I have heard people say that the Kenneth Branagh version (1989) is honest, worthy, robust, brutal, and probably truer to history—or to the early fifteenth century. And maybe there is no gainsaying the version of Henry V you were born with. I am helplessly loyal to Olivier, who, even when I was four, was spoken of as an ordinary man more regal than kings. And truly, I think that the transition from the theater and its feeble props, to the Giotto-like flatness of cities, to the steeplechase rough-and-tumble of knights in armor was a just reflection of the Chorus speech, “O, for a muse of fire that would ascend the brightest heaven of invention.”
And don’t forget that Olivier was himself in the process of discovering cinema, of how a great soliloquy could be just a voice-over on scenes of a noir camp, and realizing that music like that of William Walton spoke for chivalry as well as Shakespearean verse. There is even the possibility that the final scene, with the princess (Renée Asherson), helped break millions of British people in to the idea that a foreign language—French—might be possible, or speakable.
There is also the splendor of artisan acting—Leslie Banks, Robert Newton, Leo Genn, Esmond Knight, Ralph Truman, Max Adrian, Robert Helpmann, Freda Jackson, John Laurie—all those voices sounding as if recorded in a small back room made of oak.
He Who Gets Slapped (1924)
When it was finished, He Who Gets Shapped so impressed the sales force people at Loew’s, Inc., that they asked to have the picture held back until the Christmas season. By all accounts, this was the first project started after the merger of Metro, Goldwyn, and Mayer. And it’s fascinating that it was, principally, a Lon Chaney vehicle. Production chief Irving Thalberg had grown close to Chaney at Universal, and now the great actor was freelancing. So Thalberg made his move—a handsome young man opting for a famous monster.
Of course, there was another reason for Thalberg’s interest. The role of the bareback circus rider ended up with Norma Shearer. The story goes that Thalberg had seen a short film she made but had been unable to track her down. It was only when established at M-G-M that he was able to find the Canadian actress, who was then twenty-three. She had made a lot of films, but nothing as a star. This was a big promotion for her, not just because of the prestige of a first production, but because John Gilbert had been cast as the young male lead. Almost as an act of will, Mayer and Thalberg had determined to promote Gilbert—whether he liked it or not.
The material of He Who Gets Slapped was extraordinary. It came from a Russian play by Leonid Andreyev about a leading scientist (Chaney) who loses his wife and his vital research to the same man. This shock fixes a dreadful look on his face—somewhere between hilarity and horror. His only recourse to this is to go into the circus as a clown! That’s where he meets and falls for Consuelo (Shearer). As a clown, he is a figure of deliberate humiliation, and of course in the romantic triangle he is the loser.
Carey Wilson was hired to do the script. Cedric Gibbons built the circus sets, and Victor Seastrom was assigned to direct—this was Victor Sjöström, who had sought to escape a slump in the Swedish film industry by joining the Goldwyn Company. He adjusted to American studio conditions very well and shot the picture in a month for just $172,000. He seems to have turned a good rapport with Chaney. When the picture opened, it turned a profit of about $350,000, which kept Seastrom at the studio for several years and led to his being admired intensely by Lillian Gish.
Not that M-G-M was gentle to him. Mayer saw that he had a contract with Goldwyn that gave him $10,000 a picture plus a percentage of the profits. But Mayer persuaded the Swede to take another $10,000 up front and give away the profits. “We’ll never be able to work them out anyway,” Mayer had warned. And so an eager artist fell for money in hand against a portion of the business.
Thalberg was delighted. He pushed Gilbert hard and he started to date Shearer. She got a good studio contract in 1925, and in 1927 the actress and the mogul were married in high Hollywood style. A paradise was in the making, but by 1936, Chaney, Gilbert, and Thalberg were all dead and Shearer was stranded.
High Noon (1952)
People make faces at High Noon a lot nowadays, but I think they’re being snobs. Yes, there are things I don’t get about the picture (and we’ll come to them), but it’s easy to see why it works. When three gunslingers ride into town just to wait at the depot for the noon train, something’s working—it’s the long stretch of straight line (found near Sonora); it’s Lee Van Cleef and Robert Wilke as two of the heavies, before anyone knew who they were; and it’s that song, “Do Not Forsake Me, Oh My Darling,” written by Dimitri Tiomkin and Ned Washington, and sung by Tex Ritter. Let’s put it this way: That song is a lot better and lot more relevant than “Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head.”
