for notoriety. She’s not malicious, though. Kanin doesn’t paint her as a murderer or sociopath. She just wants renown, and she trusts that her desire necessitates worth.

Youve heard of a no-win situation, havent you?… Vietnam; this. Albert Brooks, Modern Romance

LaMotta vs. Janiro. There are some ugly fights in Raging Bull, like when Jake LaMotta (Robert De Niro) drops his arms and takes the punishment he thinks he deserves, holding himself upright as his own blood drips from saturated ropes. But not on this night. Jake is the one meting out punishment to Tony Janiro, a young middleweight challenger, and hes doing it almost entirely with blows to the head. His wife Vickie (Cathy Moriarty) had mentioned in passing that Janiro was handsome and Jake, consumed by pathological jealousy, wants to break the kids face for it. When Janiro hits the floor, Jake raises his arms and flashes a malevolent smile in Vickies direction. He aint pretty no more, says a ringside observer.

Then the cycle begins again.

Albert Brooks Modern Romance came out a year after Raging Bull, and at no point does Brooks Robert Cole resort to fisticuffs over Mary Harvard (Kathryn Harrold), his on-again/off-again girlfriend. Raging Bull is a black-and-white period drama and Modern Romance is a contemporary romantic comedy, but the two films play like companion pieces, each a disturbing and unrelenting profile of male jealousy and obsession. Jake exerts power through brute force, every bit the ferocious animal the title implies; Robert resorts to relentless passive-aggression, masking his emotional violence with the assurance that passion dictates his possessiveness. Jake thrashes his opponents in the ring, and turns on his wife, his brother (Joe Pesci), and finally himself. For Robert, the words I love you act like a soft punch that sting in the same way, because they keep him in a relationship that brings joy to neither party, but staves off the possibility that Mary can be with anyone else but him.

For Brooks to smuggle these insights into a comedyand an exceptionally funny one at thatis an achievement that should be respected as much as Martin Scorseses perennial best-of-all-time favorite, but rarely gets the same acknowledgement, if it gets acknowledged at all. (One exception: Stanley Kubrick, who loved Modern Romance so much that he reportedly contacted Brooks out of the blue to ask him how he pulled it off. It sounds absurd until you consider how much Kubricks Eyes Wide Shut taps into the same phenomenon.) Much like Brooks debut feature, Real Life, Modern Romance is a bold act of comic deconstruction, starting with the deliberately blunt title, which isnt about romance any more than the earlier film was about life. Before making movies, Brooks stand-up, short films, and talk-show appearances made delicious sport out of breaking down tired gags, like ventriloquism, celebrity impersonations, and the spit-take. Modern Romance promisesand, in its perverse way, deliversa love story for our time, but it relentlessly exposes the impulses that keep bad relationships going, bonded in perpetual dysfunction.

Brooks wastes no time. In the very first scene, Robert breaks up with Mary, likening their no-win situation to the Vietnam War. Mary rolls her eyes. This has happened before. We dont know how many times theyve broken up and gotten back together before, but Modern Romance opens somewhere in the middle of their relationship, not the beginning of it. And as the film unfolds, we can see plainly why they dont work as a couple. They have nothing in common. She works at a bank and he works as a film editor, and both have trouble even feigning interest in the others job. They fight constantly, which at least leads to great make-up sex. Theres no evidence they even like each other. Robert uses the word love to express a burbling cauldron of ugly emotions; Mary seems so worn down by his relentless entreaties that she keeps coming back.

The relationship would end if not for two related factors: 1. Robert cannot be alone for a second. 2. Robert cannot bear the thought of Mary sleeping with another man. Modern Romance makes hilarious sport of the former in an extended post-break-up where Robert pops two Quaaludes and spends a long night stumbling around his apartment, making phone calls to his assistant editor (Bruno Kirby), arranging a rebound date with a woman he cant even remember (I didnt even think you liked me, she says), and chatting up his pet bird Petey. To continue the Raging Bull analogy, the scene is like the comic equivalent of LaMotta alone in the jail cell, pounding the walls with his fists as if trying to break through the prison of his own conscience. These are metaphorical walls that both men have constructedand in Roberts case, not even a couple of ludes can soften the concrete.