'Have You Seen...?'

by David Thomson

  The film comes from a Reginald Rose script adapted from the novel The Border Jumpers, by Will C. Brown, and it has the framework of a fable, so that as Link goes after the gang, he moves into radically different scenery. The train is robbed in semi-desert. But the Tobins live amid softer greens and browns, in a poisoned pastoral country. And when the gang goes on its last great raid, it is, unwittingly, to a ghost town in another desert. The Tobin gang may be famous still, but they have gone mad, too—and it is plain that Link’s departure has broken the demented Dock.

  Man of the West is striking for its character study and for its rueful sense of consequences, and it has a savage sexual undertow not evident elsewhere in Mann. It is often disturbing (the forced striptease that prefigures rape was always noted for its nastiness), and it leaves little comfort at the end. But in the exhausted, ruined face of Cooper there is justification for the sweeping title.

  The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962)

  There are Fordians who swear by this film, yet I wonder if they have really reflected on what it tries to say. It is a film that smells of soundstages. It goes back to black and white, as if the scent of the range had dried away. And, most fatal of all, it tries to have elderly stars playing young men. All of a sudden, the Ford ethos looks fossilized, yet there he is urging us to believe in the legend and call it fact. By 1962, surely it was plain to anyone that the movies had done terrible damage to a sense of American history with their addled faith in bogus myths.

  The film begins in about 1910. Senator Ransom Stoddard (James Stewart) comes through the old frontier town of Shinbone on the train. He stops awhile and thus we go back to a past that must be thirty years earlier. Stoddard was then a law student who came to the town. He met his future wife (Vera Miles); Tom Doniphon (John Wayne), a rancher; Dutton Peabody (Edmond O’Brien), editor of the local paper; and Liberty Valance (Lee Marvin), the local rogue and intimidator. It was at that time, the legend goes, that the young lawyer faced down Valance and killed him in a gun battle that launched the lawyer’s political career. But, no, it was not really so: It was Doniphon, under cover of darkness, who did the shooting.

  Ford had a good team: the script was written by James Warner Bellah and Willis Goldbeck (who was also producer). William H. Clothier did the photography. But it’s not just the thinness of the image that is disconcerting. James Stewart was fifty-four when he made the film, and really only cursory efforts are taken to make him look younger—in scenes when he should be in his twenties. It is altogether regrettable, for the law student who is not a man of action does not need to be middle-aged, too. Vera Miles, as Hallie, his girlfriend, is twenty years his junior.

  It’s as if Ford is no longer prepared to look at his own films—and, of course, that reticence is fatally close to the film’s disinclination to honor the truth. The result is an excessive kindness toward the enfeebled ideals of old men. And there’s a way in which Lee Marvin’s honest aggression as Liberty seems preferable. Indeed, you can’t help feeling that Liberty is a Peckinpah hero who has got horribly caught up in an elderly film.

  The nostalgia has moments. The irony in the central situation is appealing. Woody Strode is excellent as Pompey, Doniphon’s “servant.” Strother Martin is a delight as Valance’s sidekick. And Wayne and Edmond O’Brien do their duty. But you can’t help feeling that history for Ford is the terrible obstacle of a man who refused to face modern times. Whereas the real history of how “legend” rescued anecdote is rich, funny, and vitally suggestive of the American character.

  The Man Who Would Be King (1975)

  John Huston had wanted to try Kipling’s story of two English army sergeants who find a magical kingdom somewhere in Kafiristan since the days when he might have had Bogart and Gable in the leading parts. As a result, he had several scripts accumulated over the years, all of which told the same story—and why not, it’s a good story and cuter still if you have Kipling as a figure in it, his mustache standing on end as he hears the tale. But by the time Huston found himself in a position to do it, the industry thinking was that Newman and Redford (very hot as a team in the early seventies) were the ideal casting. Don’t let’s forget, when obituary time comes, that Newman dropped the script and said, “They’ve got to be English. Connery and Caine!”

