'Have You Seen...?'

by David Thomson

  The Apartment (1960)

  Gradually, in the course of the 1950s, Billy Wilder picked up the reputation of being a comedy director. Yet that was far from an adequate description of a naturally amusing mind allied to a very dark view of human nature. Plainly, funny lines aside, Double Indemnity is no more of a comedy than The Lost Weekend; and while Sunset Blvd. is loaded with ironies, its situation is as macabre as that in Ace in the Hole. Still, Some Like It Hot was hailed as one of the funniest films ever made—though it was not acknowledged by the Academy for its exhilarating mix of tones. So Wilder seems to have felt the need to reestablish himself as the surveyor of a cold and heartless world.

  The Apartment (written with I. A. L. Diamond) turns on C. C. Baxter, as likeable though as neurotic as Jack Lemmon, yet deeply compromised—for Baxter is ready enough to loan the key of his apartment to figures in the corporation where he works to be ingratiating and to get ahead. And one of his superiors, Sheldrake (Fred MacMurray), is carrying on an extramarital affair with Fran Kubelik (Shirley MacLaine), the cheerful but vulnerable elevator operator in the building where Lemmon works. How is Baxter going to live with that compromise when Fran is driven to the brink of suicide and he has to look after her—because she tried to kill herself in his apartment? Or pose a larger question: Is Lemmon a heroic actor or a fumbling wretch?

  Shirley MacLaine has said that the script was only a sketch when they began, and that Wilder and Diamond let the two leads improvise a good deal to flesh out scenes. On the other hand, this was a fairly sumptuous production. Alexander Trauner was hired to do the sets for the office and the apartment, and despite black-and-white photography, it was filmed in Panavision. The picture cost $2.8 million (the same as Some Like It Hot), and the photography by Joseph LaShelle looks rich. There was also a good score from Adolph Deutsch.

  The picture did very well, with first-run earnings of $8 million, along with a spectacular cleanup at the Oscars, including best picture, director, story and screenplay, editing, and art direction. Lemmon, MacLaine, and Jack Kruschen were nominated, but nothing. In hindsight, I have the impression that The Apartment feels very sour, with an unconvincing happy ending tacked on. Its world (like that of Psycho) is unrelievedly bleak—Sheldrake, for instance, is a very cold-blooded fellow, which would shock a new age used to MacMurray’s benevolence on TV in My Three Sons.

  Wilder seemed to have hit a peak. He was only fifty-four, but he would never win another Oscar. Of course, the awards aren’t everything, but I fear that Wilder never quite regained his instinct for what would work, or what he could get away with. There are brave and interesting films to come, but they seem more and more detached from their times. And less and less amiable.

  The Apartment has other good performances, from Ray Walston, Edie Adams, and David White.

  Apocalypse Now (1979)

  In its day, Apocalypse Now was perceived as a warning to American foreign policy and ambitious moviemakers alike: Don’t go up the river, for there is no decent way of coming back. You know the setup, and you know vaguely that it comes from Conrad’s Heart of Darkness: how Captain Willard (Martin Sheen—after Harvey Keitel dropped out, no questions, please) must proceed up a Vietnamese river to locate the rogue officer, Colonel Kurtz (Marlon Brando), and eliminate him with prejudice. Kurtz was perhaps the most brilliant officer of his generation, and Francis Ford Coppola was the great American director of the 1970s.

  It seems like an unambiguous mission. But no one knows exactly where Kurtz is. And in the Philippines, where they filmed, the production had disastrous weather, enough to destroy sets and stretch every dream to the point of nightmare. Francis himself suffered all of this, along with the extra dismay of breakdown in his private life. In 1979, his wife, Eleanor, wrote a book about this, Notes, one of the best and saddest books on the making of a film. And then, when Brando arrived for what was anticipated as a short shoot, he was underprepared and overweight. The delays went to the depths of the director’s soul. There are people who know Coppola who believe he was never quite the same again.

