They shot for more than a hundred days, and they kept every bit of social criticism from the script about the way the bank was ready to make quick deals with new entrepreneurs while shafting the veterans. They treated the difficulties as honestly as they could, and they fought the Breen Office on its starchy attitude toward adultery and affairs. They found a real graveyard for bombers where Dana Andrews could have his great scene remembering the battle. And Wyler recalled his own return and put Loy and March at different ends of a corridor in an unexpected reunion. These are heartbreaking moments in a nation’s history, decently put down as fiction but resonant with the real thing. They had Hoagy Carmichael doodling piano in the bar. They got a score from Hugo Friedhofer. They did it all and hardly changed a word.
Daniel Mandell cut it, and it came out at more than 160 minutes. Too long, they all said. Goldwyn said they’d preview it and cut it down from the audience reactions. Not to worry. They ended up at 172 minutes and a budget of $2.1 million. It wouldn’t be cut. The audience drank up every scene.
In its first year the film grossed $10 million. It was nominated for eight Oscars and won seven: Best Picture, plus statues for Wyler, March, Russell, Sherwood, Friedhofer, and Mandell. No, it’s not the best American picture ever made. But if you are interested in the complex relationship between being American and the nation’s movies, you can do no better than start here. It was a moment when the realpolitik, the sense of duty, and the romance of movie storytelling went hand in glove. And it was a war that needed that much good luck.
Bhowani Junction (1956)
What a subject: the British in India. Yet how few films there are on it, let alone good pictures. David Lean’s A Passage to India seems to me inept and awkward. There are cheerful inventions like Gunga Din and Lives of a Bengal Lancer. On television, there was The Jewel in the Crown—without rival as drama as well as historical commentary. And there are moments from Merchant Ivory and even Satyajit Ray. There is The River, which may be as true as anything to a certain blinkered English colonial life, so kindly treated by Jean Renoir’s forgiveness. And then there is Bhowani Junction.
Nobody could or has ever tried to claim the picture as a success. Its director, George Cukor, regarded it as one of those projects ruined by the studio—and he was something of an expert in that kind of suffering. On the other hand, it has the look of India (in excellent CinemaScope) and the feeling of heat, polite or blunt prejudice, and impossible, fine-grained distinctions of mind-set and character that leave one marveling at the endurance of modern India as any kind of entity. And there is Ava Gardner.
It all comes from a John Masters novel, with a script by Sonya Levien and Ivan Moffat. Not that they worked together. Originally, I believe, the picture had a straightforward narrative from the point of view of the half-caste girl, Victoria Jones (Gardner). But then there were previews where the picture got knocked about and audiences didn’t like Victoria—maybe because she was half-caste, maybe because she had several affairs. So Moffat reordered the picture in a way that put it under the narrative thumb of the English colonel (Stewart Granger), one of Victoria’s men.
This has several bad results. It’s awkward as a flashback story, with too much voice-over telling us what to think. It makes Victoria look more promiscuous. And it hurts what is otherwise a pretty good performance from Granger. What’s left? Well, a very intriguing story that shows the seething impossibility of India, great photography from Freddie Young, and George Hoyningen-Huene’s color advice. All of which leads to maybe the most beautiful Ava Gardner we ever had. It’s also clear that she saw this as a unique chance. There are moments of her in distress, with India coming apart at the seams in long shot behind her, that are impressive and moving.
The supporting performances are wildly variable: Bill Travers is terrible and Lionel Jeffries is a cliché, but Francis Matthews and Marne Maitland are outstanding. And then there are moments where Granger and Gardner together are like grown-up lovers from a better film. But at M-G-M in 1956, Cukor—a loyal servant to the studio system—had no power, and no trust from above. He had clearly been aroused by India, and by Gardner, too. Cukor had wanted Trevor Howard in the Granger role—there was a time when every film wanted Howard instead of their male lead. By now, it’s just a dream, but this is one of those films where we want everyone to try again.
