'Have You Seen...?'

by David Thomson

  If I do the crazy thing myself, by choice, am I really mad yet? Don’t dismiss the case—it is the story of the scorpion and the frog. Perhaps it is just being in Boston.

  Anyway, it happens, and Cohn says he must use Rita, too, Rita Hayworth, that second wife, if only because there will be frisson in putting the couple together. Does Rita wonder if this means Orson still loves her? (No one has ever suggested that she wandered away from their marriage.) Welles would say he wrote the part first for Barbara Laage, a new amour, but it’s hard to watch the film without feeling the pangs of regret and revenge over the old one. It depends on how seriously Orson ever regarded a woman. As with the cooking of soft-boiled eggs, the margin is fine.

  So here we are in Central Park, where an Irish seaman you’d need to be mad to hire, Michael O’Hara (I spy Orson), saves a lady in distress—that’s Elsa Bannister—and soon he is hired to take the Bannister yacht over the seas—that’s Arthur Bannister (Everett Sloane), a crippled lawyer, and his pal George Grisby (Glenn Anders), who is a crooked lawyer’s straight man—as straight as a pretzel.

  It’s a film of explosions, and there’s a great moment in the bright sun of Acapulco when Grisby talks lovingly about the Bomb to come—ultimate explosion. The other sunspots include Elsa’s blonde hair, the insane upheaval of the court case, the madness of hiring a man to kill you, that sea dark with blood where the sharks fight, and the hall of mirrors finale where everyone is shooting themselves.

  It was a failure, and it lost a lot of money—but those are sensible, practical objections to what is a glorious rotting mess, the dump outside town, always seething with fire. William Castle helped, with Charles Lederer and Fletcher Markle and several cameramen. The novel was actually called If I Die Before I Wake—that’s what Orson said over the phone. And can’t you hear If I Die Before I Wake—or If I Go Crazy Before I Put On the Act? It’s the same exultant frenzy. So, please, dear God, don’t ever let anyone clean it up the way “Orson really wanted it.” It’s the way he meant it already, a vital mess, like your last guts heaved up in your bed beside you. The last thing you see.

  Lady of the Night (1925)

  This film was only recently discovered and made available by Turner Classic Movies (generally a friend to all film scholars and moviegoers). It was one of seven films from 1925 that star Norma Shearer, and it comes from the recent Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer amalgamation under the heading “Louis B. Mayer Presents.” But, of course, Irving Thalberg was already at the studio, and already taking an unusual interest in Ms. Shearer.

  But in this case, each executive could have his movie star, for this is a story (by Adela Rogers St. Johns) in which Shearer plays two roles: Florence, a rich woman, with a veil over her hair; and Molly, a street girl, with a sideburn kiss curl and lips twice as large as Florence’s. Of course, it is positively the same actress playing both parts, and, apparently, in the few scenes where they actually meet, a girl named Joan Crawford was the rearview stand-in. And as Joan might have said, she’d hugged the good girl and the bad in Shearer and didn’t know which was which.

  In truth, however, I think Shearer was more suited to silent acting than sound pictures. Born in 1900, Norma was raised in the silent “attitude.” Even now, it is not that easy to conjure up her voice. And there is plenty of onscreen evidence to suggest that she worked her face more boldly when she could not speak. For instance, as Molly here Shearer has a vigorous gum-chewing habit that works very well. But it’s hard to think of a talking picture where she feels as able to be as active. Again, when we first see Molly in Lady of the Night, it is a stark close-up in early morning light. The actress has only a little makeup, and the impression of a raw presence is startling and exciting. It suggests, too, that director Monta Bell—who did several pictures with her—was someone whose help she valued.

  So this is a very effective melodrama—as played by TCM—it has a piano accompaniment by Jon Mirsalis which is proficient but routine. That tinkling piano and the color tinting of sequences seem to me debilitating “extras” in silent film that actually detract from the best things—like the black-and-white photography and the ability (clearly possessed by Bell) to give a quick, vividly composed shot, full of meaning, and to advance on it. But the sequencing here—the notion of dramatic development—never gets past the posing of essentially still shots and the taking up of brave close-up attitudes. In other words, silence stilled movement—in American films more than in European—and so Shearer is often left looking and feeling like a promising statue.

