'Have You Seen...?'

by David Thomson

  Producer Cy Feuer hired Jay Presson Allen to do the screenplay and urged her to restore as much of Isherwood as possible. But the form of the musical, and the urges of the chosen director, Bob Fosse, resisted all her efforts. Sometimes you can think that Christopher (or Brian) (Michael York) is actually in love with Sally. His gayness—not to mention the shabby gayness favored by Isherwood—is hardly allowed to challenge the box office. And nothing can detract from the power of Joel Grey. He is not just the best performer in the club. He could be a Nazi spy, an informer. He could be Goebbels in disguise.

  That said, the film is very effective. Bob Fosse evolved a dance style that has nothing to do with Germany in the thirties, but that is sexy and insolent—and it matches the songs with their delight in money. Indeed, the film is more sinister every time you see it, as if Fosse’s cheerful ignorance of politics was letting fascism seep under the door. Liza was hugely striking in 1972. Now her limits show through. It took The Godfather to beat Cabaret as Best Picture, but Oscars went to Liza, Fosse, and Grey (none of whom ever made as big a splash again). Meanwhile, the story of Isherwood remains to be told.

  The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920)

  Caligari is alive and well. It is astonishing (I think) how many cultural historians and German experts still read Siegfried Kracauer’s From Caligari to Hitler. But even if Dr. Mabuse deserves to be in that title somewhere, the notion of an affinity between an asylum chief and a certain dictator is neither stupid nor useless. The public likes that kind of melodrama, and “Caligari” is still a familiar term in certain households. Better still, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari remains an extraordinary film. It’s still very easy to feel the startling impact it had upon the first age of film buffs as the Great War ended.

  Whether it is Griffith or Feuillade, Sjöstrom or Chaplin, we think of the first silent films as almost desperate for the light. That was the only way to film, so pictures went outdoors or shot in “studios” with glass roofs. An inevitable tradition of realism was struck up just because of that reliance on nature. But Caligari represents a theatrical tradition: that theater lights are strong enough to film by, that it might be possible to make and film a world that is the opposite of “natural,” one that expresses inner states of being. In fact, I’m not sure how far expressionist décor was prevalent in the theater anywhere except in Germany. And one thing to say about Caligari is that it represents a complete interaction of film and theater talents.

  It came from a script by Carl Mayer and Hans Janowitz. Some murders occur in the town of Holstenwall. Francis, a student, suspects a local fairground impresario, Caligari, and his somnambulist, Cesare. Francis’s lover, Jane, is abducted by Cesare; Francis follows them to an asylum to discover that Caligari is installed there as a therapist.

  Erich Pommer produced and Robert Wiene directed the film, but the most exciting element is the décor—jagged, nightmarish, distorted, the expression of a deranged sensibility—and that was done by Hermann Warm, Walter Reimann, and Walter Röhrig, stage designers crossing over to the movies (Warm would work on Carl Theodor Dreyer’s Passion of Joan of Arc, and Röhrig was a key part of F. W. Murnau’s team).

  Of course, the characters are real actors, but Wiene was prepared to treat costume like décor, and he used nearly impasto makeup to suggest ghostly spirit. He also ordered movements that owed a lot to dance; this is especially true of Conrad Veidt’s Cesare, a seductive figure of doom. But you can also see it in Lil Dagover’s Jane, Friedrich Feher’s Francis, and Werner Krauss’s infernally untidy Caligari.

  There is more. The story had a frame to it, in which Caligari was a supposedly benign master of the asylum and Francis and all the others were inmates. So the film was like a Freudian case, a sign that madness could be healed. No one has ever been satisfied with this smiling act. Caligari ranks as a deeply sinister figure (all the more so for controlling the action) and the movies’ first mad psychiatrist.

  Cabin in the Sky (1943)

  It was in October 1940 that Cabin in the Sky opened on Broadway, a “musical fantasy” with book by Lynn Root, lyrics by Jean Latouche, and music by Vernon Duke. The show didn’t run too long, but it was famous for dances by Katherine Dunham and George Balanchine, and for art direction by Boris Aronson and assisted by Vincente Minnelli. So Minnelli was invited to M-G-M by producer Arthur Freed, and after a few isolated warm-up sequences on other films, he made his debut with the Hollywood film of the all-black musical.

