The photography was shared by David Abel and Gregg Toland. Alexander Toluboff did the art direction. The cast includes Leo Carrillo, Ivan Lebedeff, and George Meeker. One reference book refers to the “seamless” direction of Frank Borzage, and the film with its cute title is regularly included in the list of Borzage masterpieces. But the truth is less tidy and convenient, and it suggests that many films survive only because they had a doctoring job in the nick of time.
A History of Violence (2005)
It begins like Out of the Past and it ends as Back to the Future. Tom Stall (Viggo Mortensen) runs a diner in Millbrook, Indiana. This is classic small-town America, a hidden place, like Bridgeport, California, in 1947, a wonderful place to live—if you are dead already. He has a wife, a honey, not just the mother of two good children, and a lawyer, but Maria Bello—one of the most attractive women in American film. Yes, it’s lovely—including the playful sex where she dresses up as a cheerleader—but it’s not quite a movie yet, is it?
Then hoodlums and murderers pass by—it is chance—and Tom, just like flipping a burger, disposes of them. This is vivid movie; it is the flash of violence, a thing that requires angles, cutting, and the way in which purpose finally chases the sadness out of Mortensen’s eyes. For Tom Stall knows what it will mean—he can’t delay history any longer.
The next visit is Ed Harris as a guy named Carl, someone who knows “Joey Cusack” and remembers how Joey took his eye out. Carl is hideous: he is violence in the flesh, and he is a great supporting actor threatening to take over a film. He rides “Joey” about the past, and in the end Tom has to kill Carl, too—so it’s a good thing Joey is there and remembers how to do it. The Stalls’ son turns violent. Tom and his wife have sex again and now it’s sex noir—rough, urgent, nasty. Haven’t the movies always taught us that sex is our act—we play it our way?
It’s very important that this film isn’t called Joey in a Corner but A History of Violence. In other words, it sets us up to receive not quite a graphic novel but an academic paper, and the marvel of the film is that David Cronenberg knows how to bridge those two styles. So, from the outset, Tom is just a touch too moody, and he’s a laboratory experiment. The film comes from a comic-book fiction by John Wagner and Vince Locke, and Cronenberg did the script with Josh Olson, so that the picture feels a little Edgar G. Ulmer meets Bresson.
Tom tells his wife that he had a revelation and gave up violence. But clearly it is there still, the dregs of DNA or a cultural style left by so many movies. If ever there was a picture that needed a sequel this is the one. For after Tom has gone back to Philly, to his brother (William Hurt—of a scummy brilliance) and to triumph, who says the machine stops there? Who says he goes back to Indiana? He is the ideal brother to take over the violent business—his job interview eliminated the incumbent.
The precision and cold advance of this film are beautiful and enthralling. The use of actors is supremely intelligent. The photography (by Peter Suschitzky) is so restrained as to make you scream. That’s what it comes to: the math textbook tone and the material of trash—one of the best American films Canada has yet provided.
The Hit (1984)
There’s always been an engaging side to Stephen Frears that says, Really, there’s no need to make quite so much fuss about filmmaking—it’s not that complicated and needn’t be as strenuous or as earnest as many make it. In that light, The Hit is a kind of summer holiday movie in which some English attitudes and actors go to Spain for a few weeks to relax. But more than that, the Frears who had been raised in very good British traditions—low-budget television, documentary realism, and slices of uneventful life—seems to have realized on this project that he deserved an adventure.
Written by Peter Prince, The Hit has the notion of some iconic London underworld figure who has grassed (“We’ll Meet Again,” the crooks sing in court as he gives damning evidence). He goes off to southern Spain, boredom and ease, but he knows what’s coming: John Hurt and Tim Roth, two versions of nastiness, one educated, one not. They pick up the grass (the urbane Terence Stamp) and have to take him back to London, and apparent doom. They acquire “spitfire” Laura del Sol along the way, and why not? It would be a solemn attempt on this genre that didn’t include an unpredictable sexpot ready to scratch anyone’s eyes out. And the final touch of aplomb is that the Spanish policeman who makes a hunt of it all should be the very same Fernando Rey who had lately done drugs in New York and been humiliated in That Obscure Object of Desire.
