'Have You Seen...?'

by David Thomson

  It was photographed by Ernest Haller (who had done Gone With the Wind), and yet the film has some of the greatest CinemaScope framing ever seen, as well as a camera spinning on its axis. Despite Warnercolor, the color scheme is electrifying and creative. And the music, by Leonard Rosenman, means as much as Steiner’s score on Gone With the Wind. Its scenes are still the stages of teenage initiation. Its reformed family (Jim, Judy, and Plato) is heartrending, and maybe the planetarium in Griffith Park still stands because of this film’s poetic grasp of being on the edge of deep space and nuclear apocalypse.

  Yes, the film announced an appalling surrender to teenagerism that we still suffer from. Yes, Deanism is a cunning version of self-pity, as seductive as a snake’s stillness. Yes, the point of view of the parental generation (Jim Backus, Ann Doran, William Hopper—all excellent) is travestied. But there are movies in which beauty or grace is so allied with timeliness, there is no stopping or forgetting it. This is the only film where Dean was a kid now—and he only needed to do it once. If you came of age around the same time as this film, then you are lost—and we understand. Growing up was over. But the dysfunctional family was a new institution. No one could swallow the happy bromide again.

  The Reckless Moment (1949)

  How quickly film noir improves on itself if put to an extra human challenge. So here is a story based on murder and blackmail. But it leaves a film that is unmistakably a love story as well as proof that, given the chance, criminal incident will bring out the character in people. It’s a story about human family as a duty and taskmaster under which the individual may lose his or her own liveliness. Lucia Harper (Joan Bennett) is a wife and mother in this predicament. She has a daughter, Bea (Geraldine Brooks), and Bea has a lover that the mother doesn’t approve of. One day, the lover’s corpse turns up and Lucia assumes that Bea is the killer. So, on her own, she disposes of the body and lives with the hopeless dream that nothing more will happen.

  Then a man appears, Martin Donnelly (James Mason), an enchanting, amiable man, not at all what you’d expect of a blackmailer. But that’s what he is, goaded on by his much blunter partner, Nagel (Roy Roberts). They know what happened, and they begin to blackmail Lucia—for money, they will say nothing. Martin is the messenger in these nasty negotiations, yet he becomes the wife’s friend. He sees how smothered or trapped she is by her family, yet he looks upon those ties with the fondness of an outcast who has never enjoyed them himself. He falls in love with Lucia. She has a husband, but she is stirred by this odd man, struggling in his own trap. What can Martin do to end the pressure on her? It’s foreseeable, maybe, yet it comes as a surprise, too, and it raises the film to the level of tragedy.

  It came from a novel, The Blank Wall, by Elisabeth Sanxay Holding. The adaptation was done by Mel Dinelli and Robert E. Kent, and the screenplay was the work of Henry Garson and Robert W. Soderberg. The producer was Walter Wanger, who was married to Joan Bennett. Wanger used two great European directors, Fritz Lang and Max Ophüls, to showcase his wife—and clearly this subtle investigation of mixed motives is Ophüls material. His handling of Mason is exemplary, and he was always a director who sympathized with the traps in which women found themselves. But this relationship is one of the most complex in his work, and it makes for a novel-like movie, full of nuance and detail.

  Burnett Guffey did the photography, and Hans Salter contributed a good score. The cast also includes Henry O’Neill and Shepperd Strudwick.

  The story was remade in 2001 as The Deep End, with Tilda Swinton as the wife. That film tended to be a vehicle for her and so it did not uncover the offbeat love affair that is so haunting in the Ophüls film. But the character of a director—let alone the greatness—is always going to be apparent in how he reads a story and in the space he finds between the lines.

  Red Dust (1932)

  It was Labor Day weekend, September 1932, when the servants came into the house on Easton Drive in Beverly Hills and found Paul Bern, naked, shot dead, with a note nearby apologizing to his wife, Jean Harlow. At the time, she was shooting Red Dust at M-G-M, with Clark Gable. It looked like being a smash hit. But when the death was reported, Louis B. Mayer concluded that Harlow would be in no state to complete the picture. So he talked to Tallulah Bankhead about taking over. Harlow rallied.