  There’s no question that Bell was a subtle director—but nothing to match Applause (which Bell produced and Rouben Mamoulian directed). So just as Lady of the Night increases one’s interest in Shearer, still it points to a terrible limitation in the silent mode. The story is trite—as if the people working on the picture were still uncertain that it could be profound.

  The Lady Vanishes (1938)

  Although the prewar economics of a Gainsborough picture shot in Islington meant that many of the railway shots are toy trains, or a set on rockers, it’s hard to argue that Alfred Hitchcock was encumbered or restricted at this stage of his career. Indeed, he had virtually pioneered the comedy suspense film and given a few hints already that—from his point of view—a big part of the fun was the way in which he could startle the suckers (us) and make them jump with “pure cinema.” The Lady Vanishes has comedy or irony at so many of its sharpest points—a nun in high heels? a message fingered on a steamy window that will fade away? to say nothing of the idea of Michael Redgrave as some kind of musicologist swapping flirtatious insults with a very gutsy and sexy Margaret Lockwood (who said Hitch could only imagine doing it with blondes?).

  Of course, there is an icy warning in this film—that even the most joyous English amateurism has no idea of just how deadly the mounting threat in Europe is. Sometimes, admirers claim that Hitchcock took his family off to America while still uncertain about what was going to happen in Europe. It’s not possible to be so charitable after you’ve seen The Lady Vanishes, a picture that has no doubt about the German intent or the British vulnerability. Beneath the comedy and the despairingly fond regard for English eccentricity (especially in the Basil Radford and Naunton Wayne team, dreaming of cricket and hardly seeing the deadlier game), The Lady Vanishes is aghast at British complacency (the real butt of this attack is the Cecil Parker character, who can hardly believe he has been shot).

  The script was by Sidney Gilliat and Frank Launder, who launched their own production team on the strength of it. It is deliciously organized, and it’s a sign of how far Hitch himself always delighted in the crosscut from mystery to lucidity. He takes us on his ride with the teasing assurance that he can play us—for suckers first, and then smarties. And even in 1938, there was a kind of plot computer in Hitch’s head that knew all stories had been told too many times before, and all referred to one another. In other words, intrigue is like a pack of cards in which every deal is fascinating and hard to bring home as a contract.

  It’s also notable that while Hitch is scathing of British dullness, he doesn’t want to overthrow all the favored character types—so he relishes the notion of Dame May Whitty as a superspy, just as he appreciated the English capacity for game playing. Of course, there is real pain, too—sudden deaths, little bits of nastiness, and the real menace of Paul Lukas, quiet, polite, but too intelligent to be believed, and quite smart enough to pick English locks. Not that Hitch was single-minded about Germany: He had learned so much there and from the Mabusian atmosphere in Fritz Lang. But Hitch was also a comic, so as Lang and Hitchcock went to America, Hitch became a commercial genius, while Lang stayed desperately loyal to his cold art.

  The Last Emperor (1987)

  As a young man, and a friend of Pasolini’s, Bernardo Bertolucci had been of the left wing. There must have been a time, therefore, if he had ever considered filming the Chinese Revolution, when his heroes would have been the great leaders, or even the people. Instead, in 1987, he made
a true epic that rehabilitates a forgotten figure, Pu Yi, the child emperor, deposed as a young man, disgraced, and then put through the grind of thought reeducation, a nobody.

  The Last Emperor won Best Picture, along with a chess set of other Oscars—and there’s no doubt but that it does balance the personal and the national story with unusual delicacy. In that sense, it’s the kind of epic that people say David Lean used to make, but which is actually so hard to find. What interests Bertolucci—who by now had emerged as far more the child of Freud than of Marx—was the indecision, the passivity, the powerlessness of Pu Yi. And by far the most beautiful passages of the film are those of his sexual education and later humiliation, as a figure so pampered that he hardly has identity, let alone character.

