It is a devastating portrait of a group and their queasy moment—and in hindsight it is so rich and intriguing that I think the only way to do the film would have been to omit Richard Milhous Nixon. Suppose he was always in the next room, at the other end of the phone line, or just off camera. He is the emptiness that inspires it all, the wall toward which all these shit-eating faces turn. But not quite there. Which would let us off the Anthony Hopkins hook.
Anthony Hopkins is a magnificent actor and a man who as he has aged has risen to greater challenges. But he doesn’t get Nixon, and I think he’s good enough as actor, mimic, and listener, to know it. He works like a demon. He sweats more than anybody in a film since Edmond O’Brien. He willingly becomes the face that is suffering a waking nightmare. And at every single moment, we say, Anthony Hopkins, know him anywhere. Of course, the problem is compounded by the way in which those of a certain age probably watched more of Richard Nixon on film and television than of anyone else alive. We know the Nixon voice, the moods, the smiles, the pauses, for even if Nixon famously lost the Kennedy debates because he was inferior as an on-camera performer, don’t think that he was a slouch. Nixon liked being on camera a lot more than is often said. We saw him and we have taken his being into ours. Yet he remains very difficult for the impersonator.
And so Oliver Stone’s three-hour Nixon is a fascinating picture in which nearly every scene and aside worked but for the looming mistake at the heart of it all. Of course, Stone is not a Nixonite, and he cannot help but tickle our paranoid fantasies with one or two quite far-fetched things about what Nixon may have done beyond all we think we know. And he does not show Nixon rationalizing it all (the David Frost Nixon). This is a portrait of a whipped, self-pitying loser.
The photography, by Robert Richardson, was beyond even his work on JFK: hallucinatory, beautiful, diseased—all those descriptions apply, and demonstrate the power of film to dig into the skin itself. It is a very fleshy, intimate film. You feel you can smell the stink of bad breath and the throb of bruised faces.
No Country for Old Men (2007)
Not for one minute does any viewer of No Country for Old Men feel that it’s an anecdote, a crime movie, or just one report to file with all the other incidents that make up “the West” or border life. Equally, Anton Chigurh (Javier Bardem) is not simply an instrument of vengeance or retribution sent by some distant but powerful forces of order or disorder to punish the hunter Llewelyn Moss (Josh Brolin), who stumbled upon the remains of a broken drug deal and reckoned he had a chance of getting away with both the heroin and the case filled with $2 million. Nor is it that Sheriff Ed Tom Bell (Tommy Lee Jones) is going to be able to set the whole thing straight, as sheriffs were once supposed to do—his is rather the sweet, sad voice that may just be able to tell the story of slaughter and remain baffled by it.
No, this is a reiteration of the old myth that Death walks the land. That is why West Texas has that desert look, the scorched air, and the heat that leaves brave men listless. It’s why Jones—himself from Texas, of course—talks in that languid, defeated way. There is no surprise in the story and it is not even that Chigurh has been hired, equipped, or paid to do his “job.” What he does is his destiny, his solitary purpose—it is to bring dread and death into a place where man has demonstrated the limits of his folly, his defiance, and his ambition by trying to bring purpose. As if some minor drug deal could save this world from itself, or shift it an inch.
The film comes from Cormac McCarthy’s novel, adapted with the utmost fidelity by the Coen Brothers—and then directed by them. The matter of fidelity lies not just in what happens and what is said (sometimes in soliloquy), but in the very narrow space left in the story for hope or pity or anything else besides the implacability of death’s reach.
That sounds terribly bleak, but just as McCarthy lifts himself from despair by the burning clarity of his writing so the Coen Brothers have made this film as if Chigurh was after them, too. Much as I admire the film, I have to say that this tautness only exposes the slackness and the cute nihilism of so many of their films. But this is the real quiet terror alluded to in Miller’s Crossing and Fargo, laughed off in too many other films.