Fred Zinnemann read the script and knew it was a masterpiece. I think he meant that for 84 minutes, or whatever it took, everything was going to be inevitable. Will Kane (Gary Cooper) is sheriff of the town and he’s retiring—on his wedding day—and on the day an old enemy gets out of the penitentiary. That’s who the guys are waiting for at the depot—it’s going to be four against one. So Kane asks around for help, and no one in the town is ready to step forward.
The script was written by Carl Foreman, and by the time the shooting began he’d had to leave the country because of the House Un-American Activities Committee. All of which has led to the interpretation of the film that, when the chips are down, your friends don’t want to know you. Howard Hawks famously sounded off against High Noon, saying, Why ask for help from amateurs? Stick to what you’ve got. And he made Rio Bravo as a corrective. Which is fine, but High Noon works—though it might work better if Kane kept refusing help. I’m not sure, now or then, that the unwillingness to fight is fair to American civic spirit. Most Americans will fight anyone. Though I can believe that a man like Kane would prefer to do it alone.
Anyway, it’s not a film to see more than once. Because if you know how the suspense comes out, then you want to know so much more about how and why Gary Cooper (age fifty-one) has just married Grace Kelly (age twenty-four). And why doesn’t he want to get to Las Vegas with her as fast as he can? A remake could have him tell her nothing about the problem but take her to a hotel room and give her the best 84-minute honeymoon she ever had and then go and shoot the bad guys and come back to a drowsy Grace for more.
Because I don’t like her being a Quaker and then helping in the fight—and I don’t like her itching to run away, either. When Cooper looks at Kelly (and apparently this is what happened in life), he knows it’s his lucky day even if he’s got the forty bandits or the seven samurai at the gate. So Cooper got an Oscar, Tiomkin got one for the score and one for the song, and Elmo Williams and Harry Gerstad won for Best Editing. Also with Katy Jurado, Lloyd Bridges, Thomas Mitchell, Otto Kruger, Lon Chaney, Jr., and Harry Morgan.
High Sierra (1941)
High Sierra is a key step in the transformation of Humphrey Bogart, and it is clear now how large a part John Huston played in that. It was a novel, by W. R. Burnett, published in 1940, whereupon Huston wrote to Hal Wallis urging that it not be a conventional gangster picture. “Take the spirit out of Burnett, the strange sense of inevitability that comes with our deepening understanding of his characters and the forces that motivate them, and only the conventional husk of a story remains.” Within a few days, Huston was plunging ahead on the screenplay, where he did his level best to make Roy Earle rather less the “Mad Dog” killer referred to in the press than a sad, isolated figure, living somewhere between law and order. And it was thanks to that new status that the Bogart we would love was able to emerge.
Paul Muni was the first casting idea, but he turned it down—and so did George Raft. That’s how Bogart got it, after he had made a personal plea to Wallis. So Huston’s Earle is a guy sprung from prison after eight years of his sentence. It’s plain that he is being freed because of underworld influence, and to pay back that good turn he has to commit to doing one more job. Very soon, he’s on
the run again, with a yearning to “break out” of this pattern.
He finds a girl, Velma (Joan Leslie), a cripple, and he puts money toward an operation for her. But being healed does not sweeten her nature, or improve Roy’s chances. She turns nasty and confirms Roy in his bleak regard for society. He has only two friends: a dog, Pard; and Marie Garson (Ida Lupino), a gangster’s moll who becomes his loyal friend. As the police close in, Roy is forced deeper and deeper into the Sierra and his own melancholy. But in the process, he abandons the conventional snarling of gangster talk. This is the guy who, on first being released from prison, goes to a park and feels the grass under his feet.
