'Have You Seen...?'

by David Thomson

  Worsley’s direction is not very inspired—it’s as if, early on, the way to use Chaney was to let him guide the film. And this Hunchback could use the real space of the cathedral better—the monster could be more agile. His strange sexiness lies there. And in the best versions of the story, Esmeralda usually reaches a kind of fascination with her dark dream. Charles Laughton is too masochistic perhaps—we feel his beast loves the whip by now. Years later, Anthony Hopkins caught the intelligent man. What a film it might be if Quasimodo had become the leader of the vampyres, say, a revolutionary figure ready to save Paris. Quasimodo and his brother, Boudu? Imagine a Quasimodo who works with the Resistance. It goes on. Depardieu could do it—but Belmondo, too.

  Hustle (1975)

  In thirty years, the Eastman Color has gone rancid, and Hustle never looked like anything except routine 1970s product. But it’s also Robert Aldrich, in Los Angeles again, twenty years after Kiss Me Deadly. And it’s a picture that says nothing has improved. At every turn, the story and the way of doing it gives off the smell of humiliation, compromise, and graft—it’s somehow a drab measure of those times that Burt Reynolds was a big star in 1975, and there he is playing a loser who has to listen to his call girl live-in, Nicole (Catherine Deneuve), making out over the phone with clients. But would he “look after” her? No, he can’t afford it. So the world goes round and everyone does the hustle.

  Aldrich is working this time from a script by Steve Shagan, and he may have had doubts about it. A girl’s body comes ashore at Malibu. It could be a drug suicide, but there’s semen in every orifice, and there are hints she knew a big-time lawyer, Leo Sellers (Eddie Albert). Reynolds and Paul Winfield are cops and partners and they investigate in a city where it’s hard to tell whether the chief of police (Ernest Borgnine) is more or less corrupt than Pasadena-based Sellers, who is also one of Nicole’s clients.

  The plot is intricate, and there’s a large slice of routine in it, as well as Burt’s dream of taking Deneuve to Rome one day. The casting is strange but effective: Reynolds is trying to get an Oscar; Deneuve is wondering about Hollywood. She’s at ease and he’s struggling. But this is not a picture where dreams come true. Far more effective—and carried in the mordant dialogue as well as the chic-ugly interiors—is the constant feeling of lives that the occupiers have sold out.

  So many elements of Kiss Me Deadly are missing—most of all the naked idiocy of the comic book, the strut of Mike Hammer, and the yearning for the end of the world. But still, Hustle has a special squalid pessimism and the casual sadomasochism that runs through it like dried blood, or semen. There’s a much better film here, I think, if the corruption is like a fur coat, and Nicole is an endlessly tradeable commodity in the sick city. But the frequent references to old movies and songs is a sign of Aldrich’s awareness that the code was cracked years ago. There’s about as little love for L.A. here as any film shot there can boast.

  It’s a letdown for Aldrich, but still it’s a mark of how dark he could be when he felt hopeless. And, needless to say, it’s something that got made in the 1970s which no one would dream of doing now. The Aldrich team is on board (Joseph Biroc on camera, Frank De Vol doing music, Michael Luciano the editor), and they must have winced to see the look of Kiss Me Deadly turned so sour. But if you want a film to show the ugliness of America at that moment, this is it. These days, of course, in a remake, the Reynolds carved out of plastic would play the Eddie Albert part. It doesn’t bear thinking about.

  The Hustler (1961)

  By the time of The Hustler, no one had much reason to anticipate fresh works from Robert Rossen. He had been blacklisted. He had produced films as obscure as Alexander the Great and as heavily labeled as Island in the Sun. They Came to Cordura was a painful, studied piece on heroism. Some people remembered that All the King’s Men had been a bad film, whatever its reputation. So there was little on the credit side but Body and Soul.

  What made The Hustler as surprising was the discovery that a pool table could hold us riveted for hours and that it was the natural cockpit for drama. All of that came from Walter Tevis’s novel, but Rossen had absorbed not just the game—he had learned character and real conflict from reading it. Thus the greatest pleasure: that at last someone had elected to make a picture about the handsome weakling lurking in Paul Newman. Nothing is as key to The Hustler as the moment where the George C. Scott character announces, “This boy’s a loser!” But that leads us to the maturity that can handle someone like Scott in a movie.

