'Have You Seen...?'

by David Thomson

  François Truffaut reckoned that the film was as if done in one line or motion, with absolute assurance. Jean Renoir thought so highly of it that, in his French Cancan, he had an aside where a look-alike version of its three central characters are sitting at a café. The Casque d’Or script was done by Becker himself, with Jacques Companéez and Annette Wademant, and the film was a production of the Hakim brothers. Those famously sleazy producers loved movies about the underworld, and it’s pretty clear that they believed they were the heroes. The story ends badly here—the guillotine plays a part—but it leaves us in no doubt about the erotic glory that came first. Becker was always a very natural director, and there are some open-air love scenes that deserve their place in the history of erotic cinema. Of course, it goes without saying, too, that the film is a cheerful advertisement for that lowlife Paris we all cherish. Pauline Kael turned a bit prim over it. She said it felt touristy—but that’s like complaining that Monument Valley in the Ford films asks, “Wish you were here?” Of course it does: It is a great part of movie magnetism that we want to be there. In the picture.

  Robert Le Febvre did the photography. Marguerite Renoir edited the film. Jean D’Eaubonne did the great sets. The costumes were by Mayo, and Georges Van Parys wrote the music. I think it’s agreed that the overall re-creation of that rich period in Montmartre was never done better. The cast also includes Claude Dauphin as Leca, the gang leader, as well as Raymond Bussières, Odette Barencey, Loleh Bellon, Solange Certin, Jacqueline Dane, and Gaston Modot.

  When Casque d’Or opened, it was a failure in France. But in Britain Signoret won a prize for her acting and her undeniable sensual presence—legend has it that’s how she got her Oscar part in Room at the Top a few years later. But she never looked better than as Casque d’Or.

  The Cat Concerto (1947)

  It’s 1947, so who’s surprised that it’s another noir picture? There is this cat—dressed to perfection, looking like aces—and it is his big night at somewhere like Carnegie Hall. He’s black and white, just like the keys on the piano. He has no name, but you know he’s a Mr. Perfection, and you know that he’s had the years of training and the master classes. And you know that, despite his claws, he has a fingering technique that is strictly for virtuosos. Except that he has this fatal flaw, that little crack in the enamel, the hardly detectable fissure in the golden bowl. You can call it neurosis or big-night nerves or just the certainty that something is going to go wrong. Think of him as doomed. Who wants a cat’s life?

  So he starts up on the “Hungarian Rhapsody” by Liszt, and everything’s going hunky-dory and keep your sofa cushions plump. But what do you know—there is a mouse who lives in this Steinway, and he is woken up by the hammering on the keys. Once the mouse sees that the player is the cat he sets a furious, loving obstacle course for him. And that’s how The Cat Concerto becomes a routine about keeping up with hell. I know, it’s M-G-M and Technicolor, but this is the great American film about the highest artistic dreams leading you to madness.

  Tom and Jerry came into being at Metro with the meeting of William Hanna and Joseph Barbera, two of the many loose-end ideas and gag guys in animation. They teamed up with Fred Quimby and soon enough—in 1940, in fact—they had Puss Gets the Boot, about a nice middle-class household presided over by a big black house-keeper, and sporting a cat and a mouse. It is the cat’s being and destiny to be tormented by the mouse and it is the mouse’s purpose in life to overcome nature and defeat the cat—so that the cat keeps after him. In Puss Gets the Boot, the mouse frames the cat for smashing the household crockery so that Black Mama throws him out. So it began, so it would always be. The cat leads a dog’s life.

  With Scott Bradley doing the music (very important in The Cat Concerto), Hanna and Barbera had a winning formula. For several years in the 1940s and thereafter they made as many as six T&Js a year, and they turned the animation Oscar into their private possession. The gags were brilliant. The situations often imitate the plots of movies—Heavenly Puss is a takeoff on A Matter of Life and Death. And the two guys were crazy about their play. Later on, the cat (Tom) turned lean, mean, and driven, but at the outset he was good-natured enough, with a lovely smile. It was just that he was too stupid to do anything except behave like a cat all the time. The mouse (Jerry) is the epitome of spunk and courage and the nerve that lets a fly-weight handle a dinosaur. Hanna and Barbera became a factory, and huge on television, but they never again recaptured the lyrical battleground of cat and mouse or the sweet way in which the mouse always won.