This was a Mark Hellinger production, directed by Raoul Walsh and released in January 1941 (well ahead of The Maltese Falcon, where Bogart’s tough manner at last could reside on the side of the law). He was turned from being a nasty, vicious slugger into a wise, world-weary counterpuncher, and it suited Bogart’s sense of himself. Walsh deserves some credit, and Howard Hawks later would add humor to the mix. But John Huston had won the act’s confidence, and seen how his sardonic grin would play. And so the rat became our hero.
The black and white was shot by Tonio Gaudio, with art direction by Ted Smith and a score by Adolph Deutsch. There were some who objected to the softening of the gangster character, but Earle is killed in the end and that “inevitability” has been there from the outset. Vigorous supporting work from Alan Curtis, Arthur Kennedy, Henry Hull, Henry Travers, Jerome Cowan, Minna Gombell, Barton MacLane, and Cornel Wilde.
Hiroshima, Mon Amour (1959)
In the dark, bodies in a bed. Are they lovers, or are they dead? That crystalline coating they wear, is it the sweat of their affection? Or is it the first sign of another affliction—call it radiation? Is that why they shine—or is shining simply the glow that says “ready for story”? Ready for history, too. She is French, from Nevers. She is an actress come to Hiroshima to make a film about peace. He is Japanese, and they are becoming lovers. They call each other by the place-names they have—Hiroshima and Nevers—and we recall the first shock this great film ever gives us, the astonishing title, and the cinema’s insistence that the epitome of disaster and the most treasured thing can be put side by side. Not just can be, but must be. Have there been lovers since 1945 who have woken in the middle of the night and not sometimes felt the litany of names somewhere in their darkness and warmth—Auschwitz, Treblinka… It is the start of a poem.
Alain Resnais’s feature film, his first, after so many films that altered the nature of documentary and introduced “essay,” came as the New Wave came. But it was hardly a young man’s film, or even a picture that was jostling to be on the crest of that wave. It was a fine reminder to young people that just as they got their breakthrough, so another film might change the landscape.
The lovers in Hiroshima, Elle and Lui, Emmanuelle Riva and Eiji Okada, are completely free from any of the terrible burden, from Sayonara and the like, of “Gee, you Japanese are strange…” She comes in from the balcony with him asleep in the bed still and she sees his arm twisted oddly, and she is back in Nevers in 1944, cradling the body of her German lover. She was in Le Silence de la Mer? Not quite, for her love affair was fulfilled so that she had the stain of German blood on her face once and then her hair cropped and her own blood where she was beaten up. She loved an official enemy, an ordinary soldier. Yet she survived. And people survived in Hiroshima, too. Or did they?
So it is a love story, a story of three loves—call it four, because she is not quite the same person at twenty and thirty-five. It was written for the screen by Marguerite Duras and then directed by Resnais, and I think it is true that Resnais submitted to the great beauty and authority of the text—for it is poetry uttered as law, erotic and geological at the same time. And if it is Resnais’s greatest film, then I think it should be said that the script is vital. It is not really a story so much as a process, to be seen over and over again, photographed by Sacha Vierny and Takahashi Michio, with exquisite music by Giovanni Fusco (the piano motif) and Georges Delerue (the desperate lyrical passages). Henri Colpi was in charge of the editing, though you know that every hesitation comes from Resnais.
There is a scene in a public place where an old Japanese woman sits between the lovers on a bench—like a passerby looking at Romeo and Juliet—that is one of the greatest things ever done. But so is the whole film.
His Girl Friday (1940)
In 1928, a play, The Front Page, written by Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur, opened in New York (Jed Harris directed). It still plays all over the world, the story of a Chicago newspaper editor, Walter Burns (Osgood Perkins in the play), who tries to stop his ace reporter Hildy Johnson (Lee Tracy) from quitting—to get married. It was filmed decently in 1931, by Lewis Milestone, with Adolphe Menjou and Pat O’Brien in the leads—and less well by Billy Wilder, in 1974, with Matthau and Lemmon.
Somehow or other, the idea occurred to Howard Hawks to try it with the reporter as a girl—and if you did that, suppose they had been married, but now Hildy was divorced and about to marry a decent, reliable guy. Hawks said the idea arose impromptu, at a dinner party, with a girl reading Hildy’s lines. Maybe. Whatever the history, Hawks got Charles Lederer to do the necessary rewrite, and thus we owe “Bruce” to Lederer—the insurance man from Albany, galoshes and umbrella, and one of American film’s most joyous insults to its own mainstream. Morrie Ryskind was also hired to do some rewriting (uncredited).
