'Have You Seen...?'

by David Thomson

  Cover Girl (1944)

  It was during the filming of Cover Girl at Columbia that Rita Hayworth and Orson Welles were married, sneaking away from the set one morning (September 7, 1943) without telling studio boss Harry Cohn or her family, the Cansinos. It may have been one of the happiest moments of her life, though Cohn was leaning on her not to appear in Orson’s evening tent show for servicemen, where he cut her in half. He wanted her fresh for the musical and never guessed that it was Orson who was keeping her fresh.

  The film was a musical based on fashion and the new way in which pretty girls were getting the cover or not. Arthur Schwartz (the composer) was the producer, Charles Vidor would direct, and Virginia Van Upp did the screenplay—she would go on to do Gilda with Rita (though it seems that Sidney Buchman had the first idea for the film). Columbia got Gene Kelly on loan from M-G-M to play opposite Hayworth, and they cast the comedian Phil Silvers as their pal. The songs were by Jerome Kern and Ira Gershwin, and the musical highlight of the picture is “Long Ago and Far Away,” done by Kelly and Hayworth, even if Martha Mears was dubbing the song.

  The other highlight, and a large reason for Kelly’s taking the assignment, was the “Alter-Ego Dance,” in which Kelly dances with himself. This was a very complicated number to design and rehearse, and it was the first occasion when Kelly gave his assistant job to Stanley Donen—although the two had worked together onstage in Pal Joey and Best Foot Forward. Charles Vidor chose to take a very superior attitude toward their collaboration, and often left them to it. The choreography also involved Seymour Felix and Jack Cole, and it showed that Hayworth was by now a glorious dancer, as much at ease with Kelly as she had been with Fred Astaire in You Were Never Lovelier and You’ll Never Get Rich.

  Allen M. Davey and Rudolph Mate did the photography, Fay Babcock did the sets, and Jean Louis the costumes. Clothes and magazines play a big part in the picture; the cast included leading models of the day, like Anita Colby and Jinx Falkenburg, as well as Otto Kruger as an editor and Eve Arden as his wisecracking assistant. Indeed, Arden tends to steal the picture.

  The film was a hit, and Cohn was as pleased as he was upset to lose some of his power over Rita. Imagine if she had had a voice, or could have acted as well as Eve Arden. And surely there were times when Ms. Arden said to herself: If only I looked like that. The ironies of such juxtapositions are a source of tragedy. Rita and Orson were together such a short time, and happy only a part of it. For her, it was an extraordinary coup, to be taken seriously by such a man. And when he grew bored, one can argue, her dismay and depression were under way.

  Cria! (1976)

  In a gloomy Madrid house, the nine-year-old Ana (Ana Torrent) comes downstairs at night, urged out of sleep and into awful discovery. The night is in color, but splashes of Gothic shadow creep up to the vulnerable white of the child’s nightgown. She hears sounds from a living room: whispers of adult lovemaking, which, separated from grown-up bodies, seem closer to superstition than suspicion. It is her father and a girlfriend: In an ecstasy that seems remote and insubstantial to the child, the father chokes and dies. Ana regards his body, arrested in grisly spasm. She looks at the glass of milk she poisoned and he drank. She takes the glass to the kitchen to wash it. After a while her mother comes in and says, in a matter-of-fact way, It is late, time for you to be asleep. It is a fond mother, neither alarmed nor surprised, but as sure of pain as Geraldine Chaplin’s drawn features.

  This lucid beginning is not quite what it seemed. The heightened state of waking and the child’s adoration have conjured back a mother who died some years before. It is not a happy family, even if Ana and her two sisters are as busy as birds in the rain. The father was a philanderer: His affairs and handling of every woman within reach broke the mother’s health, or so it seems to the single-minded Ana. She has taken on herself the suffering of the mother; she sees her in the house and talks to her, without expressionist devices or trembling music. This is everyday haunting as natural as a child’s dependence on her mother. Imagination easily disarms reality, and the tiny witch is not maddened by her powers.

