Sait-On Jamais… (1957)
As the few people helping build the contents of this book exchanged lists, Bob Gottlieb wondered about Roger Vadim’s And God Created Woman, if only because that famous if silly picture surely established Brigitte Bardot (who is historically interesting). But I guessed I would have a chance to talk about Bardot with Le Mépris, and I knew that the only Vadim film I cared about was variously known as Sait-On Jamais, or When the Devil Drives, or No Sun in Venice. Of course, the title it cries out for is simply Death in Venice.
It must be well over thirty years since I’ve seen Sait-On Jamais, and I have been unable to find a print of it now (which is unusual), so I have to admit I cannot remember too well what it is about. But that strikes me as a minor complaint. There must be some criminal enterprise involved, yet all I can really recall of “plot” is the rivalry over Françoise Arnoul between Christian Marquand and Robert Hossein. Is it possible that it’s just a love story? That could explain how I recall in some detail a prolonged scene in which Hossein pursues Arnoul through a wintry Venice with just a crimson flower as his lure.
You see, Vadim is one of those filmmakers who could handle space. One of the things admired about And God Created Woman (in a rather camp way) was how he could arrange Bardot in a CinemaScope frame. But if you have ever loved Venice, or known it in winter, just consider what a CinemaScope frame can do with its alleys and steps, its sudden prospects and its claustrophobic tight corners. I don’t believe it matters too much if this film is about very little, or next to nothing, because it is about space and movement in Venice, when the colors are gray, white, russet, and stone—the colors of a winter city.
That photography is handled by Armand Thirard, and I trust that it survives somewhere. Jean André did the production design, and Victoria Mercanton edited the film. Marquand is in his element as a rather lazy adventurer, Françoise Arnoul is very pretty, and I don’t think she ever removes any clothing (I think I would have remembered). Robert Hossein is nasty and frightening, and O. E. Hasse was another villain.
I have left the best to last. There is a sound-track to the film, written by John Lewis and played by the Modern Jazz Quartet (Lewis, Milt Jackson, Percy Heath, Connie Kay). There are some who may charge that John Lewis writes genteel chamber jazz—that he is too cool to be the real thing. Perhaps. Still, this seems to me the best jazz score written for the movies, which isn’t to say that it doesn’t sometimes rival the bells and chimes of Venice. But I recall those spaces, the tracking shots, and the chasing swirls of Lewis and Jackson, piano and vibraphone. No, it’s not a great movie, but it’s a mystery why it’s not better known.
Le Samourai (1967)
Is this authentic movie history, or the stuff of dreams? Is there a difference? It seems that Jean-Pierre Melville had wanted to do such a film as this for several years, and had had only Alain Delon in mind for the central part. And so, eventually, he cornered Delon and began to read him the script. After a few minutes, Delon stood up and stopped the director. “This is seven and a half minutes,” he said, “without dialogue. I’ll do it. What is it called?” Melville replied, “Le Samourai,” and Delon got up and led Melville to an inner room of the house that contained a leather couch, and the sword and lance of a samurai.
Well, this is a film about inner rooms of that kind, which leaves just this question hanging: Are the occupants of such private places really the grave heroes of our time, or are they solemn kids in love with disastrous fantasies? Or, to put it another way, is this the perfect, ritualistic tribute to the solitude of the hit man, or is it a superb piece of absurdist humor resting on the fact that no one—onscreen or in the audience—dares begin to smile, let alone laugh? It is as if the great beauty of Delon—though fatuous—dares us to observe his silky pretensions and stay in chilled respect, or to start to vibrate with buried laughter.
Jef Costello is a man in a raincoat and a fedora hat—they seem like soft, fabric materials, but they might be steel cast by Brancusi. There is no deviation or untidiness. He is a hit man in a world where nearly everyone could be hit. He carries out his assignments with a dreamy perfection. It is not just that he is brave, accurate, expert, and cool—but is he cool? And beautiful? So much so that our seeing him is like bearing witness to an angel’s mission. (It could as easily be Buster Keaton as Delon.) Except that he is seen on a job by an apparent stranger—by a black woman singer at the club. And so, fatalistically, Jef moves toward his destiny, for somehow he cannot blame this innocent bystander or hit her. She is another angel.
