MacArthur Park: Richard Harris

 

 

Yes, it’s kitschy, but can anyone even imagine having such romantic sentiments regarding today’s reconquista MacArthur Park?

(The late Sammy Cahn, long Sinatra’s favorite lyricist, thought otherwise, arguing, “I think one of the real, real geniuses is Jimmy Webb. His ‘MacArthur Park’ is a major piece of work, major. I’d almost compare it to Gershwin’s ‘Rhapsody in Blue’ in size and scope.”)

Jimmy Webb was one of the 1960s’ most talented tunesmiths. Granted, Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II he wasn’t, but he did give us “Up, Up, and Away,” “By the Time I Get to Phoenix,” “Wichita Lineman,” “Galveston,” “Didn’t We,” and “The Worst That Could Happen.”

Richard Harris was not a singer. Rather, the Irishman was one of the three great drunken brawlers of the stage and screen that came over from across the pond in the 1950s and 1960s, along with Welshman Richard Burton (1925-1984) and fellow Irishman Peter O’Toole. And they were all friends.

Like his counterparts above, Harris had a brashly unlimited confidence that allowed him to put over “MacArthur Park,” after the fashion of Rex Harrison and Burton’s speak-song in My Fair Lady and Camelot, respectively.

Harris was initially one of the angry young men of postwar British film, gaining fame in This Sporting Life (1963). Other AYM included Albert Finney in Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1960), and Tom Courtenay in The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner (1962).

Harris was nominated for Best Actor twice: For This Sporting Life and The Field (1990).

A dull and dreary business, this angry young man thing was, as dull and dreary as postwar British socialism, and an English culture in which Noel Coward was alive but burnt out, and there was no one to replace him.

But at least the AYM performers were great talents. America now has its angry, racist multiculturalism, in which talentless blacks and Hispanics are given acting and directing jobs, and MacArthur Park is a place you go to buy drugs and fraudulent identification.