  The great coup of the film (it was produced by Jeremy Thomas) was to gain access to the Forbidden City of Beijing, and there is no question about the magic of those scenes, and the extraordinary weight of history pushing upon Pu Yi. As a result, the rest of the film had no option but to maintain that very high level of décor. It does so, in a way that would delight the staff of any museum of Oriental arts. The fusion of camera style, with fresh-washed color (Vittorio Storaro), with the production design of Ferdinando Scarfiotti, Bruno Cesari, and Osvaldo Desideri and the ecstatic costumes of James Acheson amounts to a production value that is intoxicating, and which easily distracts one from the strange, wistful arc of the picture, which seems to sigh and say, “Poor Last Emperor.”

  It’s not that his story isn’t fascinating—and it’s not that this nostalgic concentration on the “lost” (more than the last) isn’t exactly in keeping with a reappraisal of the Bolshevik Revolution as the sad story of Anastasia. But the curiosity is that the very high style of The Last Emperor is easily mistaken for the verdict of history—so can a film that looks so good be wrong or irrelevant in its sympathies? Could Storaro and Scarfiotti be this good—this much themselves—re-creating the life of the peasantry?

  The film was scripted by Mark Peploe and Bertolucci (with reference to the published autobiography of Pu Yi) and it is the story of a boy who becomes Bartleby, losing everyone and everything he ever enjoyed along the way, and hardly understanding the history he has figured in. John Lone is very appealing as Pu Yi, and it’s clear that he felt the film was on his side. Joan Chen is very good as Wan Jung, his bride, and the whole sexual intrigue (involving Wen Hsiu and Kaige Chen—as the captain of the guard) is worthy of Sternberg, the model for the whole movie. Victor Wong is the grim interrogator, the only representative of the new order—absolutely excluded from the film’s enchantment. Though Peter O’Toole exists in another private world for cyclists and seers as the British tutor.

  The Last Laugh (1924)

  Why is it called The Last Laugh, when the German title is Der Letzte Mann? Well, about 70 minutes in, the film admits that it should have ended there, with the doorman at the Hotel Atlantic reduced to the depths of humiliation. (And the film was shown at that length sometimes in Germany.) But then there’s a coda in which fate takes a turn and the doorman (reduced to the status of lavatory attendant) becomes a millionaire simply because he inherits the fortune of a customer who dies in his arms. In other words, this very foreboding story of how fate can get you comes without cake, and with.

  The film has an immense reputation in some history books, and there are good reasons for that. This is a landmark in fluent storytelling, in camera movements through elaborate sets, and even in the use of depth in the frame. But at some cost. Every piece of pioneering technique, alas, is offset by the antiquated concentration on humiliation, self-pity, and a style of acting that defies the naturalism of the camera technique.

  So the hotel doorman (Emil Jannings) is too old to help lift the heaviest trunks. The manager sees this and quietly demotes the old man. Thus, he turns up for work next day to find a younger man in the job. Now, I suppose we are open to infinite cruelty in the hotels of Germany in the 1920s, but this line of action is very implausible, and it serves as the first instance of piling on. The doorman is monstrously pleased with himself at first—he is Emil Jannings, after all, and that seems to justify every lash the film serves up. He loses his job, his uniform, his makeup, his respect from his own family. And the great figure of the actor becomes stooped, shuffling, and very sorry for himself. He doesn’t deserve it—and even if he did, are we ready to sit through so much attenuated torture?

  I think it’s true that screenwriter Carl Mayer controlled the film and suggested the naturalistic style. And director F. W. Murnau went along with it—often to stunning effect. The sets are seen cinematically, instead of as if for stage presentation. There are spaces beyond and within spaces. The very first shot has the camera coming down in an elevator. We believe we are in a hotel. The design by Robert Herlth and Walter Röhrig and the photography of Karl Freund enhance this and leave little need for titles. But then why is Jannings allowed to play in so old-fashioned and laborious a way? Played really quietly and inwardly (by Michel Simon, say), the doorman would be touching—but then he’d need more story, more home life, more substance. Murnau never made another film so emphatic or limited. As for Jannings, I suppose one had to be there—in the theater especially—to feel his power. As it is, he looks like a sacrificial victim, so it’s easy enough to imagine some people dreaming of a comeuppance for him.

