Carmen Jones still has creative excitement attached to it, and the feeling that a breakthrough was being accomplished. Moreover, it is set in a real South, whereas Porgy and Bess was in a picture-postcard landscape that the Gershwins had chosen to idealize. What a treat it would be if somehow we could muster the ambition to do the life of Louis Armstrong, say, as a largely black enterprise. Blacks in the South are among the great untold movie stories to this day.
Un Carnet de Bal (1937)
Julien Duvivier (1896–1967) ended badly on a long run of undistinguished films, including the worlds of Don Camillo. He had gone to America during the war and made those two odd episode films, Flesh and Fantasy and Tales of Manhattan (in part, surely, because enough people had fond memories of Un Carnet de Bal). But when Truffaut met Duvivier in 1966, the old man was complaining about bad reviews. A few years later, Truffaut found that in Japan Poil de Carotte was still cherished, while in Hollywood there was a great but unidentified actress who longed to have the waltz music from Carnet de Bal.
Carnet de Bal is a dream for the late-middle-aged. Christine (Marie Bell—who was actually only thirty-seven) is recently widowed. She wonders if she chose the right man. Then she finds the dance card for a great evening long ago, and she resolves to rediscover the men who seemed to be contenders that night. She’s lucky in finding them, a little less fortunate in that she becomes the constant in an episode film in which a number of strong actors have their moment with her: Harry Baur (who has become a priest); Raimu is a town mayor; Pierre Richard-Willm is an Alpine guide; Louis Jouvet is a fatalistic nightclub owner; Pierre Blanchar is an epileptic doctor; and Fernandel is a hairdresser. It works very pleasantly, with just one problem: We don’t really learn a great deal more about Christine in the process. If you think of Kane, it is a marvel how many fresh sides of Charlie slip out as the film proceeds.
There is a revelation (of sorts) that works beautifully: We realize that the dance itself—which has become momentous in Christine’s mind—was actually a very humdrum affair. But even that touch is spoiled in that the Maurice Jaubert music cries out with nostalgia and tenderness. How did that music figure at so minor an event? All of which is a pity, for the dance card as a way of reentering the past is very promising, and the contrast between how youth felt and middle age recollects is one of those things that could be the driving force in many more films. It might be a great idea to have some senior French filmmaker of today recall Cannes in the spring the New Wave broke—and then to confront the reality.
Duvivier wrote his own script, though with a string of collaborators—Henri Jeanson, Yves Mirande, Jean Sarment, Pierre Wolff, Bernard Zimmer. The camerawork was done by Philippe Agostini, Michel Kelber, and Pierre Levent. The sets were by Paul Colin and Serge Piménoff. The cast also includes Françoise Rosay.
At the 1937 Venice festival, Un Carnet de Bal won the Mussolini Cup for the best foreign film. It certainly doesn’t stand up as well as Pépé le Moko, and dance cards don’t really exist much anymore. But any knife that can find its way into complacency’s past is valuable—it may turn out to be a scalpel. Perhaps it’s just that Carnet de Bal illustrates the astonishing fertility of scriptwriting in the 1930s.
Carrie (1952)
Mention Carrie in most American movie circles, and it is assumed that you are talking about the Brian De Palma film from 1976. And that’s fair enough, for that prom-night bloodbath struck a new young generation as just what a movie was for. The final grasp out of the grave’s ground is one of our favorite nightmares. However, for those who have learned from experience that life is so much grimmer and less melodramatic than De Palma knows, the 1952 Carrie, by William Wyler, is the movie to tremble at. I’m not sure there is a better American movie about an ordinary man’s unnoticed downfall.
Sister Carrie was Theodore Dreiser’s first novel, written and ready in 1900, when the author was twenty-nine. It was actually held back until 1912 because the publisher believed it was too shocking and too outspoken on the way in which simple romantic/sexual energy carried people so close to disaster. May I add that it is a great novel, and one that really requires a remake? It is the story of a young woman from the country with vague theatrical aspirations. She comes to Chicago and is taken up by a traveling salesman, Charles Drouet. But she then meets George Hurstwood and has him fall in love with her. He is secure, married, well-to-do, and far older than she is. But he cannot resist her youth, both as sexual renewal and as a restored hope in life itself. Their affair proves fatal: Hurstwood is ruined, though Carrie becomes a success onstage.
