'Have You Seen...?'

by David Thomson

  This holds until the very end of The Great Train Robbery, when something extraordinary happens. A “cowboy” (or an actor so dressed) comes before the camera in medium shot (it feels like a big close-up) and fires a six-gun into the camera. It is not clear that he is recognizable as one of the characters from the story just ended, because those faces are not really identifiable. Moreover, in possessing or embodying a type of shot not used in the rest of the film, it feels like an afterthought or an insurrection. And its impact is stunning. Is he meant as a flourish or a kind of company logo for “cowboy adventures” or “nickelodeon shoot-’em-ups”? Or is he just some deep-seated energy or adventure inspired by the process of the film that says, “Give it to the audience. Give them what they want. Shoot them in the face!”

  The wealth of secret knowledge implies that worthy people watch, and what they long for is immense. Does it whisper to us that, yes, in our dreams the robbers can win because isn’t that what we want? Film may be—even in 1900—an infant capitalist venture, set to make a fortune out of law and order. But somehow it knows and wants to reach out to our wildness, too—the thing that is burning in the dark. In The Story of Film, Mark Cousins points out how Scorsese has Joe Pesci do the same thing at the end of GoodFellas—a woeful defense of law and order, and a thrilling admission that we are there for the violence and the mayhem.

  The Great Ziegfeld (1936)

  It’s a black-and-white picture, but it comes complete with Overture, Intermission Entr’acte, and Exit Music. Still, the film is a sketchy biography of Florenz Ziegfeld, the impresario who had died broke in 1932. Today it’s a tough grind, with fascinating moments. William Powell holds it together as Ziegfeld, his hair turning gradually grayer, and he has all the famous attributes: the eye for girls and staircases, the extravagance with gifts and cables, the love of spectacle, and a reckless charm where pretty girls and creditors were concerned. Of course, at three hours, the film has to be packed with dull numbers that may or may not be faithful reproductions of the Ziegfeld style. They feel far more like “production values” in a rather anonymous but expensive Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer picture that seems like an antique now because it didn’t go for color. Hunt Stromberg produced it and Robert Z. Leonard directed, and that leaves it a struggle with cliché and famous show business attitudes.

  So we see Flo move from Chicago to New York. We see the evolution of the Follies. We see the marriages to Anna Held and Billie Burke. We see the impact of the Crash. Ziegfeld may easily have been a scoundrel or an obsessive in life, crazed for his art, a constant womanizer; in the movie, he has his flutters, but he’s a decent and honorable guy and a grand father, and it’s easy to see why his wives love him.

  Metro clearly threw money at the subject. There were five different photographers: Oliver Marsh, George Folsey, Karl Freund, Merritt Gerstad, and Ray June. There’s a tremendous revolving spiral set (designs by Cedric Gibbons and Eddie Imazu). The music (rather conventional) is by Walter Donaldson.

  Myrna Loy does very little as Billie Burke, but Luise Rainer gives a heavily underlined performance as Anna Held. Why she won the Oscar is hard to answer these days. She seems terribly coy, poignant, and overdone, and her celebrated telephone scene (quite short) is nearly laughable.

  On the other hand, there’s a scene where Ziegfeld is caught in a dressing room chatting to Will Rogers, and it’s a small gem, with Rogers explaining how his wife is encouraging him to just walk onstage and chat to the audience. Then Fanny Brice is announced, and it’s a rare chance to see the great woman herself—very funny, and singing “My Man.” William Demarest and Dennis Morgan appear without being credited, and Morgan actually sings “A Pretty Girl Is Like a Melody.” And I have a hunch Eve Arden makes a brief appearance.

  That the film won Best Picture in the year of Dodsworth, Mr. Deeds, and A Tale of Two Cities may be the ultimate tribute to Ziegfeld. Apart from Rainer’s victory, Powell was nominated—but for My Man Godfrey, and to give him his due, he plays the two films pretty much the same way. With Frank Morgan, Virginia Bruce, Reginald Owen, Ernest Cossart, Nat Pendleton, and Ray Bolger.

