'Have You Seen...?'

by David Thomson

  Shot in 1965–66, the film was not favored by Soviet authorities. A version played at Cannes in 1969, and there was a 185-minute version released in Russia in 1971. Two years later the film was at European festivals. And now there is a 220-minute version, thought to be complete. The photography is by Vadim Yusov and the music by Vyacheslav Ovchinnikov. Anatoly Solonitsyn plays Rublev. Irma Raush is the mute girl, and Nikolai Burlyayev is the bell-caster.

  Obsessed with rain and fire, saintliness and abandon, the film is a celebration of a pagan age when no cause or claim has authority. Just as in the later Tarkovsky films, apocalypse is like a hungry dog exploring the land, and disasters and horrors crowd in on the exquisite beatification of life. The camera races along at ground level and then soars up to magisterial points of view. Of course, Tarkovsky would probably have clung to that flux whatever his circumstances. My opening reference to Shakespeare is not casual, however. Tarkovsky’s epic stance reveals his single handicap: the lack of humor and the way in which that slows his grinding pace. One doubts whether there was ever a Tarkovsky film that he didn’t itch to lengthen.

  Angel Face (1952)

  Night in Beverly Hills. An ambulance hurries to a home on a hilltop. A woman (Barbara O’Neil) is half-gassed. It looks like attempted suicide, but she says someone tried to kill her. The ambulance driver, Frank (Robert Mitchum), is leaving the house when he hears a sad piano playing. We thought it was part of the film’s score, but now we see the piano is being played by Diane (Jean Simmons) in the drawing room. They talk. She is on the edge of hysteria. He slaps her face. She slaps him back. That’s not in the ambulance driver manual, he says. And she looks up at him from beneath her helmet of black hair and gives him Jean Simmons’s best smile. Now he’s really in trouble.

  Angel Face is RKO, with a script by Frank Nugent and Oscar Millard from a story by Chester Erskine. Nugent was John Ford’s screenwriter, but the look on Jean Simmons’s face is far from that kind of woman. This picture is called Angel Face, but Diane is dangerous, so it’s reassuring to discover that Ben Hecht went over the script before Otto Preminger shot it. Hecht knew perverse psychology, and he and Preminger had already done Whirlpool and Where the Sidewalk Ends.

  The first trick to this story is to see not just that Diane is crazy, but that Frank—the ambulance driver who wants to open a shop for sports cars—is a chump, despite being played by Mitchum. Diane’s father is Herbert Marshall playing a novelist who hasn’t written a word since he married O’Neil. To say the least, there’s a rivalry between the two women. But the angel is as manipulative as she is beautiful. Her wings may look white, but they come with the “Death” label attached.

  That’s the story onscreen. Offscreen, Simmons had been hired by Howard Hughes when she came to America with her husband, Stewart Granger. Hughes wanted her, and bought her contract from Rank. But she wasn’t playing. So he kept her under contract and gave her nothing to do—until he found this little study in alluring evil, which she was obliged to play in order to end her contract. Preminger never falls for his own star, but he photographs her (by Harry Stradling) in a way that helps explain why Mitchum and others are suckered by her. It’s a rich portrait of a femme fatale in which the young woman is driven by an insane selfishness.

  A lot depends on that piano melody, and it’s one of Dimitri Tiomkin’s best. Apart from that, just study the objectivity in the framing, the breathtaking beauty of the photography, and the importance of automobiles—yet again, Frank knows cars, but not in the way Diane has learned. Did Hughes like the film? We don’t know. But Simmons is brilliant. In 1952, she brought an intelligence and a sexiness to Hollywood that were ill rewarded by her being turned into a routine leading lady. In Diane here, you can still feel Estella from Great Expectations—the kind of girl men make idiots of themselves over.

  Angels with Dirty Faces (1938)

  The manufacture of gangster films in the 1930s was a steady source of problems with the censor at the Breen Office. Sure, the gangsters nearly always died in the end, but there were sharp parents at Breen who knew that kids loved the spectacular death-falls as much as the scenes where the hoodlums were cleaning the streets with a Thompson. The censors knew that a lot of young testosterone went to Cagney pictures to have a good time. And so, as a concession to moral caution, the pictures often employed an idea of two pals, or brothers even, one who went straight and the other directly to hell. The epitome of this plan is Angels with Dirty Faces, a picture founded on the childhood friendship between Rocky Sullivan (Jimmy Cagney) and Jerry Connolly (Pat O’Brien). Rocky becomes a low-down dirty rat (with high style), while Jerry ends up a priest (with a rugged manner).

