Into the Woods is an “attempt” to show the structures of fairy story and modern romance. It is as tricky and delicious a mix of show and show business as The Golden Coach. It is one of the masterworks in American culture and it is—quite simply—miles ahead of nearly all American movies made since 1987. If you doubt that sweeping statement, see it and get yourself a broom. If this is musical theater, then let us expand the definition of film enough to take it in.
The Intruder (2004)
Claire Denis was finishing one film, Trouble Every Day, when she happened to read a book by Jean-Luc Nancy, a philosopher, in which he described the “intrusion” of having had a heart transplant. Where does it come from? What does it bring? Where does its new life take you? Of course, you can be cold-blooded about it—you can say the heart knows no more history than a spleen or a metacarpal—but who can write a page of personal prose without using the heart as a measure of authenticity? What follows with The Intruder is a dense, enigmatic film, one of those movies open to infinite interpretation, yet a breathtaking example of modern cinema (and one that reflects Denis’s early admiration for Jacques Rivette).
Louis Trebor lives alone in the wild countryside of the Jura. He is played by Michel Subor (Godard’s Le Petit Soldat and the commandant in Denis’s Beau Travail). He is a loner, he is tough, and you can argue whether he has a heart. But his real heart lets him down so that he needs a transplant, and the old and the new both leave him in quandaries of desire. What is his past? He has traveled. He has sown his wild oats. He may have been a criminal, cruel, ruthless—he has a Swiss bank account and the instincts of a killer. He has Subor’s tanned, strained face: This is a man of rare ambition and hope.
Lest The Intruder seem too tidy, let me add that it has scenes in Geneva, Korea, and Polynesia as well as on the French-Swiss border. There is a murder and a search for revenge. There is a failed search for one son in a film that begins to persuade us that it could find a son anywhere. And throughout this, the style of the film goes from iron—to match Subor’s face—to silk, a material that can be folded in so many ways without ever picking up a crease mark. In other words, the manner with which The Intruder works is to accumulate possible plots as it goes. Only a few are actually explored—and the richness may make some viewers uneasy. But the openness is also a tribute to the poetry of the world. If it had just a touch of humor this might be a masterpiece.
As it is, I find it Denis’s most intriguing and rewarding film, and I should point out the contributions made by the photography of Agnès Godard and the music by Stuart A. Staples. Then consider the magical footage from Le Reflux (1962), an unfinished film—set in Polynesia—that Subor made with Paul Gegauff. Then the film is full of fiercely animated people, many of whom might be the center of larger movies. We only glimpse them, but we feel the expansive rooms behind them—Grégoire Colin, Florence Loiret-Caille, Katia Golubeva, Lolita Chammah, and Béatrice Dalle—to say nothing of some of the best dogs seen in recent cinema.
Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956)
A doctor, Miles Bennell (Kevin McCarthy), comes back to the small town of Santa Mira, where he lives. Santa Mira is tucked into the hills of California, a little sleepy, fairly prosperous, and white. He finds that several of his patients have unusual symptoms: People are reporting that some of the others in their lives are not quite themselves. You mean they’re sick? asks the doctor. No, comes the answer, just different. And so begins one of the best parables in American culture, the least crowded with special effects, but probably the most important sci-fi film of the 1950s. If you care to tell yourself this is the future rather than now.
It was a Walter Wanger production, directed by Don Siegel, with a script by Daniel Mainwaring adapted from a story in Collier’s by Jack Finney. And what it leads to is the entire population of Santa Mira being taken over by lifelike, yet lifeless imitations. Think of Bigger than Life (in the same year), and this is plainer than life—plus an excellent double bill. The oddest device in the story—it could be comic, yet it works very well—is that the bodies in waiting come in the form of pods. As the person sleeps, so the pod takes on final resemblance. In the big sleep, the one replaces the other.
Siegel turned this into an 80-minute suspense thriller, beautifully handled and judged—the moment when the doctor’s girlfriend (Dana Wynter) falls asleep is really heartbreaking and scary just because Ms. Wynter was always lovely but a touch hollow. And the cozy world of Santa Mira is very well used as the background.