The Hit is merry, spiteful, full of event, pretty to look at and listen to (Eric Clapton did some of the music), and it is quite an important step in the modern adoration of the criminal class in the new English film—you can see how much The Hit must have inspired Sexy Beast and other such pictures, even if Frears would always be too modest or ironic for, say, the unrestrained beastliness of Ben Kingsley in that film. Not that there isn’t enough to make enjoyment in Stamp, Hurt, and Roth. This picture did a lot to rescue Stamp from the inglorious coproductions to which his beautiful vacancy had led him. He found a comic edge in this character, just as Hurt for once was sober, lethal, and efficient. As for Roth, this was a movie debut, and it was evident that his promise would go far.
Finally, the intriguing point is the question of where Stephen Frears is most at ease. He has tried Hollywood, and had a few bruising experiences. He has proved himself, early and late, dealing with cycling clubs or 10 Downing Street, an expert eavesdropper on British society. The Grifters is a brilliant American film. And he found a nice part of himself in Ireland. In all that traveling, The Hit seemed to give him confidence and the urge to stretch his legs. It also revealed a dry, unsentimental fondness for character that could easily live on either side of the line of the law. The Grifters, for instance, could be called The Dreamers—and equally The Hit is A Hit.
Hitler, a Film from Germany (1980)
Was it a dream? If so, was it a nightmare of horrors, or a torrent of wonderful things? I am writing this essay in the first days of 2006, at a time when the filmgoer is supposed to be making his or her “top ten” list for the past year. Not for the first time, I find myself hard-pressed to recall films of the first quality. For instance, in 2006 there was a film called Babel, by Alejandro González Iñárritu, that proposed the novel platitude that we are all of us in one world, so that a shot fired in one continent echoes in another. And Babel is, I suppose, getting on for three hours in this blind mission. Yet people marvel and complain that this Hitler is seven hours long. Why complain, if something like a terrible and tormented century has been conveyed in just one night’s sleeping space?
Hitler may have exhausted its maker, Hans-Jürgen Syberberg. Being Hitler clearly had the same impact on Adolf. I met Syberberg only a few years after the film when he was still engaged on immense enterprises—like Parsifal—though nothing could compare in scope and power with Hitler. And Syberberg, a man of great charm, admitted without coyness to his own greatness and to the way he tended to tower over other filmmakers. It was all true, undeniable, and if any filmmaker had eyes, ears, and mind open, it was apparent that Hitler was doing everything in the space of one night. I mean “everything” in that it was digesting and presenting two histories: that of the world, and that of cinema. And if most people in Germany saw the work on television, then there was no getting away from the implication that television could hardly carry on afterward. Just as there must have been the intimation in 1941 for smart people as they saw Kane, that its all up—we can’t make movies anymore, so Hitler seems to declare a moratorium on television. For its great stew of news, entertainment, and commentary has made the poisoned Kool-Aid for the world. Talk about an educational experience!
Of course, television and film go on, though it becomes harder every year to believe that anyone in the process, filmmakers or viewers, really expects to be changed any longer. And the truth to this profuse but controlled anthology of Hitlerisms is that the epic theatrical form that Syberberg has put on film i
s finally a way of discovering the Adolf in every audience. Susan Sontag—whose commentaries on the film are vital—observed that Syberberg had converted Hitler into a filmmaker. The film was called Our Hitler in America—fair enough, clever enough—but another viable title is My World when the possession is Hitler’s.
You can discuss every strand of the history in the film—the actual events or the sickening way in which the circumstances of his doing and our watching indicate a terrible fascism in the nature of film itself. So Syberberg may be “over,” in the way some volcanoes are. But his orgy took film to its limits, too, and it is why the idea that we still make great films is a kindness, like telling our children everything will be all right—instead of “all right” will be everything.