  It began as a story for First National by Rowland Brown, meant for Cagney in his rebellion against Warners. But then peace was made, so Warners took on Angels. Hal Wallis always saw it as a vehicle not just for Cagney and O’Brien, but for the “Dead End Kids,” the gang led by Leo Gorcey that had featured in William Wyler’s Dead End.

  And here is the shameless point of the story, as finalized in the script by John Wexley and Warren Duff. In his terrible career, Rocky has won the admiration of some local kids whose own futures may be in the balance. So, as the time comes for Rock to test the electric chair, Father Jerry takes him aside, and in the name of friendship (and the hint that Rocky was a Catholic once, too) he wonders if on the way to the death cell Rocky could put on an Oscar show of cowardice to lose the kids’ support. At first the Rock snarls and sneers. But when the dawn comes, in shadow play (thanks to director Michael Curtiz), Cagney cringes, howls, and generally carries on like someone who has just read the scene in White Heat where Cody hears his Ma is dead. Father Jerry gives a grateful look toward heaven, and Leo Gorcey and the boys see the light—don’t be a gangster, be an actor.

  The inner meaning is so comic and so unabashed that this is one of Hollywood’s great lessons about its own power of fantasy—as well as an inadvertent comedy. Anyway, the Breen Office was left helpless. No one likes censorship, but you have to feel for the Breen boys and their awareness of the complete unscrupulousness of what they were up against.

  Cagney is as unbridled as you would guess, and O’Brien is doing Spencer Tracy—there’s a soft, gay, Irish light in their eyes, which only reminds me of another fantasy that didn’t get settled. Curtiz directs with terrific panache. Hal Wallis was always trying to get him to cut back on those little camera movements, and now they are the best thing in sight. Also with Humphrey Bogart, Ann Sheridan, George Bancroft, Gorcey, Huntz Hall, and the boys. Can you imagine the reaction the film would get now in a decent juvenile hall?

  Anna Christie (1930)

  Eugene O’Neill’s Anna Christie opened in New York in 1921, with Pauline Lord as Anna—though the play’s first title was “Chris Christopherson” (Anna’s father). Chris has not seen his daughter since she went away as a child to live with relatives in Minnesota. But she was raped there, and so she became a prostitute. She comes home and meets a sailor named Matt. The play ends in some uncertainty as to whether Anna will be there waiting for Matt when he returns from a voyage. The human drama is offset by many soulful references to the sea and its affinity with fate.

  There had been a silent-movie version, with Blanche Sweet, but the property was then considered by Irving Thalberg to become Greta Garbo’s first talking picture. “Garbo Talks!” the posters would shout. Garbo was very wary of opting for sound. She had delayed it as long as she could. But many advisers guessed that sound would help her enormously. Garbo possessed a voice that suited her face. It was deep and low, and—this is vital—it had a pacing that matched the change of expression in her eyes. Still, in the end, she persuaded M-G-M to make two versions of Anna Christie—one in English, one in German—because of her feeling that she would be more at ease in the German language.

  The English version was done first, with Clarence Brown directing from the Frances Marion screenplay. George Marion played Chris (as he had done onstage), Charles Bickford wa
s Matt, and Marie Dressler made a comeback as Marty, the drunk. Garbo and Dressler got on very well—there is an uncanny feeling of sympathy between them—and Clarence Brown declared that Garbo’s instincts about speech made her even better with sound. He admitted that he sometimes accepted her judgment on a scene or a take. That wasn’t just polite talk. From her first line—“Gimme a visky, ginger ale on the side—and don’t be stingy, baby!”—she was made. Critics adored the deep contralto voice. And Anna Christie was an event. Both Garbo and Brown were nominated for Oscars.

  William Daniels shot both the English and the German versions, but Jacques Feyder (who had just directed Garbo in The Kiss) was hired to direct the German. It is 8 minutes longer than the American, and Anna’s clothes make her work more obvious. Garbo’s friend Salka Viertel took over from Dressler, and Hans Junkermann played Matt.