  Cat People (1942)

  In less than a month, producer Val Lewton’s new unit at RKO shot Cat People using bits of sets from The Magnificent Ambersons. The film ran 71 minutes and cost about $134,000, it grossed over $2 million, and the studio was saved again. Cheap horror, B-picture horror, had made a sweet marriage with maybe its most enlightened and fastidious entrepreneur. Indeed, Val Lewton was so artistic, and so smart, that he grasped this rare insight: You don’t actually show the frightening thing.

  Irena (Simone Simon) is a fashion designer, born in the Balkans but living in New York. She is afraid that she is the descendant of cat people; she is also sexually frigid. It was Lewton’s intuition that neurosis could be the engine of horror or some heightened fantasy. She marries Oliver Reed (the upright, neutral, unthreatening Kent Smith), but she is too alarmed to consummate the marriage. He might be too if he understood exactly the kind of cat he has at home.

  Lewton gave the film to director Jacques Tourneur, who had worked in France with his father, director Maurice Tourneur, but who was an unknown quantity in America. At first, RKO thought Tourneur was failing, but all they were seeing was Lewton’s scheme of reticence, shadow, and suggestion. It was only when the film previewed that the studio realized they were on to something. (And Tourneur did so much good work—I Walked with a Zombie, Out of the Past, The Flame and the Arrow.)

  The Lewton method is still a model: artistic restraint and fiscal moderation going hand in hand, reveling in the natural suggestiveness of film itself. On Cat People, DeWitt Bodeen did the screenplay, Nicholas Musuraca handled the photography, Mark Robson was the editor, Albert S. D’Agostino and Walter E. Keller were art directors, and Roy Webb did the music. This was essentially the team that Lewton would use on the series of films that followed, though he had other directors, including Robson and Robert Wise. But Tourneur’s profound understanding of sequence construction was Lewton’s greatest asset, and it needed only a face like that of Simone Simon (or Jean Brooks in The Seventh Victim) for the audience to have a handhold on the dream.

  But Lewton was both very intelligent and highly neurotic, and the tone of his movies is rooted in that combination and in the overall feeling that quite subtle or intricate states of mind could be conveyed through violent states of denial. And so in the great works of horror, just as in the best of surrealism, there is a creeping awareness of narrative arcs that are the imprint of repressed emotions. And Cat People has the added advantage of being set in a modern New York; the exotic or period settings sometimes diluted the strength of these fables. To this day, the idea of films of suspense derived from urban neuroses is intensely promising; Hitchcock is only the most obvious example of directors who benefited from this pioneering work. Paul Schrader’s remake of Cat People (1982) was laughed at, because its sex was flagrant instead of repressed. But Schrader understood the secret, buried link between neurotic behavior and horror, and his Cat People could have been very interesting if all its characters had slipped from numb coldness to the wild overheat that lurked in Nastassja Kinski.

  Caught (1949)

  It is hardly possible nowadays to see Max Ophüls’s Caught without pondering the muddled legends on how it was made—and why. On the one hand, you have this begging romance about a rather easygoing (empty-headed) model named Leonora Eames (Barbara Bel Geddes), her gaze full of those silly, romantic dreams that afflict women, who finds herself not just wooed by but married to Smith Ohlrig (Robert
Ryan), a millionaire without feeling, the kind of husband who behaves in such a way that the wife is going to wonder whether he’s just “Oil rig” misspelled. So she can’t take the misery any longer, and she runs away and finds a job as receptionist at the clinic of a small, hardworking medical partnership—half of which is Dr. Larry Quinada, all of whom is James Mason—in a poor neighborhood, where the dedicated docs work late. And this girl never even pauses to ask, Is she lucky or what?

