'Have You Seen...?'

by David Thomson

  The film is ably directed by the versatile Mike Newell, but—after Ms. Richardson—its greatest asset is a very thoughtful screenplay by Shelagh Delaney, the author more than twenty years earlier of A Taste of Honey. The script gets the class differences exactly, and shows how far they ran the show in the 1950s. For that reason alone, you can see why Ruth might kill someone—and her David, always off to Goodwood or Silverstone for motor racing, is the perfect target. He’s someone who must have known Tony in The Servant.

  The picture was photographed in rather bitter color by Peter Hannan. The production design (scrupulous and shabby) is by Andrew Mollo. Richard Hartley wrote the music. Pip Newbery did the big A-line costumes. But the flame of bleached body is all Ms. Richardson. Holm and Everett are wonderful supports for her, but they seem to know that they’re watching something out of the ordinary. The rest of the cast includes Stratford Johns, Joanne Whalley, Tom Chadbon, Sally Anne Field, and Lesley Manville.

  Dancing Lady (1933)

  Dancing Lady is one of those pictures that had more meanings than anyone involved in it could articulate. It was an M-G-M film, made under the influence of the success of 42nd Street and featuring the growing romance between a stage director, Patch Gallagher (Clark Gable), and a young dancer, Janie Barlow (Joan Crawford). Louis B. Mayer wanted it for Crawford, and he asked his son-in-law, David O. Selznick, newly arrived from RKO, to produce the picture.

  Then something odd happened. Fred Astaire was about to start his contract at RKO, so Selznick asked him if he could give a few days to Dancing Lady as a guest star. Apparently, RKO offered no protest: The studio then was headed by Merian Cooper, who was very friendly with Selznick. M-G-M offered to pay for the Astaires’ honeymoon to sweeten the deal. And Fred would appear as himself. Still, it is odd.

  Johnny Considine was associate producer, Robert Z. Leonard was the director, and the screenplay was by Allen Rivkin and P. J. Wolfson from a novel by James Warner Bellah. Oliver T. Marsh was the photographer. The lavish costumes were by Adrian, and Merrill Pye did the beautiful moderne sets. The songs were by several hands: Burton Lane and Harold Adamson, Jimmy McHugh and Dorothy Fields, Nacio Herb Brown and Arthur Freed, and Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart.

  Astaire would say he was grateful for the experience and for all he learned—not least the need to avoid Joan Crawford in the future as a dancing partner. Crawford had been a dancing girl, of course, and she was as enthusiastic as she was beautiful. But she had the habit of doing the same dance—a flapper stomp—to every song, and she manages to look garish (in “The Gang’s All Here”) next to Astaire and very sexually aggressive. How far Astaire rationalized that is hard to say, but it does point to his need for a partner who would not question the artistic and sexual quality of his dancing. People say Ginger Rogers gave him sex, but perhaps she had the tact to refrain from asking that leading question.

  Meanwhile, something very like chemistry was developing between Gable and Crawford. He is her dominant man, and she is the slut he is made for. They had already done three films together, including the impressive Possessed. But here they are beginning to make heat—no matter that Crawford was apparently nursing some feelings for her other costar, Franchot Tone. The film repeatedly puts Gable and Crawford in clinches, with a big kiss only at the end, and you feel that Selznick knew what was happening. He had wondered out loud whether Joan could play this part—maybe it was Jean Harlow material—and that had provoked Crawford to greater extremes. She wears clothes (or not) as well as any star. She lets her hair go wild. And she gives such a sense of easy maturity that the awkward dancing is all the odder. Meanwhile, Fred looks on like the man in the moon.

  Dangerous Liaisons (1988)

  Pierre Choderlos de Laclos published Les Liaisons Dangereuses in 1782. It was an epistolary novel in which former lovers and companions in depravity—Valmont and de Merteuil fall out over a plot: Valmont must seduce the virtuous Madame de Tourvel without falling in love with her. It was filmed poorly in 1959 by Roger Vadim—despite Gérard Philipe and Jeanne Moreau as the handsome leads—updated to a modern ski-slope world, with a jazz sound track. Then the ingenious Christopher Hampton made a stage success of the work in London in the 1980s, and that led to his collaboration on the film with director Stephen Frears.

