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This is Fresh Air.
I'm David Bianculli.
Today, we're remembering Charles Strauss, the Broadway composer who died last week at age 96.
Collaborating with lyricist Lee Adams.
He won Tony Awards for Best Musical for Bye Bye, Birdie and Applause.
They also wrote the songs for Golden Boy, a musical starring Sammy Davis Jr.
Teaming up with lyricist Martin Charnin, he wrote the songs for Annie.
Even those who seldom see a Broadway show are familiar with some of the songs written by Strauss.
Gray skies are gonna clear up Brush off the clouds and cheer up.
Put on a happy face.
Take off the gloomy mask of tragedy.
It's not your style.
Once upon a time, A girl with moonlight in her eyes Put her hand in mine And said she loved me.
So That was once upon a time, Very long ago.
There are chicks just ripe for some kissing, And I mean to kiss me a few, Man.
Those chicks don't know what they're missing.
I got a lot of living to do.
The sun will come out tomorrow.
Bet your bottom dollar that tomorrow there'll be sun.
Just thinking about tomorrow clears away the cobwebs and the sorrow till there's none.
That's grey and lonely.
I just stick out my chin and grin and say The sun will come out tomorrow.
So you gotta hang on tilt.
Some of the songs written by Charles Strauss.
He started playing the piano at age 10 and graduated from Rochester's Eastman School of Music.
He studied classical music with Aaron Copland and Nadia Boulanger, then met Lee Adams and started writing a more popular style of music.
But before hitting it big in 1960 with Bye Bye Birdie, Strauss had a string of very odd jobs.
He played piano for dance rehearsals and in strip clubs and even wrote background music for Fox movie-tone newsreels.
He wrote the music for the movies Bonnie and Clyde and The Night They Raided Minsky's.
And on the opening credits of the hit 1970s TV series All in the Family, when Jean Stapleton's Edith was seen playing the piano as she and Carol O'Connor's Archie Bunker sang the Those Were the Days theme song, it actually was Charles Strauss who played the piano heard on the soundtrack.
And he also wrote the music, while his Bye, Bye Birdie partner, Lee Adams, wrote the nostalgic lyrics.
Boy, the way Glenn Miller played.
Songs that made a hit parade.
Guys like me, we had it made.
Those were the days.
Didn't need no welfare state.
Everybody pulled his weight.
G.R.O. was sour and great.
Those were the days.
And you knew where you were.
We're going to listen back to two different conversations Terry Gross had with Charles Strauss.
She first spoke with him in 1994.
When you wrote the songs for Annie and now for Annie Warbucks, did you have to write in a range that you were confident a kid could sing?
Well, that's really an interesting question because yes and no.
The yes is a part of my musical background.
I know what kids' ranges and sopranos and tenors are.
The no part is that I wanted to squeeze a little bit more out of them, because the emotional part of the music is when kids sing high.
They scream.
You know, I did it in Bye Bye Birdie.
And in Bye Bye Birdie, they sang notes in the telephone hour that they didn't think they could sing.
And actually, I had learned a lot of that.
I used to work for Frank Lesser.
I was his assistant for two years.
And I remember when Frank was testing people for range, he would often have them sing the From Bushel and a Peck.
From Bushel and a Peck.
And because he would put it in a key with the pianist, that it would be out of their range.
They had to go... But because they were making fun, they...
Could or could not hit it.
Had you said sing that note legitimately in a song like I don't know If I Loved You or something they would have said they can't reach it.
But when they were playing these characters, they could.
So I devised, it's not my own invention, or maybe it is, I don't know.
These kids would come in and I would just have them sing happy birthday.
Once they passed the other thing, I would have them sing a song that they didn't have to worry about anything.
And so they, they would happy birthday, happy birthday.
See, and very often they found that they could reach notes which on their resumes they couldn't reach at all.
And that was the sound I wanted.
So I did write for that, in particularly in a song like Hard Knock Life, and in Tomorrow, the song Tomorrow.
Let me move to the first show that you did.
That was a real hit, one of the Broadway classics, and that's Bye Bye, Birdie.
I had to tell you I was listening to the album again last night and I hadn't heard the score in a long time.
