Bad Day at Black Rock (1954)
When Dore Schary took over as head of production at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, he was determined to put a few tough, liberal projects into the bland program. And no one has ever questioned that Bad Day at Black Rock was his idea, though he did have a story called “Hondo” (by Don Maguire) as a basis. But when a few house producers proved unavailable, Schary elected to handle it himself. He got Millard Kaufman to do the screenplay (it was Oscar nominated), and he hired John Sturges to direct.
Bad Day is the story of a minor government official who gets off the train at a whistle stop—it’s Arizona or Nevada. He has something to deliver: a medal won by a son dead in the war—a Nisei, or Japanese American, who fought for the American forces. But in this small, very isolated desert community, the man’s father has suffered in the war as many Japanese did—he lost his property and his life. It’s a simple, emphatic story that fits the terrific élan of the title and the stark approach of Sturges. And it comes in bright desert colors shot by William Mellor.
Spencer Tracy had more or less agreed to play the government man, but he felt the guy needed some problem in his life, some handicap or flaw. It was Schary’s notion that the man had lost an arm in the war, and so Bad Day shaped up as Tracy, with one arm tied behind his back, up against a very menacing trio of Hollywood heavies: Robert Ryan as the man who really runs the town and Lee Marvin and Ernest Borgnine as his thugs. At that time, those two had serious credentials for glowering brutality, and the set-piece fights that ensue are a little like the battles in Shane, where pint-sized Alan Ladd disposes of the much bigger Ben Johnson. (Ironically, in the Oscars Tracy was beaten out by Ernest Borgnine, for Marty.)
The community is filled out with Dean Jagger, Walter Brennan, John Ericson, and Anne Francis, and it clearly benefited from the Mojave locations and the decision to use CinemaScope. So the parable works like a well-oiled lock. The only trouble is the complete absence of ambivalence or doubt and the clear-cut opposition of good and bad characters. Part of the problem is that the characters in the small town are Hollywood types, not the kind of people who actually inhabit the hinterland. Truth to tell, the anti-Japanese racism in America during and after the war was more extensive than this cleanup operation suggests. What the film needs is a real touch of redneck recalcitrance and tranquil bigotry.
So it’s notable that while Bad Day at Black Rock was proffered as a radical political statement, it really offended no one. Its plot doesn’t get at the embedded, vested interests that could be challenged only at the challenger’s peril. For Schary and his like it’s a comfortable feel-good film, as opposed to a genuine exploration of social and political trouble. If only fear of the foreigner had been the kind of job a one-armed Spencer Tracy could take care of.
Badlands (1973)
When people lament the decline of the Western, they overlook such pictures as Badlands, made in the early 1970s but set in the late 1950s, and precisely describing the effect of the great Western spaces on Americans. Indeed, the picture takes its title from the classic labeling of an empty part of the nation, then reexamines what “bad” could mean as it tracks a strange young killer whose self-dramatics place him as an outlaw in the empty quarter. In other words, the Western will endure for as long as young men like this are captivated by the legend of heading off into space with a gun.
The film is based on the real case of Charles Starkweather and his underage girlfriend, Caril Fugate, who went on a senseless killing rampage in Nebraska and Wyoming in 1958. (That story is told more fully in the 1993 TV film Murder in the Heartland, with Tim Roth.) Kit Carruthers (Martin Sheen) is working on a local garbage crew when he sees a newcomer in Fort Dupree, Holly (Sissy Spacek), just arrived from Texas. She is fifteen; he is twenty-five. Kit pays court, but her father (Warren Oates) rejects him, with the result that, casually and without real malice, Kit murders the father in front of the daughter. She is not much put out and soon enough runs away with Kit.
This was a first film, and really in its time a model of unexpected independence—written and directed by Terrence Malick, an Ed Pressman production, a film that used “Love Is Strange” by Mickey and Sylvia as well as Erik Satie and Carl Orff’s “Musica Poetica.” It is a film about modern delinquency, where acting out has nearly lost touch with the damage of murder, but it is a film about wild children going off on a great picnic trip, too. They live in the sparse woods. They kill people they meet. And Kit can always talk about himself as if he is a movie he’s making.
