A handsome draughtsman, Mr. Neville (Anthony Higgins), is hired by Mrs. Herbert (Janet Suzman) to do twelve drawings of her house at Compton Anstey. This work is to be done while her husband is away. Payment is to include hospitality at the house and access to Mrs. Herbert’s bed. What follows is a puzzle and an intrigue: Why the strange contract? How will it all come out? Is something far more sinister going on at the house?
The film exhibits many of Greenaway’s concerns with pure form, numeracy, line, and artificiality, but you can’t offer a British audience adultery and antiques without prompting their greedy enthusiasm and their wish to be in at the kill. The picture was shot by Curtis Clark, but there was a lot of rostrum work with drawings, too. The art direction was by Bob Ringwood, and Michael Nyman wrote the music. It was not quite clear how far this had been Greenaway’s intention, but a beguiling mixture of mystery and experimentation came together in a movie that flattered the audience’s intelligence and connoiseurship. As with high-toned advertising, it was difficult to resist the allure of acquisition and the sigh of digestion.
In Britain especially, Greenaway paid for his success and the faint aroma of mixed motives. Opponents argued that he was never much interested in the content; he had taken advantage of it here to help get a hit. This argument arose again, with far greater fury, in 1989 over The Cook, The Thief, His Wife & Her Lover, in which really gruesome violence was allied to sex and eating in very arresting ways. The Cook settled the matter for many people that Greenaway’s alleged human interest was usually a sham. But in that film Greenaway used bigger stars (Michael Gambon, Helen Mirren), and the sex was so flagrant and gloating as to be objectionable. There were also charges, with some reason, that he was himself unduly excited by cruelty. So what? If films are really supposed to give up on the delicious task of tricking and offending us, how long can this pious behavior last? The film’s mystery comes down to the wish to make an heir. Well, art cinema and exploitation have just the same horny urge to secure property. And we are the property.
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1932)
Who could be surprised at the screen appeal of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde? There’s no need for murder and mayhem to feature in the transaction. It can be simply the difference between sitting in the dark and singin’ in the rain—the spectator is Jekyll, and the man on the screen is Hyde. Robert Louis Stevenson’s 1886 novella, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, began being filmed nearly as soon as the medium existed. There were at least seven versions before this, the Rouben Mamoulian classic, and the most recent had featured a very showy performance from John Barrymore. But when Paramount decided on this remake, they went for a prestige production.
Samuel Hoffenstein and Percy Heath did the script, Karl Struss was the cameraman, Hans Dreier was in charge of art direction, and Mamoulian was the director. Fredric March had the title roles, Miriam Hopkins was his girlfriend, and the rest of the cast included Rose Hobart, Holmes Herbert, Halliwell Hobbes, Arnold Lucy, Tempe Pigott, and Edgar Norton. Moreover, in the very impressive transformation scenes—done apparently in unbroken takes—there were tricks that were never revealed but that may have employed different-colored makeup that came in and out of view.
The picture was a hit—it had over $1 million in rentals—but it was not Oscar-nominated for Best Picture, no matter that Fredric March shared the acting Oscar that year with Wallace Beery in The Champ. March is good, but you get the feeling that there is some restraint being exercised. The thrust of the film was that Jekyll needs his alter ego so he can find sexual satisfaction, but maybe censorship was pressing on that nerve. One has the feeling that March’s prize is owed to the makeup people above all. One longs for him to be bawdier and more dangerous.
The story was remade at Metro in 1941 by Victor Fleming, with Spencer Tracy in the lead. He huffed and puffed and changed his face, but it might have been subtler to play it drunk and sober. The intriguing thing about that version is that Ingrid Bergman and Lana Turner swapped parts, so Ingrid played the slut and Lana was the nice girl (I bet you can guess which one came off better).
The greatest performance in the role, I think, is that of Jean-Louis Barrault in Jean Renoir’s Le Testament du Docteur Cordelier (1959), made for French television and not easy to see. Barrault does not do a transformation, as I recall, but his Cordelier is a man of such wanton, lurching movements as to be frightening and yet a remembrance of Boudu (but, of course, the tramp and the middle-class man is just another enactment of Stevenson’s seminal dream).
