Longford is directed by Tom Hooper and written by Peter Morgan (who wrote The Queen). It is a brilliantly made character study, a film over which finally we have to make up our minds. But don’t be surprised if you have the rare feeling—without any scenes of overt violence—that you have looked evil in the face.
Brady and Hindley are in different prisons, but they write to each other. And as Longford goes to see Myra more often, so he gets an invitation to call on Brady (Andy Serki’s, and as still and startling as Lecter in The Silence of the Lambs). Leave her alone, he tells Longford, she’s mine. Don’t trust her “reform,” he says. It’s all a trick.
Longford wavers. His wife, the author Elizabeth Longford (Lindsay Duncan), hates the involvement with Hindley. Until one day she reads Myra’s letters and becomes a convert, too. The film is very balanced: It allows the possibility that a Myra might have been led and dominated by Brady, that she might be sorry and redeemed. But what is redemption? And how does a young woman survive in a prison situation where everyone hates her without being exceptionally strong, or prepared to play that part until the end?
Yes, it’s a British story, and Longford (wonderfully impersonated by Jim Broadbent) is a very English figure—noble, lofty, but not too bright. I daresay that no government would ever have released Brady or Hindley (for fear of public reaction). But locking people up does not stop their damage. Anyone capable of imagining Brady or Hindley from this film can be reached by their wickedness. But then a film as grave as Longford makes the clash of hope and fear as piercing as eyes looking at us. And virtue requires that we recognize evil.
The Long Goodbye (1973)
Observers have commented on how Leigh Brackett was one of the writers on Howard Hawks’s The Big Sleep (1946) and on Robert Altman’s thorough autopsy of the Philip Marlowe character in The Long Goodbye. What did Ms. Brackett think about the way her earlier version (with comedy, heroics, action, and mood) was reduced to cat food (curry-flavored)? Not that Altman dislikes or disapproves of Marlowe. On the contrary, it’s just that he is now something of a relic or a throwback, an amiable, decent, and very hip guy. And Altman cherishes those characteristics. He spends the whole film concentrating on the way Elliott Gould moves, murmurs, sighs, and allows silence or stillness to prevail. You may not be sure whether it’s quietism or those brownies the ladies make across the way, but this Marlowe is swinging, even if his world is no longer within his control. The real goodbye in this picture is to the brilliant effectiveness of Hawks’s character.
That said, the shift is easy enough, from the late 1930s to the early 1970s. In place of the magnificent, dandyish control with which Hawks defied darkness and chaos, Altman has a camera (by Vilmos Zsigmond) that oozes through the warm ice cream space of southern California, and a sound track where Marlowe’s mocking title song (by John Williams and Johnny Mercer) wakes up every time the doorbell rings. And it’s the richest part of Altman’s L.A. that it is lovely and quite mad, or depraved, or corrupt. Take your pick. A private eye now is no longer a knight without armor who will go down the dark streets, et cetera; he’s a wry, forlorn dude who needs shades in the sun and who tries not to do harm.
The ending is underlined: Terry Lennox, who started it all, is dead at Marlowe’s hand. He passes Nina van Pallandt on the way in and out (with a hint of The Third Man), and the jukebox hits “Hooray for Hollywood!” As an explanation or a condemnation it doesn’t stand up nearly as well as Marlowe’s own gentle forgiveness of more or less everything. This is where Gould’s dance through the picture is so utterly different from Bogey’s prowling stroll in The Big Sleep, yet as great a performance.
The most unnerving thing about this is the “It’s OK by me” as one damn thing after another comes apart. Just consider how marginal and how emotionally oppressive is Marty Augustine’s scene with Jo Ann Eggenweiler. This is a comic reverie with one of the ugliest moments of violence in American film. It is also a fair summary of Arnold Schwarzenegger’s contribution to film and to California.
Of course, long before, The Big Sleep had exploded genre expectations and let the pieces fall where they might. But here is one of the great American films of a bright new age that says, “No more genres for you, America. Just work it out.” Gould is the film, but he gets terrific support from Sterling Hayden, van Pallandt, Mark Rydell, Henry Gibson, Jim Bouton, and Ken Sansom, the guard at the Malibu Colony who would let Charles Manson in just to get a chance of impersonating him.
