'Have You Seen...?'

by David Thomson

  The script was by Leonard Praskins, from a story by Frances Marion. Gordon Avil did the photography, and the film is interesting among other things for location work in Tijuana and Agua Caliente (frequent movie escapes in those days). But what is most interesting is not Andy’s punch-drunk stalwart sentiments so much as Dink’s attitude to the world. Jackie Cooper was the toughie among child stars—Mickey Rooney before the Mick. But he was very good and very grown up, and he makes it clear that he prefers life with the Champ. Indeed, when his father dies, he goes nearly frantic; it is a superb, alarming piece of work, and it shows what a rich character he has become.

  And so it’s one of the few films where a sequel, or a follow-up, would be interesting. The Carltons are good people, but it’s possible to see Dink unhappy or restless with them and compelled to move on. He has the courage, the aggression, and the unshakable basics of Andy. He has found a liveliness in life or a reality in existence that a much more genteel middle-class setting cannot grasp or contain. And that is Vidor, homing in on the elemental and the essential.

  Wallace Beery won the Oscar, which is fine, but it’s a sign of how widely the film was misread.

  Chariots of Fire (1981)

  Chariots of Fire is crowded with the names of yesteryear, so the credits make sad reading. Dodi Fayed was executive producer, David Puttnam was producer, Hugh Hudson directed, and Colin Welland wrote it. The cast includes Ben Cross, Ian Charleson, Alice Krige, Patrick Magee, Lindsay Anderson, John Gielgud, and Brad Davis. I know, some of that company are with us still, doing quiet good works. But Chariots of Fire rang with the promise and the warning that the Brits were coming, and yet Ian Holm is about the only stalwart professional on the picture who still has credibility.

  It’s asking a lot to have a film build toward ten seconds of dash and blur—the shortest great event in sports theater, the Olympic 100 meters—and last in the memory. Still, Chariots of Fire won Best Picture in its day. It’s the story of an age of sprinters left standing after the First World War—Londoner Harold Abrahams (Cross), son of a Russian Jew; Eric Liddell (Charleson), the Scottish child of missionaries, lean as a greyhound and far more devout (though not a great talker); and Jackson Scholz (Davis), American college boy—who come together at the Paris Olympiad of 1924.

  Welland wrote the script with a view of athletes that made a nice mix of awesome ability and gestures toward real life. So Abrahams, as a Jew, is looked at just a little askance—don’t even ask why there are no black runners in these races (they were inventing jazz). And Liddell misses glory when the crucial heats of his event are moved to Sunday; he doesn’t run on Sundays, you see. It’s hard to see why, in 1981, anyone really thought this was a movie, instead of just an odd story. But such mean thinking had no vision yet, of young British colts striding out on the training sands to the inspiring sounds of Vangelis (otherwise known as music—and winning an Oscar).

  Whether that coup was Puttnam or Dodi Fayed doesn’t really matter. It was a high-class production for the uncertain eighties, and it made so stirring a trailer and TV ad that people just had to see the picture. Of course, once they got there, in their seats, they found that quick races hardly sustain serious interest. So the picture is pumped up with romance, religion, and the struggles of a professional trainer, Sam Mussabini (Holm), to be taken seriously. In turn, that character improves and strains the film, for imagistically and spiritually it wants to believe that the young men just run, for God’s sake (or not), so that training seems technological and nearly unfair (as well as foreign).

  But winning a race only works if, say. you know the boy rider and the Black Stallion love each other. As it is, the race is an excuse for certain shallow observations on England, all at the level of TV movies. The trouble is that the Olympic Games (like most sporting events) have become the province of live television. And the only way to get ten million people to watch the final of the 100 meters is if it happens now, in one shot.

  Charulata (1964)

  The creative relationship between director Satyajit Ray and poet Rabindranath Tagore (1861–1941) is as intense as that between Ray and his cameraman, Subrata Mitra (b. 1930). And so Ray’s response to Tagore’s fascination with liberal tendencies in India finds its expression in the enclosed light in which Mitra sees the precious provincial community of Charulata. The title comes from the name of the wife, who hardly knows how imprisoning her comfort is. The time is around 1880, in Bengal. Charulata’s husband is rich and settled, fond of his English pipe and half in love with the England of Shakespeare and Gladstone. He dreams that Gladstone’s Liberals mean better by India than do Disraeli and the Conservatives, and he runs a progressive newspaper, The Sentinel, to voice his self-satisfied, provincial thoughts.