  Thank God! For once those two get together, the heart of the film is impregnable, and a natural boyish humor emerges. I suspect that if he could have done it in 1945, Huston would have gone to the Sierra and fancied he was redoing Gunga Din. Bogart and Gable would have been fine, though there might have been too much time spent on lugubrious rival accents. By 1975, Huston had color (by Ossie Morris), location work in Morocco, and Mrs. Caine—the fabled Shakira—as Roxanne, the beauty who comes to Daniel Dravot in marriage.

  Huston was always very proud of his sense of irony, and the Kipling is loaded with it as these two wastrel deserters become the lords of misrule up in the mountains—until they go too far. But I’m not sure that Huston knows what else to do with the Kipling story, which is not just a “fate is strange” piece, but a rueful examination of misunderstanding between the British and their then-subject peoples.

  So it’s an adventure story, plain and simple—without, I fear, the gathered punch of all the ironies that end Treasure of the Sierra Madre or The Asphalt Jungle. Never mind, Connery and Caine are certain they’re having a good time and delivering the goods. Christopher Plummer is a treat as Kipling. And Shakira is beautiful, even if she looks as if she’s served too much time as a hostess in one of her husband’s restaurants—or listening to him telling us the simple secret of screen acting.

  In other words, it’s rather minor Huston. But if he had always wanted to do it, it must have been a relief that it turned out so well. Fabulous comic-book art direction by Alexander Trauner and a scene-stealing performance from Saeed Jaffrey as Billy Fish, the boys’ interpreter. In his book, Huston says that it was the sort of thing where an assistant director—Bert Batt—was essential if you were going to get the camels and the tribesmen surging through the Khyber Pass looking pretty. Thank you, Bert—and let’s hear more on the art of the A.D.

  The Man with a Movie Camera (1927)

  Ladies and gentlemen, I am about to cheat. I told you there would be no documentaries, and this was a considerable easing of my great problem: how to pick 1,000 feature films, story films, worthy of you and worth writing about, and with a chance of telling the story of the medium. My friend Tom Luddy looked doubtful. He said, “What are you going to do with Dziga Vertov and The Man with a Movie Camera?” I winced. I writhed. I worried. So it’s in.

  And here is the best reason I know. Suppose that you are a reader of this book, intrigued because you like watching movies, but a little intimidated because there are a good many here you haven’t seen or heard of. You may very well not know the history: how Dziga Vertov (also known as Denis Kaufman) was an inspiring spirit and innovator in the field of newsreel in the Bolshevik era. You may not know or be excited by the Soviet urge that film could show the new country to itself as a mechanical marvel. Most important, let’s say that you have young children who are monopolized by the screens that convey television, the Internet, and video games. You want to show them something that says “movie,” and you have come to realize that “movie” is not really of your child’s world. It’s not quite like madrigals or belles lettres. But it’s changed. Try The Man with a Movie Camera.

  You will find that the child’s lack of context or narrative guilt accepts easily Vertov’s conceit of the cameraman as everyman—the proletarian hero who has the power and the camera knowledge to show us not just ourselves, but visibility itself. Of course, the film is full of tricks and editing but they are all as candid and innocent as someone warning you that he’s going to cheat you. I have never found a child who was not sad when the film ended, who did not have hundreds of questions about the world being filmed and a new exhilaration with the whole process.

  I will go further. This is only a very pa
rtial record of Russia in the 1920s, so filled with hope and beauty as to be out of its mind with poetry. In being out of its mind, the camera makes a first step toward story. In truth, this film is a utopian vision—it never was or will be as free from friction and other problems. Like I Am Cuba, looking at Cuba in 1964, it is far less about the real place than the profound desire to sing or shout out.

  This could change your child and change you. With The Passion of Joan of Arc it is, I believe, the only silent film that needs no qualification or apology. It is perfect. It is new still. And it makes you love the world. If you have a child in such need—show them both films, Joan of Arc first, because they sort of know that story, and Vertov second because they need to be brilliant to see its story.

