Of course, the real breakthrough was in the digitization of computer-generated imagery so that a drawing of a dinosaur could be animated to produce lifelike locomotion. It was Muybridge again and flicking the pages fast enough to get the feeling of the naked woman opening an umbrella—except that in this case it was a prehistoric creature chasing theoretical movie stars (in the very same year that Spielberg had the Gestapo chasing Jews—a short film on crosscutting could easily show the similarity of the dynamic).
Was it amazing? Yes, it was, and instantly dull. I would dare point out that the invention of the movies themselves was sometimes regarded in the same way. For instance, Virginia Woolf, who lived through their very invention, and who was a person with a considerable interest in narrative, character, and what we may call the depths of being, noticed quite quickly that the cinema was both miraculous and boring. Jurassic Park contains wonders (along with the threat of greater ones yet), but it still comes down to Lord Attenborough as a benign but daft master of creation.
Whereas, in 1912, Arthur Conan Doyle wrote a novel, The Lost World, in which four men—two scientists, a game hunter, and a journalist—go off to explore a plateau in South America where the past has been preserved. I recall it as a reading experience to treasure, amply informed with scientific research and Doyle’s great energy, and founded upon four interesting and very different characters. It also had the great idea—later employed by King Kong—of one specimen at least being brought back to civilization (or the Royal Albert Hall).
Jurassic Park does not really have characters. One reason why the animals are the hit is that they know melodrama drives them. The people here are puffy and vague with explanations of silly points of view. They are Sam Neill, Laura Dern, Jeff Goldblum, and so on, and they seldom achieve rapport with a monster (in the way Naomi Watts does in the third King Kong). It was a sensation when it opened (budget $63 million; gross income $914 million), but I doubt today that one kid would lift a fat thumb in its favor. Show me marvels—before I sleep.
Kameradschaft (1931)
Before the First World War there was a French mining disaster at Courrières so drastic that German miners from only a few miles away had come to help their colleagues. In 1931, G. W. Pabst saw it as a splendid opportunity for the widespread liberal sentiment that former foes should find common cause, and so he made a film, set after 1918, in French and German versions, simultaneously—Kameradschaft in the German version and La Tragédie de la Mine in the French.
Shut up in the dark of the movies, we are prey to claustrophobia—a great deal of suspense or horror depends on it, not to mention trapped submarine movies, locked-room ordeals, and collapsed mines or people who simply cannot muster the will to leave a dinner party. Kameradschaft in all its versions was a major event at a time when most of the world mouthed such easy opinions as “It must never be allowed to happen again.” The “it” in that case was a renewal of military hostilities—not the chance that in a tragic disaster different countries should aid each other. The really heartbreaking story on this point of view would be a movie about Christmas Day 1914—the first Christmas of the Great War—when, apparently, British and German soldiers sang carols across no-man’s-land and then came out into the open to share Christmas dinner and play a game of soccer. And then, when Christmas was over, they went back into their trenches and picked up their guns. That incident is at least as human as the basis for Kameradschaft and a good deal sadder.
But Pabst had strong international support—it was a very easy endorsement. His script was written by Ladislaus Vajda, Karl Otten, and Peter Martin Lampel, after an idea from Otten. The photography was by Fritz Arno Wagner and Robert Baberske, and the magnificent and extended mine-shaft sets were by Ernö Metzner and Karl Vollbrecht. Indeed, if the mines in France had been made as securely as the sets for the movie in Germany, maybe the disaster could have been averted.
There was this side to Pabst: He had made Westfront 1918, too, a heartfelt plea to sensible people about the foolishness of war. But all people are sensible until they are not, and it’s intriguing that the Pabst films that have best stood the test of time are the ones that see and feel the internal confusions in people—Pandora’s Box, Diary of a Lost Girl, The Joyless Street, and Secrets of a Soul. Pabst had lived in Vienna and read Freud: Contradictory passions were meat and drink to him, just as they are more fruitful material for films than sane and pious ideas that win the support of every right-minded person in the abstract. So the film ends with miners from both sides telling each other that “gas and war are the only enemies.” But the conversation is flat and captionlike, and it shows Pabst’s odd reluctance to explore talk. He loves the underground noises as communication is attempted, but he’s far less inspired at having “enemies” talk like potential friends.