  Now, this has been done before: The exposition is a blend of What Maisie Knew—the child who witnesses adult depravity—and all those fantasies in which a child’s invented playmate monopolizes her. But director Carlos Saura adds another level of emotional grace. There are unadorned close-ups of Geraldine Chaplin looking into the camera and describing her childhood. But this Chaplin is not the mother who died young—it is the child Ana, now grown up and reporting the childhood we are in the process of observing. The impact is haunting. Pale faces and dark eyes begin to rhyme; time is turned inside out; and the formal device is a rare surge of feeling in which loss entwines with a deeper continuity. We appreciate a little later how far Saura’s expansion of the relationship has enhanced affection with imaginative energy, and made a history of the female role in the sad and happy remembrance of daily life.

  What does it all mean? Well, that this is an allegory about Franco’s power too obscure for any Franco to see the point. It is also an understandable confession of Saura’s infatuation for Geraldine Chaplin. And in the delicate, fragile ping-pong of two characters with eyes alike, it is the affirmation that film is a dream. The film ends in light and happiness. You can tell yourself that every dark item was imagined—as if you can ever forget imagination.

  Cries and Whispers (1972)

  When we sometimes hark back to the early 1970s as a supreme moment of cinema, it is all very well to invoke The Godfather, McCabe and Mrs. Miller, and Mean Streets, but let us not forget the accompanying intensity of The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie, Céline and Julie Go Boating, or Cries and Whispers. Viskningar och Rop (to give it its Swedish title) is 91 minutes long. It may have cost $100,000. It has period costumes and color but a small cast. And surely it is among the greatest films ever made—not just because of Ingmar Bergman’s long, uncompromising journey as an artist, but because of the feeling that there in the early seventies his own talent and that of his family of collaborators was at a perfect pitch. And it is a moment when a film like Cries and Whispers, removed from so many of the urgent realities of 1972, seemed somehow to reach out to all of life and to speak as the medium of the moment.

  Agnes (Harriet Andersson) is dying in the house where she was born and raised. She is attended by her two sisters, Karin (Ingrid Thulin) and Maria (Liv Ullmann). Yes, the allusion to Chekhov is obvious, but critics also identified the influence of Ozu in the essential stillness of the picture and its patient scrutiny of a family lost in their different levels of discourse—literally the cries and whispers, the outward show of feeling and the repressed inward confessions. For what is extraordinary about this film structurally is the ease with which its moments of family observation are interwoven with fantasies or scenarios that are the individuals’ attempts at explanation or vindication.

  There is an American tradition—stronger now than it was in 1972—that the cinema is not meant for this inward intensity, that a slow death and the pain of family relationships are not the material of movie. Give people something to cheer them up—and The Godfather in many ways was a bracing, rousing movie. Historically, there is much in favor of this argument: Life is hard enough, and the movies are an escape and a consolation. But then you listen to Bach or Mahler or Beethoven’s late quartets; you look at Bergman or Ozu or Mizoguchi, and it is hard to argue against the supreme truthfulness of this family portrait, the terrible sense of injury and loss, with the accompanying recollection of some shared joy. Cries and Whispers is as full of pain as a deathwatch, but it ends in a sense of a time when three sisters were as one in a summer of joy.

  One does not hear of Cries and Whispers playing too much these days. And Ingmar Bergman—who died in 2007—is amazingly forgotten. Shame on us. This is one of the great films of an unrivaled film artist. It is Bergman’s finest use of color in expression—the photography is by Sven Nykvist. As for the actresses, what can one say except that they ar
e like his old lovers and his new children? If you have any doubts about the cinema—and you should—this is one of the films you have to see. (The Sting beat it for Best Picture.)

  Le Crime de Monsieur Lange (1936)

  Amédée Lange (René Lefèevre) is one of Jean Renoir’s great romantics. Thin, pallid, properly dressed with a little bow tie, he is tongue-tied and halting, except when he is writing the stories of “Arizona Jim,” tales as bold and expansive as the American West the Frenchman has never seen. These stories are the best-selling product of a small print shop and workers’ cooperative, not just based in a Paris courtyard but embodied by it. Renoir had used courtyards before, and the views and the camera movements that flourished there had been laid down long before this remarkable collaboration with the Popular Front. It was as if Renoir—a little deaf—had been asked, ‘Will you make a film about the people, about the group?” To which, of course, he had replied, “I always do.”