Hawks had always seen Cary Grant as Walter, but it’s fascinating to note that half a dozen actresses turned down Hildy before Rosalind Russell accepted the part. Of course, people knew Hawks, but The Front Page was a modern classic and maybe the shift seemed perilous. Ralph Bellamy agreed to play Bruce and went along with every sly dig that the guy was so dull he was like that fellow in pictures—Ralph Bellamy.
We are talking about a picture that received not a single Academy nomination, and we are talking about one of the glories of American film. More than The Front Page ever dreamed of being, this is a relentless comedy of talk, action, and bad manners; it is a loving tribute to the newspaper business filled with contempt for the ethics of those who work the business; and it is possibly the greatest of the sublime comedies of remarriage made in Hollywood.
Think of it as a game. With seconds to spare, Walter learns that Hildy is off to marry Bruce. Now his every wile and invention goes into preventing that marriage, keeping Hildy as a writer, but retaining her as his girl. They bicker, they swap insults, they fight—they are in love in the Hawksian world. For the process of skirmish is the same as wooing. It’s only gradually, as you relish the film enough, that you realize this game will have to be played over and over again. Walter will never be the reliable guy Hildy wants. They will break up time and again, so that they can get back together. Indeed, you realize why Hildy came to the office to say good-bye: It was her signal, “play ball.”
Joseph Walker photographed the entirely interior picture, and it looks like noir coming to life. The supporting cast includes Gene Lockhart, Helen Mack, Porter Hall, Ernest Truex, Cliff Edwards, Clarence Kolb, Roscoe Karns, Frank Jenks, Abner Biberman, John Qualen, and Billy Gilbert as Pettibone.
Bliss.
History Is Made at Night (1937)
Sometimes chance lets us know a little extra about the making of some movies—and it’s the little extra that tells the truth. History Is Made at Night was a Walter Wanger production in which Charles Boyer and Jean Arthur would be giddy lovers. Wanger had slipped into the belief that Gene Towne and Graham Baker were brilliant new screenwriters. As far as we can tell, Towne and Baker were on to a good thing, or they were working on their gardens. Suffice it to say that the script was in chaos after an opening in which a humble waiter, Paul Dumond (Boyer), and a shipping magnate’s wife, Irene Vail (Jean Arthur), run away together after, apparently, Boyer has accidentally killed the lady’s chauffeur. Her husband, Colin Clive, arrives to discover the corpse and quite correctly elects to
pursue his wife.
Frank Borzage was directing, and he was keen to do his thing in the romantic scenes—there is a barefoot dance number, for instance, as well as a chemistry between the leads that had some onlookers persuaded they were an item. At this point, the young Joshua Logan was hired to do some “additional dialogue” work. He teamed up with Arthur Ripley (neither man is credited on the picture) and saved it. Ripley saw that it needed a “man kicks dog” scene, as follows: When Clive the husband finds the chauffeur, the wretched man comes round—he was only unconscious. Whereupon Clive hits him with the poker and blames the murder on Boyer!
Logan’s memoir (Josh, 1976) is discreet about what happened with the rest of the film. Its admirers note the abrupt shifts in tone and mood—from melodrama to screwball to romance to epic—but allow that the love story acquires an enchanted quality “all its own” in which the waiter and the millionairess discover many truths about life. So let us—fond and dutiful believers in the factory system—remember that sometimes the factory was a madhouse where momentum and the habit of doing one damn stupid thing after another was all that kept a film going.
History Is Made at Night ends up with the sinking of a Titanic-like ship and Boyer and Arthur being reunited in a lifeboat. The rest is a matter of Colin Clive being nowhere near cool enough for Boyer and Arthur. When the lovers talk, it is all whispered innuendo and her breathless reply. It is a fusion that begins as radio—and you only have to hear lovers pass two or three lines to explode the myth of silent lovers gazing at each other. Talk is the sexy thing. The balance of two voices—that is casting.
'Have You Seen...?' Page 60
