'Have You Seen...?'

by David Thomson

  Barbara Stanwyck is quite brilliant as Ann Mitchell, a lively young woman who hasn’t learned to think ahead enough yet. Nineteen forty-one is Stanwyck’s year at the movies (The Lady Eve is there, and she shoots Ball of Fire before the year is up). She has real feelings of power yet she sees the dilemma of the movie, and guides “John Doe” to something like safety. But the idea of the despairing vagrant is so nearly out of control, and so close to unleashing fascist energies. The film ends with Norton being told he’ll never beat the people, but the picture describes the people as dangerous, a mob ready to be tilted in any direction. In short, you feel Capra’s idealism dissolving, and it’s not comfortable. He was never again able to make a straight comedy. The haunting underside of populism had left him afraid of America.

  The film did not do well. It was not nominated for Best Picture. Capra did walk away with a packet of money, but he closed down Frank Capra Productions. Ever since, the film stands there on the brink of America’s war suggesting a population that has hardly begun to inhabit the real ideals of the Revolution and which is now at the mercy of its own size and power.

  Meet Me in St. Louis (1944)

  In 1944, people waiting for news or for no news sang songs. Would it be any wonder if unusually large emotions blew upon the embers of the “musical” and wondered if there could be a great fire? Lady in the Dark—the most ambitious stage musical of recent years—flopped as a film. Yet that sly fox To Have and Have Not is like a smart kid who whispers, Look at me in the right light, and aren’t I a musical? And then there is the picture that may be the most satisfying story ever told as a musical in the history of the genre: Meet Me in St. Louis.

  Take it at face value: It is a screenplay by Fred Finklehoffe and Irving Brecher from a kind of memoir novel, by Sally Benson, about family life in St. Louis during the year of the World’s Fair there, 1903. The father (Leon Ames) is doing well enough in the bank to expect a promotion to New York, an event that the family regards with mixed feelings. To advance, to travel, to adventure—these are American urges, a part of the national optimism. But to give up the beloved house and its annual rhythm, that is also betrayal, loss, and the growing up that ends childhood.

  This is a story with a crisis, and—of course—it is made for audiences in 1944. So it knows a lot about change, progress, the future, and the fears that clothe those states; it knows all the reasons for wanting to stay home, in a preserved world, the one that people left so recently. In the last great song in the cycle, “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas,” Judy Garland sings, “Some day soon we all shall be together.” Not quite all, we know that. But the togetherness is so powerful an ideal that maybe it can stop American progress in its tracks.

  So, please be ready: The family album of the passing year is a framework for mounting crisis that Christmas will settle as Tootie (Margaret O’Brien), having heard her sister’s plaintive song, the saddest Christmas song there ever was, will go down into the blue moonlit garden and smash the patient snowmen, because moving on and staying still are too much for her. In other words, this is a Chekhov play, and the reason why Garland is so touching is that she’s trying to look after her sisters.

  Now consider that the pretty sets on the M-G-M lot (under the charge of Cedric Gibbons) are the dream of all our childhoods. The Technicolor photography is by George Folsey and Henri Jaffa. The costumes are by Irene Sharaff. I do not know the wig maker who made the lush fall of Esther’s amber hair. All these crafts accomplish the heat of summer in St. Louis, the mounting nightmare of Halloween (among the greatest dreams ever filmed), and the Christmas finale. The songs are by Hugh Martin and Ralph Blane and they also include “The Boy Next Door,” “The Trolley Song,” and the old classic, “Under the Bamboo Tree,” that exquisite home musical dance with Garland and O’Brien.

  Mary Astor is the mother. Harry Davenport is grandfather. Marjorie Main is the housekeeper. Lucille Bremer is the other sister. Tom Drake is the boy next door. Vincente Minnelli did it. If in any doubt about the journey, start here.

  Melvin and Howard (1980)

  Driving in Nevada is a good title for an existential novel. After all, it has huge extent and a few good roads with five-mile straightaways where you can let go. If you like driving and cars, Nevada is a friendly place. On the other hand, there are not many “theres” there, not many places worth getting to, or even noticeable. But if you have done much driving in Nevada at night, listening to music on the radio, or preaching, or The Art Bell Show with aliens knocking at your front door, Melvin and Howard is a perfectly natural film in which there might just be a bum needing a lift, and he could be Howard Hughes, so why isn’t he likely to let you in on his will as a thank-you? The emptiness and the possibility are so very closely allied. No one would be surprised if it happened, not even if they’d driven half their life waiting for it. Real gamblers are never surprised when they win.

