'Have You Seen...?'

by David Thomson

  This is again a collaboration between Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dali, though I think that Buñuel was by now the leading force—and years later, under the godly Franco, Dali was moved to denounce the film’s anti-Catholicism. I like L’ge d’Or, and I am fascinated by the way in which its imagery of gamekeepers and orchestral conductors brings not just René Magritte to mind, but many things in La Règle du Jeu—don’t forget that the man in L’ge d’Or is played by Gaston Modot, the actor who did such a fine job as the frustrated gamekeeper Schumacher in Renoir’s final film of the thirties.

  It would be easy to claim mere coincidence, but certain gestures of the gamekeeper figure are so resonant and the role of the conductor is the inner music in La Règle du Jeu. The Renoir film is closer to orgy or abandon than you might think. Just as I would claim that Alfred Hitchcock used his memories of Portrait of Jennie in Vertigo, so I suspect that Renoir had been stirred by L’ge d’Or. And I am, too—apart from which I am a dedicated believer in Buñuel. But, truth to tell, if I had seen this in 1930, I think I would have still found the island opening fussy, just as I feel only literary shock in the final allusions to the Marquis de Sade.

  Whereas the shock in Un Chien Andalou is always in the imagery and the editing, in the sublime transitions, and in the way serene inconsequence keeps blooming with ugly, awkward, hard-on meanings. L’ge d’Or may be a surreal classic, funded by the Vicomte de Noailles, with Jacques Brunius as assistant director and a cast that includes Max Ernst, Pierre Prévert, and Lya Lys as the woman. But I continue to find Un Chien Andalou more magical and expressive, and a greater clue to the traps and springboards in Surrealist film.

  Aguirre, Wrath of God (1972)

  Long before its ending, you feel the momentum of this hypnotic film—like a great falls on the river that cannot be avoided—carrying us over the edge. But for what? Is the title, and the last tableau, ironic, mordant, a warning? Or is it exultant?

  First things first: It is 1560, and we are with a party of conquistadors in Peru. The leader is named Pizarro (we think we know there was such a man), and he sends a party of forty down the river on a raft. They are looking—so they say, so they think—for El Dorado. Ursua (Ruy Guerra) heads the forty, with his wife, Inez (Helena Rojo). Ursua looks Spanish. But his lieutenant, Aguirre, looks and sounds like Klaus Kinski. There is a priest, Gaspar de Carvajal (Del Negro) and a nobleman, Guzman (Peter Berling). Aguirre has a fifteen-year-old daughter, Flores (Cecilia Rivera).

  Things do not go well. There are Indian attacks. Ursua is killed. Inez disappears. Illness and poison arrows pick them off one by one. But the raft is left, with the crooked figure of Aguirre in command, despite the swarming mass of small monkeys, announcing himself as the Wrath of God, with plans to found a dynasty. It is a superb image, and it seems to me mean-spirited to say that it is simply the ultimate disaster. In the blazing eyes of Aguirre, it is a triumph that he has organized—it is madness run riot. The monkeys are his audience. And it is very hard to detect a demurring spirit in Werner Herzog’s film. Whatever the intent of the other conquistadors, their sensible desire for gold and silver, slaves and power, you feel that everything has worked out as Aguirre wished. For the last image is megalomania in excelsis. And from Herzog’s point of view, no matter that he came back from the jungles with a very viable movie, and his own greatest art-house hit, you do feel that some exultant nihilism was ready for only the film to survive. Herzog, Kinski, and everyone else might still be going up the river.

  I put it that way because I have never been able to feel that Herzog was much interested in sixteenth-century colonialism, its pluses and minuses. Nor is this film even—like Apocalypse Now, say—a study in how differing manias struggle to command an expedition. Aguirre’s madness is far too sweeping and ultimate, and I think Herzog found it magnificent, just as he found Klaus Kinski very dangerous as an actor or a companion, but irresistible.

  Aguirre, Wrath of God is not an adventure film. It’s not a parable about power. Rather, it is a game played on the threat of making a film as daft and giddy as this. In Aguirre, we see so many of Herzog’s future beasts, including the grizzly bears, the ones that man should not talk to. But in this era, the 1970s, Herzog was locked in a wrestling match with Kinski in which each one, I think, played with the idea of killing the other. The spectacle (it was filmed by Thomas Mauch) is stunning, but it’s like watching two mad boys in a dare contest. You wonder if you shouldn’t shoot them both.