  Red Dust had been a play, by Wilson Collison. It flopped, but the studio saw potential. It was a story set in the jungles of Indochina. Dennis Carson is a rugged rubber planter. He meets Vantine, a Saigon hooker escaping from the police. They get acquainted, but then a couple of highbrows arrive, Gary and Barbara Willis, an engineer and his wife. Barbara becomes infatuated with Dennis, but finally Dennis realizes that the Saigon hooker is more his type.

  With Hunt Stromberg producing, John Lee Mahin wrote a script, and there was some doctoring by Donald Ogden Stewart. Dennis had been earmarked for John Gilbert, but Mayer overrode that and put Gable in instead. Jean Harlow was to be Vantine—she and Gable had had a few effective scenes together in The Secret Six, and Red Dust was meant to be a sexy collision for the two of them. Indochina was built on a set by Cedric Gibbons and Arnold Gillespie, with a lot of mud and heat and a general drenched look that made clear what assets the stars had. There was a good deal of suggestive stuff with liquid rubber, and a moment where Mary Astor had to watch a black slug squirt out of a tree. It was raunchy for its day, and there was a notorious bath-in-a-barrel scene where Harlow had done her bit for Clark and then stood up to allow the crew a good look at her breasts.

  It was one of Hollywood’s class stories, with plenty of automatic racism and an attitude to Indochina that boded no good if you cared to think ahead thirty years. Gable’s attitude was live for today, and Gene Raymond and Mary Astor were the educated couple, with sex the great leveler. And, of course, there was a strange way in which the Bern-Harlow tragedy was just a cultured man and a raw doll, a famous sexpot and a guy who wasn’t sure about his sex drive. Victor Fleming directed the film, and everyone agreed that Clark and Jean were made for each other.

  Then came Paul Bern’s death, hiatus, and then Jean came back to work, too eager to see her great chance disappear. Her hunch was right. The picture cost about $400,000 and it grossed three times that amount. Gable and Harlow would do four more pictures together, though she was dead before the last one—Saratoga—came out.

  Twenty years later, it was remade as Mogambo, with Ava Gardner and Grace Kelly as the women, and Gable still living rough. John Ford directed.

  Red-Headed Woman (1932)

  When M-G-M signed Jean Harlow, they were a little nervous about owning up. On screen, in Platinum Blonde, for instance, she had been a lady. In life, she was Jean Harlow, so full of sex and mischief and available skin that it seemed stupid to ask anything else of her. But the studio did not wish to be seen as so brazenly lascivious, so low-down. So they tried to kid themselves that Harlow was more than what she was—and maybe that’s one reason why Paul Bern ended up looking after her. Bern was the man to advise exotic foreigners, shy spectacles, and people generally less self-satisfied than Jean Harlow.

  On the other hand, the studio had a property, Red-Headed Woman, from a novel by Katharine Brush, complete with a script by F. Scott Fitzgerald that pleased nobody—Fitzgerald had apparently tried to class it up. It was about a tramp who makes her way to the top by doing the very thing everyone could believe of Harlow. Jean didn’t much like the material, but the studio got a new script from Anita Loos and they put Harlow in it. Loos (an authority on blondes and gentlemen who succumb) took one look at the newcomer and wrote a script made for her.

  Harold Rosson photographed it. Jack Conway directed and took about thirty days. The material was not very much altered. Harlow’s character takes on a long line of men—Chester Morris, Lewis Stone, Henry Stephenson, Charles Boyer, and Harvey Clark. She had Leila Hyams, Una Merkel, and May Robson in the picture with her—and Paul Bern was watching over the whole thing as producer. The studio did the works: They asked Harlow not to wea
r a bra; they did scenes where she had just a satin sheet over her; and she delighted in wearing a skintight dress.