  The picture was attacked, long before it opened, as a model of Hollywood excess and vanity. When it did open, there was amazing spectacle, but it was not always clear what the film believed it was about. The jungle was savage and beautiful (Vittorio Storaro). The music (from the Doors to the Stones by way of Wagner) was hallucinatory. Some said the film “got” the Vietnamese experience perfectly, but at the end, is Kurtz mad or sane? Sometimes in a movie, if the action stops in a crisis, you can’t tell dementia from wisdom. Would it have been easier to have had Robert Duvall (superb and feisty as Kilgore) as Kurtz?

  It was a film that just needed to be over, and it was a story that had different endings even in 1979. Then, decades later, Coppola determined to reedit the picture, and so he made Apocalypse Now Redux, which retained the French plantation scene, established Dean Tavoularis’s work as designer, and let us see Aurore Clément in the love scene. I think the addition (and there are others) helps the picture, though it is finally a movie in which you must choose your own meaning. There are fine performances in small parts: G. D. Spradlin, Harrison Ford, Larry Fishburne, Sam Bottoms, Frederic Forrest. It is a film made in such a way that druggy witness may be the best way to see it. And still, I’m not sure that the versions of the film are as frightening or as human as Notes. The script had begun with John Milius, and the final narration was much influenced by Michael Herr. But there are people from the movie who felt that the whole thing grew in its own darkness, like some dire jungle infection for which there was no cure.

  Applause (1929)

  Rouben Mamoulian sounds like a made-up name now, but if it was invented (or improved), then pay heed to its rhythm and its flow. Mamoulian is out of fashion now, his reputation dwarfed by people remarkable for their coarseness. But he was a master at a crucial moment. As his name itself suggests, there could be movement in sound. More than that, with the grace of sound, movie drama was coming into a new life that would alter everything. The visual was no longer a dictatorship and no longer as insecure and bullying as most dictatorships.

  Mamoulian was born in Tiflis in 1897, Russian, but Armenian. Raised in Paris and Moscow, he studied at the Moscow Art Theatre with Yevgeny Vakhtangov and then went by way of London to America. He directed theater in Rochester, New York, and in 1927 he made a striking New York debut when he mounted the folk play Porgy (a few years later he would direct the opera Porgy and Bess). He was not shy about presenting himself as fastidious, brilliant, and a genius, and it was not long before that reputation got him hired by Paramount. And so he came to do his first film, Applause, working at the Astoria Studios in Queens, New York.

  Applause came from a hackneyed novel by Beth Brown, scripted by Garrett Fort, about an aging vaudeville singer, Kitty Darling (played by the torch singer Helen Morgan), who has a daughter, April Darling (Joan Peers), she tries to keep from following in her mother’s footsteps. It is trite material, and that may have inspired Mamoulian to be bold. When he arrived at Astoria, it was to find no less than three producers hovering over his project—Monta Bell, Jesse Lasky, and Walter Wanger—to say nothing of a studio dominated by the sound recordist (Ernest Zatorsky) and his estimate of what could or could not be done.

  Mamoulian knew his film history well enough to realize that the camera movements of the late 1920s had been stopped dead in their tracks by microphone jitters. He had a setup where he wanted the tracking camera to start on a long shot, come into a close-up, and then go back to the long shot. It was meant to catch the interplay of mother and daughter, the mother singing and the daughter saying her rosary. (At the same time—just like life! In silent film there is a dreadful habit of things happening one at a time.) The crew went crazy. Nothing could be done. Cinematographer George Folsey said the camera could not track; the mike could not record two distant strands of sound. Nonsense, said Mamoulian—he was gambling. Put the camera in a box, and have men push it. Use two mikes, one for the daughter and o
ne for the mother. Hilarity! What do you do with two sound tracks? asked the experts. You marry them, said Mamoulian, guessing: you mix them.

  And of course he was right: Sound was a new fluidity that might bridge cuts or opticals, a constant that allowed the pace of film to quicken to the speed of thought. This was crucial, and I do not mean to say that Applause is a great film or that Mamoulian was the only man alert to such breakthroughs. Applause is very antiquated and weepy, even if Helen Morgan is something to see. With confidence, Mamoulian took the unit out into the city streets, into real places. He realized that sound could be recorded or controlled, that sound was poetry as well as a synapse. The appalling rigidity of silent film and the moral and literary freeze that went with it were over.

