'Have You Seen...?'

by David Thomson

  The Rules of the Game (1939)

  The shooting began on February 15, 1939, at the Chateau de la Ferte-Saint-Aubin in Sologne. So some time in that late winter, on the steps of the chateau, Marcel Dalio’s Marquis would have stepped forward and explained that there had just been an accident. “And now, my dear friends… it is cold, you are running the risk of catching a chill and I suggest that you go inside.” A few months later, on July 7, the film, La Règle du Jeu, opened in Paris. The war was weeks away and the film’s portrait of a society that permitted such accidents, without daring to know their hideous consequences, was more than a jittery public could endure. But the time came, at Venice, in 1959, when a reconstituted version of the film opened. Where does it stand? It is the greatest film by the greatest director. Jean Renoir.

  A house party has been arranged in a society where a virus called love has descended—everyone is in love with the wrong person. It is a condition of classic theater and farce, and we have many allusions to Mozart and Beaumarchais if we need instruction in misunderstanding—after all, isn’t that the thing we do well and naturally? And once a dramatist recognizes that unstoppable proclivity in his figures, there’s no need to approve or disapprove of them—they have their reasons and their energy. It is all a camera can do to keep up with them, to see them. So La Règle du Jeu is a film about hunting and pursuit in which almost certainly anyone will hit some wrong targets. Aim is not really a human facility so much as the helpless urge to fire.

  There is also the tangle in lives (or plays) above stairs and below—once again, shown without judgment, but without any reliance on barriers that may keep people in or out. Class is only a way of organizing the others, so it is bound to occur, and certain to be overruled in a crisis. One valiant rule—one great seizing at hope—is directing: the idea that everything is under control. And there are occasions when this hurly-burly seems like a wild rugby match run by Octave (Renoir himself), our master of ceremonies and everyone’s friend. But, alas, he becomes involved himself, and he is part of the tragedy.

  From a script by Renoir, Carl Koch, Camille François, “and the cast.” Jean Bachelet was director of photography. Eugène Lourié did the décor with Max Douy. Marguerite Houlet-Renoir did the editing. Dido Freire was script girl. Coco Chanel made the clothes, and Henri Cartier-Bresson was an assistant. More or less, it was the Renoir team, giving greatest rein to the deep focus, the camera movement, and the integrated shooting style that is forever the cinematic tradition and which Renoir had discovered in the thirties.

  As for the actors, what can you say more than echo Renoir’s realization that acting may be the best way to get through life. It ranges from elegant to slapstick, from insane to exuberant. In life, people go mad, and for actors, if they are working hard at the sane scenes, well, the madness is very difficult: Marcel Dalio, Nora Gregor, Roland Toutain, Mila Parély, Paulette Dubost, Gaston Modot, Julien Carette, Jean Renoir.

  In the attempt to see an art in the movies, as well as entertainment, a culture as much as a business, I think that for some of us every attempt at judgment has come from this film’s exhausted urging not to judge. But it is so hard not to be in love.

  Rumble Fish (1983)

  Seemingly at a low ebb after the failure of One from the Heart and the loss of his Los Angeles studio, but driven to make some money to save his family house in Napa, Francis Coppola went to Tulsa, Oklahoma, to make two films from the books about teenage life by S. E. Hinton—The Outsiders and Rumble Fish. The first was fairly conventional, but for its astonishing cast (a tribute to the casting acumen of Fred Roos): Matt Dillon, Ralph Macchio, C. Thomas Howell, Patrick Swayze, Rob Lowe, Emilio Estevez, and Tom Cruise. But by the time of the second picture, some deeper ambition stirred. So Rumble Fish is far from a routine job. It is a deeply poetic and personal essay on adolescence and a sure sign that Coppola is seldom the man you want to hire for a mainstream, moneymaking project.

  It has a theme that is very close to Francis’s often troubled relationship with his own brother, August Coppola. August was older, far more handsome as a kid, and seemingly more talented. People wondered how Francis could be anything other than daunted by August. This bond lies behind the fraternal relations in The Godfather, and now it leaped out again in the feelings of awe Rusty James (Matt Dillon) has for his older brother, the Motorcycle Boy (Mickey Rourke), who left home some time ago. It is when the Motorcycle Boy comes home that a crisis arises in Rusty James’s life.

