ALL’S WELL THAT ENDS WELL … OR, UNHAPPILY EVER AFTER (2003)

It’s Oscar Time, so …

I have often said, and you have heard me say it, that a bright film with a mediocre ending is a mediocre film.

Conversely, a medium-good film with a terrific ending is a terrific film.

I have, over the years, watched various pictures and, in a frenzy, gone home to write new endings for them or to congratulate ordinary films with brilliant finales.

Let’s start with Fahrenheit 451, François Truffaut’s version of my novel, filmed in 1966, with some excellent casting: Oskar Werner as Montag and Cyril Cusack as the Fire Chief.

But his terrible mistake was casting Julie Christie in two confusing roles and eliminating Clarisse McClellan, the girl next door; Faber, the philosopher, and the Mechanical Hound.

An almost bright film with a brilliant ending.

The finale, with the fine Bernard Herrmann score, shows the Book People moving in a snowfall through the woods, whispering the lines from all the books they have remembered. This ending has never failed to move audiences. The film ends on this high note, and one leaves feeling you’ve seen more than was really there.

Next, consider Network, one of Sidney Lumet’s finest films, but with an ending—to me, anyway—that has always seemed incomplete.

It’s the story of a network reporter (played by Peter Finch) who announces his imminent suicide. Resultantly, his ratings go up and the network gives him more power, leading to that memorable scene in mid-film where he shouts for people to throw open their windows across the country and yell, “I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take this anymore!”

When his power diminishes, the network has him shot.

At the finale, he lies dead in the television theater.

I left the film with a dreadful feeling of incompleteness and published my own ending in the Los Angeles Times:

If you’re going to kill the Finch character, tell the public, so that on his death night his TV ratings go up again.

The next day, hold his funeral on the evening news with Walter Cronkite. His ratings go up again.

On the third day, you stash his body in a Forest Lawn Cemetery cave and roll a large rock in front of it as millions watch.

A week later, you roll the rock aside, find the tomb empty—and you have a television series.

That was my ending I sent to Sidney Lumet with apologies.

Now consider Rosemary’s Baby, a nice film but with a cowardly finis.

Its last scene finds Rosemary, whose child is Lucifer’s, searching for her lost baby, kidnapped by a witches’ coven in the next apartment.

Breaking in with a butcher knife, Rosemary confronts the coven and stares at a crepe-ribboned crib lying nearby.

The witches urge her, “Rock your child.”

She rocks the crib in which her lost baby cries. The end.

Not for me it wasn’t.

No normal mother would rock the crib. She should seize the baby and race down into the streets, pursued by the witches in rain and lightning.

At the nearest church she should run down the aisle and up onto the altar to lift the baby and plead, “Lord-God—God, take back your son.”

Pull the camera away, up in the church ceiling. The film ends.

So Rosemary’s Baby missed the chance after billions of years to heal the wound between Heaven and Hell, good and evil.

Now let me describe Hecht-Hill-Lancaster forty-five years ago, when they finished Sweet Smell of Success.

They asked me—along with Carol Reed, the fine director of The Third Man—to sit in on a private screening to help them with the last reel.

It is the story of a man played by Burt Lancaster, a true monster, who runs Manhattan lives with a high hand and with rampant malice.

At the finale, his sister and her boyfriend walk away, leaving him high in his penthouse, isolated and in despair.

When the lights came on, Carol and I turned to Lancaster and producers Harold Hecht and Jim Hill and said, “You can’t end the film this way. This man is too monstrous. Learn from the great masters like Lon Chaney that evil must be punished. It’s not enough to have his sister abandon him.”

I went on: “People come to films drowned in reality, leaving behind heart failures, cancer, failed marriages, bad jobs, mean bosses, and future sickness. What they need is not happy endings, but proper endings.

“The proper ending for this film is for the sister or the boyfriend to shove Lancaster off the roof. We watch him go down and down, to smash on the street.

“A proper ending. Not a happy one, but the one that we all wish for that man who is such a beast.”

Hecht-Hill-Lancaster demurred, and I continued, “If you release the film in this form, it will never make a dime because the character, as written and acted, is too terrible. Kill the son of a bitch and then you’ll have a successful film.”

The rest is history. Sweet Smell never regained its cost.

Today, with all the technical facilities available, you could digitalize hands to knock Lancaster off his penthouse. His fall would create an unhappy happy finale. You could re-screen the film and at last make a dime.

Thirty years ago, Sylvester Stallone and director John Avildsen called film critic Pauline Kael and me to MGM Studios to show us their just-finished Rocky.

“How does it end?” they asked. “Does Rocky win the fight or lose?”

Pauline Kael and I, almost in unison, responded. “It doesn’t matter,” we said. “If he wins, he wins—a happy ending. And if he loses, having fought bravely, with his wife rushing to embrace him, you still have a happy ending, because he’s behaved incredibly well.”

Watch Rocky again and see what Stallone and Avildsen decided about the last reel.

Now consider Nicolas Cage’s Oscar-nominated film this year, Adaptation. A better title would be Incompletion.

Adaptation is the story of a cowardly screenwriter and his brighter twin who writes successful screenplays that please the studios. The cowardly twin remains in the shadows, not able to succeed at writing or at life.

At the end, the smart brother dies in the arms of his cowardly twin brother. That is almost the finale of the story as it was played out by Nicolas Cage.

My ending, please, would run like this:

Lying on the road with his smart, wonderful, successful twin, Cage sees that his brother’s jacket lies open and his wallet is half revealed. He feels his hand move to take his own wallet from his pocket and shift it into his dead twin’s coat. He then takes his brother’s wallet so that when the police arrive, he has changed identities.

The cowardly brother now returns to a Hollywood life of success, riches, and perhaps along the way he may learn, given time, not to be a failure.

Which brings us at last to my laying hands on that truly great film, Lawrence of Arabia.

As you recall, we see Lawrence being motored out of Arabia by an army sergeant. A man on a motorbike rushes past them and roars down the road toward the horizon.

You’re supposed to feel that this is the ghost of a metaphor reminding us that somewhere up ahead Lawrence, in England, will be killed on the road.

Better, I thought, if—with some small license—you have Lawrence instead climb on a motorbike, race down the Arabian road, go off into the distance, duplicating at the film’s conclusion what occurs at the start, in England, when you see Lawrence thrown from his bike as he avoids bicyclists on the road.

There you have it. All of my endings.

Oh, yes … When I sent my Network ending to Sidney Lumet, he wrote back:

“Where were you when we needed you?”