'Have You Seen...?'

by David Thomson

  Clément is not much known today, despite his admirable resistance picture, La Bataille du Rail (1946), and the enchanting Knave of Hearts (1954), which has Gerard Philipe in London with some delectable women. And Plein Soleil is a very good psychological thriller that feasts on the contrast between the heat of the Riviera and the chill in Tom Ripley’s calculating blood. As shot by Henri Decaë, it is a picture where sooner or later blood is going to have to take its place in the palette of sun-drenched primary colors. But what is most impressive about the film is the way the mere look of Delon is allied to the stealthy, voyeuristic way in which we are made to watch his conspiracy against friends, order, and life. To be brief, we become accomplices to Mr. Ripley—that is his talent, and that is the amoral journey that always interested Ms. Highsmith.

  But so much more could be said about “the mere look of Alain Delon.” I don’t think there’s any point in being strenuous or determined about trying to make a case for Delon the actor. He is probably too vain, too spiritually reticent, to be seen making any effort himself. But he is, sometimes, a presence of nearly infinite complexity or mystery. This happens in Jean-Pierre Melville’s Le Samourai and even Rocco and His Brothers. It is a possibility that nearly always offers. But there is no film that watches so steadily or with such patience that gradually we begin to learn how to feel the corruption, and more, beneath the sheer beauty of his angel of death.

  And the great skill in Plein Soleil is that we are so caught up in watching through Delon’s eyes that the moral torpor, the narcissistic fatalism, really creeps up on us. As a result, this is one of those rare films in which beauty itself begins to sicken or depress us. And I daresay M. Delon had no idea of what was going on.

  Of course, the Minghella film is richer by far, and it spreads its intimations of homosexuality as a response to Tom’s “loneliness” as thick as jam. I put loneliness in quotes like that because for Highsmith that isolation is exhilarating and supreme. She takes it for granted; Minghella regrets it. That only demonstrates that Minghella is a more decent human being yet a more compromised artist.

  His film has Jude Law—though it is perverse to cast him as Dickie Greenleaf instead of Ripley. The Talented Mr. Ripley is not Highsmith but it is a very good film with maybe half an hour of greatness. But Delon’s cold gaze is still the razor that could slice Law and Matt Damon as thin, translucent, and fleshy as slices of prosciutto.

  Plenty (1985)

  In the late eighties, David Hare was much involved in film. He directed Wetherby (1985), Paris by Night, and Strapless. His play, Plenty, was brought to the screen by Fred Schepisi, and he adapted the novel, Damage, for Louis Malle. He remains an intriguing figure in the movie world (he also adapted The Hours) but he has not directed in a while and he has plunged back into a period of intense theater work, where he sometimes directs his own plays. Even that intermittent involvement establishes him as one of the more interesting English directors of the last twenty years. Wetherby remains a wonderful film, and Plenty is unforgettable.

  When the play text was published, Hare added “A Note on Performance,” which says, “To those of you who perform the play abroad, I can only say that its Englishness is of the essence.” And yet, I don’t feel that this film suffers from having an Australian director or an American lead actress. Hare adds in that “Note” that the English have a special way of being cruel, but quietly, to each other. And it is key to how his people fight each other very often, but there’s no evidence to suggest that other peoples don’t understand the hushed spite. Or aren’t good at it.

  Plenty was a play written in twelve scenes, first done in London in 1978 with Kate Nelligan as Susan Traherne. It covers the years from 1942 to 1962. Susan (Meryl Streep) is seen first as a resistance agent in German-occupied France. She is a little like the Virginia McKenna figure in Carve Her Name with Pride, except that she survives, albeit with shattered nerves. She is moderately famous because of this early life. She does talks on the radio. But her life is going nowhere, and this clashes violently in her spirit with the feeling during the war that there would be great days afterward. So she feels cheated by the peace. Betrayed by modernity, her nerve shot, she may also be bipolar—as written and played, Susan has a leaping unpredictability that is alarming. She is miserably married to a slow-moving diplomat named Brock (Charles Dance), and when she starts to make scenes she is an albatross around his career.