A word should also be added for Stephen Frears’s Mary Reilly (1996), where John Malkovich plays the two roles (but which is more frightening?) and Julia Roberts does wonders as the housemaid who realizes what is happening.
Dr. Mabuse the Gambler (1922)
You can argue that this onslaught from Fritz Lang does not deepen the intrigue of the Norbert Jacques novel on which it is based. There is not yet the darkening political undertone that distinguishes 1932’s The Testament of Dr. Mabuse. But this is a thriller that plays well over three hours in its two parts, in which the narrative energy never flags. Nor is the film ever let down by visual imagination. The English critic Tom Milne argued that Dr. Mabuse the Gambler does not rival the earlier Feuillade pictures, especially for their haunting exteriors. It’s a fair point. At the same time, I challenge anyone to point to more plot material being delivered per minute of screen time in 1922 with such conviction or atmosphere. Quite simply, in the development of early cinema, the control of complicated information, the delivery of moral point of view, and the accumulation of fascinating urban atmosphere is unrivaled.
Dr. Mabuse (Rudolf Klein-Rogge): “Who is he?” asks another character. “Nobody knows. He is there! He stands over the city like a huge tower!” In this, his first incarnation (delivered to screens just a year after the novel’s publication), Mabuse is an exponent of psychological power who shows his command in gambling, mind games, hypnotism, telekinesis, and so on. His genius is to have such a powerful, staring eye that he takes over the weaker minds of others. His targets are the rich, especially those who are prepared to gamble away their wealth at the gaming tables or on the stock exchange—that sharp comparison is itself a good deal beyond the economic wisdom of most American films at that time. Mabuse is sexy—he likes to seduce important women—and he can even add an undertone of sexuality as he overpowers men. He wants to take over Edgar Hull (Paul Richter) and Count Told (Alfred Abel), but he is opposed in everything by State Attorney von Welk (Bernhard Goetzke).
It was all filmed at Babelsberg (now part of Potsdam) in 1921–22. Lang collaborated on the script with Thea von Harbou—they married not long after the film was released. That’s worth stressing, because there is a giddy, exhilarated whirl to the action, with many sexual encounters. Lang would say later that he was out to show the depravity of postwar Germany, but in truth there’s a glittering delight in the debauchery and the collapse of lives, and an absolute fascination with so many ways of yielding to irrational power. The interest in psychology that one might expect in the German-speaking world is still pitched at the level of a kind of masochistic madness, a vision of weakness in which the “villain” Mabuse is often more ambiguous than that position allows.
The photography was by Carl Hoffmann, the art direction by Otto Hunte, Erich Kettelhut, and Karl Vollbrecht. Above all, filmed largely on sets, this epic introduces the themes of enclosure and claustrophobia in Lang. They will be better handled later, but this Mabuse ends, insane, in a locked chamber. The place is the symbol of his mania, but the world of the films thrills to the geometry and the trap. From the outset, Lang loved his Mabuse and reacted to him. That guilty secret is still there. Dr. Mabuse the Gambler doesn’t quite mean what it claims—but that is modernism.
Dr. Strangelove (1964)
Months after the death of John Kennedy, and not much more than two years after the October missile crisis, My Fair Lady beat out Dr. Strangelove for the Best Picture Oscar. Rex Harrison beat o
ut Peter Sellers for Best Actor. It’s all a measure of Hollywood’s urge to look the other way—but I’m still not sure that Dr. Strangelove has worn very well.
The subtitle—How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb—was much employed as the film opened, if only as a way of suggesting that this was a gentle, ironic comedy and a public entertainment instead of an utterly bleak satire made without hope or much amusement. Moreover, this was the second “American” film in a row that Stanley Kubrick was making from a strictly British vantage point. Rather more than might have been wished for, the film had an anti-American undertone, or a vein of English comedy that sees America as a land of buffoons. In so many ways, that comes from Peter Sellers’s triple act (as a British Air Force flier, as the American president, and as a mad scientist who has invented the Bomb).