The Lord of the Rings (2001–2003)
The Lord of the Rings is three films, but it is only one. It is an enterprise in which it is hard to resist recounting the business story first, for the business was handled with the precise, appointed acumen and good sense that we long for in our military campaigns. So, on the one hand, you can point to the dismay at Miramax after they had nurtured the project only to find that their owners—Disney—were alarmed by the scale of it all, and by the undoubted reaching for deeper, darker mystic values than Disneyfication was used to. So it’s not going too far to point to The Lord of the Rings onscreen as a signal defeat for Disney. Will they ever be the same again?
It was in that gap that Bob Shaye thrust himself and New Line to be partners with Peter Jackson’s own company and the pledged German money—so we have a co-production from Germany, New Zealand, and America. Nor is the German link mere business. If you want to find the roots of this astonishing epic, you need to go back to Fritz Lang and the Nibelungen (nearly eighty years earlier)
Grant then the magnificent decisiveness of the Peter Jackson/Fran Walsh plan: to shoot the three pictures in one immense process, and to do it at the end of the earth—in the God-given New Zealand—and at the cutting edge of digital image generation (also from a base in New Zealand). So a crew was lined up to handle the entire picture—Andrew Lesnie as photographer; Howard Shore doing music; and the effects houses required to devise a scheme of illusion for the entire film and its great series of battles. Walsh, Jackson, and Philippa Boyens had a screenplay that eventually offended very few fans of the original novel by J. R. R. Tolkien. Shooting lasted 274 days spread over a period of sixteen months.
The costs were simply divided by three, and so each film was assigned a budget of $94 million—for a total of $282 million—against which, in worldwide theatrical rentals alone, the three pictures earned $869 million, $920 million, and $1,118 million. Any one of the three would have been in profit on the total costs. And there was video still to come.
It was said, with absolute justice, that these rich numbers were sustained by the fact that three generations of any family could see the film at the same time, in emotional comfort. There were battles, violence, suspense, and fear. There were likeable central characters. There were hideous villains. Viggo Mortensen became a star as Aragorn. Elijah Wood and Sean Astin were fine as the heroes. Cate Blanchett and Ian McKellen added to their luster. Perhaps nothing was more influential than the computerized look—in this case a superb, pewterized undertone to everything that one can easily believe Tolkien would have loved. At the same time, there were those who felt that the lack of photography’s light was building a drab certainty in the film that was oppressive and without oxygen.
All of this is a few years ago now. The Lord of the Rings was an extraordinary business achievement. But this evening if I had to watch something special from Peter Jackson, I’d prefer Heavenly Creatures, which I still think of as a work of art, whereas the Tolkien pictures are a regime undergone.
The Lost Moment (1947)
There is a film called Aspern, from 1985, directed by the estimable Eduardo de Gregorio, in which Jean Sorel plays the man who has come in search of ancient love letters. They are held, fiercely, by an old woman (Alida Valli), and then there is the younger woman (Bulle Ogier), who may be used in the plot to get the letters. I have never seen this film and I would like to, just as much as I would love to see a perfect film made out of the novella on which it is based, Henry James’s The Aspern Papers (1888), one
of those several works in which James somehow suggested he had seen and absorbed every movie that might be made for fifty years or so.
But there is another version of The Aspern Papers, and it is surprisingly good—the surprise is yours if you take the easy attitude that Robert Cummings and Susan Hayward are unlikely to be in the same intriguing movie. So, give it a try.
It was a Walter Wanger production, and in its time it was written off as being rather gloomily literary, whereas I think it shows the intelligence in Wanger that helped make pictures like Scarlet Street and The Reckless Moment. Despite the invitations of period, and Venice (where the old woman lives), this is a 1947 film noir, beautifully shot by Hal Mohr, in which we come to discover the dangers of trying to bring the past back to life. For the dry papers are love letters and we hardly know now whether their muse (in the grim form of Agnes Moorehead acting at least twice her age) is wistful over her own passion or loathing of it. Is the moment worth recovering or is it more safely lost?
