'Have You Seen...?'

by David Thomson

  The balance of his success and the film’s is the ultimate question. For there is both pride and humility in the film—though I think it is striking, and a serious omission, that this country priest hardly meets poor people. He is an intellectual. He is a priest in a film. He is a performed character—even if Laydu was not a professional actor. That struggle is not resolved. You can see the film over the years, and I can only say that art’s triumph seems to matter a little less on every viewing.

  Diner (1982)

  If I tell you that Diner was a directorial debut and that it is set in Baltimore, the hometown of writer-director Barry Levinson, then it is clear this is a picture where the title says it all—and despite the many surface energies, all doesn’t amount to enough. Yes, it’s a lovely, small film, and it stands up well enough, but more than twenty years later the question is tough to handle: What was Levinson’s “promise” offering us? Or, to put it another way, has he ever made a picture that is substantially more challenging, or satisfying?

  Levinson was nearly forty when he made Diner, and maybe that hints at a slightly middle-aged take on a subject that lives or dies on the silly immediacy of being caught between school and a career in a town where life does not change too much. After all, the Colts are still in Baltimore at the time of Diner, and a potential marriage to one of our lads hangs on whether the bride-to-be can pass a searching exam on Colts history. It’s true to the film’s tone that this sort of device is known to be misogynistic and insane but is not disowned by the picture.

  Of course, Diner always depended on two things: the film’s complete sympathy for the guys who chat away the years in the diner, and the immediacy of the young actors who play the parts. There are newcomers in the film who would go on to have modest careers—Steve Guttenberg, Daniel Stern, and Paul Reiser—though all of them have faded away by now. Of those, Stern looks the most helpless, Reiser the most perverse, and Guttenberg the prototype of Ben Affleck. Which leaves the gems of the film: Kevin Bacon and Mickey Rourke.

  Bacon, playing a giggly drunk, does the most interesting piece of acting, and in hindsight one gets a better sense of how his performing character might develop. But the star is Rourke. I was startled on reviewing Diner at just how musical and dreamy he is—not in the rather flat set-piece scene, the popcorn bag in the movie dark, but just in the way he talks to the guys. There was a sweet gentleness in Rourke then, a lyricism, that may remind us of the later Johnny Depp. But equally you can see how challenging Rourke was in terms of casting. He wasn’t tough, macho, or punk. He was a poet, if someone could lay down the length of his lines.

  And in many ways a similar question still hangs over Barry Levinson. Professional, humane, likeable, deft, funny—so many welcome attributes, but so little real character. He has been back to Baltimore, of course, and some might say that he still does better with group studies of the lads. All of which brings an odd poignancy to Diner and the way promise can get lost in America.

  Dinner at Eight (1933)

  When David O. Selznick moved over from RKO to M-G-M, Dinner at Eight was there waiting for him as a present. The play, by George S. Kaufman and Edna Ferber, had opened on Broadway in October 1932, and it had been regarded as a victim of the worst of the Depression—the situation in early 1933 as Roosevelt had to close the banks briefly. But with remarkable speed it was set up as a picture, with a screenplay by Frances Marion and Herman J. Mankiewicz and some additional dialogue from Donald Ogden Stewart. George Cukor, Selznick’s favorite, would direct, and he shot the whole thing in twenty-four days (including time for a visit by George Bernard Shaw and the Long Beach earthquake of March 10, 1933) for a release in August.

  In large measure, that haste was made possible because Metro was a streamlined studio under orders to please the boss’s son-in-law. William Daniels did the high-key “rich” photography. Adrian designed the costumes, and the art direction was by Fredric Hope and Hobe Erwin. The story is what it sounds like: a high-class Manhattan dinner party, one designed to show the clash of old and new money and the several degrees of opportunism at work. It was never a deep play, but Cukor pointed out that it’s a setup in which everyone is trying to fool or betray someone.

  It was obvious from the outset that the cast would be high-powered (a key reason for shooting it quickly and tidily). Billie Burke is Mrs. Oliver Jordan, the hostess of the party. Marie Dressler is Carlotta Vance, the faded beauty. Jean Harlow is Kitty Packard, wife to Dan Packard (Wallace Beery), who’s reluctant to accompany him to Washington on his new job to help fix the country. John Barrymore is Larry Renault, a former matinee idol. Lee Tracy plays Renault’s agent. Lionel Barrymore plays Oliver Jordan (planning to leave his wife). And there were roles for Edmund Lowe, Madge Evans, Jean Hersholt, and Karen Morley.

