Made so soon after the end of the war, in a French countryside that was liberated, La Belle et la Bête is as much of a tribute to being fancy-free as Les Enfants du Paradis. And to the extent that it coincides, roughly, with the first wave of Disney feature films, so this Jean Cocteau movie is a signal that, yes, there are films that any child and any adult can see together, with profit and pleasure. For although Cocteau’s film is filled with natural miracles, and no matter that it has a Beast who might have been too fierce (or too subtextual) for American cinema to authorize, I have yet to meet a child who can’t handle the film. They know they can trust the storyteller.
This was Cocteau’s first full-length movie and his first film work since Le Sang d’un Poète (in 1930). André Paulvé was the producer, and although the resources were modest (as outlined in the published diary Cocteau kept on the filmmaking), the film succeeded marvelously in using very simple and economical special effects: mercury mirrors, reverse action, arms appearing out of black satin drapes, and so on. The gorgeous photography was by Henri Alekan, and it is still a matter of delight for most viewers that the world it depicts can turn into something else with so little fuss.
Cocteau wrote the script himself from the fairy story, and he made the basis of reality a Vermeer-like Loire Valley. That’s where we find Belle (Josette Day) at first, along with Avenant (Jean Marais), her rather obtuse boyfriend. But once we enter the enchanted lair of the Beast, Marais blooms under the fantastic makeup designed by Christian Bérard. This Beast is leonine, capable of anger and repose. He has been wounded. He has suffered. And his glance at Belle is decidedly erotic. Yet children understand it all, without alarm or sniggers. They have been lifted up by the enchantment of the film.
René Clément helped on the film with technical matters. Bérard did all the art direction as well as the Beast mask. Marcel Escoffier designed the costumes, and Georges Auric wrote the music. The rest of the cast includes Marcel André, Michel Auclair, Mila Parély, Nane Germon, Raoul Marco, Noël Blin, and Christian Marquand.
The secret to it all is that Cocteau set out to make a film that would stir adults; along the way he discovered the child’s imagination, too. So it’s an extraordinary and very encouraging fusion of pictures for kids and the surrealist art tradition, yet totally true to the diffused but heated sexuality of the original tale. It’s also the best opportunity that would ever come the way of Jean Marais, statuesque and handsome but waiting to have a little bit of the big cat pumped into him. Further, the realistic basis of the film and Alekan’s approach to magic are so very down-to-earth and practical. What keeps the film modern and dreamlike are things like Belle’s way of moving without effort or friction, and the very adult, Freudian understanding of symbols. Children at the movies require no special care or condescension. They expect genius.
La Belle Noiseuse (1991)
About one hour into this 240-minute Jacques Rivette masterpiece, the painter Frenhofer (Michel Piccoli) takes up a pen and begins to draw. We hear the scratching on the paper, and it is like his imprisoned soul coming back to life. I should say that the shots of hands working—drawing now, painting later—use the hands of Bernard Dufour. So the figure of Frenhofer is intriguingly mediated; after all, when Marianne (Emmanuelle Béart) takes off her clothes to be painted, it is Mademoiselle Béart. You can see.
In that first hour, we are in the Cévennes. Béart and her boyfriend, a painter, have come to visit Frenhofer. He lives in one of the great houses in the history of film fantasy, with a studio at the end of the garden. But Frenhofer is uneasy. He has not painted for a few years; he was doing a picture, La Belle Noiseuse, of a “nutty” young woman, and he stopped. Now he lives in the house with his wife (Jane Birkin), and he waits. He decides he would like to try drawing and painting Marianne.
She is angry. She tells her boyfriend that he has pimped her into this situation. She knows she is going to have to take off her clothes and be seen. But the next morning she is awake before her boyfriend, and she goes to the Frenhofer house to present herself. Silently, but in consent, the painter takes her to his studio and—here is the joy of a film taking its time—there is a scene of ten minutes or so in which the painter simply fidgets in his studio, killing time and making an opening for art, moving things, getting old pens and inks out again, angling his desk, just working his way into the situation of being an artist. It is the start of an enchantment that takes us into the hand and the being of a painter.
