'Have You Seen...?'

by David Thomson

  But so much is creditable: Hal Mohr did a very good job at putting the dream feeling on film, and no one could wish for more in the big magic moments. Anton Grot created a version of little England and the forest that lends support to the photography. And everyone agreed that Erich Wolfgang Korngold did a wonderful job arranging the Felix Mendelssohn music dramatically. As for screenwriters Charles Kenyon and Mary C. McCall, they did their job decently without supplanting the reputation of Shakespeare. A little more shaky are the dance routines by Bronislava Nijinska and Nini Theilade.

  There’s common consent that Puck is the stand-out figure, with Mickey Rooney, thirteen at the time, gurgling and cooing like some nonhuman species. But I think the mechanicals do very well, most notably Jimmy Cagney as Bottom. Indeed, Warners was so impressed by him that they started thinking about him as Robin Hood—not the craziest idea. In addition, Joe E. Brown plays Flute (he and Cagney are very funny in the Pyramus and Thisbe pastiche), Frank McHugh is Quince, Dewey Robinson Snug, and Hugh Herbert Snout.

  It’s in the loftier parts that you encounter some problems with verse delivery and an overall indecision on “tone”: Victor Jory as Oberon; Anita Louise as Titania; Ian Hunter as Theseus; Dick Powell as Lysander (he admitted later that he hadn’t known what he was saying); Jean Muir as Helena; Verree Teasdale as Hippolyta; Hobart Cavanaugh as Philostrate; Ross Alexander as Demetrius; and Olivia de Havilland as Hermia—she had made her teenage debut in the Hollywood Bowl version.

  So, was it meant to make Hollywood gasp at the class of Warner Brothers? A year later M-G-M did Romeo and Juliet (with notably less success) and then Shakespeare was allowed to rest until Olivier and Welles took him on. But you have to search hard for an American Shakespeare in the years since. So “long awaited” and long regretted may be more to the point.

  Mikey and Nicky (1976)

  Like a moon in the solar system of John Cassavetes, there is Elaine May’s Mikey and Nicky. Apparently Elaine May had a play version of the story dating back to the days of her celebrated nightclub act with Mike Nichols. That means that the film was not much short of twenty years in “development,” and generally I don’t think that is good for a movie. Along the way, Peter Falk read the play and said he loved it. He would do one of the parts. In turn, that led to the casting of John Cassavetes in the other part. It is the story of two very minor gangsters in Philadelphia. Nicky (Cassavetes) believes he has offended the mob and is set for execution. So he wants to get out of town, and he enlists his old friend, Mikey (Falk), to help. But is it possible that Mikey is set to finger Nicky and present him as a sitting duck to the hired killer, Kinney (Ned Beatty)?

  At some stage, Paramount gave the green light—this after May had directed A New Leaf (1971) and The Heartbreak Kid (1972). A New Leaf had been seriously reedited after May left, but The Heartbreak Kid was fresh and tart. The trouble with Mikey and Nicky seems to have been that May had been thinking about it so long, entertaining so many variations, that she couldn’t make up her mind what she wanted.

  Add that dilemma to the burning appetite of Falk and Cassavetes to turn it into an acting class for two improv-wild guys and you may begin to understand the problem. People on the film said that May was filming every scene over and over again. The schedule fell apart, and after a long period in Philadelphia the unit was reassigned to Los Angeles. Michael Hausman was the producer trying to hold it all together. But the film has three credited photographers—Bernie Abramson, Lucien Ballard, and Victor J. Kemper—as well as stories that Cassavetes shot some of it himself.

  But it was not over. The editing process went on well over a year. May removed all the film from her studio cutting room to a hotel room, and then some of the stuff went missing—there was a story that May’s psychiatrist had removed some of it to help her make up her mind. Anyway, two editors are credited—John Carter and Sheldon Kahn—but there are surely wilder stories. Paul Sylbert did the production design.