  Greed (1924)

  You can talk of Greed as a ruin, if you are inclined. That means despairing of a commercial system that would let a nine- or ten-hour monster survive as more than 140 minutes of rare sensation. It is part of the culture of ruin that points to a little gathering of memorials: like Rick Schmidlin’s reassembly with the use of stills, which amounts to four hours; like Herman G. Weinberg’s book The Complete Greed, which prints a lot of those stills. Some people even mention Frank Norris’s novel McTeague: A Story of San Francisco, published in 1899. And then there is Greed itself, quite plainly a masterpiece, a model of a kind of psychological realism that shocked and horrified most people, because it gave them no one in the film to like.

  There is the point: Greed proposes a movie that might read and feel like the great realist novels until Stroheim used the visionary trigger in film to show the characters’ inner states—and then, as they became more dependent on loneliness or madness, greed or desire, fear or violence, as they became more like us, we shrank back from them even more forcefully. All that is there still. And even if hardly a single Stroheim film is intact—do you see a strategy there? do you feel he was not responsible for it if he is responsible for everything else?—what does that mean except that he made ruined films? That is his comment on the film industry. That is his lesson. Learn to regard so many films as ghosts of themselves.

  So Stroheim had had his falling-out with Irving Thalberg at Universal over Merry-Go-Round. He went to the Goldwyn Company and made a deal to do Norris’s novel. He would write and direct it himself, the story of McTeague the dentist and his friend Marcus; of setting up in San Francisco; of meeting and marrying Trina, who steals his money so that he murders her; and of the final meeting in Death Valley, where the two men find gold at last. But too late.

  Stroheim shot the film in 1923, in real locations and interiors whenever possible. William Daniels, Ben Reynolds, and Ernest Schoedsack were his cameramen. Richard Day was the art director. Gibson Gowland played McTeague, Jean Hersholt was Marcus, and Zasu Pitts was Trina. The schedule was said to be nine months, and the cost of production $470,000. That was not a ridiculous sum.

  But as the director cut his film, Goldwyn entered into the merger with Metro and Mayer established in 1924. By a narrative stroke that Stroheim the fatalist must have relished, he was back under the command of Thalberg again. There was a dispute. There were screenings of the full-length Greed. Some fairly smart people saw it and judged it heavily overdone. So a cut Greed was released, and you can say it is a bastard version of its proper self. There is no doubt that M-G-M betrayed themselves by throwing away the cut material, though that was standard practice at the time. Otherwise, they behaved like a movie studio, like the kind of place that sold pictures for a living. And all one can say about Greed is that it is essential, frenzied yet under control, and one of the great indicators of film and its future. It is still very hard to make pictures about people the audience does not like—but, remember: At the movies, the audience is afraid of the dark. It wants comfort.

  The Grifters (1990)

  Jim Thompson is one of those hard-bitten writers who seems to have been made by and for the movies. And in recent years there has been a craze to do his material. Yet he’s tricky. He has a very literary force. His self-pitying characters often say things that actors find challenging. The Grifters had an odd history. Once upon a time, Martin Scorsese was going to direct it himself. Then he decided to produce, with Englishman Stephen Frears directing. There had been several screenplays that didn’t work before Frears found a writing partner in Donald E. Westlake.

  The story is of three loners, all working the grift, in southern California. Grifting is small fraud, anything from tricking a barman over the change to fixing the odds in a horse race. But it is also any crime. And the starkest thing about its story is the revelation that every criminal is a lo
ner. There are old ties, family bonds even, but this is the world of cold mistrust. You can rely on no one. We see that quite early on in the way the mother, who makes a technical mistake at the track (Anjelica Huston), is brutally punished by a man (Pat Hingle) she has known for decades, a man who is fond of her.

  But that rebuke is only the model for what happens as her son (John Cusack) becomes sexually involved with a freelancing girl (Annette Bening). Every family tie is invoked, but the terrible imperative of survival makes loners of them all. So it’s a film that starts with the very merry and very sexy display of Bening (never better) and then sinks toward what is Huston’s most severe performance. All in all, it’s hard to think of an American film about the criminal life that is less sentimental or more impressive.

  There are several great supporting performances—Henry Jones, J. T. Walsh, Michael Laskin, Charles Napier, Stephen Tobolowsky—but the most striking thing is the way the lead figures are seen in the same way as the supports. There is an unusually good score by Elmer Bernstein—droll, melancholy, macabre even—that is a very good guide to the way the tone gets darker as the film goes on.