  Frears and Hampton do the story in wigs and costumes, yet with very knowing modern actors in the roles. What results is a brilliant entertainment and a crowd-pleasing film, as droll and modern as Ernst Lubitsch but not too interested in the elegance and the unkind mathematics of the Laclos original. So the staginess of the Hampton script carries over very well: You almost expect John Malkovich and Glenn Close to come down to the footlights at the end, toss their wigs and their characters at the audience, and embrace like fellow players who have had a ball and provided one for us.

  Frears is a connoisseur of sexual gamesmanship and romantic folly, as he is of acting, and the same expertise unites the two ways of being. So Frears throws châteaux, coaches, clothes, and fauteuils around in the spirit of an indoor rugby match, and nakedness, embarrassment, and triumph are all stages of the game. Glenn Close is lovely and bitchy, John Malkovich is superior and wicked, and Michelle Pfeiffer (as Madame de Tourvel—it really is the stooge role) tends to be teary-eyed and hurt. So the screenplay won an Oscar, along with the art and set direction (Stuart Craig and Gérard James) and the costumes (James Acheson). Everyone else was nominated, except for Malkovich, which really wasn’t very sporting, for his bored elitism is the very spirit of the whole thing. The supporting cast includes Swoosie Kurtz, Keanu Reeves (rather encouraged to be stupid?), Mildred Natwick, Peter Capaldi, and a very young, very bare Uma Thurman.

  It happens that only a year later, yet another film from the material appeared: Valmont, directed by Milos Forman and scripted by Jean-Claude Carrière. Of course, coming in not just second but last, the Forman picture did little business, but it is the best of the three in terms of getting Laclos. For this time the story has been done icy cold, with scalding sex and a true sense of the viciousness of the eighteenth century. Nothing takes away from the fun of the Frears version and its adroit instinct for audience gratification. But if you ever get the taste for a drier wine, without a cherry in the glass, try Valmont, which has terrific performances from Annette Bening (excellent as Merteuil), Colin Firth as Valmont, Meg Tilly, Fairuza Balk, Siân Phillips, Jeffrey Jones, Henry Thomas, and Fabia Drake.

  Dark Victory (1939)

  Which films would you take on your honeymoon, have on a desert island, or treasure in prison? The parlor game less often played is what film would you prefer to have playing as you die? Well, Dark Victory has to be a candidate. If you recall, Judith Traherne has worked it all out, the way her blindness surely signals the approaching finale. Husband and friends are out of the house. She has just Martha, her housekeeper, and her dog, Terry—and in the script she does take Terry up to her room as she prepares to die. Indeed, the last shot of that sequence was to be Terry lying on the floor, his head stretched out on his paws. In the finished film, however, Judith is absolutely alone. No dog sees her fade away. Was it the SPCA?

  Dark Victory had been a play in 1934–35, by George Brewer, Jr., and Bertram Bloch. It starred Tallulah Bankhead and was a disaster—but dying onstage is far harder than doing it in the movies. Anyway, several people remembered the play and kept dreaming of a movie, notably David O. Selznick, who owned the rights for some time and had thoughts of doing it with Janet Gaynor or Carole Lombard. Another prospector was Casey Robinson, who seems to have written a script and offered it to Warners. That’s when Warners began to ease the rights away from Selznick. A third fan was Bette Davis, who ignored Jack Warner’s amiable “Who’s gonna pay to see you die?” (he had come close himself sometimes) and backed her own hunch that it would work.

  At last Warners got it, and David Lewis was eager to produce it. Edmund Goulding was hired as director. Casey Robinson was installed as writer, and he made the point that the success of the
story depended on Dr. Steele—he urged that Spencer Tracy be offered the part that eventually went to George Brent. Davis was the leading candidate for Judith, though Kay Francis was a contender.

