Farewell to Nora

I’m interrupting my weekly theme about food and taste trends to reflect upon the death, at 71, of Nora Ephron. Ephron was a well-known screenwriter, director, produced and writer of novels and essays.

She gets most press over such romcoms as Sleepless in Seattle, When Harry Met Sally and You’ve Got Mail. No one’s going to forget the deli scene from WHMS or the whole Empire State Building thing from SIS.

(You’ve Got Mail didn’t click with me perhaps because I so clearly had The Shop Around the Corner in my mind and heart. Although I did get a real kick out of the love of Jean Stapleton’s life being Francisco Franco. “He ran Spain,” as a throwaway line—that’s class.)

No—my favorite of Ephron’s films is My Blue Heaven—an entirely different view of the federal witness protection program than you saw in In Plain Sight. In this classic fish-out-of-water WitSec world, mob informant Vinnie Antonelli (Steve Martin) is relocated to San Diego, given the name of Todd Wilkenson and left to fend for himself.

“Fending” includes hooking up with a posse of Mafia informants (including William Hickey as a strip mall pet shop owner), engaging in various scams and writing his autobiography. In the process he opens up the world for his nebbishy FBI minder (Rick Moranis) and sparks a romance between the latter and a DA (Joan Cusack) whose baseball-player husband just dumped her for his psychotherapist.

Only a woman writing for her own sensibilities would pair Moranis and Cusack—or their characters, Barney Coopersmith and Hannah Stubbs—as a romantic duo. Only a woman with Ephron’s sensibilities would make that work for the audience.

There’s a lot to love about MBH—the baseball sequence where, during the playing of the national anthem, Vinnie teaches one of the DA’s boys how to guard against getting his pocket picked; the scene where Hannah buys a turtle from Hickey to replace the one she accidentally ran through the garbage disposer; or Vinnie’s matter-of-fact testimony about a mob murderer, “Richie loved to use .22s because the bullets are small and they don’t come out the other end like a .45. See, a 45 will blow a barn door out the back of your head and there’s a lot of dry cleaning involved; but a .22 will just rattle around like Pac-Man until you’re dead.”

Two of my favorite bits involve the transformation of Barney Coopersmith through…dance. In the first one, Vinney teaches Barney how to merengue:

And in the second, under the influence of Vinnie’s confidence-boosting emoluments, Barney applies this knowledge to sweeping Hannah off her feet:

(The music also affects Barney’s partner.)

The whole thing is a delight. and you don’t find movie writing or setups like that anymore. I’ll really miss Ephron.