The calm, or the tranquillity, of the violence is often hallucinatory, and you can surely feel some very big artistic aspirations in Mr. Malick, not just to the Western and the Dean-age daring, but to the Jungian meaning of fairy tales and the clear knowledge that Malick and Kit were both wayward geniuses of a kind—interfere at your peril.
With the music and the sweet, semiabstract span of the photography (by Brian Probyn and Tak Fujimoto), one can feel the draw of surrealism and the banal cruelty of the actions. The rampage stands comparison with the killing of the Clutters in In Cold Blood, yet here Kit’s unsteady grasp of the nightmare in what he has done is both intriguing and frightening.
Coyness and the matter-of-fact go close together. Holly’s voice-over is artless and natural, yet I can imagine it being studiously rewritten. And the ending, with Kit recognized by state troopers as a Deaner, is too tidy. But that very patness helps us see how far the “Badlands” are not real country but an imagined place. Altogether, this is one of the most exciting American debuts on film, and a picture lamentably let down by the more recent artiness of Malick.
The Bad Seed (1956)
There’s no denying the power that remains with this hideous melodrama and its horrible assurance that nature takes priority over nurture. The Bad Seed had been a minor Broadway sensation in 1954 as a Maxwell Anderson play, adapted from a novel by William March. Mervyn LeRoy was knocked out by it, and he bought it for Warners, determined to use the original cast. He then got John Lee Mahin to do the screen adaptation, and Mahin was an expert with melodrama as well as a natural conservative. The result is not for the squeamish, for social workers or child psychologists.
For Rhoda (Patty McCormack), aged eight, is horrid, despite her pretty dresses and her blond braids tied as tight as ropes. You see, her grandmother was a notorious murderess, and these urges get passed along. When her father (William Hopper, who had only just got over having Natalie Wood as a daughter) goes to war, Rhoda gets a little out of line, and her mother (Nancy Kelly) can’t help but notice. The mother is the central role, and Kelly is actually heart-stopping in the scene with her father (but her adoptive father), where she learns the nature of the crooked family tree.
There are several allegedly learned voices gathered in this shameless “play” to say why, yes, these things can happen—notably Evelyn Varden as Mrs. Breedlove, a know-all amateur psychiatrist. And Rhoda is just a nightmare. The legend persists that Patty McCormack (who was actually eleven) gives a great performance. She does not. Instead, she has two looks—the oily smile and the mean frown—and it’s up to us to say which is more hateful. She doesn’t act, and the character of Rhoda is not explained or made remotely plausible; in fact, she’s like a visitor from sci-fi land, sacrificed to the social determinism that believes in bad-seed tosh like this. Apply the idea to matters of race, and you can see what this is really about. So the picture is a portrait of America in the 1950s, and that is far and away the most scary thing. There are no real relationships between any of the characters, and there is not the least sense of shared ideals beyond those of cliché. In all of this contrived fever, Nancy Kelly insists on delivering a very careful and deeply felt performance, the mad logic of which is to send her unfortunate bearer of the bad seed to suicide, just as if she was carrying a fatal virus.
I won’t say more about the disgusting contrivances of the last fifteen minutes, except to say that God takes a hand, all’s-well-that-ends-well gets a look in, and there are credit
s in which the actors appear on the dreaded set as themselves—this includes Kelly spanking Ms. McCormack on the bottom in an inadvertently comic and suggestive prank. It’s ghastly, but not to be missed.
Mervyn LeRoy does nothing to get in the way of the portentous text, or to detract from two very good supporting performances—from Eileen Heckart as a mother whose little boy has incurred Rhoda’s wrath, and from Henry Jones as the handyman who is on to Rhoda from the start, because he’s badder. The film did very well, alas, and Kelly, McCormack, and Heckart were all Oscar nominated.
Bad Timing (1980)
Bad Timing counts as a British film in that it was made for the Rank Organisation. But the delivered picture shocked the old bakery operation, so they removed their logo (Billy Wells banging the gong). You could say it’s an American film in that Art Garfunkel and Harvey Keitel are both American, while Theresa Russell’s character, Milena Flaherty (Joyce meets Musil?), is said to be American and is played with an American accent and a naggy American urge to get to the bottom of everything. However, I see no real doubt about it: The picture is tourist Viennese, for good and ill.