  So Melvin and Howard is as sweet, hopeful, and generous as a ballad—there’s no anger or resentment hanging over it. Melvin Dummar (Paul Le Mat) picks up a man in the desert and takes him to Las Vegas. The man says he is Howard Hughes (Jason Robards). Melvin’s life is not doing so well, but neither is Howard’s. Howard is at that long-haired point where he’s living on the top floor of a casino, worrying over germs. Melvin’s wife (Mary Steenburgen) walks out on him, taking their daughter. They divorce. Then the wife says she is pregnant and they get hitched again. She wins some money, but he is a spendthrift and so she leaves him again. It’s the same old pattern until he gets a letter that is Howard Hughes’s will with Melvin due an inheritance. That’s when the lawyers take over and Melvin reckons it’s all too much trouble.

  All of this is, as they say, based on fact, or legend. Dummar did say he had a will. Bo Goldman wrote the script and Jonathan Demme directed it at the time when he had every reason to be the best hope among new directors. Demme and Goldman know not to press Melvin’s case too far. It is its dreaminess that is most engaging. And then there is the way it fits into the odd mix of relaxed haplessness and chance—with game-show glory beckoning—that is so redolent of the new West where neon kids the moonlight.

  It is this novelistic irony and the kindness that lets it ride that is so distinctive and pleasing, plus that sure notion that away from the coasts America is another country and every bit as strange as those Eastern kingdoms you hear about where people believe in things. That Demme is no more. I’d say the last clear sighting of him was in Something Wild. And it’s a loss, one of our worst.

  Tak Fujimoto shot this lovely Western light. Toby Rafelson did the production design for trailer living. Craig McKay edited it, and the music is a pretty medley of hits on the radio. The cast also includes Elizabeth Cheshire, Chip Taylor, Michael J. Pollard, Denise Galik, Gloria Grahame, Charles Napier, Pamela Reed, Charlene Holt, and someone named Melvin E. Dummar, coming in the back door for fifteen seconds’ more fame.

  Men in War (1957)

  The story is that Men in War was a Sidney Harmon production, with a script by Philip Yordan, for which Anthony Mann took a platoon of actors out into the California hills, and just shot it without a single interior. It’s a film about the Korean War, but the enemy are hardly named or seen as more than distant figures that leave the burnt grass trembling. By 2005, asking for the picture at a Pacific Film Archive screening, I found that no print seemed to be in existence. A Dutch television company owned the rights, but they had no material. All the PFA could find then was one good 35 mm print owned by a retired projectionist in Los Angeles. And this is the alleged art of film, and what had happened to an invaluable American movie.

  The platoon is lost in open country under the command of a weary lieutenant (Robert Ryan). They come upon two other Americans: a shell-shocked colonel, driven by a devoted sergeant, the one man in view who seems made for war (Aldo Ray). The sergeant wants to remain alone, undisciplined, but the lieutenant insists on joining forces. And so the culture and ethos of the two men is put to the test—how do men
in war behave if they mean to survive?

  These men have no backstory, and little chance of a future. They are figures in Mann’s eternally beautiful landscape photography, in which you can feel the beginnings of Japanese fatalism, a Mizoguchi, who sees that all men are shadows under the same sun. In the end, a few Americans make it to safety, though they are driven to use their flamethrower as darkness falls. This feels like a parable on weapons and commitment in which even the liberal lieutenant bows to the force of Sergeant Montana’s flamethrower, the final answer to his own inarticulateness.

  As always with Mann, the distant views are so lovely as to be mannered, and the fable on commitment comes close to being a homily. But as with Mann at his best, there is a profound identification with all the male figures and the minor disparities of bravery and resolve. I can hardly think of another film so unswervingly about war and yet so calm, so meditative, or so philosophical.

