'Have You Seen...?'

by David Thomson

  The screenplay was by Willis Goldbeck and Leon Gordon, working from a short story, “Spurs,” by Tod Robbins. And it’s a matter of how real-life people, beauties some of them in the circus, interact with the freaks. Money comes into it, and Cleopatra (Olga Baclanova), who marries a midget, Hans (Harry Earles), for his money. The film was shot by Merritt Gerstad, who did several of Browning’s horror films, but the modernity here is a matter of the very straightforward style. Nothing is exaggerated; nothing is set up in a world of shadow or dementia. There is no souped-up music cuing us to the freaks’ ugliness, and there are no italic close-ups. It’s just a simple, cruel story told in 64 minutes. And it ends with Cleopatra reduced to the look and squawk of a chicken.

  The other real people are Wallace Ford, Leila Hyams, Roscoe Ates, and Henry Victor, and then there are freaks—Siamese twins (kiss one and the other gets the thrill). The film cost $316,000 and lost more than $150,000—yet it plays somewhere all the time, when many of the M-G-M “beauties” of 1932 have been forgotten.

  French Cancan (1955)

  It was the simplest of ideas, and it seemed to coincide with the way, at sixty, Jean Renoir was thinking back to the old days. It would be the invention of the cancan, of French music hall, in the era when Paris belonged to his father, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, and his fellow painters. It would be his third film in color; it would be an excuse to celebrate some of the great artistes of the variety stage; and it would be a chance to make a film with Leslie Caron, the young French actress, already a Hollywood discovery, and the basis for Renoir’s play Orvet, which he did with Caron in 1955. But Caron could not make the film (Daddy Long Legs and Fred Astaire called). So Renoir let his eye wander, and Françoise Arnoul was cast as Nini, the Montmartre laundress who will become the star of the cancan.

  The impresario was based on the real figure of Ziegler, the founder of the Moulin Rouge and the character played by Jim Broadbent in Baz Luhrmann’s Moulin Rouge. Renoir changed the name to Danglard, hired Jean Gabin to play him, and created a character who is a discoverer of female talent, who cannot stop moving forward in search of someone new. Each fresh discovery disturbs Danglard’s company, but each new girl is a star, and so the company advances. Yet, within the enormous lighthearted energy of the let’s-put-on-a-show film, there are plain signs of the damage done to people. Nini has a jealous fit when she realizes she has been supplanted by Guibolle (Lydia Johnson), and that’s when Danglard and Renoir tell her to get on with it, to be professional, to see that instability is just a part of show business. Dance your heart out. There are some people—Gypsies, show people—who are good for nothing else.

  What else? The prettiest sets of Paris in the late nineteenth century, made by Max Douy; the fabulous color photography by Michel Kelber; the salute to the trio from Jacques Becker’s Casque d’Or; the chance to see such performers as Edith Piaf, Patachou, and Philippe Clay; the soulful eyes of Gianni Esposito as the prince in love with Nini; the immense force of María Félix as Lola di Castro, eating just carrots and steak, and nearly taking Arnoul’s head off in their big fight; and the delirious froth and leaping of the cancan itself (choreographed by Claude Grandjean). Never filmed better.

  French Cancan looks like one of those films in love with show business—with the bonus of its affections for the Impressionists’ world. Yet it’s profound as a demonstration of how for some people theater is a more lasting reality than life. Nothing can match the ecstasy of Danglard sitting backstage in his great chair, his foot tapping to the pounding dance and the gasps of wonder from an audience as the girls let everything go. I wonder if anyone at the age of sixty has ever made so lively a picture—or one that so subtly observes the loneliness of great performers?

  The French Connection (1971)

  When a movie opens, it is far easier to fall for its specious suggestions about its own purpose. And so The French Connection once could be passed off as a desperate study in the fight to keep “foreign” drugs (like surrealism, coffee, and Godard) out of New York. It followed that the rather informal police techniques offered by Gene Hackman and Roy Scheider were, if not forgiven, at least understandable. And so the film fell, apparently, into the category of movies in which we said to ourselves, Gee, don’t we expect a lot of our cops—not just keeping us safe, upholding the Constitution, and being starry, but holding a movie together in the age of the ACLU.

