'Have You Seen...?'

by David Thomson

  It helps a lot that we meet the wives of these men: so Marcia Gay Harden is Dave’s wife, crushed, conflicted in her loyalties, a liability to her own man; Laura Linney is Jimmy’s wife—and this is one of those films where you have to admit that, as good as Linney can be when her characters are nice, she’s a lot better when they’re dangerous. As for Sean, his wife has left him (we hardly know why) but she has a habit of phoning him and staying silent on the other end of the line. So some get killed, and some lead shattered lives. Eastwood hardly seems like this sort of man now, but over the years his would-be gent has let fatigue show and allowed acid to eat away at fatuous self-polish. Larry Fishburne is excellent as the second cop, and the acting seems raised on unforgiving New England weather and Eastwood’s sense of the underprivileged as people who must learn to look after themselves.

  The Naked City (1948)

  The movies have had an enormous and often unexamined impact on our everyday ideas and pursuits. But we should recognize at the outset that this is chiefly because they are a medium that releases pent-up or taboo longings. Nowhere has it been more persuasive or insidious than in affecting our attitudes to crime and love. Put the two together, and you can find yourself adoring the utterly unreciprocating and undeserving Michael Corleone, just as if you were part of his family. And The Godfather is only the most sophisticated version of the myth that wonders if gangsters aren’t appealing, attractive, and imitable. But on the other hand, the movies have often fought to present crime as a kind of social overspill, as much the result of underprivilege, poverty, overcrowding, and hard luck as it is of inspired malignance. In that code, the cops are our soldiers and society’s teachers, and all for a lousy salary.

  Especially in the years after the Second World War, there was a surge of films that sought to show the realism of crime, and to do so in documentary terms. The Naked City is a characteristic film of that period. It was dreamed up by the producer Mark Hellinger in the thought that the urban police force was like the army—a regiment of decent men doing a hard job methodically in a way that deserved attention. As a result, the action and the camera went out on the streets—especially with such films made at Twentieth Century Fox. The look was realistic, yet the attitude to the police was idealistic. It would be twenty years before real study of police procedures resulted in the realization that some cops might be crooked.

  The script was written by Albert Maltz and Malvin Wald, and Jules Dassin was hired as director. Cameraman William Daniels won an Oscar for the new gritty look, and editor Paul Weatherwax won another Oscar. There was a further compromise with “realism” in that Barry Fitzgerald was cast as Muldoon, the lead cop—you could argue that nobody behaved like Fitzgerald in real life, and he surely provided a lovable, eccentric hero. But the film was well cast all the way down the credits list: Howard Duff, Don Taylor, Dorothy Hart, Ted de Corsia, House Jameson, David Opatoshu, Arthur O’Connell, Paul Ford, and James Gregory.

  The idea that there are eight million stories in The Naked City had a big influence. In 1958, ABC revived the title and Lieutenant Dan Muldoon (played by John McIntire) in a TV series that ran until 1963. Later, Horace McMahon took over as the top cop. It never went to eight million stories, but the collective genre of precinct stories includes such heights as Hill Street Blues. Let’s just say we’ve heard most of the stories by now, and still don’t have a coherent theory as to whether police or education is the best remedy for crime.

  Napoleon (1927)

  According to one of his great disciples, this is how Abel Gance addressed the crew of Napoleon in June 1924, the night before they began work:

  This is a film which must—and let no one underestimate the profundity of what I’m saying—a film which must allow us to enter the Temple of Art through the giant gates of History. An inexpressible anguish grips me at the thought that my will and my vital gift are as nothing if you do not bring me your unremitting devotion…

  The world’s screens await you, my friends. From all of you, whatever your role or rank, leading actors, supporting actors, cameramen, scenery artists, electricians, props everyone, and especially, the unsung extras who have to rediscover the spirit of your ancestors to find in your hearts the unity and fearlessness which was France between 1792 and 1815, I ask, no, I demand, that you abandon petty, personal considerations and give me your total devotion. Only in this way will you serve and revere the already illustrious cause of the first art-form of the future, through the most formidable lesson in history.

