'Have You Seen...?'

by David Thomson

  Die Nibelungen (1924)

  It speaks to the ambition as well as the solemn pretension of film in Germany, of Ufa and of Fritz Lang, that in 1924 he turned his hand to a two-part version of the Nibelung saga. It is as if, in America, Griffith, or someone, had elected to do… well, what? By virtue of being a freshly invented or discovered land, the United States had no mythic history. That Germany had this Norse and Gothic legend and felt it still, enough to pictorialize at the level of Andrew Lang’s Fairy Books, tells us so much about what to expect from Germany in the next twenty years. It seems to have been Fritz Lang’s idea, one that producer Erich Pommer jumped at. And naturally Lang’s wife, Thea von Harbou, would write the script—hadn’t she once played Kriemhild onstage? She delivered the script as a wedding present to Lang.

  It’s something more than just a “story,” but Harbou had written for two movies: In the first, Siegfried (Paul Richter), the title character, wants to marry Kriemhild (Margarete Schön), but only after her brother, King Günther (Theodor Loos), has married Brunhild (Hanna Ralph)—and Brunhild will only marry a man who defeats her in combat. Through magic, Siegfried becomes Günther and defeats Brunhild. But before the double wedding, Hagen (Hans Adalbert Schlettow) exposes the trick and murders Siegfried. Kriemhild departs.

  In the second part, Kriemhild’s Revenge, Kriemhild marries King Etzel (Rudolf Klein-Rogge) and plans revenge. She invites Günther and Hagen to a banquet. There is an immense battle, which ends in conflagration and the death of all parties.

  Photography was assigned to Carl Hoffmann, Günther Rittau, and Walter Ruttmann. Otto Hunte, Erich Kettelhut, and Karl Vollbrecht did the art direction, borrowing from paintings by Arnold Böcklin. The shooting lasted more than thirty weeks. There were training problems with a seventy-foot dragon that Siegfried fights. Siegfried ended up at 130 minutes, and Kriemhild’s Revenge was 95 minutes.

  Siegfried is by far the better-known film, in that it tells the Wagnerian story and uses filmmaking to assist in all kinds of magic. Its forest is a great expressionist creation, and the very studied unfolding of the legend is one of those unending monuments to silent cinema that cries out for speech and talk and humanity. The film is of historic interest, though there’s far less feeling of Lang’s lethal eye than in his contemporary crime films from the 1920s.

  Kriemhild’s Revenge is another matter. From the outset, it was the less seen of the two—in part it was too much of a good thing, and in the Nazi era it was actually withdrawn on account of its nihilism (or the remorseless execution of its plan). But it has to be seen. More or less, it is an hour of unrelieved combat, one of the outstanding action films in all cinema and a testimony to Lang’s staggering violence, which so often he kept under wraps. That even the Nazis were shocked and exhausted by the film speaks to Lang’s murderous energy. He could kill in ways undreamed of by other directors, and he could set a bloodlust howling with the rhythm of the slaughter.

  Night and the City (1950)

  Jules Dassin had made some promising thrillers in the late 1940s—Brute Force, The Naked City, and Thieves’ Highway. But the ugly forces of the blacklist were conspiring against him. He had one friend, Darryl F. Zanuck, and the Fox mogul told him to get himself to London and start shooting Night and the City so that it would have to be finished. It was one more film to his bank balance, and his last American picture. Once in London, Dassin got a note from Zanuck: “You owe me one. Put Gene Tierney in your picture.” There were worse compromises in those days.

  Night and the City came from a good, tough novel by Gerald Kersh, with a setting in the wrestling business in London. The novel was well adapted for the screen by Jo Eisinger and Austin Dempster, and the central character, Harry Fabian, was made an American, trying to survive in this world. It was a perfect part for Richard Widmark in that Fabian, hounded by creditors, is cracking up and being pursued by heavies trained in the ring.