I used to think that La Belle Noiseuse was a lovely, elegiac work from an aging artist, a reverie on the process and on Mademoiselle Béart. But it is far more than those things. It is a symphony on the sexual transaction in art—there is usually something like this at work, and I think there is no question but that making art or life is every bit as biologically positive and hopeful as having sex. It is a reminder that, as a rule in any Rivette film there is a work of art in development: the plays in Paris Nous Appartient or L’Amour Fou, the unwinding of the inner movie in Céline and Julie Go Boating.
And so, in this case, in the painting of the nude body there is the astounding intimacy and the distance at the same time, the notion that you are never more alive than when making art though you’re always an observer. It is an old-fashioned view, perhaps, a Renoir view—but earlier in his career Rivette had made a long documentary film, Renoir, le Patron. This is the culmination of that work. Piccoli shows how great an actor he is. Jane Birkin gives one of the most touching performances you will ever see. And Mademoiselle Béart is defiantly herself and naked for the duration of, say, Run of the Arrow.
Ben-Hur (1925)
Lew Wallace’s novel Ben-Hur was published in 1880. In 1899, it was presented onstage in New York in a dramatization by William Young. There were real horses on treadmills; William S. Hart played Messala, and Edward Morgan was Ben-Hur. One of the people behind the production was Abe Erlanger, and it was Erlanger and Florenz Ziegfeld who formed a syndicate to bring Ben-Hur to the movies. To that end, they sold the property to the Goldwyn Company in return for the ludicrous reward of 50 percent of the gross! Thus, when Goldwyn became part of the M-G-M merger in 1924, this was one of their properties—though it was spelled out in the merger that no one from Mayer would share in its profits.
But very soon, Mayer and Irving Thalberg would be called upon to rescue the company from this monster. At first, Goldwyn had put June Mathis in charge of the whole thing. She had attempted a script, hired Charles Brabin to direct, and cast her lover, George Walsh, in the lead. They had all gone off to Italy together to research locations and soak up the Roman atmosphere.
The results were disastrous. Louis B. Mayer horned his way into the mess (through Marcus Loew), renegotiated the profits arrangement, and began to consider options. Relations with the Fascist film authorities in Italy were not good. The building of sets and the hiring of labor presented many problems. Brabin’s footage was inept, and no one reckoned that George Walsh could carry the film. So Mayer took a closer hand and gradually eased Mathis out. A great deal of the material shot in Italy was abandoned. Carey Wilson and Bess Meredyth were to redo the script. Fred Niblo was the replacement director, and Ramon Novarro was now cast as Ben-Hur.
It was only after Mayer went to Italy (with his family) and watched the shooting of the battle of Livorno that the enterprise was ordered home. There was a real crisis in Italy. Mayer fell ill and had to have all his teeth removed. Later on, Thalberg had a heart attack. Niblo was bullied and harassed, and several other people came in on the direction. With a final cost likely to be $4 million, Mayer pulled production back to Los Angeles, and the actual chariot race—high spectacle, with twelve chariots, each with four horses—was shot in L.A. in October 1925.
At one time, the Mathis project had called for a 250-minute film. It came down to 140 minutes, but they had spent 214 days shooting. A lot of the most exciting effects were handled by B. Reeves Eason, with Karl Struss in charge of photography. The cast also included Francis X. Bushman (as Me
ssala), May McAvoy, Betty Bronson (as the Virgin Mary), Carmel Myers, and Nigel De Brulier.
The film lost money, but probably only about half a million. So it was regarded as a triumph of executive decision, with the showmanship of the great chariot race.
Ben-Hur (1959)
Has anybody made a voluntary decision to see Heston’s Ben-Hur in recent years? I understand the possibility that it may appear on television, in the way clouds slowly pass across the window space. And maybe the film stays on for a few minutes before the viewer realizes what’s happening. I know it was nominated for twelve Oscars and won eleven, a record that has been tied but not topped. But does anyone really check it out for all that craft? I think it’s more likely that any rentals come from attempts to track Gore Vidal’s malicious but unforgettable rumor that Stephen Boyd’s Messala and Charlton Heston’s Ben-Hur had a feeling for each other, but that only Boyd was aware of it.