The picture was scripted by Leonardo Bercovici—at very much the same time he worked on Portrait of Jennie, which has moments of nearly occult seductiveness as the past comes back. Martin Gabel (more an actor than a director) directed the film and he does not do enough to withstand the fits of melodrama in the material. But he also makes us feel not just a haunted house but the way in which past drama may be remade. In short, this is a film that leaves one thinking of things like Vertigo and Celine and Julie Go Boating.
I have the hunch that James would have admired it. Coming two years before The Heiress (which is a very fixed and unmagical story), this is the first movie that comes close to James’s spirit. And Susan Hayward deserves high praise for the way she switches from a prim young woman to one who sometimes seems carried away by the romance of the letters. Cummings might have been recast—Montgomery Clift is the obvious choice. But Agnes Moorehead could have played any woman of any age. Anyone who loves her—and wishes there was more of her on film—will be stirred by this wolfish invocation of a dangerous past and a fatal future.
The Lost Weekend (1945)
The train trip, coast to coast, was four days and a boon to reading. (You also got to see “the dark fields of the republic.”) Sometime in 1944, just after Double Indemnity, Billy Wilder traveled east, with Charles Jackson’s The Lost Weekend as his reading. It was a best seller and one of the first accounts of alcoholism written as fiction but supplied with modern medical information. Living in a community of heavy drinking and self-delusion, Wilder jumped at the subject. He said he had the shape of the movie in his head by the time he reached New York.
Then he sat down with Charles Brackett to do the script. And here are valuable stories: Brackett’s wife was a drunk; he had a relative who was a closeted gay—and in Jackson’s novel, Don Birnam drinks for that very reason: He cannot face his own sexual nature. Furthermore, in March 1944, Myron Selznick died of alcoholism—and he had been Wilder’s agent once. So the personal drive to do this film was out of the ordinary. Wilder even wanted a character actor to play Birnam—to take away glamour or starriness. But Paramount prevailed on him: A star would permit better identification—so they all agreed on Ray Milland.
With John Seitz doing the camera work again (he had done Double Indemnity), the picture went on location in New York. It even used Bellevue and incurred their wrath when the film came out. Moreover, apart from having Jane Wyman as the rather woeful girlfriend, Wilder went for a tough cast: Frank Faylen as the sanatorium aide; Howard da Silva as the barman; Phillip Terry as the brother; and Wilder’s girlfriend, Doris Dowling, as the hooker. The bat and the mouse played themselves—and you have to stretch your imaginations to get the really loathsome kick in those scenes in 1945.
Then came hiatus. The studio didn’t like the picture—they suddenly realized it was about the most common social disease in America. It was said that gangster Frank Costello offered Paramount $5 million to have the negative burned. There was no release date, and Wilder went off to a shattered Europe to do war work—especially a film on the camps. His marriage was breaking up. No wonder if he started drinking more.
He was back in the fall, and somehow the world had changed. Early screenings got good results—had the public grown up? Even the studio? Miklós Rózsa dumped the jazz score and replaced it with dark, violent music of his own using the wailing theremin (which he had pioneered on Spellbound). All of a sudden the downer picture had a tragic force—as well as an allowable positive ending: Birnam may be on the road to recovery. Then again, he is so weak.
The Lost Weekend was a hit, which surely says a lot for audiences then. It had cost close to $1.5 million, but it had rentals of $4.3 million. Maybe there was a backlash from the neglect of Double Indemnity (a better film), but The Lost Weekend cleaned up: Best Screenplay; Best Actor for Ray Milland; Best Director; and Best Picture (Spellbound won for score!). It’s still deeply alarming.
Loulou (1980)
One of the great dangers to cinema is that audiences feel they’ve seen it all and (at least in their fantasies) done that. And by 1980, it was possible for people to be blasé about sex and violence—censorship no longer existed, did it? You could show whatever you could get actors to do—and the danger was clear already, that bored and cynical audiences sat back and said, “It’s not real anymore. It’s just actors pretending.” And so a kind of class distinction opened up—you can see signs of it all over the world—between people who were sophisticated about sex and violence, and those who did it. Loulou is that sort of film.