Kubrick and Peter George were working on George’s book Red Alert and getting nowhere, though Sellers had signed on to play as many as four roles. So Terry Southern took over, working in the car on the way to the studio with Kubrick. There were disputes over the writing later, but it’s pretty clear that the satirical approach was all due to Southern. I’m not so sure now whether it feels like a funny film or a much more serious work struggling to find the right tone.
There’s something resolutely facetious and schoolboyish in the humor. It seems to grow out of British Radio’s The Goon Show and an adoration of Sellers the mimic that goes beyond reason. This indulgence of Sellers had already helped to spoil Lolita, where he had been permitted to improvise in ways that betrayed the commitment of James Mason—noble yet insane, eloquent but demented—as Humbert.
The real imaginative energy in Strangelove was going to Ken Adam’s brilliant, futuristic sets (all made at Shepperton) and the attempt to create a world that was the manifestation of the daft bureaucracy in the nuclear-secure operation. This clash, or gap, between the tone of the action and the awesomeness of the physical world is not uncommon in Kubrick, but it is ruinous, and it sometimes enforces the inescapable feeling that his England is not the America that haunted him. His decision to be in England may have been made for strong personal reasons, but I think it did great damage artistically.
That said, here is a film alive with daring, a chilly black-and-white look (by cinematographer Gilbert Taylor), and very funny supporting performances from George C. Scott as Turgidson, Sterling Hayden as Ripper, and Slim Pickens as the ultimate pilot of the Bomb. If Preston Sturges had taken on this story—we can dream—the one thing I’m sure of, and that underlines Kubrick’s limits, is that there would have been a woman in a lead part. Of course, I can’t say for sure that Sturges would have left us laughing. But it’s quite clear that Kubrick removed no one’s worry.
Drunken Angel (1948)
Because it’s still only 1948 in Tokyo, it’s no surprise to see and feel a strain of Japanese neo-realism. There’s nothing angry or aggressive in this film, but notice how Akira Kurosawa keeps showing us a city in ruins, with stagnant water stirred only by mosquitoes. Tuberculosis is everywhere, and as the film makes clear, this is a disease that can be stopped. But the doctor is a drunk, embittered at the way his treatments are so often neglected and mocked by the class of minor gangsters that seems to have taken the city over.
But look at Drunken Angel from a different angle and you have to ask yourself whether Kurosawa had been open to all of the best American noirs of 1947—or has he somehow intuited or predicted their tough angularity, their use of shadow, the jazzy dance halls, and the whole nature of the young yakuza who has TB and who is played by Toshiro Mifune (at the age of twenty-seven).
Put the package together and Drunken Angel is a remarkable picture. Kurosawa had made several films before this, but this is the one on which he felt he had become his own man and was able to work without interference. So it’s important that he met Mifune here, of course, but just as important a presence is Takashi Shimura (as the doctor), who would be the leader of the Seven Samurai and the clerk in Living. Shimura is gruff, contradictory, alcoholic, but altruistic. He is a mess, but one of the most moving characters in world cinema, trying to make sense of things after the war.
Mifune is clean-shaven, thinner than he would later be, dressed in padded shoulders and striped ties. He is languid and lethal, with an air of Robert Mitchum to him. Yet there are moments when he lets us see the vulnerable boy dressed up as a yakuza, and Kurosawa gives us a very logical course for the character as he ultimately challenges a more mature and corrupt gangster.
I prefer Drunken Angel to the period adventure of Rashomon. I think the characters here mean more and that the film grows out of a Japan that all the cast and crew were struggling with. If you think of noir as an international wave—and we have to, for it is postwar despair—then Drunken Angel is as disturbing as the best films, as well as a proof of Kurosawa’s astonishing facility and dexterity with Western techniques. He does several mirror shots, for instance, that are not underlined but are as lucid and subtle as Sirk or Ophüls.