And I was just shocked to realize that I remembered words to songs...
When I'd completely forgotten the song existed, like Normal American Boy.
I mean, I haven't thought about that song in years and I realized God, I know all the words to this.
And I bet so many people have that reaction when they hear songs from Bye Bye Birdie.
Yes, fortunately they do.
It's a very, very much performed show.
At the time, Lee Adams and Mike Stewart and I wrote it.
We wrote it because it was offered us, you might say.
We would have written, I guess, almost any show that was offered us.
It actually wasn't even in that shape.
It was just to be a show about teenagers.
And prisons.
I don't know.
Everybody does it.
It's incredible.
And it keeps picking up in performances.
I think we would have said, oh, let's do that show.
But at the time, it was just... It was actually even a little strange.
It was a bit of an embarrassment, in a funny way, to uh, to uh to me and to mike because, well to me, particularly because i had uh uh, i'd been in serious music all my life, i'd studied, uh classical music, i was embarking on a serious music career And that this would be the first opportunity that I'd have for a major public hearing.
And then that we had this silly name, Bye Bye Birdie.
It was not the show that I wanted to write which taught me something about myself, which is I don't know where the hell I am half the time.
Let me ask you about writing the telephone hour from Bye Bye Birdie.
And this is a series of phone conversations that the teenagers are having with each other.
And it's not a straightforward song.
I mean, you're basically setting a series of conversations to music, with little interruptions and phones ringing.
So what were some of your considerations when you were writing the music for that?
Well, you know, before I just answer, that I have four kids and it's come back to haunt me because I have four telephone lines and it's still every second everybody's on the phone.
Anyway, beside the point, my considerations were, first of all, that it was rock and of its sort.
It is rock music, though such an innocent sort that you know I don't like to listen to it and say I'm Mick Jagger or anybody like that.
But it was rock and and and.
Uh, I paid attention very strongly to the guitar chords.
You know that all guitarists play on it.
You know, a lot of rock music in those days particularly was very... There were certain patterns.
It became patterned in a way.
And I did model it on that.
But then I used a lot of.
I used a lot of changes of time and a lot of interjections, which is into the exact rock beat.
But I kept the beat going very much.
And then I used just, you know...
Lee and I sat and kind of carved it out together hi, and you know the things did, they really get pinned.
Well, here's the telephone hour from Bye Bye Birdie music by my guest, Ross Faust.
Did they really get pinned?
Did she kiss him and cry?
Did he pin the pin on?
Or was he too shy?
Well, I heard they got pinned.
I was hoping they would.
Now they're living at last.
Going steady for good.
Hello, Mr. Hankel.
This is Harvey Johnson.
Can I speak to Penelope yet?
What about Kim?
Not at all.
He's too thin, she's too tall.
Hello, mrs miller.
This is harvey johnson.
Can i speak to deborah?
That's the telephone song from the Broadway musical Bye, Bye Birdie, with lyrics by Lee Adams and music by Charles Strauss.
You studied with Nadia Boulanger.
Did she give you any advice about pop music versus classical music?
Well, oddly enough, she did.
This woman was the great musician of our generation in many ways.
And her greatness was that she was a master musician, analyst not only of music, but a psychoanalyst in her own way.
And she used to hear the music of her students, and she was able to isolate it.
She was able to shine a spotlight on what was you and what was watered-down Stravinsky and I remember when I worked with her, she asked to hear everything I'd written and I played her my sonata and my concerto.
She said, well, what else, what else, what else?
And I said, well, that's it.
She said, well, no, what about your student pieces?
And I played her some of them, and then anything else?
And I said well, there was my parents, who were never into serious music at all, though they were very proud of me.
I used to come home from college and play them, all these pieces that sounded like watered-down bar talk really, but they were very serious kind of things.
I was really, you know, into it.
But I remember writing a piece that I considered my party piece, that I could play, that they could show off to my aunt.
I wrote this piece and it was really you know, I look back at it today kind of saucy or something.
It was very lighthearted.
And they loved it.
Everybody liked it.
So it became my piece.
And, uh...
I played that for her, which I very rarely.
