And that is entirely suited to the framing scenes, the cirque du minuit in New Orleans. Lola Montès, about forty, has been engaged by an impresario/ringmaster (Peter Ustinov) to be the stricken centerpiece in tableaux of her scandalous life. It is all done in a circus ring, and at the end, after Lola has again survived the dire plunge into a small pool of water, she sits like a frozen empress selling her kisses at a dollar a time to a line of men that stretches out to meet us, the ultimate audience.
There are those who say that Martine Carol was not the actress to be Lola, that she was not vivacious enough. Perhaps. Casting is a grand game that goes on forever. (Vivien Leigh? Danielle Darrieux? Ingrid Bergman? Judy Garland? Marlene Dietrich? Simone Signoret? Every suggestion is ravishing. Because nearly every one of those women would have understood Lola Montès.) But Carol was beautiful, of the right age, herself touched by notoriety and in her rather drained way a suitable player of the exhausted, sick, depleted Lola Montès. So I do not believe a problem shows—and I am not afraid of the possibility that Lola is a very sad, unsentimental person compared with the fevered legend of her which the apparatus of circus and the glorious formal enactment (the ritual) of Ophüls’s tracking shots only enhances.
To be an actress, or a performer; to put on a show; to turn life into a circus or a mise-en-scène; to see beauty dying—these are some of the motifs to be found within this dazzling film. The circus gives access to flashbacks—scenes from her life all the way from the teenager on the boat back from India, through the liaison with Liszt, to the bittersweet romance with Ludwig of Bavaria (Anton Walbrook). It is based on the real woman, yet the film is free to invent and adorn. And in its use of color, décor, CinemaScope, movement, and music, it is the swan song of Ophüls’s very troubled career. Of course, we have it incomplete—110 minutes as against 140 originally. It is enough.
Christian Matras did the photography. Georges Auric wrote the haunting score. Jean D’Eaubonne was in charge of the design. Madeleine Gug was the editor. Ophüls and Jacques Natanson did the script, with Annette Wademant and Franz Geiger. Also with Oskar Werner, Ivan Desny, Will Quadflieg, Henri Guisol, Lise Delamare, and Paulette Dubost. Ustinov speaking quietly to Lola as she wonders if she can jump again is among the most pained and precious moments in cinema. It is every director asking every actress to be public, because he loves her in private. And the one erases the other. For the butterfly knows that there is only one exit. One of the essential films, despite misguided abuse on its release—deeply influential on the New Wave.
Lolita (1962)
In electing to do Lolita, Stanley Kubrick put himself forward in the small field of those contesting for the title of the most intelligent/the most stupid film director in the world. In another decision that could be taken either way, he elected to live and work in England. So, on the one hand, to take on the Vladimir Nabokov novel and its weird best-seller status was a way of claiming sophistication and literary learning. Equally, to suppose that a film of Lolita was either necessary or possible was also a display of idiocy, pretension, and vainglory. Yet you can tell how far flattery, self-delusion, and compromise were afoot when you know that Nabokov himself was persuaded to do a screenplay for the picture. Indeed, Nabokov seems to have been thoroughly wooed by young Stanley.
The Nabokov screenplay is published separately, and it is an intriguing document—but this was plainly rescripted by Kubrick, and perhaps some others. Tuesday Weld was certainly considered for Lo, but the nod went to Sue Lyon, an unknown. Peter Sellers—a man for whom Kubrick felt little reservation—was to be Clare Quilty; Shelley Winters would be Charlotte. And James Mason was Humbert. To this day, the film remains of interest because of Mason and his voice, his tenderness and his folly. He does seem like a man of high learning. He does also seem profoundly in love, and sure as an actor that he is handling a great work. Kubrick is not often interested in ambiguity in his heroes, and I feel that Mason delivered things that are beyond his director.