  On the other hand, the film apparently grew out of Ophüls’s pathological loathing of Howard Hughes, a lifetime’s experience acquired on the wretched Vendetta project. Thus, Ophüls approaches the screenwriter, Arthur Laurents, and tells him, Don’t bother too much with the book you’ve been assigned (Wild Calendar, by Libbie Block); make this film the blackest portrait you can of that evil Howard Hughes! Well, why not? So many films have been made by great or graceless men attempting to portray their own story, why not a piece of character assassination like this? Except that word gets back to Hughes himself—the walls have ears, et cetera—and Hughes, in a passing whit of fimsy, calls in Robert Ryan and says, I hear you’re playing me—in which case, let me give you a few pointers.

  Of course, what we’re outlining here is the picture of a world so demented that it passes understanding that it should be taught at decent universities, let alone that Ph.D.’s should be given for advanced knowledge in it. Something else remains to be said: Caught is a treat. Somehow all the mixed motives have conspired to make a love story noir in which the rawness of the material makes a rich contrast with the sophistication and warmth in Ophüls’s way of looking at people.

  Arthur Laurents is on record as saying that he couldn’t see what the fuss was about where Ophüls was concerned. In which case he should look more closely at the rapturous passage of the film where Leonora joins the Quinada practice—look at the spaces, the light, the movement of the camera (there is a dance sequence that is ravishing), and the overall way in which Mason (who loved Ophüls) begins to convey to Leonora that she is in another world.

  Photographed by Lee Garmes, Caught has passages where the cinematic density lifts the whole project up. There is also music by Frederick Hollander. To my eyes, Robert Ryan is just like Robert Ryan in a rather clichéd role, but Mason is the heart of the film. Good support from Curt Bois, Frank Ferguson, and Art Smith.

  Céline and Julie Go Boating (1974)

  It is summer in Paris. Julie (Dominique Labourier) is a librarian, sitting in one of those pretty, small parks, watching the cats watch her. She has a book of magic, and she mutters a spell. Whereupon a creature, Céline (Juliet Berto), appears, in a rush, dropping things, unaware of the scene she is making. Céline is a magician, and you can wonder what a librarian and a magician might have in common, save for the feeling of being mystified by what the other does. Well, they become friends or accomplices, no more suited than those other great couples held together by an ampersand, like Laurel & Hardy. And Céline tells Julie about a house where something rather nasty is going on. Meanwhile, summer continues, and Céline and Julie chat and get into silly adventures.

  But the idea of the house weighs on them. It is a very pleasant place, rather secluded and apparently unoccupied. Julie enters the house and is thrown out, as if by force. But she has a candy in her mouth, and when she sucks on it, she gets brief flashes of imagery of the life inside the house. Gradually, the two of them enter the house. And they discover… it is still summer, very nice, and the cats are about in the small, pretty parks.

  When they are in the house Céline and Julie go unnoticed. There are people in the house—three adults (Barbet Schroeder, Bulle Ogier, and Marie-France Pisier) and a little girl, Madlyn (Nathalie Asnar). The two young women cannot work out what is happening in the house—how would they know that this action, “Phantom Ladies Over Paris,” comes from a couple of Henry James stories? But they do realize that Madlyn is at risk. You see, something like a movie is playing continually in the house, and over the course of a few visits Céline and Julie begin to piece it together. The adults in the house are trying to win Madlyn for her money. Someone must rescue the child.

  In advance of Céline and Julie, Jacques Rivette had made his immense conspiracy film, Out One, at over twelve hours. I think that experiment in duration had cleared the way for this unusually epic encounter with a dream. It is 192 minutes. It is a film in which we often feel time pass, though never with anything other than fascination or suspense. For what it builds to is a parable on film-watching itself, as “Phantom Ladies…” becomes increasingly like a Fantomas-style serial breathed back into life. The script is credited to the cast, to Eduardo de Gregorio, and to Rivette himself. The original 16 mm photography was by Jacques Renard, and Nicole Lubtchansky did the editing.

  I don’t think there has ever been a portrait so fond, so oblique, so touching, or so funny of what happens to us at the movies. The humor and the taste are exquisite, yet very commonplace, and the airy conception is rooted by the very physical behavior of Labourier and Berto. Their delight as the story inside the house begins to look more and more like an RKO film noir is that of people who are finding their way home. And so it all ends in a pretty little park, so that it can begin again. Continual showings.

