'Have You Seen...?'
Page 59
It has to have helped that there was no one in an intermediary position (like Elvis’s dreaded and bogus Colonel Parker) who could come between the boys and the camera to “control” the image. And then it meant a lot that the Beatles were a very cool, hip collective who had already essayed the style of the film in their attitude to press conferences. So when, in their first days of glory, the lads were asked what it felt like, they brushed such idiocies away with studied vacancy, insolence, surreal irrelevance, or “you tell us.” And I think that Alun Owen’s script for A Hard Day’s Night, as well as Lester’s visual approach, took off from the press conferences and the Harold Lloyd–like idea of the boys forever trying to escape their mob. Thus, their private sport in the playing fields scene—shot near Isleworth—is a kind of “away from it all” reverie. And their entire imitation of a running, jumping, and standing still film (one of Lester’s earlier works) is part of their canny reluctance to be pinned down in the white heat of narcissism. They looked great, of course, by 1964, but their whole manner is to say, This is pretty stupid, isn’t it?
The film had to be packed with songs, but Lester took that problem head-on, and used it as an excuse for no story. The very worst thing about the Elvis pictures is the attempt to restrain the dynamo with story when it is quite plain that he is ready to do anything and anyone. And that’s what the Beatles are like in this film—though their sexual aggression has been “handled” well enough to make the film friendly to very young children.
Yes, there was a lot more to the Beatles, as time would tell. But granted that movie exploitation was inescapable, I think everyone comes away from A Hard Day’s Night with credit and aplomb. Help!, done two years later, is full of color and money, and the luxury shows to no good effect. The nice thing about A Hard Day’s Night is that feeling of a silly sensation that might not last long enough to get the film out. Also with Richard Vernon, Wilfrid Brambell, Norman Rossington, John Junkin, Anna Quayle, and Victor Spinetti.
The Hard Way (1942)
Sometimes a story or a script starts to be talked about in Hollywood long before the cameras turn over. It was like that with The Hard Way, a Jerry Wald story about a woman, Helen Chernen, who tries to kill herself in the first sequence (just what Wald would do in Mildred Pierce). Why? Because, she says, she has given her own life to promote the career of her kid sister, Katherine (Joan Leslie), in show business. The rumor was that the story was based on real figures in Hollywood, but nobody could pin down those origins. Wald hired Irwin Shaw to do a screenplay, and then Daniel Fuchs and Peter Viertel were asked to do a polish. Meanwhile, the lead role, Helen, was thought of for Ginger Rogers, Rosalind Russell, and Olivia de Havilland, before it found its match in Ida Lupino.
She was twenty-three and clearly an out-of-the-ordinary actress, but her father was dying and she was suffering from exhaustion. From the outset, she was drawn to the part and the opportunity, and of course she was herself from an intense show business family. But for those very reasons, maybe, she resisted the material and the bitchiness in Helen. She said she found the role very difficult to play, and some observers reckoned that the stress of the part was adding to her illness. There were times when she was too sick to come to work, and Warners even considered replacing her with Ann Sheridan.
But that seems to have given Lupino a steel edge, and it persuaded her to do the part without conventional makeup. Let Joan Leslie look lovely as the younger sister—there should be no question but that Helen was too tough or grim to have a show business career herself. In short, she made it through, despite her father’s death, and she gives a performance that many people reckoned should have had some recognition from the Academy. She did win the New York Film Critics award.
Vincent Sherman was the director, and he did a very good job. James Wong Howe was the cameraman, and at a moment when Warners tried to reassign Howe to another picture, Lupino begged for him to be retained. The film stands up very well in the severity of its portrait of the necessary lack of compromise in show business careers, to say nothing of that kind of surrogate success that emotionally feeds a person the public never sees. It’s hard to think of any film of this period that is less sentimental in its view of the business—and nowhere is this more true than in Jack Carson’s fine performance as a very feeble guy who gets pushed around.