  The film is funny still, nowhere more so than in John Barrymore’s every moment as Renault. Playing a version of himself, close to the brink of humiliation, he was always eager for more, and he relished Cukor’s ideas about getting mixed up with an intransigent stool in his suicide scene. But the pièce de résistance is a conversation between Dressler and Harlow.

  “I was reading a book the other day,” says Harlow.

  At which Dressler is caught between a totter and a hesitation—as if that Long Beach earthquake happened while they were filming. The reaction is magnificent. But then Dressler asks what the book was about.

  “How machinery is going to take over from every profession,” bleats Harlow.

  “Oh, my dear,” says Dressler, “that’s something you need never worry about.” In fact, Harlow’s one problem on the film was wearing all white in a white room—somehow the dark arrowhead of her pubic hair showed. It had to be bleached. All in twenty-four days. Cost $375,000; profit nearly a million dollars.

  The Dirty Dozen (1967)

  I think you’d have to include The Dirty Dozen in this book if only on commercial grounds. With first-run rental income of more than $20 million, it was a huge hit as well as a dreadful example of how a certain kind of cynical adventure film could be set up on a parcel of alleged but second-rate stars. The most telling comparison is with Attack!, only ten years earlier, and a film filled with such pain, such candor about combat, and such precise character studies that The Dirty Dozen seems grotesque in comparison.

  Yet here is Lee Marvin (so good as the manipulative colonel in Attack!) as the very detached commanding officer who is given the task of rounding up a bunch of prison scum to go on a suicide mission against a Nazi stronghold. The film is in two blunt parts: recruitment and training, and then the mission itself. And suddenly, it’s as if war had become no more than a pretext for cheap, vulgar entertainment—whereas Attack! is a movie seemingly made by men who had been to war themselves and who had their own dark stories (Lee Marvin for one). In its look and its sense of period, The Dirty Dozen is slovenly and second-rate, devoid of cinematic interest or tension.

  It comes from a novel by E. M. Nathanson and a script by Nunnally Johnson and Lukas Heller. But Robert Aldrich is the real author, and that is an admission that this remarkable director of the 1950s had become a desperate, stop-at-nothing survivor by the sixties. The real cynicism of these movies is borne out by the revival of Aldrich the artist in the seventies, with films like Ulzana’s Raid and Hustle.

  The Dozen are lurid, unrestrained, and unwholesome—no, that’s not a description of their criminal record so much as a tribute to their dire acting styles, all over the top and all cheerfully proud of their dirtiness. Aldrich may have felt that he was tuning in with the antiestablishment mood of the late 1960s. See the film and try that stupid explanation. Anyway, the hired men are Jim Brown, John Cassavetes, Charles Bronson, Donald Sutherland, Ralph Meeker, George Kennedy, Telly Savalas, Clint Walker, Trini López, and Ben Carruthers.

  The raid is something of an anticlimax, in that it has to be more conventional, but it is equally stupid, notably in the “run” in which star football player Jim Brown delivers a lot of explosives. Still, the na
stiest thing in the film is the use of Robert Ryan as a fusspot officer who is trying to spoil the Dozen’s fun. There is a veiled antigay thrust in the role and a scurrilous muckraking that shows the decline in Aldrich. Justifiably in Attack! he had had to make do without Defense Department support. Here, he never comes close to deserving it.

  The cast also includes Ernest Borgnine and Richard Jaeckel, men who had seen Aldrich at his best. Did everyone chuckle and forget the humiliation as they realized the hit they were embarked on?

  Dirty Harry (1971)

  Once upon a time, Dirty Harry was to be set in New York and Frank Sinatra was to play Harry Callahan, whose dogged pursuit of a serial killer offends the ethical code of police conduct and the Miranda rules. You can see and hear Sinatra doing it—even “So, do you feel lucky, punk?”—but he would have been casual, laconic, soiled by the city and sour from contempt. The thing about Clint Eastwood’s Callahan is his tweed jacket, his upright stance, his tousled surfer beauty, and the anger in the man that the world has got to this grubby state. Norman Mailer once said that the film felt like a Western. That fits the way Eastwood strides through and ignores the world, and it gives his anger a faint edge of the nineteenth century.

