As a Goldwyn production, the film was given everything, including Gregg Toland as cinematographer, Perry Ferguson as art director, and Edith Head to do Sugarpuss’s costumes. Cooper complained as the shooting went on that the rapid, intellectual dialogue was a stretch for him. So lately, as Alvin York, he had been a religious Tennessee boy. Yet the marvel about Cooper was that, just as in life the cowpoke could look like the most elegant man in Vanity Fair, so if he got comfortable with his lines, he could seem Ivy League or man of the West.
Filmed August through October of 1941, Ball of Fire stands as a fine example of merry escapism as war clouds draw close, with Hawks having a lot of fun getting Stanwyck to remind the professors of the shorter words in the dictionary. She is saucy, naughty, and as quick as a shortstop. The guys doing the dictionary are as fanciful as the gangsters, Joe Lilac (Dana Andrews) and Duke Pastrami (Dan Duryea). Indeed, there’s a cheerful attitude to the interchangeability of all human pursuits that foreshadows Some Like It Hot—especially if sex is kept in mind as the number-one pursuit. Cooper was easily funny with a saucy girl without ever forcing the humor. His character is named Bertram Potts, so Stanwyck gets to sigh, “Oh, Pottsy,” and make it sound very sexy. The group work by the dwarves is nicely done; they are Oscar Homolka, Henry Travers, S. Z. Sakall, Tully Marshall, Leonid Kinskey, Richard Haydn, and Aubrey Mather.
The picture was released days before Pearl Harbor, and it was exactly the high-energy, blithe escapism that clicked with the war spirit in those first days. After all, what did the title mean, except that America in its innocent exuberance fired off entertaining explosions? “It was a silly picture,” Wilder would say. “But so were audiences in those days.”
Bambi (1942)
Felix Salten had done a novel for children about a fawn growing up in the forest. (None other than Whittaker Chambers translated it!) Disney bought the rights to it in 1937 with an eye to a feature film, but it was five years in the making, delayed by a traumatic strike at Disney, the onset of war, and the meticulous preparations Walt insisted on for this picture. He sent artists and researchers to the woods of New England. He even installed a small menagerie in Burbank so the draftsmen could study animal movement. In Maine and elsewhere, researchers undertook immense field projects on rainfall and how it splashed, and countless brilliant photographs of water on foliage, spiders’ webs, and so on were sent back to California. As a result, Bambi is the Disney picture with the most exhaustive animation of nature. The movements of the deer are anatomically as exact as anything done by George Stubbs. And the forest is probably the most realistic setting—even if idealized—that Disney ever attempted or achieved.
None of which conveys the extraordinary drama of the film. For Disney was faithful to the Salten novel—which meant that Bambi’s mother would die. One of Walt’s own daughters protested this detail, and parents ever since have had their qualms over Bambi. It’s all the more striking, therefore, to remember that Bambi came out in 1942, by which time death was an altogether more disturbing prospect to most Americans. No one is quite sure now how thoroughly Walt weighed this. He was a man for detail more than the big picture. But no viewer raised on the film would ever question its tragedy and its feeling for a developing disaster in the fire scene. I can recall Lassie running from the Gestapo, and Bambi and Faline running for their lives, and I know which was the more alarming.
But the skill of Bambi is to open in an infant’s world: This is the forest made of perfumed rain and balmy banks. It is the place of Thumper. The father deer is hardly seen. But as Bambi grows, so his life becomes tougher and the vague threat—of man as the real enemy in the meadow—becomes more testing. It’s the book, said Disney. But thousands of American hunters believed they were being attacked, and protested.
It does come closer to a point of view than anything else Disney ever tried, and it seems blind of a critic like Manny Farber to protest the loss of fantasy without seeing the parable on maturation. Unlike so many Disney projects, Bambi is about coming of age and discarding childhood. It’s about watchful male deer (scouts) keeping the forest safe. Was there a political undertone? I suspect Walt would have been amazed at the suggestion, but that does not mean it is not there. Bambi may be the most beautiful film Disney ever made, as well as the toughest ordeal for any of his characters. In the course of under 70 minutes, the world changes.