  It’s interesting to wonder whether an American director would have kept this as such a scathing character study. You feel that Frears likes or at least pities all these people, and you can see how an American toughness might have dismissed them all until The Grifters felt like Detour or a Sam Fuller film. But this is a film about family ties that just don’t count enough in a world where dishonesty has made for a terrible privacy.

  This is easily the best of the films Frears has made in America, the best Jim Thompson adaptation (rivaled only by Bertrand Tavernier’s Coup de Torchon), and just about the best of Huston, Cusack, and Bening. Put that package together and it’s a compelling film—if short of ultimate power.

  La Guerre Est Finie (1966)

  As he made La Guerre Est Finie, Yves Montand was forty-five—it is the age Tom Cruise is now. How can this be? For instance, I think you could get away with having the Montand from La Guerre Est Finie serve as the father to the Cruise from War of the Worlds. Are we on the brink of some odd condition of nurture (or nature) that increasingly separates Americans from Europeans (or non-Americans)? Is it that Montand, born in Italy and raised fairly poor during the Depression, ended up looking older, more worn, more tired than an American boy born into the Great Society? Or is it a matter of experience? I am not picking on Montand or Cruise in this argument. The outlines of the question apply to a whole range of other actors. And that’s why one notices a terrible, perhaps fatal, handicap—that of American actors to grow older, or to seem more loaded with experience and doubt. The last American lead actor who had that mixture of being good-looking but exhausted was William Holden—who is a long way from the faded boyishness of Warren Beatty and Robert Redford.

  That is an aside to remarks on the resonance of Montand as Diego Mora in La Guerre Est Finie—a Spaniard, a veteran of the battle against Franco, and still an agent in the commitment to overthrow the dictator. It is not that Montand was a great actor, but he was a mighty presence, and his seeming so much more mature or resigned than his actual age would permit is vital to this deeply affecting film. Its subject is an agent who knows his old war is no more. After all, Franco had changed Spain, even if fascism remained. Diego can foresee the kind of transition to democracy that occurred when Franco at last died. The war is over. The battles of the late 1930s—losses then—are now to be re-registered as victories.

  But Diego is committed to taking the grave risk of going back when he knows he may be arrested. And the dilemma is beautifully personified in his two love relationships: he has lived with Marianne (Ingrid Thulin) for several years—they have a searching affection, and the same history; but he enters into an intense, very physical affair (the most erotic ever filmed by Resnais) with Nadine (Geneviève Bujold), a student, a very smart girl, and exactly the radical Diego might have been twenty-five years earlier. This is far from old sex and young sex. It is not even quite fidelity. For Resnais manages to film and edit the sex as if aware of the complicity, and the joint effect on Diego.

  In short, this is a very sophisticated thriller about character, written by Jorge Semprún (who would do Stavisky) and worked on by the usual Resnais team: photographer Sacha Vierny; music by Giovanni Fusco; production design by Jacques Saulnier. It is also a striking example of the viability of political cinema, for this is a study of ideas and practice in which every private gesture carries a larger meaning. Inexplicably neglected today, La Guerre Est Finie is another Resnais masterwork. Also with Jean Dasté and Michel Piccoli.

  Gun Crazy (1950)

  There are times when the sheer knowingness, the terrible omniscient superiority of people like Mitchum and Jane Greer gets in the way of a film noir. So it’s easier to believe of Out of the Past that these two sleepwalkers are more in love with death than each other. That’s a pity, and it’s the moment to renew your acquaintance with the terrific, ragged unlikelihood of the lovers in Joseph H. Lewis’s Gun Crazy, John Dall and Peggy Cummins.

  Though it’s an 87-minute Β picture, produced by the King Brothers, Gun Crazy has literary antecedents. It first saw the light as a Saturday Evening Post story by MacKinlay Kantor (the writer who started The Best Years of Our Lives). That turned into a two-hundred-page script, written by Kantor and Millard Kaufman. Kantor had had in mind a thorough social survey of violent youth, and he never spoke to Lewis again after the director shaped it up for a movie. But Lewis improved it: for the finale, when the young lovers are in the swamp, he cut out the sight of the cops closing in—now, they are just heard and felt by the young people. In nearly everything he did, Lewis honed in on their emotions.

