The Maltese Falcon (1941)
In this case you can trust the lady. It was Mary Astor who observed, “It was Huston’s picture, Huston’s script. He’d had the wit to keep Hammett’s book intact. His shooting script was a precise map of what went on. Every shot, camera move, entrance, exit was down on paper, leaving nothing to chance. Inspiration or invention.” But spur-of-the-moment genius did have its opening: that’s how Ms. Astor and Mr. Huston found time for a nice little affair during the shooting of The Maltese Falcon.
Warner Brothers had purchased the Dashiell Hammett novel (1930) when it came out for $8,500, and on the strength of that they’d ruined it twice already—The Maltese Falcon and Satan Met a Lady. But John Huston was a favored man at the studio. He had been writing his head off for them, and producer Henry Blanke asked what he would like to direct. Huston got the feeling straightaway that the studio was backing the offer. So The Maltese Falcon got its third shot. Early plans to cast Geraldine Fitzgerald and George Raft sank away, and Huston got Astor and Bogart instead, the latter at three days’ notice when he was on suspension. So don’t give up on paying your dues and having the luck. Huston was thirty-five.
Among many other things, he was an astute and regular reader. He knew Hammett had done so much of the work and had written a movie if the studio chumps would leave well enough alone. For his part, Huston storyboarded the whole thing and then went out and found Peter Lorre for Joel Cairo and Sydney Greenstreet for Casper Gutman. Even then, he read the book closely enough to realize that Spade and the dame are two of a kind—not very nice—but that Spade has a bleak sense of honor while she’ll do anything. He also saw that Spade walks a fine line. He often seems to be in charge of everything, and with Bogart in the role, that could lead to sardonic superiority. But Spade can be rattled. You can get under his skin. And at the very end he isn’t quite sure whether to be the man he wants to be or to trade everything away for Brigid.
So I’ll grant that The Maltese Falcon is meticulously shot (without ever getting that locked-up Fritz Lang feeling). I’ll allow that Lorre, Greenstreet, and Elisha Cook, Jr., are definitive supporting characters in the world of noir to come. And I’d add that it took a mercurial spirit to know that Greenstreet and Lorre would have such sly chemistry. But it’s the love story that is riveting, by which I mean the way Mary Astor tells her tales, with deepening sincerity and fuckability (they are very sexy together), and Bogart’s Spade chuckles and says, “Oh, you’re good, darling!” More or less, I think it’s the first film in which two characters go on a spin based on not telling the truth. It’s something Hammett guessed, that the players felt, and it’s the lovely crisscross of screwball and noir. It’s one of the sweetest discoveries in American film.
The Manchurian Candidate (1962)
There’s a fascinating group of pictures made in the late 1950s and early 1960s where American genre seems to have gone astray—Some Like It Hot, Touch of Evil, Psycho, Rio Bravo, and The Manchurian Candidate. It’s not that that thriller wasn’t a warning. Frank Sinatra certainly seemed to wonder whether Lee Harvey Oswald had seen The Manchurian Candidate. Yet no one, I think, ever took the whole brainwashing stuff seriously, with its stress on playing a little solitaire and the Queen of Diamonds, as anything except Richard Condon and George Axelrod’s wild injection of screwball menace into an electoral comedy. In other words, aren’t election campaigns comic enough already without solitaire?
There are sublime things in the picture: the dream in which a ladies’ flower-club meeting slips in and out of brainwashing; the entire conceit of Laurence Harvey as someone not quite there; the furious, digestive satisfaction of Angela Lansbury feeding on all around her; and the dotty-meeting-cute scene between Sinatra and Janet Leigh on the train. Throw in director John Frankenheimer’s gleeful portrait of television at work as a confusing miasma and The Manchurian Candidate is jumpy with stuff to watch (and laugh at). For instance, when Lansbury, playing Harvey’s mother, gives him the full-lipped kiss we can’t honestly say that that issue is explored—it’s an instant joke, especially since we half know that Lansbury was only three years older than Harvey. Think if he had really begun to get the hots for her.
The notion that we are asked to accept—that the Iselins are Communists on their way to the White House as part of a Big Red Plot—is nonsensical, scriptwriting ingenuity, and an idea that deserves to be treated comically. The real sources of paranoia and menace in American politics are so much more alarming than the Iselins. If you want to worry, think of people as jittery as Sinatra’s Ben Marco in any position of power in the Army.