  The whole movie was shot in London by “Mutz Greenbaum” (a pseudonym for blacklisted Max Greene). It has a lustrous noir look, and there is an astonishing scene where underworld news is spread from a car as it drives through the West End stopping at every news vendor. The look is very American, and one wonders how far Greene and Dassin had studied English noir films of the era—less melodramatic, more human and socially credible, more gray than black? One reason for asking is the expert supporting performance from Googie Withers (Robert Hamer’s star on It Always Rains on Sunday and Pink String and Sealing Wax). Gene Tierney does her expert job as a beauty, but Withers as the girlfriend might have been better or more interesting. As it is, she and Francis L. Sullivan (Bumble from Oliver Twist) are perversely well-matched as club owners in the wrestling business.

  It’s content to be a story of fate closing in on Fabian, and the mounting hysteria in Widmark is a large part of the fun. But Dassin was clearly in love with London, and this is one of those films that helped a generation of English filmmakers realize what London looked like—or could look like. There’s a fine, noir supporting cast—Herbert Lom and Mike Mazurki, for instance—and the bigger scenes (at the club or at the wrestling matches) have a terrific cynical panache. (Kay Kendall is seen briefly.)

  Thereafter, Dassin was off the screen for four years. His new film proved to be Rififi, in many ways his most expert and profitable crime picture. What happened next is confused or like real life. Dassin stayed in Europe. He married Melina Mercouri. He made some poor films. Indeed, you can say he was never as good again as in the period 1948–54. But I daresay he was a happier man. There’s a 1992 remake, with De Niro and Jessica Lange, directed by Irwin Winkler, and it’s awful.

  A Night at the Opera (1935)

  Sooner or later, the United Nations is going to have to take it on—I had high hopes of Kofi Annan (he had the look of a brother)—as to whether Irving Grant Thalberg helped or hindered the Marx boys. It seems to me pretty obvious that that deliberating body’s due respect is just morning dew until they buckle down to this one. (After all, isn’t it more or less 1935—“I’ll be seeing you,” said Haile Selassie—that everything starts to go wrong?)

  Duck Soup (1933) had been a failure, no matter that some purists regard it as the prize dish on the menu. The brothers by then were in their forties, and there were those who took the view that amid Depression et cetera there would be little sympathy for these elderly prophets playing the fool. However, Chico liked to play bridge with Thalberg and, while exchanging vulnerabilities, they had got into comic theory. The trouble is, said Thalberg, that men, and generally intelligent, educated men, like your films. Since anyone can see the future for that breed is dwindling in the republic, we have to get women to like your films, too. Three no trump, said Chico. Let’s try romance, and songs, said Thalberg. And breathing spaces?

  What’s breathing space? asked Chico.

  A hotel bedroom in Philadelphia? guessed Groucho later.

  Thalberg gave them a good deal. He was prepared to hire writers—indeed, he apparently funded George S. Kaufman during his torrid affair with Mary Astor (I hope to see some UN enactment of these scenes). And he said they could have Sam Wood as a director. This may be the old Irving coming out a champ, for Wood was so humorless that he undoubtedly stimulated the boys to wilder flights of cruel fancy (there’s a great title). And when they got Allan Jones and Kitty Carlisle as romantic leads, why they sent a dozen red roses from Jones to Carlisle—COD! Jones was heard to say his daughter wanted a cocker spaniel and the boys sent a Great Dane called Hamlet. The dog needed meat and—believe it or not—that is how Hamburger Hamlet got its start.

  Duck Soup was 70 minutes; A Night at the Opera was 92. But you could relieve yourself in the breathing spaces. Opera has the Party of the First Part and the stateroom scene, and it’s clear that when that didn’t work onstage it was Thalberg who said keep it in—because the reality of the room is different on film. My friends, that is quietly brilliant, even if you can tell that someone in southern California with thoughts like that cannot be lo
ng for this world. The brothers never had a bigger hit than A Night at the Opera, and Margaret Dumont was there again, too, as if some bylaw had been passed to say that Groucho couldn’t make a crack without that great lady present steadfastly ignoring the jokes—let alone the crack. And the brothers made more money themselves, and if you think that was a distraction from art ask yourself why Chico was playing bridge. Of course, Thalberg did die, and the brothers suffered because Mayer hated them, and Groucho often challenged Mr. Mayer. But don’t kid yourself: Without this film, opera wouldn’t be where it is in America.