  To inhabit Charulata for twenty minutes is to realize how rich a context Ray had—and how difficult it was for modern Indians or Europeans to pick up on all his references. Yet the density of hypocrisy and muddle is vital to the way the husband likes to sprinkle his Bengali with English phrases, and the way his visiting brother-in-law plays “God Save the Queen” on the piano. The husband is hardworking and earnest, but the brother-in-law is an intriguing mix of fop and poseur: He sings, he writes for literary magazines, he flirts, and he practices indolence. He is barely respectable, but in the innocent gaze of Charulata, he may be the lesson she needs in feeling, expression, and love. She does not quite fall in love with the brother-in-law, but she falls for his version of love, and she realizes that the security she has with her husband is far short of love. Indeed, she writes for the literary magazines, and she is published, but she cannot draw her husband’s attention to that much independence.

  Meanwhile, Mitra studies these hothouse creatures in deepening close-up. They live in their overdecorated salons and their over-planted gardens. You feel a shortage of air itself. Yet the faces are beautiful, and Mitra’s austere black-and-white photography turns them into icons likely to be undermined by fresh ideas. For instance, there are views of Madhabi Mukherjee as the wife in which new ideas seem to grow at the pace of aging or disillusion. The Western viewer may be inclined to think of Chekhov (or Renoir), but I’m sure that we need only a better knowledge of Tagore to see where it all comes from.

  The mood changes. The precious stillness is broken by small acts of dishonesty. The brother goes away, and Charulata is left to face the question of whether she can continue to grow in his absence. This is one of the best films about feminist awakening, and it comes as a sweet but belated measure of satisfaction to see that it was made in the same year as Carl Dreyer’s Gertrud. Charulata won the Silver Bear at Berlin, while Gertrud was hooted off the screen in Paris.

  The Chase (1946)

  There has to be room in collections like this for films as unlikely, vagrant, and thoroughly maudit as The Chase (1946), even if it means firing that large, heavy, and ominously respectable The Chase from 1966, the one where Marlon Brando is the sheriff of a depraved Texas town who is beaten to a pulp by the vicious citizenry. We shall not miss that Chase too much—concentrate instead on pulp, a vital ingredient of so many American cooking processes.

  First of all there is a novel, The Black Path of Fear, published in 1944 by Cornell Woolrich, perhaps the most inspired and haunted of all the American noiristas, a man who lived with his mother in a shabby Manhattan hotel and wrote stories to frighten himself. It became a United Artists picture, produced by Seymour Nebenzal, who had worked on Pandora’s Box and The Testament of Dr. Mabuse before leaving Germany, and who would help to produce Mayerling, Hitler’s Madman, Summer Storm, The Chase, and then the remake of M.

  Nebenzal, neurotic but talented, entrusted the screenplay for what became The Chase to the astonishing Philip Yordan, a mythic figure among American screenwriters—a real talent but a masquerader (he is credited on Johnny Guitar, Men in War, The Black Book, and El Cid). Yordan grasped the frenzy of the Woolrich novel and did it justice. And so this strange film proceeds accordingly:

  Chuck Scott (Robert
Cummings) is just out of the Army, a damaged man. In his hazy half-life, he takes a job as chauffeur to a gangster, Eddie Roman (Steve Cochran), but straightaway he starts to fall in love with Roman’s pale, mysterious wife, Lorna (Michele Morgan). He escapes with her to Havana, but then retribution catches up and gangsters kill Lorna so that Chuck will be framed. Then a pop goes off in Chuck’s head and he wakes to find everything was a dream, except that he is still a chauffeur in love with Lorna. Can he avert the old ending as one version of his life chases another?

  The director of the film is Arthur Ripley, another strange fellow, the writer for comedian Harry Langdon and then the maker of increasingly arty trash—his career finished with Thunder Road, that sultry fantasy about Robert Mitchum in moonshine country. In addition, The Chase is beautifully photographed by Franz Planer (who did Liebelei, Letter from an Unknown Woman and Criss Cross).