  Whereas it seems clearer now that what the film is really saying is, Look, how else are monstrous infants going to avoid growing up but by being cops? That’s what allows them to dress that way, to stay up all night in a cold car eating junk, to talk like louts and vermin, to terrorize the streets with reckless car chases and unrestrained gunplay. The message of the sequel—that these kid kops will make perfect addicts—is already implicit. So the film is really saying to every kid in the audience, Let’s rock and roll. That there is nothing remotely cool or hip in these Ubus only offends the Marcusian notion that rock is somehow a redemptive form.

  So the French connection is a French drug dealer, but it is also the trashy-profound idea of director William Friedkin that the French do these things better. The title is an homage to the New Wave and to the alluring dandyism of the Frog himself, Fernando Rey, whose true cool remains a remote but mystical quest for our New York urchins. That’s why the subway chase with Rey is actually a prolonged, absurdist seduction scene in which his last wistful wave is to the film as well as to Popeye Doyle (there’s a lot of gay longing).

  Isn’t it easier now to recognize—and enjoy—the uninhibited grunge of this project, the enfants terribles–like gestures of the cops, and the poetry of the bumping bass notes in the piano? It’s worth recalling that the film beat A Clockwork Orange for Best Picture at the Oscars that year—and why not, for this is really droogs in action without those decadent color schemes that Kubrick found in swinging England. No, The French Connection looks as real as names like Sal Boca (Tony LoBianco) and the “actual” cops in small parts, watching these actors with a mix of disapproval and longing. But in time those names become blunt words in a picture that is giving up law, language, and humanism. Brecht would have loved it, because here rogue cops are really taking over the city. Censorship (that pretty dream) stood on, helpless, and for a moment the saturnine, reptilian narcissism of Friedkin was a living terror. It all collapsed soon enough, but The French Connection remains to be seen as a jazzy dance of death. Civilians have been warned.

  Frenzy (1944)

  Here is a question for film buffs: Who was the first great screen actress to bring beauty et cetera to the work of Ingmar Bergman? Marks of distinction go to those naming Nine-Christine Jönsson in Port of Call or Doris Svedlund in The Devil’s Wanton, but my real target is Mai Zetterling in the film that is Bergman’s first writing credit, Hets in Swedish, Frenzy or Torment in English translation. It was directed by Alf Sjöberg, and I would be happy if this book encouraged more people to recognize him as an important director, albeit a rather lost figure.

  Sjöberg was born in Stockholm in 1903. He acted with the Royal Dramatic Theater there and became Sweden’s outstanding stage director—even Bergman acknowledged that. Sjöberg directed his first film in 1929 and was at his peak in the forties and early fifties. That’s when he did his version of Miss Julie (with Anita Björk), as well as Iris and the Lieutenant, Barabbas, and Karin Månsdotter. And Frenzy.

  Frenzy is set in the Sweden of 1944 (a neutral country), in a high school. Alf Kjellin plays a boy who falls in love with a young girl, played by Zetterling, who was nineteen at the time. Stig Järrel plays a sadistic teacher, named Caligula by the class but clearly rooted in fascism and looming over the lives of the students. Ingmar Bergman was the author of the screenplay; he was twenty-six at the time, immensely ambitious, though a long-haired outsider, looked at askance by his contemporaries yet oddly favored by young actresses, who believed he saw deeply into them. As Bergman did Frenzy he accepted a key job as director at the Hälsingborg Theater.

  Frenz
y attracted international attention. Kjellin got a Hollywood contract (using the name Christopher Kent), and he would appear in a few American films. Mai Zetterling won a contract with J. Arthur Rank in Britain and had a longer screen life than Kent, as a Swedish sexpot in British films. She then became an interesting director. Sjöberg died in 1980, eclipsed by Bergman.

  I wouldn’t dispute that Bergman is by far the larger figure. But that’s no reason to neglect Sjöberg. The disappearance of his Miss Julie from critical appraisal is a bewildering thing. And Frenzy is not just a sinister, disturbing film but a clear influence on Bergman for several years and at least one source of his guilty obsession with sexual discovery. There was a time, in the late 1940s, when Bergman did a script for David O. Selznick: It was A Doll’s House, with a happy ending, meant for Dorothy McGuire and Robert Mitchum. And that Bergman seemed ready to think of moving beyond Sweden. It was years before he saw the role that country would play for him as a remote fastness—ultimately in the form of the island of Faro, which the master could hardly leave. But Bergman was both an actor and a character working out the story of his life.