I didn't do that for anybody except you know a couple of relatives.
And she said, ah.
And she said, well, what else?
And I said well, I really, Oh.
I laugh because it was a funny moment in my life.
I said, I wrote this little song for him called Welcome Home, Able-Bodied Steven Strauss.
And she said, may I hear that?
Oh, I said, I could.
Oh, she said, please.
And so there was this venerable woman.
I played this silly song.
She said, I see.
She said, anything else?
And I said...
Well, I said... This makes me laugh.
I said I used to go out with a girl.
I really liked her.
Her name was Janet.
And we lived on the Upper West Side of New York.
And I wrote this song.
It was a joke called Moon Over 83rd Street.
She said, play this for me.
Here I am in Paris, you know, with an intimate of Stravinsky's and every American composer that you could think of having studied with this great woman.
So I played Moon over 83rd Street.
And she said, ah, good.
Now we go back to this whatever.
So we went back to Towards the end of my thing.
She said to me something that nobody had ever said to me.
She said, you have a great talent for light music.
May I make a request?
Sure.
Could you sing one of the songs that you played for her?
LAUGHTER
Wait a second.
No, I can't sing that one.
This is the funniest interview I've ever done.
Moon over 83rd Street, with shrafts right below.
Moon over 83rd Street, my heart's all aglow.
You, Janet, in the lamplight, I hear something cold.
I hear something dull.
I'm yours, body and soul.
I think that was the last one.
It was meant partly as a jest.
I mean, you know, but...
That was it.
There's a first performance for you.
But it helped you find out that that's what you should be doing is writing pop tunes.
That was her genius.
That's why I can laugh at it.
I can also laugh at it because I've had some successful shows.
But her genius was really taking a young kid like me.
I was quite young when I was there.
I was around 18 or so.
And...
I know from my own experience with my own children what it is to be searching for an identity.
And she, in her soft, brilliant way, was able to contribute to my identifying who I was.
I want to close with the story behind one of your most famous songs, and this is the song from Annie Tomorrow.
Tell us about writing this song what you intended when you wrote it, and this song has really taken on a life of its own.
This song seems to alternate between major and minor keys.
Yes, it does.
Well, there are a number of feelings I have about the song.
The first one always had been and still stays with me.
It's the one song in this show of a personal nature in the show that could not have been written in the 30s.
I could say the same perhaps for Hard Knock Life.
But Hard Knock Life was a bit of dramatic music where I was kind of outside it in a way.
But here's a song of a girl during the Depression and this song definitely could have only been written in the 70s, the harmonies and the kind of melodic.
If nothing else.
I mean, I didn't think the show was going to be successful, but I certainly felt as though critics were going to say now wait a second.
How could they write this?
Everything else was, we'd like to thank you, Herbert Hoover, and I don't need anything but you.
They were kind of pastiches, using Harry Warren and Cole Porter and those kind of Gershwin composers as the filter, so to speak.
But that song, no.
And it was just out of another era completely.
So that was my first thing about it.
The second thing about it was that nobody could sing it because it was so rangy.
And the third thing about it, which is... It's just curious.
I've worked with a number of collaborators... though I've worked mostly with Lee Adams.
But, you know, I've done a show with Sami Khan, with Alan Jay Lerner, with Richard Maulby.
I mean, there have just been a lot of them.
Stephen Schwartz in my life.
Though not those particularly, but all the collaborators along the way.
I had the song and I played it for many of them.
And they all said, yeah, okay, what else do you have?
And Martin and I were looking for a song of hope at that moment.
And I played him.
Actually, it wasn't a whole song.
I had written it for a movie. this theme for an industrial film that I did.
I always liked the theme and Martin picked up on it.
I had no idea.
I certainly didn't think it was going to be a big success.
I did think that it got an awfully big hand in the theater when Andrea sang it, but I thought it was the set.
Martin had made a nice move with the set that had changed.
She went behind and then she wasn't there.
So I always thought, gee, they're applauding that set.
So this is a trunk song that every lyricist you work with rejected, and it finally went on to be a big success.
At that point, every lyricist, yeah.
Right.
Well, let's hear it.