  Nearly three years later, Napoleon—the thing itself—opened in a definitive version that includes a triple-screen finale (i.e., a passage in which something like a CinemaScope screen is occupied by three side-by-side images which, as a rule, give different views of the same event). The movie is by turns rapturous and tedious. In the truest sense, it is based on an urge to be Napoleon—not to explain or understand the human phenomenon, but to glory in it.

  At his best, Gance could animate a sequence like the childhood snowball fight. At his worst, he could lapse into a kind of unsleeping bombast and period detail. As for the Art and History business, make no mistake about it: If you wish to know all that you can about Bonaparte, then you must read books. You must do the work of research as it is available. But if you have neither the time nor the will for that, then you get Gance’s Napoleon (which is oddly close to Gance’s Gance. And with about the same amount of doubt or reflection).

  The epic film is essential—yet it is minor, too. In 1981, thanks to Kevin Brownlow and David Gill, the film was restored and revived at 235 minutes in a labor of love and scholarship. This version was given a music track (in America) by Carmine Coppola and (in Britain) by Carl Davis—the Davis score is infinitely preferable, though I will repeat the plea made by Gilbert Adair (and derived from the screening policies of Henri Langlois) that silent pictures should play silent.

  There have been histories of film that respond to all the fuss with clarion cries on the great and undying progressive impact of film. Alas, I see it differently. Napoleon is a film that makes painfully clear the medium’s susceptibility to blowhards and their speeches. With Albert Dieudonné as Napoleon, Gance himself as Saint-Just, designer W. Percy Day as Admiral Hood, and Antonin Artaud as Marat.

  Nashville (1976)

  Why Nashville as the setting for this bicentennial panorama of America? Because Nashville would be a pretext for songs—and don’t miss how far this movie is a musical, or one in which the narrative is set spinning in adjacent circles by the songs. But also because the songs encouraged ABC to think of an album to promote with the picture—and that’s one reason why Robert Altman would get his actors to write the songs: so that he had few problems with controlling the rights. You may hear America, but Altman saw a means to a deal on a difficult picture.

  Because his other vague intent was another set of circles—circles of activity (call them lives) all spinning in the same direction, many touching the outer edges of other circles. And offering comfort or friction in the touching as well as an overall pattern of the flux and order (the chaos and the rhyming) of so many lives all on their own yet in something like concert. It was a way of looking at society such as no American film had really tried before. So Nashville itself was almost irrelevant, and no one should regard this as an especially sympathetic approach to the country music capital of America. It’s an open question, I think, whether Altman actually likes country music—and yet by the time of Kansas City there was no doubt about his attitude to jazz. (Of course, he had been born in KC.)

  Joan Tewkesbury was charged with writing the first script, and she did crucial work in inventing characters and the kind of freewheeling, associative style of the film that let them meet. Altman said build the number of characters to twenty-four, with a killing at the end. The first script was 176 pages. Then Alan Rudolph tried to make a shooting script of it, and then Tewkesbury did another revision.

  Of course, the music scene is a metaphor for show business (and filmmakin
g), and the self-conscious patriotism of the Nashville scene fixes on the hollow campaign for Thomas Hal Phillips (with Michael Murphy—as his agent—and Murphy would be Altman’s Tanner, one day). The idea of Nashville as a place becomes a kind of great dome/mall where political messages are being delivered all day long to a population that is a cross section of a West full of dysfunctional families, escaping people, and returning madmen. As a view of America after two hundred years it is baleful. “We must be doing something right” is offered as a very weary hope.

  The music made the film possible, but it becomes a labored crutch. The film could have meant more, I think, if the music had seemed from the heart and of the moment. Nashville is brilliant and audacious, but it just misses that Whitmanesque grandeur that it glimpses because so many of the people are trite. Still, it is perhaps the best ensemble cast in American film (until Short Cuts or Magnolia): Jeff Goldblum, Barbara Harris, Bert Remsen, David Hayward, Scott Glenn, Ned Beatty, Lily Tomlin, Dave Peel, Barbara Baxley, Henry Gibson, Ronee Blakley, Allen Garfield, Timothy Brown, Karen Black, Keith Carradine, Cristina Raines, Allan Nicholls, David Arkin, Shelley Duvall, Gwen Welles, Robert DoQui, Geraldine Chaplin, Keenan Wynn, and Richard Baskin.