You can easily reckon Nelly and André (Isabelle Huppert and Guy Marchand) have seen Last Tango in Paris and The Godfather. They’ve talked about these things, and sometimes the talk has spiced up their love life. He runs an advertising agency where she works. They go dancing one night and, irritated by André’s manner and assumption of authority, Nelly lets herself be picked up by Loulou (Gérard Depardieu). He is a drunk, intimidating. Loulou means “yobbo” or “lout.” He is a working-class character. He probably doesn’t go to the movies. They become lovers.
One reason for that—and Maurice Pialat reveals it with a strange mixture of tenderness and grimness—is their sex. For Nelly, it is new and less gentle. It goes on so much longer. It exhausts and fulfills her. She doesn’t know whether she’s coming or going. But the attraction is more than that. She likes Loulou’s wildness, the cheap hotel where he lives, and the life of minor crime into which she is drawn. Is it the danger, or the pursuit of disorder? She doesn’t know, but it helps her resist every effort from André to win her back. How will it end?
The abrasive novelty of class disparity is very well revealed—for instance we see Nelly go from a studiously “nice” apartment to a dump (art direction by Max Berto, Jean-Pierre Sarrazin, and Alain Alitbol) without really being troubled. Pialat is as tough as he is fond of his characters: He pushed them to the limit, and there are excruciating scenes close to embarrassment. But he is a believer in the unpeeling of emotional nature, and he grasps a lot about how Nelly’s mind works—Huppert easily supplies the rest. But Loulou is a chump. He doesn’t get it or find something playful in the girl. Is it true to life, or just to story, that they begin to cross over?
This was a big hit for Pialat, a breakthrough, and it’s still riveting—obviously for the most part because the three actors trusted him to observe them in extremis. Arlette Langmann wrote the script with Pialat, and the photography was done by Pierre-William Glenn and Jacques Loiseleux. Philippe Sarde did the music, with contributions from Larry Coryell and Hubert Laws. The cast also includes Humbert Balsan, Bernard Tronczak, and Christian Boucher.
Love Affair (1939)
There are two halves to Love Affair, and it has always been a great question as to whether they match—or are they separate parts each searching for a mate? But the question takes you straight to the tricky heart of Leo McCarey and to the matter of sentiment in American pictures. So it began like this: McCarey, at RKO, had a plan for a romantic story invol
ving an American woman and a French diplomat. He had Irene Dunne and Charles Boyer lined up for it. But the French government went into a stuffy fit (now there’s a subject for the film: U.S. screenwriter has to thrash out with French ambassador the proper way to do a love story).
Keep moving. McCarey apparently woke Delmer Daves in the middle of the night and said, I have to have a story to go with the title “Love Affair.” So Daves thought about it, and lo and behold… on board a ship, Terry (Dunne) meets Michel (Boyer). He is engaged; she has a lover. They pick each other up in a quite delightful way—smart but vulnerable, expert yet awkward: It really is a love story.
They agree to meet six months later—on top of the Empire State Building. But on her way to that date, she is hit by a car and crippled. She conceals her injury from him. He decides she didn’t care. The wonderful, elegant tone of the first part turns into every-line-loaded-with-misunderstanding. McCarey hired Donald Ogden Stewart to smarten up the dialogue, but of course he had his own method in that, too. He liked to come on set in the morning, doodle away at his piano while looking at the script until he found a point of departure—a line to improve. Then he and the actors were at it in improvs and rehearsals, nudging the text this way and that. Indeed, in the first half of the film, we feel we are watching the rehearsals as the characters comment on their own dialogue, improve it, mock it, and generally scrutinize its honesty. It’s their shared way of working that lands them in love.
You can say it is the Hawksian method, but whereas Hawks loved play, in McCarey the search is on for real feeling. Boyer was not used to it, but he learned to like it—and Dunne was always a great comedienne.
'Have You Seen...?' Page 79