And let me say it's been a pleasure to talk with you.
Thank you very much for joining us.
Oh, thank you, Terry.
For me, it's great.
The sun will come out tomorrow.
Bet your bottom dollar that tomorrow There'll be sun.
Just thinking about tomorrow Clears away the cobwebs and the sorrow Till there's none.
When I'm stuck with a day that's grey and lonely, I just stick out my chin and grin and say oh, the sun will come out tomorrow.
So you've got to hang on till tomorrow.
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We're remembering composer Charles Strauss, who died last week at the age of 96.
He wrote the music and won Tony Awards for the Broadway hits Bye Bye Birdie, Annie, and Applause.
One of his lesser-known works is the 1964 musical Golden Boy.
It was based on the 1937 play of the same name by Clifford Odets, who also wrote the musical adaptation.
The 1964 musical starred Sammy Davis Jr as a man who breaks out of Harlem by becoming a prizefighter.
Terry Gross spoke to Charles Strauss again in 2002, when Golden Boy was being revived as part of the City Center Encore series.
Great American Musicals in Concert.
They began with one of the songs from the show called Night Song.
The singer is Sammy Davis Jr and the lyricist is Lee Adams, who previously had collaborated with Strauss on the 1960 musical Bye Bye Birdie.
¶¶
Summer, not a bit of breeze.
Neon signs are shining through the tired trees, Lovers walking to and fro.
Everyone has someone And a place to go.
Listen, Hear the cars go past.
They don't even see me Flying by so fast.
They are moving, Going who knows where.
Only thing I know is I'm not going there.
Where do you go when you feel that your brain is on fire?
Where do you go when you don't even know what it is you desire?
Listen Charles Strauss, welcome back to Fresh Air.
Is there a story behind writing night songs?
A very intimate story, and that is I remember lying on the grass in the park looking up at the skyline in New York, saying I wish I could be there and I wish I had some friends.
Wish you could be where?
Oh, way up on top.
Oh.
So you were yearning while writing this song about yearning?
I was yearning, and I was remembering that period of my life very strongly.
How were you first brought in to do the music for Golden Boy?
Well, it's really because of the producer, a man by the name of Hillard Elkins, who was a real operator.
And he somehow got Sammy Davis to agree to do it if Clifford Odets did it.
And then he called Clifford and said, would you do it as a musical if Sammy Davis did it?
And then he called us. and said, would you do it if Clifford Odess and Sammy Davis did?
And we all said, gee, that would be great if, if, if.
And he was able to, in the manner of agents and producers, convince everybody that it was going to happen, and it did happen.
Sammy also was very, very interested in becoming a serious actor and had the build and the drawing power for this role.
It's always been a great star vehicle.
Sammy agreed to do it.
He, because he was such a highly paid star, he did something which is very unusual.
I don't know whether I would have accepted it today, but that is.
He maintained legal approvals of every word and every note of music.
Let's play a song from the original cast production with Sammy Davis singing.
This is a song called I Want to Be With You.
Sammy Davis Jr., as the boxer, falls in love with a white woman in the 1964 version of Golden Boy.
I'd like you to describe the context that the song is performed in in the musical.
This particular scene where they sing I Want to Be With You caused us to receive a lot of venomous mail, particularly in Philadelphia, where we opened.
As a matter of fact, after the show opened, Lee Adams and I had to have bodyguards actually walk us to the hotel.
We didn't think it was anything much.
We just thought it was two people.
I mean, we were aware one was black and one was white, but we didn't think it would arouse people.
So, And this song for me and Lee was a particularly interesting one, because I have a serious music background and yet I've played in jazz groups and jazz is part of my nature.
I tried very hard in this to combine any depth that I might have as a composer with a feeling for jazz.
And I felt in a certain way that I had succeeded.
I'm very proud of this song.
But it was also because it was not only a passionate moment in the play, but I was aware that it was a passionate moment where the lovers themselves, a la Romeo and Juliet, were really leaping over a great hurdle.
They weren't aware of it or they were I mean, nobody talks about that kind of thing in one way, but they leaped this hurdle.
