Herbert Ross’ Literate Touch Will Be Missed

The recent release of the restored version of “Funny Girl” reconfirmed the talents of Herbert Ross, who died last week of heart failure. It was Ross who staged the marvelous musical numbers in Barbra Streisand’s film debut, including the witty re-creations of the Ziegfeld Follies and the memorable New York Harbor climax, “Don’t Rain on My Parade.” Ross’ work on that movie led to his directorial debut the following year on “Goodbye, Mr. Chips,” and he went on to direct two dozen movies over the course of a remarkably prolific career.

Ross started out in the musical theater (where he worked as a dancer, choreographer and director) and in the ballet, so it was natural that music and dance first brought him into the movies. Unfortunately, by the time he directed his first movie in 1969, musicals were already a dying form, but he demonstrated extraordinary inventiveness in finding ways to keep the musical tradition alive at a time when others gave up on it. He made three serious movies about ballet: “The Turning Point,” “Nijinsky” and “Dancers”--as well as a successful pop musical, “Footloose,” and a highly imaginative ‘30s pastiche, “Pennies From Heaven,” inspired by a Dennis Potter British TV series.

I first met Herb in 1974, on the set of “Funny Lady,” the sequel to “Funny Girl.” At the indoor swimming pool at USC, he was staging an elaborate re-creation of Billy Rose’s Aquacade. It was fun to be on hand for one of the last splashy musical sequences that Hollywood would ever produce. I remember Herb spoke knowledgeably and fondly about the old Esther Williams movies that inspired that sequence in “Funny Lady.”

Speaking to him then and on many subsequent occasions, I felt that he epitomized the values of an earlier era in Hollywood; he demonstrated rapier-like wit and matchless urbanity. Many of his best films gave evidence of his sly, sophisticated sensibility.

He encouraged his friends Stephen Sondheim and Anthony Perkins to write “The Last of Sheila,” which was based on the murder mystery games that the two of them concocted for their friends and that Ross often ended up winning. The movie was too specialized to be a box-office success, but its intricately structured plot and sharp-witted satire of the Hollywood crowd made it a cult film par excellence.

That same elegant style brightened “The Seven-Per-Cent Solution” (based on Nicholas Meyer’s clever novel about an imagined collaboration between Sherlock Holmes and Sigmund Freud), “California Suite” (a graceful cinematic interpolation of four Neil Simon playlets set at the Beverly Hills Hotel), and “The Secret of My Success” (a wry Michael J. Fox comedy about corporate shenanigans).

Of course not every one of Ross’ movies achieved that level of sophistication. He worked incessantly, probably because he came late to movies and wanted to make up for lost time. He was over 40 when he directed his first movie, and he told me he was sorry he hadn’t started earlier because he felt film enabled him to bring together all his talents and interests. He was refreshingly modest; he knew that film was a collaborative art, and he bluntly criticized several of his own movies (not a common practice among directors).

But the best of them were gloriously literate. Some critics quibbled, but I still think “The Turning Point” (1977) was a milestone--not just because it helped to popularize the ballet, but because it took women’s lives seriously at a time when Hollywood had virtually forgotten that women existed. Several of his other films--including “Steel Magnolias” and the tangy “Boys on the Side”--also focused on friendships among women, and his romantic films often highlighted relationships between men and women that were defined first and foremost as friendships between equals. That theme first emerged in his film of Woody Allen’s “Play It Again, Sam,” which discovered a marvelous chemistry between Allen and Diane Keaton. Ross reworked this same dynamic in the rambunctious but affectionate sparring matches between Streisand and James Caan in “Funny Lady” and in the scenes between Michael Caine and Maggie Smith in “California Suite,” a fascinating portrait of the tense but loving marriage of a bisexual man and his insecure wife. (Smith won an Academy Award for her performance.)

No doubt these thoughtfully delineated screen pairings of feisty, evenly matched partners in love and work drew some of their inspiration from Ross’ own marriage to Nora Kaye. They married in 1959, when Kaye was giving up her career as a ballerina, and the two of them inspired a chapter in Gail Sheehy’s book “Passages” because they epitomized a couple redefining and reinventing themselves in midlife. Kaye become Ross’ professional as well as personal partner, and he always gave her credit for making tremendous contributions to his most serious movies, like “The Turning Point” and “Pennies From Heaven.” They sometimes bickered affectionately, like a couple in a ‘30s movie, but they were absolutely devoted to each other until Nora’s death in 1987.

Ross’ output dwindled in the last decade, probably because he depended on the kind of scripts that Hollywood just wasn’t producing any more--witty, high-style entertainments that went out of fashion at around the time that musicals died. He upheld a tradition of literacy in his life and his work; he made civilized movies, in the best sense of that word.

It’s a quality that seems ever more precious in a world overrun by thugs.