  Two things resulted: Garbo’s stardom was assured, even if in time the pace of her talking might become a touch monotonous—she was no more suited to comedy vocally than in the inner room of her own mind. Marie Dressler was immediately acclaimed by M-G-M. Her days as a comedy sidekick with Polly Moran were over. She was now central, and so with Min and Bill, Tugboat Annie, and Dinner at Eight Dressler was a star again. Indeed, at sixty, she was the most popular actress in the nation. When Garbo looked at Dressler, was she wondering whether she could or would get away with being that ancient?

  Annie Hall (1977)

  Around 1977, a wave—something—swept over American filmmaking. Some called it feminism and pointed with a weird mixture of pride and wonder at the new sensibility. Annie Hall won Best Picture—and seemingly that must be about a woman. Another nominated film was Julia—see the pattern? And then there was The Turning Point, which was susceptible to the label Can a woman enjoy career and life? Lurking, though less noticed, was one of the most profound of films: Three Women, an orgy of female consciousness, under the name of dream. Martin Scorsese even made a picture—New York, New York, perhaps his finest—in which a woman qualified as a leading character. In the next few years, there were other major American movies that in their titles and their selling lines seemed to stress this new deal for women: Coming Home, An Unmarried Woman, Norma Rae, Coal Miner’s Daughter, Tootsie… well, no, not exactly.

  It passed.

  And really, Annie Hall is a misnomer. The film should be entitled How Alvy Singer Learned to Forget Annie Hall and Keep Worrying About Himself. Which is to say the film itself was a rotten trick. It won Best Picture, with Oscars for Woody Allen as director and writer, and for Diane Keaton. Now, I treasure Ms. K and would happily surround her with Oscars if it was in my doing—I would have given her one for Reds—but I have to say that the statuette for Annie Hall was a public love letter, a mash note. She is not actually allowed to act in the film, in part because she is not given a character, but chiefly because she is put in a weather system where her silky sails can only fill with the cold wind of Alvy Singer. After all, the song is his.

  Ostensibly, it’s a film in which a twice-married, self-preoccupied neurotic sucks a sunny California girl into his gloomy orbit and sets her tasks in order to free him from the witch’s castle on which he holds—no, grasps—a 999-year lease. In other words, he is not letting go. The film is full of jokes and funny observations. It has great scenes. But it is not a story or a drama. It is a comic’s sad monologue filled out to the dimensions of a movie (93 minutes) in which the impenetrable, impregnable self-regard of Alvy fends off a delightful woman. This is not quite feminism. Indeed, it is a kind of celebration of male infantilism (otherwise known as the movies).

  Marshall Brickman and Woody Allen wrote it, Woody Allen directed it, and you can guess who plays Alvy Singer. The picture charmed the masses, for it seemed like a turning point at which Woody went from comic to comic artist. Events have proved otherwise. Gordon Willis shot the film. Ralph Rosenblum edited it. Mel Bourne did the art direction. The whole thing is very hip, very American New Wave, and disastrously empty. Diane Keaton sings “It Had to Be You,” and many filmmakers might see then and there the way the film had to go—into the Annie Hall Songbook. Also with Tony Roberts, Carol Kane, Paul Simon, Janet Margolin, Colleen Dewhurst, Christopher Walken (very good), and Marshall McLuhan (looking a bit like Gary Cooper as a professor).

  À Nos Amours (1983)

  There’s a scene just before the middle of À Nos Amours where Suzanne (Sandrine Bonnaire) comes home late and finds her father (Maurice Pialat) still up. They talk. Suzanne is said to be fifteen. Her sex life has begun—she is responding to the muddle of her home life by sleeping around. Note that Pialat, the director, plays the father himself and that he cast his real wife, Evelyne Ker, as his wife. I stress that because the acrimony between the two parents is hard to take, or to deal with, and the thought that a real couple—even if their love is over—could enter into this lacerating contest is hard to credit. Is there anything people will not do for a movie? Is there anything they should be stopped from doing? In other words, À Nos Amours belongs in part in the theater of embarrassment.