  The photography, often with intricate moving shots, is by Ernest Haller, and there is an inane flourish of music at the end from Elmer Bernstein. The sound is actual, natural, and restricted and this music sticks out like a studio touch. You can say it’s an antiwar movie, but the truth is graver. This is a picture about the necessary abandonment of other attitudes in war. As the film ends, the two leads toss the medals they have down the smoking hillside that has seemed so vital. In truth, Men in War is like a war memorial, made and built in the gravest helplessness.

  Ryan and Ray are perfectly judged as opponents, Robert Keith is very good as the speechless colonel, and the grunts include Philip Pine, Nehemiah Persoff, James Edwards, Vic Morrow, L. Q. Jones, Anthony Ray, and Adam Davis.

  Mephisto (1981)

  Whenever the old riddles return on whether Leni Riefenstahl was good or bad, I feel the urge to reexplore István Szabó’s magnificent and disgusted Mephisto. It’s more than a mercy, it’s a coup, that when this film comes to offer us its “leader” he is in no way a Hitler substitute—he’s the General (Rolf Hoppe), not just a fan of Mephistopheles the character, but an expert on every nuance in the performance, and a man whose ultimate sense of power rests in wondering out loud why the actor, Hendrik Hofgen (Klaus Maria Brandauer), has such a limp handshake.

  Szabó’s film is based on a 1936 novel by Klaus Mann on the career of a real German collaborator, Gustav Grundgens, the actor who played the gangster chief in M and the husband in Ophüls’s Liebelei. (Grundgens was also for a time the brother-in-law of Klaus Mann.) In the film (written by Szabó and Péter Dobai), we encounter Hofgen first as a provincial success—in Hamburg. He is a brilliant actor, a ruthless user of people, and one of those men so helplessly ambitious that even those most appalled by the spectacle are tempted to laugh at his shamelessness.

  And bit by bit Hofgen rises: He goes to Berlin and wins the support of the General—though this general makes it plain at every step that he can as easily condemn and diminish as praise. The actor’s life is crowded with women (including a black dancer, Karin Boyd), but he betrays them one after another in his effort to reach the top. And for Hofgen and Grundgens alike, Mephisto (opposite Faust) was the role by which the ascendant actor was best known.

  So the reference to the Nazi regime is very clear. But still Mephisto works so well because it could be applied to any dictatorial and paranoid regime. Again, the story is best felt as one in which Hofgen gradually recedes from us—but only gradually. At first, his abilities, his energy, and his neediness are oddly appealing. We know we’re going to loathe him very soon, but he is a great talent—or is it just that the role is battered by the full weight of Klaus Maria Brandauer’s insatiable charm?

  And this is where the full ambiguity of Mephisto sinks in. Brandauer is intensely physical, chronically devious—and in all of this he seems to love and beg for more of the close-ups that peer into his own greedy gaze. When Mephisto opened, Brandauer was famous only in Germany, and this spectacular film made him a star. Yet he was so personally difficult, apparently, that he became very hard to cast, or hold in a film venture. Several years ago, he was out of commission just because of this intense, problematic ego and his own inability to restrain his talent. It’s a puzzle that adds enormously to the power of the film.

  Lajos Koltai did the superb photography where Hofgen seems to be in a flaring emotional spotlight so much of the time. The supporting acting is first class: Ildikó Bánsági, Krystyna Janda, György Cserhalmi, Péter Andorai, and Christine Harbort, and the film does that first necessary thing for films of the Reich—it suggests the foul breath of these handsome people. It’s a world in which you can’t breathe for the stink.

  Le Mépris (1963)

  In Mépris, Michel Piccoli (Paul Javal) is married to Brigitte Bardot (Camille). That means he is nine years older than she is. He is a scriptwriter who likes to keep his hat on, not because he has lost as much hair as Michel Piccoli, but because the Dean Martin character followed that strategy in Some Came Running. Piccoli’s writer is working on a script of The Odyssey for a producer played by Jack Palance (Jeremy Prokosch) and a director who might be mistaken for Fritz Lang. The marriage is that odd sort where the wife apparently has nothing to do but take a bath or recline naked on the hotel bed all day. Bardot seems patient enough doing this. But we have known wives with a shorter fuse.