One lesson is to stay interested in the modern Kurosawa, the one who doesn’t need samurai costume and manners. The photography is by Takeo Ito, and it ranges from urban desolation to fevered-dream sequences. The script is by Kurosawa and Keinosuke Uegusa, and there is a gallery of good work from actresses Michiyo Kogure, Reisaburo Yamamoto, and Chieko Nakakita. The other lesson is not to kid ourselves about having discovered the limits of Japanese film. Indeed, as I write, Mikio Naruse is opening at the National Film Theatre in London for the first time.
Duck Soup (1933)
Duck Soup is all credentials: Leo McCarey directed; Herman J. Mankiewicz produced it; Bert Kalmar and Harry Ruby wrote it; Ansel Adams photographed it, mostly at magic hour; it was Marcel Proust’s favorite Marx Brothers film; the Duke of Windsor watched it constantly in his years of exile. Are you believing this? Where does that get you? It was the poorest performer of all their Paramount films—there was a time when the University of Chicago economics department was stocked with people who’d done their Ph.D. on “Duck Soup and the Collapsing Cash Nexus” and similar titles. In other words, how could you expect a dazed, defeated, demoralized, and de-walleted population to go to see a film that mocked government when the folks were waiting for a New Deal?
In case you can’t place the film, this is the one where Mrs. Teasdale (Margaret Dumont) will give the nation of Freedonia $20 million if Rufus T. Firefly is appointed its leader (and if she gets the fire in the fly). Aha, you may say, such cynicism and manipulation in the affairs of modest third-world nations was far more likely the cause of public despair. Enter Trentino (played by that very respectable actor Louis Calhern), the ambassador from Sylvania (before it was in the TV business), and soon we are on the brink of world war. But why remind the public of that?
Like many Marx Brothers films, Duck Soup has the suspicious air of a few set pieces strung together with Christmas lights and pretending to be a whole film. And why not? Hollywood was learning with talk and plots and so forth that the manufacture of whole films (as opposed to scene anthologies) was a dirty job, even if you were being paid for it. There has never been a better answer to the question of what holds this film together than glue. The essential ethos of the Marx Brothers (this is Irving Thalberg talking as he prepared to ship them off to Culver City) is to make their fragmentation seem natural. So Thalberg foresaw Marxian nights with a film program continually interrupted by little scenes from Marxist groups. This was a principle applied fully on the BBC years later with the arrival of Monty Python. The show might be over, but still somehow the other programs—the news, Gardeners’ Question Time, England v. Pakistan—could not but take on a Pythonesque flourish. This could have revolutionized TV, but the Python boys (who had been to university) asked for ghostly residuals.
Anyway, Duck Soup has the extended routine where Chico (as Chicolini) and Harpo (as Pinky) harrass Edgar Kennedy. And it also has Groucho and the mirror, which is enough to persuade you all to get every bit of polished glass out o
f the house.
If you find you like this sort of thing, you’ll be glad to know that The Cocoanuts, Animal Crackers, Monkey Business, and Horse Feathers once existed. There was a moment—we call it sound—when the Marx Brothers made the trip from vaudeville to Hollywood, and it’s like Neil Armstrong stepping down onto the moon and landing on a banana peel.
Duel in the Sun (1946)
This astonishing film began life as a novel by Niven Busch, based on some modest “psychological” principles. When it became a best seller, Busch himself proposed to produce the movie, and he was thinking of John Wayne as Lewt and Hedy Lamarr as Pearl, the half-caste. But then David Selznick got wind of the enterprise and reckoned that Pearl might be the role that would display his beloved Jennifer Jones as a sex bomb. Very soon Busch was gone and the Selznick production was under way—it would be bigger than Gone With the Wind.
It isn’t. But what is it—apart from the painful evidence of a producer making an immense home movie about his rather naïve sex life? Selznick hired an old friend, King Vidor, to direct but then interfered so much that Vidor quit the film. William Dieterle became director (uncredited), and an entire backstory involving Pearl’s parents—Tilly Losch and Herbert Marshall (a marriage that called for a Buñuel)—was incorporated.
'Have You Seen...?' Page 40