  Susan is a rich part, and Streep is as extraordinary in the film as she is unappealing. Yet she’s beautiful, talented, smart—she is a warrior who worries at her own guts. There’s not a lot of story, and on film it’s clearer how far some episodes repeat others. Instead, this is a portrait of a person who is likely to end her days locked up. Hare wanted the play to be enigmatic, yet perhaps the film adaptation needed a little more clinical diagnosis. If Susan’s fierceness comes from having known terror, and being ruined by it, that could be more fully explained. Especially since Hare did the screenplay himself. But the very English thing about Hare is how his people make a fortress out of their problems.

  The supporting cast is outstanding: Tracey Ullman, Sting, John Gielgud, Ian McKellen, Sam Neill, Burt Kwouk.

  Point Blank (1967)

  Some kind of criminal job has been done, and the three robbers meet in the abandoned Alcatraz prison, in San Francisco Bay, to share the loot. There’s Mal Reese (John Vernon), Walker (Lee Marvin), and Walker’s wife (Sharon Acker). But Reese turns on Walker, shoots him, leaves him for dead in a cell, and goes off with the wife.

  Reese is not likely to have made a mistake. But we see Walker, wounded, falling into the famously cold and unfriendly waters off Alcatraz. And then night turns to day and we are on a tourist boat, looking at Alcatraz. Walker is gazing at the water, lost in thought. But someone else on the boat talks to him—it’s Yost (Keenan Wynn), and he gives Walker the first leads in how to go after Reese and the $93,000 (his share in the job).

  This is the opening of Point Blank, taken from a Richard Stark novel, The Hunter—Richard Stark being Donald Westlake. The script was by Alex Jacobs, and John Boorman was hired to direct, an Englishman—what did he know of Alcatraz and film noir? Enough, for this is not just a cool, violent pursuit film, it is a wistful dream and one of the great reflections on how movies are fantasies that we are reaching out for all the time—it’s singin’ in the rain again, the white lie that erases night.

  With all the force of an implacable sleepwalker, Walker goes after his precise sum of money. Piece by piece, he takes out the levels of the Mob organization on the West Coast—is that what Yost wanted? The action goes from San Francisco to Los Angeles and back again. Walker finds his wife, and she kills herself. He finds his wife’s sister, Chris (Angie Dickinson), and she agrees to help him. The steps involve a used-car lot, the rivers that run through L.A., a nice out-of-town house in the Hollywood hills, and back to San Francisco again, to Fort Point, for the payoff.

  Walker is as in-our-face as Lee Marvin and as naturally brutal. But does he listen to what is said? Does he change his mind? Or is he dreaming? Is he actually dead or dying back in the cell on Alcatraz, constructing an immense journey in the name of revenge? Is his success real, or is it a modern myth?

  The photography (Philip Lathrop) of California is harsh and schematic. The color schemes are bold, brilliant warning—Angie’s orange dress in her great seduction scene is like flame. The supporting players include Carroll O’Connor, Michael Strong, Lloyd Bochner, and James Sikking. Boorman had a rare bond with Marvin, and no one ever used him better. Always frightening, even in repose, the actor had a power to suggest profound underground rivers of thought. Angie Dickinson is perfect as the brave woman in these dangerous spots. John Vernon is odious, and Sharon Acker is pathetic. Time and again, pulp films fail when they strive for ambition or poetry—and this has a form affected by Alain Resnais as much as Jim Thompson. But this is a masterpiece, endlessly intriguing—make what you will of it.

  Poltergeist (1982)

/>   The Freeling family lives in a suburban subdivision—it is the kind of place that covers the hills of southern California, now, like lichen. There are a mother and a father and three children. The father is a real estate broker; he works on subdivisions like the one where he lives. His younger daughter, Carol Anne (Heather O’Rourke), watches a lot of television and is fascinated by the white static that follows programs. When her budgerigar dies, her mother, Diane (JoBeth Williams), helps her bury it in the backyard. Carol Anne begins to hear voices in the TV set. The weather worsens, and in a great storm Carol Anne’s brother, Robbie (Oliver Robins), is sucked into the set. The father, Steve (Craig T. Nelson), rescues him, but in the turmoil Carol Anne is sucked away and lost.

  The Freelings learn that their house (and much of the subdivision) was built on an old burial ground (presumably Native American). They hire mediums and parapsychologists to advise on how to recover Carol Anne. In the crisis, her mother enters the TV set and retrieves the child. But scarcely has that ordeal ended than the ground erupts as the spirits of the dead come to claim the house. Finally, the Freeling house explodes—but the family has escaped to a motel.