  Air Force (1943)

  Major General Henry (Hap) Arnold, chief of the Army Air Forces, and Howard Hawks had been friends for years. At the moment of Pearl Harbor, Arnold spoke to Jack Warner and called for a movie that would stand up for the air force. Warner, proud of his own rank of “Colonel,” put Hawks on the project with Dudley Nichols to do a script. But it was Arnold who suggested the story of one B-17 bomber flying from Hamilton Field in California as news of Pearl Harbor comes in. This was ideally suited to Hawks’s delight in the small, self-contained unit—this could be Only Angels Have Wings in uniform, flying for the flag. Hal Wallis was put in charge of it all as producer. Warner wanted the picture ready for the first anniversary of Pearl.

  But as Hawks researched Florida airfields, Nichols got himself into writing a heartfelt masterpiece. By June 1942, he delivered a 207-page script. A key problem was to get the right B-17 mock-up for scenes supposedly done in the air. To film in the air was to incur many extra problems and flaws in the image—witness the documentary footage done that way. Clearly, the aim of Air Force was to make audiences believe in the real guys, but Hawks was always determined to do it as a feature. It was just that, as a flier, he wanted the air stuff to look as good as Only Angels Have Wings, with its uncanny circular tracking shot for the mountain landing.

  The Nichols script was never cut down before shooting. Rather, Wallis trusted Hawks to economize, on the basis of the director’s habit of rewriting. With James Wong Howe as cameraman, and working miracles when lights failed, they shot in Florida and then came back to Los Angeles for the mock-up footage. And Hawks was rewriting (though he liked the Nichols script) and incurring Wallis’s wrath because of it. Wallis was a controlling force, and Hawks was one of the few directors at that time who could make a film up as he went along.

  This led to a major row, during which Hawks said he was “ill” and Vincent Sherman was brought in to take over. But Sherman could do nothing with the loyal cast, who played every scene Sherman shot at Hawks’s underplayed level—plus a few degrees further under. So Hawks came back, and when he felt that the pilot Quincannon’s death scene Nichols had written was too sentimental, he enlisted William Faulkner to rewrite it; the result may be the best bit of writing Faulkner ever did for the screen.

  So it got done and cut down to 124 minutes, with a Franz Waxman score. It opened in February 1943, taking over from Casablanca—and, truly, it has the same panache, granted its lack of romance and the stress on doing a job. It is hokey, it is fond, it is lyrical—and war is seldom those things. But Air Force was a film for its moment, with John Ridgely (as Quincannon), John Garfield, Gig Young, Arthur Kennedy, Charles Drake, Harry Carey, and George Tobias.

  Alexander Nevsky (1938)

  One day, we may have a great comedy over the making of Alexander Nevsky—Some Like It Cold, Some Like It Hot, Some Don’t Ask. Here’s how it goes. Sergei Eisenstein, the great Russian filmmaking genius, is in poor standing with his Soviet masters. Early in the thirties, he went off to Hollywood and then to Mexico (see Que Viva Mexico) and was in disgrace at home. Once restored to Mother Russia, he started Bezhin Meadow, but the project was stopped. Desperately, Sergei needed a film. The authorities offered one last chance, and they gave him a list of subjects.

  With Russia’s delicate political situation in 1937, the friends of Sergei assessed the list most carefully. They opted for the story of Alexander Nevsky’s defeat of the Germans in the thirteenth century. Why? asked Sergei. Because no one knows anything about him, said the friends,
but it’s pro-Russia and anti-Germany. A done deal.

  It is clearly a battle film, the good Russians in dark tunics and pointed helmets, the Germans in white with upside-down coal buckets for helmets. I know, it is a masterpiece, but it is a very silly masterpiece, even with the Prokofiev music bubbling along beside it. Eduard Tisse did the photography—and it still looks like a lovely summer’s day. They filmed in summer, with filtered lenses, and melted glass for the ice. It is a prolonged battle, and Nevsky wins—thanks in part to this actor, Nikolai Cherkasov, who played Nevsky: seven feet tall, a bit like Gary Cooper, really good-looking.

