But in the end, I find O’Toole insufferably swish without ever really examining homosexuality. I despise the casting of Guinness and Anthony Quinn as Arabs (Jose Ferrer as a Turk is in the same line). And I lament that in this day and age the film gives very little insight as to how modern Iraq came into being—we need more of Claude Rains’s character. (A Dangerous Man, 1990, with Ralph Fiennes, covered that far better.) Still, it had ten nominations and seven Oscars, including Best Picture. My guess is that already the reputation hovers like the desert sun over the shell of an empty film, one where the interest has evaporated. Ah, the desert! How fortunate England was to be spared such wastelands and their astonishing metaphorical value.
Leave Her to Heaven (1945)
It was not the kind of part Gene Tierney expected to be given—Ellen Berent in Leave Her to Heaven, taken from the novel by Ben Ames Williams, a portrait of a beautiful but dementedly selfish young woman. It was what Tierney herself saw as a “bitch” part, the kind of role Bette Davis played. And Tierney hoped she wasn’t like that. But something in her made her go up to Darryl Zanuck at a party and tell him that if he gave her the part he wouldn’t regret it. She was right. She is amazing as Ellen, in ways she never matched before or since. What does it mean? Well, you could point to the fact that in time Gene Tierney had serious nervous breakdowns of her own—there were great strains that went with being one of the loveliest women in the world, and she gave birth to a retarded child. But I’m not sure that was it. Let’s just say that in any actress there builds slowly—and sometimes very politely—the energy that knows how to murder people.
Leave Her to Heaven is actually rather more than a “bitch” movie—it’s a mad goddess creation. Because Ellen has something in her that doesn’t quite see or admit her own calculations. She’s like so many of us, not objectively privy to her own bouts of unreason. And that’s the way Leave Her to Heaven is played. Jo Swerling did a very good script in which we never quite lose all sympathy with Ellen—no matter that one of her victims is a sick child, allowed to drown in a lake (Bass Lake in northern California) in quite hideous circumstances. That Ellen should still be understandable owes a lot to the Swerling script, to Tierney’s natural warmth, and to John M. Stahl’s direction. He seemed an old man to Tierney (he was fifty-eight!), and he was a master of silent films and of women’s pictures from the sound era.
Beyond that, this is a very fine example of Technicolor as a source of unruly passion—the colors of hair, lipstick, and skin are like paint (as they nearly were in the Technicolor dye transfer system). If ever you need a proof of how Technicolor fueled films, this is the one to quote. The camerawork was done by Leon Shamroy, a true master, and he won an Oscar for it. The design was by Lyle Wheeler, and it involves some luxurious and spacious country houses as well as a staircase down which Ellen throws herself at one point.
The supporting cast includes Cornel Wilde (rather out of his depth), Jeanne Crain, Vincent Price, Mary Philips, Ray Collins, Gene Lockhart, Reed Hadley, Darryl Hickman, and Chill Wills.
Tierney was nominated for an Oscar as Best Actress, and she lost to Joan Crawford in Mildred Pierce. You can see why: Crawford had more than paid her dues; she had made a serious comeback; and Mildred Pierce is a valuable and important picture. But if you want a wild thrill one night, I know which way I’d go.
Leaving Las Vegas (1995)
Talk about moments. At one point in Leaving Las Vegas, Ben (Nicolas Cage) and Sera (Elisabeth Shue) go to a desert motel for a tryst. They watch television in the middle of the night in the open air by the pool: it’s The Third Man. Why? The rights were free, said Mike Figgis, director; it was a favorite, and, “I also loved the idea of that zither theme in the desert mixing with crickets and coyotes.”
In the middle of the buoyant 1990s, Leaving Las Vegas was the sort of film they were not supposed to be making. It was a film about alcoholism and hooking, uncompromising in its ugliness and sublimely without any concession to healing or conversion. This drunk starts the film as a screenwriter still in Hollywood, still recognized as a screenwriter. He seems at a low point. But he will get no higher—except for winning the love of a Las Vegas hooker who hasn’t yet grasped all the dangers of being a freelance, of a certain age, with a self-destructive streak and insane hopes of making something better of herself.