  Eddie Felson (Newman) is a pool demon and a hustler who is playing on the small-time circuit. The focus of this film is how he lives up to two challenges: meeting Bert Gordon (Scott), who offers to manage him in the big time; and falling in love with Sarah Packard (Piper Laurie), so much more of a woman than Rossen had ever tried before.

  The Hustler is one more of those beautiful films done in black-and-white CinemaScope, and the format suits the table just as the lighting revels in the grungy world of hotels, diners, and pool halls. The photography is by Eugene Shuftan, who had worked most recently for Franju. His contribution is enormous and must have offered hope to a design team that included Harry Horner and Gene Callahan. Rossen and Sidney Carroll did the screenplay, and this has to count as by far Rossen’s best and only major work. An intriguing question was how far his maturity had to do with the onset of an illness that would soon kill him.

  In theory, Eddie comes through—he grows up. In reality, he remains a loser, because the smirk of superiority and the grimace of self-pity in Newman are flip sides of one coin. Rossen had a theory that actors needed to find themselves in a part (he said that’s what happened with Broderick Crawford on All the King’s Men). In which case this picture was an ordeal for Newman—or was he pushed harder than usual by Laurie and Scott, both of whom are arresting and frightening in equal degrees?

  The other immense force in the film is TV comic Jackie Gleason as Minnesota Fats, the reigning pool champion. Gleason never mugs, never seeks a laugh. He seems filled with respect for the project. There are also good performances from Myron McCormick and Murray Hamilton and a grave score from Kenyon Hopkins. Dede Allen edited, and Willie Mosconi, another pool champion, was the technical adviser. Not that Newman and Gleason play a poor game.

  I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang (1932)

  Seventy-five years after it was made, I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang is still a slap in the face, exemplary as dramatized journalism, and enough to move any audience to anger and grief. You could redo it today, though the “I” would likely be a black character now. It remains a country where awkwardness is shut away and forgotten, or executed. America is still terrified of its own outcast energy. And every year, there are press stories of someone—old, retired, established, the Count of Monte Cristo—who is found out to be not what he said, but a fugitive from the thing called justice.

  The credits say, produced by Morgan Wallis, executive producer, William Koenig, directed by Mervyn LeRoy. None of which helps much. Of course, it was a Warner Brothers picture in the years when that studio was winning a reputation for doing crime pictures, or gangster movies. Yet this is an anticrime movie. It’s a tribute to all those unknown, unattained “I” figures in the prison scenes from big, violent pictures. The executives’ names don’t mean much. Mervyn LeRoy is considered a lightweight—he did Random Harvest, Madame Curie, and Little Women. But in the early 1930s he had a reputation for hard-hitting stuff: Little Caesar, Three on a Match, and Hard to Handle—one of the best “routine” Cagney pictures. So LeRoy was something then, but it’s more than likely that he was driven by the production chief at Warners, a name linked to good, honest work: Darryl F. Zanuck.

  This is what happens: James Allen (Paul Muni) comes back from the First World War. He gets a job in construction in the South, where he is tricked into joining a holdup. He is given a ten-year hard labor sentence. He serves on a chain gang and escapes after a year of brutality. He runs away to Chicago and sets up under a false identi
ty. But his landlady finds out. He has to marry her. When he finds another woman, the wife informs on him. He is sent back to the chain gang. He escapes again. He meets his true love. “How do you live?” she asks him—for he is like a beast. “I steal,” he says—and it is stark and straight into the camera, like a shot or that slap in the face.

  It was scripted by Howard J. Green and Brown Holmes and taken from a book, I Am a Fugitive from a Georgia Chain Gang by “Robert E. Burns.” That was an alias, actually paid by the studio—despite legal objections. Sol Polito did the photography, Leo Forbstein handled the music, Jack Okey was the art director.

  Paul Muni would soon enough earn the reputation of being a ham. But he is as big and human as “I” requires. It is a simple, raw performance, and it soars because of sound—because he can speak and think at the same time. It is a modern film because of that. In fact, it has survived far better than Little Caesar. The cast includes Glenda Farrell, Helen Vinson, Noel Francis, Preston Foster, Allen Jenkins, Berton Churchill, Edward Ellis, and David Landau.

