'Have You Seen...?'

by David Thomson

  Psycho (1960)

  In Phoenix, Arizona, Friday, December 11, at 2:43 p.m., the world changes, as the camera slithers in through a window in a cheap hotel to discover a man and a woman, naked by 1960s standards, flagrantly in heat by the conventions of a Phoenix Friday when even if it is winter, it’s stifling, headachy weather in which Marion Crane (Janet Leigh), not satisfied in the hotel room, will feel so little air in her life that rather than bank the $40,000 from a realty deal that her boss has handed her, she’ll take to the road with it. And in her lack of satisfaction, she is not alone.

  In the first forty minutes, we see Marion in her underwear three times, without having a proper chance to rip her flesh from her smile. Hold on, it is coming. After one of the great night drives in American film, with torment in the rearview mirror, Marion comes to a shabby motel bypassed by the new highway—in the fifties, America’s rural character was erased by freeways. Yet something remained in the bypassed spots—rancor, regret, revenge, as mothers and sons huddled together in the same lamplight. And in a bathroom as bright as a furnace, the knife would go in. Oh no, explained pious Alfred, never quite in, not in our state of censorship. Never quite in—satisfaction is not my game.

  The world changed? I think so. Here is a Hollywood film cut to ribbons by its own internal energy, long before it can end—cut up by a process of pastiche, camp mockery, and what did we ever think we were doing by using the word “horror”? So Psycho is the most shocking film made in America (no one allowed in after it had started) and yet a startling new comedy, where we have to laugh at our own outrage. The very warning offered in Vertigo, of our culpability at the movies, was screaming at us now like Bernard Herrmann’s strangled chords.

  In addition, at the cost of about $1 million, it took in around $20 million and it made fear, unimaginable violence, and the expectation of the upraised knife key dynamics in a new cinema. At the same time, it was brilliant and so full of understanding of the medium that it became harder to love the medium. And as for “psycho” itself, that word, the name, the film turned it loose on the culture like a mad dog, and it shifted the Freudian age of potential treatment into one of licensed glee.

  In conjunction with that, Anthony Perkins was allowed to make Norman Bates the most gentle and sympathetic character in the film—that’s where Hitchcock’s humor was going. Janet Leigh became the Fay Wray of stardom—the iconic sacrificial victim. And the film was full of nasty, suspicious, grudging people—John Gavin, Vera Miles, Martin Balsam, John McIntire, John Anderson, Pat Hitchcock, Frank Albertson, Vaughn Taylor, Mort Mills, all the way to Simon Oakland, who manages to be the necessary explainer of it all as well as the bomb under any explainer’s seat. Of course, Norman has the last look and the last word—as well as the greatest curse in American film—“Mother!”

  Public Enemy (1931)

  There’s a sly coyness about Public Enemy. That’s why it picks a forbidding and impersonal title when it really wants to offer us the gutter charms of James Cagney as gangster Tom Powers. It’s as if the film is wondering: Can we get away with it? But don’t forget that initially, Cagney and Edward Woods were cast in opposite roles: Woods would be Powers and Cagney would be Matt Doyle, killed along the way. But the more William Wellman looked at his two actors, the more clearly he saw Cagney’s edge of punchy humor and lethal seductiveness. He’s the guy they want to see, Wellman decided. And if Cagney asked what this meant, he was told, Just be yourself, Jimmy; be wicked, outrageous, cocky, funny, a pile of trouble. If there was any doubt in milking this dangerous energy, the film could remind itself that Cagney’s role would wind up dead.

  Better than dead. Starting in 1909, Tom and Matt are childhood friends on the make in the city—naughty kids, but you’ve got to love them. Fifty years later it was the same thing with Al Pacino and Steven Bauer in that first part of Scarface, joshing each other, flirting with girls, strutting their stuff and taking on vicious opponents—what was not to love? And when the point comes that Pacino and Cagney have gone too far, let them go a little further, because they’ve agreed to die. So in Public Enemy, Matt is killed and Tom is shot to pieces. His family lines up at Matt’s hospital bed—the mother, the good brother, and Matt’s sister. They are reconciled. But then, before you can blink, the word comes that the scum have got Tom. There’s a knock at the door, and there he is, a corpse rolled up like a mummy, pitching forward into the camera. You can hear the connoisseurs sighing at this spiffy death.