This is a story of savage downward arcs, with a redemptive value of nil. It was shot on Super 16 mm, on a very tight budget. But it only cost $4.4 million and it would gross $31.9 million in the United States alone because there were enough people around ready to concede that this is the greatest Hollywood picture ever made about alcoholism and addiction.
Mike Figgis had been around for several years doing interesting work, often working on the music himself. But this was a breakthrough film with an intensity he has never regained. It came from an autobiographical novel by John O’Brien—who killed himself after selling the movie rights. Figgis did the script himself and then went on location with the crew. Declan Quinn did the photography—it’s not hard to make Vegas at night look spectacular, but there are so many other darker moods here. Waldemar Kalinowski did the design, and Laura Goldsmith did the clothes—Sera’s costumes are especially notable, “sexy” but repressed, too, and trying to hide a small weight problem. Figgis did the music and was part of a jazz ensemble playing it. There were also several songs sung by Sting and one, “Ridiculous,” by Nicolas Cage.
Both lead players were nominated, and Cage won the Oscar—not unexpectedly, for his part is the showier of the two. But it is a true case of joint acting. The risks and the glories are shared, and Figgis deserves great credit for earning their trust on a small venture. Shue has never had such a chance again, while Cage is as flagrant with his talent as Ben is with life.
The picture is crammed with excellent small performances, or presences: from Lou Rawls and Xander Berkeley as two cabbies to Graham Beckel, Danny Huston, and Julian Lennon as three bartenders, and Figgis, Kalinowski, and Ed Lauter as three heavies. Also with Richard Lewis, Valeria Golino, Carey Lowell, Julian Sands, Vincent Ward, Mariska Hargitay, Laurie Metcalf, and Bob Rafelson.
The Leopard (1963)
If you want to know how the Sicilian aristocracy dressed and had dinner in the 1860s, this is the film for you—and I do not mean that facetiously. For what is most remarkable about Il Gattopardo is that the film’s eye for table settings, porcelain, the color of the wines, and the costume of the ladies is only as strict and admiring as that of the film’s central character, Don Fabrizio, Prince of Salina, the monarch of melancholy. He is Burt Lancaster to the eye, but in all other ways he is a surrogate for that duke of Modrone, Luchino Visconti himself.
Yes, it is Sicily again, but an island where the film is only interested in the wealthiest inhabitants, and the mixed feelings with which they are bound to observe the political process called the unification of Italy. Does it sustain for a film of 205 minutes—the proper length of The Leopard, despite several shorter versions with degrees of dubbing—or is it more realistically an attempt on the part of the director to imagine that he is there, being rained upon by every moment?
With Goffredo Lombardo as his producer, Visconti adapted the novel by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, with the help of Suso Cecchi d’Amico, Pasquale Festa Campanile, Enrico Medioli, and Massimo Franciosa. Time and again, Visconti—and Italian cinema as a whole—employed this screenwriting by committee. And it’s hard to guess what was done on The Leopard beyond the fond transcription of the novel, along with the studious researching of any bit of protocol, décor, and mannerism. The Technicolor photography is justifiably famous, and it was the work of Giuseppe Rotunno. The music was by Nino Rota.
It was a casting coup when Burt Lancaster was hired in to be the old aristocrat, and it’s not that he does a bad job. What is more striking is the way Visconti himself has shifted so much in regard to his own work so that the would-be revolutionary is now a connoisseur of the manifestations of a dying order. Lancaster
is handsome and elegant. He moves with nobility (he always did). But there are the beginnings of that camp regret in his feelings that will prove catastrophic with Dirk Bogarde in Death in Venice.
The Leopard won the prize at Venice in 1963, and its long version has a deserved reputation for style and detail. But in the end this is no more than Masterpiece Theatre made by a heartfelt conservative who can hardly accommodate the loss given up to history. The rest of the cast includes Alain Delon, Claudia Cardinale, Paolo Stoppa, Rina Morelli, Serge Reggiani, Romolo Valli, and Leslie French. The people move to order, like figures in a dance that the prince is observing. His artistic eye has so little awareness that his etiquette is as severe a restriction on liberty as poverty or the climate of Sicily. It’s worth stressing that after The Leopard, Visconti moved increasingly—and without irony—into the self-protected worlds of solitary men of taste.