Of course, Frankenheimer had an instinct that his film had to be played over the top. He took his cue from Harvey’s natural-born zombie act and the amazing release in Angela Lansbury. And he never let the audience have time to reflect on the cockamamie plot. In the lamentable remake (by Jonathan Demme), the flat-footed time we have to think about it all kills the fun.
Axelrod deserves great praise: He was one of those writers who could hold the screen and the moment while letting a mass of resonance fill the theater. Lionel Lindon’s black-and-white photography is tough and wintry, and the young Richard Sylbert did a great job on the décor. The film might have been better still if the crazy design had gone all the way through, like the streaky remnants of some hallucinatory drug. But in fact, as it nears its end, Frankenheimer turns pro and solemn, Ben Marco becomes active, and the film says, “Look, I’m a suspense thriller!” But that’s not what we remember later.
A Man Escaped (1956)
Fontaine is a French Resistance fighter captured by the Germans. He is sent to a forbidding prison. Not that we have to see individual Germans. When Fontaine is in a car being taken to the prison with other prisoners, he thinks to make an escape. He runs, but the camera remains, fixed on his empty place in the back of the car. We hear the noise of feet and scuffle and then Fontaine is brought back, bloodied. Now he is handcuffed, too. But everything has been told in terms of his pace, his face, and offscreen sounds.
The “actor” playing Fontaine is François Leterrier; he has the face of a saint, and of a man who will go to any extreme to be free. It is a brave face yet a frightening face, and by now—1956—we are learning what to expect of Robert Bresson’s faces. So he picks people who do not regard themselves as actors, but they have the most compelling faces we have encountered. The first principle of watching, therefore, is exaltation. Fontaine looks like Antonin Artaud’s Brother Martin in The Passion of Joan of Arc.
The story of the film, its ritual, is his attempt to escape. With an old spoon, he is able to loosen panels in his door. With the wires in his bedstead he can make ropes, wrapping the wire in shredded clothing. He shapes hooks that will hold the ropes so he can climb up and down. Meanwhile, there are the sounds of executions. Prisoners come and go. Fontaine doesn’t know how long he has. He washes his face. He has a pail of food. He walks in the yard and cleans out his latrine pot. He listens and waits. The film is a relentless study of his face—imprisonment has never seemed so intense.
Then, at the point of crisis, he acquires a cellmate. Is he an ally or a stool pigeon? Fontaine must make his decision. He looks at the boy: is he a lout, or another baffled saint? He makes his choice, yet he has no choice: the subtitle of the film is “The wind blows where it will.” He is a man escaping. The camera just admits that he has to kill a German on the way out. But Bresson refuses to dramatize or humanize the event. It is past four in the morning. They have left their shoes and jackets behind. I am not spoiling it for you. The title tells you. Fontaine has fulfilled his duty again. He has escaped. And as he and the other man walk away, Mozart comes up on the sound track welcoming them, taking them in. Not that it is a film about Mozart.
It is a film about the triumph of the will—and obviously I choose those words very carefully. It is an acceptance of fate, too. But it is a fierce film, as well as utterly humble. And you can tell yourself that it is a French Resistance story, if you like.
Photographed in black-and-white by Léonce-Henri Burel, based on an account of real events by André Devigny. Design by Pierre Charbonnier. Bresson’s second masterpiece. There are books that say the “style” is “rigorously spare,” and you know what they mean. But it is a symphony of a face in concentration and in excelsis. No effect is as special.
The Man from Laramie (1955)
After Winchester ’73, Anthony Mann made four more Westerns with Jimmy Stewart: Bend of the River, The Naked Spur, The Far Country, and The Man from Laramie. If we only have space for one, which will it be? I grew up on them all, and it hurts to exclude anything, but I’ll settle for the last if only because the story is the most interesting.
Will Lockhart (Stewart) comes to the West with a mission and a mule train. We’re not sure at first what the quest is, but with Mann it usually involves some unpaid score from the past. Lockhart is driving pack animals, but when he puts them out on a salt flat he is viciously attacked by Dave Waggoman (Alex Nicol), the son of the local rancher. What follows is a reason for including Laramie, for it’s one of the more startling pieces of violence in the Western. Dave shoots Lockhart in the hand—and Stewart is harrowing in registering the pain and the outrage.