So what do we have? Sellers is grotesquely conceited and fussy in a role that needs deadly simplicity. Shelley Winters is right and smart. Sue Lyon is not bad if you like sixteen-year-olds (which is not what the novel is about). The decision to film in Britain—when Lolita is one of the great roaming tours of Americana—is demented. But Ossie Morris delivers a nice, gray black-and-white look that encourages one to listen to the words. Also on the sound track is a naggy, silly, cute, but actually quite enticing score (Nelson Riddle and Bob Harris) that I can never get out of my head and which I now associate with the great book.
In all the extensive silliness called the Novel and the Film that goes on in academia, you should simply work on Lolita—the book and the film—and with as much pain as you think fit make it clear that anyone prepared to take literature seriously and to read novels like Lolita, hoping that a film on such a book will turn out nicely, is akin to hoping the Jews didn’t suffer too much. And there is a torment in that process, too, which is that we do not possess a recording of Mason just reading the entire novel aloud.
Such a thing was done with the remake: Jeremy Irons read the whole book on tape. He is not bad, though the second film repeats the inaccessibility of the book. But Irons believes he is reciting a tragedy. Mason knew it was a dangerous rapture.
London After Midnight (1927)
Do not be encouraged too much. Tod Browning’s London After Midnight remains a lost film, one of the most famous and most sought-after films that have vanished in the industry’s famous neglect of its own material. It seems to have been one more of those very short films made at M-G-M, with Waldemar Young as the screenwriter (he was a Stanford graduate who would go on to work for DeMille), though in this case he adapted a novel by Browning, called The Hypnotist.
The film was a couple of minutes longer than The Unknown (made in the same year), but it has vanished. However, I am including it in this book not just because absence has stimulated thoughts about the picture, but because the resourceful Rick Schmidling has made a reconstructed version based on stills from the production as well as titles from the original (he did the same with Greed). In other words, he has pioneered a new medium: the illustrated film script, all done in stills. Ron Haver employed this method in lost sections of the 1954 A Star Is Born, and it is up to the viewer to say how well it works. History is helped, but drama pays the price, I fear.
Anyway, London After Midnight is London at the turn of the last century with murder afoot in the streets. Lon Chaney is presented to us as a grim, upright police inspector on the trail of the criminal. Then we discover that a vampiric figure is also on the streets. He is stooped. He wears a top hat with long hair hanging down beneath it. He has huge, protruding eyes and a mouth made savage by enlarged teeth. There was no way that the audience of the time could not recognize this as another Chaney part (one for which eyes and mouth were painfully stretched by wire). In other words, the actor’s versatility dispelled the intrigue and diminished the “horror” of the vampire’s appearance.
It’s worth saying that when Browning came to remake London After Midnight as Mark of the Vampire, he had the good sense to separate the two roles (Lionel Barrymore and Bela Lugosi). But London After Midnight may be the first use of the vampire figure in an American film, and it is fascinating to wonder whether Browning or Chaney had seen the Murnau Nosferatu.
The Schmidling reconstruction has only a limited number of stills, so it is obliged to use many of them several times. But it pans and scans across the surface of a still, and it uses a sinister music track. So it’s interesting to wonder why Schmidling didn’t go all the way and have the titles spoken on the sound track, instead of printed. Surely this would have made for a more compelling film, or one that came closer to fear. As it is, the titles only draw attention to the way in which so much acting was a signal of impossible talk: You either take the risk of people missing sense, or you employ this woeful slowing and rearticulation. It leaves London After Midnight as a museum piece—but nothing takes awa
y from the haunted look of Chaney as the vampire with Edna Tichenor as his daughter.
Lonesome (1928)
In the last twenty-five years, at festivals and in academia, Lonesome has been recognized as the surviving piece from a strange, maverick director, Pál Fejös (1897–1963), and also as one of those key films made in the moment of sound’s arrival, and deeply expressive of a new urban wistfulness being discovered by cinema. Thus, elsewhere there is Sunrise, The Man with a Movie Camera, King Vidor’s The Crowd and Street Scene, People on Sunday (made in Berlin by that group of young beginners), as well as Gustav Machatý’s From Saturday to Sunday… and Lonesome. Fejös’s previous film—The Last Moment (1928)—is tantalizing in various descriptions, yet apparently lost for all time.