  So he joined with a real collaborative, and agreed to write the script with Jacques Prévert. That was the important innovation, for Prévert—a poet and wordsmith—adored playing with words, whereas Renoir in the past had been at pains to ensure that his characters spoke naturally. So here we have socialists, typesetters, and people of the people uttering puns, epigrams, and the well-rounded sentences of theatrical talk. Yet it works.

  The politics may be as naïve as Arizona Jim, but the particularity of the films clings to these actors and that place. The women—Florelle, Nadia Sibirskaïa (a classic exploitable virgin), and Sylvie Bataille—are closer to stage archetypes. But the triumph of the film is, perversely, its great capitalist, exploiter, and outsider to the socialist spirit, Batala (Jules Berry). One of the greatest scoundrels in Renoir’s work, he is also the one given the most dynamic dispatch as the entire cooperative and building seem to join in the fabulous circular tracking shot (photographed by Jean Bachelet) in which he is finally executed.

  At the time—and when Renoir joined in the clumsier La Vie Est à Nous, in 1936—some remarked on the way politics had taken over the director’s mind. But in hindsight, Le Crime de Monsieur Lange looks like one of those happy minglings of theater and cinema that Renoir would develop in the 1950s. So, as early as 1936, it is fascinating to see the great realist prepared to enjoy theatricality and take advantage of it. Equally, the film’s score, by Jean Wiener and Joseph Kosma, is the first hint of something like performance or dance taking Renoir’s fancy.

  In just a few years, it is true, Renoir would lose a lot of his faith in joint action and solidarity, at least in France. La Règle du Jeu (1939) is a film in which politics are in tatters and the old struggle of servants and masters has turned into tragicomic operetta. Whatever will be will be, and woe betide the doctrinaire spirit. But in sharing this very lively socialist unit with us, Renoir easily enlarged his own style and began to see the shapes of theater in all of life. Was he aware of that at the time? Probably not. But it is in the nature of Renoir’s policy and method that you may have to look for some time before you see. The single great consistency is his searching gaze.

  Crimes and Misdemeanors (1989)

  The idea persists that Crimes and Misdemeanors is one of Woody Allen’s more serious, novelistic movies. Equally, I recall the time when expressions of disaster were to be seen on the faces of Allen admirers as he slipped from Annie Hall to Interiors. To be blunt, I’m not sure that Allen has demonstrated the muscle, the warmth, or the true humor to be taken that seriously. I know he’s a comic, a stand-up once, and often the author of very funny lines, but I’m not sure that he is amused by life, in the manner of Preston Sturges, Howard Hawks, or Jean Renoir. Sometimes his comedy seems like sniping opportunism rather than a profound, extensive attitude that functions across a wide range of experience. The thought endures that gravity for Woody Allen is a matter of being himself—and therein lies solemnity, not anything akin to the novel, or what he reports as finding in Tolstoy. We are accustomed to having to deal with his ongoing reference to Ingmar Bergman. And Ingmar was not really a stand-up. Still, before agreeing to Allen’s seriousness, I would like to see a humor as interesting as that in Bergman.

  There are several stories in the pattern of Crimes and Misdemeanors: Judah Rosenthal (Martin Landau), a married man, has been having an affair with Dolores Paley (Anjelica Huston), but she is “difficult”—she wants something more lasting; she wants Judah to leave his wife, Miriam (Claire Bloom). Ben (Sam Waterston), a rabbi, is going blind. Cliff Stern (Woody Allen) is making a slow, verité-like documentary film about “life” and another about his insufferable, more successful brother-in-law, Lester (Alan Alda). Judah asks his brother, Jack (Jerry Orbach), to get rid of Dolores. It all fits in theory, yet none of it fits in practice. And I’m bound to wonder about Allen’s method: Write the script, cast it, let his players see only their “bit,” and give them very little direction. Contrast that with the method of Mike Leigh, whose actors assemble and arrive at parts through a long process of rehearsal or improvisation, all under the encouragement of Leigh. There is a huge difference in felt reality. Allen’s method is hurried but superficial. He works all the time, yet lazily and privately. Without criticism or collaboration. I don’t think he ever really explores his worlds. And so—for instance—the central murder in Crimes and Misdemeanors is never more than a gesture.