Vidal posits this suggestion because he did a good deal of rewriting on the picture to add something to Karl Tunberg’s original screenplay—that was the single nomination that went unrewarded. And all of this came from General Lew Wallace’s novel, written presumably on those rainy New Mexico evenings when he didn’t have Pat Garrett to dinner. It’s about boyhood friends who become deadly enemies, and it’s about the Christ who reaches out a hand to help Ben-Hur at an especially bad moment in his life.
Ben-Hur climaxed a wave of religious epics in the 1950s, and I suppose the trend speaks to a real devoutness in the nation. If only those films’ directors had anything like vision or faith in their minds. It remains one of the great ironies of film history that Hollywood was making this kind of heavenly-choir bombast at exactly the time when Robert Bresson was directing some of the most genuinely spiritual films ever made.
William Wyler could be a pretty good director, but he was wry, wary, and down-to-earth. Nick Ray, by contrast, made a film about Christ, King of Kings, that is vivid with his own belief in belief. Ben-Hur is 212 minutes long. The rare passages of excitement, like the chariot race, are delivered by unit directors Andrew Marton and Yakima Canutt. If only they had been given the whole project. You have to sit down and breathe deeply, because it is my duty to tell you that Ben-Hur won Best Picture—defeating Anatomy of a Murder.
Wyler won his third Best Director Oscar. Charlton Heston won for Best Actor, beating out Jimmy Stewart in Anatomy and Jack Lemmon in Some Like It Hot. Hugh Griffith beat George C. Scott in Anatomy to win the Supporting Actor Oscar. The terminally boring cast also includes Jack Hawkins, a lady named Haya Harareet, Martha Scott, Sam Jaffe, Cathy O’Donnell, and Finlay Currie. What else is there to say, except that these immense Biblical protestations are as profound and ignorant an intrusion on the life of what we call the Middle East as our several wars and invasions. And very likely there is a muscular connection between those two insults. Finally, it is justice of a special kind that the film Hollywood chose to honor the most is now forgotten and unseen. The attempt by the Academy to impose an academic standard failed.
Berlin Alexanderplatz (1980)
So Rainer Werner Fassbinder, having made more than thirty-five films in fifteen years, committed himself to direct Berlin Alexanderplatz for Bavarian television. More or less, it would run for 933 minutes, and it would require a shooting schedule of 200 days. Fassbinder agreed and said that he would promise to come off drugs for the duration, to facilitate the production. In the event, he shot it in 154 days. And he died in 1982, having resumed his drug habit.
In the nature of things, it is not easy to see the whole of Berlin Alexanderplatz. It is harder still to see it as a movie in a theater. There were complaints when it was released that some of the TV imagery was too dark to be seen clearly. Still, this is the climax of Fassbinder’s tumultuous career and one of the landmarks in realist film. It’s easy in this day and age to say that we have “everything” we ever wanted to see at hand, whereas the ideal viewing circumstances for every project are much harder to achieve. Fassbinder is at a point where he is dismissed in many minds because of his fertility—how can the newcomer sit down and see all that work?
The TV show is based on Alfred Döblin’s novel, published in the years 1927–29. Fassbinder had read it as a youth, but it was only just before the television show that he read it again—reviewed his own work—and decided in effect that it was the basis for everything he had done. In that sweeping gesture, you have a taste of Fassbinder the idealist, as well as the analyst, the man who saw that Döblin’s stress on the whore-pimp bond was beneath nearly all of his own work. And so he adapted the novel for the screen himself (noting and appreciating Piel Jutzi’s film from 1931). It’s the saga of Franz Biberkopf (Günter Lamprecht), who comes out of prison resolved to go straight. But his friendship with Reinhold (Gottfried John) leads him back to pimping. He sells Nazi newspapers. He runs a team of girls. He loses an arm. He falls in love with a whore, Mieze (Barbara Sukowa). The girl is murdered. He is shut up in an asylum.
Xaver Schwarzenberger shot the series in color. Juliane Lorenz edited it. Peer Raben did the music. Helmut Gassner led the design team. And the cast also included Hanna Schygulla, Franz Buchrieser, and Claus Holm. The result is sordid, tough, but amazingly authentic—and a crucial material for anyone researching Berlin in the late twenties.