  Whereas The Outsiders had been shot in realistic color, Rumble Fish was done in a very stylized, noirish black and white (handled by Stephen Burum) with just flashes of vivid color (for the tropical fish). It has dream sequences, fantasy scenes, and a very lyrical design sense, supplied by Dean Tavoularis. Stewart Copeland supplied a terrific rock score, and Barry Malkin was in charge of the editing. Coppola’s two sons, Roman and Gian-Carlo, or Gio, worked as associate producers, and the cast includes a very young Sofia Coppola as Diane Lane’s sister. The rest of the cast included Dennis Hopper (as the father to the two boys), Vincent Spano, Nicolas Cage (August’s son), Christopher Penn, Larry Fishburne, William Smith, Michael Higgins, and Tom Waits.

  I don’t mean to overpraise Rumble Fish, but I think it is a haunting evocation of teenage years and maybe the most satisfying picture Coppola made after Apocalypse Now. I know that range includes Tucker, The Godfather Part III, and Bram Stoker’s Dracula. But in fact only Apocalypse Now Redux seems to me in the same class as Rumble Fish and the great films of the early seventies. There’s nothing too remarkable about that decline, or the loss of focus. There are many directors in America whose halcyon days have been quite short-lived. What happens in that loss of dedication, or the psychic need that powers it, is a fascinating question. There are no easy answers—and few striking comebacks. So Coppola has just four films to stand for his greatness. Of course, one would be enough.

  Run of the Arrow (1956)

  The charitable interpretation of John Ford’s The Searchers—that it pays heed to the civil rights movement of the 1950s—should keep in mind that Run of the Arrow comes in the same year and surely recognizes an America raw with unhealed war wounds, racial hostilities, and that intransigent energy that makes Samuel Fuller so fascinating and alarming. Fifty years after the two “classics” were made, the Ford is a set piece with wondrous resonance here and there. But it is a fanciful view of what life was like in its America. Whereas Run of the Arrow is as fresh and scorched as a recent report carried through fire and ice, conceived and delivered in momentous anger. I’m not sure if there is another American movie that indicates so thoroughly the way the impact of an unresolved war has been branded on America.

  O’Meara is one of the most unbridled, odious heroes in the Western. Give some credit to the rebellious Rod Steiger, granted free rein, but the entire conception is Fuller’s—an Irish Confederate, a rebel who, having fired the last shot of the war (a hit), defies the peace and the weariness that may have overtaken General Lee. This is a man who will fight on, a spirit for whom the war was a convenience, even if it captured many of his innermost prejudices. O’Meara is an extraordinary picture of a type of Southerner who still drives America on to a fearsome date with destiny. And so Run of the Arrow and the journey of the film are kinds of wicked, drunken pilgrimage, mockeries of real spiritual inquiry, yet aching with O’Meara’s cruel ego. That’s why the desert is his proper destination (the film was shot near St. George, Utah), whereas the Monument Valley of The Searchers is simply an inane place for settlement.

  This is a film of 86 minutes, with its own concessions to “Hollywood”—like Charles Bronson as Blue Buffalo, and Angie Dickinson reading the dialogue for Sarita Montiel’s squaw. No matter, it is a properly violent fable in which that old word “savage” seems to fit our hero better than the “Indians” he finds in the wilderness. Ralph Meeker and Brian Keith are brilliantly articulate as cavalry officers with alternative answers (or failures to answer) the question of where America is
going. And Steiger is a wild man such as few American films (or stars) could tolerate.

  It is often said that Fuller films like a journalist reporting, but that point is not right. A journalist describes a scene. Fuller has had the daring and the historical acumen to imagine an action that may never have been. Never mind: As we watch, we seem to be seeing the uniquely dangerous Eden that America’s melodrama required. It is taken for granted in this approach that the Indians are doomed. But there is the same bleak open-mindedness left for the larger enterprises—the West, America, civilization. For, in the end, this is a film about outcast fury—the energy that made America—and its longing for death.