  The Army of Shadows (1969)

  Context changes so much. When L’Armée des Ombres appeared in Paris (in September 1969), sympathy for or interest in the Resistance was waning. Cahiers condemned it as “Gaullist art.” The age of Pompidou was beginning. Marcel Ophuls was busy making The Sorrow and the Pity, a profound survey of collaboration more than resistance. Jean-Pierre Melville’s film seemed old-fashioned. Admissions dropped nearly half a million from his previous work, and that almost certainly prevented the film from getting an American release. A lot of time had to pass. It was not until 2006 that the film played properly in America—and, in a country that was for the first time wondering about its own tyranny, did very well. Manohla Dargis of the New York Times wrote that it might be the best film of the year.

  Of course, Melville had himself served in the Resistance, and he took as his basis for the film a celebrated novel by Joseph Kessel (published in 1943). It is the story of a group of men who are working for the Resistance, and it’s only proper to observe that their hostility to the police (the Gestapo, the Vichy forces) makes them resemble the several circles of criminals Melville had filmed earlier. But these men are stronger, far less given to betrayal, and they do what they do for altruistic reasons, which they hardly expect to live to see fulfilled. Indeed, Melville’s film is rather darker and more pessimistic than even Kessel’s novel.

  It was filmed in Paris, in the South of France, and in London, and Melville staged a small coup in that he had a fine shot of German soldiers marching on the Champs-Élysées—technically still against the law. It’s a world in which strangers, or shadows, come together under code names, in which brothers may not know that they follow the same bleak service, and in which sometimes you murder your own people to prevent the risk of their talking. The threat, of torture and helpless betrayal, hangs over the whole enterprise, and part of the film’s grip, I find, comes from the certain understanding that even the Paris one loves and admires was once chilled by this terror. The excursion to London—where Adrien Cayla-Legrand appears as De Gaulle himself—is odd and not very English. But I can believe that it is the way these haunted Frenchmen saw London.

  France in the war is a great subject, and one that the French have been reluctant so far to film. The wounds are deep, and the urge to forget is very strong. But here, in Bertrand Tavernier’s Safe Conduct, and of course in Hiroshima Mon Amour, the story emerges. On the demerit side, there is the quite dreadful Is Paris Burning?, a film that one would like to forget belongs to René Clément, who once made the somber La Bataille du Rail. The great cast of Army of Shadows includes Lino Ventura, Paul Meurisse, Jean-Pierre Cassel, Claude Mann, Simone Signoret, Paul Crauchet, Christian Barbier, and Serge Reggiani.

  L’Arrosseur Arrossé (1895)

  We take it for granted now that the Lumière brothers were dutiful sons and fond brothers—after all, their name means “light,” so why should they not serve as windows to that transmission, patient, impartial, and lucid? Except that they were brothers, too, and don’t we know that it is a short step from, “Well, wouldn’t it be nice if he had another little fellow to play with?” to The Master of Ballantrae or Michael giving Fredo the farewell kiss? So L’Arrosseur Arrossé begins to make you wonder about Auguste and Louis, and it cannot help but guide us to the edge of an opening sentence in some great revenge epic.

  Of course, the Lumière brothers do seem to have been a bit sly. When Georges Méliès approached them with a view to purchasing their invention, le cinematographe, they are supposed to have gone all wide-eyed and told him that it had no future. Well, if they could not yet see Méliès’s wild dreams, they surely saw a business of their own. In the next few years, they compiled a catalogue of over a thousand items, almost all of them matters of fact and visual observation, but from all over the world. Yet they went further: some of these famous events were staged or improved. And others were created—like a short version of Faust and the Joan of Arc story. It was not until 1900 that Louis Lumière (the stronger figure of the two) abandoned the shooting of fragments and concentrated on equipment.