It was on the strength of that hit that Universal invited Fejös to make Lonesome. A machinist (Glenn Tryon) and a telephonist (Barbara Kent) meet on a bus to Coney Island. They have a day out amid the entertainments. There is a little talk between them—utterly banal small talk—but Fejös films everything in the real places of summer holiday and moves his camera constantly to convey the flux of feeling in a strangers’ meeting.
Just as in People on Sunday, say, or Dziga Vertov’s work, there is that uncanny feeing of being there, of documentary, while at the same time the movements of the characters and the camera build a fascinating and complete fictional mood. As in so many films of this brief era, you feel the excitement of the artists as they begin to appreciate the seamless and fantastical command of a total reality that is coming into being. Scott Eyman has said that Lonesome is not as searching as The Crowd, and I think that’s correct. Moreover, its brief dialogue scenes have to be listened to tongue-in-cheek. But the anticipation of what is at hand, for the medium and its makers, is extraordinary, and it may leave the viewer all the more open to an interaction of sound and presence. In other words, I suspect writers and directors felt the potential depth of scenes opening up—for example, the talk scenes where Fejös is too fresh to bother with them much. After all, the very title aspires to a generalized inwardness that is not really possible under the restrictions of strictly silent pictures. Because a picture plus sound equals more than illustrated action. It is action itself. It is drama and context.
In fact, the couple in Lonesome are not really such strangers. It turns out that they live in the same building—so loneliness is an urban condition that can be altered or reappraised. In short, Lonesome is a film more pregnant than delivered. Broadway, done in 1929, was another big picture. Fejös stayed active through the thirties, though he went to Europe and was generally disappointed and frustrated. He ended in documentary (in Siam and Peru!)—but Marie, made in Hungary in 1932 (and shown at Telluride in 2007), is enough to prove a talent who had gone way beyond Lonesome.
The Long Day Closes (1992)
Liverpool, 1955–56, before the Beatles. An empty street, it is pouring with rain. This is not a real street, but the set of a street. The camera has a life of its own (a crane and a track), and it moves down the street like age advancing. We see posters for movies. We hear brief flourishes of their voice or music on the sound track. The Robe. The Ladykillers. The Happiest Days of Your Life. Meet Me in St. Louis. We enter a house, and there is a boy of eleven. His name is Bud. And he says to his mother, “Mam… Mam… Can I go to the pictures, Mam?”
It is the start of Terence Davies’s The Long Day Closes, and it is one of those tender moments when film goes to the pictures (if it can get in): I think of Truffaut’s dream in Day for Night of that locked, barred place where Citizen Kane has shown; or the picture house in a windswept Texas town where Red River is the last film that is ever going to play. “Can I go to the pictures, Mam?”
Terence Davies was born in Liverpool in 1945, and for the first part of his life, he made films about that experience. There was the trilogy—black and white, 16 mm, done as student films, paid for by scratching and saving and miracles; there was Distant Voices, Still Lives, which centered on a violent father; and then there is the reward, The Long Day Closes, which is just Bud and Mam and the pictures, and the paradise of American grandeur in raining streets.
You need to see all those films in order to get the proper sense of the boy growing up and emerging from one church (Roman, florid but harsh) to another—the unrestricted fantasy hedonism of the movie palace. But I include The Long Day Closes here because of its ecstatic sense of good fortune. Of course, Davies was a boy becoming a man at a time when “the cinema” was not sure where it would go. That doubt has become so chronic now, it has altered the experience. These days, Mam has so many other things the boy could do. And in the last decade, I fear, Davies (a superb talent) has found it very difficult to get the work he deserves (his excellent and unremitting House of Mirth went unnoticed).
The Long Day Closes was made by the British Film Institute and Channel 4. Olivia Stewart was the producer. Michael Coulter shot it in ravishing color. Christopher Hobbs was the production designer. There is not a lot of story in the film. Rather, it is a quiet passion, a religious celebration of the dark and the light that lives there. One day, maybe, we will need The Long Day Closes if only to say to children, There, that is what it was like and how it was done. And they will look back at us in horror—at being the descendants of people who could not be trusted to look after something.