  John Milius worked on the script with Terrence Malick at an early stage, and apparently he had an opening where Harry addressed the audience (or an assembly of cadets), ranting about the modern dilemma of the police. It was too close to Patton—so said Eastwood once he came on board. It was then that Harry Julian Fink, Rita Fink, and Dean Riesner were hired and the film got the opening of San Francisco on a sunny day, with the first killing, a girl shot dead in her rooftop swimming pool.

  Don Siegel came onto the project as director because of Eastwood, and it’s fascinating to note the way they were left and right wing in their attitudes. But Siegel found Andy Robinson to play the killer, Scorpio—young, long-haired, perverse, as wordy as Harry was taciturn, and potentially loathsome. Bruce Surtees did the photography and caught the bright light of the Bay Area, and Siegel enjoyed using some unlikely locations, like Kezar Stadium. Lalo Schifrin wrote the music.

  It’s important that Harry is a loner—as Eastwood saw him, a sad man—who has already lost his wife and who wonders if he is bad luck for partners. But the fury is Eastwood’s own, I think, as the killer is likely to get off on a technicality and as Harry goes after him as a private mission. The audience backs this because we hate Scorpio, and there’s no doubt that this picture was crucial in the elevation of Eastwood as a popular hero in the age of Reagan. Pauline Kael called Dirty Harry a fascist film, which was going a lot too far and only played into the hands of the wry Eastwood, who could arch a Clintish eyebrow at so highbrow a word.

  But Clint/Harry is already a free agent operator. So his wars with authority (Harry Guardino and John Vernon) are obligatory and perfunctory. And there’s no doubt that as he throws away his badge, he is filled with disgust for liberal America. The film had rentals of more than $50 million, though, so the badge was retrieved. There would be five more Callahan pictures, plus Tightrope, in which even Clint seemed to agonize over his character.

  The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (1972)

  Once upon a time, in Land without Bread (1932), Luis Buñuel knew how to raise the howl of protest, the terrible cry of rage at hunger in the world. But the history of his career is the distillation of rage, until he is able to isolate that mundane irritation that still afflicts the well-fed when they have to wait. The discreet charm of the bourgeoisie is their polite handling of their sense of futility and dismay. (Of course, it is also one of those sublime titles that applies to the medium as a whole.)

  So you take a handful of the “right” people (and their melodious names are worth repeating): Henri and Alice Sénéchal (Jean-Pierre Cassel and Stéphane Audran), an ideal romantic couple in their mid-forties, her false eyelashes making a nice rhyme with his sideburns; the Thévenots, Paul and Delphine (Paul Frankeur and Delphine Seyrig); the slightly rebellious Florence (Bulle Ogier); as well as a bishop (Julien Bertheau) and an ambassador, Rafael de Acosta (Fernando Rey), a man absolutely smooth enough to be running consignments of cocaine in the diplomatic pouch (or behind his mustache). They are stars, starry, superbly dressed, though in a pleasingly old-fashioned style. They are the people you might expect to meet at a French dinner party, even if you had to walk there on the open road, surrounded by the corn, the buttercups, and the aimless blue sky. And, really, as a group, these people are not demanding or difficult. But they would like their dinner. Something simple, if necessary: a soup, homemade from stock; a piece of meat with the blood showing; a salad glistening with oil; and something sweet, a pie of sliced apples and ears; and of course the appropriate wines.

  Alas, everything from small misunderstandings to major eruptions of civil disturbance keep getting in the way of the proper marriage of these pilgrims and their meal. And as the interruptions mount, a profound panic breaks through, so that even when the would-be diners are at the point of a gun, a hand can’t help but give itself away by reaching up for a slice of pink lamb, still warm. Sooner or later, a meal becomes a massacre.

  This is Luis Buñuel, collaborating on a screenplay with Jean-Claude Carrière, working for that ancient producer Serge Silberman, with Edmond Richard doing the very pretty color photography, sets by Pierre Guffroy (the film is full of pieces of furniture one might give an arm for), and editing by Hélène Plemiannikov.