The movie is not as tough as the novel (that could be the excuse for a remake), but it is so severe and unsentimental that it was a real box-office failure at the time, no matter that it displays Wyler’s genius for examining the middle class, their feeble romanticism, and the way in which the unsympathetic world can turn on them. This is the toughness that made Dodsworth one of his best films, and it is something you can feel in The Letter, The Heiress, and The Best Years of Our Lives. Wyler was seldom an inspired filmmaker, let alone an artist of beauty. But he was loyal to his actors, and he had an innate sense of unpleasant truths that is often interesting.
It has to be admitted that Carrie is played by Jennifer Jones, and that several other actresses of the time might have been better. But Laurence Olivier is Hurstwood, and this is one of his finest performances, deeply American, doggedly self-destructive, yet gentlemanly at every step. If you have doubts about Olivier, see Carrie. His work there is a triumph. There are other good performances, from Eddie Albert and a very nasty Miriam Hopkins. Hal Pereira contributes a series of very good sets, admirably filmed in black and white by Victor Milner. David Raksin’s score helps bring out the tragedy. A remake? It is so unlikely. But think of it with Julia Roberts and Robert Redford, with a script as tough as Dreiser.
Carrie (1976)
This is the authentic bucket-of-blood film—pig’s blood, as it turns out. That is what is awaiting Carrie White (Sissy Spacek) as she walks onstage to become prom queen at the high-school dance. And, as is so often the case in American films, this is high school and Spacek is at least twenty-five. Of course, the film assumes that her problems in school have to do with a fiercely overprotective mother (Piper Laurie, encouraged to rant and exhibit signs of Gothic fixation) and Carrie’s ignorance of her own menstrual processes. The film begins at the hysteria with which she greets her first period. And the prom night ruse is a cruel game, led by bad girl Chris Hargenson (Nancy Allen, also twenty-five).
I know that this is Middle America as dreamed and dreaded by Stephen King, but still I marvel at so many kids who seem to have been left behind by the educational system—is the film perhaps a secret call for rescue? The only thing that offsets the humiliation of Carrie is the small matter of her telekinetic powers. No, they’re not exactly explained, but I can easily think of ways they might have helped her get through school. Instead, of course, they serve to crucify her mother—all too late in the day. With the best will in the world, it’s very hard to imagine how Carrie has put up with this Mom when she can do her kind of knife tricks. But Carrie is a curious character—all-powerful when she has to be, but otherwise a creature huddled in paranoia.
Carrie was scripted by Lawrence D. Cohen, who is definitely not the person who became Larry Cohen, the maker of his own domestic horror pictures. But this was clearly the film that carried Brian De Palma over from intriguing offbeat pictures (like Sisters) to bucket movies. It caused a small sensation when it opened, and people who should have thought harder and longer rushed off some glib commentaries on the “craft” to be found in creepiness—photography by Mario Tosi, art direction by William Kenney and Jack Fisk, music by Pino Donaggio, and editing by Paul Hirsch. And in fact, I haven’t mentioned the best thing in the picture—and the biggest kicker of pure fright—but you have to stay till the end for that.
It seemed pretty clear to me in 1976 that De Palma was an interesting minor talent, ready (if not de
termined) to sell out to reckless exploitation but with a quite subtle taste for cruelty. Nothing has altered that view or the surmise that, drained of its hysteria and with real kids of the right age, Carrie might be a very interesting picture about the real impact of menstruation. But it’s also true that Carrie gave a kind of credibility to those willing to take garish horror pictures seriously.
The cast also includes Amy Irving, William Katt, John Travolta, Betty Buckley, P. J. Soles, Sydney Lassick, Stefan Gierasch, and Priscilla Pointer.
Carrington (1995)
Sometimes, a certain kind of Brit—to say nothing of Americans relying on Masterpiece Theatre to keep their heads above the rising flood—can believe that he is and was a part of Bloomsbury. Or at the very least, a distant relationship is vaguely perceived, like the principle that the tube can take you from Balham to Russell Square. There have been so many books, documentaries, and dramatic impersonations of those alert, prickly minds, their Edwardian fashions, and their wild gardens. We believe we saw Virginia Woolf herself plunge into her cold river, dragged down by stones, and we did little to rescue her, no matter that she wrote with Nicole Kidman’s hand.