At the time, there was wide debate as to whether the pods were a metaphor for Communists or anti-Communists—and in a way that confusion says it all about the 1950s. Seen now, the film’s focus has shifted and deepened: The pod people are those who would give up critical thinking, and human difference and flaw, for the smooth custard of uniformity. For that reason alone, it may be that every generation will want to redo its own Invasion. Thus Philip Kaufman did the story in the 1970s in San Francisco, and did it very well, with a lot of humor before the dread struck home.
I think the original is the best version, just because originality counts for so much, but it has to be said that Don Siegel—a self-effacing director—was a very smart man. The diagnosis of 1950s America here is balanced, cool, and adroit. Allied Artists found the finished film too frightening. It had ended with Miles in freeway traffic shouting, “You’re next!” at cars and at us. The studio asked for a framing device where Miles goes to an L.A. hospital and is told that everything is going to be all right. Just rest, he’s told—as if anyone ever felt happy about falling asleep in a hospital! The cast also includes King Donovan, Carolyn Jones, Larry Gates, Jean Willes, and even Sam Peckinpah in a small spot.
The Iron Horse (1924)
As he ranged far and wide in the making of The Iron Horse, the story of the transcontinental railroads, and as he naturally enough imitated some of the drinking habits of the railroad workers, John Ford found himself in Truckee, in California, just over the border from Nevada. There he bumped into Eddie Sutherland, known as one of the funniest and fastest-living Hollywood directors. Eddie was in Truckee because he’d been visiting a film set—fellow called Chaplin doing The Gold Rush. So Ford and Sutherland took over Chaplin’s room at the Summit Hotel, emptied it of all furniture, and filled the room with liquor bottles—empty ones. There’s something lovely about it—the way these kids were telling new stories of the West and having such a grand time doing it.
The railroads were a natural subject (and one that they keep going back to): how the Central Pacific and the Union Pacific railroads went all the way from Chicago to Sacramento and met up at Promontory Point in Utah on May 10, 1869. No group was more numerous in the labor gangs than the Irish, and Ford had relatives who had been there and had told him stories. But it was entirely Fordian to dream up the idea of having a young Abraham Lincoln (played by Reno businessman Charles Edward Bull) bless the union and smile over the introduction of so potent an artery. Indeed, Ford found ways of bringing in Buffalo Bill and Wild Bill Hickok and just about every other thing in the West he fancied. The result is a merry picture, very good-looking and more entertaining than The Covered Wagon from the previous year—but still a picture that only Ford maniacs and Western buffs can sit through.
Charles Kenyon and John Russell did the story, which is also bound to include a hero (George O’Brien), a railroad scout searching for the man who killed his father. Then there’s the romance which Fox believed Ford had neglected. So they took miles of close-up of the heroine (Madge Bellamy) and stuck it in wherever they felt the picture needed a sweetener. George Schneiderman was in charge of the handsome photography, with Burnett Guffey as his assistant (years later Guffey would shoot Bonnie and Clyde!). Ford’s brother, Eddie, was assistant director, and the story is that they had some terrific fights along the way.
But Eddie was hard-pushed, looking after 5,000 extras, 2,000 horses, and 1,300 buffalo—and keeping them apart. The shoot lasted ten weeks, in part because of blizzards
and the need to find the best vistas, but maybe because of the bottle situation—these were Prohibition years, but a film crew has always been a traveling town with its own laws. The picture cost just under $300,000 (less than half the bill for The Covered Wagon), and Fox would get rentals of $2 million. The cast also included William Walling, Fred Kohler, Cyril Chadwick, Gladys Hulette, James Marcus, Francis Powers, J. Farrell MacDonald, George Waggner (as Buffalo Bill), and John Padjan (as Wild Bill Hickok).
It (1927)
In 1927, and for a few years in that vicinity, Clara Bow had a case as the prettiest, the sexiest, and the nicest girl in Hollywood. It is a fair example of the very cautious limits to what the town could do with her—at least, on the screen. There are darker stories about how she was used in private, and they gather together the other rumors that Clara was mentally unbalanced. You’d never guess it from the screen: She has spunk, common sense, kindness, and practicality. And as with every girl that attractive, we want to know a lot more.