Key Largo (1948)
What they did to Maxwell Anderson’s play Key Largo is a sign of how high and mighty they reckoned they were. And it was John Huston who did it. Key Largo opened on Broadway in November 1939. Its central figure is King McCloud (Paul Muni), who urges his group of men to desert during the Spanish Civil War because the cause is lost. Beset by guilt, back home in America, McCloud determines to visit the families of his lost comrades. So he visits one family in the Florida Keys and finds them under threat from gangsters. Cynical, at first, and detached, he feels compelled to join in the fight and is killed saving the family.
It was a Warner Brothers picture, with Jerry Wald producing and Huston looking to end his Warners contract. Richard Brooks was the assigned writer, and he and Huston agreed that the play—in blank verse—was a bit of a bore. Huston challenged Brooks to find some way of making it interesting. So they made the hero a veteran from World War II coming to the Keys to meet the family of a fallen comrade. That’s how they smuggled in a love story. But he discovers that the hotel the family runs is held up by gangsters waiting for a payoff. So it’s that old wartime spirit against modern criminal corruption.
The writers had been to the Keys to soak up atmosphere and gamble, but Warners preferred to shoot almost all the picture in Burbank. So they were fortunate to have Karl Freund there to cook up the stormy atmosphere, inside and out. Freund concentrated on the fleshy tones, the sweat and the threat of a hurricane, and he did wonders in photographing the chief gangster, Rocco (Edward G. Robinson—smoking a cigar in his bath), who looks, in Huston’s words, “like a crustacean out of its shell.” There’s also a hushed moment when Rocco leans into Lauren Bacall’s ear and whispers filthy sexual suggestions, not heard, but spelled out in the grossness of his face and the tremor of her mare’s nostrils.
The gangster is based loosely on Lucky Luciano, and he has a mistress, Gaye Dawn (Claire Trevor), whose fallen status is touching. There’s a moment when Rocco makes her sing “Moanin’ Low” to get a drink—and then denies it. The Floridians are Lionel Barrymore in a wheelchair as the father of the hero, and Bacall as his widow. The other hoodlums are Thomas Gomez, Marc Lawrence, Harry Lewis, and Dan Seymour, and Jay Silverheels can be seen playing an Indian. The guy back from the war, McCloud still, is—of course—Humphrey Bogart.
In fact, Huston allows Bacall and Bogart to be overshadowed. They get very little warmth or fun. They have only a few routine stiff-upper-lip scenes. There’s far more attention on Rocco and Gaye, no matter that Robinson was reluctant to hit up the old clichés. But he is very good and the best source of energy in the film. In his book, Huston recalled Key Largo getting a Best Picture Oscar nomination. It didn’t—that was Treasure of the Sierra Madre (a far better movie). But Claire Trevor did win for Supporting Actress. Max Steiner did the score.
The Killers (1946)
The Hemingway short story (written in 1926) hangs there in the night like a cold moon: Two thugs hold up a diner, intending to kill Ole Andreson when he comes in to eat his usual dinner—this in a small town, nowhere, but Nick Adams is there to see it all and remember the thugs’ poised talk and the sinister rhythm of their stay. They depart and Nick
goes to warn Ole. But the Swede is impassive. Sooner or later, he seems to say, he’s going to get it. So where should he go to be safe? That cold moon is going to be watching. You eat your dinner and wait your time, and in the end the gunfire will come as a relief after the grating menace of the way the thugs talk.
So what happened, and how is the Swede so young and healthy and so down in the dumps that he’ll take what’s coming? Very seldom before had a full film thought to take off from the germ of an earlier story, and even if Anthony Veiller and an uncredited John Huston aren’t Hemingway, they made a pretty good shot at the backstory. So good that when you see it laid out you’re going to say, Well, I could have guessed that. Because according to the noir standards of the day, the Swede—he’s no longer Swedish in the movie, he’s Burt Lancaster—fell for one of those beautiful girls the whole world knows you can’t trust, Kitty Collins was her name, and Ava Gardner got the part.