Melville films all this as if it might be the only film he would ever make. Indeed, he makes it look like Bresson, and I think it is far more productive to see the links with Pickpocket, say, than with This Gun for Hire, the Frank Tuttle film from the Graham Greene novel. Henri Decaë shot it in subdued colors, and Delon seems to know that this is the film for which he will be remembered. He might even have concluded from this film that he could as well rest with tranquillity beneath the snow of rumors about his own underworld life. There is an implacable suggestiveness to the picture that leaves no room for argument.
It is a perfect film, until you realize that this same Melville once made Le Silence de la Mer and Les Enfants Terribles—and then its immense aplomb can shrivel up, just like the Wicked Witch of the West when a drop of water hits her.
In short, I love the film, but I am daunted by my feelings.
Samson and Delilah (1949)
If you recall, there is a moment in Sunset Blvd. when Norma Desmond gets out the car and has Max von Mayerling drive her over to Paramount, where she will talk to Cecil B. DeMille about her script. The assumption behind Sunset Blvd. is that Norma is crazy to think that a working professional, let alone the great DeMille, would countenance her garbage. This seems reasonable, but for one thing: At Paramount, at that moment, DeMille was making Samson and Delilah, which is beyond trash.
The screenplay required at least eight hands—Fredric M. Frank, Vladimir Jabotinsky, Harold Lamb, and Jessie L. Lasky, Jr. I’m sure Norma Desmond could have done it on her own—and who can rule out the chance that she actually wrote it in childish longhand? For this is the story of Samson, a very strong man among the Israelites and easily seen as a threat to the Philistines. So those wicked and malign occupiers set Delilah, their most beautiful babe, to seduce Samson. She thereby discovered that his strength lay in his hair, and while he was in a drugged sleep she cut it off. Then was Samson reduced and humiliated by the Philistines and brought into the Temple to be mocked. But Samson called out to God, got an extension of his old strength, and pulled down the Temple. Big finish. Samson and Delilah crushed in the ruins. Philistines defeated.
Dewey Wrigly was credited with “Holy Land Photography,” but most of the picture was done at Paramount with George Barnes handling the Technicolor (very rich in the red-brown range), which got an Oscar nomination. Edith Head and a team of others (including Dorothy Jeakins) were nominated for costumes, though Hedy Lamarr had her own designer, Elois Jenssen. But the key Oscar went to the design quartet—Hans Dreier, Walter Tyler, Sam Comer, and Ray Moyer—who did the Temple in its destruction.
Still, I have to say, you could have Samson and Delilah naked on a simple sofa and the picture would still be a wow if you had Victor Mature and Hedy Lamarr. Mature’s good nature was as ample as his muscles, and he plunges into the pathos here without shame or coyness. Indeed, Mature could have played King Kong. But Hedy Lamarr (aged thirty-six) was genius casting. Her career was in decline by then (maybe she was putting in too much time on her inventions—her brow does look furrowed). But she had a kind of gloomy sexuality that places the story in that intriguing ground where biblical overlaps with screwball—bibleball?
Nor is this the end of the fun. Let me just add that the leading Philistine aristocrats are George Sanders and Angela Lansbury, both of whom have the English background that so naturally inspires thoughts of vicious corruption. The cast also includes Henry Wilcoxon, Olive Deering, F
ay Holden, Russ Tamblyn, George Reeves, Tom Tyler, and Mike Mazurki.
The picture had first rentals of $11.5 million, a Paramount record at the time.
San Francisco (1936)
Timed for the thirtieth anniversary of the 1906 earthquake and fire, San Francisco is a fine example of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer’s attitude to the world’s problems: Surely star power, high-mindedness, prayer, and song will get us through. San Francisco is depicted as the expression of three personalities: Mary Blake(Jeanette MacDonald), a sweet girl with a sweeter voice, just as good with opera as she is with the “Battle Hymn of the Republic”; Father Tim Mullin (Spencer Tracy), a robust churchman, the model of piety standing in for civic enlightenment; and Blackie Norton (Clark Gable), saloon keeper, expert in a pretty corrupt world, but with his heart so firmly in the right place that he can be redeemed. When the act of God strikes San Francisco, it’s Jesus and melody that carry the spirit of determination that will build the city back up again.