  Public Enemy was written by Harvey Thew from a story, “Beer and Blood,” by John Bright and Kubec Glasmon. Darryl Zanuck was the producer, keeping an eye on the script and giving Wellman the confidence to go with Cagney—make it a gangster picture. That’s how the grapefruit business works. One morning, seeing a cut fruit on the breakfast table, Powers rams it in the face of Mae Clarke (one of his girls). It’s shocking. It’s talked about. You wouldn’t want it to happen to you, but there’s panache in doing it to a sour-faced broad. The gangster can do and say things that are over the top. If the film’s a hit, you’ll find kids on the street repeating the trick in a few weeks.

  So you can pump out the stories that Cagney was a gentle soul, really. You can put your hand on your heart and say we never had a gangster we didn’t bury—until Michael Corleone. But the public can read your wink and they know the public enemy is a treat, a hell of a guy. Public Enemy is as terse as good journalism, with good side bits by Jean Harlow, Joan Blondell, Donald Cook, Leslie Fenton, and Frankie Darro. There had never been anything as cheerful and dangerous before.

  Pulp Fiction (1994)

  Rest assured: The jazzy, cool assurance and the bravura exhilaration of Pulp Fiction still work as it lies coiled, like a sleepy mamba or a Möbius strip, on a child’s daydream version of underworld Los Angeles. And it’s not just the famous and much repeated comic verve of the chatter (the “royale” stuff, or Mr. Winston Wolfe’s wicked cleanup patter), but the lovely, elegant way in which the story is always our snake, wondering when to eat its own tail.

  It is a terrific screenplay—by which I don’t mean to assert that the shapes were always there in the script, or that they arose, like champagne bubbles, in the editing. But the ways in which the John Travolta character is alive yet not, and the final QED of the people in the diner, are exquisitely worked out and something of profound aesthetic pleasure. It is both a marvel and a disgrace that there wasn’t enough in Quentin Tarantino’s makeup or our culture’s imperatives to say, There, see that, study that, do more of that. Whereas, more or less, he has chosen to follow up individual stories when his enormous naïveté and innocence were so protected by his urge to make a crazy quilt film, and by the way it never threatened his unawareness of nearly everything except sweet movie impact.

  Still, it is mysterious to see how easily he had risen above the blood-soaked violence and the gloating cruelty of Reservoir Dogs. There are things of huge potential grotesquerie in Pulp Fiction—the mess in the back of the car, adrenaline straight to the heart, and the little shop of perverts—but the energy and comic curiosity of the picture drive straight through those worries as if they were paper walls. Somehow or other Tarantino knew he had a story that worked, and a band of actors who could do it all in his sleep—no, they are awake, but Quentin is dreaming, and the playing is perfectly in key with his trance.

  So it’s magic when a puffy Travolta gets up to dance, and Uma Thurman for once in her life was revealed as a collection of foxy, Egyptian moves. I don’t think Bruce Willis was ever better, just as Harvey Keitel will never be so likeable, useful, and practical. Tim Roth and Amanda Plummer are enshrined in their diner with their loving rant, and while staring into the camera Christopher Walken seems to have faced and accepted the proposition that yes, he really is a very strange guy, the more so when he tries to be salt of the earth.

  So nothing is really off or wrong, and Tarantino whips 154 minutes by in a cool hurry. It’s sheer movie, and no wonder the American business (let alone the art) reeled with
the thought that it had tossed off a work of natural genius. But then you have to face the failure to ditto, or to make any real advance (despite Jackie Brown being worthwhile and interesting). More and more, it becomes apparent that only the snake and the shape knew what they were doing. As for Quentin, he was in a trance.

  The Puppetmaster (1993)

  Hou Hsiao-hsien was born in mainland China in 1947, but in a year he was taken by his family to Taiwan. He is one of the great masters of film alive and working now, and it’s fascinating and appropriate that The Puppetmaster is an account of the career of Li Tien-lu, one of Taiwan’s most famous puppeteers and a man who was born in 1909, only a few years after Japan had begun an occupation of the island that lasted until its military defeat in 1945.

