'Have You Seen...?'

by David Thomson

  In Chaplin’s My Autobiography, and in all the other biographies, there is not a complete answer to what the combination meant to him. He had a very technical side: He was keen on filling time, and he wanted familiar routines—the clash of rich and poor had always been a stock-in-trade. He loved the sentimentality of what the heart feels and the eyes don’t see. So the tramp would save the girl’s eyesight and then, when she could see, she would not notice him.

  I suspect that Chaplin could develop these twin ideas only by not relating them in all the ways that are available. In other words, the intellectualization of his art could have stripped it. He had to depend on situations where, in effect, he was all the people—or they were parts of his teeming soul. And it’s quite clear from what happened on City Lights that he felt the potential of these setups without grasping the detail. That’s why the schedule went well over five hundred days (on an 86-minute picture!), with many of those days spent waiting for Chaplin as he thought about what he wanted. Yet any simple analysis on his part, that his two plots were versions of one idea, could have ruined it.

  So love and money (Charlie’s warring passions) came together in a film still being made when Wall Street crashed in October 1929.

  He was wanton in his changes of mind. So he fired Henry Clive (who had also done the sets) as the millionaire and replaced him with Harry Myers, no matter that that meant reshooting a lot of material. He never warmed to Virginia Cherrill, his discovery for the blind girl, and had terrible trouble getting her to be as exquisite as he believed the girl should be. He came very close to firing her. And in the famous last shot, of himself with a flower in his teeth, watching the girl ignore him, Charlie was all parts, all in one. It is monstrous, great acting, cannibalistic, and one of the most potent shots in film history.

  City Lights opened in an impoverished world, still silent except for music, and it did immense business. Chaplin had made it his enterprise, and in the end he likely profited by $5 million—extraordinary money in those days, and his greatest success. To this day, the film is worth every penny, and it is the amazing mirror of his very mixed-up ego. You could argue that there isn’t another movie that so addresses the appeal of films to poor people in a world where the only other recourse would be violent political action.

  City Streets (1931)

  Although City Streets deserves to be remembered as director Rouben Mamoulian’s second film at Paramount, and a far more drastic experiment with sound than Applause, quick history says it is one of the few times Dashiell Hammett had his name on a picture as a screenwriter (as opposed to author of the source material). This is true: Hammett wrote a story, someone named Max Marcin did some adapting, and Oliver H. P. Garrett turned it into a script—though I suspect that all three men raised their eyebrows to see what Mamoulian had done with it. In fact, Hammett wrote to Lillian Hellman that he found the film “pretty lousy, though Sylvia Sidney makes the whole thing seem fairly good in spots. She’s good, that ugly little baby, and currently my favorite screen actress.”

  Well, that’s a note of authentic sadism, plus the discovery that even distinguished authors go to the movies to look at the girls and dream about them. The story is Gary Cooper in his country boy mode: he is “the Kid,” a guy who works in a carnival and falls for Nan Cooley (Sylvia Sidney), the daughter of a racketeer. Alas, the Kid gets drawn closer to a life of crime, and soon he’s in prison. None of which is very interesting, though Paul Lukas and Guy Kibbee give good performances as gangsters, and there is a natural chemistry between Cooper and Sidney.

  The film is important and still worth seeing because of two things: the ways in which Mamoulian explores the possibilities of sound, and the wonderful chemistry he has achieved with cameraman Lee Garmes—himself one of the most artistic of Hollywood photographers and someone famous for searching out new ways for film language to work. So, just as Mamoulian had begun in Applause, City Streets goes all over the city (New York) and Garmes delivers a tone poem to the place that deserves lasting attention. And, of course, the visuals are now all the more eloquent in that the film is conceived of as a sound symphony. Mamoulian uses voice-overs with flashbacks in a way not done before. He turns dialogue into abstract noise with just certain words or phrases sticking out. He begins to build the sound track with talk, music, effects, and atmospheric sound in the way indicated in Applause.