Milena has been having an affair with Dr.Alex Linden (Garfunkel), a psychoanalyst. In despair, she tries to kill herself. She is rushed to the hospital. Inspector Netusil (Keitel) is brought in to investigate. The blood at the end in attempts to save Milena’s life is a part of the art direction: All along, she has been a girl who wears strident mauves, begging pinks, or assertive reds. (Art direction by David Brockhurst; photography by Anthony Richmond.) She is, I suppose, the sexual principle in that she lives to fuck, without undue regard for loyalty or conventional movie methodology. And, of course, she is the director’s wife.
Theresa Russell is not a great beauty or an extraordinary actress. There is even a disconsolate, slightly depressed air to her, as if she is aware of these shortcomings—but what can she do about them? On the other hand, she is fiercely sexual, quite unashamed and untouched by coyness. And the fact is that the amazed lust and reverence Alex feels for her is not too far from the way in which Nicolas Roeg’s film and camera observe her. This is where Vienna comes in, for we are on the home ground of Klimt, Schiele, and Freud—it’s a wonder, but not a note of Mahler is heard. And in what is a very heady (if not pretentious) film, the history and its look are inhaled not just as atmospheric décor but as a sort of explanation for the people. We see some Klimt and Schiele in galleries, and the tesselated look of one and the sprawl of the other are taken to be the origin of the profuse disorder in the apartments. More or less, sexual expression here equals untidiness, and Alex and Roeg watch with the same bated breath to see all the unexpected ways in which Alex and Milena can do it.
The script comes from Yale Udoff, a playwright, and it says far too much while delivering too little. I wish Roeg would trust animal action more and intellectual justification less. As it is, the most profound thing is the kind of exhausted affection for Milena/Russell that grows as the film progresses. Rank was upset because Alex delays calling medical help for Milena in order to have sex with her potential corpse. That’s not an improper or unlovely resolution of their desperation about each other. It’s justified. It works. Until explanation steps in—and that’s where Garfunkel is helplessly wordy and inferior next to Russell’s defiant belief in action. Still, the attempt is remarkable. The film does not reach the bottom of sex, but as to the bottom of Ms. Russell, we are home. It also has Denholm Elliott—alas, if only there was more of him, for he watches what he can with a look of Ophuls on his face.
La Baie des Anges (1962)
The first shot: dawn on the promenade at Nice. We see a woman wearing white—it is Jeanne Moreau. And as the camera begins to move rapidly away from the woman and ahead, we hear a rising crescendo of music, by Michel Legrand. It is the “passion” music that goes with the gambling sequences in this astonishing film. I love the whole picture, and the sardonic, reptilian aura that Moreau tosses out with a glance. But the opening shot is one of my favorites. The music is exhilarating, yet the figure diminishes, receding but staying visible because there is no one else around at that time of day. And the light and the loneliness are as undermining as the music is momentous. Somehow, in a single shot, Jacques Demy has caught the contradictoriness of gambling in a film that understands its subject so well, it never stoops to moralize or see the consequences. You have only to see that gambling is just a metaphor for living, and you have a film close to perfection. And this opening is not just arresting but maybe the best shot in the film. How sure are you, or how fatalistic, if you’re going to play your best card first?
Of course, I am talking about a fusion of action and music such as we saw in Demy’s Lola, with the white Cadillac and some phrases of Beethoven—and still to come is the ecstatic, discovered genre of his Les Parapluies de Cherbourg, where a very simple love story rises with Legrand’s music. Demy and Legrand—it is one of the best marriages in film history.
The story is so modest: A handsome but timid young man comes to gambling, and he meets Jackie (Moreau), a woman who has been doing it all her life, someone in whom haggardness and radiance go on and off like the light. You could say she is bipolar, and I do not mean to hide the nearly sublime portrait of that very grave condition that the film presents. But Demy sees gambling as akin to faith in life itself. The plunging and surging of fortune—the almost immediate shifts from no money for coffee to the best hotel room in the city. And Moreau’s woman swings round on a dime in this room and asks, “Quel luxe?” as if she hardly notices the good fortune or the extravagance.