In this atmosphere the wit and wisdom of the Bloomsburyites stands in for the loss of religious faith with which their era coincides. There is a scene in Carrington where people on the southern shores of sweet England hear the artillery bombardments in Flanders. I don’t know if that was possible during the war, but I can see that it seemed essential afterward and was part of the rather flippant way in which these smart people observed the end of civilization, even if one of them, J. M. Keynes, had a plan for ending the economic crash.
Carrington is the best film about this moment and group, in great part because it has the sense to concentrate on a fringe figure, Dora Carrington—would-be painter, would-be lover, and suicide. It is very much the work of Christopher Hampton, who wrote the script and directed the film and who was so intent on doing good work that he hardly noticed the extent to which Carrington was a downer perhaps, a self-dramatist for sure, a minor figure maybe, but the opportunity for Emma Thompson’s finest acting in film. The reason to see it is Thompson’s loyalty to a confused and confusing woman, a chump among so many paragons, yet one who exposes a great deal of their self-serving fakery.
The film has another rock to stand on: just as it is adapted in part from Michael Holroyd’s biography of Lytton Strachey, so Strachey is its other central character—fey, coy, hilarious, selfish, lovable, hateful. It is a very thorough portrait and the best thing Jonathan Pryce has ever done. You can take it for granted that in the matter of country houses and sylvan picnic glades, the film is beyond reproach. Similarly, there is hardly a costume that might not have graced the Victoria and Albert Museum. There is nudity, too; this is a properly sensual film. Nevertheless, its strength is a kind of biographical integrity: we believe that these lives were as we see them—and that leaves no room for evading the final tragedy.
Denis Lenoir photographed the movie, Michael Nyman wrote the music, and Caroline Amies did the production design. The cast also includes Steven Waddington as Ralph Partridge, Samuel West as Gerald Brenan, Rufus Sewell as Mark Gertler, Penelope Wilton as Lady Ottoline Morrell, Janet McTeer as Vanessa Bell, and Jeremy Northam as Beacus Penrose.
Casablanca (1942)
It’s a war picture, it’s a love story, it’s a bit of a musical—and it’s a café picture. You have only to think of To Have and Have Not to see how many genres can coexist (like all those refugees) under the roof of a café picture, an uneasy haven close to the battle lines, a place where every supporting actor can have his or her moment.
There is an excellent full-length book on the making of this one picture (Round Up the Usual Suspects, by Aljean Harmetz), in which you can follow the many uncertainties that attended this extraordinary hit and lasting classic from Warners. And every doubt and shift in direction is worth recalling when one recalls the lustrous, phenomenal “rightness” of the picture. The lesson here is that—in classical cinema, at least—doubts can be rendered feeble in the face of the certainty of the medium.
Casablanca began as a play, Everybody Comes to Rick’s, by Murray Burnett and Joan Alison, set in Casablanca and inspired by seeing Jews attempting to escape from Vienna. Warners got the play (unproduced) on December 8, 1941, the day after Pearl Harbor. The play and the names of the characters are very close to the final film (though Ilsa was originally called Lois). The three credited screenwriters were the Epstein brothers and Howard Koch, not that anyone was sure who did what. Asked his opinion, the very good producer Robert Lord reckoned that Rick was “two parts Hemingway, one part Scott Fitzgerald, and a dash of café Christ.”
It’s true that many other contract players were considered for the leads, but Hal Wallis always saw Rick as a Bogart part, and in the end the chance of borrowing Ingrid Bergman from David O. Selznick outweighed thoughts of Ann Sheridan, Hedy Lamarr, or Michele Morgan. While Warners paid $20,000 for the play and $47,281 to six writers (including Aeneas MacKenzie and Lenore Coffee), they paid $73,400 to the one and only director, Michael Curtiz. The total cast salary bill was $91,717. In other words, a huge stress was put on Curtiz pulling this all together—and I think criticism should follow the money lead. The visual panache (photography by Arthur Edeson) is extraordinary and very subtle. The framing and the movements are golden.