  Paramount must have had mixed feelings: The experiments (and they don’t all succeed) smothered the story too much. Mamoulian himself might have replied, Why not take a year to shoot all manner of sound experiments before embarking on a piece of material? Of course, that was too sensible or long-term for the factory, and so Mamoulian began to get the reputation of a technician, not terribly interested in material or story. Mamoulian never got an award from the Academy (or even a nomination). Warners got one for The Jazz Singer, and in 1959 Lee de Forest got an honorary award for his pioneering work with sound. Sound was irresistible, but Mamoulian was one of those who knew why.

  Claire’s Knee (1970)

  In the matter of Eric Rohmer, with so many films that are reflections or variants of each other, it would be too easy to take them all—or to leave them all behind. You could argue that few directors came so close, so regularly, to meeting their own ambitions. And I must confess that I have sometimes found myself in the middle of a Rohmer film, content but utterly lost, because I was thinking about something else altogether. And I can’t help feeling that there was a moment, at the end of the 1960s, when Rohmer mattered most. He seemed to turn a corner, one in which the physical became mathematical—it is like the right angle made by, let us say, a knee at the moment when it shifts from being part of a body to a shape in a theorem. I know, for myself, it is Nabokovian.

  So here we are in a village near Annecy in the summer. Jerome is visiting from Stockholm, where he is cultural attaché. His marriage is all planned; he is only waiting. He is Jean-Claude Brialy, the classical figure among young French actors. He meets an old friend, Aurora (Aurora Cornu), a novelist, and they both agree, playfully, to see him as a character. He meets Aurora’s landlady, Madame Walter (Michèle Montel), and her teenage daughter, Laura (Béatrice Romand). Aurora tells Jerome that Laura loves him. He doubts this but is too provoked to ignore it. He kisses the girl. She rebuffs him—she was merely looking for a father figure. But then Claire (Laurence de Monaghan) arrives—a little older (seventeen?), moody, nearly a woman, but burdened with a stupid boyfriend. Jerome realizes that the boyfriend is unfaithful. Caught in a storm, he tells Claire this. She is distraught. He comforts her—he touches her knee. He tells Aurora, proud to have made it as a character. He goes away to be married.

  There it is, a little summer adventure, all shot in the amiable light by Nestor Almendros. There is no music, no adornment, no frame—except for Aurora’s way of judging everything as worthy of a story or not It is intensely erotic, no matter that Jerome remains gentlemanly, kind, and civilized. I hope the touch may help Claire become a good woman, just as it may make Jerome a more mature husband.

  This is a world where people talk a great deal more than they do things, and it seems to me entirely true to the condition of summer holiday and life at large. It’s also a deeply suspenseful film, and a wholehearted immersion in the absurd—after all, even in 1970, was it a criminal offense to touch a girl’s knee? No, but perhaps it was a singular failure of the human spirit to let it go unattended. Rohmer is one of the kindest of film directors, and that is a quality that doesn’t crowd our heroes’ lives. Aurora Cornu, I believe, was a novelist, but she was also one of the thirty or forty special women Rohmer found over the years for a film. Indeed, Rohmer was a tender wolf, so much more gentle than Roger Vadim, and so much more nurturing.

  Cleopatra (1963)

  Long before this monster of its own doom dragged itself (243 minutes) across the wide screen, the picture had been stifled by its fuss and furor. So what chance does a real queen of Egypt have when trying to emerge from the embrace of Elizabeth
Taylor—not just notorious for her $1 million salary (the first for a woman), not just near death as the project foundered in Britain, but then so much the subject of the film that she managed to turn her Antony into her guy. No wonder, then, if, despite all the research on period and costume, she and Burton manage to look like a couple from mid-America enjoying themselves at Caesars Palace, the soon-to-be opened and innovative theme casino in Las Vegas.

  It’s not that Elizabeth Taylor is bad in the film. She was always, beneath all the fuss, a professional and a smart actress who knew her range very well. But that meant she was shrewd enough to know there was little point in doing Cleopatra as a thinking person’s epic. Sooner or later, it’s sex and the asp; it’s desert scenery, old palaces, and battles; it’s gold leaf, doing your wanton act, and being drawn in a chariot by a hundred seminaked Nubians. It’s spectacle, and yet the strange rescuing decision made by Darryl F. Zanuck as the film spun out of control was to make it intelligent.