  The Ceremony (1971)

  I had seen The Ceremony once, when it came out—that might have been 1972 in England—and I remembered two things: the anguish of the picture and a kind of collective image on a wide screen of family faces hovering around a coffin. I knew I treasured the film, or the uncertain memory of it, but I guessed that it must have detailed bearings on modern Japanese history that left me helpless. So I thought, as I watched the film again and began to remember it, that it was like a family from Faulkner or Greek tragedy. We do our best. I could not identify the film in its Japanese context, and I have seen enough Japanese films to know that, much as I admire that national cinema, it is based on precepts that are strange to me.

  So, for this book, I looked at the film again—on DVD, whereas I saw it in a cinema the first time. All of this touches on what seems to me a huge and enveloping topic: the ways in which we remember and forget films. Anyway, on second viewing, Nagisa Oshima’s The Ceremony looks like a gripping film, full of that embattled struggle with the world that is so notably absent in the work of Yasujiro Ozu. Oshima, of course, is from another generation. He was born in 1932, and so he was a child during the Second World War. In fact, I know now, he was of samurai descent, and this is the ruinous story of a family like his own, dominated by an autocrat, a man whose life was pledged to the supremacy of the emperor and who began to collapse when that institution was reduced to ordinariness.

  The film follows Masuo Sakurada from childhood in 1947 to 1971. He and his cousin Ritsuko (female) are journeying to an island of exile where another cousin, Terumichi, has committed suicide. It was a family dominated by the grandfather, Kazuomi, to the extent that many of his “grandchildren” are actually his own children because of incest and the virtual rape of others’ wives or mistresses. It is a place of torment, where Masuo begins to realize that his love for Ritsuko may be made impossible by their being brother and sister.

  I’m still not sure of every reference in the film. And the picture is one where the new viewer might be helped by a family tree. But what is clear is Oshima’s sense of disgust and horror at what has been done to his family by the rule of the grandfather (this character is fearsomely well played by Kei Sato). Oshima’s use of interior space, distended by the wide screen, is akin to looking at Ozu’s tidy groupings and ripping them apart with the savage truths that formality is trying to deny. Oshima is a more troubled man than Ozu, but he is the best example of Japanese self-criticism in the era since the war. He has many other films well worth watching: Diary of a Shinjuko Thief, Boy, and In the Realm of the Senses, a movie that explores his considerable awareness of sex. But The Ceremony still seems to me his masterpiece. It has a chilly score by Toru Takemitsu, and it is very well photographed by T
sutomu Narushima.

  The Champ (1931)

  There are anomalies within The Champ that transcend its obvious sentimentality and help remind us that it is a King Vidor film (yet not one of his own favorites). Andy Purcell (Wallace Beery) is a failed boxer, a drunk, who is deluded into believing in his own comeback. He lives in Tijuana with his son, Dink (Jackie Cooper, ten when the film opens). But quickly we discover that Andy is divorced from a society woman, Linda (Irene Rich), who is now married to Tony Carlton (Hale Hamilton). The Carltons are well off financially, and they are well intentioned. They like horse racing, but they do not seem to be running liquor or organizing prostitution. So what divorce court gave custody of Dink to Andy? Come to that, how in the world did Andy and Linda ever get married?

  Well, you’ll tell me that in 1916, briefly, Beery was married to Gloria Swanson (when he was thirty-one and she was nineteen). Still, the narrative structure of The Champ establishes the Dink-Andy bond before we ever meet Linda, and demonstrates that the kid is looking after the father as well as he can under the circumstances.

  On the face of it, you could see a lot of ways the story could go. Linda tries to regain custody. Dink grows increasingly independent. And a very intriguing clash is set up between the impoverished “warmth” of the Champ’s household and the pristine coolness available with Linda. Instead, the story introduces a beloved horse and the problem of its ownership, which sends Andy back into the ring again in a desperate and potentially disastrous bout with Manuel Quiroga (Frank Hagney). This fight takes place, and against all odds, Andy wins. But he has a heart attack and dies, and Dink is taken away by Linda.