  The film was buried by reviews and ignored by the public. Yet, like many of the Cassavetes projects, it has a seething intelligence at work that is reluctant to accept any formal discipline. It’s not just that these two guys are unlikeable (they are). It’s more that their situation is not very interesting. Had May lived with it all so long that she no longer saw it as a project or a story? All one can say is that this picture serves to enlarge the strange story of her undoubted but unresolved talent. The cast includes Rose Arrick, Carol Grace, William Hickey, Sanford Meisner, Joyce Van Patten, and M. Emmet Walsh.

  Mildred Pierce (1945)

  Warner Brothers was in a muddle over Mildred Pierce from the outset, and in many ways that was because everything James M. Cain wrote was always said to be “unfilmable” on grounds of censorship. The novel was published in 1941, and Warners flinched from the way in which Cain had told his story without “sympathetic” characters. It’s easier to see now that that was his genius, and in Mildred Pierce he had deliberately moved away from melodrama and murder to deal with money and class, issues that fascinated him and which put him almost in the same league as Dreiser. So the book is very much about a divorced lower-middle-class woman and her difficulties in making it on her own. There is not a murder in the novel.

  But there is a good deal of adultery, compromise, bad language, and sordidness, which is what Warners meant by it being unsympathetic. Perversely, this studio attitude introduced a killing, of the Monte character (Zachary Scott), in the attempt to make Mildred more winning or noble. Of course, this affected everything else, notably the role of Veda (Ann Blyth)—bad enough in the book, but hissable on screen. This process took time, and it went through a number of screenwriters, several of whom were so attached to the Cain original that they resisted the changes—notably the flashback structure with police station talk that came from producer Jerry Wald as much as anyone. So Thames Williamson did a treatment, and there were scripts from Catherine Turney and Margaret Gruen (at least) before Ranald MacDougall came up with the final version, which begins with the murder and finds Mildred on the waterfront at a point close to suicide. In all of this, Cain was amiable and supportive, but not inclined to write it himself.

  In fact, the Cain view of money and self-respect survives the murder. Indeed, I think the compromise is acceptable, and I love the view of Mildred in southern California (with Eve Arden as her chum) trying to make a baking business. Director Michael Curtiz—that rich mystery man—is every bit as attentive to that job as he is to the melodrama, and I think a lot comes from the treatment of the character Wally (Jack Carson), sleazy but irresistible.

  The studio worried over how to photograph Joan Crawford. They felt she looked better at M-G-M, the studio that had dropped her. But it’s clear from that opening waterfront sequence that Ernest Haller had learned how to let shadow fall on her angry brow. It works, and the film is very well made. Ann Blyth would never be better, and the rest of the cast includes Bruce Bennett, Lee Patrick, and Butterfly McQueen. And today it’s far easier to see it as a milestone in feminist cinema, as well as a triumph for Crawford.

  Crawford won her Oscar—she was at home in bed, “ill,” and they brought her the Oscar as medicine. And don’t forget that Ann Blyth and Eve Arden were nominated for Supporting Actress, too.

  Miller’s Crossing (1990)

  I am not a steadfast enthusiast of the Coen Brothers, and I have given up trying to explain the haphazard movements of their career. But the thing that nags me about their record is Miller’s Crossing, a superb, languid fantasia on the theme of the gangster film that repays endless viewing. It is derived quite plainly from Dashiell Hammett’s The Glass Key, although the script was done by the Coens themselves.

  At the heart of the film’s assurance are the dour, glum rhythms of Gabriel Byrne as the “hero” figure who happens to be fucking his friend’s girl. The girl is Marcia Gay Harden, never better and so sexy that you understand why Byrne did not bother to debate the temptation. The friend is Albert Finney, charged with energy and booze
in equal parts as the thick-headed crime boss who can’t see a con if it’s a cat curled up on his lap. This broken bond between Byrne and Finney is a good version of the relationship between Ned Beaumont and Paul Madvig in Hammett’s novel. And it’s a shared virtue of both works that they convey the disgust and disbelief in tough men that sees how they can betray each other over a piece of ass. Of course, it is a testament to Harden’s ass that we never question the imperative of the ruinous equation.