  So the friends of Sergei watched over the editing, and they told their man, please, no fancy montage stuff—just the battle. And Sergei did as he was told, so it’s one of his dullest pictures, unless you love axes coming down on helmets. There is a sneak preview at the Kremlin, and the word is that Stalin loved it. But when the print comes back, one reel is missing: lost, or did Stalin not like it? No one dares ask. They recompose the film to hide the missing reel. It opens in November 1938 and is acclaimed.

  Less than a year later, the great and merciful nonaggression pact is signed between Russia and Germany. Sergei gets ready to cringe. The film is withdrawn. All mention of it is dropped. But then, a couple of years later, with Germany invading the Soviet Union, the film is back, and it’s a masterpiece again!

  And more or less, in the history books, that’s where it stands now. But it’s the movie of someone who has had good reason to become nervous. Indeed, the story is that Eisenstein encouraged a codirector, Dmitri Vasiliev, to do a good deal of the shooting, perhaps on the principle of “That was Vasiliev!” Why not? Compared with a film like Strike, say, the eye has gone dead and little is left but the bloodthirsty urge. Still, there are good scenes of Teutonic knights hurling naked children into the flames. To be candid, it is spectacular propaganda rubbish, and an unnerving if sidelong portrait of the lengths to which even great talent will go to survive.

  Alice Adams (1935)

  When Bette Davis won her first Oscar, in 1936, for Dangerous, one of the people she beat was Katharine Hepburn as Alice Adams. And it leaves you wondering, because Hepburn’s performance as the unlikeable but yearning Alice is still so good as to take your breath away. The only possible resemblance is to some of the work done by Meryl Streep while still young—and it may help to explain Hepburn’s failure to win public affection in the 1930s that she and Streep are so good, so clever, that we sometimes watch the cleverness more than the story.

  Alice Adams is Midwest America, from a Booth Tarkington novel. Alice wants it all, and she gets little except embarrassment. Indeed, it isn’t going too far to say that she could be Fanny (Agnes Moorehead) from The Magnificent Ambersons, perhaps twenty years younger.

  This is an RKO film, produced by Pandro Berman and adapted for the screen by Jane Murfin and then scripted by Dorothy Yost and Mortimer Offner. But I think it’s more to the point that this was a pact between Hepburn and her director, the very able George Stevens. The story lingers that they were lovers. No hard evidence survives, but Stevens was exactly the man’s man she liked—and they clearly saw eye to eye on the richness of Alice as a role, the awkward version of the dazzling American heroine, the girl who can’t help seeming gauche or fake in the upper set to which she aspires.

  The film is kinder than the Tarkington novel—it has a more conventional romantic ending in which we suppose Alice is going to get her man (Fred MacMurray). The novel is far more set on the kind of solitude that affects Fanny, and therefore more certain of the loneliness that could settle over single women. Hepburn was not good casting, therefore, in anything except intelligence. And there are scenes here—set pieces of misery—in which we wince for Alice while wanting to see the shit hit her. This is rare in American cinema and accounts for the rather hurried coziness of the ending.

  Robert De Grasse did the photography, Van Nest Polglase and Perry Ferguson did the art direction, and Max Steiner did the music. Stevens directs it beautifully, but without ever reaching the despair that Orson Welles got at in Ambersons. The cast includes Fred Stone, Evelyn Venable, Frank Albertson, Ann Shoemaker, Charley Grapewin, Grady Sutton, Hedda Hopper, Jonathan Hale, and Hattie McDaniel.

  Alice Adams got a Best Picture nomination, as well as the nod to Hepburn, but it’s clear historically that this great success led her down a dangerous path. Alice seemed chilly, a snob and a poseur. Not a happy mixture. And what is so impressive about Hepburn is the way she resolved to be likeable, and how to get there. Of course, this was tantamount to admitting that in American movies there was no other way in the 1930s. And she wanted to be an American success, as well as a famously independent self. Nobody had as much cake, ate as much, and stayed so slim.

