Maria Cooper Janis Celebrates the 1st Annual Gary Cooper Film Festival at the New Southampton Playhouse
What a great Southampton weekend! The town has always been part of my life since I was 5 years old and visiting my maternal grandmother, Veronica Shields. The house which they built in the 1920s was on Ox Pasture Road, and is still alive and well! But the special glow around this weekend for me was being at the 1st Annual Gary Cooper Film Festival, held in the beautifully renovated Southampton Playhouse. It boasts 4 screens, one of them being a state of the art IMAX theater; beautiful image, exquisite sound. It should be a “destination point” for every Hamptonite, local or visitor. It was a totally new experience for me to absorb my father’s movies on an IMAX screen––the average size is 55’ x 30’––as opposed to even the largest television screens available today.
This is seeing movies the way they were created and meant to be viewed!
You can imagine… Memories sitting with my mother and father, hands plunged into real buttered popcorn and watching the movies of the 1940s and 50s unfold. I am a good many decades past those simple idyllic days but the magic feeling of sitting in a darkened movie theater does not fade!
One can’t put into words the feeling of watching one’s own father up there bigger than life, living, still talking, laughing, weeping, loving a wife, and portraying courage. These are many of the things that we not only admire on the Silver Screen, but hope can carry us through our own lives in the real world.
While signing copies of my books, Gary Cooper: A Daughter Remembers, so many old friends came over to say hello and reminisce with me about personal memories and conversations they had with my father. We laughed with members of the Catena’s Market family about how many dozens of Little Neck clams my father could put away in one sitting! How he would take time to talk with a little boy who wanted an autograph, how he loved to drive out alone toward Montauk looking to photograph Osprey nests, always weaving himself into the fabric of the wildlife and nature he was surrounded by.
The director of the Playhouse, Eric Kohn, selected an important variety of Gary Cooper films to screen on this opening weekend: Ball of Fire, a screwball comedy, the famous western High Noon, and the emotional moving baseball story of Lou Gehrig, The Pride of the Yankees.
Yes, it was a great weekend seeing 3 terrific Gary Cooper movies, but oh so much more than that! Putting my own wonderful, personal, emotional experiences this weekend, aside, those in Southampton who can say “Let’s go to the movies tonight!” are very lucky.
Maria Cooper Janis’s post-screening thoughts on Ball of Fire, The Pride of the Yankees & High Noon.
BALL OF FIRE
This film is well described by delighted critics as a screwball comedy. It was originally titled The Professor and the Burlesque Queen. It gave my father the opportunity to stretch his “comedic chops” in his own subtle ways. He was happy to be working again, after the film Meet John Doe, with his old family friend and co-star Barbara Stanwyck who earned an Oscar nomination for her role as an exotic dancer named Sugar Puss O’Shea. Gary Cooper plays an English professor upgrading encyclopedias with his friends when some gangsters come into the plot and wonderful laughs ensue throughout the movie. I had never seen this on a big screen and the experience was wonderful.
The Pride of THe Yankees
It was an honor, joy and challenge for my father to portray the great New York Yankees baseball player Lou Gehrig. I recommend to anyone interested in baseball Richard Sandomir’s book The Pride of the Yankees: Lou Gehrig, Gary Cooper and the Making of a Classic. In an uncanny way, there is a real emotional resemblance between the 2 men. My father had to try to learn how to handle a baseball bat as a lefty, which he was not. The comment of the Yankee coach Lefty O’Doul to my father when training him, “Coop, you throw the ball like an old lady tossing a hot biscuit.” It was a sobering criticism while he practiced for the role in Sun Valley, Idaho. Sometimes they used a snowball instead of the real thing. Lou Gehrig’s life, and as captured in the film, is a meaningful portrayal of grace under pressure and tremendous courage. The example set by a beloved sports hero who died so young from the disease ALS (Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis) - still today with no cure in sight - is a lesson for us all. His famous farewell speech has become a classic and when my father entertained the troops in the Pacific during World War II, all the soldiers wanted to hear was him redeliver that speech.
HIGH NOON
What else could I add to the myriad of comments of praise for this “simple little Western” as it was originally described. My father won his second Academy Award for portraying Marshall Will Kane who stands up to the four bad guys coming back to town to kill him. It was Grace Kelly’s first screen role and the movie sets up a dynamic contrast between her and Katy Jurado; 2 strong women but in entirely different ways. It is a movie/story watched many times at the White House by several US presidents. It points out the age old dilemma of courage when facing death literally and figuratively. Written by Carl Foreman, he puts a strong spotlight on the morals of human behavior – pluses and minuses.
Again, I must repeat my amazement at the difference it is to experience a film like this on a big theatrical screen as opposed to even a large screen television. The camera pulls the viewer both into the persona of the characters being portrayed and it invites you to really feel the essence of the story – be it comedy, drama or action film – it makes you care about a good story and the all too human characters portrayed.