  The Navigator (1924)

  The serene impartiality on the face of Rollo Treadway (Buster Keaton) is the clear glass to a rare sight in American film (or maybe film as a whole)—I refer to the vacancy or the brainstormed fit of the wealthy. So often, the wealthy are guilt-ridden and sinister in that they search the world for accusing or reforming urges. Or the rich are haughty and hypocritical (smiling upon the poor, treacling their pain numb). Whereas Buster knows that only one trinity properly explains inordinate wealth: absurdity, ignorance, and bad luck. And so Rollo—“Every family tree must have its sap”—is the arrangement of life to manifest wealth to the point of folly.

  “I think I’ll get married,” he declares to the mirror and the silence when he sees a jolly black couple just married—in the back of a car. A truly inspired Keaton film might then follow based on Rollo’s flawless logic that to be black and happy means you have to get married. He doesn’t leap quite that far (though that collapse of logic is there waiting, or latent, in many of the films). So, instead, he gives us a beautiful shot of fine houses on the crest of a hill—it could be San Francisco, Pacific Heights—with a great arc of sky filling half the screen. Rollo comes out of his house, gets in the parked car, which then takes a chauffeured curve across the wide street to the house opposite where a girl/his girl/the girl (Kathryn McGuire) lives. It is not quite that she is the only girl in the world—just the only one Rollo has ever heard of. He goes inside, asks if she will marry him. Vigorously, she shakes her head—women are energetic in Keaton films. Whereupon he leaves the house, disconsolate enough to tell the chauffeur he needs a long walk. And then he walks back across the street to home.

  And we are not even at sea yet, on the Navigator, with those long empty corridors and decks where Rollo and the girl pursue each other. (There is a faint sense of the Overlook Hotel in The Shining. And one can believe that Kubrick might have loved Keaton’s withheld dismay at plans gone astray.) Having use of a ship, Buster reckoned to see it as a machine made for a thousand that cannot really cope with a couple. But his mind wanders so that there is a sequence with Buster in a diving suit on the bottom of the sea, and then frightening the wits out of some “natives.” By the way, the ship, the Navigator, is in some tangled way the object of desire for the two sides fighting that little war over there—presumably the Great War, but handled like a tantrummy child by Buster’s sense of perspective.

  He directed this with Donald Crisp (so the credits say), working for Joe Schenck at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. Three people (including Clyde Bruckman) are credited with a “screenplay,” but it’s plainly a film without a plan. Indeed, Buster seems to wait to catch sight of a shot, a setup, or a plan (and the ship is one big, empty plan) before entering into it with his unique affinity for disorder.

  Network (1976)

  Elsewhere in this book, I challenge Sidney Lumet’s impressive The Verdict for being a good deal less than it seems, and a victim of Lumet’s excessive respect for tidiness. Above all, that respect shows in his reluctance to test or stretch David Mamet’s complacent script. Consider in contrast, the profuse, explosive suggestiveness of Lumet’s earlier Network and the spectacle it represents of Lumet clinging on for dear life to the flying reins of Paddy Chayefsky’s reckless script, which only dares to be bolder as it encounters every difficulty.

  What’s it all about, within the inexhaustible satirical energy that lashes out at black power, the charisma of anchors, career women (the best thing Faye Dunaway ever did?), the sentimental faith in the good nature of the public, et cetera? It’s about television, and I think it makes a fascinating contrast with Woody Allen’s Radio Days, which is equally about radio and content to be a nostalgic tribute and a trusting celebration of the world of Allen’s childhood. Network, on the other hand, has no doubt about the dangers of television and the way it has played into the hands of vile businessmen and the ever-available stupidity of the public.