  Frenzy (1972)

  The Birds, Marnie, Torn Curtain, Topaz… that was the run of Alfred Hitchcock after Psycho, a succession of films that made even his great admirers begin to feel he’d lost touch or suffered fatigue at last. Frenzy, the next film, is a very special case, a mess, or a problem picture. Yes, Hitchcock was reported as often weary, or world-weary, during production. There were those who said that, returning to London in the early 1970s, Hitch could see only the place he had known in the twenties and thirties. So Frenzy is, in one way, a grindingly old-fashioned film. Yet there are bits of nastiness in it as startling as anchovies, things that seem to indicate his resentment at the way censorship had changed in the last few years. So the film needs to be watched with many concessions to the director’s age, but then look out for the gotchas.

  The source was a novel, Goodbye Piccadilly, Farewell Leicester Square, by Arthur La Bern (the author also of It Always Rains on Sunday). It’s about a mad killer of women and the Air Force officer who is suspected of the crimes. The killer was Rusk, a man who obtained sexual satisfaction only in murder. The wronged man, Blaney, was an ex-hero, a drunk, and a man full of violence and unease. But this promise evaporated when Hitch hired playwright Anthony Shaffer to do the script and started pushing for deliberately archaic dialogue. Hitch and his writer did not get on very well. And Shaffer regretted that the script was clichéd, full of holes, and a throwback to older films. There was also a note of gruesome humor, much of it borrowed from the novel, but enough to make everyone wonder how the film would play in terms of taste. Universal paid for it all (just over $2 million), but it was shot entirely in London, with Gil Taylor as cameraman.

  Turned down by Michael Caine, Hitch went with Barry Foster as Rusk and favored him far more than he did Blaney (Jon Finch). Indeed, Blaney feels like the morose outsider, while Rusk is the life and soul of the party—animated, cheeky, funny. He also plays a man in the fruit and vegetable trade (the work of Hitchcock’s father).

  The tone shifts violently. There is black humor that turns hideous; there are cooking scenes, involving a police inspector and his wife (Alec McCowen and Vivien Merchant), that seem out of control. The killing of Barbara Leigh-Hunt is really disturbing, sexually exploitative of the actress, and dark with cruelty. But then the shot that signals the killing of Anna Massey is done with an elaborate, floating crane that is exquisite—even if it seems out of place in this cut-and-dried film.

  Frenzy is never stable or consistent. Much of it comes close to comic in its failures of tone. But then there are scenes that remind us of Hitchcock and suggest the frenzy he was feeling then. Far from a work of nostalgia, or a fond tribute to England, this is a piece of grotesque cinema, trying to be offensive and leaving us with the idea that Hitch feels uncomfortably close to his killer.

  From Here to Eternity (1953)

  They said it couldn’t be filmed in the early 1950s—and in a way, they were right. If you want a full version of the James Jones novel, published in 1951, you need to go to the 1979 miniseries made for television, where the largest thing that emerges is that none of the five leading characters is as vivid or upstanding as they seemed in 1953. For instance, Sergeant Warden is a drunk and a mess, and the Donna Reed role really is a whore, and a pretty stupid one at that.

  But they did make the film. Daniel Taradash brought in a screenplay that took an 800-page novel down to 118 minutes, cleaned up the language, and made the characters some of the most commanding in American film drama. Buddy Adler produced it. Harry Cohn stuck with it. And director Fred Zinnemann steered a way past all the rocks. He sat through the rage for Aldo Ray as Prewitt (Ray was far closer to the character in the novel) and clung to the idea of Montgomery Clift’s brightest moment. He had the luck to lose Joan Crawford and the brilliance to cast Deborah Kerr. He trusted Burt Lancaster—though Burt made Warden a paragon compared with William Devane’s earthy performance in the TV film. And Zinnemann got Sinatra instead of Eli Wallach for Maggio—let’s not begin to argue how that happened.