  Alien (1979)

  There are those who say that James Cameron’s Aliens (1986), the second film in the series, was the fullest exploitation of the original’s many potent ideas. And the case can even be argued that David Fincher’s Alien 3 is a very interesting picture, though it proudly begins to dismantle the suspense dynamic of the series and is ready to sacrifice Sigourney Weaver’s sturdy Ripley in the process. No one has much good to say about Alien Resurrection, though I have argued elsewhere that even that tone-dead picture had several fascinating ideas in play. But Alien, the original, is a favorite all round. Nostalgists shudder again to recall how high they jumped when that first stickleback poked its way out of John Hurt’s tubercular chest. And no one has ever denied the allure of Weaver in her underwear, prepared for a last battle with the great monster.

  I think a large part of the appeal is the way in which the Nostromo—a very beaten-up, underrepaired piece of the space fleet, with a crew that is equally tattered at its edges—should have the ill luck to encounter such a supreme, streamlined, Eigeresque monster. Remember, though, that that meeting is clearly signaled as something ordained, something desired by the creature. And from the very outset, it was not just that the monster was uncommonly visceral and psychically alarming (it was); it also had ideas, personality, and even a macabre wit. It hides as cunningly as an uncle who is skilled at hide-and-seek, and its timing is without rival. As Aliens will discover, this is a species made for a battle royal, only really vulnerable at that nexus of the film’s other plot, the surrogate motherhood that makes Ripley so appealing.

  But the first film is so slow, so stealthy, so gradual in finding its battle. There is time to smell out this lugubrious, neurotic crew—just think of being cooped up with Harry Dean Stanton, Veronica Cartwright, a zombie Ian Holm, Yaphet Kotto, and poor John Hurt. Yes, Weaver and Tom Skerritt are more regular and wholesome, and there was even a thought once of some sex between them. But Ridley Scott and his writers eschewed it. and rightly so—romance is too fanciful in outer space. Ripley’s real mate is the rapist monster, and it all feels better if she has not been touched before.

  So take the time to study Howard Hanson’s mournful music, the fabulous striations of vulcanized rubber on the dead planet. The meanings in Alien are myriad, and it’s telling that the film came along just ahead of an unexpected and irrational invasion of the human immune system. For finally the alien here is not simply a monster, the great shadow of the id stepping into life, but DNA flipped over so that it says And? in the most menacing way. It is about things that are alien to us, and one regrets that the series could never quite see its way through to that, instead of settling for one genre display after another. But Alien is not just a monster movie, or science fiction, or horror even. It is a study of the loneliness of the human species, dismaying and moving because of unknowns it is on the point of disclosing.

  Aliens (1986)

  Generally speaking, the industrial strategy known as franchising—of doing sequels until the end of time—was a disaster in the 1980s and 1990s. But every now and then, something quite wonderful came of the plodding method. If you put Alien and Aliens side by side (and it may be one of the last great double bills in American film), you get
not just the thumping and very satisfactory sequence of prolonged combat after great unnerving threat. You also get the emergence of the secret love story in these Alien pictures, the way in which no matter what happens in her movie career, Sigourney Weaver is never going to meet a more faithful lover than the creature. Indeed, its only rivals were the gorillas in the mist.

  Ripley comes back from the first film like Sleeping Beauty in her spacecraft. She looks lovely still, but the journey has taken fifty-seven years. She is brought back to Earth’s drab reality, but she has nightmares. And then she hears that the planet the Nostromo went to—it is called LV-426 now—has a small community of miners on it, a few families. And now, as Ripley comes home and wakes after fifty-seven years, the regular signal from LV-426 cuts out. Is there a clearer way the Alien has of calling to Ripley?

  The second film is said to be written by director James Cameron after a story by Cameron, David Giler, and Walter Hill. Hill and Giler were set on doing a combat film this time, but Cameron was in such control that they weren’t asked for too much. So a patrol goes back to LV-426 and discovers a little girl, Newt (Carrie Henn), the only human left alive on a planet writhing with monsters and pods ready to make more. As such, Cameron made a terrific action film (there is a director’s cut of 153 minutes, compared with the release print of 136). Of course, the patrol is no match for the creatures; but Ripley becomes Newt’s surrogate mother, and the “marines” all go down in a blaze of glory. The film has a lot of Cameron’s actors in this capacity—Michael Biehn, Bill Paxton, William Hope, Al Matthews, Jenette Goldstein—as well as brilliant imagery of intestinal corridors, flamethrowers, and the sudden lunge of the monster’s jaws.