Perhaps aided by the barrier of subtitles, and the luster of Charles Lang’s photography, André Breton was the first surrealist to pounce on this Hollywood film, made at Paramount, as a tribute to l’amour fou.
It was taken from the novel by George du Maurier (Daphne’s grandfather), published in 1891, and certainly based in dream experience. But in 1935, how consciously was that past held up as an aim? Constance Collier adapted the book, and the screenplay was worked on by Vincent Lawrence, Waldemar Young, John Meehan, and Edwin Justus Mayer. Director Henry Hathaway was young, a devotee of Westerns and horse-riding films, yet intrigued by fantasy. No, he is not exactly the person likely to draw the idyll of romantic dream to the surface—though such a figure, Josef von Sternberg, was more or less at Paramount at the same time. What would Sternberg have done with it? Or is it possible that only a straightforward approach had a chance of making the subject work?
As always, look at the picture: Look at the aura in Lang’s imagery and the elaborate, antique sets—by Hans Dreier and Robert Usher—with many suggestions of separation. And then look at the starry stillness of Gary Cooper and the impassive, somnambulist beauty of Ann Harding waiting to be occupied. There really was something happening. You can watch Peter Ibbetson as just the rather strange story it claims to be. But once you see the window to dream, it is irresistible, and the starry presence of Cooper is an amazingly clear path to follow.
No, I don’t think this really suggests that Hathaway or Gary Cooper was poised to do the works of Magritte or Max Ernst. But equally the Hollywood film, so bent on action and character, is a dream we behold. Vertigo looks like a thriller until you realize that the outward mystery is silly compared with the inner malice. In other words, Peter Ibbetson is a lesson in how to look. You will find a few people who can hardly live without the film, and who treasure it as the key that opens the locked door. John Halliday is the Duke of Towers, Ida Lupino is Agnes, Virginia Weidler is Mimsey, and Dickie Moore is Gogo. Take a lesson, for there is hardly a flat movie with Dickie Moore in it—or Cooper—or Lupino. (If it had been me, I’d have put Lupino in the Harding role.)
The Petrified Forest (1936)
Robert Sherwood’s The Petrified Forest opened on Broadway in 1935 and was esteemed for its wisdom. The title referred to a desolate stretch of Arizona, between Gallup and Indian reservations. The action takes place there in a roadhouse where a rather self-conscious and plaintive prophet of doom in the world, Alan Squier (Leslie Howard), will oppose a brutal gangster, Duke Mantee, and his response to depression and poverty. It was talky, but the Western setting was novel and exciting, and the play caught a current mood of cozy foreboding. Onstage, Mantee had been played by Humphrey Bogart in what was his biggest success to that date. Wearing no makeup and keeping his beard stubble, Bogart reminded audiences of Dillinger, who had just escaped from prison.
Warner Brothers led the open bidding on the play rights, and they at first announced Leslie Howard and Edward G. Robinson in the movie. But Howard stood by a promise to Bogart: If Warners wanted Howard, then Bogart must repeat as Mantee. He got the deal with $750 a week for three weeks.
Henry Blanke was the producer in charge, and he hired Archie Mayo to direct, while getting a screenplay from Charles Kenyon and Delmer Daves that is faithful to the stage work. Bette Davis was cast in the female lead role, the waitress who dreams of being a painter. Sol Polito was doing the photography, and art director John Hughes built a huge version of the roadhouse—it feels large enough for all the airy talk about humanity and the end of the world.
For some reason, they imported great quantities of dust and grit from Arizona and this began blowing about in the air conditioning on the sound stage. Illness and damage to equipment resulted, and the picture was proving extra expensive because the languid Howard was invariably late to turn up and serenely unaware of being in charge.
The story ended with Howard dead in Bette’s arms and Bogart escaped—and it had cost $500,000 already. Was this a con or art? The question was asked very seriously at Warners, and some wondered if the high-mindedness of the drama didn’t require a title or two to say what it was really about! Today, it looks like a very stilted show, and one can think of movie gangsters or tough movie producers who would have killed Howard’s Alan off early just to stop him talking.