And yet, oddly enough, Ida Lupino didn’t catch fire. Indeed, she remained a bit of a secret for most of her career. But when she started to direct herself, in the 1950s, it was not difficult to see the influence of The Hard Way on her pragmatic approach to untidy emotions.
Heat (1995)
It is the assumption of Heat that everyone in its Los Angeles is pressurized by the unlikelihood of survival. Time and again, small overtures of decency or ordinariness are chopped off by this ceaseless yet nameless tension. In the end, the most natural explanation is that this fever derives less from some bleak analysis of victory or money than from the remorseless, despairing beauty of Michael Mann’s style. This is a world without boredom, rest, or humane reflection. What passes for philosophy is only the preening of cats for whom it is always night, and always the battle—even if you’re having a friendly and lunatic cup of coffee with a soulmate in a diner. Or it’s show business.
Vincent is a top cop, Neil is a taker-down of big scores—they are also Al Pacino and Robert De Niro, and in that contest of wary if kindred champions (father and son in Godfather II), it is vital that they could swap roles. Thus Mann’s facile concept: that cops and thieves are alike, forged in the heat, equally ready to give up common attachments in real life for… well, for movie, I suppose. The real point of Heat, granted Mann’s exhilarating prowess, his unmatched capacity for holding the screen, is that so sweet a movie justifies the flagrant absurdity (and worse) in the idea. If you can’t stop watching, Mann might say, then the fix is in, just like the master bolt in a machine. Nothing else intrudes in the dire but delectable equation in which the horror of life is made cinematically exquisite.
That sounds pathetic and disturbing, and someone has to stand up for the stupidity of the fundamental premise—that cops and thieves are interchangeable, and that the idea of these men being ready to give up all “family” in thirty seconds if the heat comes down is adolescent and fascistic. But fascistic cinema can be engrossing—as witness Leni Riefenstahl’s days and nights in Nuremberg. And Mann is the hapless possessor of something like genius—or mastery—or is it more accurately perceived as the ability to make surface so alluring that we no longer think of substance? Heat is a skin—taut, alert, buffed—like the look of a great athlete or a new car.
On the other hand, Heat has nothing less than a love of Los Angeles and a remarkable ability for holding many lives and subplots in balance. The structure is as intricate as that of Magnolia, and in the interaction of lives Mann is at his most intelligent and demanding. It follows that there is not a bad performance, and not a character crying out for autopsy, or mercy-killing. (There is a profound alienation from life itself.) Just look at Val Kilmer, Tom Sizemore, Natalie Portman, William Fichtner, Jon Voight, Tom Noonan, Diane Venora, and even Ashley Judd, to see a faultless hiring of players as well as an unerring ear for movie talk. It is 172 minutes, too long, yet it could be longer. We could watch this ease for days at a time—or until the realization that making movie movie is not enough, and may be the medium’s most disastrous digression.
Heaven’s Gate (1981)
It was all too easy in 1981, and for years afterward, to say that Heaven’s Gate had gone out of control. Final Cut, the excellent, pained, and nearly confessional book by Steven Bach—one of the United Artists executives who took the fall in the film’s disaster—gave an exactly plausible account of where and how control had been given up. That book remains one of the most frank and alarming descriptions of the film business written from the inside. Bach takes on a good deal of the blame himself, which makes it fairer for him to point out the arbitrary outrages by Michael Cimino, the writer-director who
had been hired as a savior by United Artists and who was given every indulgence allowed to a great artist. So I am not saying that Heaven’s Gate might not have turned out better with more modesty and an urge to compromise on all sides.
Still, in the four or five times I have looked at it since 1981, and in the most recent reviewing, where fate spared me the prolonged opening scenes at Harvard (actually Oxford), so that I began as James Averill comes to Wyoming on the train, I thought it was close enough to a real film to leave no worthwhile gap.
