It is the story of an English family in India: the father (Esmond Knight); the mother (Nora Swinburne); two English girls, teenagers, Harriet (Patricia Walters) and Valerie (Adrienne Corri), and their Indian friend, Melanie (Radha Sri Ram). There is the little boy of the house, Bogey (Richard Foster), and Captain John (Thomas E. Breen), the American who lost a leg in the war. Brando was considered for Captain John (along with a dozen other actors), but the part went to the son of the censor (Joseph Breen), who had already lost his leg in the war.
Claude Renoir agreed to be the photographer and Eugene Lourie the designer—and of course, in India, the film had to be Renoir’s introduction to Technicolor. It is a small family story, I suppose, and not without that English indifference to extraordinary foreign places where they are posted. It is also that rare thing, a story about adolescence, with three girls infatuated with the wounded captain, and making idiots of themselves. There’s the point. If everyone has his or her reasons, we all know we can be wrong and make fools of ourselves.
There is drama on a hot afternoon—Bogey is taken by the great cobra he adores. And there is melodrama, with red hair and temperament flashing in the sun. But there is India, hardly noticing it all—the India of so much larger tragedies that individuals have a very small claim on our time. Renoir had always loved individuals, the specifics of the human case, but here there is an attitude—tranquil, half-sleepy, resigned—that knows their tempests come and go. And just as Rumer Godden supplies the English family mood to perfection, so Renoir recognizes how India alters everything.
This is the resumption of a great career and one of those postwar films that finds the larger world as its subject. It would be foolish to link it too closely to Indian religion or philosophy. Renoir was only a traveler and a visitor. But he had had his mind enlarged, and there is a way in which this river—the Ganges—is attached to the river in Partie de Campagne (1935), and the notion (spelled out in the book Renoir My Father, published in 1962) that we are just corks bobbing on the stream. Some say The River is picturesque, or for children, or a holiday excursion. Whereas it is the start of Renoir’s last great burst of action.
Robin Hood (1922)
The Fairbanks unit was a gang of athletic boys who, first of all, had to keep Doug amused: the idea and practice of boys’ adventures turning into immense movies really operates with Douglas Fairbanks. So it was Allan Dwan, apparently, who first had the idea of Doug playing Robin Hood. But Doug wasn’t interested. He had Jack Dempsey as a visitor and everyone was watching the great boxer. Then Dwan had an idea: get some real archery equipment with targets on the lot and challenge Doug to hit a bull’s-eye. It was a new game, and it worked. Within a couple of days, the star was hooked on playing Robin Hood. What’s more, it turned into the most expensive film made in America to date.
Dwan and the writers read up on the subject as best they could, but they were candid in admitting that it hardly mattered whether Robin of Locksley had even existed. It was the story of a king, Richard the Lion-Hearted, who goes off on the Crusade. In his absence, that wicked brother Prince John and the Sheriff of Nottingham seize the country. Who shall defend the nation? Robin—that’s who!
Dwan would direct. The script came from Lotta Woods and Doug himself. And a whole lot of building was entrusted to art directors Wilfred Buckland, Irvin J. Martin, and Edward M. Langley as well as the costumer Mitchell Leisen, hired in from DeMille. They built a castle in Santa Monica on the principle that guys in Europe had been halfhearted about it. With Bob Fairbanks, Dwan built immense sets with an interior hall that was 450 feet long—big enough for a football field. Doug was daunted when he saw them, but then Dwan taught him how the sets could be rigged as gymnasia, with handholds, slides, and chutes behind the tapestry wall covers so Doug could do his great chase sequences. And once Doug could move across these sets, the film became his. He had a pretty bizarre wig, and no one enjoyed wearing the armor. But put him in tights and he was Tarzan in the castle. And all the while, Leisen was designing the knights’ tabards so they matched the illuminated manuscripts.
Arthur Edeson shot it, and Richard Rosson was the assistant director handling the crowd scenes. But the adventure stuff was done by Doug and Allan Dwan, and it was a matter of vaults, swinging sashes, balconies, staircases, and sudden appearances. Plus archery and sword fighting. Children today are blasé technocrats: They take color and sound for granted—they are used to fabulous scenery. But strap them to the sofa and the gnashing of protest and fury can still be silenced by Doug’s exuberance.