  Now, in part, this was a contractual obligation. The producer, Joseph E. Levine, had ordered that Bardot must do a nude scene, so Jean-Luc Godard had reckoned to get it out of the way as quickly as possible. He arranges Bardot across the CinemaScope frame (it may have been her second nature by then), and he goes through a series of color filters as the couple talk for no other reason than to let you know the nudity is mediated and contrived.

  One might argue that shades of “contempt” are being proffered here: toward Levine for his crass directive—as if Bardot’s clothes might not be whisked away by providence; toward Bardot for tolerating this treatment of herself—is it crazy to say she would not let kittens be treated like this?; toward Paul for making such a trophy into a wife. And toward us, of course, for watching. But by 1963 Godard was already over the edge: he believed watching a movie (a Prokosch movie) was as great a ruin as making one. Yet he labored on.

  A little later, Paul allows Camille to be alone for a short time with Prokosch. She believes he may have been making her available to advance his career. That she has so little self-respect or independence suggests a code of marriage belonging to the seventh century. Never mind: like many ultramodernists, Godard was old-fashioned in many respects. So the marriage breaks. Tragedy will follow. And a serene Lang will be left with The Odyssey—perhaps the least promising project Fritz Lang ever considered.

  I am being a little facetious because Le Mépris is now so taken for granted as a masterpiece—and because I wish to show that it has many silly things wrong with it. Still, Godard’s baleful feelings about the movies are no longer in doubt. He disapproves, and as he disapproves so he gives us yet more ravishing footage (by Raoul Coutard) from the roof of the villa (it had belonged to Curzio Malaparte) overlooking the Mediterranean (more spectacular than even Mlle. Bardot). With such grave camera movements and the music of Georges Delerue, Le Mépris has all the framework of a great film. But the little boy making it holds on to his disillusion the way older boys clutch their prick. It is beauty—but it is all over.

  The Merry Widow (1925)

  For every account of Greed that defines it as a battle between Erich von Stroheim (the director, the artist) and Irving Thalberg (the producer, the businessman), it has to be remembered that Stroheim’s next picture was The Merry Widow—for which his immediate boss and the man who hired him was Irving Thalberg. Moreover, while the cost of Greed (all that shooting!) was $665,000, The Merry Widow’s budget was less than $600,000. Grant, too, that even before Greed, it had been Thalberg who fired Stroheim from Merry-Go-Round at Universal. So two things emerge: first, that Thalberg recognized some quality or potential in Stroheim; second, that the rogue director was hard-pressed
to get directing work elsewhere.

  Not that this silent Merry Widow was a pleasant experience for anyone. It was planned that pit orchestras would play the Lehár music—still, the songs are instrumental in the love story, and it’s no wonder if Stroheim found screen time to turn toward a satire on the aristocracy in Montenegro (or Monteblanco as he called it). A story persists that Stroheim tried to introduce every perversion he could think of—but the film doesn’t really substantiate that. The operetta romance is fully indulged: there are lavish sets by Richard Day, and lustrous photography by Ben Reynolds and William Daniels. The film had two major players—John Gilbert and Mae Murray—and it made a healthy profit ($750,000). Stroheim’s treatment of the flimsy world in The Merry Widow is scathing and pungent, but there’s every indication in public response that that went down better than Lubitsch’s more wide-eyed reverence in the 1934 sound version (with Maurice Chevalier and Jeanette MacDonald).

  I do not minimize the willful self-destructive in Stroheim, but the most intriguing thing is that if he could have “survived” a few years longer then the edge of his satire and his psychological realism could have been strengthened by talk. What Lubitsch did with sound is something that Stroheim might have trumped.

  Yet it seems to be true that Stroheim let his relations with Mae Murray deteriorate. She was anxious to walk off the film and may have enlisted John Gilbert on her side. But the decisive incident probably occurred in Mayer’s office. Thalberg was away, so Mayer had to deal with the Von. Mayer tried to persuade Stroheim to be less cynical in his view. Then Stroheim suggested that Sonia (the Murray role) was really a whore. “I don’t make films about whores,” said Mayer, his anger building. “But all women are whores,” said Stroheim. Whereupon the toughie in Mayer lashed out and he is said to have knocked Stroheim off his feet. But the Von recovered himself and went back to work.