  The Sacrifice (1986)

  We are on a flat shore by a lake or an inland sea (it is Gotland in the Baltic). The grass is that wintered green that has been hidden by snow. A man is trying to plant a tree by the shore, and he is talking to a child, his grandson. The camera stays fixed, at a remove, covering slightly, as a postman arrives, weaving figure eights on his bike as he talks to the man. It is the man’s birthday: he is a writer, a critic, a philosopher, and a teacher (he was an actor once, but he found he could not speak onstage). We move inside the house; it is a lovely study in white, brown, and gray. People gather for the party—the man’s English wife, a few friends. Gifts arrive—an old map of Europe. But then there is a roar in the air. Low-flying jets crush the scene. A pitcher of milk falls from a shelf. There is a terrible intimation of terminus. A great passage of film has been achieved.

  This is the opening of Andrei Tarkovsky’s last film, The Sacrifice. The light is Swedish, rendered by Sven Nykvist, and much of the mood and the place comes from Bergman, along with the brooding on the end of the world. The man is played by Erland Josephson. His wife is Susan Fleetwood. The grandson is played by Tarkovsky’s young son, Andriosha. Tarkovsky himself dies in 1986.

  As befits a film made in the last light of life, the beauty is not just heartfelt but perilous. There is a sense of time running out that comes even before the warnings of what is World War III. And the life on the shore is a semblance of that last rational but hedonistic version of life that must succumb to the poison in due course. But this is not simply a rational film in which the philosopher and everyone else faces extinction. It is a deeply religious story in which, perhaps, the worst can be avoided in the spirit of sacrifice. If the man can give up much of his great place and calm, then perhaps life will persist for the grandson.

  In turn, The Sacrifice touches on the supernatural and the divine. There is a character who could be a saint or a witch. There will be nightmares—and the act of sacrifice. Some people get this terminology wrong. In truth, this film is one of those meetings with death and disaster that are so very hard to steer away from horror or the nearly hysterical hope for regeneration. The immense beauty of the first third of the film gives way, gradually, to increasingly contrived spectacle and the special mood of salvation. And by then, I fear, the authentic poetry of the opening has yielded to specious scenarios that remind us that Tarkovsky, too, was dying and that he found it very hard to bear. Why not—with his infant son playing in the grass?

  What I am trying to say is that The Sacrifice is plainly the work of a master and for at least thirty minutes its poetry is impeccable. What follows fails… or it is less impressive. But that doesn’t really matter. The attempt in The Sacrifice is what counts. And the mannerism that follows, the vanity even, are a forgivable despair. It is worth stressing that as he died, Tarkovsky estimated that the only cinema that would last would be that of the poets. Of course, he was laying down the law, for his son and every would-be poet.

  Sadie Thompson (1928)

  W. Somerset Maugham wrote “Rain” as a short story in 1921—it was published in the collection The Trembling of a Leaf—and the title speaks for the use of weather to enhance the story’s sexual tensions as a whore meets a strict clergyman. In 1922, John Colton and Clemence Randolph had turned it into a Broadway play, Rain, that ran for 648 performances and starred Jeanne Eagels as Sadie Thompson with Robert Kelly as the Reverend Alfred Davidson.

  This was a story in which Davidson first castigates Miss Thompson and then as he realizes how attracted he is to her he kills himself. The topic of sex and the critical view of a man of the church were both certain sources of trouble with the Hays Office. But Gloria Swanson was determined to do it. She and her backer, Joseph Kennedy (later U.S. ambassador to London), bought the rights to both the story and the play—later, she even asked Maugham to write a sequel (which he said he would do for $25,000). Then Joe Schenck and United Artists mounted a big protest because the story had been banned. It’s the same old story with censorship, a fight for naughty love and hollow glory.

