So what does one eye see—apart from its own wretched handicap? Well, there is the slow business of rehabilitation and learning language again. That ends in the way Bauby will write a book. There is also the way in which memory and the new, fragmented moment conspires to keep Bauby in love with life—whether he is looking at the thighs of a woman or the sweep of long grass in the sun and the wind.
We are here to notice things, I propose—for if we do not notice, then we and the things might as well not be here. So we remember and try to guard the things worth loving—the thighs, the grass—and yet our feebleness leads to forgetfulness. Whether it is by stroke or just the gradual erasure of loss, we lose the precious things. At the end of Bauby’s life, this film incorporates the closing music from Les 400 Coups—sparse, stricken, yet alive—and I should say that as I heard it, and remembered it, I was in love with the thing I can only call experience. And lost in doubts over how often the movies have sought to bury those precious sights and sounds in the ceaseless catalogue of bizarre ways in which we die. A slight touch, a stroke, can turn out the light. But before then, did you see?
D.O.A. (1950)
Dead on Arrival, or “I don’t think you understand, Mr Bigelow. You’ve been murdered.” Frank Bigelow (Edmond O’Brien) is a lawyer from the desert country, looking forward to a weekend in San Francisco. He reckons to get away from his small-town girlfriend and live it up like a traveling salesman on a spree. San Francisco is alive with parties and available women, and Bigelow never dreams of the risk.
He goes to a terrific-looking jazz club on the waterfront (if only such clubs still existed!), and someone slips him an unusual drink. He starts to sweat (this is Edmond O’Brien). He has a stomachache and intimations of mortality. He’s in agony. He hobbles into a doctor’s office and learns the truth. He has been given a radioactive poison, and his hours are numbered. There’s a shot famous in film noir of a darkened room and the X-ray with a livid, glowing block of poison. So Frank decides he has to find out what happened to him and why.
This fabulous setup came from a story and script by Clarence Greene and Russell Rouse. Within a few moments, Bigelow is reduced from a cocksure tourist to a furious bundle of mortified energy and ruined body, searching to work out why he has to die. In truth, the answer to that puzzle is a lot less satisfactory than the mystery itself, but that’s a weakness with plenty of film noirs. And there’s no denying that the desperation here is both alarming and faintly comic—there is room for a little more surreal humor. Leo Popkin produced. Rudolph Mate directed, with Ernest Laszlo as his cameraman, and the film is as visually arresting as it is startling. There are wonderful sequences of Bigelow running down Market Street in San Francisco, half-crazed because of what he has found out about himself. You can imagine that the pounding score, by Dimitri Tiomkin, leaves no doubt about the general level of panic. The intrigue that unfolds only proves that lawyers like Bigelow should stay out in the sticks. San Francisco looks racy and exciting, but the point of the film is to stress that its too sophisticated for its own good.
The supporting cast is very good, so often with these noir pictures, the unusual setup relies on exaggerated character studies to sustain interest. There’s Pamela Britton, Luther Adler, Beverly Garland, Lynn Baggett, William Ching, Henry Hart, Neville Brand (punching Bigelow in that glowing stomach), Laurette Luez, and Jess Kirkpatrick.
The story has been tried again, most notably in a 1988 remake by Rocky Morton and Annabel Jankel that starred Dennis Quaid and Meg Ryan. But now it only seemed fanciful and implausible, because there was no grasp of the atmosphere or the hectic style that noir needed if we were to suspend disbelief. Once that disbelief goes, not a lot is left—noir was always a genre poised on the brink of style without content.
Doctor Zhivago (1965)
Everything about Doctor Zhivago reeks of middlebrow compromise; nothing is direct or authentic. And the crucial point to be made about David Lean is that, once upon a time, within the framework of Dickens adaptation or enclosed romance, so much in his films was particular and local. Indeed, you can hardly measure 1940s Britain better than through the strangled emotion of Trevor Howard and Celia Johnson in Brief Encounter, and yet in Zhivago Lean asks an Egyptian to be a Russian and trusts that we will abandon all doubts in the shimmer of exoticism. It is all part of a condescension and willful ignorance that has separated Britain (and the West) from real knowledge of other parts of the world.