  Night Moves (1975)

  From The Miracle Worker until Night Moves, Arthur Penn was not just a top director, but the one with the sharpest instincts for what was happening to America. He made films set outside the modern era, yet from The Miracle Worker to Little Big Man the metaphor was inescapable—he was dealing with now. Nowhere was that more true than with Night Moves, a compelling, twisty thriller and an increasingly bleak portrait of American ethical dismay at the end of Watergate and Vietnam. When Night Moves proved a flop, you could argue that it was because it was too uncomfortable for viewers, not that its director had lost touch. Yet Night Moves would prove to be the beginning of Penn’s “decline.” I put that word in quotes because he still seems so honorable and important, and because The Missouri Breaks is a delicious film. But a question remains: Did we lose Penn, or did he lose us? Is it even possible that he found it vital to start looking on the bright side?

  From an original screenplay by Alan Sharp, Night Moves goes like this: Harry Moseby (Gene Hackman) was a football player, and now he is a private eye in Miami. Arlene Iverson (Janet Ward) hires him to find her runaway teenage daughter, Delly (Melanie Griffith—straightaway explosive). This leads Harry to the shabby world of movie stuntmen, one of whom, Quentin (James Woods), has been Delly’s boyfriend. But as he makes one search, Harry blunders into realizing that his wife (Susan Clark) is having an affair. The main search leads to the Florida Keys and a trade in smuggled archaeological pieces from Mexico. But nothing turns out well. The intrigue and the mendacity mount. Harry is left helpless, a victim of intrigue and of every stupid Hollywood notion that a private eye can look after himself.

  As so often with Penn movies, every task is top of the line: Bruce Surtees did the photography, the daytime color increasingly betrayed by night—this is one of the films that helped us realize there could be films noir in color; the production design is by George Jenkins; the editing by Dede Allen and Stephen Rotter; the music by Michael Small. Moreover, Penn’s use of people is as tender and piercing as ever. The great cast builds an unforgettable gallery of unease and unreliability—in this, in addition to those named already, add the wolfish look of Jennifer Warren, Edward Binns, Harris Yulin, Kenneth Mars, and Anthony Costello.

  Night Moves is gloomy, downcast, and grown-up. It’s exactly what America deserved at the time: an unforced use of the thriller genre to show far-reaching dishonesty. Yet within a few years, the strain of such films had made the picture business cheer up. Surely we still—more than ever—need films made with Night Moves’ reluctance to compromise about the Bush regime and its woeful empire. But the state of the nation and the state of its cinema are paths by now so far apart no one thinks of them being on the same map.

  The Night of the Hunter (1955)

  I recall the first time at Dartmouth College in the late 1970s when I tried showing The Night of the Hunter to Americans. The kids had no trouble with the film—though it scared them. But the adults (the senior faculty) found the picture silly and fanciful, and they remembered that it had done very badly when it opened—so badly, indeed, that Charles Laughton gave up all thoughts of directing again, no matter that he had a script from Norman Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead all ready to go. So never forget that it can take nearly fifty years sometimes for a picture to go from crushing ignominy to being accepted at the Library of Congress as a work that must be preserved.

  The producer Paul Gregory was working with Laughton on stage productions, and he thought to follow up on the actor’s occasional feeling that he’d love to make a movie. They picked on a novel, by Davis Grubb, a remarkable work—Southern, in period, Gothic, haunted—about a mad “preacher” who goes after stolen money possessed by two young children. So he marries their widowed mother. He kills her. And he pursues the children across one of the great nightmare film-scapes ever made.

  The plot thickens here. James Agee was asked to do the screenplay, and he delivered a work far too long and far too dependent on the literary power of the novel. Laughton was therefore compelled to redo the script himself. He hired the great Stanley Cortez to do the photography, and asked him to look at D. W. Griffith pictures to get that simplicity of vision that becomes fairy story. Hilyard Brown did the sets—and for the most part Laughton preferred sets to real settings, despite his attraction to Griffith. Walter Schumann did the music.

  This was a rare team, but it would have been as nothing without the people. Robert Mitchum helped get the financing for the picture, but then imagine the depth of insight that could see through Mitchum’s deliberate casualness and indifference over work and guess that he might be inspired, elemental, and quite monstrous as Powell. Shelley Winters (the widow) was a student of Laughton, so she was natural casting. But to go to Lillian Gish as the strict fairy godmother was intuitive in a way that almost lets us see Laughton the actor. Allow those leads, plus James Gleason, Evelyn Varden, and Billy Chapin and Sally Jane Bruce as the children. And still Laughton—famously inarticulate as an actor—had to know how to direct.