The script job was given to Anita Loos and Robert Hopkins (both San Franciscans originally), and they based the Gable role on Wilson Mizner, a man about town. It had been a Thalberg production, but when Irving died it was reassigned to Bernard Hyman, and he enlisted Woody Van Dyke to direct. It was a big picture that cost $1.3 million in the end. By far the most beautiful and cinematic part of the film is the exciting Slavko Vorkapich montage that depicts the earthquake—and there was a lot more in the way of special effects from James Basevi. But Jeanette MacDonald is Metro’s idea of spectacle, singing opera and then coming in at the end with the terrific first four notes of “San-Fran-cisco,” the epitome of easy courage and studio politics.
There is a scene where Blackie knocks Father Tim off his feet, and the Breen Office said it had to go because it showed lack of respect for the Church. So Loos and Hopkins threw in another scene, in the gym, where we see that Father Tim is actually a far better boxer than Blackie—you see, he only let himself be knocked out! The key song was written by Bronislau Kaper and Walter Jurmann, and Gus Kahn added the lyrics. To this day, the organist at the Castro Theater plays it every night as a finale, and it stands as the San Francisco anthem.
Considering the real place of earthquake threats in California, it’s a foolishly cheerful, detached film. Indeed, it views natural disaster the way studios regarded the war effort. But it got a Best Picture nomination, and it made a huge profit of $2.23 million. No other Metro picture of that era came close to it. Of course, in the thirties, natural disaster was a blip on the screen. In the current climate of Hollywood, no one would dare to make a film about Katrina not just because they’d fear the likelihood of being attacked for a partisan job, but because no studio recognizes the responsibility. San Francisco may be ruined by a second “big one,” a blow that takes the smile off the California face. But for 1936 this film sufficed as a rousing affirmative and a rehearsal for war. Did anyone look at the Vorkapich rhapsodies on collapse and imagine?
Sansho the Bailiff (1954)
Watching Sansho the Bailiff, and wondering why it has that title, I ask myself how far Jean Renoir and Kenji Mizoguchi knew each other. I cannot find references to understanding, but Mizoguchi was winning prizes at European festivals during Renoir’s great surge in the 1950s. (Sansho won the Silver Lion at Venice, the third Mizoguchi in a row to take that prize.) Surely they felt some kinship. For the humanism in Mizoguchi and the Shakespearean sweep of time and society are akin to Renoir’s vision of life’s theater carrying on in India, in Montmartre, and in the theater. Their language was the same: the way camera movements expanded consequence; spatial connections that spoke to likeness; and the suffering. Let us be clear: There is more suffering in Mizoguchi. His work of the fifties is the great tragic moment of cinema. Yet Ugetsu finds a calm in story itself—and that was Renoir’s compassion, too.
We are in eleventh-century Japan. The governor of Tairo province, Masauji (Masao Shimizu), has to go into exile. He has challenged the system of corruption and slavery. His wife, Tamaki (Kinuyo Tanaka), undertakes a journey to join him. But she and their two children are waylaid by bandits: The mother is sold into prostitution; the two children become the property of Sansho the cruel bailiff.
Ten years pass. The children are grown: They are Zushio (Yoshiaki Hanayagi) and Anju (Kyoko Kagawa). Zushio has declined. But Anju urges him to escape and find their parents. When he does escape, Anju stays behind and kills herself. Zushio hides in a temple, protected by Taro, the son of Sansho. He learns that his father is dead, but when he seeks justice he is made governor of Tairo, like his father. He ends slavery. He searches, and finally at the seashore he finds his mother, old, crippled, and blind.
As a story of family separation and search, Sansho comes without the odd, brief mercy that Ugetsu holds. But Ugetsu is a story of spirits. Sansho is a chronicle, nearly Lincolnian in its study of a man who might free slaves. Its method is discreet: long shots, camera movements, sudden glimpses into the abyss—like Anju walking slowly into a pool, setting off her own ripples. It comes from a novel by Ogai Mori. Kazuo Miyagawa did the photography. Near the end of his life, though only in his fifties, Mizoguchi was working very hard. He knew that he and his characters were on the same path.