The casinos look like churches, and not by accident, for the most daring or insolent thing about this film is the way it sees gambling as a spiritual adventure. Of course, in Monte Carlo or Las Vegas that is not always so; the sordid, the grim, and the absence of pity await most gamblers, just like the damage to their friends and relatives. But winning is a proof of life, and art, and everything. It is like the vision, the command, and the actress willing to walk the length of the promenade on her own that gets you that first shot. This is very dangerous territory, and it would be a terrible mistake not to see that Demy’s people walk the high wire without a net. But if you don’t get that opening shot and aren’t changed by it, there is always gardening or embroidery.
The Baker’s Wife (1938)
Marcel Pagnol (1895–1974) was his own man, with his own studio, but today he has an odd worldwide reputation that does not seem to waver. In the 1980s, director Claude Berri made two very successful films, Manon des Sources and Jean de Florette, in a ravishing color that Pagnol never used and with stars a lot prettier than Pagnol preferred. But the movies were taken for granted as “Pagnol,” and six thousand miles away, in Berkeley, California, Alice Waters opened her restaurant, Chez Panisse, as a tribute to the world and the culinary interest of the filmmaker. In time, Chez Panisse was joined by the smaller Café Fanny. The restaurants are open to more than filmmakers, of course, but the northern California movie set love the place.
Pagnol was born and raised in the harsh south of France, near Marseilles, and he was a schoolteacher for several years. But once posted to Paris, he tried out some of his plays in the big city. Topaze and Marius were acclaimed, and so Pagnol returned to Marseilles, opened a modest studio there, and began a local film industry that flourished in the years before the war. Marius, Fanny, and César made a trilogy, bound together by the great actor Raimu. The Baker’s Wife was made quite late, but it was one of Pagnol’s great hits, and it survives as a very enjoyable comedy.
Raimu plays the baker in a small town. He has a young, pretty, but not thoroughly satisfied wife (Ginette Leclerc), who runs away with a handsome drifter (Charles Moulin). The baker is distraught, and his bread suffers, whereupon his regular customers determine that, for the sake of continued good eating, they must do whatever it takes to repair the marriage. The story comes from an incident in the novel Jean le Bleu, by Jean Giono, and Pagnol, as was his habit, translated it into a sc
reenplay. Georges Benoît photographed it, keeping generally to interiors, with a few sunbathed exteriors of the countryside. However, Jean Renoir, who went to the Pagnol studio to make Toni, was far more observant of the real location.
Pagnol was unashamedly theatrical. He liked good talk and comic acting, and his films have been remade time and again, in France and elsewhere. John Barrymore did a remake of Topaze in the 1930s; and Joshua Logan’s Fanny (1961), with Maurice Chevalier, Charles Boyer, and Leslie Caron, actually does as good a job as Pagnol’s even if it is prettified. In other words, the world has been kind to his movies, and it enjoys his idyllic portrait of romantic troubles being manageable enough to be handled by the interests of gastronomy. It was François Truffaut who shrewdly observed that the quite cunning real-life dramas of, say, Vittorio De Sica came directly from the work and ambiance of Marcel Pagnol, who appreciated country people so long as they were characters, good talkers, and great cooks.
Ball of Fire (1941)
Sam Goldwyn often bemoaned the fact that “his” Gary Cooper pictures seldom made money, or not as much as when the star was loaned out. So he begged the writing team of Charles Brackett and Billy Wilder to find a vehicle for the big guy. And Wilder remembered a treatment he had written with Thomas Monroe in which a learned lexicographer meets a showgirl. They did a screenplay and called it Ball of Fire. The story now turned on an encyclopedia project that had come to “Slang,” so the compilers seek an expert—enter a young showgirl trying to get away from her mobster associates.
Whereupon Cooper himself—who had just enjoyed doing Sergeant York and sensed a big hit there—suggested Howard Hawks as a director. Goldwyn was not happy: He didn’t get on with Hawks, or his $100,000 asking fee. But he agreed to it all, because Hawks admired the script—“It’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs,” he explained to Wilder. That doesn’t get you a shared credit, warned Wilder. The role of the showgirl, Sugarpuss O’Shea, was touted for Ginger Rogers, but she was not interested. Carole Lombard said no. Betty Field and Lucille Ball were tested. And then Cooper suggested Barbara Stanwyck.
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