  The next thing to remark on is the way Canadian studios and locations give such a rich, satisfying air of period and place. We never know, or need to know, the city, but there is nothing shabby or secondhand in the décor, and there’s an eagerness in the look of the film that speaks to a real love of space, furniture, light, and mood. The same pleasure vibrates in the very intricate story structure. There are some who find Miller’s Crossing too clever by half, but I think that misses how far the Gabriel Byrne character recognizes the curse of intelligence that hangs over him and the duty it imposes—of always being driven to nose out the cons of others, while hoping that his own subterfuges are going unnoticed. It’s kill or be killed and the air of life is smartness. Take it or leave it.

  There’s more, much more, and I think it centers on the “Schmatta” as played by John Turturro—queer as a coot, a dandy, a coward, and as brave as any coward who takes terrible risks. This could be the finest work of one of our best supporting actors. And don’t forget that he stands out in a movie that includes the adorable Jon Polito and the very frightening Eddie the Dane (J. E. Freeman), not to forget a passing secretary, who is Frances McDormand flashing the camera a quick greedy eye as she minces by.

  All of that said, after learning to love the crammed texture and its nearly constant inventiveness, it is the more baffling and disconcerting that the Coens seem so often prepared to deliver films that are enervated and without a single good reason for being made. Do they wake up at night wondering if they were ever really this good, or do they refuse to look at the film again?

  Le Million (1931)

  The camera sees a man and a woman at opposite rooftop windows. They say good-night and then the camera cranes and tracks over the roofs of Paris—and everything is a set, of course, by Lazare Meerson. It’s a miniature city but one where nothing unpleasant could ever happen. So it’s a film about money, but made by someone who doesn’t really know what hardship feels like. We are in the world of René Clair, where a taxicab can’t sound its horn without the orchestra picking up the phrase, and where a character’s thoughts are soon carried along in recitatif. The people say they are poor, but they look like an affluent dance company, thank you very much. Truth to tell, the one thing Clair needed in these films was a stronger choreographic sense. For although Le Million has a lot of fun over the silliness of money and its pursuit, you don’t feel much is at stake beyond the perfection of a soap bubble.

  Never mind, it’s instructive that Parisians loved these films in the early thirties and thought the use of sound was witty and elegant—it is, but sound can be so much more, so sound for Clair is like glass-blown silence. And in this one, Michel (René Lefèvre) and Prosper (Louis Allibert) have won the lottery—but where’s the ticket? It’s surprising, I think, that Michel claims the win instead of letting it be shared with Prosper; sharing, after all, is the visual motif of all those group shots that Clair loved where the light by Georges Périnal slips down on everyone equally, like blossoms in spring. (There is a very nice stage moment where Michel and his girl, Béatrice [a pouty Annabella], become reconciled while hiding behind the scenery as fat opera singers go on about nonexistent love.)

  When it’s over, you’ll marvel that the search for the lost ticket took so long. Clair wrote the film as well as directing it, but he doesn’t push himself into any really madcap situations and—compared with the screwball comedies in America—he doesn’t want to say anything unpleasant about French society. So the people are without substance: Michel’s poverty is alleged but not felt, and the plenty and stupidity of the society characters is just indicated. What appealed to Clair, plainly, was the idea of music carrying the action along—he must have died when he saw The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, but Jacques Demy gives so much body and weight to his romance.

  Le Million is very fragile, but it’s short and quick. The final scramble for the vital jacket ought to be crazier and funnier. You can imagine what the Marx Brothers or Buster Keaton might have made of it—and you feel the possibility that the madness will consume everyone, just like a panic or the cry “Gold!” So the film and its daintiness need more energy. But Clair’s world is unique, and models like Lefèvre and Annabella adorn it prettily—not quite people, not quite puppets. They’re toys that sing when you pinch them. Also with Raymond Cordy, Paul Ollivier, and Vanda Gréville.