Of course, it is not impossible to have a good film that destroys not just itself, but its business enterprise and many settled ideas of what makes a movie. More or less, Greed, Gone With the Wind, Citizen Kane, and Apocalypse Now all build that pattern. But there is a rich American tradition (Melville, James, Ives, Pollock, Parker) that seeks a mighty dispersal of what has gone before. In America, there are great innovations in art that suddenly create fields of apparent emptiness. They may seem like omissions or mistakes at first. Yet in time we come to see them as meant for our exploration.
So I’d like to stress, in Heaven’s Gate, the uncertainty that exists wherever we look—and which at first seemed so offensive in so big and expensive a film. Spending that much, why not establish the emotional facts in the triangle of Averill-Ella-Champion? Yet as I see the film again, their yearning glances, those things unsaid, the very doubt, become as fruitful as the wide open landscapes of Wyoming—beautiful, dangerous, extreme, inhuman. Wouldn’t it be something if Cimino had found a way of looking at his characters that was affected by the scale of the place?
That may be enough to persuade you to look again. But have a large basket for the other virtues: Vilmos Zsigmond’s heartbreaking photography; the music—a prelude to Ken Burns and films like Cold Mountain but still not surpassed; the eastern European faces and the savagery of Wyoming; the murderous violence; the perfect parable for control and the lack of control in using the great spaces. And the very title—Heaven’s Gate, and hell’s journey. Yes, it was a disaster, but disasters are ten-a-penny. It is also a wounded monster.
Isabelle Huppert is luminous—although nearly everyone warned Cimino not to use her. Kris Kristofferson has some of the stature of silent Western stars. Christopher Walken is the eternal lost Kid—lethal and loving. And there is fine support from Brad Dourif, Sam Waterston, and a John Hurt who hardly needs to be there.
The Heiress (1949)
Some people would rescue the slightest work if it could be called “film noir.” But they miss so much. Go to the late 1940s, the heyday of the genre, and try to find a picture with worse things to say about human nature and the traps people make for themselves than The Heiress. The end is breathtaking: The wretched Morris Townsend (Montgomery Clift) is beating helplessly on the door of number 16, unable to escape his shallow calculating soul, and excluded for the rest of his life. Catherine Sloper (Olivia de Havilland) is making her way upstairs. She has eliminated white lies and embroidery from her life. She is set in a living rigor, determined to be the bleak, despicable woman her father saw. But coming close now to the cruelty of her father, Austin Sloper (Ralph Richardson), who has gone upstairs to his bed to die—unless we get to him first, for Sloper has a case for being the wickedest character in American film, prepared to tell his daughter that she disappoints him utterly. Is The Heiress not a great film noir—or could it be that Henry James was degrees wiser and sadder than Edgar Ulmer or Joseph H. Lewis?
James’s novel, Washington Square, was published in 1881. In 1947 it reached Broadway as the play by Ruth and Augustus Goetz, with Basil Rathbone as Sloper and Wendy Hiller as Catherine. Two years later, William Wyler came to make the film as his first freelance film after leaving Goldwyn. The Goetzes did the screenplay and seem to have missed an Oscar nomination for it only because they had done such thorough work already for the stage. Harry Homer’s sets made the house come alive (and won an Oscar), and the dark velvety photography (with a lot of deep focus and staircase angles) is by Leo Tover.
Of course, it is all James; Wyler and the Goetzes were simply translating his conception. But anyone watching decades later will be startled by the meticulous hatefulness in Richardson’s Sloper, all done with a gentle touch and a light voice, but showing the offense he has taken at being given a plain daughter. The moment when Sloper, a doctor, puts his own stethoscope to his chest to discover fatal illness is so chilly and narcissistic it is breathtaking. Richardson was nominated only as supporting actor—a nonsense (he lost to Dean Jagger in Twelve O’Clock High).