  The Allen approach has become very refined, and on this film he had Sven Nykvist as photographer and Santo Loquasto as designer. But does it look good or interesting? No. I think generally it looks like TV drama, without much character or texture. Again, the apparent obsession with filmmaking is accompanied by an actual indifference.

  People say that actors long to be in Woody Allen pictures, and I suppose that’s true. But do they really benefit from it, or do they just say the lines? It seems to me that in this film nearly every figure suffers to some degree from Allen’s latent dislike of people. The contrast with Sturges is very revealing. Sturges loved actors—it’s the only word—whether the overlooked Joel McCrea or a dreamboat character actor like Eugene Pallette. You can feel Sturges laughing at his people—and that’s why the movies are more than comedies. But in Allen you feel him as a sunken figure watching from a distance, unwarmed, unpleased—and that’s why I seldom laugh.

  Criss Cross (1949)

  You can find commentaries on Robert Siodmak’s Criss Cross that say it’s OK except for the “miscasting” of Burt Lancaster as the weak ex-husband who comes home from the war and falls for his no-good ex again as sure as fate. Whereas almost the thing I like the most is that curdled weakness in Burt, the sneer that’s directed at the self, that knows what a masochistic idiot he is. So imagine you have an OK film with this superb, piercing use of Burt Lancaster as his own worst enemy.

  Steve Thompson (Lancaster) comes home to Los Angeles, to the small family house in the Bunker Hill area, and straightaway this picture delivers one of its major minor virtues: a first-class sense of the old downtown Los Angeles, with the elevated railway, the steps, and the houses pushed into the hillside. It’s background, of course, but there it is, laid out as an invaluable architectural record (second unit photography by Paul Ivano). Steve is restless. He wonders about the old place, the bar, and what happened to Anna (Yvonne De Carlo), his wife. Very soon, he’s back at his old habits, though now Anna is married to Slim Dundee (Dan Duryea), a vicious dandy who wears silk and talks like the feel of lingerie.

  The evocation of the interior L.A. is as good as the exteriors. In the daytime the bar is half-empty. No one there remembers Steve. But at night it’s a jumping place, with great Latin music supplied by Esy Morales and his orchestra. And then we get a sight of Anna dancing—and apart from realizing what a great dame De Carlo was then, you suddenly notice that her dancing partner is a very young Tony Curtis, looking like gold dust.

  Well, Steve gets hooked into the Dundee gang, because Anna lets him believe she still cares—and he’s so helpless and narcissistic that he believes her. There’s an a
rmored-car robbery and a lot of double-crossing, with a finale in a little house in San Pedro where you can see the sun setting. Burt is on the slide all the way, but there’s a brilliant scene in a hospital where, all smashed up, he begins to realize that the amiable guy visiting him (John Doucette) is there to finish him off.

  I don’t mean to overload Criss Cross with significance. But the craft can bring tears to your eyes. It’s from a novel by Don Tracy, but the script was by Daniel Fuchs, one of the best writers working in Hollywood. Franz Planer did the photography, Bernard Herzbrun and Boris Leven were the production designers, and the music is by Miklós Rózsa. Siodmak had no superior at this: With The Killers (which Criss Cross resembles in some ways) you have Siodmak as one of the great natural noir directors and the clearest diagnosis of Burt Lancaster anyone would ever make.

  The rich cast includes Stephen McNally, Percy Helton, Alan Napier, Griff Barnett, Joan Miller, and Curtis, so happy to be there you feel like shouting out, “Give that kid a line!”

  Crossfire (1947)

  It started as a novel by Richard Brooks, The Brick Foxhole, which deals with homophobia in the U.S. Army. That was a little tough to take in 1947, so for the film, the “problem” was switched to anti-Semitism. All this in a movie that would become a gathering place for people who were blacklisted: The producer Adrian Scott, the writer John Paxton, and the director Edward Dmytryk would all be named as unfriendly witnesses. Never mind. This low-budget RKO venture was nominated as Best Picture (it lost to Gentleman’s Agreement, an error that tells you all you need to know about the Academy). It also got nominations for Robert Ryan and Gloria Grahame as well as for Paxton’s screenplay and Dmytryk’s direction.