  Yet the scene between the father and Suzanne is absorbing, tender, and extraordinarily detailed. It has at least three components: one, the assigned roles of father and daughter and the background of family history we have seen; two, the actors, a man in his fifties and an extremely attractive girl (I don’t mean to say that anything happened between them, but it is absurd to think that the possibility did not exist); and three, the director and the kid he has discovered, the strange mixture of hope and envy that exists in that kind of relationship.

  I feel confident that Pialat would have encouraged Mademoiselle Bonnaire to embrace all three states of being, because as an artist he relied upon that candor and authenticity. Indeed, À Nos Amours was a minefield and an ordeal from which many parents might have preferred to shelter their daughter. Needless to say, in this instance, the gamble was successful in that Sandrine Bonnaire was clearly going to be one of the great actresses of our time. Fierce, funny, very sexy, and as smart as a wolf, she was a match for the rest of the family. She was a life force.

  À Nos Amours won the César for Best Film and the Prix Louis Delluc. Two years later, Bonnaire won a César herself for her role in Agnès Varda’s Vagabond, which could be construed as an extension of the part here. Bonnaire has done great work since, but there is nothing like the debut, even if she made hers very young. And surely one of the life-affirming virtues in cinema is that it reiterates the greatest thing in real life: meeting a sensational new person. Of course, the novelty is never repeated, and few people can survive familiarity, but when you see someone startling for the first time—Dean, Depp, Kidman, Bonnaire—it means so much. We fall for them (one way or the other). Our affair with the medium is renewed: Look, it has done it again. Most profound of all, we feel better again about life, and the way an ordinary meeting can reenergize us. And that’s exactly how Pialat is in that scene. You can feel him saying, My god, how lucky I am, and alas, how old I am.

  Apache (1954)

  You can see Apache as one of the films that began to examine Native American life and history responsibly, or you can see it as an important stepping-stone in the career of Burt Lancaster. There was a novel, Bronco Apache, by Paul I. Wellman, that traced the last days of a rogue Apache warrior who refused to live on the reservation. Robert Aldrich and Joseph Losey had teamed up to purchase the rights (though apparently Aldrich had paid for them), so when Losey went off to Europe blacklisted, Aldrich took on the project. But it got made and financed through United Artists, largely because Burt Lancaster liked it and the opportunities it allowed him in the great career surge that followed From Here to Eternity. So it was a Hecht-Lancaster production, with Harold Hecht as the official producer and Burt getting his way.

  James R. Webb did the screenplay, which doesn’t sound quite right. Webb was conventional in his work, and Apache was a strikingly new kind of film—not just in the way it really explores the independence of its hero, Massai, but in t
he authentic toughness of Apache life, which makes him a good deal more “savage” than the Indian figures in films like Broken Arrow. Maybe Losey left some marks on the script, maybe it’s Aldrich—or Burt, wishing to be rugged and rough to his women—but this is an austere and uncomfortable view of Native American life. (It’s worth noting that that attitude would be delivered fully, and with far greater severity, decades later in Ulzana’s Raid, which is Aldrich and Lancaster again.)

  It’s easy to see what Burt enjoyed: He wore a black wig, and his blue eyes seldom smiled. He had a lot of running, hiding, hunting, and fighting to do in the hard rock of the desert Southwest, and Apache is among other things a tribute to a buffed athlete who never wears a shirt. In addition, he treats his wife (Jean Peters) with a brusqueness that may be based on research, but may have been to Burt’s taste, too.

  Everybody on board, Burt included, was of the opinion that Massai should die. The logic is plain, and the integrity of the character is hardly going to settle for a quiet farming life. But that’s what United Artists insisted on—and that’s the point that was redeemed only in the death of the rogue chief in Ulzana’s Raid.

  Never mind: this is an important and impressive Western for its time, and a valuable attempt to correct the old code of being a redskin. A star had never before dared such a role, and maybe only Burt could have identified so readily with Massai’s triathlete robustness. The supporting cast includes John McIntire (as the one white man who respects the Apache), Charles Buchinsky (or Bronson), John Dehner, Paul Guilfoyle, Morris Ankrum, and Monte Blue. Rather surprisingly, it was a big hit. To this day, it makes a fascinating double bill with Ulzana’s Raid.