  The Last of the Mohicans (1992)

  One of the more neglected (or easily assumed) qualities of the Western is the physical commitment, the way in which largely unsupported human physiques had to stand up against the landscape, the weather, and the Iroquois hatchets. Time and again, Michael Mann gives us sumptuous shots of folds of mountains reaching into the distance. A novice might automatically think of the Rockies or the Sierra. But these hills are green and blue and mauve. They have eastern growth. They are “only” the hills of North Carolina. Yet it is a place in which, in 1826 (when James Fenimore Cooper published The Last of the Mohicans), a man, a family, a tribe, or a nation might have got lost.

  We know Michael Mann now as a master of cityscapes, and above all Los Angeles at night—Heat and Collateral are unrivaled records of urban pleasure and disquiet. So it is proper to praise The Last of the Mohicans for the ecstatic locations—places where great action occurs, but places where the eye needs time and time again simply to revel in the narrow defile, the sheer slippery rock, the steepness of the place. And the immense, constant effort required of all men and women who seek to survive there.

  But then you have to recall the athletic prowess of actors, above all the running and leaping that traverse these places, and the thud of moccasined feet on fresh earth. The sound throughout this picture is pristine, ominous, and beautiful; it is the deepest level of perception offered to the new land, and it is never marred by an exactly contemporary and poignant score (by Trevor Jones and Randy Edelman).

  Magua (Wes Studi) is one of epic literature’s fiercest villains, but we know that Mann respects Studi and likes him. So the exchange of looks between Studi and Jodhi May near the very end (just before she floats off into the abyss, like a sketch of waterfall) is so rich with hope and dread—it is a great moment, and so touching that Magua is hardly a villain anymore. He is a man who lives in this terrain, just like Hawkeye, Uncas, and Chingachgook. Indeed, the villains in Mann’s mind are all those people—the soldiers, the settlers—who wear the wrong clothes for the terrain. That is not just stupidity but a failure in respect, and Mann knows that the great god of America was then and must be still not the kind of fellow who trades in stone tablets and Guides for Life, but Nature. I cannot praise this film enough or come closer to its spirit than to say it would not seem amiss if William Wordsworth passed by at some point, ducking astutely to avoid an arrow.

  Daniel Day-Lewis and Madeleine Stowe convey a real sense of heat—I would have liked a moment in which the woman tossed off London clothes and made a costume out of nature. But the great truth in this Western—and it is something the genre too often avoided
—is that it is a work of history, and of how America looked and felt in 1757.

  The Last Picture Show (1971)

  Thirty-seven years later, this feels like a great American debut (no matter that Targets, 1968, was actually Peter Bogdanovich’s first feature film). So it’s natural that Bogdanovich should bring his film historian’s mind to bear: This is an update on what happened to the iconic Texas, just as the presence of Ben Johnson inhales some of the atmosphere of John Ford. More pointedly, there is a bittersweet contrast in the way the one movie house in this windswept town is closing down, and saying farewell with Howard Hawks’s Red River. The extract we see is the dawn gathering before the cattle drive heads north. All too plainly, this new Texas lacks the exhilaration of that moment. The sweetness of legend has been replaced with heat and dust.

  The film is adapted from a novel by Larry McMurtry, and he and Bogdanovich wrote the script together—with how much help from Bogdanovich’s wife, Polly Platt, remains a fascinating question. It is also a coming-of-age story about kids in this arid world, helplessly devoted to thoughts of sex and love, and of the older generation, their parents, already crushed by the failure of the same hopes. So it is way beyond Ford or Hawks in its temperament. This is a French film made in the West, with few illusions and no concession to romance. People grow older here, but no one comes out of it too well. No wonder in 1971 if we rejoiced that a good film critic and historian was showing such touch.

  It may be that everything fits a little too tidily—thus the discovery that the Ben Johnson character has had an affair with the Ellen Burstyn character—but this is small-town life, where the options are not crowded, and where memories linger in the strangest way. Indeed, here in 1971 was maybe the first Texas film anyone could recall that noted how small, mean, and provincial the place was.