'Have You Seen...?'

by David Thomson

  Gone to Earth (1950)

  The short business relationship between Alexander Korda and David O. Selznick was as hilarious as it was vexed. And it ended in huge litigation, from which there were eggcup results. Perhaps it was all because the two men—wonderful and impossible—were so alike. It hardly matters, since their history together produced The Third Man and Gone to Earth.

  Korda owned the rights to a Mary Webb novel, Gone to Earth, about a strange country girl, Hazel Woodus (Jennifer Jones). She lives in Shropshire in the late nineteenth century (which feels closer to Shakespeare’s time than ours). She is bound to a pet fox, and you don’t have to be trained as a Freudian to see that the wild animal’s life embodies her sense of herself. Romantically, she is torn between the prim parson, Edward Marston (Cyril Cusack), and the squire, Jack Reddin (David Farrar), who is red-blooded, brutally selfish, and devilishly attractive. Marston believes it is heretical and absurd to love a fox, whereas Reddin sees the creature as the proper quarry of the local hunt. The film ends with a heartfelt chase scene across fabulous country where the greens, the browns, and the reds are rainbow strong.

  Mary Webb’s material is unashamedly melodramatic or heightened, and Michael Powell, the director, was heard to wonder whether it was even filmable. The answer is yes, but only if the filmmaker was as imbued with melodramatic symbolism and emotional extremism as the author. What equips Powell is his sense of place (he never filmed nature or landscape better), his instinct for color (this is one of the greatest Technicolor films ever made, and a sign that British Technicolor at this period was better than American), his fairy-tale sense of character, and the fact that he got to work with Jennifer Jones.

  That was not easy. It was during the trip to Europe for Gone to Earth that Ms. Jones and David Selznick were married, after the collapse of their previous marriages, years of tortured indecision, and some suicide gestures by Jones. You don’t have too far to go at this period to find Jones struggling as an actress (Duel in the Sun, Terminal Station) while her real life was close to crazed. But Powell treated her professionally, and Hazel won her unsteady heart. There are passages in the film where you can believe the girl is possessed by the same deep Celtic or gypsy imagination that figures in Powell’s I Know Where I’m Going.

  As for the surrounding world, Cusack seems pained by the simplicity of his part, but Farrar exudes a scent of leather, tobacco, and earth, and the supporting cast is outstanding: Sybil Thorndike, Edward Chapman, Esmond Knight, Hugh Griffith, George Cole, and Beatrice Varley.

  Selznick did not like or understand Gone to Earth, so he exercised his contractual right and tried remaking the film. He hired Rouben Mamoulian to direct. There was some more shooting. He recut and added a narrator—all under the heading of The Wild Heart, and inexplicable compared with the original.

  Gone With the Wind (1939)

  We know it worked, but why? Margaret Mitchell’s novel, published in 1936, was an immense best seller in an age when that counted. Kay Brown, Selznick’s literary scout, insisted that he buy it—no need to read it first. On top of that, by decision and helpless accident, the Selznick organization pumped up public interest in the project in hysterical ways. Today that interest could easily prompt disaster; in 1939 that was unlikely, because the public was so much more innocent.

  The picture opened in December 1939 (premiering in Atlanta), as the American public was reckoning on how long before it found itself in a war. The war in the movie was mild by comparison with 1939–45, but it seemed relevant to the audience and recent to most Americans. In the same way, they may have been ready to relinquish a great age and culture that had lasted since the coming of sound: the American romance. So perhaps GWTW was a farewell as much as a fulfillment.

  Sidney Howard wrote an amazingly clear and effective script. Selznick did everything he could to bury it in rewrites. But in the crisis of January 1939, as he fired the original director, George Cukor, Selznick rediscovered the early script and trusted it. Victor Fleming was brought on board as a director to get it done. The balance then was perfect: Fleming had the drive, and Selznick had the vision.

  The film marked the full arrival of glorious Technicolor. In design (William Cameron Menzies) and photography (Ray Rennahan and Ernest Haller), it had a look that struck 1939 as burningly real but that was actually profoundly romantic. And the faux-Southern look carried all the way through, like a pulse. It was there in Max Steiner’s music—music, as in the Tara theme, that has come to stand for Hollywood itself.