  In an examination paper on American film, one might present that synopsis and then ask students to explain why they’d assign it to this or that director. To be sporting, I think you’d have to allow the students a few changes in the story outline. So there might be an inspired Preston Sturges picture if we cut the graveyard eruption and simply suggested that the Freelings’ cable package has this unusual extra—that members of the family can go off on short vacations to certain programs. A smart answer might see that this world and its family are not far from the archetypes offered in Steven Spielberg’s E.T. But Spielberg in those days wasn’t really associated with irrational horror—apart from Duel. So where did the savage conclusion come from?

  In fact, we do have an answer: Poltergeist is credited to Tobe Hooper, the maker of Texas Chainsaw Massacre. It is “a Steven Spielberg Production”—the producers are Spielberg and his associate, Frank Marshall. Spielberg is credited with the story, and the script is attributed to Spielberg, Michael Grais, and Mark Victor. More significant, there were rumors from the set that Spielberg had been present a lot and that Hooper might even have been fired. Spielberg issued a statement congratulating Hooper on their unique creative relationship.

  All that needs to be said is that Poltergeist is one of the most pregnant domestic horror films in which the family are beset with nightmarish specters—like a gaunt tree, dead, but able to grow into the house. Why not? If Spielberg and Hooper took turns, shot by shot, it’s not likely to be dull. But the real coup here, and well worth fuller development, is the TV as the threshold for the other world. Matthew Leonetti shot it. Michael Kahn edited. Jerry Goldsmith did the music, and there are a lot of special effects credits. Also with Beatrice Straight, Dominique Dunne, and Zelda Rubinstein.

  Portrait of Jennie (1949)

  Here is one of the most intriguing “problem” films ever made in America. First, how does an 86-minute movie, almost all of it black-and-white, with a small cast, in 1949, cost $4 million? How does it make back only a quarter of that amount? And how does it contrive to work itself into frenzies of a strange half-erotic, half-faerie ecstasy over the eternally placid Jennifer Jones? After all, in 1949, this project—about a hard-luck painter who meets a strange girl in Central Park, a girl who seems out of her own time, and who finds himself in his desire to paint her—might have cast Moira Shearer, Jean Simmons, Pier Angeli, or even Grace Kelly (she was twenty-one on Broadway in 1949). All I mean to suggest by that brief casting list is that Jennie could have been ravishing, very sexy and very touching, a photographer’s delight.

  Of course, all the questions in the opening paragraph are tidied up with one answer: David O. Selznick. There he was in the late forties, the two-time winner of the Best Picture Oscar; a divorced man and the helpless guide to his discovery, Miss Jones; the titan in a business that was running out of audience and funds; the gambler whose many losses now drove him to even wilder plays than he had indulged before. Jennifer Jones in Duel in the Sun had raked in money and he had thrown it away in simultaneous gestures. The film had also proved the limits of Miss Jones and exposed Selznick to ridicule and the ordeal of trying to take over from a fired director.

  Jennie came from a Robert Nathan novel, and Leonardo Bercovici, Peter Berneis, and Paul Osborn all worked on the script. But so did Selznick. William Dieterle directed, and no one can deny that there are some very beautiful, if not spooky, sequences in the picture, with Joseph August haunted by twilight in Central Park and Jennie as an apparition in period clothes. But it’s at times like that, when the film gathers a true atmosphere, that its premise is most shaky. Do we believe in the occult? Does the look on Jennie’s face drag us into the whirlpool in the way, presumably, Miss Jones had that effect on Selznick? Is it possible that the love story would be more thrilling if there was a little more use of suspense, or horror? As it is, there are frightening moments, at which the power of this dreamed woman seems ready to surpass the coziness (all thoroughly boring) of Joseph Cotten, Ethel Barrymore, David Wayne, and Lillian Gish.

  And here we come to the fascinating point about the film. One cool observer of the whole fiasco was Alfred Hitchcock, at the end of his rope with Selznick and nearly free of the contract with him. My reason for saying that is the hunch that the man who would make Vertigo learned a lot from Portrait of Jennie: the erotic allure, the morbid sexual fantasy, the being in and out of life, the green light even (the original Jennie ended in a wash of green), and above all, the intuition that this love story would work best if allowed to strike dread.