  The Man with the Golden Arm (1955)

  Literally, I can’t have this wide-screen title go across my mind without the rattle and flat-footed menace of Elmer Bernstein’s score going with it, plus the elegance of the Saul Bass titles—the train needs its smoke. It was said to be a jazz score, and Frankie Machine, the central character, does want to be a jazz drummer, like Dave Tough, but it’s jazz according to Stan Kenton or those intellectual white bands that were a big part of the fifties. If it’s Chicago, and I think it is, where are the black people? What I’m trying to say is that Otto Preminger’s The Man with the Golden Arm was one of those 1950s films that said, There’s a big, nasty world out there. With women like Eleanor Parker and DRUGS!!! (So we’ll do blacks next time?)

  At this distance, I neither know nor care whether the film is any good. It’s just that, seen at fourteen or so, sneaking in under the intended barrier of ratings et cetera, this seemed so hellaciously and giddily adult as to be intoxicating. OK, you took DRUGS—which was a very bad thing—but then Kim Novak lay with you to keep you warm as you went cold turkey. All of which is patently fantasy bumping up against the harsh realities in life—and perhaps the lesson is that film has nothing to do with reality, and don’t try pretending that it does.

  So it came from a Nelson Algren novel of 1949 in which Frankie is a would-be drummer, an expert card dealer, and an arm aching for a fix. Walter Newman and Lewis Meltzer did the script, and producer-director Preminger had to accept that Machine no longer killed himself if the film wanted to get the subject of DRUGS onto the American screen. Of course, in real American life, Dave Tough was dead at forty from what the reference books call bouts of alcoholism. Jazz had quite simply mapped out the self-destructive struggle between liberty and order in American life, years ahead of social studies.

  I still love the black-and-white photography by Sam Leavitt and the feeling that the whole street is one big set—because it was. And Preminger could film space, movement, and context as well as anyone. Arnold Stang is wondrous as the pal, Sparrow. Darren McGavin is one of the most odious suave drug dealers in American film. Kim Novak was a Molly that every boy dreamed of every night, whereas Eleanor Parker’s Zosch was the kind of woman no one had met yet.

  And then there is Frank—Sinatra—who craved to be in great movies until he got there and then grew bored with the whole thing. Maybe Sinatra really did act so fully as a singer that no other version of the art interested him. I don’t care. Sinatra as Frankie Machine took over one’s life for a season. His desperate face was the screw that held the CinemaScope in place. It’s a total performance—no wonder DRUGS took off in such a big way in America. If only jazz could have ridden along on the same arrows of desire.

  Mare Nostrum (1926)

  Rex Ingram’s Mare Nostrum is often hailed as one of the most beautiful of silent films. Alas, the more such praise is applied, the clearer it is that a fatal gap was opening up in the 1920s between visual spectacle and common sense or dramatic holding power. The screen was apparently a place where you could get away with nearly anything, if it was dazzling or hitherto unseen. At the same time, the public quickly heard alarm bells when plausibility was being tested. We still gasp at effects if we have not seen them before—and a moment later hiss if we feel they are unearned.

  Of course, it’s nearly always the case that when one notices “beauty” ahead of anything else in a work of art then the work is doomed and likely short-lived. Ingram had a painter’s eye, it is often said—but, we have to add, a painter who would have been in his element thirty or forty years before he was working. The sort of empire Ingram enjoyed at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer—with his wife, Alice Terry, as his unquestioned leading lady, and the Victorine Studio at Nice as his getaway—did not last long. The pictures came in too expensive, but worst of all they were archaic in their dramatic attitudes.

  Mare Nostrum may be the most beautiful of all, no matter that it’s ostensibly a portrait of naval warfare during the years 1914–18. That was a grim period, with Jutland and Scapa Flow as key events. Yet Ingram persuaded himself into a romance involving submarines and sailing ships in the Mediterranean. The source material was the novel by Vicente Blasco Ibáñez. An adventurer, Ulysses Ferragut (Antonio Moreno), is tempted into supplying the German submarines by Freya Talberg (Terry). She is shot as a spy and he is reunited with her in a watery grave. It is turgid nonsense, so far from the new “realism” in Army films like The Big Parade. Moreover, this much later in time it has to be said that Ingram’s loyalty to his own wife leaves only one appreciative person: the wife. Ms. Terry was a beauty, but that condition had had a calming effect on her mind that may have warmed Ingram in life. It seldom helps on the screen. Yet Ingram hardly seems to have realized that his characters were responding to ancient and literary codes of honor in an age when war at sea was the business of mighty ships and fleets.