  The whole thing had begun as a Walter Wanger production, with Rouben Mamoulian directing. Sets were built at Pinewood in England, and Cleopatra herself caught a mighty chill that turned to pneumonia. She didn’t perk up until she got to Rome, with Joseph L. Mankiewicz in charge. While he made the script literate, she waited on an authentic Egyptian throne with her then husband, Eddie Fisher (snatched from Debbie Reynolds), and then along came Richard Burton. Imagine the forlorn task of Mankiewicz trying to make these sex-and-publicity freaks sound Shavian. (Of course the Shaw version, Caesar and Cleopatra, had been done years earlier, and with Claude Rains and Vivien Leigh, it was a small delight. Leigh looked feline, sexy, crafty, dangerous, and something you could wrap up in a carpet.) Whereas Liz already had more bulk than flimsy clothes were kind to. Her eyelashes needed cranes!

  All you can say is that the film got done—for $44 million more or less. It earned $26 million, and on an intelligent film plenty of people can see that those figures don’t match. Worse by far was the unstoppable gulf opening up between publicity and reality. The picture business had always been for barkers and come-on artists—Wait for next week! Wait for Gone With the Wind!! We did, and we judged that the wait had been worthwhile. But the years of publicity and paparazzi on Cleopatra could not hide a sluggish, dull film without wit, beauty, sex, or blood. Yes, it does talk a lot, and at last Mankiewicz’s smart talk began to sound dead on arrival.

  You have to see Cleopatra if you have any remote interest in film history, but it is better to read the Joe Hyams and Wanger book on the mishaps along the way. Rex Harrison was Caesar, of course—why can’t Caesar be more like an Englishman? The only people to emerge with credit are Pamela Brown and Roddy McDowall, but that’s not quite enough.

  The Clock (1945)

  At Dartmouth College, I discovered that the archive possessed a 16 mm print of Vincente Minnell’s The Clock, a 90-minute movie, on two reels of equal length. That’s what gave me the idea. We aligned two 16 mm projectors side by side. Reel 1 was loaded onto the first projector, playing forward, with sound. Reel 2 was put on the second running backward from the end of the film toward the middle, without sound. The two images played side by side.

  What did it accomplish, beyond a method of screening films in half the normal time? Well, it introduced a new mode of film—in reverse—so stunning, so lovely, so surreal, that it helped eyes appreciate all the same lyrical, kinetic things in forward motion, things to which we become so accustomed that we grow blasé. Movies are about movement. Second, it became apparent that they have an internal structure—master shot, close up, reaction, et cetera—that plays over and over again. Films are narrative machines. And as the two parts converged an exhilarating artificiality became clear in which momentum surpassed meaning.

  The method seemed not just fair but enlightening with a picture based on meeting and time, and on the rapidity with which a meaning—“love”—could be conveyed in that time. A girl and a soldier meet by chance under the clock at Penn Station in New York. They fall in love, and though he has only forty-eight hours left on his leave, they will be married before he goes off to war.

  Next point of view. This very simple story was beset by chaos. M-G-M had cast Judy Garland as the girl, despite the mounting difficulties of working with her. They had a script, by Robert Nathan, derived from a story by Paul and Pauline Gallico. Jack Conway was going to direct; he collapsed. Fred Zinnemann replaced him—the Zinnemann who had just made The Seventh Cross. But Zinnemann was quiet, introverted, logical. He couldn’t see why you had to tell Judy you loved her all the time. After ten days, Judy had lunch with Minnelli and explained the situation. On Meet Me in St. Louis she had done her best work for him. They had been nearly in love, but they knew he was gay.

  Judy asked him to take over. Zinnemann was ready to resign. The studio had the Penn Station set built and $200,000 spent. So Minnelli came on board, and the tenderness, the charm, and the love were back. You can see it in every foot of this lovely little film. But they were trapped. Judy moved in with Vincente. They got married. It was Hollywood perfection. No, of course it couldn’t last—though Liza came out of its odd egg, looking startled.