Montgomery Clift is Morris, and you can see him flinching at the character’s duplicity—a hint that Clift would turn down Joe Gillis in Sunset Blvd. Then there is de Havilland, winning her second Oscar. She is hunched and dark in shyness at first, and then made older and deeper in her voice by revenge. It is a great performance. Credit, too, to Miriam Hopkins, Betty Linley, and Ray Collins. As for Wyler, is this simply professional, exact, accomplished—or great? The play may be tidy, but Wyler lets the beasts show in father and daughter. Grant Wyler this, Carrie, The Little Foxes, The Letter, and The Best Years of Our Lives.
Aaron Copland won the Oscar for his fine score.
Hell’s Angels (1930)
Howard Hughes made his first airplane flight in 1920, at the age of fifteen—it was one of the sensations in life he most enjoyed, and it is likely that he actually died in the air, on the way to futile medical assistance in Houston, where he had been born. It was after the success of his movie production Two Arabian Knights (1927, Lewis Milestone) that he first conceived the notion of Hell’s Angels, a flying epic set during the First World War.
“Story” is a strong word for what is left, but it’s the arc of two brothers, Roy and Monte Rutledge (James Hall and Ben Lyon), Oxford men who join the Flying Corps. At the outset, Marshall Neilan (who was going to direct) worked up this story line. But Neilan was fired as director, and when his replacement, Luther Reed, went, too, he suggested that Hughes might as well direct it himself. Would nobody ever ask?
Hughes was a kind of toy-collecting little boy as well as a grown man, and as he prepared for the film he is said to have spent over half a million dollars on eighty-seven aircraft from the 1914–18 era. From October 1927 onward, Hughes was shooting scenes—a great many of them aerial over the Mojave Desert—with a camera crew headed by Tony Gaudio but including many others, notably Elmer Dyer. Many planes crashed, and it is alleged that three men were killed in the shooting.
Not that a coherent movie had emerged. But suddenly Hughes realized that as he had been working sound had arrived. He could not possibly offer a film full of planes and battle without sound. So in a way he started again. He hired Howard Estabrook and then Joseph Moncure March to write a new script—one that could be spoken—and he dropped Greta Niessen because her Norwegian accent would never work as the English girlfriend. Ann Harding and Carole Lombard were both considered for the part but it went instead to Jean Harlow—a sign of what Hughes was looking for. James Whale was hired to direct the new dialogue scenes, but he reported that Hughes might just as well have not bothered. At one point Whale cracked and told Harlow that even if he could tell her how to act he couldn’t help her be a woman.
Hughes did not seem to be interested personally in Harlow—very soon, he would drop her contract. But neither could he recognize the flatness of her delivery. His ear was all attuned to aircraft engines and the bravado of boyish talk.
No one knows what the film cost, because no one trusted Hughes. He claimed $4 million, just enough to have beaten Ben-Hur. But it was likely no more than $3 million. Whatever, it grossed about half that in America. Of course, Hughes could afford to lose money on the film, and he was personally thrilled by many of the dogfights and the overall feeling of being in the air. But the regular, human scenes just went to prove his great difficulty at hearing people. The cast also included John Darrow, Lucien Prival, Frank Clarke, Roy Wilson, and Douglas Gilmore.
Henry V (1944)
So I am suckered by the Olivier Henry V, especially by the burden of having hardly understood a word when I saw it. I could not know then that the first part, with its painted backdrops of fifteenth-century cities, was in debt to Les Trés Riches Heures du Duc de Berry. And I did not really notice the lovely shift as it goes to the green fields—the Technicolor green—of Ireland. I can only remember the complete assurance with which victory came to the British, and the breathtaking idea that “history” might be as immediate as the rush of arrows in the air and the hallucinatory message that page boys’ faces were burning like waxworks as the French set light to the English camp.
So the Olivier Henry V is not just a matter of taking pride in one’s country, but of discovering the medium. I had no notion how daring it was to build a Globe Theatre and have the camera plunge down into its O to discover the nervous actor waiting to be a king. But ever since, I find, I have exulted in backstage stories and take it for granted that works of the imagination should lift a modest hem and let the public see the legs of how the thing is done.