  Willis Goldbeck wrote the script, Ben Carre was involved in the art direction (though Ingram apparently took on that key job himself), and John Seitz was the photographer—it’s so telling that Seitz shot this and the exposé footage of Sunset Blvd. The cast also included Hughie Mack, André van Engelmann, and Álex Nova. Mare Nostrum cost £140,000—and Ingram said it earned £400,000. Tiny sums today, but it was enough for Metro to shut off its involvement with Victorine. The studio was becoming a factory.

  Marnie (1964)

  It’s hardly possible to describe the psychosexual condition of the character Marnie without applying a similar scrutiny to Alfred Hitchcock. This was the first picture Hitch had undertaken since the career-spanning interview conducted by François Truffaut. And screenwriter Evan Hunter was a little perplexed to discover that Hitchcock was now tape-recording their conversations. Was he so much more conscious of posterity, or was he becoming impressed by his own fame? It had been his first determination that Marnie—a beautiful woman who is a chronic thief and sexually frigid—should mark Grace Kelly’s return. We should note that this would have been a less merry Grace, something of a return to the haunted woman in Dial M for Murder.

  Tippi Hedren was still there, under contract, as a standby, and no one yet saw any of Hitch’s irrational interest in her. But Evan Hunter, while intrigued by the Winston Graham novel, was forever stuck on the scene where Marnie was to be raped by her new husband, Mark. Can’t we lose it? he asked. Oh, no, said Hitch, painfully eager. In the end, Hunter was fired, and replaced with Jay Presson Allen, a novice. They got on, but Allen always felt the film was flawed. And by the time it shot, Hitch was pressing his attentions on Tippi Hedren in a way that shocked the actress—something of that horror surely helps the film. And it’s not that the morbid psychology isn’t felt. Marnie really is a wreck, and I’m not sure how much confidence we have in her recovery at the end. Rather there’s a feeling of life as a slippery, canted slope—where things get worse.

  So, to put it mildly, the sexual openness of the film is both gloomy and melodramatic—it’s as if Hitch sensed that censorship was breaking down, but he was lost in the new liberty. There’s also the chance that he felt both his new celebrity and his age and became obsessed with an actress, something he had played with all his life, but handled.

  A lot of the film feels contrived—I think Hitch’s kno
wledge of the real world was beginning to betray him. Hedren gives a very touching performance, but do we quite believe in Marnie’s sexual hang-ups driving her to steal? Or care? Hedren feels like a victim onscreen, not a strong enough person to be interesting. In turn that makes Sean Connery’s Mark unduly sadistic. It’s a problem, and it’s a film with many effective scenes fatally let down by occasional exaggeration.

  The team is the same: Robert Burks on camera (for the twelfth and last time); Robert Boyle on production design. Edith Head doing costumes, George Tomasini as editor. Bernard Herrmann doing music—his last Hitchcock score. The supporting cast includes Diane Baker, Martin Gabel, Louise Latham, Bob Sweeney, Milton Selzer, Mariette Hartley, Alan Napier, and Bruce Dern.

  The Marriage of Maria Braun (1979)

  As he prepared to do Berlin Alexanderplatz for television (the biggest budget ever ordered in West German TV), so Rainer Werner Fassbinder horrified his colleagues by suggesting they could “squeeze” one more picture in before they started. He had this story in mind, The Marriage of Maria Braun. Fassbinder was a wreck. Peter Berling reported: “His skin… looked like the rind of a sweating Swiss Emmenthal cheese.” But there was backing for another film because, for a moment, it seemed possible that the German favorite Romy Schneider might play the title part. But, once he’d met her, Fassbinder announced that she was a “dumb cow,” and so he fell back on Hanna Schygulla, who had been out of favor since Effi Briest. The budget for Maria Braun was less than a million marks, but the filming doubled that in a nightmare of scenes, stoppages, and sulks, chiefly because Fassbinder behaved so badly. Of course, it would prove his greatest hit. By the time it was finished he was doing seven or eight grams of cocaine a day.