Bande à Part (1964)
The “kids” in Bande à Part are all too old—they’re in their mid- to late twenties. But that hardly matters, because the kids in American films are usually too old. It’s one of the things that kids enjoy about them, because they’re being flattered for their alleged maturity. And in this case, you have French people, old enough to be dead, who are determined to be like American kids. They have no careers. They hang out together in the suburbs. They go to cafés and dance the Madison, like jerks who always knew they could be Rogers and Astaire.
There are three of them—Odile (Anna Karina), Arthur (Claude Brasseur), and Franz (Sami Frey)—and Odile lets it out one day that maybe the aunt she lives with has some money hidden away. They resolve to steal the money. It seems like a game or a dream, and the air of making it all up as they go along leaves uncertain to the end what has happened. Yes, there has been a robbery, but it was a robbery on film. The daydreaming idleness of the outsiders’ life has risen gently to the level of action. But it’s only a movie. And, in truth, it’s a chance to witness the shallow friendship of the three—the odd way they amount to a trio by doing things like their two-minute tour of the Louvre. They are not so much real people as an attitude. Nothing ever happens at the movies, after all, nothing except the frenzy on the wall.
As his basis, Jean-Luc Godard took a novel, Fool’s Gold, by Dolores Hitchens, which he then stripped down to its bare bones. He cut out all the psychology and meaning: He wanted to concentrate on the trio, the dream of action, and the odd way in which they know their action (if taken) will likely end the trio. It’s like Sherlock, Jr.: He can be a detective if he steps into the film—but then who’ll trust the film running on, because the projectionist has vanished?
Shot in a few weeks, in black and white, by Raoul Coutard, this is one more work in imagined cinema, which still played at international film festivals and got worldwide distribution. It is Funny Face meets The Big Combo. It is part of a game of Trivial Pursuit in which, drawing two cards—film titles—you act them out, ideally doing the whole film in two minutes. Above all, it loves and defends the sense of fiction in the chill, damp winter light, the readiness, the fuse that could go off at any minute. And it would not hurt if the “kids” were really children or if they dressed and talked like infants. For they are three small laps in one chair reading a large adventure book and climbing into its pictures. The result is so slight and so momentous that it’s strange, and as always it is a throwaway commentary from Godard on the nature of film. Utterly beautiful, yet threatening some dire change. How long would Godard be content with this playfulness? When it was clear that he was not one bit a playful guy?
Music by Michel Legrand (very helpful to the dream). Godard does the narration, his harsh voice cutting to the bone. Agnès Guillemot edited. Also with Louisa Colpeyn, Danièle Girard, Ernest Menzer, Chantal Darget, Michèle Seghers, and Michel Delahaye.
The Band Wagon (1953)
I know a number of people who love musicals for whom The Band Wagon is the peak of that art. One reason is that it is a story about “putting on a show,” about the theatrical enterprise and the efforts of a gang of people to provide a few moments of fun, magic, and elegance. It’s about doing musicals, a genre that maybe at its best has so little content you’d be an idiot to go looking for it. Especially if you’ve got the chance to hold the screen for a few minutes with “Dancing in the Dark,” by Arthur Schwartz and Howard Dietz. This is one of the select dances the desert island comes equipped with. It’s Fred Astaire and Cyd Charisse on a set that represents a clearing in Central Park. It is twilight, and they b
oth wear white. Her dress is yards of some silk that swirls and hangs like waves in thick air. They scarcely touch, yet they have the loveliest unison you ever saw. Michael Kidd did the choreography, and you’d better see it before you die.
Anyway, there are characters in the film—played by Nanette Fabray and Oscar Levant—who are like Betty Comden and Adolph Green, cobbling together the script for this film. And Fred Astaire and Jack Buchanan are the two egos—one shy, one glaring—trying to dominate the show. Just like life.
This is the Arthur Freed unit at M-G-M at its best, and in a routine product. This isn’t An American in Paris; it’s everyday work, and maybe more appealing because of that. Vincente Minnelli directed. Cedric Gibbons and Preston Ames did the sets. Harry Jackson photographed it.