And so the song was a very important one for me, where they were both finally able to express their passion as two people for each other.
Well, let's hear the first part of this song.
And this is Sammy Davis Jr. from the original cast recording of Golden Boy.
Launa, Lana and Joe.
Somehow it sounds so right.
Somehow you feel what I feel too.
I wanna be with you.
I wanna be with you.
I wanna be with you After all the nights of wanting you, Lying there, loving you, hating you.
Tonight I'm touching you, holding you World.
You're gonna see, We'll make out somehow.
Here's my girl and me.
They can't hurt us now.
We're gonna have it all.
Every day, Lana.
Life can be so great for us.
Here's our chance.
It's not too late for us.
Grab it fast, or life won't wait for us.
Sammy Davis Jr.
From the original cast recording of Golden Boy, with music composed by my guest, Charles Strauss, lyrics by Lee Adams.
Did you get a sense of what it was like for Sammy Davis to be the subject of controversy in real life because he was married to My Brit, a white woman, and to, at the same time, be the subject of controversy because he was portraying on stage a black man in love with a white woman?
It was going on in both his stage life and his real life.
Sure.
I did have a real sense, particularly towards the end of our run after...
No, it was before he went to London with the show.
We both marched in Selma and I think we were both drunk and we kind of got to know one another.
I learned a lot about Sammy and his time in the U.S.
Army where he was pummeled and other soldiers urinated on him.
He had in him a great great deal of suffering and he turned whatever hurt or anger into an intense desire to be loved by everybody.
And yet part of him also wanted to be in that white world.
He was a most complex man.
Composer Charles Strauss speaking to Terry Gross in 2002.
He died last week at the age of 96.
More after a break.
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I'd like to hear what it was like when you had to follow Sammy Davis Jr around Vegas playing him demos of your new songs so he could give them his approval.
Well, we played the songs and invariably Sammy was late.
Lee Adams in particular was not a late owl.
And he would say, I'll meet you after the show at one in the morning.
And we would be lucky sometimes if he got there at 2.30.
And then we would play the songs in front of the chorus girls.
He was constantly partying, Sammy.
And we would play these songs in that atmosphere all the time.
And I must tell you, at that point in our lives, we were very timid, particularly me.
And I was the one that was playing it and singing them.
So we did that.
He would go out and play music eight, nine holes of golf or something, and then we would meet him in the steam room to discuss a scene.
And the first time I met Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin and that whole bunch I think Joey Bishop was there too we were all naked, which is an odd thing to add to my composer's resume.
There were all kinds of odd incidents like that.
So when you first met Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin and all those guys naked in a steam room, were you also expected to demo your songs for Sammy Davis?
No, no.
That was a – this would be a part of Sammy.
That's typical of him and probably partially meaningless to anybody else.
He brought me down there.
He said he wanted to see me for a conference.
And I remember one of the things, you know, we all introduced ourselves around.
Believe me, I was not as proud of my physique as they of theirs.
And so I was and he said, this is my composer, Charles Strauss.
Oh, hi, Charlie.
You know, and it was basically in my opinion, looking back, that he wanted to show them that he had a composer, a Broadway composer, who had written Bye, Bye Birdie.
That was his composer.
And I remember asking him later, why do you... I don't say this is my actor, Sammy.
Why do you say this is my composer?
That was one of the times that he didn't argue the point with me, but I think he saw the emptiness of having me down there.
Although, by the way, it's always made an amusing story, and a true one.
But it was basically a kind of...
His day in the sauna with the guys, you know, I was the drop-in guest.
Charles Strauss speaking to Terry Gross in 2002.
We couldn't end this tribute without considering the impact of perhaps his most enduring musical.
In 2010, Terry spoke with the rapper Jay-Z about how one of the songs from Annie inspired his own, distinctly different interpretation.
Let's talk about another one of your tracks.
I want to play Hard Knock Life, which really surprised me when I first heard it, because you sample the song Hard Knock Life from the Broadway show Annie, which I thought was a real surprise, surprising choice.
To say the least.
Yes, to say the least.
So how did you decide to use that?
Well, what happened was my sister's name is Andrea Carter and we call her Annie for short.
