Never mind, 42nd Street hasn’t dated yet. Every time Warner Baxter comes on as the desperate producer, fighting ill health and worrying whether or not he has a show, you feel for him. And the film was an original, not a stage rip-off. Rian James and James Seymour did the script from a story by Bradford Ropes. Lloyd Bacon directed, but Zanuck was in charge, and it has his quick-switch temperament, going tough, going soft on a dime. The show has to go on, and when Bebe gets up limping, Ruby Keeler just happens to know the part back to front. Baxter has a little trouble getting Keeler to act, but he asks her if she’s ever been in love and gives her an express-train kiss. She never even blushes! Or acts.
The songs are by Harry Warren and Al Dubin, and they’re peachy in themselves, but then Berkeley gets to work. It’s not just that he did the set-piece routines with that astonishing aerial eye for orgasm. He could take a silly number like “Shuffle Off to Buffalo” and make you smile. Plus, Berkeley could never get enough shots of girls in their underwear or nightdresses or Joan Blondell pulling on her stockings. He was like Howard Hawks in that he knew how to toss in a little eye candy as a guy has to walk across the stage.
Dick Powell is a shameless mugger. Bebe Daniels is really very interesting (especially on “You’re Getting to Be a Habit with Me”). Ginger Rogers is clearly itching for a break, yet she stands up and tells Baxter no, she’s really not ready for the big time, give it to Ruby instead. Sol Polito photographed it. Guy Kibbee, Ned Sparks, and Una Merkel do the laughs. As to the irresistible, that’s us, having a ball.
For Whom the Bell Tolls (1943)
The great drama in advance of the shooting of For Whom the Bell Tolls was who would play Maria, the Spanish peasant girl with cropped hair, the victim of gang rape in a Valladolid prison, who would be brought back into loving flower by Robert Jordan, Ernest Hemingway’s hero from academia who also knows how to blow up a bridge. “Everyone” wanted the part, especially any actress who could claim a drop of foreign blood. So it was a surprise when the role was awarded to Vera Zorina, the Norwegian-German ballet dancer who was then married to George Balanchine.
A worse surprise hit Paramount as the first rushes came in from the Sierra Nevada location, north of Sonora. Zorina couldn’t cut it. Whereupon David Selznick moved in with even stronger pleas on behalf of his contract actress Ingrid Bergman. He knew Ingrid was desperate for the part. She shot a test at Paramount (without letting her hair be cut) and waited. She was doing stills at Warners for Casablanca with Paul Henreid when Selznick called—Henreid treasured her cry of animal appetite on getting the good news. Selznick was well fed, too: He got $90,000 from Paramount for her services, nearly three times what he was contracted to pay her.
On the face of it, this was a major event: a best-selling novel from the country’s leading writer, a sweeping love story that would become the great advertisement for sleeping bags, and a suitably anti-Fascist war story. Sam Wood was directing. Dudley Nichols had done the screenplay, very faithfully. And Gary Cooper was up there in the mountains in a leather jacket and a fedora waiting for his girl.
There are virtues to it all: Cooper and Bergman are plainly crazy about each other, Ray Rennahan’s winter Technicolor shooting is superb, the locations are admirably Spanish, and the supporting cast is exotically foreign—even if no one was exactly Spanish. But in Wood’s hands, the 130 minutes seem longer than the actual numbers. When it comes, the final attack on the bridge is exciting, but the uneasy days and nights in camp go on too long, and the flashback is awkward. You can’t help feeling that Huston or Hawks would have given the film more edge.
Never mind: It was nominated for a Best Picture Oscar (it lost to Casablanca, of course), and it had rentals of more than $6 million. Cooper, Bergman, and Akim Tamiroff were all nominated. The Victor Young music is soupy and sad. But you do want to be in the sleeping bag with one or the other of the leads. The supporting cast is Tamiroff (more or less Russian), Katina Paxinou (Greek—she won the supporting Oscar), Arturo de Córdova (Mexican), Joseph Calleia (Maltese), Vladimir Sokoloff (Russian), Mikhail Rasumny (Russian), and Fortunio Bonanova (Italian).
