At the center of the circle is a woman ahead of her time.
Guns aren’t lawful; Nooses give; Gas smells awful; You might as well live. — Dorothy Parker
Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle movie storyline. And live she did, until her life itself became a long-running suicide note. When she died at 74 in 1967, nearly 40 years had passed since she reigned at the Algonquin Round Table, that fabled shrine in a hotel dining room where New York’s wits practiced their art on one another, and got drunk.
Dorothy Parker was the wittiest of the Algonquin crowd, and the one whose work has survived the best. And probably she was the saddest, too; she never won her true love, drank too much, and her wonderful talent rarely broke free from the wisecracks and the booze.
Her credo: “Let’s go wild tonight! There’s plenty of time to do nothing once you’re dead.” The great achievement of Alan Rudolph’s “Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle” is that it allows us to empathize with Dorothy Parker on her long descent. That is largely because of the performance by Jennifer Jason Leigh in the title role, as a small, pretty, tough alcoholic — a woman who found unhappiness in love affairs and two marriages (to the same man) and spent a lifetime in love with another man, whom she never married.
That was the humorist Robert Benchley, whose short subjects used to play before feature films in the 1930s and 1940s, and who was once as famous as he is now forgotten. I read everything he wrote when I was young, and thought Benchley had to be the nicest, as well as the funniest, man alive (James Thurber was as funny, but not nice). Campbell Scott plays Benchley in “Mrs. Parker” with a detached, almost studious niceness that is just right: If he tried any harder, he’d seem to want to be nice, and of course the Algonquin wits lived in fear of ever seeming to want to be anything.
As the story opens in the 1920s, Parker and Benchley are working for Vanity Fair magazine. Parker is fired because of the caustic tone of her reviews, Benchley resigns in sympathy, and they establish their own partnership, named the Utica Drop Forge and Tool Co. It consists of the two of them sitting at facing desks with twin typewriters, and it is significant that their typewriters are between them: They kept themselves apart with words. “I’m afraid I might lose you,” she tells him at one point, and he replies gently, “You’d have to wear a pretty large hole in your pocket to lose me, Mrs. Parker.”
In New York in the 1920s, before television, the written and spoken word was king, and the members of the Algonquin Round Table were known for their quick verbal skills. A legend grew up around them so potent that even today they are remembered for their wit (even if few people can quote any of it). They met every day for lunch and basically drank right on through until dawn; it is hard to see how they got any work done, but they did, and also hard to imagine how they kept up the level of their conversation, but perhaps they did not: Hours of conversation were distilled in the next morning’s columns into perfectly edited little gems.
Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle is a 1994 American film scripted by screenwriter / director Alan Rudolph and former Washington Star reporter Randy Sue Coburn. Directed by Rudolph, it starred Jennifer Jason Leigh as the writer Dorothy Parker and depicted the members of the Algonquin Round Table, a group of writers, actors and critics who met almost every weekday from 1919 to 1929, at Manhattan’s Algonquin Hotel.
The film was an Official Selection at the 1994 Cannes Film Festival and was nominated for the Palme d’Or. The film was a critical but not a commercial success. Peter Benchley, who played editor Frank Crowninshield, was the grandson of Robert Benchley, the humorist who once worked underneath Crowninshield. Actor Wallace Shawn was the son of William Shawn, the longtime editor of The New Yorker.
Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle (1994)
Directed by: Alan Rudolph
Starring: Jennifer Jason Leigh, Campbell Scott, Matthew Broderick, Peter Gallagher, Jennifer Beals, Andrew McCarthy, Rebecca Miller, Martha Plimpton, Lili Taylor, Gwyneth Paltrow, Heather Graham
Screenplay by: Alan Rudolph, Randy Sue Coburn
Production Design by: François Séguin
Cinematography by: Jan Kiesser
Film Editing by: Suzy Elmiger
Costume Design by: Renée April, John Hay
Set Decoration by: Frances Calder
Art Direction by: James Fox
Music by: Mark Isham
Distributed by: Miramax Films
Release Date: September 7, 1994
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