  Ministry of Fear (1944)

  A man comes out of an asylum into a world that is at war. As he waits for the train to take him away, he sees a country fete in progress. He takes part in an absentminded sort of way, and apparently he guesses the weight of the cake—without ever knowing that the sweet mixture contains microfilm vital to the war effort. So begins the film that may yet be appreciated as Lang’s greatest in America, more delicately poised over the razor’s edge of war and madness, more lyrically given over to the abstract. It is from the novel by Graham Greene, published in 1943, and it does have a sequence in the improvised bomb shelter made out of a London tube station, but the film is not nearly as heavy on the atmosphere of London in the blitz as the novel. Which is not to deny that Ministry of Fear is actually more atmospheric than, say, Hangmen Also Die or Cloak and Dagger, films in which the history of the Second World War is more immediate but less dramatic. In Ministry of Fear we are back in those stage-made cities from the German period, where every building or doorway conforms to the architecture of dread and trap.

  Ministry of Fear was written by its producer, Seton I. Miller, and made at Paramount. Henry Sharp did the photography, and the design is by Hans Dreier and Hal Pereira. Bert Granger did the sets, which ranged from the tube station to the country fete. And Ray Milland played the protagonist, Stephen Neale. Milland at this time was a very intriguing actor, handsome yet lacking natural confidence, and he has an intuitive understanding of how to be released from a madhouse, yet not necessarily beyond its care. The plot of the film is a series of irrational and unexplained forces striking at Stephen, yet inwardly Milland suggests no surprise. His madness has taught him that much.

  For the rest it is a master class in Fritz Lang’s use of entranceways and the barriers between spaces that can be elided by light and bullets. So the craziness of its world is opposed by a constant and precise physical geometry that is as beautiful as anything Lang filmed. And long before the end, that relationship of disturbance and visual grace is the music of the film, and its greatness as art. Do not come here expecting Englishness, Graham Greene, or a lucid espionage plot. Follow your eyes in all things, and see how the momentum of the film gathers. In the mid-forties as in the twenties and the sixties, Lang was one of the greatest compositional artists the movies have known, as well as a man who taught us to see the forms of framing. In the end, of course, the meaning of the framing is fatal or filled with dread. So even when this story ends well, the forms tell us to stay alert.

  The excellent supporting cast—everyone edgy or eccentric—includes Marjorie Reynolds, Carl Esmond, Dan Duryea, Hillary Brooke, Percy Waram, Erskine Sanford, Thomas Louden, Alan Napier, Byron Foulger, and Eustace Wyatt.

  The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek (1944)

  “Education, though compulsory,” wrote Preston Sturges, “seems to be spreading slowly.” He had the idea for The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek back in the thirties. He eventually filmed it in 1942, but while there were few films with so frantic and inspired a take on the war effort, Paramount held the finished film up until 1944. And by then, Sturges was leaving the studio. It was the end of a perfect marriage. Hail the Conquering Hero was still to come, b
ut Sturges was an independent, and he was lost. Meanwhile Paramount’s comic output shrank to things like Samson and Delilah.

  It had been Sturges’s first idea that in a place called Morgan’s Creek, a girl is pregnant by the banker’s son. But he won’t marry her. So she lives with a hermit and has sextuplets. Sturges wanted to do it with Betty Hutton and Harry Carey as the hermit, but he dropped the hermit and wrote a part for Eddie Bracken. As the story now stood, Trudy Kockenlocker (Betty Hutton) is determined to “kiss the boys good-bye” at a military dance. (Buy War Condoms as You Leave This Theater?) This is much to the ire of Papa Kockenlocker (William Demarest) and the woe and dismay of Norval Jones (Eddie Bracken), who loves Trudy. No matter that he is a feeble jerk who can’t even get accepted by the Army. And so Trudy’s six bright boys are attributed to Norval.

  At last, Preston Sturges was setting aside New York and Palm Beach, as well as the society people he knew and loved. Morgan’s Creek is a place that might frighten even the campaigning politicians as they pass through once in a lifetime. It is the home of madness, excess, and the frantic desperation to be American. It was Sturges’s first great attempt to haul himself up on high and survey what the idiots had made of the terrain. Thus the foreboding comments on education and its prospects.