  Joseph Schrank did a screenplay from the stage show, maintaining the story of Petunia Jackson asking God to spare the life of her wandering husband, Little Joe. Joe is given six months to redeem himself, and he has the Lord’s General on his side, as well as Lucifer Jr. scheming against him. Joe nearly ruins his chances, but at the last moment God is touched by Petunia’s pleas.

  Ethel Waters kept the lead for the screen version, but Dooley Wilson was replaced as Little Joe by Eddie Anderson. Rex Ingram kept the part of Lucifer, and in the movie the young Lena Horne made a striking appearance singing “Honey in the Honeycomb,” one of the original Vernon Duke numbers. The other songs from the stage show are “Cabin in the Sky” and “Taking a Chance on Love” (both sung by Waters and Anderson).

  Harold Arlen and E. Y. Harburg wrote some extra songs for the movie, notably Ethel Waters’s heartfelt number “Happiness Is a Thing Called Joe.” In addition, the Duke Ellington Orchestra appeared in two Ellington songs, “Going Up” and “Things Ain’t What They Used to Be.” Louis Armstrong is there, too, though he seems a little lost without a really strong part.

  Compared with Carmen Jones (1954), say, Cabin in the Sky is folksy and condescending, yet it is one of the first films to treat a black myth seriously. Moreover, in some of the numbers, under Minnelli’s guidance, you can see the ethos of the new musical and the urge to cast human nature as fantasy and romance. Minnelli had designed many shows at Radio City Music Hall, and in doing Cabin in the Sky he was trying to develop a potential he had seen in Ernst Lubitsch’s Love Me Tonight, in which character came out of song, dance, and décor. He had the greatest difficulty working with the studio art department, because those people had become very fixed in their realistic way of doing things. Right from the start, therefore, Minnelli saw the need for dream in his style, and the dream was a way of escaping the harsh black stereo-typing.

  In short, there were from the outset two approaches in the Metro musical: the kind of deliberate, athletic realism that Gene Kelly and Stanley Donen preferred, and a theatrical stylization that Minnelli had picked up on Broadway. There’s no need for this difference to be resolved, with either side victorious. Cabin in the Sky looks much better, however, if you see it as a dream—almost certainly a white person’s dream.

  Camille (1936)

  If you look at Greta Garbo’s Camille today, you can act smug if you are so inclined. You can say, Well, of course, they could do that kind of nonsense in 1936, but you couldn’t do it today. I think you’d be right—no one in Hollywood, at least, now has the daring or the wisdom to do this story with such breathtaking simplicity and brevity. They’d build it up; they’d camp it up. Whereas all Garbo does is murmur to herself, Well, of course, it’s about someone who dies for love—what’s more natural than that?

  There had been a lot of Camilles in picture history: Sarah Bernhardt, Clara Kimball Young, Theda Bara, and Nazimova had done it (the last with Rudolph Valentino as Armand). But after Garbo, people stopped doing Camille because she had nailed it, because no one was reckless enough to go near her gravity again, because no one could comprehend the simplicity with which she died finally—like a flower deserted by the light.

  Yes, it’s the story of Marguerite Gautier, derived from Alexandre Dumas, of a courtesan of a certain age who falls in love with a ravishing young man, gives him up under the pressure of respectable society, and is then briefly reunited with him before her death from consumption. Today, as the film’s director, George Cukor, observed, women tend to be consumed with their own lib
eration, not self-sacrifice, But look around you in life, look at the stories of Colette, look at Cherie, and you may realize how often young men suck their romantic education from older women and then abandon the women. It remains an everyday sort of thing, tragic and inevitable. And all Cukor did was to insist on the truth of the situation and permit Garbo’s great work.

  Cukor gave a lot of credit to Irving Thalberg, who had nursed Garbo’s career personally—and who died during the filming. They labored over a script. Frances Marion and James Hilton produced wordy stuff, and then Zoe Akins delivered a script that worked on the principle that the less Marguerite had to say, the more she was going to feel. Time and again, Garbo found modest physical gestures (restrained but seething, Cukor said)—just look at the swoon that is actually her death. How does an actress make the death in Camille a surprise except through genius? The bittersweet expressions on her face are by now the idiom of classic cinema. Everyone went to school on her.