  The screenplay’s focus on the action is a fine example of that mathematical art, and certainly for 1953 the texture of life in the military felt right to a middle-class audience that had never been there. Indeed, the treatment that Prewitt is subjected to was nasty and disturbing and enough of a shock. Of course, that still leaves a stunning gulf between real Army life and the public’s notion of realism—which says a huge amount about the quality of our movies from the golden age.

  Above all, this complicated romantic story is so wonderfully aimed at December 7, 1941. The sudden collapse of urgent personal stories in the name of war is what is most impressive about this picture, and most true to the mood of 1941. In a world war, millions of ordinary people put their lives and dreams on hold. In turn, the quality that a nation brings to its war is exemplified in part by the stubbornness of Prewitt and Maggio and the expertise of Sergeant Warden at getting things done.

  So the failings of this film do not date or endanger it. Prewitt is still blowing taps. Donna Reed is still there like a poor boy’s dream of calm. Burt and Deborah are rolling on the Hawaiian beach in a huge ad for the islands. Ernest Borgnine is fearsome and hideous. Thirteen Oscar nominations. Eight wins—including Best Picture and a statue apiece for Zinnemann, Reed, Sinatra, Taradash, and cameraman Burnett Guffey. Definitive popular cinema.

  Funny Face (1957)

  You can say that everything works on Funny Face, from the clever way director Stanley Donen integrates the title song and the darkroom development of pictures of Audrey to the artful playing on the reputation and style of Richard Avedon, the fashion photographer on whom Fred Astaire’s character, Dick Avery, is based. But the heart of the film is the authentically touching rapport between Astaire and Audrey Hepburn. In the 1950s, she did pictures with several older men—Gregory Peck, Gary Cooper, Humphrey Bogart—but Funny Face is the most innocent and magical, because Audrey is so moved by being close to Fred. Once upon a time, Ginger gave Fred sex—but Audrey brings him assurance and pleasure. It’s not that we really contemplate their marriage after the film stops, but we settle for the winged fantasy of their being together for an hour.

  Leonard Gershe did the screenplay, working from a Gershwin musical that was never produced—not from the 1927 show called Funny Face, with music by George, lyrics by Ira, in which Fred and Adele Astaire had one of their triumphs. Gershe and Donen capitalized on Paris (tourism was still an infant business) and the current fad for existentialism, which is actually quite funny, and which serves the place of Marxism in Silk Stockings.

  But the inspiration of the film is to make the fashion business its engine, and I think we respond to the uncomplicated adoration of clothes that Donen, Avedon, Audrey, and costume designer Edith Head had in common. (Don’t forget that in 1957, fashion glory was another concept about to have meaning for the middle class.) Of course,
the film’s confrontation of hostile worlds—the mind versus clothes—is another version of the battle between lingerie and hair shirts in Silk Stockings, and thus Ninotchka. And in that battle, it’s worth saying that Audrey’s wide eyes stand up for reading in a vigorous way.

  Then there is VistaVision (originally) and Ray June’s photogravure color—so much of the time, the imagery seems still wet from the developing tray. The dances are not complicated, but Audrey had once been a dancer, and she acquits herself very well in motion, if not always up to the high standard of “How Long Has This Been Going On?” in the ravaged bookstore. And then there is the gaiety and utter conviction of “On How to Be Lovely,” and Kay Thompson’s moment of revelation on film—not just her encapsulation of every fashion editor from Carmel Snow to Diana Vreeland, but the exuberant “Think Pink,” with its total self-confidence and the near certainty that tomorrow will be green.

  Funny Face is a love story that blends two fragile fantasies (the idea of being Fred and Audrey); it is a love letter to Paris; and it is one of the last great musicals, taking its songs from here and there, but reminding us that in the great age of popular art in America called the movies, the joy of it all was sustained by a few geniuses like George and Ira and Fred, all born to the theater but in love with movies. Let’s see it tonight.

  Fury (1936)

  It was director Fritz Lang’s story, told in later years, that after he had hung around a good deal at M-G-M waiting for a project, somehow a short treatment, “Mob Rule,” by Norman Krasna, was found for him. The studio regarded it as a C picture, Lang said, about a man who is nearly lynched for a crime he did not commit and who then returns as if from the dead to punish those who acted against him. The studio records suggest it was an A picture, that producer Joseph L. Mankiewicz had wanted to direct it himself, that he developed the script with Bartlett Cormack and offered it to Lang.