  So, the years of Li Tien-lu’s early life might easily be presented as an era of hardship and deprivation under a cruel occupying force. Children and old people alike die of untended illness and even starvation. Japanese officials visit the family home one day and insist that the old Chinese pigtails must be cut off as a sign of subservience. In return, the Chinese are given tickets to the Japanese opera. It is the bargain of tyranny, of course, but Li Tien-lu is fascinated by the opera, and Hou Hsiao-hsien allows us several minutes of an uninterrupted long shot to observe and absorb the show. It is felt as nourishment.

  But to speak of Hou’s long shots is to get to the heart of this film. Just as the commentary of the master puppeteer is phlegmatic and resigned to fate, so Hou’s camera prefers withdrawn, static setups in which a good deal of action flows back and forth across the frame, without the film resorting to cuts or close-ups to point up the details. In a way, the overall has taken over from the detail. It is the refusal to take sides that is so distinctive. Yet, here’s an interesting extra. The style I have just described could fit the Japanese director Ozu, and there are resemblances. But the very opening shot of The Puppetmaster—fixed and remote—is teeming with family life, with people moving back and forth, freely and boldly, from instinct and liberty. It actually feels more like a modern Western family than those Ozu films where something in the air—some caution, some chill of respect—has frozen people into a position. I have talked elsewhere about a growing sense of restriction in Ozu—and I can only say that it emerges more clearly when set beside the work of Hou Hsiao-hsien.

  The Puppetmaster uses on-camera interviews with, and voiceover narrative from, Li Tien-lu, but he’s far from a sentimental old-timer catering to an audience. He’s dry, withered, very professional, and startlingly given to fate and accepting its considerable inroads. Gradually, too, we wonder at his reliability. There’s a superb scene of wartime activity set on a dank, misty hilltop, with soldiers quarreling over hygiene, all done in one long shot that is remarkable in its refusal to depict the Japanese in cliché terms. There is also a great deal of puppet theater, including a play about a raid behind American lines. It is this steady sense of story or play commenting on life that makes the film so complex and challenging. We learn a great deal about Taiwan, not least the existence there of an ironic sense of theater.

  Pursued (1947)

  Every now and then in film history, someone offers a classic summation of the movies. So one afternoon in the summer of 1983, there I was in his study with Niven Busch (author of Duel in the Sun), overlooking the Golden Gate Bridge. He was screenwriter and producer on Pursued, and this is what he said: “It has kind of Greek overtones—incest feeling, and all that—which the West was like. Greece in the ancient days must have been very much like the West. Passions were powerful and arms were at hand.” It sounds like some Hollywood producer, snarling as he tries to hold on to his cigar. But Niven Busch, my dear friend, was an educated man. He had been to Princeton and written for The New Yorker—not that he ever let such things get in his way.

  Still, he’d read enough of the Greeks to see that the Western was déjà vu, and he had enough innate knowledge of psychology to see that within the myths of the Western there were Freudian truths. So Pursued is the story of a man intent on finding the killers of his father. And in a West where families might be split up, you just have to take care to remember which was your father and which the killers. In other words, pause before you fire—you may be shooting yourself. Jeb (Robert Mitchum) has fragmented memories: a woman (Judith Anderson), a pair of spurred boots, and flashing lights.

  The very clever script (influenced by Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Master of Ballantrae) is told in flashback: Jeb and Thorley (Teresa Wright—Mrs. Niven Busch) are in the ruins of his childhood house waiting for Grant, Thorley’s father and a crooked lawyer, a man with one arm (Dean Jagger). The truth as it spills out involves sex and incest and the way so many families could hardly draw their own family tree.

  It is a wonderful story, set against Monument Valley, photographed by James Wong Howe, and directed by Raoul Walsh. In time, critics came to see it as a Walsh film, but it’s hard to find anything else as intricate or potent in Walsh’s work. Truly, I think this is a Busch film, in which even the casting of Teresa Wright had special overtones. The lead part went to Mitchum only after several other actors had turned it down, and the film was close to Mitchum’s heart just because it had required him to act. Howe made it a Western noir, and it seems magical now that the Western apparatus lends itself so easily to a story of the inner life. Max Steiner’s score is a further underlining of the lineaments of dread.