  That does not take away from the pioneering occasion of December 28, 1895, when the brothers took over the Grand Café on the Boulevard des Capucines in Paris and showed their bits of film to an audience—over thirty people, it seems. On the whole, they had simply shot available things: workers leaving their father’s factory; a baby being fed; a train drawing into the station at La Ciotat. The fragments are calm, removed, but trembling with authenticity—you feel the light and the sudden trick that is being played with time where a shot or a “snap” may become emblematic. And so, all at once, humble duration is a sea of metaphors.

  But they went even further. They filmed in one unbroken shot a little ruse or escapade. A man is watering his lawn with a hose. Behind him, a joker, a trickster, the spirit of Peter Lorre, steps on the hose. The flow of water is blocked. The puzzled idiot looks at the nozzle. The foot is removed. Face full of water! You can say it’s just innocent fun in the noon light of some meadow near Lyons. But don’t you at least consider the follow-up: an international, touristique film in which the joker is pursued round the world by the soaked citizen? (Think of The Duellists.) After all, we have laughed at the joke just as we may have flinched at the splash of indignity. But we are part of it all. And somewhere way down the line—it may take over fifty years—a man with an empty nozzle (think of Javier Bardem in No Country for Old Men) is going to stumble toward us, pained, wronged, and driven by the pain to murder but asking us what it is we want of him. Story is as long and twisty as hose. It goes on forever.

  Ascenseur pour L’Échafaud (1958)

  A couple of years before the New Wave, Louis Malle’s Lift to the Scaffold (its English-speaking title) is perhaps more readily understood as in the Melville school of the mid-1950s: as a very neat, tricky thriller, poker-faced and with a sting in the tail. On the other hand, its luminous night shooting on the streets of Paris is by Henri Decae, and its assurance that if, on those streets, you have the harrowed, haunted face of Jeanne Moreau when she was twenty-nine, looking for someone, then what more do you need? I stress the actress’s age because I have known people who have met her in later life and come tottering away, gasping about what she must have been like in her twenties. Well, this is what she was like—she made you want to make a movie. What would its subject be? Just photograph that face and wait for things to happen. You don’t need anyone to tell you that Louis Malle must have been in love with her.

  Moreau and Maurice Ronet plan to murder her husband, and they nearly pull off a perfect crime but for a stalled elevator. Ronet was handsome and tough in those days, and the chemistry is so deep and quick it doesn’t need to be dwelled on. After that, it’s a film about frustration and missed timing, and about the way small vagaries of life can spoil the outline map made by intelligence. This theme is not deeply felt, not nearly as deeply as the mounting pain in Moreau’s face. But there are many moments in great film where the greatness comes from the God-given and the film’s simple acceptance that that is what we want to see. A woman on the real streets of a city after dark was a rare sight in movies in 1957. After all, so many of those streets had been sets, like the one where Joan Bennett appears in The Woman in
the Window. But being able to use the real Paris brings you the sinking cold, the damp, the wind, and the fact of strangers giving you their insolent scrutiny. So the face toughens just that little bit, and at twenty-nine Moreau had a face where the toughness and the pathos (not to say the eroticism) were in perfect balance. So that sequence could go on a lot longer. And in a way it’s as much thanks to the development of Tri-X stock as it is to the vision of Decae.

  There’s someone else looking, and when I remind you that it’s Miles Davis, you may conclude that that rather bloody-minded genius did not look for anyone. But he went into a studio with his trumpet, and he improvised over the scenes of Moreau on the street. The combination is exquisite, and it suggests a method that has been used too seldom. More than that, you want Mademoiselle Moreau to come around a corner and bump into the growling voice and the Satanic readiness of Miles himself. What do I play? Davis might have said. Just look at me, she tells him.

  Ashes and Diamonds (1958)

  His name is Maciek, and there is a nearly American narcissism in the way he observes himself and plays scenes. He wears dark glasses in the daytime and says they are a souvenir from the sewers. This places him as one of the Polish partisans who fought for the Warsaw uprising in 1944, the events depicted in Kanal (1957), the previous film by Andrzej Wajda. It was never quite clear how determined he was about the sequence, but there were three films—A Generation, Kanal, and Ashes and Diamonds—about coming of age in Poland during the war. It seems to me that A Generation is the purest, Kanal the most intense, and Ashes and Diamonds the most interesting.