Hoffa (1992)
Hoffa was a horrible failure: having cost $42 million, it earned only $24 million in the domestic market. There were plenty of explanations to choose from—the public had it in its head that Jimmy Hoffa, president of the Teamsters Union, was a bad man who deserved whatever he got. Beyond that, there was a widespread feeling in Hollywood of why draw attention to unions by making pictures about them? If God made a mistake, have the tact to leave well alone. And what was with this lugubrious narrative setup where Jimmy and his sidekick are waiting all day long at a roadhouse for destiny to arrive. Are they idiots, or what?
But then look at the stirring, nearly Soviet way in which director Danny DeVito can use a single, developing camera movement to shift from a small gathering of dissidents to a great surge of protest. The feeling for labor and union cohesion is extraordinary, and it’s in the mise-en-scène, the life and breath of the film. Again, look at the suspended, wordless scene where Hoffa returns from a great battle in a crowd of other people and the battered madonna figure of Karen Young attends to him—the suggestions of a love affair, but also of how her character is his conscience, are uncanny and beautiful. Look at the high comedy of the deer-hunting sequence. In all the union gatherings there is an implicit comedy of shady men being dumb boys together. This is a movie fully aware of how a great hero in labor can become corrupt, but faithful to the significance of unions in the history of so many American industries. The picture never excuses Hoffa or sentimentalizes him, but in its overall attitudes and in Jack Nicholson’s tough Irish snarl—don’t explain, don’t complain—it leaves us fully aware of what happened.
Edward Pressman produced this out-of-the-way project and David Mamet’s script is probably the best he has ever done for the movies in that it is loaded with humor and compassion. Stephen Burum did the photography, and he rises to every great challenge DeVito throws at him. But there’s the point to stress: This is a very well directed film, with a bold, forthright vision that could easily fit a much bigger name.
As for Nicholson, he was at a point where people were beginning to think he traded on just being Jack. But this is so tart and fresh a performance, so wiry, needling, and so set on an aggressive or unfriendly manner. It’s an irony that the people who did Nicholson’s makeup on Hoffa got nominated but not Jack himself, though it’s very clear that the makeup is a natural extension of attitude and thinking. DeVito plays the chief sidekick. Armand Assante has the right empty panache as the mobster, and then there are a host of beautifully judged performances: J. T. Walsh, John C. Reilly, Frank Whaley (the onlooker?), Kevin Anderson (as Robert Kennedy), John P. Ryan, Robert Prosky, Natalie Nogulich (the wife), Nicholas Pryor, Paul Guilfoyle, Karen Young, Cliff Gorman.
Hold Back the Dawn (1941)
We open on a working film set at Paramount: Mitchell Leisen is directing Veronica Lake and Brian Donlevy in a scene from I Wanted Wings. An unexpected visitor slips in, George Iscovescu (Charles Boyer), and at the lunch break he insists on telling Leisen his story. Iscovescu (a ballroom dancer) had found himself in Mexico trying to get into the United States. He is warned by the authorities that the “Iscovescu” quota is short of places. But his dancing partner, Anita Dixon (Paulette Goddard), tells him there is a way. He would have to marry an American woman. He looks up and there is Emmy Brown (Olivia de Havilland), a schoolteacher, leading a class day trip to Mexico.
Like a cad, George woos Emmy, who proves a simple and gullible woman. When he tells her he loves her, she wants to believe him. They are married. Emmy takes the kids back to California, while George refiles for immigration. Then Emmy returns—for her honeymoon. She is a changed woman already, but Anita tells her about the real George. Emmy pretends not to be upset, but she goes back to the United States in distress and is hurt in a car crash. George sneaks over the border to be with her. They are in love now, and he wonders if Mr. Leisen can help their cause by telling their story.
And Hold Back the Dawn turns out to be their story and a Mitchell Leisen picture from Paramount. It is one of his best (it was nominated for Best Picture), an adroit mixture of romance and social commentary coming from a film community that knew real stories of people denied visas and working papers (Billy Wilder’s included). It came from a short story by Ketti Frings (based in fact), and Arthur Hornblow produced it for Paramount, with a script by Charles Brackett and Wilder. Later on, Wilder would often complain that Leisen had spoiled or softened his scripts, but it’s easier to see how the Wilder of the 1940s might have made this a far nastier film. Whereas Leisen really liked people more than Wilder did, and knew the story had to have a happy ending and a reformed heel.