He is reassured by Dave’s father, Alec (Donald Crisp), and by the foreman, Vic Hansbro (Arthur Kennedy). But followers of Mann don’t need to be told to watch Kennedy closely. It has been said that the story is a version of Lear, with Donald Crisp as the unbalanced king. That’s going too far and it detracts from the quality of Crisp’s performance. But if it’s not Lear, it’s still one of the subtlest stories in a Western.
The script is by Philip Yordan and Frank Burt, and taken from a Saturday Evening Post story by Thomas T. Flynn. Charles Lang photographed it, and it’s the first Mann Western in CinemaScope. Yes, he had loved and honored the golden section, but the compositions here are alive and eager for the new screen shape, and there are several of the great traveling shots that Mann did better than anyone.
There isn’t the feeling of betrayal that haunts The Far Country or the near breakdown of the Stewart character as occurs in The Naked Spur. But the eye for terrain, depth, and the splendor of trees is without limit. It may seem trivial or sentimental to say that Mann filmed trees better than anyone—but look at the movies long enough and you will know what I mean. No other director ever studied the details of a location or a landscape with more feeling. The place is always a character in Mann, and the unspoken bond between the hero and the country is the code of honor he adheres to. To see the same thing addressed or felt in, say, Michael Mann’s The Last of the Mohicans, is to feel the artistic power of Tony Mann’s eye and the political decisions attached to it. He should have been secretary of the interior.
The cast also includes Cathy O’Donnell (always touching), Aline MacMahon, Wallace Ford, Jack Elam, James Millican, John War Eagle, and Gregg Barton. From Winchester ’73 to Man of the West (with all the Stewart films in between), this is the last great campaign in the Western until Peckinpah comes along, and he was too drunk or too sad to see the trees.
Man Hunt (1941)
Geoffrey Household’s novel Rogue Male is a thriller with real flavor and a book that has attracted several filmmakers—there is a version from the 1970s in which Peter O’Toole plays the hero as a far more authentic and high Tory sportsman than Walter Pidgeon dares in Fritz Lang’s Man Hunt. But it’s the story of a hunter-stalker in Europe in the late 1930s who actually has Adolf Hitler in the sights of his high-powered rifle near Berchtesgaden. He pulls the trigger, but the gun is not loaded. He has done the stalking as a lark and a test of skill. But he is pounced upon by Nazi guards and tortured. This is not a pretty scene, and it is all part of Lang’s larger wish to persuade us that this enemy is not sporting. The man escapes, but he is on the run with a chance of uncovering a Nazi plot in London.
Dudley Nichols had done the script for Twentieth Century Fox and John Ford, with Kenneth Macgowan producing. But Ford declined and Macgowan saw Lang as the ideal person for the story. The film came out in the year the U.S. entered the war. Still, it’s fascinating how much Lang gives it a period feeling—it could be occurring in the twenties, with Dr. Mabuse running the conspiracies. Richard Day and Wiard Ihnen did the sets and they’re very good; even in open country Lang prefers to build the world rather than let nature or daylight get a look in. Arthur Miller did the black-and-white photography, and there is great stuff with streetlights, fog, the parapet of a bridge, and nothing else in the night. Alfred Newman wrote the music. It might qualify as a film noir if it dug deeper into the violence in the man—is he a natural killer, or just a sportsman? Could he have killed Hitler? Of course, Lang believes he is foreseeing a new world where everyone must be ready to kill.
Lang and Hitchcock went to school on each other, and it’s interesting to compare Man Hunt with The 39 Steps in that both books were adventures told from the point of view of an English upper-class gent. Hitchcock believes that polish never fades, even if it goes down fighting. But Lang has seen a world that knows not to trust anything for lasting value. The Hitchcock hero retains his identity. For Lang, it can be the first thing to go. And in an era of stardom, Lang’s anxiety was far more pessimistic than Hitchcock, though Hitch would go on to paint darker portraits of individual dread.
Walter Pidgeon does a sturdy job as the hero. Joan Bennett (in her first film for Lang) is excellent as the London tart who helps him (though Fox was uneasy about mentioning her job), and there is good work from George Sanders, John Carradine, Roddy McDowall, Ludwig Stössel, and Heather Thatcher.