Having despaired of the way producer Sam Spiegel regularly screwed him out of money on successful pictures, Lean looked to Carlo Ponti to back a film from the novel that had won Boris Pasternak the Nobel Prize (then rejected by the author) while becoming a test case in the Cold War. Robert Bolt writes the screenplay, in a vein that will become the basis of BBC adaptations of classic novels: where being faithful means keeping the incidents while omitting the cultural air that the characters breathe. So the Russian Revolution is an aberration in Zhivago, not an understandable and tragic response to the despotism of Russia. So it’s easy to have Yuri Zhivago and his loved ones as the wounded figures in the history of modern Russia, and far too easy to make black-hearted villains out of the other characters. So, finally, the sentiment of interrupted love affairs takes precedence over the core of poetry or the meaning of Russia. Doctor Zhivago is an epic that could be set down in any country. Just give the external events different names and remember the heart of Brief Encounter: that a thwarted-love story is richer than one that lasts.
Freddie Young (replacing Nicolas Roeg, after disagreements) did the photography for Panavision 70 mm, and it is beautiful, but worse than that, things are arranged in order to be beautiful. Over the years, spectacle rises up and drowns Lean. John Box did production design, Terence Marsh art direction, Phyllis Dalton costumes—and all are talented and well funded, which usually means Oscars. The music is by Maurice Jarre, and “Lara’s Theme” became one of the hits of the swinging sixties.
The performances, as always in Lean, are secondary to the casting: Omar Sharif, Julie Christie, Geraldine Chaplin, Tom Courtenay, Alec Guinness, Siobhan McKenna, Ralph Richardson, Rod Steiger, Rita Tushingham, Adrienne Corri, Geoffrey Keen, Klaus Kinski, Jack MacGowran.
The film was defeated for Best Picture by The Sound of Music, but it won Oscars for Bolt, Young, and most of the craftsmen. It had cost $15 million, and its first-run rentals were $43 million. This time, Lean himself was to earn as much as $10 million in the long run. Let Pauline Kael have the last word. The film ends with a pretty, forgiving rainbow over a Soviet dam, as if to say, Well, it all worked out for the best. Asks Kael: “Would Lean and Bolt place a rainbow over the future of England?”
Dodsworth (1936)
Deprived of all knowledge of its credits, one could easily guess that William Wyler’s Dodsworth had been photographed by Gregg Toland. There are a lot of very artfully composed images of people arranged in deep space that seem to prefigure the work the director and cameraman would do a few years later. In particular, look for a scene in happy Naples when the lead, Sam Dodsworth (Walter Huston), has at last escaped his very spoiled wife (Ruth Chatterton) and found his true love (Mary Astor). Dodsworth is set on a new life—but then the telephone rings. It’s Vienna, which means it’s her. The use of spatial relationships and full figures moving in the frame is quite beautiful. And the film was shot by Rudolph Mate, a fascinating semigenius figure (he filmed The Passion of Joan of Arc and made D.O.A).
At any event, Dodsworth is a very sophisticated film for 1936—a real social study as opposed to a romantic comedy—and one of the most telling portraits of marriage in American film. It comes from a Sinclair Lewis novel, published in 1929 and turned into a play by Sidney Howard in 1936. Incidentally, it was Howard’s brilliant script for this film (being faithful to a novel while cutting a lot) that inspired David O. Selznick to give him the Gone With the Wind job.
Huston had played the role of Samuel Dodsworth onstage, and it was a touch of great sanity to have him do the film
. For Dodsworth is central but not handsome, not even strong (he’s curiously indecisive and passive for a successful businessman), but Huston brings the detailed observation of supporting acting to a lead role. And you feel the picture shift as a result. It is no longer a study of stars but an examination of muddled people. Just watch for the way Huston uses Sam’s limp, and the change in physical stance—for all the gruff, forthright manner, this is an insecure man, and Hollywood did not often bother with them in 1936.