There are set pieces, like “The Girl Hunt” ballet, where Kidd got Fred to do staccato moves and somehow the show had him in white and Cyd in orange against a crushed plum and dusky blue scene. Cyd was dubbed by India Adams, but you can’t dub dancing, and you can see that between them Kidd and Charisse have persuaded Fred to loosen up. Then there’s Fred and Jack doing “I Guess I’ll Have to Change My Plan.” There’s Fred at the depot, “By Myself.” There’s the “Triplets” number, which I never have liked, but I find I wait for it every time.
Not even Freed said the Arthur Freed films were going to save the world or qualify for a Nobel Prize. No one said they were important. But did Hollywood ever do anything so odd so well? There really is something about the idea—so long as you don’t stress it that putting on a show is the best thing in the world for your disasters and dreads. I find myself torn over whether musicals should or should not be “about” anything. But The Band Wagon is about itself, and how a country may have had three hundred years of bloodshed and idealism, Moby-Dick and chewing gum, but a couple of minutes of “Dancing in the Dark” can make it all seem sensible.
The Bank Dick (1940)
W. C. Fields (1879–1946) is the kind of figure who can come off badly in a book like this. How easily one can imagine him squeezed out by yards of Fellini and Ford, or trying to invite Ingmar Bergman for a drink. After all, in this compendium of superlatives in film, what is a Fields to do but wish for some tidy two-hour anthology that had all his best routines and moments. Surely that is the video fate awaiting those stars of whom it is said that they really only ever made one film, stretched out over the years—as if Dietrich with Sternberg or Wayne with Ford didn’t come under the same category. With Fields, moreover, you might strike boldly and go for a single, sublime film, like It’s the Old Army Game, with Fields’s “Elmer Prettywillie” beholding Louise Brooks’s “Marilyn,” all directed by Eddie Sutherland and produced by the William LeBaron who would hire Preston Sturges.
But then I wake up from a nightmare where Fields is poking me with a pool cue because I have neglected to direct you to the very sound of him—squashed, aggrieved, plaintive yet drawling, the very voice of sober soliloquy dismissed by a busy world. You have to have the man’s sigh, as wounded and as solipsistic as my dog’s as he signals sleep and luxurious farting. I am wary and fearful, and I have discovered that, whereas today’s children will stay awake for the Marx Brothers (they are enthralled by Harpo), they simply cannot penetrate the lifelike sounds of breathing and dismay (to say nothing of the failure, the old age, and the fulfilled misanthropy) to get Fields. How can a culture founded on “Have a nice day” conceive of Fields, or the way he would have lashed out in attack at such an opening insult?
I am going with The Bank Dick because it was a film, at Universal, where Fields had come as close to freedom as makes no difference in the mind of a man convinced of eternal imprisonment. It is the one where he may be hired as a bank guard. It is the one where he is Egbert Sousé, with Grady Sutton as Ogg Ogilby, suitor for his daughter’s hand. Edward Cline directed, and the studio tried to rewrite the script, even to honor the Breen Office’s worry over the Black Pussy Saloon. But Fields wrote it all, and in a way it is Fields’s masochistic glee that is energizing all the appalling women, children, and sober men who make his life so painful.
Milton Krasner shot it, and it is good to think of him going on for years afterward, doing things like Bus Stop and The Seven Year Itch. Imagine Fields with the real Marilyn. Imagine Fields in Persona, or Belle de Jour; imagine him as Nicole’s father in To Die For—there is not a picture ever made that is not enlightened by his presence. I do not mean “improved,” merely, or suddenly exposed to a surreal light. I mean not a picture that is not led gently and sadly toward life’s impertinence by Fields’s attendance. One mouth says “Rosebud,” and Fields’s answering lips say “Wild Turkey.”
The Barefoot Contessa (1954)
There was a time when this was taken very seriously as a picture—and not just by all the well-shod Hollywood actresses who aspired to be reappraised as barefoot Gypsies. Even François Truffaut, who had acclaimed its sincerity and daring, wasn’t quite sure what it was about. I regret to say that I think it was about the delusion—shared by Joseph L. Mankiewicz and others of his generation once they got the warm air of French praise in their lungs—that they might be Thomas Mann, or at least Somerset Maugham. So, I’m afraid to say, it’s about the Movies and the World, and the terrible dread in smart practitioners that maybe their own heartless depravity is set to crush all the wonderful Maria Vargases in the world. Because Maria is really intended as a noble savage, a sedate version of King Kong.