Leigh McCormick is Bud, Marjorie Yates is Mam, and the cast includes Anthony Watson, Nicholas Lamont, Ayse Owens, Joy Blakeman, Denise Thomas, and Patricia Morrison.
Long Day’s Journey into Night (1962)
Who said this?: “After such an experience, I don’t see how one can niggle over whether it’s ‘cinema’ or merely ‘filmed theatre.’ Whatever it is, it’s great.” Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey into Night was not meant to be produced for decades after the playwright’s death. But his widow overrode his instruction—and we are in her debt. The play opened in New York in 1956, with Fredric March, Florence Eldridge, Jason Robards, Jr., and Bradford Dillman. The film came six years later, directed by Sidney Lumet, with Ralph Richardson, Katharine Hepburn, Robards (again), and Dean Stockwell.
And it is still a great experience (it was Pauline Kael who offered that verdict). It’s easy to say that this is because it’s a great play, or a searing ordeal, in the theater—but now we are watching in greater comfort and with all the advantages of close-ups. But very quickly this argument gets into a consideration of how film and theater relate. I have seen the final plays of O’Neill several times “live.” I have seen The Iceman Cometh with Ian Bannen and Kevin Spacey as Hickey—and I have seen the television version, where Lee Marvin played Hickey. It’s enough to think that O’Neill lends himself to the screen. But he doesn’t. There are many bad films of O’Neill. There is also the enforced habitation of O’Neill’s places—the house on Long Island, or the bar. Being there is part of the sense of group or family.
But one thing emerges from the film of Long Day’s Journey—though I am not quite sure what it means. In the film, Mary becomes central. I don’t think that’s because Katharine Hepburn was a better actress than those onstage. But whereas onstage the figures have equal force—like the figures in a weather house—in the film, Mary is the center or the wavering light.
If it’s not Hepburn making that shift, is it Lumet, is it photographer Boris Kaufman, or is it cinema itself? I don’t know the answer. But whenever a “family drama” has moved one at the movies, I think there’s a case for putting on Long Day’s Journey and seeing just how much deeper O’Neill goes. And it is O’Neill. My admiration for Lumet hinges on his doing the film in O’Neill’s service.
But then there’s another aspect to the play: It is a kind of history of acting in that James O’Neill (Richardson) was one of the great figures in nineteenth-century theater—and here he is, decades later and in another process, acting the part of himself. I’m sure O’Neill felt that, and I’d guess that Lumet was fascinated by the opportunity to look at the history of acting in America. So the
play may change. Later productions may miss a lot—but Hepburn and Richardson are from the start of the twentieth century. They knew silent cinema and signaled acting. And now here they are, bringing a life into a look, like putting a tiger in a jewel.
Longford (2006)
There were five killings, of children and teenagers, and they occurred in 1963. A young couple, lovers and partners in sadomasochism, lured the children into a vehicle. Then they were killed—sometimes with tape recordings of their last pleas. The bodies were buried on the moors, near Manchester. The killers were Ian Brady and Myra Hindley, and in 1966 a court gave them life imprisonment. The court said Brady was “wicked beyond belief,” but Hindley might reform if removed from Brady’s influence.
That’s what Frank Longford noticed—he was an aristocrat, devout, sixty, in the Harold Wilson cabinet. He had causes, like prison visiting. He believed that wickedness could be overcome, and he felt that most prisoners had a right to earn parole. That’s how he got interested in Myra Hindley.
That’s all you need to know before you see Longford (made for HBO), one of the most absorbing of the new British films, and the shot in which Longford (Jim Broadbent) searches in the visitors’ room at Holloway Prison for Myra Hindley. He expects a blonde—in all the harsh press pictures, she had blonde hair—but in prison she has gone back to brown. She sits off to one side, a pariah, abused by other prisoners, fearful they will read her lips. Longford sits down, and before long he is telling her she has a nice smile—she does, though we have to judge whether it is Myra’s or a smile from Samantha Morton, the uncanny actress. Is she seducing him, or just trying to be human?
'Have You Seen...?' Page 78