  Clark Gable was so perfect that his indifference and laziness hardly mattered—they actually give Rhett a glow of amiability.

  Vivien Leigh was the miracle, the ultimate reward for insane casting hopes that had nearly ruined Selznick’s venture.

  Olivia de Havilland and Leslie Howard did subplot without rancor or envy, and they gave the audience an “ordinary” couple to admire.

  Hattie McDaniel and Butterfly McQueen (if you can credit this) actually made a great stride forward for black players and black characters. McDaniel was the first black actor to win an Oscar, yet she was not allowed to go to Atlanta for the opening.

  This was almost the only time in his life that David Selznick won an important gamble: The film cost $4.25 million, and it is still earning money. And Scarlett O’Hara and David O. Selznick were alike in believing they would survive and flourish. Long before the theory of authorship in American movies, Selznick established that in his time and at his studio producers made the films. It all came undone later. He ruined himself, and he gave up his ownership of the film that had both made and destroyed him. This brought untold grief and damage to most people in his circle. But the film—having been made—ignores those things and now dares America, Hollywood, and the picture business to be as grand or as lucky again.

  The Good Earth (1937)

  Pearl S. Buck’s The Good Earth was published in 1932, and it won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. It was an earnest if patronizing attempt to comprehend the life of the Chinese peasantry, in which those peasants were reproduced very much as they might have been played in a Hollywood movie. At the time there were a few Asian actors (like Anna May Wong), but when the film came to be made at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, both lead parts were taken by Austrians.

  Though he was dead before the film was released, Irving Thalberg had been its mastermind; indeed, the film must take some credit for dispatching him. M-G-M bought the screen rights, and the project was at first entrusted to director George W. Hill and his wife, screenwriter Frances Marion. As Marion worked on the script, eliminating any elements that might offend the Chinese government, her marriage to Hill broke apart because of his syphilis. (He would die in 1934, only thirty-nine, an apparent suicide.)

  The plan was to film as much as possible in China. Hill was sent there to get as much footage as possible. He worked with the consul general in Shanghai and even had interviews with Chiang Kai-shek. But he had to return because of illness. In the end, the studio gave up on China after offending everyone in sight. So the picture was rearranged to be shot in California. The script was reassigned to Tess Slesinger, Claudine West, Talbot Jennings, and Marc Connelly, with Sidney Franklin directing—in fact, it seems certain that Victor Fleming and Gustav Machatý shot some parts of it. Thalberg put Albert Lewin in charge as producer, and he engaged Karl Freund as director of photography.

  The central role of the farmer Li went to Paul Muni, and his wife, O-Lan, was Luise Rainer. That casting and the departure from China had left many bad feelings. Though the studio was eager to repair fences as best it could, its enormous ignorance about what China and the Chinese were like shows in the film, an idealization of peasant life that might have been set nearly anywhere in the Third World. The acting is heartfelt but empty epic, with strained accents and makeup struggling to be exotic and understandable at the same time. Far and away the best things are the landscape shots and especially the locust-attack montage, which Freund and Slavko Vorkapich contrived with coffee ground
s in water.

  To be sure, the result was a “big” picture, 138 minutes long. It cost $2.8 million and lost money eventually, despite strong reviews and big audiences. It got a Best Picture Oscar nomination, but lost out to another Muni picture, The Life of Émile Zola. Muni was nominated for Zola but not for The Good Earth. But Luise Rainer won her second Oscar in a row, for playing O-Lan—Graham Greene thought her acting great and heartbreaking. The rest of the cast included Walter Connolly, Charley Grapewin, Jessie Ralph, and Tilly Losch.

  GoodFellas (1990)

  Was GoodFellas an attempt to stand up for the “working class” elements of the Mob, stripped of the sham dignity and gravitas associated with The Godfather, or was it just Martin Scorsese’s helpless yearning to get in on the act himself? There’s no doubt about the momentum and exuberance of GoodFellas. It rushes down its slope like a great musical or a wild comedy, exhilarating in its sense of “movie” and sometimes finding an exact balance of film fluency and character. For instance, the terrific, serpentine, Steadicam tracking shot by which Henry Hill and his girl enter the Copacabana by the back exit is not just his attempt to impress her but Scorsese’s urge to stagger us and himself with bravura cinema.