  The great difficulty about the film today is that we know so much about it, not least that unexpected death (through a brain tumor) is coming to Judith Traherne. More than that, we are all hypochondriacal medical experts. So many hospital shows have made us very knowing and very sharp about what death looks like. And it’s not quite the sweet spectacle that cinematographer Ernest Haller achieves in the film. In fact, the cinema has externalized death relentlessly: Death is being ripped apart by bullets; it is the riotous death scene of great acting (“Is this the end of Rico?”); it is the endless ingenuity with which people in films meet explosion and collapse. But the inner moment is so empty. That’s why death and sex are so difficult to film, and it’s why what happens to Judith Traherne is more a kind of socialite sainthood, all done in the church of Max Steiner’s splendid, unquenchable music. And just as Robinson foretold, George Brent is very good. But Geraldine Fitzgerald as Judith’s friend is even better. In addition, you get Humphrey Bogart trying to be Irish, Ronald Reagan trying not to cry, and the dogs trying to get screen time.

  David Copperfield (1935)

  You can argue that this adaptation of Charles Dickens is one of the most influential films ever made. It established that a classic novel could be adapted with decency and tact—thus 800 pages became 135 minutes, and few grumbled at the omissions. In turn—in ways that would come to affect the BBC in its serializations of so much period literature—the notion arose that with good costumes, authentic furniture, an army of supporting actors, and taste, then, yes, the world of Dickens, or whomever, could be brought to the big screen.

  In this case, the urge and the enthusiasm (if not the taste) came from David O. Selznick, who loved the book and all it represented, and who was prepared to visit England and let the Dickensian world seep into the picture. It came from Hugh Walpole’s discretion and delicacy over the screenplay—and his realizing that to some extent Dickens had lost interest in his own novel. But, above all, I think, we owe the picture to George Cukor’s instinct. As he wrote: “There was the problem of re-creating Dickens’ characters, making them slightly grotesque, at times caricature, yet completely human—as Dickens did himself. It was a difficult thing, making these people funny and frightening at the same time. You achieve it partly by the casting but also by deciding on the style of the playing. The outward semblance is important, too, and here we were guided by Phiz, who did the original illustrations. And somehow I think we managed all that.”

  Fair comment? I think so, just as I marvel at Mutiny on the Bounty’s getting Best Picture that year. The Bounty story now feels slow and predictable; somehow we know that what transpired on that unlucky ship was more complicated. Whereas Copperfield is a benign meeting of so many craft talents: the script; photography by Oliver T. Marsh in velvet black and white; Dolly Tree’s costumes; the sets by Cedric Gibbons, Edwin Willis, and Merrill Pye; and even some montages by Slavko Vorkapich.

  And then you have to list the glorious characters: Edna May Oliver as Betsey Trotwood; Lennox Pawle as Mr. Dick; Lionel Barrymore as Dan Peggotty; Basil Rathbone as Mr. Murdstone; Roland Young as Uriah Heep; and W. C. Fields as Mr. Micawber, cast after Charles Laughton had been intimidated by the role. Fields is Fields, of course, always ill dressed but insouciant, never quite drunk or sober, unusually fond of children here, and—as Cukor saw it—exactly the near monster (kind or unkind) that a child perceives. Dickens guessed something of profound importance: that in studying adults and passing from fear to equality, we achieve adulthood. And that is why, onscreen, Dickens needs his young characters, who guide our reaction to the larger world.

  It follows that Freddie Bartholomew is not just perfect as David—he is the eyepiece for the movie. Alas, when David becomes grown up (Frank Lawton) and makes mistakes with the women in his life, the film falters. But Dickens was never too impressed by falling in love, or much interested in writing about it.

  Dawn of the Dead (1978)

  Here are the rules of the game: Unfortunately, the world is subject to mounting attacks from the zombies. The zombies are the dead, but they have been given another, desperate, slow-motion life in which they seek their food: normal, living humans. You will know the zombies by the lurching, exhausted manner of their attack, and from their very messy mouths—they have no table manners. They can be made dead as dead by a shot to the brain. And they’re back after the phenomenal success of George A. Romero’s Night of the Living Dead (1968), the classic exposition of the threat, done in black and white with no stars. Educated at Carnegie Mellon, Romero was a devotee of the Pittsburgh area and the associate of collaborators first encountered in college.