Sansho is two hours long, and the ten-year gap is the clue to its Shakespearean ambition. But you are left in no doubt about old people waiting for the young to grow up, and then forgetting what they are waiting for. This is a perfect film, one in which we never notice execution or exactness. We are waiting for the ending, its bleakness, its happiness, its dread. You can take those few years around 1955 and still be amazed that such staggering films were made. And I cannot help but wonder whether in their travels, in their work, Renoir and Mizoguchi ever quite realized how they were looking for each other.
Saturday Night Fever (1977)
By the mid-1970s, the American movie musical hardly existed with any vitality or novelty. There had been great hits—like West Side Story and The Sound of Music—but it is an act of charity to call them movies. Saturday Night Fever came out of nowhere in 1977, and it was a new kind of musical, one that found a way to harness the new youth audience that liked to dance, and here was a story about a Brooklyn kid with few assets but a great urge to make it. He dances in the way earlier movie characters boxed, played the violin, or turned to a life of crime. In fascinating ways, Tony Manero combined all those urges—and the public went with him in a rush, John Travolta became a major star, and disco music (not our finest hour) was elevated.
To that extent it was a film with a story or a question—will Tony get out of Brooklyn?—to which songs, or a kind of Muzak, had been added in the form of the background music to his chosen way—disco dance contests. The film was produced by Robert Stigwood (who would then produce Grease). The screenplay was by Norman Wexler, based on a magazine story by Nik Cohn. And it was directed by John Badham. Yet I wonder whether any of those people had a claim for authorship to match either Travolta or the Bee Gees, the group that contributed the inspirational, sliding, gliding music that was disco.
The greatest interest in the film was the clash between that streamlined fantasizing in the music and the really gritty quality of the Brooklyn life. This isn’t simply a story about two people who win the dance prize and fall in love. It’s about the poverty of imagination and opportunity in Italian-American life, about families without much hope, about suicide and rape as some of the destinies these young people are headed for. Are those two things balanced? No, not quite. In the end, this is a picture that glimpsed the chance of cleaning up on the music—which is what happened. The real barriers to progress in places like Brooklyn remain. So few win a boxing title. So few win a dance cup.
But the impact on young imaginations was immense—just look at the spread of Tony’s white suit (as designed for the film by Patrizia von Brandenstein). And then notice the heady bliss felt by Tony and his partner Stephanie (Karen Lynn Gorney) in the oddly plastic moves of disco dance. Disco may be the dance form of a
diminished culture, but the dancing scenes here—to stuff like “How Deep Is Your Love,” “More Than a Woman,” and “Staying Alive”—is what made this a repeat experience for white kids. (The film does show a very white world, just as hip-hop was about to revolutionize music.)
As for Travolta, a TV high school kid was suddenly promoted to the big screen. He was a sweet, dumb, goofy boy, full of strut and acting instincts, but so palpably kind as to be like uncooked dough. He was twenty-three when the film came out, but he was as pulpy and unformed as sixteen. He still is.
Save the Tiger (1973)
John G. Avildsen is the director of one of the great rose-colored myths in Hollywood history—the humbug of a hopeless and used-up club fighter named Rocky Balboa fighting for the heavyweight championship of the world. (It was also the story of how a Hollywood unknown named Sylvester Stallone became one of the big men in town.) Four years before Rocky, this same John G. Avildsen had directed one of the most misanthropic of American films, Save the Tiger. Do we reconcile this contrast by taking it for granted that Avildsen had an alert proficiency that would do whatever he was offered? Or is there actually some common sense of the world, of its essential stupidity and indifference, in both the nightmare and the happiness dream?
There’s no doubt that Save the Tiger was lifted way above its rut to a place where one wants to ask these questions because of Jack Lemmon’s presence as the hero, Harry Stoner. Stoner has been a hero in the war and a real figure in his locality as a youth. But years have passed. He is unhappily married. He hates the dress company, Capri Casuals, that he runs with a friend. He is out of hope and energy and of that American delusion that the two together can still make everything turn out all right. It is his dreadful attempt at “everything” that makes him such a nonstop gloom merchant—and such a begging noise for an actor to mime to.
'Have You Seen...?' Page 120