  The comparison with a musical is not far-fetched. These Mafia hoods do not sing and dance, yet their routines are constantly musicalized by Scorsese’s jukebox of hits. I don’t see that as just a way to fill in period atmosphere on the sound track. It is a subtle moral legitimization of what we’re seeing. And here is the really tricky point about GoodFellas, and about where Scorsese has gone: Does this film have a secure attitude toward the lives of its guys, or is it giddy with its own ability to ride along in their slipstream?

  It’s all very well to say that the point of view of GoodFellas is from within the group, so this is how small-minded career criminals see themselves. Frank Pierson’s 2001 television film Conspiracy does much the same thing for the Nazi leaders at the Wannsee Conference. Yet that film leaves no doubt about the evil of that group and the grisly camaraderie—the jokes, the cruel asides, the little nods of tacit understanding—that accompanied the evil. The GoodFellas may not be as evil by an absolute standard, though they murder, steal, and undermine the concept of law and justice in their society. And what emerges from Scorsese’s film is a trembling, increasingly cocaine-dependent ambivalence.

  One has to add the sinking realization that, time and again, Scorsese returns to this boys’ world and its fearful isolation from adult values. Nowhere is that clearer than in his indulgence of the Joe Pesci character—hilarious, yet so dangerous he could be a Nazi thug. It’s as if Scorsese cannot bring himself to disown this demon, and movement, vitality, mad humor, music, and contempt for women are the ingredients of the lifestyle of the GoodFellas.

  The film is superbly done, from the screenplay (by Scorsese and Nicholas Pileggi, based on the latter’s book Wise Guy) to the beautiful photography by Michael Ballhaus and the sets by Kristi Zea, at the same time grotesque and exactly right. The acting is like the music. These guys really are singing, and it’s irresistible when they’re most familial—as in prison (their paradise of an existence): Pesci, Ray Liotta, Robert De Niro (very frightening), Paul Sorvino, Lorraine Bracco, Frank Sivero, Tony Darrow, Frank Vincent, and Samuel L. Jackson.

  A film made by a master, but a man who is lost—and Casino is still to come.

  The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966)

  Clint Eastwood had to go to Italy to find his river to cross. He had done some movies, and he was a star in the TV series Rawhide, but he was not a movie star. Then he agreed to go to Italy to do A Fistful of Dollars (1964) for Sergio Leone. He did it for $15,000 and coach airfare. For a Few Dollars More followed in 1965. And these films did well in Europe (though they had not opened in America yet!). For The Good, the Bad and the Ugly—which Eastwood had said would be his last Leone picture—he would get $250,000, a Ferrari, and 10 percent of the profits in the Western Hemisphere.

  Clint was nettled that on this picture there were to be three leads—not just himself as the Stranger and Lee Van Cleef as Angel Eyes, but a new role: Tuco, a kind of urchin outlaw. Gian Maria Volonte passed on the role, and Eli Wallach got it instead.

  Like the first two films, this one was shot cheaply, using locations around Burgos and Almería, Spain. The budget on the third film was only $1.3 million, which included the cheroots that Leone insisted Eastwood smoke and that were always close to turning his stomach. But on this film, Leone had a new cameraman, Tonino Delli Colli, who went for a less harsh look and indulged Leone’s taste for imitating the compositions of great paintings. So, depending on your taste, it looks better or sillier than the first two pictures. In addition, Ennio Morricone had done the score in advance, and there’s no question that Leone had it in his head as he shot certain scenes.

  The story came from Leone and Luciano Vincenzoni, and as on the first two pictures, it was a flagrant yet sluggish anthology of scenes from Westerns. But whereas Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (only a few years away) was very cool, very hip and superior (as if The New Yorker had opted to run a Western story), Leone’s film was exaggerated, coarse and arty. The violence was different, largely because it was so isolated by silence, and the cynicism was new: The West had become a gutter, and even if Clint was ostensibly “the Good,” he was mercenary, cold-blooded, insolent, and cruel. He also had a scene with a prostitute that was cut in the American version of the film. But Leone was not superior to the Western; he adored it—no matter that he gets the genre and its historical reality so wrong.