  I Am Cuba (1964)

  From the first shot, as a transcendent camera tracks over a black molasses sea and comes to an island where the palm trees seem frosted, or like ghosts on the shore, I Am Cuba is a giddy piece of self-expression desperate to go to any extreme it can think of. There are plenty of underwater shots, and for the rest it feels like swimming through humid air or thinking of sex. As the film progresses, you may be reminded of Que Viva Mexico as done by Oliver Stone, or Touch of Evil’s delight in rancid frontier passages. Every obvious point of reference is stylistic and personal to the point of self-indulgence, and yet there’s no way to describe the film except as a rhapsody on the themes of Cuban vitality and liberty. For this is a film in four movements that goes from the decadent fleshpots of Havana under Batista to the gathering of insurrectionaries in the mountains. You know the judgment you’re meant to pass—but you want it all, as in a holiday of the senses.

  The history is as astonishing as the film. It was made in 1964 (i.e., just two years after the Cuban missile crisis) as a coproduction of Cuba and Russia, but with a Russian crew. The script was by the Cuban Enrique Pineda Barnet and the Russian poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko, and the film was directed by Mikhail Kalatozov (director of The Cranes Are Flying and The Letter That Was Never Sent). Both countries regarded the frenzy of its filmmaking with alarm: In Cuba it was written off as I Am Not Cuba, and in Russia it was dismissed for stylistic formalism. Nobody wanted to know. But then in the early 1980s, Bill Pence and Tom Luddy secured a print for the Telluride Film Festival—and all of a sudden audiences and filmmakers were going crazy for its orgy of imagery. In time, the officials behind the film found some compromise, and they yielded to its great success—though Yevtushenko was always a little bitter about being involved with such “kitsch propaganda.”

  In truth, the film is far more radical and lush than Kalatozov’s other feature films. You have the feeling of a Soviet crew surrendering to the light of Cuba, the music, the bodies, and celebrating them all in some of the most sinuous and dream-ridden shots of all time. It adds up less to the politics of Castro than to a profound, tourist poetry with many hints at the underground marvels to be seen and heard in Cuba. The film feels drugged, with movement and skin tones as its chief stimulants. And just as it is a very difficult film to convey, or to imagine before you see it, so it hardly subscribes to the matter–of-fact strain of “documentary.” Cuba is a dream. You can argue that it takes the visual beyond the point of reason and that the film is finally a kind of musical cry on behalf of Cuba and those drunken poets who love the place.

  If… (1968)

  David Sherwin and John Howlett wrote a script called Crusaders in 1960. It was about life in a British public school. They sent it everywhere they could think of, and Seth Holt saw it and felt that Lindsay Anderson might be the director for it. If Anderson was interested in directing, Holt would produce. Anderson met with the writers and gave them notes toward a new draft. Holt and Howlett fell away, but Sherwin and Anderson gathered steam, in part because they both loved Jean Vigo’s Zéro de Conduite and saw it as a model. The script was becoming more epic, more surreal, less English, less authentic. But the spirit of anarchy was moving in it.

  But then Albert Finney heard about it. Rich from Tom Jones, he had formed a company, Memorial Enterprises. His partner, Michael Medwin, went to New York and persuaded Charles Bluhdorn of Paramount to front $600,000 to make it (this despite the fact that Paramount in London had already turned it down). Sherwin then came up with the title If, from Kipling, and Anderson added the three dots.

  They used Cheltenham College—Anderson’s old school—for the basic exteriors, and they went to work with Miroslav Ondrícek, filming it in color and black-and-white (the latter because he was uncertain about the color image inside the chapel). They found twenty-four-year-old Malcolm McDowell to be the sixteen-year-old imp of rebellion, Mick Travis. Anderson was said to be never happier than on the film, and it is the one project rooted in a credible situation that reaches his dreamed-of lyrical and surrealist manner. Moreover, it is rare among public school films in that it has a true loathing of its subject, and not a glimmer of a tranquilizing nostalgia. Stephen Frears was an assistant director on the film, and it’s worth noting that his film The Queen—funny as it is—turns full circle and finally evokes sympathy for the benighted monarch, leaving republicanism stranded. If… leaves no stone unturned—literally, it uses machine guns upon the enemy. You can call that a dream, but you can smell the death.