While the wife, Fran, could easily be loathed—she is frivolous, selfish, thoughtless—Ruth Chatterton makes her familiar and understandable. The scene where Maria Ouspenskaya tells Chatterton she isn’t right for her son (played by Gregory Gaye) is a classic. And then there is Mary Astor, as Mrs. Cortright, the other woman. She never looked better than here, and there is a shot of her standing in a far doorway in a midlength dress that is to die for. Astor and the film are so decent that we say, Yes, Sam deserves her—but will he be brave enough to take her?
Richard Day won an Oscar for very good sets—and this is really a film about traveling people, in transit, trying to find themselves, so the sets are important. As for Wyler’s work, he is devoted to his players and surely responsible for the very unusual feeling of a picture about grown-ups. Also with David Niven, Paul Lukas, Spring Byington, and Grant Mitchell.
Dog Day Afternoon (1975)
It’s August 2, 1972, and a branch of the First Brooklyn Savings Bank is under siege. One of the secretaries has been on the phone to her husband. Finished, she turns to Sonny (Al Pacino) and says, “He wants to know what time you’ll be through?” That’s very true to the spirit of New York living theater: Sonny had resolved that this was going to be his big day, but now a bit player is horning in with a smart line and his priorities. Do we need to be told that this all happened—or something more or less like it? Or is it simply very close to that sense of bursting street theater that was so self-conscious in New York in the 1970s and that really bespeaks a general public who have already been on television a few times and who are addicts of the Gore Vidal principle—that you can’t be on television or a minor celebrity too often. Face it, there are no minor celebrities.
In Dog Day Afternoon (it is very hot and humid), three men hold up the bank with guns. One of them runs away, leaving Sonny and Sal (John Cazale) in charge—and they begin to negotiate about how to get out. The bank has a manager (Sully Boyar) and a female staff who recover their nerves enough to keep up a back-track of chatter. The police are in the form of Moretti (Charles Durning), and the FBI are around (James Broderick). It’s dangerous, clearly: the guns could go off. But the great strength of Dog Day Afternoon is its ear and instinct for comedy. The film is based on a magazine article by P. F. Kluge and Thomas Moore, but Frank Pierson’s script goes out of its way to give everyone a point of view. Indeed, in a way, it’s everyone’s big day, and they all rise to the occasion in the daft spirit of people who reckon they have a duty to television—so don’t talk small talk.
Sidney Lumet directs and makes it the most ribald and unexpected of his police procedurals—how is everyone going to proceed when the whole thing is like an improv? It’s at that thought that you may begin to get the feeling that the whole thing is an acting workshop in which Al Pacino is experimenting with that energy that was so repressed in The Godfather. I enjoy it, but I think everyone is a touch too colorful for comfort.
The producers were Martin Elfand and Martin Bregman (a major ennabler or indulger of Mr. Pacino). Victor Kemper photographs the film in a rough newsreel way, and Dede Allen is the editor. The most credible performances come from John Cazale (the one victim of the day) and Chris Sarandon as Sonny’s transvestite “wife.” Again, the gayness is more schtick than reality, but Pacino’s Sonny is auditioning. Pierson’s script, I think, deserves better, a performance more from life. Pacino was exploring his own larger-than-life charm. In truth, it’s not an especially ambitious film, but it got a parcel of Oscar nominations (including Best Picture), and it won for Frank Pierson’s script.
Dogville (2003)
You must realize, reading this book, that it’s all a game. The notion that some films are literally and objectively “better” than others is a kind of smoke that encourages everything from the Academy Awards to the outside prospect that reading this book may improve you. One of my publishers once had the idea of a star system for the films, to spur you on. I responded that if anyone read what I said, they knew what I felt. Moreover, the pinnacle of all ratings systems, the steady nomination of Citizen Kane as “the best film ever made,” is a damaging nonsense that has probably stopped people from seeing or thinking about Kane. All of which is a prelude to saying that as a more or less paid-up member of the auteur theory, I dislike director Lars von Trier a lot, but I love his Dogville. You see, you have to keep looking, because you never know when some hack is going to glimpse the grail. Even his own.