The Letter (1940)
It is a great opening, and vital evidence. On a rich tropic night somewhere in the Malay jungle (with the rubber trees oozing), shots ring out. A man staggers down the steps of a house pursued by a woman in a flowing housecoat. She puts six bullets into him and you know that if there had been more bullets in the gun he would have got all of those, too. She is Leslie Crosbie, the respectable wife of a leading English planter. Even with six bullets in the middle of the night, the authorities believe the matter can be dealt with. The man had just called by on a friendly visit and then he turned ugly. But there is a letter, from her, begging him to come.
At Warners, on the eve of The Letter, Joseph Breen warned the studio that it could hardly be done with decency. There was all that implied sex, there was a Chinese mistress, and the English would be offended. The Somerset Maugham play had been filmed in 1929, with Jeanne Eagels, and it had been a scandal. But producer Robert Lord and production head Hal Wallis were eager to do it again—and to have Bette Davis as Leslie Crosbie. The excellent Howard Koch was put on the script, and he turned the Chinese mistress into a Eurasian wife. For the rest, everyone very sensibly recognized that the sex was not required onscreen—just get the night and the weeping trees, clouds scurrying over the moon, Max Steiner’s music, and Bette Davis’s pinched, greedy face. It would work.
William Wyler came over on loan to do it. He wanted longer and more rehearsal than the studio could allow. He was a very deliberate worker. But he did the necessary thing: He entered into an affair with Davis. I am not being unkind, I think, in saying the film needed that—as many films did and do. For it all depended on Davis, and she needed a director to reassure her that this was not just trash but tragedy. It is a close-run thing. The Letter remains a great, bursting melodrama of the sort that hinges upon censorship saying you can’t show the sex—and so the desire builds out of all proportion and it becomes a study in yearning and the way desire can wreck every civilized system.
Of course, the crime comes at the start, and the rest is the maneuvers that follow. But this is where the movie most excels. Herbert Marshall is the forlorn husband, taking Leslie for granted still. And James Stephenson is her lawyer, a man half in love with her until he realizes the loathing she deserves. So much of the best of the film is in Stephenson’s way of watching her. And then you have Gale Sondergaard, in Chinese costume, as the widow taking her revenge.
Wyler wanted Gregg Toland to do the photography, but too much deep focus might have looked studied and in 1940 he had another job. So Tony Gaudio stepped in and did fine. Pauline Kael once observed that Steiner’s music vulgarized Wyler’s direction, but I think it just added the right juicy ooze. Wyler, Davis, Stephenson, and the picture were all nominated for Oscars.
Letter from an Unknown Woman (1948)
In 1946, Joan Fontaine married her second husband, producer William Dozier. They were eager to work together and came upon a Stefan Zweig novella, Brief Einer Unbekannten. Set in nineteenth-century Vienna, it’s a woman’s story of three meetings she has with a man: an encounter as a teenager; a one-night stand a few years later; and a final meeting where she writes him a letter telling her story. Of course, he does not remember her. It was not a simple part, in its progression from teenage years to maturity, but Fontaine was a very accomplished actress, and she felt she could do it.
How easily the project could have gone astray. Yet every decision was sure. They went to John Houseman to serve as producer—he had had his own fling with Joan earlier and he was devoted to her. Howard Koch was hired to do the screenplay (an old Mercury associate of Houseman’s), and it was Koch who asked the others to see Liebelei, with a view to securing Max Ophüls as director. At that time, Ophüls had just had his ruinous experience on Vendetta, and he jumped at the Zweig material and saw it as the opportunity for his greatest picture.
They were filming at Universal, but they managed to have Franz Planer for the photography (he had shot Liebelei) and Alexander Golitzen to do the sets. There was some attempt to get Charles Boyer for the male lead, but he was unavailable and a little too old, so they cast Louis Jourdan instead in his signature performance—handsome yet a touch empty; romantic yet not entirely there. Houseman felt he lacked sex appeal, but that shortcoming serves very well as his defect of memory.
According to Houseman, Ophüls worked like a demon on the picture. He established a very good relationship with Fontaine, even though they hardly shared a language, and he took immense pains to correct and enhance the sets, as only someone who loved the Viennese tradition could. So this is the re-creation of a bittersweet city, perfectly attuned to the heartbreak of the central character, a place where we hear long dresses swish on marble stairs but the camera soars above the figures in angelic silence.