  Bart Tare (John Dall) is a strange kid—he is good-natured and sensitive, but he loves guns in a way he can’t explain. He goes to reform school. He goes in the Army. Then he meets Annie Laurie Starr (Peggy Cummins), a trick-shot artist in a show where she wears Wild West clothes. They aren’t a match, except as shots, and that’s what turns them on. It is a sexual kick at first and it sends them on a modest crime rampage. Then the feelings deepen. They pull off a bank job and then rob a meat-packing plant. They kill people almost as a way of affirming their own love. And it is a love story, no matter that Dall seems gay while Cummins (offered as Canadian) is a petite blonde from Prestatyn in Wales whose brief career with Fox was just about over.

  There was a thought that this sexual edge showed too much, and the picture was called Deadly Is the Female at first, but Gun Crazy is better, because it admits to their real passion and it gives them the equal weight they deserve. Above all, the picture is handled with terrific verve by Lewis: very bold framing, deep focus, and a single-take bank robbery seen from the back of the car. These are wildly exciting and easily encourage the comparison with Bonnie and Clyde—though nobody on that much bigger success seems to have known about the Lewis film.

  It’s also a source of Lewis’s success that these kids are Wild West characters, and it helps that the film is set in unnamed rural parts of the country. Russell Harlan shot it and the cast also includes Barry Kroeger, Anabel Shaw, Harry Lewis, Morris Carnovsky, Stanley Prager, Nedrick Young, Mickey Little, Russ Tamblyn, and Don Bed-doe. But it’s Dall and Cummins who last in the memory, and who give unexpected proof that once in a while miscasting is golden.

  Gunga Din (1939)

  On every picture that involves a lot of location work, a scout has to go out into the territory and find economical, accessible, and lovely places where the filming can be done. In the case of Gunga Din, RKO would have sent someone out to discover a manageable northwest frontier or Khyber Pass sort of country. As far as I know, they found places on the eastern face of the Sierra, near Lone Pine, a glorious world of immense mountains and near desert. And if someone asked me to close my eyes and say “Gunga Din,” I think I’d see those places first (superbly marked out for action by George Stevens), especially the sequence where the British army is marching int
o the jaws of ambush, but Gunga Din (Sam Jaffe) climbs to the top of a shining tower and blows the alarm on a bugle—saving the day and winning his place in regimental history.

  It comes from a poem by Rudyard Kipling, of course, and it’s a nice touch of the film to include Kipling as a supporting character (something picked up years later in Huston’s The Man Who Would Be King). The script was by Joel Sayre and Fred Guiol, but only after an adaptation by Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur. Actually, in view of Hecht’s soon-to-be-intense Zionism, it’s good to see him so wholeheartedly on the side of the British army here. Is Gunga Din racist?—yes, of course it is, with many extras in body paint as the revolting Indian hordes and Eduardo Ciannelli turning in a classic, leering, and roaring performance as the rascal in charge.

  I don’t think it matters. The story concerns a trio of British soldiers—Cary Grant, Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., and Victor McLaglen—and it would take a very stern taskmaster to disown them. They are sui generis, to be sure, and the movie is steeped in mindless imperialism. I don’t think it could have been made with the same panache and innocence in 1946, only because Indians and Asians had figured so much in the recent war.

  So this is Hollywood on the brink of its future—George Stevens would never again be as lighthearted. It’s fast, funny, adventurous, and spectacular. And Sam Jaffe is more than touching as the water boy who longs to be part of the team—he is a new kind of hero. Would I like to be introducing it to an audience of the Taliban? No. Could I defend it? No. But I come from a culture that sees the black humor in that predicament, and the Taliban do not.

  Gunga Din was a routine film—it was not nominated for anything, nor should it have been. But its confidence, its brio, and its fun have hardly faded. If anything, the rest of the world is left with just one objection: not that the film and its follies were uttered, but that America has become so much gloomier and more self-conscious a country, always testing its own motivation. Joan Fontaine is the pretty female lead, and the cast also includes Montagu Love, Abner Biberman, Robert Coote, Lumsden Haire, Cecil Kellaway, and Reginald Sheffield as Kipling.