Some may find Bardem’s intense physical presence—loopy but staring; certain but so weird—a distraction. And surely Chigurh could have been played cooler and straighter. Bardem is a touch too lurid and wacky, and McCarthy’s Death needs to be a clerical figure, ticking off assignments but never really getting off on them. He is not a serial killer, after all, he’s encyclopedic. That’s to be brooded on. Elsewhere, there are outstanding performances, from Woody Harrelson as a merely professional killer, Brolin as the ingenious outlaw, and Tommy Lee Jones, who seems to know that this and Melquiades Estrada are carrying him to the leadership among dismayed American old-timers.
No Man of Her Own (1950)
William Irish (or Cornell Woolrich) published I Married a Dead Man in 1948; it was a full-length novelization of a previous short story. Paramount bought the book, with Richard Maibaum producing and Mitchell Leisen set to direct. Maibaum and Leisen never got on well, no matter that this feels like ideal Maibaum material. Leisen showed the book to Barbara Stanwyck, and she told Paramount she had to play it. Sally Benson wrote a draft which Leisen rejected. Then Catherine Turney had a shot at it. According to Leisen, he did the script himself, but took no credit. According to Maibaum, it was all an unpleasant experience because Leisen didn’t pay much attention to dialogue.
It doesn’t seem that way in a film where the fragile plot is treated with loving care. Helen Ferguson (Stanwyck) is unmarried but pregnant. Her scummy lover, Stephen Morley (Lyle Bettger), has packed her off on a long train journey. On that train, she meets Hugh and Patrice Harkness (Richard Denning and Phyllis Thaxter). They are just married; she is pregnant. He is taking her home to meet his parents for the first time. The train crashes. Hugh and Patrice are killed, and Helen is misidentified as Patrice Harkness. And so she is taken in by the mother (Jane Cowl) and Hughs brother, Bill (John Lund). It seems to work. Helen is made welcome. She is cared for. In time, she and Bill will fall in love. But then Stephen Morley turns up.
There’s a great pleasure in recounting the narrative structures of Irish/Woolrich—the tidiness becomes fate. In Leisen’s film, a happy ending is put upon the whole thing. The mother takes the blame for Stephen’s eventual murder. Helen, Bill, and child can live happily ever after. And I like the film a lot, but I’m bound to say that the Irish novel is better still. Stephen Morley is killed, and the couple are left with guilt and uncertainty. The first-person narrative fears that they are going to break up one day and move on.
And that’s where the quality of the film lies: the sense of a country where space beckons with ideas of escape, a second chance, a new beginning. In American culture, as opposed to European (and this is a force in many films), people are drawn outward, into that fresh space, toward new story. It takes a genius as strange as Woolrich’s to identify that wanderlust with instability, madness, and desolation. So the book could be remade, with advantage, but even in Leisen’s version the train is ordeal and hope for Helen, and her suspension of all other considerations when she realizes that she is being misidentified is sinister and exciting at the same time. And Stanwyck is just right as the woman who can make a new life for herself like a story. Any actress would be crazy for the part because it gets at what actresses do.
Leisen shoots it beautifully, with Daniel Fapp on camera and Henry Bumstead doing the design, Edith Head the clothes, and Hugo Friedhofer the music. It’s one of those films in which we see how the example of acting has affected us all. It also has one of the best train crashes of all time.
North by Northwest (1959)
Living in San Francisco, I have had my fill of Vertigo. I mean, I love it to death; I admire it; I live with the deepest fears it invokes—which are not those of heights, but the ones that make imagination a prison. But the other day I woke up and realized, for the first t
ime, that North by Northwest is better, because all the fears that this film touches on—a fear of trains, of blondes (above all of blondes who ask no questions), of inane national monuments and flat desolate fields—are rendered as comedy. You see, what I realized was that North by Northwest is only pretending to be a suspense thriller, an action-adventure picture or a road movie. It’s actually a screwball comedy—and one of our greatest. And I have reached a time in life where I’d rather have a great screwball comedy than a profound tragedy. After all, tragedy is all around us and screwball is something only the movies can do.