The Hemingway story, strangely, remains more visual, and more of a movie, just because it isn’t explained. You can see the tense hour at the diner so well, and William Conrad and Charles McGraw are matchless as the double act, the killers. They don’t kill anyone in the story, but that’s why you take them seriously. That, and the scarring impact they make on the conventional or undeveloped mind of the law-abiding Nick, the kid who needs to work out where and what these dark angels came from. And how they learned to talk like ruined comedians.
So the plot of The Killers feels mundane and pedestrian, even if Edmond O’Brien does a busy and vaguely plausible job as the insurance investigator who needs to know. And cameraman Woody Bredell busts his britches to give you every noir effect in one movie and to convince you that, sure, he read the Hemingway story and he really “saw” the whole thing. The Killers is a classic movie of its kind, and really no one ever did such things better than Robert Siodmak or with a more equable, self-effacing manner. If there was an inch more of ego in Siodmak he’d be far more famous. As it is, it’s just that he made half a dozen fascinating and near-faultless films. He gets the masochistic fatalism and somehow he got the burstingly robust Burt Lancaster to see it, too, and to settle for living in the sad sigh that always lurked in Burt’s voice and his hurt eyes.
But if you really need to think highly of the film, don’t reread the story.
The Killers (1964)
Why would I rather see this, the 1964 television remake, in drab red-sauce color, than the magnificent Siodmak-Bredell original? Well, you can call it perversity, and I can hear the dirty-minded whispers that this guy could never resist five minutes of Police Woman just because Angie Dickinson was in it. We’ll come to that. Meanwhile, I have a nice high-minded and quite intellectual answer.
The TV Killers never set out to be a classic, whereas the 1946 film felt loaded down with class from the start. And whereas in the original, Burt Lancaster is an undeserving victim for the killers, in the later version no one is going to fret at the thought of John Cassavetes getting offed. One tense grin from Cassavetes and he was living on borrowed time, and in this picture he plays a nasty, self-centered idiot who has notions of being a tragic hero. For myself, I admire the way Roman Polanski took one look at Cassavetes’s tragic side and cast him as the devil’s henchman.
But the real coup of the TV version is the boldness that realizes it’s a story about the two thugs—Conrad and McGraw in the original—two heavy suits who seem doomed to drive the highways of America, waiting their time at unappetizing diners with their lethal small talk for rosary beads. And for TV, director Don Siegel (a very smart guy whenever he was under absurd pressure) had Lee Marvin and Clu Gulager, in love with each other and their Beckett-crossed-with-Benny backchat. They are the center of the film, and that is enough to excuse the inert texture of the 64 Killers. There really are matters of content in stories that have to be honored. And what the 1946 movie never grasped (it’s there in the title!) was that the two visitors were the kick.
In the TV version, they become the engine of the film, just as they are—if you like, or even if you don’t like—crusaders on their mission. And Siegel is decisive about it: He knows in the end that once his killers become characters then they have to die too—don’t minimize the impact this film had in establishing the “Lee Marvin” image in the fragile mind of Marvin himself. You can still see how much he loves every step and grunt of his journey, and here at last a new type is emerging in noir, the dutiful killer.
With that established, you can turn to the incredible casting of Angie and Ronald Reagan as the vicious lovers who do such dirt on poor John Cassavetes. Here are bedmates from opposite ideas of the bed, and we can feel how they grate and nag on each other so that finally—in one of the few authentic gestures of his career—Reagan reaches out and slaps Angie. That scene could last a lot longer without any referee I know intervening. But when Reagan and Angie are “together,” I can’t think of a more persuasive proof of how much winning and money mean in America.
The Killing (1956)
The horse is named Red Lightning. He will be shot on the far turn. At the same time there will be a staged fight in the racetrack bar. The cops will go to the bar, attention will go to the far turn. And that’s how a heist operation will take sacks of money out of the racetrack, the sacks tumbling through the air so a crooked cop can put them in the trunk of his car and get away. The whole thing should work like clockwork, because Sterling Hayden has planned it all out and hired the perfect men for every job. Except that there are no perfect men.