  No, of course it doesn’t look or feel like an American film of 1955, but at that moment it was essential that some movies begin to do things differently. The Night of the Hunter is not just a great film, it is among the great expressions of America’s sense of childhood giving way to warped adulthood. Everything that was “wrong” about it, was right—because an artist had perceived the work as a whole and brought it home. It was the public that was wrong and no condition is more alarming.

  Ninotchka (1939)

  Ninotchka is a splendid example of sex in politics. The time is an unspecified moment in the late thirties. Ninotchka is a humorless commissar sent from Moscow to Paris to check up on three delinquent officials. “How are things in Moscow?” the trio ask. “Very good,” she says. “The last mass trials were a great success. There are going to be fewer but better Russians.” If you find that joke tasteless, you probably won’t like Ninotchka—and you shouldn’t go near To Be or Not to Be. After all, real people were appallingly tortured and slowly executed in the mass trials. Yet the jump to Soviet logic—fewer but better—is piercing political satire. And the film is setting Ninotchka up for her humorlessness to be “executed.” She asks Melvyn Douglas, “Must you flirt?”

  “I don’t have to, but I find it natural.” (This is the essence of Lubitsch: Let God stand up for nature.)

  “Suppress it,” she replies, and there the line has the politics of suppression and the sex of repression bouncing together. Don’t forget that Billy Wilder did the script for Lubitsch.

  What is less clear is why this large, charismatic, and powerful figure was let go by Paramount, and ended up at M-G-M. For the story is that Greta Garbo dropped by his beach house one day, uninvited. Ernst was touched, and he came out with that automatic endearment among Hollywood “friends”—“We have to work together.” He had a meal ready. Garbo said, No, thank you, she wasn’t hungry, but she would listen while Lubitsch told her the story. He got so carried away that he ate nothing. But Garbo was drawn in; she ate a hearty meal.

  The idea had come from Melchior Lengyel—a stern commissar in America—but the script really emerged from the partnership of Wilder, Charles Brackett, and Walter Reisch. They came up with this idea: Garbo is sent West to recover three wayward and lesser officials who have been sent to stop the Grand Duchess Swana from selling her jewels. But the duchess is involved with a silky middle man, Léon.

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sp; Melvyn Douglas would be Léon, Ina Claire was the grand duchess, and the three naughty boys were Sig Rumann, Felix Bressart, and Alexander Granach—in his bureaucracies and minor roles, Lubitsch took delight in fusspot charm. William Daniels, a Garbo expert, did the photography. Adrian did the gowns, including a pre-Prada suit for lady commissars. The sets were by Cedric Gibbons, Randall Duell, and Edwin B. Willis.

  The commercial key to it all was “Garbo laughs,” and so she did. Of course, no one doubts that she is going to melt, but the lovely thing about the film is the way chat and smiles do the trick. She doesn’t have to be convinced by some ponderous arguments over political destiny. Flirtation does it—the most egalitarian weapon. The film was a huge success in a very rich year. It was nominated for Best Picture, something Lubitsch had missed since The Smiling Lieutenant, and Garbo was nominated as Best Actress. But Lubitsch wasn’t nominated as Best Director. He never won that award.

  Nixon (1995)

  Nixon has one of the great supporting casts ever put on film. How can you improve on James Woods as Haldeman, with his magnificent improv to Ehrlich-man at the end of one scene, “You know who’s next, don’t you?”; or Paul Sorvino as Kissinger, his voice like Captain Queeg’s ball bearings?; or Ed Harris, bristling and insane as Howard Hunt?; or David Hyde Pierce as John Dean?; or Mary Steenburgen as the harsh Mother Nixon?; or Bob Hoskins as J. Edgar Hoover, and Tony Lo Bianco as Johnny Roselli?; or J. T. Walsh as Ehrlich-man, or Powers Boothe as Al Haig? To say nothing of the death’s-head smile that holds Joan Allen’s Pat Nixon in place, like nails.