  The Chase is a great demented rapture, so close to dream as to make no difference. It is also one of the truest reflections of the world of Cornell Woolrich and his amazed mixed feelings over death. I could add that it also stars Peter Lorre as a sadistic gangster—one Lorre scholar actually called it “the strangest film Lorre ever made”—but then you’ll be getting really angry that no one has told you about it before. Yes, Robert Cummings is entirely miscast in the lead role. And yes. it really needs Lorre as the desperate hero for a queasy sort of reality to loom into place. But you can’t have everything.

  The Chelsea Girls (1966)

  Early in the 1960s, everyone was rethinking “cinema”: what it was, where it had been, and where it was going. Surely there was an obituary sense in that concern. It was as if in the late fifties television had stolen the crown of urgency and purpose (the thing called audience) from the movies, and the cinema had made a few glorious swan songs that summarize the changes in fifty years and the achievement to date: Lola Montes, The Golden Coach, Ugetsu Monogatari, Vertigo, Some Like It Hot, Rio Bravo, et cetera. And surely you can see a sweet sisterhood between Angie Dickinson in that last film, asking us to consider what black tights might do for her, and, let’s say, Viva in Blue Movie, trying to decide whether she has really been screwed or not.

  In other words, if you gather together all the startling summaries on the medium offered around 1960—from Godard to Kael, from Hitchcock to McLuhan—don’t forget to include Andy Warhol. In what he did and did not do, in his slogans and signs as much as his films, Warhol changed the ground. Few people adored Hollywood as much (or were so prescient in seeing that nostalgic reverence for it had turned camp), and no one at that time was so radically cannibalistic about why and how we were prepared to eat the signs of fame and beauty and turn them into excrement. Moreover, in so many ways Warhol sought to remove the “extra” of cinema—the vibrato, the pathos, the shivering shakes he saw—that it was so expressive it should play “flat” as if for the Lumière brothers, in 1895. Once the camera has made that intrusion upon nature through appearance, it should be that films mean anything (and nothing). They just are. Thus, all films are great and boring.

  If I choose The Chelsea Girls to stand for Warhol, it’s not because he ever reckoned to make one film that captured all his thoughts, as in a masterpiece. I pick it because it is a film subject to the theater of performance, for it plays as it projects, and such things as “timing” or “cross-reference” can be taken any way you like. Quite literally, if you have the elements of the film, you can play it your way.

  Beyond that, the stunning originality of life unwinding is unerringly a riddle over fate and freedom—was this directed or planned? Is it theater or life? The “vision” of people just talking may be boring, but it is also a primitive occasion. Let the camera be chained. Let everything be filmed “in absentia”—it may look as “beautiful” as Bob Williams. Don’t worry too much about the craft of it all, and don’t waste our time getting the acting right! Warhol never once felt that an actor could go wrong or right. It’s enough for them to be there. Warhol knew that he was a kind of last emperor—not just of America’s cultural supremacy but of art’s gimmick and film’s gotcha. He is the force that lets us see that the world has become an act. It is a very bleak vision, notwithstanding his own lazy insolence and the empty assurance that everyone looked terrific. It no longer photographs.

  Un Chien Andalou (1928)

  “Once upon a time. A balcony. A man is sharpening his razor by the balcony. The man looks through a window at the sky and sees… A light cloud passing across the face of the full moon. Then the head of a young woman with wide-open eyes. The blade of the razor moves toward one of her eyes. The light cloud now moves across the face of the moon, the razor-blade slices the eye of the young woman, dividing it.”

  Anyone who has ever tried to teach film knows that scene, and without being identifiable as sadists those of us who have used the seventeen-minute “silent” film have invariably chosen to show it without warning. The talk of the dead sheep can come later, after the panic attacks that were still very common in the 1970s (when some students had seen Vietnam). I hope they happen still, because if ever outrages like this lose their power to shock then maybe the movies can fold up the tent.