It is silent, and it is in many ways an exploitation of Elinor Glyn’s unremarkable divination that “It” was attractiveness plus—you could say it was sex, but in the American context it was more likely stardom, fame, or the thing that got you noticed. So the first sadness of the Bow films is the way her own cheery nature is used to mask or divert her sexuality.
In It, she is Betty Lou (not quite Lulu), who works in a big department store as a clerk and is candidly out to hook her boss, Waltham (Antonio Moreno), a dandy who looks half-afraid that Clara might devour him. Things are going well, and Clara has had Madame Glyn’s seal of approval, but then there’s “a terrible misunderstanding.” This kind of plotting dogged Clara Bow’s films—if only sometimes she had the right and the will to do the wrong thing and let the world shape up (like Mae West).
But Betty is mistaken for the mother of her roommate’s baby. (Gary Cooper has a small part as a reporter, leaning in the doorway and writing down the dirt. If only Clara had said, “I want him!”) So she’s a scandal now, and she quits her job. But is Clara down? No way. When she learns the truth from Montgomery (William Austin), Waltham’s swish assistant, she vows a little gutsy revenge. She’ll get Waltham to admit he loves her and then she’ll slap him in the face.
So Betty gets herself on Waltham’s next yachting trip—the boat is called the Itola! And it all works out the way she predicted, except that love intervenes. The boat has a collision and people are thrown overboard. Betty is soaked to the skin, and very nice, too, and it’s all going to be OK. Clarence Badger directed, and Elinor Glyn added her flashy signature to the script.
Bow was bursting for more, yet Paramount never really turned her loose. The kind of uninhibited sexuality that Louise Brooks delivered—in Germany—was always going to be out of Bow’s reach. You wonder what someone like a Sternberg or a Lubitsch even would have done with her. In close-up, she seems quick, thoughtful, and understated. Yet no picture ever really took her up on those offers. So It is just another version of a babe who wants to marry well and settle down—as opposed to having a life, a job, and a choice fit for a man.
The Italian Straw Hat (1927)
René Clair (1898–1981) was more than a star—he was one of those people who was cinema, at least until the 1950s. He was a hero, too, and a perfect cineaste: He had made his own puppet theater as a child; he had driven ambulances in the First World War, and been invalided out. He wrote poetry and acted a little, and he began as an artistic and experimental filmmaker—Paris Qui Dort and Entr’acte. Then as silence turned to sound he made a handful of exquisite comedies. He went to England and America and returned to France after the war. In his day, he was held in glory for The Italian Straw Hat (an international classic of silent film), Sous les Toits de Paris, Le Million, and À Nous la Liberté. And yet he is now as thoroughly in eclipse as any great name I can think of. And it’s a puzzle, for he seldom seems to have given offense.
The Italian Straw Hat “is very simply one of the funniest films ever made and one of the most elegant as well” (Pauline Kael, 1966). It comes from a play by Eugène Labiche and Marc Michel, first produced in 1895. It is a farce, in which the horse of a young groom eats a young woman’s straw hat as the groom is driving to his wedding. It turns out that the young lady with the hat was enjoying a romantic interlude with a friend. Now she must find a new hat to prevent her husband from being suspicious. And so, our would-be groom is diverted from his own wedding to preserve the illusion of another. Eventually, he will conduct the entire wedding party on a citywide search for just the right Italian straw hat.
Clair was both a Parisian and a fond historian of the movies, and the re-creation for this film (sets by Lazare Meerson) is a very fair approximation of what the city looked and felt like in year 1 of the cinématographe. In addition, the chase framework and the race against time permit a steady stream of ironic observations on the middle class, propriety, and marriage. Clair wrote and directed, and was plainly in love with audiences, laughter, and the new language of film. Yet he has been steadily dumped upon over the years as an inflated reputation hardly deserving of the place in film history that was once granted to him.