Wallace Beery is King Richard, Enid Bennett is Lady Marian, Sam De Grasse is Prince John, Willard Louis is Friar Tuck, and Alan Hale is Little John. The estimate is that it cost $1.5 million, and it earned $2.5 million in America alone.
Robinson Crusoe (1952)
Sometimes known as The Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, this film was a major step in the world’s rediscovery of Luis Buñuel—and his first film in color. In so many ways, it’s a fitting subject for him: for the original novel, by Daniel Defoe, is an immense, conscientious, and self-congratulatory reestablishment of a bourgeois existence, after our hero has suffered the misfortune of a shipwreck. That’s why Crusoe has it in him to be smug, ultramaterialist, and an unblinking visitor from capitalist Europe, utterly secure about his superiority. Inasmuch as Buñuel made a faithful adaptation of Defoe—not just in terms of action, but in living up to the familiar imagery of the novel—it is remarkable that this should end up so alarming a portrait of an increasingly lonely and incipiently crazy man.
The film was produced by Óscar Dancigers (Buñuel’s regular producer in his early Mexican years). Buñuel did the screenplay with Philip Roll (a pen name for Hugo Butler). And the film was shot largely in a jungle area near Acapulco, by Alex Phillips, using Pathécolor. The look of the film is naturalistic, though there are arresting scenes of Crusoe “talking to” his own echo in the mountains, and of a trailing torch being quenched by the sea. There is also a moment when Friday becomes “naughty” and the film hints, comically, at a direction it might take. But Crusoe remains heroic, and there may have been a tension in Buñuel between honoring that box-office need and digging deeper into loneliness and hallucination. As it was, the picture cost $300,000, a huge sum for the Mexican industry, and one that required some money from the United States.
No one seems to have enjoyed the shoot very much. The jungle proved hot, with scorpions. Buñuel was observed to be drinking a lot. And he was not, at first, on easy terms with Dan O’Herlihy, his Crusoe. It seems that the producers had wanted Orson Welles, having seen him in Macbeth. And when that proved fruitless, their eye fell on Macduff in that film. O’Herlihy was always a good actor, but he spoke no Spanish and he did not swim. At first, he was taken aback by Buñuel’s dogged insistence that he not act for effect.
Under the circumstances, O’Herlihy gives a solid performance (he got an Oscar nod—Brando won in On the Waterfront), and there is an amusing interplay between him and Jaime Fernández (Man Friday). Of course, a Buñuel film without women is an anomaly, if not a perversion. Crusoe is moved by a dress on a scarecrow blowing in the wind—and I think in hindsight that Buñuel’s Crusoe cries out for some of the small indiscretions that Fernando Rey might have brought to the part. But it’s clear how far Buñuel was still learning as he struggled to become a professional filmmaker as well as the source of outrage. The Mexican work is not consistent. It seldom has the poetry that would come in the sixties and the seventies. But it’s as if Buñuel had only begun to ask himself practical questions in the fifties.
Rocco and His Brothers (1960)
We should remember the rush of films in 1960. It was the year when the French New Wave broke upon the shore. It was the time of Psycho, The Apartment, and The Bellboy. And in Italy, these films had their opening—L’Avventura, La Dolce Vita, and Rocco and His Brothers. Of those three, the last—by Luchino Visconti—is certainly the least known today. But have no doubt about it: In 1960, Rocco was
a shattering experience. I recall its screening at the London Film Festival with audience members crying out at the concluding events of the melodrama. There was a terrible sense of wound and loss. The film worked.
When Visconti made La Terra Trema, he had had a scene of a few men leaving Sicily for the north. In the fifties, this became a heavy migration. So Visconti had the idea of picking up that story. But in the years that had passed, he had become so distant from the man who made La Terra Trema. In that documentary-like film, Visconti had used natives and amateurs. In Rocco, the title part—that of a boxer—was taken by Alain Delon, not just French, not just uncommonly beautiful and delicate for a boxer, but an actor who reckons he is playing something like the noble brother Alyosha in some Karamazovian scheme.