  This could sound like the warning description on one of the more radical movies ever made in America—and, in fact, that estimate is justified—but Network was a big hit, it received ten Academy Award nominations and it won four Oscars, including those for Best Actor (Peter Finch) and Best Original Screenplay. Of course, that was 1976, the bicentennial year, but a moment when the spirit and habit of American self-criticism was maybe more alive and well than it has been since. So this is not just a piece of bravery that survived, it is one of the reckless triumphs in American show business, a work of such heady eloquence that Hollywood hardly noticed how far it was biting the hand that fed it.

  I suppose it seemed far-fetched in 1976, but Chayefsky the social critic was rooted in prophecy. Network is a film that, incidentally, warns us of the craze for dramatized conflict in television talk, the fusion of current events and the game show, and the coming surge in what we still call “reality TV”—you can’t say we aren’t inclined to trust our idiocy until the end. And it’s proper to remind ourselves that Chayefsky had observed the modern history of television: He had been one of the pioneering dramatists in the age of live drama when we all took it for granted that the medium was very well placed and appointed to deal decently with ordinary lives—like Marty.

  Network is, among other things, the record of how a kind of hysteria took over, and in that sense the ruin of the William Holden character—the way he surrenders family and weary love for the new sex—is a tragic account of men trying to keep up with changing times in the seventies. That is a type Chayefsky knew and dreaded in himself, and its greatest example is George C. Scott’s doctor in The Hospital, a man who sees how far a once benevolent system has gone mad with bureaucracy.

  New York, New York (1977)

  There are Scorsese admirers who tend to put New York, New York aside—as if to say it was some kind of aberration, an infatuation alike with Liza Minnelli and drugs, a very difficult, untidy experience, and a film that proved to have little public support. And an unfortunate departure from Scorsese’s natural métier (the gangster romance—or rather the film that romanticizes gangsterism). Whereas, not the least interesting thing about this film is that Jimmy Doyle is gangsterlike, yet denied any of the warm, supportive atmosphere of a gang. Because Jimmy is an essential loner. Add to that the film’s uncommon interest in a female character, and the exceptional use of music as a dramatic element. In short, I love New York, New York, and if you are hurt or pained at mockery of gangster habits, let’s settle for it being one of the most remarkable extensions of the musical.

  Jimmy Doyle hits New York on VJ Day 1945. He is a saxophone player who goes through an extraordinary set of routines to pick up Francine Evans, a singer. She cannot drop him, escape him, or deny him. It may be that he loves her, or just that he needs to conquer her. But they become a couple. They marry, and they will h
ave a child. Meanwhile, she is a singer in the big-band style, lovable and sweet, and he is a white saxophonist itching to get into the bop school. You can say they are incompatible, or you can conclude that Jimmy is so selfish, so alone, and such a chronic actor (or player) that he has no self to offer to anyone else. You can also say that this dilemma is as frightening as any of the crime situations in Scorsese films.

  In the end, and as much because of musical styles as anything else, the marriage breaks up. Francine becomes a popular success and a Hollywood star while Jimmy is a cool jazz tyrant. There can be no reunion. Call it career, call it art—the musical drive ensures that these two people, “lovers” if you like, must go their separate ways.

  Time and again, Scorsese uses musical numbers to spell out drama and character: the way Jimmy’s style frightens the bandleader who hires them both (Georgie Auld); the dictatorial way in which Jimmy tells off other players in his own band rehearsals; the slinky, sultry liaison with Diahnne Abbott that precedes her doing “Honeysuckle Rose”; and the irony of the final production number, “Happy Endings.”

  The script was by Earl Mac Rauch and Mardik Martin; László Kovacs did the photography. Boris Leven did the outstanding production design. Irving Lerner and Marcia Lucas were the editors. Minnelli sings beautifully in a great range of styles and gives a lovely, stupefied performance. Indeed, the barrage of mannerism in Robert De Niro seems to have left her plain and simple for once. As for De Niro, he is so antic he is nearly deranged—but that’s the point. And this is the most inwardly disturbing film from a director too easily persuaded to shock us with the stamp of violence.