So when the TV version of the play, you know, came on and it was like there's a story called Annie.
I was immediately drawn to it, of course, is my sister's name.
Like, what is this about?
So, you know, I watched it and I was, you know, I was immediately drawn to that story.
And, you know, those words instead of treated, we get tricked instead of kisses, we get kicked.
It immediately resonated with me.
So you know, fast forward.
I'm on the Puff Daddy tour and I'm about to leave stage and a DJ by the name of Kid Capri plays this song.
This track, no rap on it, just instrumental.
You know, it stopped me in my tracks.
It immediately brought me back to my childhood and that feeling.
And I knew right then and there that I had to make that record and that, you know, people will relate to the struggle in it and the aspiration in it as well.
So let's hear the song and then we'll talk a little more about it.
So this is Hard Knock Life, Ghetto Anthem by Jay-Z.
Take the bass line out.
Uh-huh.
From standing on the corners bopping to driving some of the hottest cars New Yorkers ever seen.
For driving some of the hottest verses rappers ever heard.
From the dope spot with the smoke lock cleaning the murder scene.
You know me well from nightmares of a lonely cell.
My only hell was since when y'all niggas know me to fell.
You know it's hell when I come through The life and times of Sean Cardin in Volume 2
That's Hard Knock Life, ghetto anthem by my guest Jay-Z.
So you tell a great story in the book about how you got the rights to use that song, to use the song from Annie Hard Knock Life.
Would you tell the story?
Yeah.
Well, I mean, we got the rights already, so it was a bit late.
Because I exaggerated a touch.
You know it's typical when you have to clear a song, you have to send it a sampled song.
You send it to the original writers and they grant you permission and you pay a fee for that permission.
You know, with some writers, their art is, for them, very important.
So it has to be the right sort of attitude and the right take and the emotion on the record has to fit.
You know what was originally intended.
So we're having difficulties clearing the sample.
And I wrote a letter about how much it meant to me.
You know what it meant to me growing up and how I went to like a Broadway play, which was an exaggeration.
I saw it on TV and, you know, we got the rights.
Jay-Z speaking with Terry Gross in 2010 about his Hard Knock Life ghetto anthem.
When Terry talked to Charles Strauss back in 2002, she asked him about that version.
How did you find out that Hard Knock Life was going to be sampled for a rap record?
I found it out just through hearing it at my publisher.
But I'll tell you something.
He said something.
I never met Jay-Z.
Or as Andrew Lloyd Webber said in a phone call to me, he said, Jay Zed recorded the song of yours.
I thought that was wonderful.
And I dropped in Andrew's name too.
He said something in the liner notes that it was gritty.
He said it was gritty and he felt that that was the way black people felt in the ghetto.
And the fact is, when we were working on Annie, it was the first song that I had written the music for.
Martin and I had never gotten, Martin Charnin and I had never gotten together.
We were old friends, but that was the first song we wrote.
And I wanted that song to be gritty.
I didn't want it to be a fake.
I wanted it to show these desperate times and these maltreated girls, etc., etc.
So when he picked up on that, I was very proud of myself for that reason alone.
Charles Strauss speaking to Terry Gross in 2002.
The composer of the music for Bye Bye Birdie, Applause, and Annie died last week.
He was 96 years old.
Coming up, critic-at-large John Powers reviews Mission Impossible, The Final Reckoning.
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Mission Impossible The Final Reckoning is the eighth and reportedly final installment in the action-adventure series starring Tom Cruise, who plays the head of a secret government team that does what the CIA cannot do.
In this latest installment, the crew must try to stop rogue AI from wiping out humanity.
Our critic-at-large, John Powers, has seen all seven of the preceding Mission Impossible pictures, plus the TV series that preceded it.
He says this latest effort is a crazily entertaining monument to its star.
Pop culture has long had a tendency toward bloat.
The catchy two-minute singles of the 1950s gave way to the laborious concept albums of the 60s.
The slim, mind-blowing novels of Philip K. Dick and J.G.
Ballard led to the doorstops of Stephen King and Neal Stephenson.
And then there's Mission Impossible, which began in 1966 as a tautly unpretentious hour-long TV series with a fantastic theme by Lalo Schifrin.