Why do I love Dogville? Let me count the ways.
As one who cherishes theater every time I see a film, and who loves the history of the stage breaking into film, I am thrilled by Dogville’s bold, radical, yet faintly camp reversion to a soundstage (or a rehearsal room), with areas marked out on the floor where the buildings are to be placed. The vision of a frontier town like a board game (or a construction kit) is delicious.
Further, the actual state of such infant communities as Dogville, Montana, is often so rigid, so doctrinaire, that this way of presenting the place is witty and inventive. Note, in this respect, that I am going along with the view of Dogville as a cruel anti-American satire—and a good thing, too.
The wild range of the casting here is akin to abandoning casting (or getting it wrong deliberately). It’s a way of saying any actor can play any part. It’s Brechtian and refreshing, and I think it’s a way to break out of the dire confines of naturalism. So Lauren Bacall as a dour Ma Ginger, Paul Bettany as a lily-livered Tom Edison, and James Caan as The Big Man are all refreshing.
Although the film is too slow, there is a true narrative arc, a fable, like the moon’s passage across the night sky. And surely Nicole Kidman was exactly right as the nice lost girl/witch/femme fatale who can set that arc moving just by slipping from one persona to another.
Above all, Dogville is a real contribution to the Western in its depiction of a fiercely ingrowing community terrified of the space it has challenged and the violence it is prepared to undertake. I can’t think of another Western so acute or understanding of how the people who have gone there to sit in their little enclosures have ruined the West.
And because I’d never seen anything like it before, or found any movie that had such a charming offset between grand fateful design and small daily advances. The great point of America is that it can furnish a brilliant, if not radiant, display of its own complete failure as the land of the free and the home of the brave. This is the land of chains and the home of the afraid—which often feels much more like life.
La Dolce Vita (1960)
Some people believed that La Dolce Vita was a turning point in world cinema. Some said it was Thomas Mann meets Eurotrash. Some admitted that it was just Federico Fellini at his old game of pleasing the bourgeoisie with a gesture toward daring. Fellini got a Best Director Oscar nomination. And it occurs to me now that this film is actually I Vitelloni transferred from listless beach towns to Rome and replacing hapless young guys with the gossip-column elite of the Western world. In other words, both are films about the boredom of boring people. As for the turning point in world cinema, may we say that 1960 is also the year of Psycho, Shadows, L’Avventura, and Breathless?
By now, as if writing was a unique burden, Fellini had cultivated the Italian system of group writing, so he was aided and abetted by Ennio Flaiano, Tullio Pinelli, and Brunello Rondi. They got a collective Oscar nomination for Best Screenplay, though no one doubts that it was Fellini’s vision to portray a great modern city (rooted in antiquity) where the various whoring professions of the day (the movi
emakers, the journalists, the scandal photographers, the academics, the politicians, and the intellectuals) were all mixed in with the oldest one. As a measure of its depth and seriousness, the film ran 175 minutes, nearly twice as long as previous Fellini films. As a balance, less happened in overt script terms. You might think that cinematically a lot is happening, but if you’re of that hopeful persuasion, you have to go to Antonioni to find the new texture of modern cinematic event.
Nothing happens, except for flatulent set pieces, epic reaches of symbolism, and teary-eyed larger metaphors. Thus you get Anita Ekberg in the Trevi Fountain, an upside-down Christ statue arriving by helicopter, and the little girl on the beach whose Mona Lisa smile urges Marcello to keep trying. Otello Martelli did the photography, and Piero Gherardi won an Oscar for the art direction. Nino Rota wrote the music.
The cast was headed by Marcello Mastroianni as the fatalistic, observing conscience—Fellini himself, surely—and this was the picture that made Mastroianni a star and ensured that he could get away with doing very little. For the rest, the film involves Ekberg, Anouk Aimée, Yvonne Furneaux, Magali Noël, Alain Cuny, Annibale Ninchi, Walter Santesso, Lex Barker, Jacques Sernas, and Nadia Gray.
'Have You Seen...?' Page 38