This is arguably the most faithfully filmed piece of Hemingway ever, and the most successful. But that’s not saying too much. The Hemingway style has never been captured on film, just as the Hawks style in the very cheeky To Have and Have Not has never been equaled. Great writers should take the money and run, or hope to be introduced to the actresses.
The Fountainhead (1949)
Having walked away from David O. Selznick’s Duel in the Sun because of the intolerable competition between director and producer, King Vidor somehow agreed to make the movie of Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead. And so the director of Our Daily Bread—one of the most genuinely Communist pictures ever made in the United States—turned to the massive right-wing positivism of Ms. Rand. And what emerges, of course, is that the one is not so far from the other. In America, ideologies come and go, but personal passion—the confidence that the whole thing is about me—is what matters. Never forget that Charles Foster Kane, hailed as communist and fascist in his great obituary, had another title for himself: “American.” What matters about The Fountainhead is that it is a King Vidor film, and one of the great examples of his towering achievement in trash.
Some say Howard Roark, the architect, was based on Frank Lloyd Wright. That immediately gives him an interest in pure design that is frivolous. Roark is a creative ego who designs buildings only initially for the good of society. His real purpose is to make a battleground with the craven forces of approval, and to assert his creative rights over all their treacherous second-guessing. He would as easily destroy a building as erect it. And surely the elements of movie in The Fountainhead help this scheme. Real buildings are obstinate; in the movies they are décor tents inflated or razed in one cut or dissolve.
So Rand involved herself in the production. She wrote the script, and then she stood up for Gary Cooper as Roark, instead of accepting Vidor’s choice, Humphrey Bogart. That sounds like Duel in the Sun again. But pause a moment: In keeping her own baby talk and violent narrative energy, she served Vidor and left him to discover the cinematic expression that makes the dialogue seem natural. And in rejecting the more “intelligent” actor, the one who might have been better with the talk, she helped us see that Roark is more a force than a mind. Cooper is iconic, full of savage grace and grudging of conversation. Bogart was smart enough to sneer at the film’s hysteria. Cooper never noticed it.
After that, it’s like looking at the first film ever made. You can believe this is primitive cinema in which psychic thrust lies naked in the imagery, like a sword in a bed. There is no inhibition, and the viewer settles in after a few minutes. The exaggeration relies on the constant, penetrative accuracy of the imagery. You don’t need to have Roark, the drill, and Dominique (Patricia Neal) explained. The film ravishes us. We might cry rape, but we have paid our money. And the risk of Rand’s hysterical intellectualism is grounded by all the rock and stone, and by the impassive, unwavering Cooperism. What really shows Vidor’s intelligence (a quality he was apt to mask) is the wit and cunning in the playing of Patricia Neal, Raymond Massey, Robert Douglas, and even Kent Smith. This is a film that reaches a point where it cannot make a mistake. That is the essence of Rand.
The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (1921)
Our first instinct is to say that the original Four Horsemen was the crucial Rudolph Valentino film, the one that lifted him out of obscurity and ensured five years of stardom. This is true, but it is the secondary truth. The real point about the picture is that it is Rex Ingram’s vision, that Ingram is one of the spectacular directors from the silent era, and that this (rather more than The Big Parade, four years later) is the most moving statement on what war had done to the world.
The novel, by Vicente Blasco Ibáñez, was published in 1920, and despite its awkward set up—an Argentinean family sends cousins to fight on both sides in the Great War—it became a best seller. June Mat
his, the head of the Metro script department, was not deterred by the evident expense of filming it—she smelled a big picture, and the deal was done for $20,000 against 10 percent of the profits. Moreover, Mathis was put in charge of the production: She would hire the director and do the casting. She opted for the Irishman Rex Ingram. He had nothing big to this credit yet, but Mathis believed that he had the eye and an epic sense of story. Between them, they settled on Rudolph Valentino to play Julio Desnoyers, the playboy who grows up during the war. Indeed, it was only after seeing Valentino try the tango that Ingram revived a dance sequence from an earlier film and built it into the sensational first appearance of Valentino as a star—in gaucho pants and a flat sombrero, effortlessly sexual in the dance and entirely commanding. When the scene played for real in the big picture, Valentino was a made man.