This may account for why Bogart’s Mantee got such good reviews—he was a relief with his trust in rough action and put-down lines from old fight films. Indeed, by the time it opened, Warners had decided to give Bogart third lead status. He was established, at last, as a villain.
The Petrified Forest also starred Genevieve Tobin, Dick Foran, Joseph Sawyer, Porter Hall, Charley Grapewin, Paul Harvey, and Eddie Acuff. Though it had been a prestige production, it was shut out in the Academy Award nominations.
Phantom Lady (1944)
Perhaps he was going mad—I mean Cornell Woolrich (1903–68), arguably the most distinctive figure in the history of American noir. Woolrich was writing so much that as he completed Phantom Lady as a novel it was already serialized in a pulp magazine as Phantom Alibi. He was persuaded to adopt a pen name: William Irish was the name that came up. And at much the same time, the deeply unhappy Woolrich decided to go back to the Hotel Marseilles (in New York) and live with his mother. Phantom Lady is a magnificent book, in which a man unhappily married and uneasily placed in an affair elects to spend a whole evening in the city with a strange woman he meets in a bar. A number of apparently vivid incidents occur in the course of the evening. But when the man gets back to his apartment, two impassive men are waiting—policemen. The body of his dead wife is in the bedroom. He is the number one suspect.
That first chapter has been titled “The 150th Day Before the Execution,” and the novel unfolds as the man’s attempt to prove his innocence and find the alibi woman. Once he is incarcerated, the quest is carried on by his secretary. The quality of the book rests in the surrealism of this quest and our whole growing suspicion that the man’s account of her may have been deranged. In the artistic sense, the question as to where she is or whether she is should never be answered. In the book, Woolrich was driven to pages of dotty explanation, best left unread. He was within reach of a masterpiece.
The movie followed quickly, and the key figure in its development was Joan Harrison (Hitchcock’s trusty and very skilled assistant). She was associate producer on it for Universal. She got Bernard Schoenfeld to do the script, and she found Robert Siodmak and freed him from rather trashy horror pictures for his true métier. In turn, Siodmak got Woody Bredell to do the photography—every bit as startling and groundbreaking as their work together on The Killers. This is black-and-white that crackles and shines like a cellophane raincoat. You know if the woman had a scent you could catch, it would be nitrate—deadly nightshade.
Of course, the movie has to resolve its ending, and so a pretty obvious villain may be discerned, lurking, with a polite smile. In other words, the film becomes conventional. But along the way it has quite extraordinary scenes—as witness everything involving the hophead drummer Cliff Milburn, played by Elisha Cook, Jr. He was dubbed supposedly by Buddy Rich, and the sexual transference between Cook and Ella Raines in those sequences is such that you guess the censor lived with his mother, too.
The movie is a noir delight, with Alan Curtis, Franchot Tone, Aurora, Thomas Gomez, Regis Toomey, and Joseph Crehan. But if the narrative obsession could have been slipped, if Woolrich’s great dream could have been honored, then you would have one of the great puzzle pictures, a movie fit for “Rosebud,” a labyrinth with emptiness at the center, a story in which we are never quite sure whether the storyteller is wicked or demented. But it could be tried again.
The Phantom of the Opera (1925)
It is said that The Phantom of the Opera cost Universal over $1 million—and the picture turned big profits. Yet it was Lon Chaney’s last film at Universal, the studio where he had started. Thereafter, he followed Irving Thalberg, his friend and supporter (
he thought), to Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. Yet his first film at the new home, the fascinating He Who Gets Slapped, cost just $172,000, and it was clearly a triangle film, with John Gilbert and Norma Shearer as important as Chaney.
It’s also significant that the pictures Chaney made at M-G-M were on a much smaller scale than those at Universal. He Who Gets Slapped is 85 minutes; The Unholy Three is 72, West of Zanzibar is 65, and The Unknown and London After Midnight were less than an hour. And, of course, London After Midnight is one of just four Chaney films that do not survive. No one means to dump all that blame on Thalberg, but the pattern surely reflects a different way of using the actor—and perhaps a basic disdain of horror.
So it’s a real treat to look at The Phantom of the Opera, worth all of its 111 minutes, fabulously photographed by Charles Van Enger and with some of the most potent sets in silent film, designed by E. E. Sheeley, Sidney Ullman, and Ben Carré.