So let me say that The Italian Straw Hat now plays as more sustained hilarity than many things by, say, Chaplin or Keaton. In great part that is because it is not a comedy about self-pity or solitude, but a complete social observation in which the maturity of the gaze knows there is no need to spread the jam of sympathy or villainy on individual characters. Kael was right. This plays. It would be perfect accompaniment for a children’s party—or a wedding reception. It was redone in 1937 at the Mercury Theatre as Horse Eats Hat (with Joseph Cotten as the groom—and with music by Paul Bowles and Virgil Thomson), and it was one of their greatest successes. It is still available.
It Always Rains on Sunday (1947)
The title, spoken with a sigh, is so expressive of English pessimism and the conviction that bad luck is dogging one’s steps. The weather is beyond intervention, and it is far from religion. It is not necessarily a statistical reality so much as an emotional assertion about the way the one day a week that “lowly” people had off is traditionally marked by overcast skies and picnic-killing rain. Life in Britain in the late 1940s was, in some ways, tougher than it had been during the war. A camaraderie had existed then. Victorious, the British reclaimed their solitude or shyness. And the victors were rationed for years as they walked past unhealed bomb sites. That is the mood of Robert Hamer’s It Always Rains on Sunday, a picture that uses all the eloquence of film to express the standard British idea that belief in film fantasy is absurd.
Rose (Googie Withers) is a barmaid in London’s East End. She lives with her husband, George (Edward Chapman), an older man, and her stepchildren. She is steady but not happy. The marriage fulfills none of her need for love; indeed, she has learned to suppress that feeling, and never talks about it. Suppose she had gone with her former lover, Tommy (John McCallum), so much more daring and exciting than George, but in prison because of it. And then one day, she finds Tommy sheltering in the air-raid shelter (the war lives on) in the back garden. She takes him in, for he has escaped from prison. Without telling anyone in the household, she hides him and tries to smuggle him to freedom. But Tommy sees the danger he represents. He goes off, and he is captured. Rose tries to kill herself, and recognizes that family life will go on.
This was an Ealing film, derived from a novel by Arthur La Bern with a screenplay by Hamer and Henry Cornelius. A good deal of it was shot in the Bethnal Green area, with Douglas Slocombe doing the photography. In fact, there were reviews that remarked on the film’s gloom and set it in contrast with the “cheery” attitude of East Enders. No wonder the melancholy Robert Hamer sank a little and ended up an alcoholic. He is best known for the brilliant, sardonic period style of Kind Hearts and Coronets, but this is from his heart and it helped build the remarkable quality of British filmmaking in the years after the war. The one gesture away from strict realism is the sc
ore, by Georges Auric, which is a mordant link with the tradition of film noir in France. But It Always Rains on Sunday is a reminder that in noir it was possible to express a country’s sense of itself—a prospect less often envisaged in America.
The acting is outstanding, and a tribute should be paid to Googie Withers and John McCallum, married in real life, and happy exiles to Australia in the 1950s. Withers is the lead in another Hamer period piece of the same era, Pink String and Sealing Wax, and her sad, tight face was the image of numbed desire.
It Happened One Night (1934)
Night Bus, they were going to call it, full of foreboding. The people around Frank Capra at Columbia were convinced it was going to turn out badly. But It Happened One Night is one of the most important pictures ever made in America—not least, but not only, for the great boost it gave to Capra. For one thing, it was a comedy that turned out to be a big picture—and that still goes against the grain in Hollywood. For this would be the first occasion on which the Best Picture Oscar went to a comedy. More than that, the early sound comedies were very often pictures about the rich or the faux rich (like Trouble in Paradise, City Lights, and even the Marx Brothers movies). It Happened One Night smelled like a news story—it need not have been a comedy—in which the class distinctions of America were bridged as a newspaperman met an heiress, and proved smarter than she was. In other words, it was a comedy that spoke up for the common sense, the wit, the ingenuity, and the romantic readiness of the ordinary man. You could call it “sexiness,” and it transformed Gable’s fortunes and licensed his cocky grin.
'Have You Seen...?' Page 66