But Rudy only started at $100 a week, and The Four Horsemen cost $1 million. Photographed by John Seitz but truly visualized by Ingram, the picture built village and battlefield sets north of Los Angeles. The terrain was wrong, but nothing previously had revealed the terrible devastation of that war. Consider: The picture cost at least three times the budget of The Big Parade, and the reality of the war was magically lifted to the mythology or mysticism of the four horsemen themselves. And what makes the film work so well is that the sensuality and selfishness in the personal story are exposed and reeducated by the lessons of the total war. So it isn’t just that Valentino was hot and sexy; he is also deeply thoughtful and tragic in the way he changes.
Alice Terry is the female lead; she was Ingram’s wife and one of the great beauties in silent film (when you could get away with mere beauty). Moreover, she had real chemistry with Valentino. Other parts are played by Pomeroy Cannon, Josef Swickard, Brinsley Shaw, Alan Hale, Bridgetta Clark, Mabel Van Buren, Bowditch Turner, Nigel De Brulier, Jean Hersholt, and Wallace Beery. The film runs 131 minutes, and it seems to me in a class of its own for the time. Ingram was a real director, and it is to his credit that he understood both the war and the droop in Valentino’s sad eyes. And somehow he bridged the gap.
4 Months, 3 Weeks, and 2 Days (2007)
The young Romanian director, Cristian Mungiu, had been gathering stories to make a panorama movie about life under Ceauşescu. But as he felt it taking shape, it seemed too comic in its general tone—and that was the last description that fitted those days. So he put aside that script and turned to one particular story that he had heard. A young woman, Gabita (Laura Vasiliu), needs an abortion—four months, et cetera, is how far along she is. Such a thing is illegal and difficult and expensive. She turns to a friend, Otilia (Anamaria Marinca), to help her. It began in Mungiu’s mind as the story of two women, but as the picture advanced it became the story of one woman, the friend.
Otilia makes the arrangements, booking the room in the hotel—a shabby, official place, beset by petty regulations. The abortionist arrives—a mysterious, very tough man, not stupid but as hard as his trade and a scold to the women. And when it is clear that the women don’t have enough money for him, why, he takes the extra in sex with the friend. We do not see this, but imagining it in the next room may be worse. And if the abortion works “tidily” then it is Otilia’s job to dispose of the remains and to act as if nothing untoward has occurred.
Time and again, Mungiu exerts intolerable suspense through very long takes and relatively fixed compositions. The best example of this is at a dinner party that Otilia has promised to attend; there she has to wait before she can phone Gabita—still in midprocedure in the hotel room. Half a dozen figures fill the frame and the table in an unrelenting composition, with Otilia trapped in the center—the meal and the smalltalk play back and forth, and we await the telephone call or the news.
It is only when Mungiu has done that kind of thing several times that you realize how far he is a stylistic master (at a very early age), Bressonian in his reluctance to let people escape attention. The same severity applies in the long discussion with the abortionist, and it is enough to make the small anecdote seem like a trial by ordeal. This is as draining as an epic.
4 Months… won the Palme d’Or at Cannes and I suspect that it presages an important career. It is only in hindsight that one realizes the two huge questions that overhang the whole story without ever being directly addressed: Is it a good or bad thing to have an abortion? And were the days of Ceauşescu a monstrous deformation of the human spirit or just hard times that ingenuity, courage, and dogged perseverance can survive?
That those questions have been bypassed, or deferred, is the ultimate measure of Mungiu’s intelligence—for he knows that the cinema is far better suited to the actual inspection of what happens in the passage of time than to the trite coughing up of an answering message. The cinema is a study of action, and action is behavior. The behavior of people under Ceauşescu is so fully laid out, we do not need to be given a “meaning” to go with it.