The story is the one that will not go away: the novel by Gaston Leroux, first published in 1910. Erik (Chaney) is a deformed musician who lives in the cellars and sewers beneath the Paris Opera House. He loves Christine (Mary Philbin), a singer with the company, and he wants her to get lead parts. He kidnaps her and takes her to his subterranean realm. She rips off his mask and sees his hideous features. She is released, but she tells others about Erik, and in an immense finale she returns to the depths, defeats his plans, is reunited with her true love, and sees Erik thrown in the Seine.
Rupert Julian was charged with the direction, but he was apparently so difficult that a good deal was handled by Edward Sedgwick and Chaney himself. But this is authentic myth material, not far from “Beauty and the Beast,” and soundly based in the concept of the underground world. The great Ben Carré (who had worked at the Paris Opera) did most of the designing for this, and someone knew how to frame and photograph the beautiful scenes of the Phantom taking his stunned beloved by tunnel and canal, deeper toward…
The face that Chaney reveals is not hideous by modern standards: Indeed, a face so alarming almost relies upon not being seen. But the key scene of the unmasking is superbly done, and the instinctive awareness of the unspeakable withheld but then delivered is profound and stirring. I’m not sure if any male actor in silent film digs deeper into our being now than Chaney at such moments. Thalberg may have flinched from horror (or thought it a touch vulgar)—but Chaney is the lode.
The Philadelphia Story (1940)
As I write this book, I begin to realize how many of George Cukor’s films have to be included. Some are landmarks—you have to have A Star Is Born, Gaslight, and Born Yesterday. Some are fascinating failures—Bhowani Junction. Some become models—David Copperfield. And now I’m at The Philadelphia Story, which is only one of the essential American comedies.
And what a lovely thing the story of the Story is: how Katharine Hepburn was given the label “box-office poison” and thought to get rid of it; how her amiable would-be lover and producer Howard Hughes helped pay for it; how she got Philip Barry to write the play; how it opened in March 1939 and ran 417 performances with herself, Joseph Cotten as C. K. Dexter Haven, Van Heflin as Mike Conner, and Shirley Booth as Elizabeth Imbrie. And how it was the story of a stuck-up heroine, too perfect and chilly to feel enough, who is brought back to life and her very suitable first marriage on the doorstep of a second. The point is not stressed, but this scheme is Jane Austen–like in its focus on getting a paragon to behave naturally.
The movie started out as very much something Hepburn negotiated with Louis B. Mayer; she was one of the few stars who really got on with him. She had part ownership in the play and had asked for Gable and Tracy as costars. Mayer reflected and saw fit to teach her who was boss. You can do it, he said, but with Cary Grant and Jimmy Stewart—you see how brutal some moguls could be. Don’t forget that Joseph L. Mankiewicz was the official producer on the venture, or that Donald Ogden Stewart was hired to do the screenplay.
At Metro, it was all too easy for the production values to reflect Barry’s deep-seated belief that the rich are wonderful people. And this is one of those movies, screwball or verging on it, where wealth and style, wealth and manners, wealth and good clothes really do go together and give a lift to life. Joseph Ruttenberg’s photography is like a high-key salon. Adrian did the clothes. For the first time in its young life, America began to seem like a cool place.
Hepburn shared in all this beauty. She found a modern look, with softer, longer hair that was becoming, and she held to it for several years. And she does fall for Mike—you feel the giddy rapture. Yes, it’s odd that Stewart got the Best Actor Oscar instead of Cary Grant—not that Stewart is ever at fault. And yes, we need to note Ruth Hussey as Liz Imbrie, and all the rest of the cast. But Cukor knew just what he was doing, and he made a love story in which we are not sure until the very end which guy Tracy Lord is going to go with. Thus the knockout finale and one of the best last shots in pictures. You won’t believe me—look it up—but Rebecca won the Best Picture Oscar that year. Not that Rebecca isn’t pretty good, and so on.