  The film won the Palme d’Or at Cannes, despite being disowned by some British authorities and called a disgrace to the nation. It even made money. McDowell was never more natural, or more likely to make it as a movie star. The cast also included David Wood, Richard Warwick, Robert Swann, Christine Noonan (in a great sex scene), Arthur Lowe, Graham Crowden, Peter Jeffrey, Mona Washbourne, and Simon Ward.

  Forty years later, the English public school survives (and is still largely a place of privilege). The three dots that Anderson added to the title can stand for the threshold to fantasy, or an encouragement to everyone to keep hoping that the walls come tumbling down one day. Lindsay Anderson, meanwhile, a prickly, insecure talent, but someone who was an English example for a couple of decades, never made a film again that felt so right or such a happy mixture of wrath and absurdism.

  I Know Where I’m Going (1945)

  Joan Webster (Wendy Hiller) is a modern young woman who is engaged to be married to Sir Robert Bellinger, the head of Consolidated Chemicals. Ostensibly this is the brave new world that was supposed to follow the war, uniting big business with a smart young mind. Suffice it to say, Bellinger never actually makes an appearance—we do hear him, crackly on the radio, unable to get there yet, and it is the voice of Norman Shelley, so blimpish that he would play Pooh and Dr. Watson on radio in later years.

  The big thing in I Know Where I’m Going is the “there,” the Scotland of the islands, the Celtic archipelago, the fringe where hard common sense joins hands with myth and magic. Joan makes her way north, and on the train she has one of those Powell-girl dreams in which the landscape is a tartan rug shifting like the sea. (It is a part of the mythology here that the land has attributes of the ocean—including storms, calms, shorelines, and whirlpools—Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger do not make a travelogue in this film so much as an evocation of the allegorical forces in water.)

  In the north, Joan finds a new world that is an old one—and as so often in the Powell-Pressburger films the great new challenge comes in standing up to an old order or tradition. Sir Robert actually owns the lands that once belonged to the Lord of Killoran, Torquil MacNeil (Roger Livesey), who has fought the war at sea—as opposed to consolidating chemicals. He was so broke that Bellinger got his property. But there will be a fair exchange: for Killoran will get Bellinger’s wife-to-be.

  They went north—to Mull and Tobermory, actually—with Erwin Hillier doing the black-and
-white camerawork. But Alfred Junge then re-created many parts of Scotland in the studio on sets, in a story where the characters must survive tests and ordeals (as in fairy tale) to deserve the right to know where they are going. Indeed, the confidence of the title and its song are actually belied by a gambling uncertainty.

  During the filming, Powell fell in love with Pamela Brown, who played Catriona, a girl led on by wolfhounds: He saw “a spectacular young actress with resplendent chestnut hair to her shoulders, and great liquid eyes full of disdain, that could dart a glance backwards like a nervous thoroughbred. She was tall, with a long back and lovely legs, crossing the stage with swift strides and a queer long gait as if she were a cripple and trying to hide it.”

  You can cherish cinema, and the piercing impact Brown makes, but Powell could put her in words, too. It’s a film in which you feel the love for the people, so it’s the place to remark on how superb Roger Livesey was for Powell. Hiller might have felt hurt, or shunned. In fact, her gradual discovery of instinct within common sense is still the engine of the picture. The cast also includes George Carney, Walter Hudd, Duncan MacKechnie, Ian Sadler, Finlay Currie, Murdo Morrison, C. W. R. Knight, Jean Cadell, and a young Petula Clark.

  Illustrious Corpses (1976)

  This is the last part of Francesco Rosi’s informal trilogy of the 1970s in which he gradually allows the tide of paranoia and uncertainty to invade every institution of society. With The Mattei Affair and Lucky Luciano, he had taken real cases and historical figures to demonstrate the difficulty of any investigative process emerging with reliable truth. And here, in the finale, he stages a completely fictional inquiry in which finally society concludes that the leading investigator had gone mad. Thus, his death ends the process and his unsoundness leaves us free to ignore his findings.