October 21 | 3 films
Acting and comedic legend Bill Murray joins Turner Classic Movies for a night of films that he’s appeared in along with a personal favorite. He will feature Andrew Muscato’s 2021 concert documentary New Worlds: The Cradle of Civilization, which premiered at the Cannes Film Festival, as well as John McNaughton’s 1993 dramatic comedy Mad Dog and Glory. Closing out the evening will be Jim Jarmusch’s Broken Flowers from 2005. It will be an evening full of behind-the-scenes stories about these very different films, all premiering for the first time on TCM.
Bill Murray is one of the most dynamic actors of our time, with his long career punctuated by different eras. He debuted to audiences nationwide in a breakout role as a cast member on “Saturday Night Live.” As a comedian whose physical hilarity was well-balanced by deadpan delivery, he continued in roles that became part of America’s collective nostalgia, like Carl Spackler in Caddyshack (1980) and Dr. Peter Venkman of Ghostbusters (1984). The 1990s ushered in a time of character complexity, with Murray inhabiting more multi-dimensional roles, from the volatile gangster Frank Milo in Mad Dog and Glory to the cynical weatherman with a heart of gold, Phil Connors in Groundhog Day (1993). The late 1990s and early 2000s brought us Murray in Wes Anderson’s Rushmore (1998) and The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou (2004), Sofia Coppola’s Lost in Translation (2003) and Jim Jarmusch’s Broken Flowers, which all showed Murray as the tragicomic (anti)hero. Then, Murray’s New Worlds: The Cradle of Civilization explored novel territory. His remarkable range paints him as a true Renaissance Man.
Hailing from a large Irish Catholic family, Murray is one of nine children. He first tried his hand at comedy when he joined his older brother Brian Doyle-Murray, who is also an actor, in Chicago’s famous improvisational comedy troupe The Second City, where he met Harold Ramis and John Belushi. The four of them went on to New York to perform in “The National Lampoon Radio Hour,” followed by the off-Broadway “National Lampoon Show.”
Bill Murray finally got his big break with “Saturday Night Live,” filling the role left by Chevy Chase. During Murray’s time there from 1977 to 1980, he received a Primetime Emmy for Outstanding Writing for a Variety Series. The first movie where he had a leading role was Meatballs in 1979, co-written by Ramis and directed by Ivan Reitman. The film proved Murray’s talent translated easily to the big screen, and it solidified a collaboration between Murray, Ramis and Reitman that dominated the 1980s. Murray quickly rose to fame with such comedy classics as Caddyshack, directed by Ramis; Ivan Reitman’s Stripes (1981); and the film that made him a household name, Ghostbusters. The critical acclaim and box-office success of Ghostbusters shot Murray’s stardom into the stratosphere, but he wasn’t entirely comfortable with it.
Though Murray was renowned for his straight-faced comedic timing, he also nurtured a more dramatic side, co-writing and starring in an existential drama called The Razor’s Edge, based on the W. Somerset Maugham book. In fact, Murray only agreed to do Ghostbusters if Columbia TriStar financed The Razor’s Edge. Though audiences at the time perhaps weren’t ready for Murray to take such a dramatic turn, the film nevertheless laid the groundwork for expanding his acting range. After The Razor’s Edge, Murray took a bit of a sabbatical from Hollywood and became a student of philosophy at the Sorbonne in Paris, France for six months.
When he returned to acting, Murray sought out characters who were more than just slapstick funny. He chose projects where the leading men were layered and multi-dimensional. In Groundhog Day, Murray’s sardonic weatherman is destined to live the same day on repeat until he can break free from the cycle. Murray’s fusion of both comedy and drama made him an impactful presence. In Mad Dog and Glory, Murray is the eccentric gangster Frank Milo with a penchant for stand-up comedy. Murray and De Niro both played against type, with De Niro as the reserved, shy cop and Murray as the mercurial mob boss. In the movie, De Niro’s character, Wayne, saves Murray’s Frank during a robbery. Now bonded, Frank sends Wayne a thank-you gift in the form of Uma Thurman’s Glory, a bartender indebted to Frank and beholden to his every command. Complications arise when Wayne falls in love with Glory and tries to free her from Frank’s grasp. De Niro and Murray’s on-screen dynamic is compelling, and Murray is particularly mesmerizing as a mobster. Though it did modestly at the box office, the film endures as a testament to Murray’s craft and ability to play outside of what audiences expected of him.