Mannequin (1937)
Taken from a short story, “Marry for Money,” by Katherine Brush, Mannequin is not just an unexpected working of feminist ground, but one of the most remarkable and admirable Joan Crawford pictures. She plays Jessie Cassidy, a hardworking seamstress in the city (it’s New York). She lives at home with her family, and she knows full well that the money she turns over to her mother (Mary Philips) often ends up as booze money for her idle father and brother (Ralph Morgan and a crackerjack Leo Gorcey). Frank Borzage, the director, sees her coming home one night, so poor she has to walk, and trudging up tenement staircases in one of the best scenes of ordinary hardship.
Jessie has a boyfriend, Eddie Miller (Alan Curtis), a second-rate boxing promoter, a no-good, and she’s kidded herself about their love. In fact, as her mother sees all too well, Jessie’s life is going nowhere—so it’s odd that those eyes are like headlights staring ahead for Joan Crawford’s great beauty. But in a moment of weakness, she marries Eddie and is suckered by the apartment he’s rented for them. She thinks it’s all going to be OK. Then they meet John L. Hennessey (Spencer Tracy), a self-made rich man, someone who escaped the slums and went into shipping. It’s clear that he adores Jessie.
Eddie wonders if maybe he and Jessie could have a “divorce” so Jessie could win Hennessey and take his money. Jessie settles for the divorce. She is magically transformed, not a seamstress now but a mannequin modeling great clothes (by Adrian). She marries Hennessey, and he does his best to win her—but she never loves him. And the point of the film is to heed her mother’s advice: Be strong, be selfish, be the man, look after your own life.
It was an M-G-M picture, produced by Joseph L. Mankiewicz, scripted by Lawrence Hazard and with Borzage directing. But this is beyond the usual Borzage: he was all too good at making a secure dream world for lovers and he does it quickly a couple of times here only to shatter the dream in the steady working toward an idea of economic independence. So the film is beautiful in Borzage’s normal way; in tough and sweet circumstances, he depicts external reality in terms of female emotion. But the plot keeps driving toward self-sufficiency and a kind of solitude that is rare in Borzage, but which glorifies Joan Crawford. There’s a lush song, “Always and Always,” written by Edward Ward, that got an Oscar nomination, but the inner sentiment of the picture is to say “maybe” and to leave decisions in the woman’s hands.
And C
rawford leaps at this new power. There’s a story told that while the picture was shooting, Norma Shearer wanted to borrow the cameraman, George Folsey, for some tests. But Crawford came to her dressing-room door, dressed in her underwear, and told Shearer, “Not on your life!” It was an answer that had been ten years in the making.
Man of the West (1958)
Link Jones is a man of about sixty—if you look carefully you have to see that he is dying. This is not just because he is gaunt-looking. It is a matter of the inward anxiety beneath the weathered exterior. He takes a train, headed toward Fort Worth. He has a modest packet of money, enough to hire a teacher for the frontier community where he lives. The thing he fears is not just death, but the responsibility of carrying the means to improvement for his community. We never see this small town where he has a wife and two children. For the train is robbed. Link recognizes some of the outlaws as members of the infamous Tobin gang. He ought to remember this, for he was once himself one of the Tobins.
Man of the West was made three years before Gary Cooper’s death, and it seemed strange then that James Stewart was not the central hero he had played so often for Anthony Mann. No doubt Stewart would have done a fine job, though he was seven years younger than Cooper. But just as Stewart would have been unlikely to catch Cooper’s shyness at the railway depot, so Stewart did not seem as ready for the tragedy that faces Link Jones as he renews contact with his own past.
Of course, Mann had often used the idea of a lone Westerner who has an ugly past to live down. But he had referred to it quickly. With Cooper in this story, Mann seems far more struck by the wounds left by the past. So it’s striking that while Link has a family, the film pushes him into a relationship with Billie Ellis (Julie London), the saloon singer who is on the train and who becomes his surrogate wife in the lecherous eyes of the Tobin gang. Thus, Link has to save his precious money, but he has to defend Billie against the threat of rape and ultimate defilement at the hands of Dock Tobin (Lee J. Cobb), the head of the gang and Link’s father figure.
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