Bicycle Thieves (1948)
First things first: The original Italian title to this film is Ladri di Biciclette, which can only be translated as “Bicycle Thieves.” However, a stupid orthodoxy prevails in the United States, where, on its first release, the picture was called The Bicycle Thief. That contradicts the very thing that anyone moved by the story takes away from it: that in the world it shows, there are thousands of bicycle thieves because of the terrible economy.
Consider the story: Ricci (Lamberto Maggiorani) is one of so many men in Rome looking for work. He has a wife and a son to support. One day he finds a job. It is to ride around the city pasting up posters for American movies; the image he labors over is Rita Hayworth from Gilda. But he has no bicycle, because his wife, Maria (Lianella Carell), pawned it. So she pawns bedsheets to redeem the bicycle, and Ricci is off. But every time he puts up a poster, he leans the bike against a wall. We know what will happen. And once the bike is stolen, Ricci is left with his young son, Bruno (Enzo Staiola), to lament his fate, to search for the thief and his bicycle, to get soaked in the rain, to exemplify poverty. In the end, Ricci is driven to try to steal another bike for himself. But he is not a good thief, and he is caught and disgraced in the eyes of his son.
The film came from a novel by Luigi Bartolini and a screenplay by Cesare Zavattini, who was a key figure in what became known as the Italian neo-realist movement. A true humanitarian, Zavattini maintained the social realism in Vittorio De Sica’s work and kept its sentiments on the left. That surely helps explain the impact of the film: Bicycle Thieves, though ignored by the Italian film business and funded by De Sica himself, became a hit in America and the rest of the world. It made real money. It was referred to often as a model of postwar poverty in Europe and What Had to Be Done. It inspired David Selznick to think of an American remake—with Cary Grant as Ricci! The screenplay was nominated for an Oscar.
And, of course, the film is moving, even if the attempt on our heartstrings is so blatant and so much at odds with the thing that is really striking and beautiful: the sense of the streets of a great city where nearly everyone is having a hard time. Although De Sica used nonprofessional actors, that does not mean they were not actorly. They feel theatrical (in both the good and the bad senses—eloquent, yet arranged). The nature of the fable is obtrusive, whereas the atmosphere of the streets is stunning. And that was what was really new: the untidy infinity of life made to seem like the crowd, or all of Italy. For De Sica was a very talented film director: He saw the grayness and heard the faraway sea of bicycle bells ringing. L’Eclisse was taking shape.
So we are all likely thieves now, or if times get hard enough—because we are urban creatures. That’s what the film says, and why it needs its due restoration to Bicycle Thieves.
The Big Combo (1955)
These days, the urge to make film noir respectable and festival-worthy is so chronic and academic that it’s hard to find a noir that is as nasty and pretentious as the genre once wanted to be. The characters should be not hard-boiled, not entertainingly cynical—they should be odious, without any chance of redemption. But the film, while low-budget and hurried, should have streaks of vulgar intelligence. You should be able to convince yourself that it was made by a hood who had read some books in prison and was insufferable because of it. The picture should be suffering from a proper neglect, so that its sourness seems to be turning rank in front of our eyes. Some deterioration in the film stock would help, some harshness that enhances the mannered photography. The trouble is that nearly every candidate has now achieved cult status, so that some archive has fondly restored the film and rot has been stopped.
So be it. Still, I’d like to propose Joseph H. Lewis’s The Big Combo as a work that should be lost or withdrawn to ensure that people start desiring it, and I support the attitude of Philip Yordan, its writer, who, when asked if he liked The Big Combo, said no and moved on.
It’s a story of two men, a cop and a mobster, who are essentially very alike. Played by Cornel Wilde and Richard Conte (the sort of marginal actors and heavy presences that do well in noir), they have the same cynical attitude to life and the law, and the same sadomasochistic view of the woman they love (or need), who is played by Jean Wallace. Wallace (1923–90) was a beauty of an especially somber kind, one that is the more lovely for not being much of an actress. In her time, she was married to both Franchot Tone and Cornel Wilde (she died just a year after he did). She is photographed in The Big Combo, by John Alton, as if she is the Virgin come down among men. She is bathed in light, a thing she hardly notices, but it brings a wan spiritual quality to the film that exactly fits the kind of pretension I like to see in a noir.