  By the way, Robert Walker (the soldier) behaved like a champ. He was going crazy at the time, because his wife, Jennifer Jones, was dumping him for David O. Selznick, the producer who had discovered her.

  The art may look natural, but this is not an easy life.

  A Clockwork Orange (1971)

  With A Clockwork Orange (if not before), a problem came to the surface with Stanley Kubrick, a matter very like one’s response to Billy Wilder: If the artist doesn’t like people or humankind, then how long can it be before his films take on a sardonic mannerism where cruelty is hard to tell from style? It seems to me part of Kubrick’s analytical eye for intelligence that he tends to see people in terms of the mistakes they make. This is lucid sometimes, but so cold. Think of the Peatty marriage in The Killing, the paranoid state of the army in Paths of Glory, the madness running society in Dr. Strangelove; think of the shells of beings in 2001. Lolita is the one film where we have a chance of liking the people, and surely that comes from the irresistible thrust of Nabokov, a novelist sometimes challenged for his chilly control and supercilious omniscience.

  Having lived for much of a decade in England, Kubrick was undoubtedly affected by English issues. A Clockwork Orange came from Anthony Burgess’s virtuoso novel, with an invented language for its teenagers, but it also reflected England’s horror of personal violence, along with its seeming indifference to bureaucratic or institutional force. The world of the film is very stylized, but you can feel the mean streets of England, where young people have grown steadily more callous. Burgess did not want to work on the film, so Kubrick took the script on himself, and he kept faith with the novel.

  In many ways, this was his fullest film to date. The air of the near future allows a great surge of invention in the décor and the costumes, and Kubrick took color to heart for the first time. John Barry did wonderful work with the production design, and the costumes by Milena Canonero—especially the droogs in white, a codpiece, and a bowler hat—have passed into international culture. John Alcott did a superb job with the camera and with lenses that regularly stretched real space to bursting.

  But there’s something else new to Kubrick here, which is the zest, the desperation, and the dread of Malcolm McDowell as Alex. McDowell was so alive then, so passionate and gloomy, so nasty and saintly. He breaks through Kubrick’s restraint—he makes the film love him in a way that had never occurred in Kubrick before (it would happen again with Jack Nicholson in The Shining). Moreover, Kubrick’s old fondness for supporting players came through in the use of Patrick Magee, Michael Bates, Adrienne Corri, Miriam Karlin, and Philip Stone (as Dad).

  The film was deservedly controversial. The rape, to “Singin’ in the Rain,” was too gleeful for many. To this day, there are tender souls who should not see that scene. Several moral guardians wondered aloud whether it was dangerou
s. Of course, in some ways this question was at the heart of the film’s theme—and that put censors on their guard. But in England crimes followed that Kubrick felt were copies of acts in his film. So he censored it himself. He had control of the film in Britain, and for the last two decades of his life he would not allow it to be shown there.

  Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977)

  It was whispered in advance of Close Encounters that Steven Spielberg’s film was going directly to the “third kind,” in that Spielberg did not really do human closeness. He did man meets truck or man meets shark, but not intimacy. But then, as he prepared the film, he started seeing Amy Irving, and he had Paul Schrader as his first screenwriter because Schrader brought some spiritual quality to the idea of man meets lights in the sky. There were many bridges and a lot of water to come: Schrader claimed no screen credit in the event—though later he felt a little tricked into that generosity. But when all was said and done, Close Encounters was something new for Spielberg in that it concerned very ordinary people convinced that they had seen and felt something momentous. What’s more, the momentous was not threatening or disturbing.

  I don’t know if I believe in UFOs, said Spielberg, but I believe in people who believe in them. And he had three characters, from humble roots, who know what they have seen: Roy Neary (Richard Dreyfuss), a blue-collar guy from Muncie, Indiana; Gillian Guiler (Melinda Dillon), a mom; and Barry (Cary Guffey), her son. As Schrader withdrew as scriptwriter, any and every writer Spielberg had access to came in with six cents’ worth: Matthew Robbins, Hal Bar-wood, Jerry Belson, and others. And by then Spielberg was doing the script himself, albeit as a kind of popular survey.