  You can say that Cukor merely attended to her performance. But consider that Max Ophuls attends to his actresses out of affection while a Joseph Mankiewicz, say, does so from strict duty. You can feel the difference, and you can feel Cukor especially in the treatment of Robert Taylor, telling him it’s all right to be so beautiful—let it shine—because, truly, you are in the film to be a face looking at her.

  The film was photographed by William Daniels and Karl Freund—how did they collaborate?—with brilliant décor and costumes and fine support from Lionel Barrymore, Henry Daniell (very good), Elizabeth Allan, Laura Hope Crews, Lenore Ulric, and Jessie Ralph. This is Hollywood at its best.

  Cape Fear (1962)

  No one could seek to suggest that J. Lee Thompson was a better film director than Martin Scorsese. Everyone can see that Scorsese’s Cape Fear (1991) is a subtler film than the original, with far more complex character studies. But I will stick with the first film, because it is trash honestly done, whereas the Scorsese version is a tangled mess of violent urges and improving attitudes. And, finally, I think that Robert De Niro’s Max Cady is a superb master class given by a great actor, whereas Robert Mitchum’s Cady is the Beast.

  You know the story. Gregory Peck is a lawyer, as decent a man as Peck would lead you to anticipate. He lives in Florida with his wife (Polly Bergen) and an early teenage daughter (Lori Martin). Then Max Cady comes back into his life, a prisoner Peck once had to defend—but not too strenuously, because in his heart he knew that the only safe place for Cady was inside a maximum-security prison or at the bottom of the swamp. Cady vows to be avenged, to hurt Peck where he is most vulnerable.

  This all came from a John D. MacDonald novel, The Executioners. The 1962 version was scripted by James R. Webb, and it settles for emphatic characters. But in 1991, with Wesley Strick doing the screenplay, Scorsese took the very reasonable course of enriching the motivation. In the remake, Nick Nolte plays the lawyer, and it is clear that he is lazy and unprincipled. He did let Cady down, and he has betrayed his wife (Jessica Lange) in affairs. So the threatened household is far more insecure. Above all, the daughter in the remake (Juliette Lewis at her best) is a theater student who thinks Cady is her new acting teacher. They have a couple of brilliant and very frightening scenes together that actually suggest a quite different menace: that Max really woos the daughter away from home.

  The Scorsese picture is in color, photographed by Freddie Francis. The Lee Thompson is in black and white, handled by Sam Leavitt. And given the much more restrictive censorship of 1962, the first film is far more suggestive and far more reliant on Mitchum. This is Harry Powell from The Night of the Hunter without the comedy. This is the man who allegedly wandered the country as a drifter before he became a movie star. This is the man who could be flat-out frightening in his mature life by letting you see the contempt he felt for your world. When Mitchum takes off his shirt and goes into the water, he is a sea beast, hot and lusty in ways no sophistication can match. The threat in his watching Polly Bergen and Lori Martin, the gloating over them, is unequivocal and unlimited. It is hideous, and it lets us feel the darkness that has so often been romanticized in Mitchum’s heroic roles.

  Thompson films it straight and well, and he gets good supporting work from Martin Balsam, Jack Kruschen, Telly Savalas, Barrie Chase, and Edward Platt. He is plainly gripped and alarmed by his own story. Scorsese is far more spectacular. He shows off by giving Peck and Mitchum cameos. He takes the original Bernard Herrmann score and has Elmer Bernstein redo it. Scorsese is not afraid. But he should be. For Cape Fear is an authentic confrontation with paranoia.

  Carefree (1938)

  Alas, by 1938, Carefree wasn’t the best working title. At last, the blithe gulf between the world of wealth onscreen in the Astaire-Rogers musicals and the economic realities of the time was exposed. Carefree was number eight in their series. It cost $1.25 million, nearly three times as much as Flying Down to Rio and about $300,000 more than Shall We Dance? Production costs were building, perhaps, but above all, Astaire’s salary was mounting. He was paid $10,000 for Flying Down to Rio; by Carefree he was up to $100,000.

  Who can say he wasn’t worth much more? Fred Astaire was an art and a genre unto himself, not to mention a business. If his pictures had happened along in the 1970s, say, he would have been their owner. His wealth would have been at a quite different level. Yet for RKO in the 1930s, he was the pressure that was making “his” pictures untenable.