Here’s one demonstration. Don’t you love the stupidity—the fond, yearning craziness—of a nation that will take an innocent, lovely mountainside and carve in it, larger than houses, the solemn faces of presidents? The mixture of authority over nature and childlike impulse! And then along comes a strange genius of another American form—movie—and he sees that this daft monstrosity can be employed for a desperate chase sequence where someone hides in Jefferson’s nostril or a high heel trips on Washington’s proud lip. Had I been a Soviet leader in ’59—cold going on frigid—I’d have looked at North by Northwest and told my commissars, “Sorry, guys, the jig is up. They’ve taken the acme of patriotic realism and turned it inside out!” And isn’t that a pretty good definition of screwball?
Anyway, this is the one where Roger O. Thornhill (ROT—we are warned) blunders into one embrace after another in his headlong run. This means catching a falling corpse at the UN, finding himself in bed with Eva Marie Saint and her flat, utterly available voice, darting into the cornfield and pausing briefly in a hospital room somewhere when the lady patient sits up and screams and corrects herself, “Don’t go.” The whole thing is in the cause of terribly important secrets, so vital that the film has the tact not to mention them. Just look at the stills of Cary Grant pursued by a plane and isn’t it as plain as the plain—this is Keystone country, touched up by the hand of Sturges? And it is a great film.
Ernest Lehman wrote it, and for a talented writer who got himself into some awkward pictures, this must have been grace and reassurance: Just write Cary Grant straight against a rising disorder, and you have a film. Eva Marie Saint found herself. James Mason is divine. Bernard Herrmann is laughing to himself and saying, I knew I always wanted to do music for a comedy! Robert Burks makes it look like tourist country. And the immaculate cast includes Jessie Royce Landis, Leo G. Carroll, Philip Ober, Josephine Hutchinson, Martin Landau, and Malcolm Atterbury (the man at the bus stop on the prairie).
Nosferatu (1922)
When Cesare carries away the girl in Caligari, the hint was there already: Yes, it must be terrible to be abducted like that, but look at the way her long gown seems like roots drawn up out of the very ground, and isn’t there something lustrous and sensual about it? Something cinematic? Come forward, to Psycho (1960), when at last—after forty minutes of having been grilled, scrutinized, and stripped down to her underwear—Janet Leigh is bathed in the shower. Isn’t there something lovely in the way the knife comes in, too? We are on dangerous ground here, playing with our darker urges. And it begins with Nosferatu, nine years before the Bela Lugosi Dracula and so much more disturbing.
Bram Stoker (1847–1912) was Irish. For nearly thirty years, he was manager to the great actor Henry Irving, and so he was working in the pit of melodrama when film offered itself as the fresh, flaming sensation. He wrote Dracula in 1897, and it remains a very readable book in which the count is “a tall old man, clean shaven save for a long white moustache, and clad in black from head to foot.” Any reader of the novel learns quickly that its vampirism is a metaphor for the sexual act. That also reminds us that the movies arrived at a moment when the mass population had to digest sexual experience and work out whether they liked it or not.
Nosferatu, by F. W. Murnau, does not put aside the sexual drive, but it adds more. It was based on a screenplay, taken from Stoker, by Henrik Galeen, in which the count is named Orlok (Max Schreck) and he is tall, emaciated, bald, with pointed ears, long fixed arms, and large white hands. His face is made up in the style of a skull. He is, shall we say, very ill, but he is part of an overall design that is natural. Murnau loved nature and light, and while he knew that Nosferatu existed in a sinister world it is still one of real forests, mountains, sunlight, moonlight, and the sea. In other words, Nosferatu forsakes the “easy” expressionist manner of Caligari. It wants a more filmic reality.
Murnau was at the start of his career still, and he was ready to try anything—stop motion, projecting negative footage, and some special effects that look comic now. And Murnau was not content with Stoker’s interpretation: He feels the diseased soul and the malign religion in the confrontation. Above all, he sees Orlok as an emanation of the natural world—he is a mist and a vapor in mountains where cloud formations are often strange. Time and again, he makes the threat poetic, as if he feared the melodrama. Stoker felt that sex could only be melodramatic. In Nosferatu, the wife gives herself to the plague to save her husband.