  Here was a tranquil international art-house hit, rising like a soufflé above any suggestion of censorship, anti-Americanism, or unpleasantness, but gently acting like acid on the tender meat of bourgeois self-protection. The film got an Oscar nomination for best script (it lost to Jeremy Larner’s The Candidate, another sign of how steadily the bourgeoisie looks after itself). The cast—who also include Michel Piccoli, Maria Gabriella Maione, François Maistre, and Milena Vukotic—are as beautiful as white marble statues. This is the work of a great filmmaker in his classic period.

  Distant Thunder (1973)

  It is 1942, and we are in a Bengal village. A girl bathing in the river sees fighter planes pass overhead, and she says to herself that they are as beautiful as cranes. A profound film is about to unfold. Ganga is a young Brahmin who moves from village to village as a doctor. He is about to set himself up as a teacher—why not? He is educated, he is a Brahmin, and he has a sweet wife, Ananga. They are the local class. Ganga notices that the price of rice is mounting, and he supposes it is the war. It is still only 1942.

  This is a major work by Satyajit Ray, written for the screen from a novel by Bibhuti Bhushan Bannerjee and photographed in color by Soumendu Roy. Of course, the famine advances. The value of rice goes mad, and Ganga’s calm and class are left helpless in the panic. Biswas offers him rice because of Ganga’s caste when the official report is that the store is empty. Then the store is truly empty, and Ananga does manual labor for some rice—no matter that that breaks the caste laws. The value of money goes. Rape becomes a currency, nearly. The famine rages, and Moti, an untouchable girl, dies outside Ganga’s house. He decides to bury the untouchable. He and Ananga take in starving strangers, and she tells him she is pregnant.

  The vulnerability of people aches out of the film, and even though Ray was telling the story thirty years after the events, he supplies a chilling title at the end of the film, all the more shocking to people who know no Indian history: that five million people starved to death in the Bengal famine of 1943.

  Not that anger or recrimination really figure in this film. It’s a Chekhovian study of country life in ghastly times, and it has the warmth and curiosity to see something of value in nearly all the characters, just as it observes the discipline and fatuity of caste without any apparent disturbance. And whereas Ray had filmed the poverty or the hard times of Bengal before, by going back to the years of World War II, he was involving Western audiences in a new way. For we know “our” war reached India, and we may have a friendly image of brave, fierce Indian troo
ps who served the Allied cause. But in India, one year there was a minor rice problem and the next there were five million dead. And just because the human context is so lucid and understandable, the political implication is one that cannot be shrugged off.

  It is said, still, that Satyajit Ray was a European Indian, in that he was raised and trained in London ways, and that he made movies aimed cleverly at the European art-house market. But why not? There are stories—like that of the five million—that deserve to be heard. As for Ray’s “humanism,” it is just another form of colonial patronage (or condescension), laying claim to an authentic artistic vision as a European heritage. Ray is one of the supreme directors.

  The Diving Bell and the Butterfly (2007)

  Movie gathers up “the disasters of life” with insatiable greed, yet it misses the dead ends that so many people have to face. I write—this is my last entry for the book—in a season in which slaughtered barbershop customers are converted to meat pies, where a bizarre figure of Death stalks the Big Bend country of Texas, and where the fierce struggle for oil promises “there will be blood.” Yet few of us actually give up the ghost to those ingenious gas-cylinder guns that can leave a hole in the world big enough for golf balls. My life has depended on concentration, attention, and choice in nothing more dangerous than words, and the terminus in life I fear the most, I think—I know—is stroke or some gentle smothering of whatever minor faculties I have.

  Julian Schnabel’s mercurial picture The Diving Bell and the Butterfly is a study of that risk, and because it has such a lifelike and accurate sense of death and loss, it is a film that shines with the immanence of life. It is based on a real story, that of Jean-Dominique Bauby, once the editor of French Elle. We see, briefly, the flashy spasms of his magazine and his work—we know the ceaseless activity and the importance of image. But then Bauby is stilled by a stroke that leaves him paralyzed except for one eye. He can see. He can hear. He can comprehend. And he will learn to communicate—he invents a language through the device of blinking his eye. At the same time, Schnabel, a painter in his other life, can see the wreck of Bauby and imagine the point of view from within as his other eye is sewn shut to avoid infection. This is the most claustrophobic shot I can recall in the history of cinema.