The operatic and the literary sensibility had surfaced in Visconti, and not too much was left of the communist or the realist. In his family grouping, there are two brothers—the saint and the beast, Simone (Renato Salvatori). Their antagonism turns on Nadia (Annie Girardot), the woman they both love. In the final passages of Rocco, Simone rapes Nadia, then beats up Rocco (who has been compelled to watch the rape). Then after Rocco has told Nadia that he cannot see her anymore—a sacrifice all the more portentous for being shot on the roof of Milan Cathedral—Simone murders Nadia, stabbing her repeatedly while she adopts a crucifixion-like posture. I didn’t say it was good—just shattering.
Visconti wrote the picture with Suso Cecchi d’Amico and Pasquale Festa Campanile, and the ravishing black-and-white photography (like a very velvety noir) was entrusted to Giuseppe Rotunno. The music, ornate and romantic, was by Nino Rota. It’s hard to exaggerate how far removed these characters were from Sicily—let’s say that they were as glamorous, as dark, and as theatrical as the figures in The Godfather. And Visconti was surely aiming at a kind of international audience. In La Terra Trema he had used rare dialects. In Rocco, several of the cast were dubbed because they could not speak Italian. The central trio—all of whom are very powerful—were backed up by Katina Paxinou as the mother, Roger Hanin, Suzy Delair, Paolo Stoppa, and the young Claudia Cardinale.
I suspect that Rocco looks dated now, and I have to say that it marks a process of self-betrayal in Visconti that is the opposite of true development. From now on, he was an habitué of the studio, of art directors and designers, of starry casts and obsessively pessimistic and literary conclusions. But in 1960, there were people who felt that Rocco was the best Italian picture of the year.
Rocky (1976)
There is a fond school of thought that sees the economy, the daring, and the quality of American movies in the early 1970s (the term “silver age” has been used) being crushed by two very big events: the opening of Jaws and Star Wars. No matter that those two films came from apparently promising new directors, they ended up making life harder for new directors. But there is a third film in that dire pattern of influence, the most excruciating and the least explicable—we have come to Rocky.
Sylvester Stallone was twenty-nine in 1975, real name Michael, with eyes stolen from a very sad bloodhound. He had been acting a little and in three days he wrote a script about a hard-luck club fighter, Rocky Balboa, who goes up against the champion, Apollo Creed (Carl Weathers). Stallone was quite proud of the three days, but I think it suggests that he rested a lot. Well, it was taken up by Robert Chartoff and Irwin Winkler, producers, who reasoned that it was so simple, so stupid, and so made for Stallone’s lovelorn look, why not risk a million on it?
They shot it fast in twenty-eight days, with John G. Avildsen directing. James Crabe did the photography. Bill Cassidy did the production design. Scott Conrad and Rick Halsey would edit it. Bill Conti wrote some music, and Sly’s brother Frank wrote a song, “Take Me Back.”
It was about this pretty boy palooka, his girlfriend Adrian (Talia Shire), his trainer (Burgess Meredith), and Burt Young as his brother. It was either Capraesque or it was raw corn—depending on your take. It was also comic-book blatant, full-frontal and inspirational. Everyone began to catch Stallone’s fever for wishful thinking (Sly was shy until he started talking, and then he was over the top). And he seemed to be the one guy who believed in it all.
It’s when the picture reaches the fight that you realize what a travesty it means to be. The fighting is not just implausible, it’s not far from slapstick ballet, and all based on a way of fighting in which no one bothers with defense. (Stallone says that he got his idea from seeing Chuck Wepner fight Muhammad Ali.) It’s shameless and brutal, and deeply sentimental in every way. But the public loved it and responded to the sudden stardom of this young writer-actor. There were even those who reckoned that a Wellesian “talent” had been unleashed upon us all.
It won the Oscar for Best Picture—against Network, Taxi Driver, and All the President’s Men. Avildsen then won for directing (Ingmar Bergman was one of those he beat). Sly was nominated as actor and writer. Talia Shire, Burgess Meredith, and Burt Young were all nominated. The madness knew no end. Balboa became a patron saint of Philadelphia—allegedly a tough city on sports heroes. And, of course, the film grossed $225 million worldwide.