  I am fond of Night of the Living Dead, and I recognize the great danger of such talents becoming unduly sophisticated as success swells their budgets. Dawn of the Dead is in color, and clearly better funded, and there are Romero purists who sniff at it a little because of those advantages. But the budget allows Romero to use the mall, and I have to say that Dawn of the Dead is a superior shocker, finally, by virtue of the allusions made possible by the way four vigilantes allow themselves to be besieged by zombies in a huge Pennsylvania shopping mall. The constant menace of a noxious embrace is underscored by the prospect of a lifetime supply of everything being available within arm’s reach. This is coupled with the natural schlock poetry that compares the zombies and the mannequins—dead already, but perfect or idealized figures. It’s not that Romero really convinces as a social critic, but the extra glee cinematically is giddy and stirring. The shock is piled on, and the viewer can draw his own conclusions about the “ethics” of the zombies or the vigilante integrity of those armed freedom fighters who are defending the consumer society. Let’s just say it works. There is a note of social pessimism, but it is saved from solemnity by the sheer magic of the juxtapositions and by our increasing sense of the zombies as children helplessly following in our footsteps. Romero has never gone this far, but I think his approach cries out for a film in which children are the ultimate zombies, the hungry, questioning ones.

  The fragile eco-balance at the mall is destroyed when a gang of bikers come hunting zombies—and then the world is at risk again. Michael Gornick did the photography. Romero wrote the script and edited the movie; Dario Argento is credited as a script consultant and as composer of some of the music. Once again, it seems a good deal more fun to play the zombies than the living guys, though naturally the zombies are expected not to laugh as a way of showing their hunger. We are accustomed by now to regard Romero as a slick primitive and one of the best “local” filmmakers in America. Of course, what’s more intriguing is just how much his vision fed the borrowed tastes of Hollywood.

  Day for Night / La Nuit Américaine (1973)

  Not every moviemaker really loves the process of making pictures. It can be exhausting, strenuous, and likely to take away from insight or concentration. You have to have answers for everyone on set, from the neurotic actress who thinks she loves you to the union shop steward who wants to make an idiot or a scoundrel of you. There are directors—not least François Truffaut’s adored mentor, Alfred Hitchcock—who declared that the real art and joy was making the storyboard, conceiving all the visual ideas. After that, being on the set was a bore and a chore.

  But there is a sustained passage in Day for Night, called “Cinema Reigns,” in which we have no doubt that for Truffaut the process itself was heaven—a sweet weather. And for every time something does not work—there is a very funny passage with a cat that does not deliver the goods—there is the ritual of readiness and preparation that is exquisite and spiritual. Indeed, you can feel in this film how far, for Truffaut, the fragments of life reordered as film were religious and blessed: Day for Night is therefore one of those movies that can be used in any introductory class on what it feels like to make a movie if you want to
feel good.

  Indeed, I think it’s very telling that whereas films like Sunset Blvd. and The Bad and the Beautiful are concerned with the atmospherics and treachery that surround filmmaking, Truffaut is so dedicated to the work—to tracking shots, to the background fuss that assistant directors control, to the lights and the sound—that you can appreciate the zeal that hardly sees the larger consequences. And so, truly, there are very few films that are as technical and educational as this and that survey the background—the betrayals, the infatuations, the location romances—with such steadfast indifference.

  It is a bonus that most of Day for Night was shot at the Victorine Studios in Nice, thus providing us with a documentary on that hallowed ground in practice. Of course, the charade is much enhanced by Truffaut’s own presence—rather grim and a little deaf—as the director, and in his dreams of a childhood encounter with a locked cinema where Citizen Kane is playing. This is not just reverential but fond, not just confessional but intimate; and it inevitably leads us to look back on Truffaut’s emotional role as the leader of the New Wave (he was so much more winning than Jean-Luc Godard) and as someone we lost far too early. As in any profound study of a passion, you see that the life is nearly irrelevant.