In 1996 it became a 110-minute movie with a megastar actor, Tom Cruise, and an auteur director, Brian De Palma, who larded its silly story with big, gaudy action scenes.
Now, seven sequels and three decades later, we have Mission Impossible, The Final Reckoning, the two-hour and 49-minute conclusion to the nearly as long Mission Impossible.
Dead Reckoning, Part 1.
Pictures so grandiose, they require a colon and an em dash just to write their titles.
Predictably, this new movie is overblown, inanely plotted, clotted with expository dialogue and boundlessly self-congratulatory.
But you know, it's also fun to watch.
Flaunting its big budget.
We zoot from tourist London to Norwegian snowscapes to sun-blasted South Africa.
This souped-up thriller offers the irresponsible escape that most of us want from Hollywood blockbusters.
As the action begins, the world is being threatened by the Entity, a nasty piece of AI that's going to annihilate humanity in four days' time.
Naturally, our hero Ethan Hunt, that's Cruise, wants to stop both the entity and the velvety villain Gabriel, played by Isai Morales, who seeks to control it.
Ethan enlists his impossible mission team.
There's tech whiz Luther, that's Ving Rhames, Simon Pegg's jokey field agent Benji, and the recent addition Grace, a one-time thief played by Hayley Atwell, who joins the stream of talented B-list actresses that Cruise seems comfortable with.
The story is mainly racing around toward a gizmo hidden in a submarine away from the CIA, which foolishly wants to stop Ethan.
Still, there's plenty of time for bombastic dialogue.
Here, the righteous Luther reassures Ethan that he's doing good work.
Not that Ethan needs reassuring.
Reporting directly to President Angela Bassett, he's confident as ever.
I need you to trust me.
One last time.
Because this is purportedly the last installment unless it makes a fortune, of course the final reckoning works hard to make the whole series cohere and give it emotional heft.
We see flashbacks to stunts from earlier movies Cruise looks so young and callbacks to deaths of characters who've been lost along the way.
Yet because Mission Impossible storylines have always been unabashedly harebrained, such stabs at depth ring hollow.
This isn't like the second season of Andor, in which we feel the weight of characters dying because they're sacrificing themselves for a cause.
Nor does the Mission Impossible series possess any perceptible cultural resonance.
James Bond was an icon of both the British Empire and a certain dated brand of masculinity.
He helped shape our culture.
Not so Ethan.
Although Bond had no real inner life.
Sorry, Daniel Craig, compared to Ethan, he's positively Dostoevskian.
We at least knew 007's snobberies, cruelties, and pleasures.
Gambling in Monaco, drinking martinis shaken not stirred, sleeping with women, then killing them.
What Cruise, and therefore Ethan, lives for is eye-popping stunts.
And it's been so since the first Mission Impossible had him clinging to the outside of a high-speed train roaring through the channel from England to France.
The final reckoning boasts two gigantic action sequences an underwater bit that could have been spectacular were Christopher McQuarrie a better director, and a genuinely bravura climax that finds Cruise holding onto the wing of a biplane as it buzzes through and above the Blyde River Canyon in South Africa.
It's this scene that everyone will remember.
And, of course, they'll talk about Cruise doing this stunt himself.
Cruise has been on top for over 40 years, as long as John Wayne, longer than Cary Grant.
He's not a great actor, but he is a terrific movie star.
Though, starting to look his age at 62, he still possesses the boyish energy and commitment of his younger self.
Whether sprinting past Big Ben, diving into icy waters without a wetsuit or simply letting the movie idolize him, Cruise is playing hero ball.
And you know what?
He's really good at it.
John Powers reviewed Mission Impossible, The Final Reckoning.
On Monday's show, we feature our interview about the life and legacy of Sly Stone.
Questlove talks about his documentary, Sly Lives, a.k.a.
The Burden of Black Genius, on Hulu.
Questlove won the Oscar for another of his music documentaries, Summer of Soul.
Hope you can join us.
Fresh Air's executive producer is Danny Miller.
For Terry Gross and Tanya Mosley, I'm David Dean Poole.
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