  The use of Monument Valley is intriguing. That is Ford’s territory, of course, but Ford uses it as spectacle whereas Busch and Walsh turn it into a psychic setting for characters who have offended the gods. Pursuit, tracking, searching have their outward meanings. But put an American in the wilderness and he is so astounded that he decides space is a projection of his mind.

  Pygmalion (1938)

  George Bernard Shaw knew enough about the twentieth century and the reputation of authors to understand that he had to be a hit in the movies—it was the only way the world might be saved for common sense and literacy. But over the years, the few screen adaptations of his work had failed dismally. Moreover, Shaw had given early warning of his ambitions. On meeting Samuel Goldwyn, and talking to him about a project, Shaw said, “The trouble is, Mr. Goldwyn, you are interested in art, whereas I am interested in money.”

  But in the mid-1930s, Pygmalion (a play that opened in 1913) was filmed in Germany and Holland. Why not in English? Shaw wanted to know. And the object of his question was Gabriel Pascal, a Transylvanian he had met one day on the beach. The world tended to suppose that Pascal was a brilliant entrepreneur who had wooed the playwright. It was the other way round: Shaw had got his hooks into Pascal, and soon enough he would draw blood.

  You know the story. No one quite understands the odd “collaboration” on the script. Shaw got the screenplay credit (and he won the Oscar for it), but W. P. Lipscomb and Cecil Lewis helped on the screenplay, and there was extra dialogue work by Ian Dalrymple, Anatole de Grunwald, and Kay Walsh, the actress who would later marry David Lean. By some weird arrangement, Pascal agreed to let the directing credit be shared by Anthony Asquith and Leslie Howard—Asquith actually directed the film, but Howard gave some notes to the cast. And, of course, Howard played Professor Henry Higgins, a shrewd box-office ploy at the time, and a way of guiding the film toward romance, but not necessarily the best casting available. On the other hand, Wendy Hiller, twenty-six at the time, is arguably the best Eliza there has ever been—coarse and delicate, and both from the heart. Added to which, you have the rare Wilfrid Lawson as Doolittle, one of the outstanding “unknown” English actors in history. What this all means is the play—a smart comedy of manners and a subtle romance—is played as such. You may wonder where the songs have gone. But not for long. Shaw was in heaven: The film was a hit, and it was absolutely faithful to what he had written.

  Harry Stradling was brought in from America for the photography. The young David Lean was the film’s editor. And John Bryan did splendid art direction. The costumes were by Ladi
slaw Czettel, but gowns for the Ascot scene came from Worth and Schiaparelli. The supporting cast included Marie Lohr, Scott Sunderland, Jean Cadell, David Tree, Everley Gregg, and Cathleen Nesbitt.

  The film’s success launched a heady plan for a complete Shaw, but the next step was Major Barbara (a flop, despite having Wendy Hiller and Rex Harrison), and then Caesar and Cleopatra (with Claude Rains and Vivien Leigh) which proved one of the biggest money losers in British film.

  Quai des Brumes (1938)

  This is the one where Michèle Morgan plays the seventeen-year-old girl, wearing a cellophane raincoat (Coco Chanel did the costumes). Morgan was the right age, but she looks like a crazy angel who has seen enough darkness for a couple of lives. She’s Nelly, the ingenue, the girl who wins Jean Gabin’s deserter soldier the instant he sees her, the one who lures him off the boat for a last farewell when he’s safe and on his way to Venezuela.

  It came from a novel by Pierre Mac Orlan, published in 1927 and set in Montmartre. Marcel Carné and writer Jacques Prévert both loved the novel, but they felt it couldn’t be done in its real setting. So they thought of Hamburg and had proposed it to Ufa as a German film. But then the word came down from Dr. Goebbels that the material had some unpleasant elements. So it was reassigned, to a Jewish producer (Gregor Rabinovitch), and they decided to relocate to Le Havre.

  That’s where Jean (Gabin) arrives, a truculent deserter with no backstory—the overall air of defeatism is so great it makes up for every vagueness. He’s given a helping hand by Panama (Édouard Delmont), and he meets the sweet, melancholy painter, Michel Krauss (Robert Le Vigan). But he’s also met Nelly, who is terrorized by her guardian, Zabel (Michel Simon), and the gangsters he knows.