This trademark duality was taken a step further with his roles in Wes Anderson’s movies, especially in Rushmore and The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, in which he plays protagonists ambivalent about midlife and flailing in fatherhood. Sofia Coppola’s Lost in Translation features Murray as Bob Harris, an American actor past his prime living in Japan and overwhelmed by the culture, reflecting his overall feeling of being unmoored in life. The role earned him an Academy Award nomination. His portrayals showed individuals alienated from the world around them, melancholy, yet still holding a thinly concealed yearning to engage with humanity.
But it was in Murray’s collaboration with legendary indie maverick Jim Jarmusch that he showed audiences what he could really do. Murray has starred in three Jarmusch films, the first being Coffee and Cigarettes in 2003, a collection of black-and-white vignettes. Murray plays a waiter effusively recognized by RZA and GZA of Wu-Tang Clan fame. The creative team’s most recent pairing was in The Dead Don’t Die (2019), a zombie apocalypse movie also starring Tilda Swinton and Chloë Sevigny, with Murray as the head of law enforcement in Centerville, a town taken over by the undead. However, Murray’s performance in Jarmusch’s cult classic Broken Flowers seems his most nuanced to date.
Murray portrays a former Don Juan whose latest girlfriend has left him because he is unable to commit. At first, he retires back to his sofa, resigned to stare aimlessly at the TV. But his idleness is turned upside down when he receives an anonymous letter from an ex revealing he has a 19-year-old son who has run away to find him. Goaded on by his amateur sleuth neighbor Winston, a charming Jeffrey Wright, he launches into a cross-country search of all his former loves, played by such forces of nature as Sharon Stone, Frances Conroy, Jessica Lange and Tilda Swinton. He hopes to solve the mystery of his lost son and his erstwhile lover but what he needed all along was an appreciation of the life that seemed to be passing him by. It is a true journey of the soul. Jarmusch’s understated approach with lingering shots foregrounding Murray against a bleak landscape works in tandem with Murray’s downtrodden character. But deadpan should not be confused with apathy. In Murray’s subtle performance is inner conflict emoted with quite changes in expression revealing that still waters indeed run deep.
With New Worlds: The Cradle of Civilization, a personal favorite of Murray’s, he appears to be entering a new era, fusing art with life. The film is a concert documentary directed by Andrew Muscato and featuring a harmonious blend of literary readings by Murray from Ernest Hemingway, James Fenimore Cooper and Walt Whitman set against classical music by Schubert and Gershwin, amongst others. World-renown cellist Jan Vogler, violinist Mira Wang and pianist Vanessa Perez bring the instrumentation to life, providing a soundscape for Murray’s spoken word. Murray also sings such hits as “I Feel Pretty” from West Side Story and Bruce Hornsby’s “The Way It Is” with childlike abandon.
The idea for the show came from a chance meeting between Murray and Vogler on a flight from Berlin to New York, when Murray marveled at how Vogler bought a window seat for his cello. What began as a mutual appreciation for the arts morphed into a vision of performing both literary masterpieces and pop songs to live audiences in a communion of culture, comedy and catharsis. They took the show on the road, like a bookish, civilized Rolling Stones tour, and audience reactions matched those of rock concerts. In an interview for “Deadline,” Murray said, “The shows, each one of them was an extraordinary experience to perform... and sort of head-shaking after you’d be done because the power of all this material and their playing just kind of knocked people out. They didn’t see it coming. And it was a joy every night we did it and every night the people saw it.”
The film documents the last night of their world tour, a performance that seems mythical against the ancient setting of the Acropolis in Athens. Murray is at once an iconic film legend and a relatable folksy poet, yawping from an ecstatically human place, singing well-loved melodies by Van Morrison and Tom Waits one moment and dancing with the violinist the next. In an interview with Patrick Heidmann for “The Talks,” Murray said, “To be a real artist I think is really about the art of living. The guys who are real artists are people who have figured out the art of living, and that their art is art because they live…And that they are constantly inputting life as opposed to expressing life. It’s more intake than output.” If Murray had become renowned as a tragicomic hero, then Bill Murray in New Worlds: The Cradle of Civilization is a departure from that. Here, he embraces poetry, serenades the audience and expresses a joie de vivre that inspires us all to do the same.
One last note as a tribute to his incredible career. Not only is Bill Murray a film legend, but he’s a bit of an urban legend as well. Stories abound of Murray appearing at parties unannounced, to play tambourine with a band or wash the dishes, popping up at construction sites to do poetry readings and inviting random strangers to sit with him at baseball games. And people always welcome him with open arms, amused that an actor of his stature would fold so easily into the fabric of the everyday. When he leaves, people are delighted with, yes, his charm but also what he has inadvertently taught them about life – to embrace the chance encounter and live in the moment, because every moment could spell magic.