  The picture opened in June. It had cost about $400,000, and it made the same amount in profit. Paul Bern wanted to marry her, while the public simply wanted more of her. The movie was banned in Britain, but in Culver City everyone had a new take on Harlow. She became engaged to Bern and no one raised an eyebrow—not even Thalberg, who must have realized that his studio was taking on a “slut,” as opposed to all its ladies. It was Mr. Mayer who believed the M-G-M stars should be genteel (except when they were in his office with him). But the popular trend was toward sex, and Harlow had a unique vulnerable cheerfulness about it.

  That would mean fifteen films made for them by 1937, despite the Bern scandal—or because of it. It’s clear that the studio “handled” that killing with great shrewdness and maximum showmanship. With a mother and a stepfather on the dangerous side, Harlow needed a lot more care. But it was her misfortune that she came on tough, raunchy, or at least unflappable.

  Red River (1948)

  Like Bonnard or Dickens, Howard Hawks loved to be alive. Look at that, he says, time and again, whether it be smoke from wagons burning in the distance, or the gathering of cattle and men before sun-up that a circular panning shot can embrace and memorialize, or whether it is Dunson’s hand waving cattle out of his way as he strides through the great herd—ownership with horns—to confront the man who took it away from him. Everything looks like the ugliness of revenge taking its toll (and revenge is a huge force in American film), but it is absolutely characteristic of Hawks that he is optimist enough, and enough a lover of life, that he sets that harsh call aside. And it is only by the most mature standards—those of Renoir, say—that the ending of Red River is right, even if father and son may never be at ease again.

  It was meant to be the big film in Hawks’s career, and loving life meant taking care of it. It would be a great hit film where he and his wife, Slim, took the real profits from ownership. But it is a film that asks searching questions of ownership. Though the film was a huge hit, there were unending legal troubles over the cattle, et cetera, and then there was a divorce—because Hawks loved liveliness too much, and couldn’t settle for maybe the best wife a great director ever had.

  What else? This is the one on how Tom Dunson, with Groot and Matthew Garth in tow, as well as a cow and a bull, makes a place for himself in Texas and then, after the Civil War, has to drive the herd to a railhead—wherever. And on the way, Dunson’s anxiety makes him a tyrant, and Garths cool presence make’s him available as the rebel always waiting to see that no one else tangled with the father. The cattle stuff was all shot in a valley in Arizona—you can trace the geography if you study the backgrounds. But you can do that only if you want to miss the brilliant eye-and-glance action among the men.

  You see two Dunsons: the young man from Republic, and for the first time an aging wolf—mean and nasty. You get two women—one not quite strong enough to insist, one certain that that is her destiny. You get Montgomery Clift proving that he could be a cowpoke too—even if guys like Richard Farnsworth helped him ride, fight, and roll a cigarette.

  It’s black and white, shot by Russell Harlan. The script is Charles Schnee from Borden Chase. The music is Dimitri Tiomkin. Aged eight, taken by an aunt, I saw the film and said I would stay to see it through again—just to be in that valley and with that group longer. My aunt looked at me. It is a film about insisting. She said she’d go shopping and come back. Ah, for the days of continuous performance. My favorite picture—but that is smoke in the wind.

  With Walter Brennan, Joanne Dru, Colleen Gray, John Ireland, Harry Carey, Harry Carey, Jr., Noah Beery, Jr., Hank Worden, Paul Fix, Chief Yowlachie, and more cattle than anyone ever had a reliable count on.

  Reds (1981)

  Reds was an immense enterprise, a labor of years and love, but a film for which Warren Beatty—one of the most adroit producers in the history of Hollywood—would do no publicity. It makes no sense, not in Reagan’s America, to say that a biopic on America’s most attractive Communist should have to speak for itself. After all, in so many respects it was a film pledged to history, which may be the ultimate residence of politics. It was a film about what had actually happened in a young America, about the justice, nobility, and “rightness” of so many smart Americans once being so left. And even if times had changed, the film could not help but refer to the modern relevance of what they had said and believed in the years of the First World War. Yet Beatty would not testify on behalf of this five-year work and his own dedication.