The Piano (1993)
The Piano is one of those films that leaves one marveling at America’s failure to imagine the inner life of its own earliest peoples. Of course, we have had our Western, and we are grateful for it, but the Western externalizes every issue. Whereas any traveler in the real West of today knows that it is a place of the spirit, where immense desolation looms over the human figure. We know the old cliché of the Western’s “lone rider,” but so few of them seem to have felt solitude.
Jane Campion wrote The Piano on her own—whereas she had often written in collaboration before—and it seems to me that she never sought to root this parable in studious research on early life in New Zealand. So things happen as they do in a story. Ada (Holly Hunter) is Scottish. She has a daughter, Flora (Anna Paquin), but we know very little about her early life—we do not know why she does not speak, any more than we understand why her piano means so much to her.
The two women and the piano are on a ship to New Zealand, for Ada has engaged (by post) to marry a settler named Stewart (Sam Neill). Stewart does not appreciate or like the piano. He leaves it on the beach, where it is rescued by Baines (Harvey Keitel), another settler. Baines buys the piano for land Stewart wants, and Ada agrees to teach him to play. Their bargain is blunt: For every note on the instrument, she is to give herself in sex to Baines. This transpires. Ada remains silent, but the feeling is very passionate. Then one day, out of neglect or whim, Flora gives them away to Stewart. In his rage he slices a tip off one of Ada’s fingers. But Stewart is so horrified that he gives his wife to Baines. On another voyage she lets the piano go overboard and nearly drowns herself. Then she is better again. She speaks and plays with her silver-tipped finger.
There were some critics who said it was a smokescreen of the exotic and the erotic meaning very little. I think it is a fascinating story of pride and need, solitude and alliance, on which the stark beauty of New Zealand locations offsets the perilous state of these pilgrims. And, as with the best of Campion’s other work (I think of In the Cut), it is more usefully seen as surreal than as naturalistic.
Stewart Dryburgh’s photography is outstanding—wintry, cold but gorgeous. The lack of sunlight says a lot about Ada’s lack of speech. Michael Nyman did a wonderful score. The acting is uncanny: Holly Hunter had never seemed to have such size or severity before. Keitel managed a very difficult part and the idea of a man inclined to sink into savagery. Sam Neill was as good as he always is in a supporting part. And Anna Paquin managed to make most prior child actors seem trained, coy, and phony. Hunter and Paquin won Oscars, as did Campion for her script. I have to say that she has not been as good or as piercing since. But The Piano is warning enough that she had wild and dangerous things in her, as well as a serious resolve to see the female side of our music.
The Piano Teacher (2001)
On the box that holds the DVD of The Piano Teacher (by Kino), it says that the film tells the sto
ry of “a middle-aged classical piano instructor who is trapped between her rigid passion for music and her suffocating home life.” Well, you have to start somewhere. In Elfriede Jelinek’s novel, this woman, Erika Kohut, is in her late thirties, and her mother is said to be old enough to be her grandmother. Late thirties, I think, is not quite middle-aged. And when the film opened, the actress playing Erika, Isabelle Huppert, was forty-six. The actress playing her mother, Annie Girardot, was seventy.
So something has shifted. The mother feels “right” in age. Erika is older than the novel intended—but Erika now is Isabelle Huppert, and that surely alters our response to the film. You see, Erika—a stranger when we open the novel, and for an instant as Michael Haneke’s film begins—is not simply a woman of unusual strictness or severity who teaches piano to very good students in Vienna. No, she is a woman who attends pornography salons; who, before dinner one night, steps into her bath and, with a razor blade, cuts at her private parts; and who will demand of one young student, Walter (Benoît Magimel), that if he wants her he must engage in precise sadomasochistic sexual rites, binding her and beating her. It is a long letter she gives him in which she has written out the instructions—rather as if she might be giving him notes on a performance of Schubert.
It is Isabelle Huppert doing and asking these things, and you do not have to step very far back from the enthralling but alarming film to realize that, but for her, there would be no film. The Piano Teacher was not prohibitively expensive, perhaps. Still, it only proceeded to win prizes at Cannes and a place on art-house screens because Mlle. Huppert agreed to do it. Most reviews therefore observed her courage, her artistic daring—all fair enough—but things that get in the way of Erika Kohut’s desperation and her… need (if that is the word).
'Have You Seen...?' Page 106