It was treated as a big picture. Leo Tover shot it, and he had a noir feeling. Robert Usher did the excellent sets (the picture is notable for its time in not making fun of Mexico or its people), and Edith Head made the clothes. De Havilland handles the shift from naïveté to beauty as the emotionally awakened woman (she got an Oscar nomination), and Boyer enjoyed playing the heel with a heart. But it’s the development of warmer feelings, and the sly growth of love, that marks Leisen, and as so often he uses an excellent supporting cast to build a community of needy people. Goddard is spunky and funny. Rosemary DeCamp excels as another refugee, and Walter Abel is outstanding as a lawyer. Also with Victor Francen, Nestor Paiva, Curt Bois, Eva Puig, and Madeleine LeBeau. Music by Victor Young.
Holiday (1938)
It’s a nice trick question: What’s the most sophisticated film Cary Grant and Katharine Hepburn made in 1938? And the answer is Holiday, which is really a new subgenre (of enormous promise) in which someone says, “Is this a comedy?” and the answer goes, “Only if you’re laughing.” As a piece of material, Holiday is very serious: It’s what are we going to do with life—is it a burden or a duty, or a holiday? Having its origins on the happy side of the Great Crash, Holiday is one of the most inspired ways of asking the rich in America, What are you going to do with it all? I first saw the film with Ivy League undergraduates in the late 1970s, and the sweet way in which their merriment turned quiet was to know just the questions these kids were asking themselves.
So Holiday was a play by Philip Barry that opened in 1928 (there was a 1930 movie, with Ann Harding as Hepburn—very worthwhile). In the play, Johnny Case (Ben Smith) is a success made from not much who is about to marry one sister, Julia, only to find that the other sister, Linda, is closer to him in philosophy. It’s important that Case is not of the monied class. He is an American newcomer. And his dealings with the sisters are a prototype of the comedy of remarriage: It’s also a pattern for the two sisters in My Man Godfrey.
The play did well enough (and a young Katharine Hepburn understudied in it), but this movie is a decade later and by then a lot had changed. The Depression had isolated the old rich and made their good intentions suspect. So Case now is not as wealthy—indeed, he’s an ordinary sort of fellow, and it is therefore just a little suspect that he has won the heart of the other sister to begin with.
The movie was scripted by Donald Ogden Stewart and Sidney Buchman, and it was mounted at Columbia, with nearly everyone out on loan. That may have added to the verve of Holiday, and George Cukor said it was one of his favorites in which he loved exploring Barry’s pe
netrating points made as light comedy. Grant and Hepburn developed their bond from Sylvia Scarlett—and the way they like each other’s oddness is vital. He does some physical comedy and she lolls around in mock solitude. In a quiet way, it’s very physical. Lew Ayres may never have been better as the smart, sad brother. Doris Nolan is so good as the jilted sister—and men were crazy about her. But then you’ve got the effortless byplay of Edward Everett Horton and Jean Dixon as Case’s friends. Horton was often made fun of by the movies so it’s good to see his decency. As for Jean Dixon, why did someone never make a movie that was just Dixon reflecting sotto voce on the action of idiots and bringing the house down?
Holiday was, in a way, a routine picture. Can you credit such brilliance as a routine thing? Can you really hide from the grandeur of smart comedy in all the Hollywood forms—or miss what has been lost?
Yes, they made Bringing Up Baby, too!
Hope and Glory (1987)
Now that the film is in the past nearly as much as the war it describes, John Boorman’s Hope and Glory is called warm, nostalgic, and a tribute to survival and conservatism in another age. But that’s not quite what it is. My sense of the film (especially the first part in more central London) is of the surprise, the marvel, and the spontaneity of the great fireworks show. People die in this blitz, to be sure. There is sudden damage. And the explosions are amazingly large. But still there’s a feeling for the great, unsignaled playtime of the war, especially for the kids—and John Boorman would have been seven in the summer of the Battle of Britain.
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