Is Nosferatu frightening still? Or are we watching a relic in a scholarly mood? In the phantom ship and the uncanny apparition of Orlok I think there is fear still, but Murnau has caught the deeper dread: that the count is spiritually lost (like Norman Bates). And doesn’t Norman have Orlok’s frozen smile?
Nostalghia (1983)
There’s a moment early on in Nostalghia when the Russian who is journeying through Tuscany tells his Italian interpreter that he’s tired of all these beautiful paintings she’s having him see. It’s a rebuke that, sooner or later, in this film the viewer may wish to level at Andrei Tarkovsky, the director of Nostalghia. Except that if you do succumb to that crass and vulgar instinct, then Tarkovsky will hit you with an image so fresh and haunting, it takes your breath away.
This was Tarkovsky’s first film made after leaving the Soviet Union, and the title of the film—I assume—refers to a deep love of country, a kind of homesickness, that goes beyond the normal. The film was shot in Italy, and it involves a Russian poet (Oleg Yankovsky) who is following the path taken by a great composer. I have to admit that I have seen the film three times, and I believe this is what it is about. I am not sure—but over the years I have grown accustomed to films where I’m not always sure what they’re about.
The poet has an Italian interpreter (Domiziana Giordano), a woman of exorbitant beauty, long amber ringlets of hair, see-through clothes, and at least one great breast that is ready and waiting to be bared to the Russian, with the cry, “Is this what you want?” I think the woman is disturbed and I sometimes wonder what she is doing in the film. They also meet another disturbed man (Erland Josephson), who thinks the world is coming to an end.
That is about it in terms of narrative, except that it rains a great deal so that some of the ruins they visit are in a state of near flood. This waterlogged condition can get to you and to the characters. There is one moment when the Russian is smoking. He pulls at his cigarette and the sodden, tobacco-filled tube separates from the filtered end left in his mouth. But I’m not sure if it’s a joke, one of those stray accidents that Tarkovsky left in, or… significant.
It’s a film of two hours that seems to resolve nothing. But there are images to die for, like the last one of a huge ruined Gothic cathedral with a log-cabin house lurking inside it. I think this is old Russia being seen in old Italy. I’m not sure, but I love it.
Am I being too patient or dense? I first saw Nostalghia at the Telluride Film Festival of 1983, when Tarkovsky and Richard Widmark were two of the people being honored. On one night, Tarkovsky read (in Russian) a diatribe against America. Widmark was one who heard it. The next night was Widmark’s tribute and he begged indulgence by saying that, whatever the faults of the United States, it had a tradition of trying to make movies that an audience could understand. It was a fair point, made with politeness. And for me it is part of a dispute that hangs in the air over Nostalghia—like the rain. You should see it and make up your own m
ind.
Nothing Sacred (1937)
How long does it take to make a good movie? Nothing Sacred is only 75 minutes long (but an hour and a quarter can seem a very long time in the wrong company). Ben Hecht is alleged (by Ben Hecht) to have written most of the script in four days, traveling by train across the country—and I’d guess that the train was kinder to screenwriting than air travel has ever been. Still, Hecht was hired in April 1937. He had one disastrous first attempt, and then the real script was in by late May. The picture opened November 25 at Radio City Music Hall.
It was David Selznick’s partner, Jock Whitney, who asked for a “cockeyed comedy,” like My Man Godfrey. Selznick said only Ben Hecht could do it, and everyone agreed that Carole Lombard ought to be in it—this was made easier and tougher by the fact that she was a client of David’s brother, Myron Selznick. In fact, after his first no-hoper script, Hecht was put on a story from Cosmopolitan magazine. It was about a woman from the hinterland who claimed she was dying of radium poisoning. Hecht fussed with the story and came up with this: Hazel Flagg is dying, in Warsaw, Vermont—of boredom. So she puts the blame on radium poisoning. A reporter at the New York Morning Star hears the news and persuades his editor that it’ll boost circulation. So they bring Hazel to town, even after she has learned from her doctor that he made a faulty diagnosis. She and the reporter fall in love.
'Have You Seen...?' Page 97