  If I were teaching anything on film, I’d come to this blade of a film very early and I’d say, Look, here we are at the moment when the lifelike dream went complete and industrial. We are at the start of sound and the complete fantasy, all done under the easeful guise of the lifelike. But here we are, in the same year, in Paris (with bits of Beethoven, Wagner, and a tango) as this “silent” short caused such a stink and showed the other way to let film work upon ourselves as complete dream, an apparition in which the lifelike is the ability of the ghosts to smile and be polite. Thus, the man on the balcony (Buñuel himself) wears a striped shirt, without a collar. And when he, or another he, comes to hold the young woman’s eye open, he has a striped diagonal tie, too, not evident in the fuller shot.

  Continuity gives way to consciousness. It’s just the first lesson looking at dreams, along with the realization that we have to explain or respond to the carved, burnished head of the man in the moonlight—is he a thug or a lover? Next lesson: Every question of analysis contains its own answer. He is both. See everything. Use everything.

  Within minutes of the cloud and the moon, a young man (Pierre Batcheff) sees the woman (Simone Mareuil):

  “The man with the determination of someone who feels sure of his rights, goes over to the young woman and, after staring at her lustfully with rolling eyes, grabs her breasts through her dress.

  “Close-up of the man’s hands fondling the breasts which appear through the dress. The man’s face has a terrible look, almost of mortal anguish, and a stream of blood-flecked saliva begins to run out of the corner of his mouth onto the naked breasts. The breasts disappear to become a pair of thighs which the man kneads.”

  It is only seventeen minutes—you can afford the time, even if no one can take the risk lightly. This is the start of Luis Buñuel, of course, not just a great career, but the most naked indicator that the history of movie is the history of whether or not we can come to terms with sexual existence. And don’t think that’s a foregone conclusion. Its half-brother, cruelty, gains every day; there are people who would rather do torture than fuck. We are hardly more mature than we were in ’28, and maybe sex and cinema both need to be put back in their sleeping bags and locked in the cabinet. The Andalusian dog may have passed us by.

  La Chienne (1931)

  La Chienne is Jean Renoir with sound. In fact, On Purge Bébé was his sound debut, a test taken on to prove that he could handle La Chienne. As he explained it, the film was an attempt to make a naturaliste tradition: It was filmed in and around Montmartre, in natural light, employing as much slang and untidy talk as possible, yet somehow having the camera soar as if it were a butterfly.

  Monsieur Legrand (Michel Simon) is a failure. He works as a cashier in a large store. He is married to a very unpleasant woman (Magdeleine Bérubet), who regularly
finds him failing in comparisons with her first husband, a soldier killed in the war. He is also a Sunday painter, unknown to the art world. One night, on the streets, Legrand sees a drunken pimp, Dede (Georges Flamant) roughing up one of his girls, Lulu (Janie Marèse). Legrand sees Dede off and takes the girl home.

  One thing leads to another. Legrand falls for Lulu—in a very casual way, this is a deeply erotic film, with Legrand’s humble innocence exposed to flesh and rapture for the first time in his life. Of course, Lulu and Dede milk the foolish man. They draw off his money. They have their eyes on the cash box at his store. But Legrand establishes Lulu in a small apartment. There are stairs leading up to it; there is a courtyard and windows on the far side of the yard. This is the vision of Jean Renoir coming to life.

  Things go well for Legrand for a moment. He paints. He loves Lulu. And he bumps into that supposedly lost soldier, the first husband. He sees how his dreadful marriage can be nullified. But, of course, his fall is also assured, and one rainy day he finds Lulu in bed with Dede. Legrand is crushed.

  I cut now to a passage in a letter from Renoir to Dudley Nichols in the hope of an American remake of La Chienne (Cary Grant wanted to be Legrand!): “Legrand tells Lulu he will take her away, far from Paris, and from Dede. They will live together in the country, he will paint, and they will be happy. Lulu is lying on a bed cutting the pages of a book. Street-singers are outside. Whilst he paces up and down in the room their voices reach him through an open window. He is trying to understand what’s going on in the girl’s head. And suddenly he understands she does not love him, has never loved him. He tells her so, and it makes her laugh. She cannot stop. And this laugh is so exasperating that he kills her with the paper-knife.”