It’s clear that Fassbinder was surprised and distressed by the poor reception on television; he had hoped to make a definitive work. And so it is hardly surprising that in his last years he was planning a separate movie version—not cut from the TV show, but begun again. This time, Gérard Depardieu would be Biberkopf, Fassbinder would himself have been Reinhold, Isabelle Adjani would have been Mieze, and the rest would have included Jeanne Moreau and Charles Aznavour.
The Best of Youth (2003)
Marco Tullio Giordana’s The Best of Youth was a sensation, all over the world. Its virtues are many, but I suspect its impact is more significant than its achievement. It was a 423-minute series made for RAI, Italian television. As it was aimed at domestic consumption only, it took a little time for critics and writers to spread the word. Eventually, however, it had theatrical releases in many other countries in shorter versions, and there were places where it played for weeks on end, like a cult film. Audiences knew it by heart, and yet in most cases they were not aware of all the details in modern Italian history to which the film refers.
The Best of Youth (written by professionals, Sandro Petraglia and Stefano Rulli) covers the years from the 1960s to the 1990s, following several members of the generation born right after the war. In other words, these are the new Italians, people who had to find out whether they could make their own lives and their nation’s starting at Italy Year Zero. Key figures include Nicola (Luigi Lo Cascio), a medical student who will become a psychiatrist; his brother, Matteo (Alessio Boni), who becomes a policeman; Giulia (Sonia Bergamasco), who joins the Red Brigades; and Giovanna (Lidia Vitale), a magistrate who opposes the Mafia.
The approach is realistic, detailed, and humane but not auteurist. Giordana is a good director, but some of his feature films are a good deal more personal than this. He shoots simply, directly, with a lot of close-ups, and in a self-effacing way that lays every stress on his story and his characters. If you’re going to like this, he seems to say, it’s because you will believe in the world I establish. In other words, it is simple accuracy to say that The Best of Youth is an example of the economy and effectiveness of TV storytelling.
That needs to be established because I believe the audience’s “discovery” of the film—a real phenomenon—was in no way the grasping of something new or radical. It was a way of saying, Look, here we are, and we still treasure good stories well told. I’d never make the claim that The Best of Youth is a great film. But it is absorbing, sympathetic, and good-natured. It tries to show us decent people in a coherent way. And in 2003 and the years immediately after, all over the world, significant numbers acclaimed the achievement and, it seems to me, passed an oblique verdic
t on so much of modern moviemaking, where cruelty and obscurity in subject matter show a disinclination to entertain.
There’s another conclusion worth making: that in most countries of the world we have had excellent TV dramas, some far longer than The Best of Youth, that dwarf the achievement of the “movies” of the time. These are group works, in most cases, even if The Sopranos always relied on a “creator” like David Chase. But how many can say that the great achievements of The Godfather tower over the lives we have led with the Soprano family?
The Best Years of Our Lives (1946)
In 1944, for $20,000, Sam Goldwyn asked MacKinlay Kantor to consider writing something on men coming home from the war. It turned into a verse novel about three men, Glory for Me. It struck Goldwyn as something different. Then William Wyler, himself back from a tough war, read it and said he’d like to do it. Goldwyn persuaded Robert Sherwood to try a screenplay. At first nothing clicked, and then, on the point of giving up, Sherwood saw a way to do it. The script he wrote was far too long, but Goldwyn promised they wouldn’t change a word.
Wyler wanted Gregg Toland to shoot it, and Toland noted how the war had altered Wyler: he cut down on his old camera movements. Now he wanted simplicity with depth—naturalism as far as the eye could see—and Toland delivered. Goldwyn had thought of Fred MacMurray and Olivia de Havilland to play the older couple. They turned him down—third-banana part, said MacMurray. So Goldwyn went to Fredric March and Myrna Loy instead. Teresa Wright would be their daughter, and she would fall in love with Dana Andrews as his marriage to Virginia Mayo broke up. One of the trio had lost his hands, and Farley Granger was the first thought. But Wyler wanted to look at real veterans, and they found Harold Russell in a training film, joking about how he’d lost his hands in a fight with TNT. Cathy O’Donnell would be his girlfriend.
'Have You Seen...?' Page 15