  The Postman Always Rings Twice (1946)

  “Rip me, Frank! Rip me!” says Cora to Frank on the hillside at night after they’ve killed the husband and he has to smack her around so that she looks as if she just survived a car crash, but she has the idea that while he’s hitting her he could really do her some good. Of course, they couldn’t film that in 1946—but the great thing about then was that they didn’t need to. You could just have the faces shining in the dark, and in every cinema in the land some guy would be telling his girl, or just reciting it under his breath: “Rip me, Frank!” You maybe didn’t want the job of cleaning up afterward, but make no mistake about it, the underprivileged classes were getting sex for pleasure as a new habit, and without the movies it might not have happened.

  The James M. Cain novel was published in 1934. It was done on the stage, and it was stolen in Italy for Visconti’s Ossessione, but still that’s how long it was before M-G-M took the plunge on a cunning script by Niven Busch (with Harry Ruskin doing just enough to share credit). It’s the old story of that California roadside diner run by a Greek and his young wife and then one day this good-for-nothing, Frank Chambers, comes by. And sooner or later it’s just Frank and Cora running the diner, except that they’ve got these clever lawyers in their life and nothing else is ever the same again. But the original was the perfect highway novel for the thirties, and every time anyone has tried it it works.

  Tay Garnett was the assigned director, and he’s exactly right. What wasn’t exactly right was the Greek husband. The studio suddenly got scared of offending Greeks so they cast Cecil Kellaway, jolly, English, effete, all wrong. The role needed a stinking thug. So it was that much harder for John Garfield and Lana Turner to build up the heat, but they did it—and Turner all in her white sunsuit is probably Frank’s idea of a madonna with a habit.

  Everything else works, especially the stuff in court with the lawyers: Hume Cronyn is devious and hateful, and it’s good to see Leon Ames with his benign smile wiped away. Audrey Totter is great as the other woman. It was remade in 1981, with a pile of credentials: Bob Rafelson directing, David Mamet writing, and Jack Nicholson and Jessica Lange as the lovers. That’s a good film, too, though it strays a little in suggesting that the Cain might be a great novel. It’s not. It’s a great pulp novel. And the 1946
version feels that tension between the page and respectability. Nicholson and Lange go much further on the kitchen table—but in 1981 they made the journey, and in 1946 there is no question that its heady and dirty delight was being offered to us.

  Pretty Woman (1990)

  Not to get too solemn too quickly, but I think this may be one of the films that tells you most about Hollywood most nakedly. First of all, this is a story based on the toss of a coin that puts you in the Beverly Wilshire or in a shack off Hollywood Boulevard, a story in which one girl gets from one square to another without so much as shaking the dice—she does shake her hair. The next great myth to consider is that of the almightily rich, cold, suave, and distinguished man of business who can find a heart if he is first given the right kind of head by a girl young enough to be his daughter. Backup data: Julia Roberts was twenty-three at the moment of the film; Richard Gere was forty-one. Next myth: The process of prostitution is like washing your hands—this is of real utility in Hollywood because sooner or later in that business nearly everyone must consent to being screwed for money. Thus, two points: Though he may use whores, Mr. Gere still has an open heart and sweet feelings. He has not been compromised. If a princess comes along, he will fall in love. Second: Though for some time Julia Roberts’s Vivien has been available for purchase on the street, she is still whole, virginal, and young. The film is called Pretty Woman as in Hemingway’s classic line, “Wouldn’t it be pretty to think so?”

  Beyond that, the film is about three very compelling items in the American dream: sex, shopping, and transformation. Thus, Julia has sex with Gere—she strips down, she does it, she bathes with him, and in all this he is the pasha, serene, immaculate, tolerating his own pleasure. And then—as she is hired for the week at $3,000—she gets to go shopping on Rodeo Drive, a chance to despise the snobby element on that street while still having a fashion show. Just like Audrey Hepburn in Funny Face, Julia gets to wear the wardrobe—and some very handsome outfits. This culminates in the trip to San Francisco to visit the opera in a red sheath dress. And, of course, she remains herself while being a hit. She is accepted. She makes the grade and sows the seeds that Gere will have her educated next so that she is fit for marriage. (Alas, alas—the film we all want to see, Vivien Goes to College, has never been offered.)