  It was only in 1967–68 that the “trilogy” opened in the United States—three pictures in the course of a year—to unimagined success. In a way, the nearest comparison is with the James Bond pictures, for truly the Western had been subjected to a camp but brutal dislocation. These were fever-dream Westerns, but they helped close down the prospects of the real genre. The Good, The Bad and the Ugly had $8 million of rentals in the United States, and it fixed Clint’s image: angry, cold, narrow-eyed, hearing his own music. You could put him into a police force, but he was still a loner. It was his future. Nowadays, in its odd mix of the garish and the flat, the trilogy is clearly the origin of video games where echoing gunfire merges with Morricone’s music and the blood is poured like tomato sauce.

  The Graduate (1967)

  The Graduate is supposed to be one of those films that straddle prehistory and modern times, and I think it’s the case still today that the picture takes such old-fashioned genres as the coming-of-age movie, the love story, the screwball comedy, and even the fatal love story and taps them gently to see if each gives off a different musical note or the same wounded bleat. And for the first half of the movie, there’s no doubt that everything is coming up new and strange in movie terms. Ben (Dustin Hoffman) has just graduated from college. Allegedly the world waits for his decision—will his future be plastics or not. The world is a series of acrid New Yorker cartoons, and Hoffman plays Ben without affect or identity. And then he meets Mrs. Robinson (Anne Bancroft), the mother of a potential girlfriend (Katharine Ross).

  Mrs. Robinson seduces him—she will claim later that he raped her. But as we see it, in intimidating camera angles and finely cut close-ups that do not quite show anything naughty, it’s not just that she is the deeply depressed aggressor. Before her, Ben was not really there. He takes her to a big hotel for sexual liaisons. He sleeps with her—this is clear. And it is clear, too, I think, that she is very disturbed. But the film is so arranged, as an information system, that we never see Ben asking himself about that. In other words, his acquiescence is so passive as to absolve him from responsibility. And this is a very big problem if we are being asked to consider The Graduate as possessing any kind of emotional reality.

  Of course, it all comes out, at which point The Graduate becomes an impossibly dreamy frustrated romance story in which the daughter is said to be Ben’s one true love, despite her being embodied in the famously pretty but quite empty Kath
arine Ross. She is a Berkeley student who seems to be wearing false eyelashes in her every scene. The way Ben tracks her, up and down the coast—and don’t forget Simon and Garfunkel driving him on in the background—is not just rosy and silly but nearly as demented as the affair with the mother. In other words, Ben has no judgment, no soul, but he has a romantic horniness that falls for every woman he meets.

  Now, the film is very astute, if not cunning: You know that from the Simon and Garfunkel score and the odious way in which second-time director Mike Nichols keeps zooming all the time. More problematic, the script by Buck Henry is full of great lines and situations (in one of the best of which Henry plays himself)—and a nearly complete reluctance to make them coherent. So The Graduate seems to me a mess, a film that cries out for thorough reconstruction and critical debate. I think it’s a cold, heartless entertainment, never more ruthless than when dumping charm on us. As a start, it is a fair indication of how long it would take Mike Nichols to find character, and it still raises the question of whether Hoffman could ever get at simple truth within his intricate, self-serving flatness.

  Still, for the moment it is said to be one of everybody’s favorites!

  La Grande Illusion (1937)

  So here is the Renoir who had flirted intensely with the Popular Front, noticing the small but distinct gap between a man and an aristocrat. How does one film of only reasonable length, often so casual and easygoing, have so many nuances and so many large statements (including its title) without ever seeming portentous? And how, in the great light of Hollywood, was it possible to make a film, set in the past, that assuredly spoke to 1937 without overdoing the bleakness or the hope? There are American films of 1937 striving to be on the same shaky pulse—like The Good Earth, You Only Live Once, Dead End, Make Way for Tomorrow—but La Grande Illusion is simply there, candid, cheerful, sad, alert. No wonder Hollywood gave it a Best Picture nomination, but the prize went to You Can’t Take It With You, strenuous, radiant, archaic.