So, long ago, when he was hardly out of Look magazine as a red-hot journalistic photographer who did human interest the way some lawyers follow ambulances, Stanley Kubrick had a debut film to knock your eyes out. It still does the trick, with a grinding voice-over commentary and lovely little switchback flashbacks. Jim Thompson is alleged to have done some of the dialogue, and you hope he did the sour back talk in the Peatty marriage—that’s Elisha Cook as George and Marie Windsor as Sherry, about as humanly interesting as chop bones left overnight on a plate. There was always a way Kubrick had of snapping human vitality just at the instant where you felt life was going to be replaced by a fresh corpse, still warm and fragrant. You can smell Sherry’s lipstick and George’s flop sweat.
The Killing is extremely cut-and-dried. Intellectually, Kubrick’s scenario allows the need for chance, but you feel he has had that fusspot little dog in training all the time so it will escape its owner and run out onto the tarmac, so the luggage handler swerves and the big suitcase bounces on the ground and—bingo!—there’s the money eddying around in the slipstream of a patiently waiting jet. In other words, Kubrick knows luck or chance about as well as he knows true love or warmth in a woman.
But the panache of the film is irresistible, and Kubrick finds time to dig up a lot of hard-luck stories in his strange male cast—from Jay C. Flippen, never more wheedlingly gay, to Timothy Carey, a fuckup with his gun and his perfect parking place, about the last hiring a real boss would ever make. Never mind, we love them all—Vince Edwards, Ted de Corsia, Joe Sawyer, and Kola Kwariani, who tosses cops around as if they were dolls. And since reason dictates that the film can’t be simply the Peatty hell, and since 1956’s taste would have forbidden a glimpse of their congealed sex acts, then it’s no bad thing to have enough diverse characters to make the 84 minutes slip by.
But that doesn’t give enough credit to Sterling Hayden’s fine Johnny Clay, diligent, patient, a diplomat, a manager, a dreamer, the guy who had it all worked out. It’s only after a good dose of guys like Johnny that you understand why and how the only people Kubrick ever trusted were flat-out crazies, like Jack Torrance.
Kind Hearts and Coronets (1949)
Start obliquely: How nice it is that the photography on The Servant (in which a sharp eye cannot miss the ooze of social putrescence) was handled by Douglas Slocombe, the very man who had photographed Kind Hearts and Coronets nearly fifteen years earlier and given it such mourning undertones—never say that photographers do not
have themes or motifs. For while there is a sturdy English defiance of deep truth that says, Oh yes, Kind Hearts is a very funny film, don’t let yourself settle for the jollity. Yes, it is funny, but haven’t we learned yet that good comedy is a very serious matter, and generally the most confounding and subversive way of dealing with important issues?
So, let us be clear, coming to its climax in the year 1902, Kind Hearts and Coronets is insurrectionary and quite prepared to murder the members of the upper class if political reform can find no other way. This is an immense celebration of the upstart spirit and the way a “Louis Mazzini” raised on Balaclava Avenue, in southwest London, can take Chalfont Castle by the inspired process of killing off every prior claimant. Nor should it be missed in this story that our Louis (the magnificent Dennis Price) is altogether the best-spoken and most aristocratically behaved person in sight. I think it’s also essential to note the degree to which Price and Louis resemble or invoke Oscar Wilde (who had died in 1900).
In 1949, probably, very few people read Kind Hearts clearly enough to note that Louis was gay—though nowadays I think Price’s performance can leave little doubt, just as it is evident that the film enjoys the charms and the menace of womanhood. This attitude is not malicious, or politically incorrect, merely competitive—and the only reservation in the film, I think, is that in all his gallery of D’Ascoynes Alec Guinness doesn’t get the chance to be an attractive young woman, a sexpot.
Of course, it was directed and cowritten by Robert Hamer (the other writer was John Dighton), and it is high time that Hamer—uneasily upper class, secretly gay, publicly alcoholic—be recognized as one of the most impressive of English directors from this rich period. And in the context of Hamer’s work as a whole, with its interest in the working classes and in murder as a social resolution, it’s easier to see the contempt within the satire of Kind Hearts. At the time, and thereafter, the film was known for Guinness and his eight D’Ascoynes, but next to the subtle playing of Price, Guinness was surely meant to address the English fondness for feeble impersonation and indulged eccentricity. So one of the ironies to the movie is its being known as a Guinness picture.
'Have You Seen...?' Page 70