The series went to Rocky V, with Stallone himself directing parts 2, 3, and 4. (Then in 2006 came the pensioner Rocky.) There were also three Rambos, plus Rambo on Social Security, to say nothing of the film careers of Arnold Schwarzenegger, Steven Seagal, and sundry other superheroes with empty, puffed-up faces.
Roman Holiday (1953)
In 1953, the movies believed in princesses and the millions who would be captivated by the thought of a holiday in Rome. That’s worth stressing because the movies have been a measure of how up-to-date we are or aren’t, and of how we advertise such sweet messages to ourselves. In 2008, what equal idiocies are there prompting entire movies?
It’s easy now to see how in 1953 (the year of the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II—a landmark in the spread of TV sets in Britain and Europe), Hollywood could envisage Audrey Hepburn as a princess (a Princess Margaret who had swallowed her politeness pills, was X degrees prettier, and spoke the Queen’s clear English, not Margaret Windsor’s drawl), instead of Grace Kelly. (Question: Would it have been to the benefit of the movies and/or Monaco if Prince Rainier had married Audrey and Grace had been free to do Vertigo, Marnie, and Wait Until Dark?)
Roman Holiday was directed by William Wyler, who had done a number of grown-up films with complicated women. It was written by John Dighton and Ian McLellan Hunter, though it would turn out that Hunter was fronting for Dalton Trumbo. And Gregory Peck as the American journalist who gives Audrey’s princess a brief vacation from duty had done a lot by then—not just Lewt in Duel in the Sun and Twelve O’Clock High, but David and Bathsheba with Susan Hayward. There was every indicator at “go” in the public mind that, offscreen, Gregory Peck could make love in a movie.
But Roman Holiday was a fairy tale, simply because of the radiant presence of Audrey Hepburn, in her first starring role (after doing Gigi on Broadway), and so sublimely set apart from changing times, the idioms of talk and what a girl might do, that the film could have been silent. Audrey is the auteur of the film. It’s not just that with any other actress the film alters—it’s far more likely that it was made only because this creature called Audrey came along: unreasonably beautiful; completely likeable; entirely thin—and yet for the 1950s, not absurd, but palatable. Try to think of a comparable event in movie history and the closest I can come is Julia Roberts in Pretty Woman—made in a completely different degree of sexual candor, but with Julia’s charm simply warding off any foul suggestions in the script, her costume, and what she does. She was perfect, and it’s films like these that show how insane the public can be. Another example—far tougher to explain: Diana in her strange real life.
Who knows what Wyler thought? Or Trumbo? His story won an Oscar for Hunter. The picture was nominated as Best, Wyler was nominated, and so was Eddie Albert for Supporting Actor. And Audrey beat Deborah Kerr in From Here to Eternity for Best Actress. Seen to
day, Roman Holiday is hard to finish, because it has only its charm. There is no world, no masked meaning behind it. My one comment would be to juxtapose two photographs: Audrey in 1953, with Princess Margaret, not as pretty or charming, hopelessly human, and hoping against hope for a life.
La Ronde (1950)
In more recent times, La Ronde has been redone as The Blue Room, scripted by David Hare and directed by Sam Mendes, with Nicole Kidman starring. But this is the real thing, a movie version of the Arthur Schnitzler play Der Reigen, set in Vienna in 1900, adapted for the screen by Jacques Natanson and Max Ophüls, and directed by Ophüls. It’s in black and white, photographed by Christian Matras. Jean d’Eaubonne did the sets. The music is from Oscar Straus.
In its day, La Ronde was perceived as the classically “naughty” French film. Another word was “sophisticated.” And I suppose the views came from the antisentimental notion that amorousness, or seduction, or sex made its natural way through society, circulating as freely as money, or infection. So the idea had been used before of a coin or a banknote passing through many hands in one day. In La Ronde, what was being passed was the sexual urge—the hard-on, if you will, or even the same bodily fluid. I use that metaphor poetically, but today no inspector of infectious diseases could be quite so amused. La Ronde is a demonstration of dangerous practices. Yet in 1950, all people noticed was that sex could be enjoyed without love being declared.
'Have You Seen...?' Page 117