Yes, the casting seems inspired: not just Bogart and Bergman, both with bruised, masochistic strains, but Paul Henreid sporting a concentration camp scar, the impeccable Claude Rains, as well as Peter Lorre, Sydney Greenstreet, Conrad Veidt, S. Z. Sakall, Dooley Wilson (singing “As Time Goes By”), Madeleine LeBeau, John Qualen, Leonid Kinskey, Helmut Dantine, and the divine Marcel Dalio.
But the screen was not enough. The film was released as the Allies took Casablanca—a just war breeds perfect publicity. It cost $878,000, and the first domestic rentals were $3.7 million. It won Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Screenplay. It stands for brave movies in a just war. It may be America’s great moment: hard-boiled, soft-centered, and with a dream coinciding with the real.
Casino (1995)
Casino for me is a test case. When I first saw the film, I recognized that it had astonishing prettiness, fluidity, and a musical line. I had a good time, though I was wary: It seemed to me I was being encouraged to fantasize about being a gangster—and I fear that for Martin Scorsese (a great filmmaker, not equaled in his age for raw talent), that was a beckoning dead end already fully explored in GoodFellas. Why would we spend so much time gloating over (and almost singing along with) the lifestyles of the rich and vicious if Scorsese and we were not deeply vulnerable to the myth “It must be fun to be a gangster”?
I am not giving up that uneasiness, or its application to Scorsese’s career as a whole. I believe he has allowed himself to become monopolized by young hoodlumism. But I have to add this: Over the years since it was made, I have found myself watching Casino endlessly—not always the whole film, but half an hour here or there, passages, riffs, routines, “numbers” if you like—and I think that references to music are vital. I can hardly do that without asking myself why, or at least admitting that I just love the sensation, in the same way that I listen to certain pieces of music over and over (for example, Sweeney Todd, some Sinatra songs, Mahler symphonies, Lester Young). And so I think that the thing I called “prettiness” first (and there is a put-down in that word) is beauty: It’s sheer love for the expressive flow of film, especially when musicalized (and I am at the point of seeing Casino as a new musical).
But it is more than that. I think I like Casino as much as I do because of two eternal, frustrating ties: the one between Robert De Niro and Sharon Stone, and the other between De Niro and Joe Pesci. The latter is something we have seen before in Scorsese (in Raging Bull and GoodFellas, but in other films, too, like Mean Streets, where “brothers” move apart). In Casino, Pesci’s infernal zest actually overpowers De Niro’s fusspot meticulousness (the sc
ene where De Niro folds his pants in the office is sublimely telling).
Then there is Sharon Stone’s Ginger. There are not really that many interesting women in Scorsese’s work, and that is one of his gravest handicaps. But Stone will not let Ginger be overlooked. She gnaws at the film like a mongoose with a grip on a cobra’s neck. She is incessant, forlorn, trashy, and human. And she actually conspires with Pesci to undermine De Niro’s perfect manager figure, a negativism that rises to the level of tragedy.
More than that, the film has so many inspired scenes—like the car blowing up. the desert digging, the analysis of how a casino functions. Plus, everything involving James Woods, Don Rickles, Alan King, L. Q. Jones (superb), Dick Smothers, and Frank Vincent is to see again and again.
Casque d’Or (1952)
By general consent, this is the masterpiece of Jacques Becker, one of the most popular men in the French film industry and someone who often rated friendship as the finest thing in life. It’s a love story set in the Paris underworld in the late 1890s, the bond between Marie (Simone Signoret) and Manda (Serge Reggiani), and there’s ample reason for saying it was the best thing either one of them ever did. Signoret was a beauty on a very rapid arc—to see her at her best was a matter of only a dozen years or so—and in Casque d’Or the title refers to her hair, a golden helmet, put down on top of an insolent and sensual gaze. It’s the keynote of the film, a measure of a real love story told without any sentimentality or any concession. For these characters are lowlifes—they are, I think, the predecessors of so many Jean-Pierre Melville pictures—who will do what they have to to survive.
'Have You Seen...?' Page 25