Of course, by 1954, Mankiewicz was such a guarantee of Oscar nominations that it’s striking how badly this gloomy romance fared—though Edmond O’Brien, overacting outrageously (as Oscar Muldoon!), did get the supporting-actor award. Even so, in the early 1950s hardly anyone made what is now the real comparison (and the killer): that if you want Humphrey Bogart in a picture that rips the mask and some of the rotting skin off the face of Hollywood, then it exists in In a Lonely Place. How strange it is that Hollywood managed to make such an exposé and still ignore it. How bizarre that the dogged Mankiewicz, lining up lines for his characters, could pass as a great filmmaker.
Nor should the critical eye excuse the film’s very strange awareness of “Europe” as a place where Ava Gardner, fully made up, can exist in patient poverty. The many would-be actresses of Spain, Italy, France, and all points deeper must have died laughing at the fatuous portrait of “simplicity.” As for Ava’s “flamenco” scene, why be surprised at its torpor? Ava could be sexy, but she had her pace—languid—and nothing jolted her out of it. Please note, too, the effete prince (Rossano Brazzi), the decent Englishwoman (Elizabeth Sellars), livid Continental vice (Marius Goring), and the very ugly American producer (Warren Stevens). How can anyone believe that Contempt is only ten years later—accurate while crazed, and so very unsettling?
The only real romance in the picture is the one involving Ava, Technicolor, and cinematographer Jack Cardiff—though even there, Pandora and the Flying Dutchman feels bloodier and more out of control. The look is impressive sometimes (the funeral scene, outdoors, with umbrellas like crows), and so it’s worth stressing that Technicolor itself was not long for the world—it was thought to be too naïve! If only we could have mustered a similar system of rebuke for films like this. It may be added that Mankiewicz probably never made another decent or sane film after it—Guys and Dolls may just pass inspection. But Suddenly Last Summer is plainly the payoff to The Barefoot Contessa: a comic case of Art-thritis.
Barry Lyndon (1975)
At 185 minutes, this is Stanley Kubrick’s longest film, and many would say his emptiest. But it has an exquisite look, not least in its use of candlelight, with special lenses made to capture its flutter, and various other degrees of dusk and dawn, twilight and firelight. You see, in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, the light was natural, or it was candle. On the other hand, the unlucky inhabitants of that age didn’t know what photography was, let alone a director who could take years to watch beards grow. All of which is an admission that this was th
e first film I can ever recall falling asleep at. I daresay I was under unusual strain; still, I was shocked at the time and took it for a nearly objective proof of Kubrick’s own lack of interest. Whatever century, we like to think that the characters in pictures are too pressed to fall asleep. And nothing ever alters the fact that Barry Lyndon himself is no one to care about, and 185 minutes is a long time to register that absence.
As Thackeray described the character in his novel, Lyndon was a self-interested knave who rose and fell by the same pattern of bullying, dishonesty, and luck. Ryan O’Neal, who plays him, seems quite prepared to leave any judgments up to us. On the whole, he would prefer not to be involved. It’s hard to resist the way in which—given this character and the work’s aloofness to him, given O’Neal’s intractability, and Kubrick’s own impassivity where human feeling is at issue—the film sought a narrator, so that the story might take on just a little of the curvature of arc, as opposed to a flat line. So Michael Hordern’s narrative is the most natural reservoir of sentiment in the film.
Of course, all this time, “period” is prevailing, like sultry weather in which no one has the energy to do anything. John Alcott did the photography, and Ken Adam is in charge of the design—though he takes advantage of places like Corsham Court, Stourhead House, and Castle Howard. The very pretty and authentic clothes are by Ulla-Britt Söderlund and Milena Canonero. There is music from just about every composer of that era you can think of, with some Irish traditional music played by the Chieftains.
'Have You Seen...?' Page 13