  It is the story of John Reed, scripted by the English playwright Trevor Griffiths, yet plainly made under the imprimatur of its producer. Nothing in the film is there because people persuaded Warren Beatty out of his own thoughts. And one has to admit that, despite the apparatus of the witnesses—ancient, broken faces, beautifully filmed, eloquent, and some dead before the film came out—the story (of Reed and Louise Bryant) is tricked out in Hollywoodish ways, even introducing an immense journey across the snows to save a beloved that resembles Doctor Zhivago but which did not happen.

  It is two films—and that may be proper in dealing with a revolutionary figure in a sedate society who then goes into the cockpit of action. The first part is very exciting, and it hangs on Diane Keaton’s Louise—the best work she has ever done—and enough of a portrait of a dynamic feminist for us not to notice how little of Reed we are getting. And Reed is Beatty—earnest, heartfelt, but self-effacing—the figure that has increasingly dominated the sultry kingmaker (and princess-taker). The photography (by Vittorio Storaro) and the décor (by Richard Sylbert) are glorious—though they smack so much of gift catalogues that it counts against the film’s alleged Communist ideology.

  Part two—with adventure, Russia, political tangles, and Zinoviev (Jerzy Kosinski)—is a mess and Reed becomes a decreasingly important or impressive figure. But the film cannot bring itself to ask whether he is simply washed aside by the tide or whether he becomes disillusioned with his own cause. Indeed, at the end, Reed is a kind of beaten-down kid such as Ronald Reagan could have liked—and when Beatty screened the film for the president, Reagan said he had hoped for a happy ending. By now, Beatty remembers Ron and Nancy as friends. That is not a mistake Reed would have made. But Reed would not have made so pretty a film or kept so straight a face when he got the Best Director Oscar for it. (This film is not directed; it is assembled like a souvenir issue of Vanity Fair—on the Red Look.) Reed wanted to change the world. Beatty wanted to secure his place.

  Also with Jack Nicholson (overrated as Eugene O’Neill), Paul Sorvino, Maureen Stapleton, Gene Hackman, Edward Herrmann, and many others.

  The Red Shoes (1948)

  In A Matter of Life and Death (1946), Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger had been charged with improving Anglo-American relations. Two years later, flagrantly against the grain of rationing and austerity in Britain they made a beautiful, extravagant, art-for-art’s-sake movie, The Red Shoes, with the forbidding figures of J. Arthur Rank and his managing director, John Davis, looking over their shoulders as the budget rose. The bosses thought the whole thing was fanciful and would do no business. But then the film opened in America, and something in that country rose up with the cry “Gotta dance.” In time the film would make a lot of money. More than that, a classic was established, that inspired generations of dancers or balletomanes. Much more than that, it inspired people to be part of those beleaguered groups that did “art.”

  There is a moment in Monte Carlo when the several members of the company begin to prowl around the vague notion of a Red Shoes ballet (or a film). Then they start to move in unison: Shared hopes are a prelude to the achievement itself. Lermontov (Anton Walbrook) says, “The Ballet of the Red Shoes is from a story by Hans Christian Andersen. It is about a young girl who is devoured by an ambition to attend a dance in a pair of red shoes. She gets the shoes and goes to the Ball. For a time all goes well.
And she is happy. But at the end of the evening she is tired and wants to go home. But the red shoes are not tired. The red shoes are never tired. They dance her out into the street, they dance her over the mountains and valleys, through fields and forests, through night and day. Time rushes by, love rushes by, life rushes by, but the red shoes dance on.”

  Whereupon, Julian Craster (Marius Goring) interrupts—he writes the music and he loves the dancer. “What happens in the end?”

  “Oh!” says Lermontov. “In the end she dies.”

  Well, no, nobody on the film died because of the film, though Albert Bassermann died four years later. Many found a new life. But they are all dead now. Not just Powell and Pressburger, and J. Arthur Rank, but Walbrook, Marius Goring and Moira Shearer, Leonide Massine, Ludmilla Tcherina and Robert Helpmann. Hein Heckroth, who did the production design; Brian Easdale, who wrote the music; Sir Thomas Beecham, who conducted it. One person is left (March 2008): Jack Cardiff, who did the color photography.