Of course, for Ophüls, movement was like life, and one reason for his attention to the sets was that they were places that a tracking, craning camera would have to work. At the climax of the film, he planned what Houseman calculated as a three-minute tracking shot, with many extras, the flying in and out of some décor, and an immense amount of rehearsal. Furthermore, Houseman feared that Ophüls meant to do it all without coverage or mercy. But he achieved the shot and then did two cover close-ups to appease Houseman. When the scene was cut, the close-ups allowed it to be half its length—but the exhilaration of the movement was there, and it feels like flight in the short life of a bird or a lover. This could be one of the great Viennese movies, and it’s a thrill to think that it is in so many ways American.
Liebelei (1932)
As you follow the history of movie romance, you have to go through the years of strenuous silent proclamation—they are saying their hearts are broken. And then, in 1932, you get Liebelei—when you notice that your own heart has split. It is a story of two dragoon officers in Vienna before the Great War—they are played by Wolfgang Liebeneiner and Willi Eichberger. One night at the opera, they meet two pretty girls when the girls drop a pair of opera glasses from a box—they are Magda Schneider and Luise Ullrich. The one officer, Liebeneiner, is ending an awkward affair with another man’s wife. He feels free as he finds out what real love can be with Christine (Schneider).
This comes from a story by Arthur Schnitzler, and it was adapted for the screen by Curt Alexander and Hans Wilhelm. As photographed by Franz Planer, this is a Vienna of nighttime or twilight, and there is an intoxicating intimacy to the way the quartet of young lovers drink and carouse together. They are officers and nice girls but the suggestion of regular sex is unmistakable—and I should say in all of this that Luise Ullrich (the blonde of the pair) is actually the more vivacious of the two girls.
Max Ophüls films them as if no one has been in love before—the very touching is stroked by the camera. There is a superb nocturnal sleigh ride in the snow, to be set beside a similar scene in The Magnificent Ambersons, and there is an altogether astonishing and timeless fluency in the ways moments are shot. Of course, fate intrudes. The jealous husband from the dead affair (Gustaf Gründgens) demands a duel of honor—and then Ophüls films that with just the other officer and his girl hearing
the first shot and waiting for the second.
Magda Schneider (the mother of Romy Schneider) was a popular favorite, and she gets to sing as well as deliver a tragic speech when Christine has heard the worst news. It’s almost the only failure in the film: a set piece for a star rather than a real, trembling response to life. Decades later, Liebelei hinges on the duel and its code of honor, and I think more could be made of that—even of a couple who went on the run from society, rather than submit to the archaic rulings on what has to be done.
Liebelei was made on the eve of Hitlerian success. Famously, Ophüls and his family had to leave Berlin as the film opened. Ironically, it was a great hit, enough to launch a big career. But Ophüls was on the run from very early on, and there is never anything as touching in his films as the eagerness (and then the fear of loss) with which lovers rush together. One way or another, Ophüls would not get back to “his” Vienna until Letter from an Unknown Woman.
The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (1943)
Michael Powell was one of those deliberately naughty boys who had been daring rebuke all his life. So don’t mistake the recklessness of doing Peeping Tom in 1960—just see it as part and parcel with offering Blimp in 1943 (and expecting the world to turn around for him in 1980, as it did—even the world has taste sometimes).
In the summer of 1945, when the Labour Party was elected to run the country (just months after parades to celebrate Churchill), many in the electorate were voting against “Blimpishness” in Britain. Blimp was a cartoon character created by David Low, an elderly military officer who believed in the old pre-1914 world, and in war by the Marquess of Queensberry rules. He was a High Tory archetype (you can read the tough version of the old boy in Evelyn Waughs wartime trilogy, Sword of Honor). In the film, Blimp is honorable, kindly, decent, but helplessly old-fashioned. In truth, he probably believed in capital punishment, keeping the wogs in their place, flogging homosexuals, and a little charity for the poor. Powell and Emeric Pressburger do not stress the latter attitudes, but this is their hero for 1943. And their loyalty hurt. Churchill opposed the film and war shortages caused 40 minutes to be chopped out on first release.
'Have You Seen...?' Page 75