  More serious, Carefree was said to have lost money: Its total income was $1.73 million. With marketing costs added on, it was left in the red on its first run. Shall We Dance? (1937) had earned $2.16 million. In other words, the audience was in decline. Just as Ginger Rogers was pressing for solo pictures where she got more acting opportunities, so it seems that the public was jaded. (Note, too, that Carefree was 80 minutes, instead of 116 for Shall We Dance? and 105 for Swing Time.) Carefree also had one of the best ideas behind an Astaire-Rogers film: him as her psychiatrist. The script was by Allan Scott and Ernest Pagano, from a treatment by Dudley Nichols and Hagar Wilde, from a story by Guy Endore. The songs were Irving Berlin, and they include “I Used to Be Color Blind” and “Change Partners.” The latter involves a fascinating dance sequence in which Fred is like the hypnotist while Ginger is the sleepwalker. That was edging into fresh territory, and maybe the novelty put some audiences off.

  Hermes Pan did the dances, and it’s notable that Astaire was more willing to cut closer shots into the objective, full-figure coverage. Mark Sandrich directed. Yet something was amiss—almost like the irresistible germ of change for its own sake nagging at Preston Sturges, the inability to leave well enough alone.

  Of course, Ginger Rogers succeeded in her ambition: She became an actress, won her Oscar. It was Fred who was stranded. He never really found a formula for a different kind of film, just as he never surrendered his own meticulous standards. So his search for partners began, meeting with as much success as failure. The trouble was that his rather vague charm never found another personality. Fred had to prove the lesson that if you do something better than anyone else has ever done it, you may lose your following.

  The pair made only two more films: first, The Story of Vernon and Irene Castle (1939), which had about the same business history as Carefree. You can blame the studio and Rogers’s urge for independence. But the end of the partnership must also be credited to Astaire’s inability to find a fresh format. Just over the horizon was a young, athletic, very male dancer—Gene Kelly. And ten years later, The Barkleys of Broadway.

  Carmen Jones (1954)

  Carmen Jones appeared on Broadway in 1943, prompted by Oscar Hammerstein’s urge to give the Bizet score modern lyrics. It was the classic opera set in a cigarette factory in the American South, done with an all-black cast. It wasn’t quite Porgy and Bess, but it was a big hit, and eventually Otto Preminger managed to bring it to the screen at Twentieth Century Fox.

  Harry Kleiner did a good screenplay for the musical, and it was always Preminger’s i
ntention to make it a dramatic film with songs. His Carmen was Dorothy Dandridge, a fascinating if tragic Hollywood story, and Preminger’s mistress. The soldier, Joe, would be Harry Belafonte.

  The production went to the South, and Sam Leavitt did a great job photographing the open spaces and Edward Ilou’s sets in CinemaScope. A young Herbert Ross worked on the dance numbers, and they involve a dynamic moving-camera treatment from Preminger in which the energy of the players pushed against the limits of their world. Of course, the actors could not do the singing themselves, so Dandridge is dubbed by Marilyn Horne, Belafonte by LeVern Hutcherson, Diahann Carroll by Bernice Peterson, and Joe Adams by Marvin Hayes. But the dubbing is done so well that there is not the usual feeling of dislocation in the performances. The cast also includes Olga James, Brock Peters, and Pearl Bailey, who does sing “Beat Out Dat Rhythm on a Drum,” to tremendous effect.

  Dandridge delivers Carmen sultry and insolent—she is still one of the best Carmens offered on film (in all forms of song, dance, or overacting). She was Oscar-nominated as Best Actress, the first time a black performer had been so rewarded for a lead role. That she lost to Grace Kelly in The Country Girl (maybe Kelly’s worst performance) only adds to the chagrin—she could at least have lost to Judy Garland in A Star Is Born. Dandridge was dead by 1965 (aged forty-two).

  Five years later, Preminger took on Porgy and Bess, another great score. He was given more means, and he had Dandridge again and Sidney Poitier in the leads, with Sammy Davis, Jr., as Sportin’ Life. It is a far inferior film, moving slowly and somehow managing a much faker view of black life. But there the matter stands. Apart from The Wiz (misguided in every way), we have not really had a black musical since, and it certainly doesn’t even have to be all black—no matter that in our culture black music has been so dominant in the years since.