So this nasty little crime film is actually made in a spirit busting for a prize. But Lewis is content to go through the motions here, never touching the real humanity of his far better Gun Crazy. But whereas that is a truly strange, unbalanced film, this is a hack job looking to get by on “class.” And Jean Wallace is a weird icon of class caught between two snakes. There is clever use of a hearing aid to build sadism, and the cast also includes Brian Donlevy, Lee Van Cleef, Robert Middleton, Earl Holliman, and Helen Walker. Just don’t let the word get around.
Bigger Than Life (1956)
It’s touching to see how often in his first years in Hollywood James Mason inspired a rare kind of movie by launching into friendship with a director on the cusp of the system. There was his alliance with Max Ophuls, and then there was the meeting with Nick Ray that made Bigger Than Life. For this is one of the finest pictures of the 1950s, a diagnosis of mounting alienation and madness in a very ordinary guy: an idealistic, small-town teacher.
The idea came from a New Yorker article, “Ten Feet Tall,” by Berton Roueché, on some of the deluding side effects of the new miracle drug cortisone. Mason produced the picture, and Richard Maibaum and Cyril Hume did the screenplay, though Ray’s close friend Gavin Lambert did some doctoring work and then Clifford Odets added one or two scenes—scenes that Maibaum found overreaching, and a part of what he called Ray’s muddying it up.
There may be something in that. Ray, Mason, and Odets were all creative people wounded by the system, and bitter about past compromises. Given a good subject, like this one, such talents are always likely to go for broke. And some people find Bigger Than Life overstated in that end-of-the-world mood that could overtake Ray. Equally, I think you have to see how in the 1950s a safe director would have made this too tidy, too pat. The hero, Ed Avery, is a man tormented by the feeling that he might be a colossus, and so the film needs to rise to that inflated stature.
I think it does, because of the benign but epic fury in Mason, but also because of Ray’s further pursuit of design as an element in the melodrama. The compositions and the color schemes evident in Rebel Without a Cause and clearly inspired by CinemaScope are here again: Joe MacDonald was the cameraman; Lyle Wheeler and Jack Martin Smith did the décor. These are studio names, people who presided over sedate pictures, and I think we have to see Ray himself having a tremendous impact on the production design. David Raksin delivered one of his best scores. And the cast includes Barbara Rush (as the wife), Walter Matthau, Robert Simon, and Christopher Olsen.
Mason is brilliant and very moving, and yet one has to ask—is he right? For he seems both English and patrician, and soon enough Mason’s liquid eloquence would be interpreted as a sign of villainy. Yet Ed Avery is mainstream America. I can see how Mason wanted to play the part, but I wonder how much more striking the story might have been for American viewers if it had penetrated closer to home, with someone like William Holden in the central role.
Who can tell? Bigger Than Life did little business in its day, but it is now established as one of Ray’s most important and dynamic films. Of course, there was too much Ed Avery in Ray for him to stay stable. He had his own addictions and inner storms, and so the career was always likely to go off course. But Rebel and Bigger Than Life show how plainly he saw manias building in America.
The Big Heat (1953)
I saw an essay the other day that argued that The Big Heat was driven by the selfishness of the Glenn Ford character, Detective Dave Bannion: He lets his wife be killed after he’s had warning; he helps bring about the death of Debby (Gloria Grahame), his unexpected ally; and he generally carries himself with an immense self-righteousness that begins to lose sight of the lesser feelings of others. But I’m not sure that that reading is missing from Fritz Lang’s simple yet layered film. Indeed, Lang takes pains to show how far every action has a consequence, and I do not think he has any illusion about the fate of this widower cop who has tasted revenge and extreme violence. In the context of Lang’s work, Bannion has become a dangerous man. That’s what the big heat—the pressure—has done to him, and to the city at large.
The Big Heat is the kind of picture easily placed at the fountainhead of the modern police story, with one exception: Ford’s integrity does seem to put the wicked city to rights—until you think how extensive the Lagana organization was, and how thoroughly it had infiltrated the police department. Lagana (Alexander Scourby) is gone, along with Vince Stone (Lee Marvin). But that only leaves a vacuum, and the one thing The Big Heat needs today to be a masterpiece—as opposed to a brilliant, lethal exercise—is the hint that Ford’s cop is no longer sound.