Frankenstein (1931)
Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus was published by Mary Shelley in 1818, and it was clearly a philosophical speculation (despite the atmosphere of horror) on the scientific responsibility in the possible remaking of life. While the Dracula story goes to the heart of neurosis, Frankenstein is always going to concern our future. That’s why it’s worth stressing the common error made with the story: that Frankenstein is the name of the monster. Not so: it’s the name of the scientist.
By the time the project came to Universal’s attention as a film, the novel was in the public domain. Carl Laemmle was all for leaving it there, but his son, Carl Junior, saw both its relevance and its appeal, and Dad let him go ahead. The studio bought the rights to the London play by Peggy Webling. They put John Balderston on the script, and then Garrett Fort and Francis Edward Faragoh. They were encouraged by the Frenchman Robert Florey, who was hopeful of directing the film. Indeed, Florey actually shot a test (though without a monster), and that’s what persuaded Universal to assign the film to James Whale.
In turn, Whale cast Colin Clive as Frankenstein, and it was Whale’s assistant, David Lewis, who noticed Boris Karloff in Howard Hawks’s The Criminal Code. At one time, the part had been set for Bela Lugosi, but could the monster be that small? It was one of Whale’s triumphs that, with makeup artist Jack Pierce, he created Karloff’s look as the monster, with an enlarged skull. It was Faragoh’s thought that the monster should inherit the brain of a vicious criminal (it’s interesting to think of the whole genre if he had had the brain of Emerson or Herman Melville).
Whatever the audience wants, or expected, Whale makes this a whole drama—it’s just that Clive’s high-strung doctor is no longer as sympathetic as he might have been. He plays in a frenzy, and so much could be different if he was calm and thoughtful—some real scientists thought Clive helped establish the mad scientist cliché. Is the monster frightening? Well, once maybe, but not anymore. In seventy years, we have learned to see and hear the wounded humanity in the monster, and we can only revel in the great contribution Karloff was able to make to film history. He was a decent man and a serious actor, but truly his other work would not have made him famous.
There is a theory that Whale (who was gay) felt especially drawn to the monster. I think that’s foolish, and an offense to Whale’s professionalism in playing the horror for all it was worth. But in the haunting scene with the little girl at the lake, it’s clear that Karloff wanted to play it more gently than Whale wished. Never mind; the material here is strong enough to invest horror with genuine ambiguities. In the years to come, it is far more likely that we might see a great film inspired by Frankenstein and man’s quandary in designing life.
The film was a huge success—much more than Dracula—and may have earned $5 million in rentals.
Freaks (1932)
Is it possible? Could that small, slender, very good-looking guy have been some kind of freak—even if the freakishness didn’t show? I mean, he was a perfect little man, except for his bad heart and that certainty in everyone who ever
met him that he wasn’t going to live very long. What did that do to him? There he was, being rational, sensible, practical, making sure the film-studio machine ticked over, and all the time he’s saying to himself, “Will I wake up tomorrow?” The more I think about it, the more I like the idea of a movie in which there is said to be a monster in the studio. All likely leads are tested out. But no one ever suspects that the monster, the hideously deformed creature, is that paragon of law and order, Irving Thalberg. Until in one scene, where he’s alone, he takes his head off and tops his body up with acid.
Far-fetched? Well, remember if you will that the very first production done at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer after its merger was He Who Gets Slapped, in which Lon Chaney—and Irving and Chaney were very close—plays a man who has lost his science research and his wife, and as a result his face has been shocked and set in a hideous expression. Some see it as a grin; some believe it is horror. And then there is the reported fact that, over Freaks, Irving Thalberg said, “If it’s a mistake, I’ll take the blame.”
Was it a mistake? I don’t think so. Consider the case of Pauline Kael, who—somehow—was taken to see the film as a child and came away scared out of her wits by any malformation or oddity (and Pauline was small, very small). Then she went back as an adult and saw that the whole creatures in the film were the ugly ones. The freaks were warm, amiable, and tender. And so they are—not that it’s that brilliant a coup to see that they might be. But the film of Freaks (credited to director Tod Browning) seems more modern still. I agree with those who say it might be Luis Buñuel, because its achievement is to subvert the anticipated order of things.
'Have You Seen...?' Page 50