  The whole thing came to pass. There had been a first thought of going to Samoa itself, but wiser and cheaper plans prevailed and Catalina Island was reckoned close enough to “Pago-Pago,” with William Cameron Menzies doing the interiors at a studio in town. There were other obstacles. George Barnes was hired as photographer, but then Goldwyn pulled him off it and in turn Robert Kurrle and Oliver T. Marsh took over (with Charles Roshier working occasionally). Swanson’s chief support in all this was her director, Raoul Walsh, and one day she determined that he was ideal to play Sergeant O’Hara—and she was right. Meanwhile, securing Lionel Barrymore for Davidson was key to the project.

  The original version was 97 minutes, but some damage was suffered so that only a 91-minute version remains. Still, it shows a fine American production at the end of the silent era, well played and well directed, and a role very well suited to Swanson’s self-confidence. The film did pass the Code—or rather the Code came in a distant second. There was never going to be any stopping the movies as a conveyor of the idea of sex. Of course, the reality is another matter. But Sadie Thompson speaks to the health and candor of Sadie’s attitudes, and the film took in a million dollars.

  A few years later, Joe Schenck persuaded Joan Crawford to do a remake, Rain (with Lewis Milestone directing and Walter Huston as Davidson). It was not a happy or relaxed experience, and Walter Catlett, a supporting actor, told Joan, “When Jeanne Eagels died, Rain died with her.” By 1953, Miss Sadie Thompson (with Rita Hayworth and Jose Ferrer) only showed how the material had dated. Swanson struck while it was dangerous, and hers is the best version (even with the ending lost). Swanson was nominated for the first Best Actress Oscar, but lost to Janet Gaynor.

  Safety Last! (1923)

  Several years before Metropolis, there he is, modern man, clinging on for dear life to the hands on a great city clock. But not for Harold Lloyd the urban doom that pervades Fritz Lang’s film: Harold is attached to the clock in no metaphorical sense. He’s there for bare survival, as he tries to win promotion at the department store where he works and get his girl to marry him. Yes, you can say it was safer than it looked, but in fact Lloyd dragged his arm out of its socket doing the routine. And still to this day, there you are in downtown Los Angeles—when it was a very different place—and you can see all the life and bustle going on at ground level, while Harold flirts with his mission impossible.

  Is it just me, or isn’t there something of Tom Cruise in Harold Lloyd? The slight figure. The shock of dark hair. The inner numbness wiped away by the terrific friendly grin. And, more than anything, the innocent yet determined notion of getting ahead and being a success. It’s typical of Lloyd that he has a girl (Mildred Davis) whose attitude to him is that she’ll marry him, not when he discovers El Dorado or the Holy Grail, but when he gets ahead in the modern race. And so, he leaves Great Bend for the big city, narrowly avoiding carrying a black baby with him instead of his suitcase, and only just reclaiming the train after he’s been picked up by a horse and carriage. Harold is always going somewhere, but he has a sublime talent for getting the wrong lift.

  Lloyd had seen a steeplejack on the side of the Brockman Building in Los Angeles, and he conceived the whole picture out of that set piece. In his case, they’d climb the International Ba
nk Building (with the aid of Bill Strother). Hal Roach himself filmed as they built sets attached to the skyscraper and had catching cradles out of camera view. The climax comes as Harold reaches the top, is knocked half-conscious by a whirling wind vane, and does a lovely staggery dance on the parapet ledge.

  It was a Roach production for Pathé release, with Fred Newmeyer and Sam Taylor as directors, and Roach, Taylor, Tim Whelan, and Harold himself doing the story. Walter Lundin shot the film, and on a budget of $121,000 it earned $1.588 million. Thus, the immense fortune of Harold Lloyd and the absolutely honest emphasis on getting ahead. He was kind, good-hearted, and boyish, without a trace of cunning or intrigue to him. He stands for the days when the American audience liked nothing better than identifying with a good kid, a go-getter, and a fellow whose blue sky knew not a cloud of neurosis. People were scared for Lloyd in his stunts, but they trusted him to take care of himself. In the same way, we look at the youthful energy of the central character and the patient way the camera waits on him, and we know that the films are effectively directed by what Lloyd decides to do. And so a movie, a classic, came from the idea that a man climbing a building would draw a crowd.