Still, as far as it goes, this movie charts the stepping-stones of pressure: a suicide; the widow becomes a blackmailer; Ford is pressured; his wife is killed. There is hot coffee on the heater. Vince sees it and, in his temper, hurls it in Gloria Grahame’s face—thus her famous molten look really turns to marred plastic. And so, in turn and in time, from the dark, she will repay the gift and make the sneer on Marvin’s face as permanent as scarring.
I think we know that Ford is going to pursue evil to its lair; we know that his determination will not be cheated or bought off. But that only makes his resolve more ugly or warping. And so, in a movie that seldom fails to show cause and effect, we have to ask ourselves what is happening to our Dave Bannion. Is he growing braver, or more desperate? Is he out to build a new city, or destroy himself? Isn’t his menace to the Lagana gang a matter of his not caring?
It follows that because the human action is mathematical, with equations showing the thrust of dynamic forces, so the style of the film is geometric—a series of tense diagrams where the figures of the people pass like scraps of clothing blown by a great wind. This is no city, or all cities. It is another version of metropolis, or M, where structures are alike. And it is Bannion’s sentimentality, or hope, that you can make up your mind to be good. He does not see that, instead, he is impelled by vengeance and its sure erasure of nobility.
The Big Lebowski (1998)
When you think about it, the most inexplicable and forlorn thing about Elliott Gould’s Philip Marlowe in Altman’s The Long Goodbye is that he is still a private detective, for heaven’s sake. This doesn’t take anything away from the importance of Gould’s drifting, muttering, swinging guy—this Marlowe is a pioneering apostle of not really caring, even if you’re in a movie. But who, by the early seventies, would trust ten cents on the methodology or ideology of the private eye? The world had gone to hell, and hand baskets were about all America made. However, if we can muster the belief, and if he could summon the necessary resolution (perhaps with the Nina van Pallandt character—just a suggestion), then here, wandering up on the millennium as if it were a split spare, we have the Dude, Jeffrey Lebowski, big in his dreams and in his scruffy sneakers, and dragged into a semblance of the private-operative stance thanks to a mistaken-identity routine, when thugs mistake him for the real Big Lebowski, and en
d up pissing on his rug.
This is the Los Angeles where a midweek bowling league can be the center of some guys’ lives, and The Big Lebowski is a movie about the kind of life that would be burned at the stake before it admitted to being impressed at being in a movie. As such, it is one of the Coen Brothers’ most coherent and endearing satires on movie existence, shot through with a genuine affection for the kind of no-hopes who people this world and who hold off silence and horror by the steady beat of “dude” talk. It is all the more pleasing that the film came nowhere near any Academy Awards, or such, yet it has surely passed into the slacker pantheon of those millions of people—homely guys, especially—who suspect their lives may never amount to anything (unless fate provides for them in the form of some hooligans pissing on their rug—it’s enough to sustain the rug business when rugs are, actually, pretty far-fetched).
Could the film have been made without Jeff Bridges? We doubt it, because Bridges is the weary saint of that brigade of great American actors who will never get an Oscar—or not until the day comes when honor falls on his casual shoulders (in which case let us hope the award itself is called “the Dude”).
So maybe this is for acquired tastes, or maybe taste is just something we all have to work hard at acquiring—and where better but in the groves of failure, shabbiness, and La Cienega? It is a key work of late-twentieth-century culture (whereas a lot of more vaunted things aren’t), and we love everyone involved—not just Jeff, but John Goodman, Julianne Moore, Steve Buscemi, Philip Seymour Hoffman (we remember him when he wasn’t ubiquitous), Tara Reid, Peter Stormare, John Turturro, and the magnificent Sam Elliott. Above all, we like this one because its tattered dignity and straight-faced hilarity served to take the superior smirk off the Coen Brothers’ faces (Joel directed, they both wrote it, and Ethan produced).
'Have You Seen...?' Page 16
