'Have You Seen...?'

by David Thomson

  Faced with his need (he has to be married by 7 p.m. to get his grandfather’s money), Jimmy bungles his plea to Mary, not because he’s shy, but because, again, he is not exactly human—he gets things wrong. And then he goes along with his pal’s idea, to make a short list of the next seven possibilities. With Buster, you begin to wonder if it might not be easier for him to marry seven girls instead of one. Was the grandfather trying to say something in all the stress on 7? In other words, that horse-and-carriage act we all cherish, love and marriage, is getting the runaround.

  So the film turns into a fantasia on number. Buster at the church is suddenly in an immensely crowded frame because the position of his consort, or 7-up, has been advertised. And then it’s Buster being pursued by a horde of marriage-mad women. No wonder Buñuel adored this kind of thing—for we are as close to horror as we are to farce. Then we get an avalanche of rocks before the whole thing (not even 70 minutes) gets sorted out. And Buster ends up with Mary, except that she is clearly worried out of her mind by that blank look in his face. He has eyes like roulette wheels.

  This is Keaton at M-G-M, with Joe Schenck producing and Clyde Bruckman serving as “writer.” And in many ways, this is the purest of Keaton films in which a poor boot is going to be pursued by all the 7s. So many silent films now seem woefully out-of-date. But Seven Chances is ahead even of the other Keatons in that it takes for granted the coming of a society where transactions between men and women (or whatever) are akin to throwing dice. The jokes are hilarious, but we dare not laugh out loud for fear of waking Buster from his endless dream. From time to time, in this book, I have remarked on the gap between film and literature in the twenties. Yet Keaton was instructing Franz Kafka on the pitiless futility of taking sides in life.

  Seven Samurai (1954)

  In sixteenth-century Japan, an idyllic village, in a valley below steep mountains, discovers that bandits will attack as soon as the barley crop is ripe. They have suffered before—should they yield again, or fight back? A small committee is appointed to find samurai who will defend the village. This is a long film, drawn out by a master of suspense and control (over 200 minutes in its full version). We meet the seven samurai. We see them living in the village, doing their best to train the farmers and work out a strategy. And then there is battle, begun in sunlight and ending in pouring rain. Why seven?

  The film is over fifty years old now, and it is impossible for anyone to see it today without thinking of the traditions it inspired: not just The Magnificent Seven and the Sergio Leone pictures; not just the immense field of martial-arts films based on the Western fascination with samurai armor and Japanese discipline; not just Melville’s Le Samourai, or Frankenheimer’s Ronin, but the laser-beam sword battles of the Star Wars series. (George Lucas was a huge admirer of Akira Kurosawa—and the eventual coproducer on Ran.)

  Yet I urge you to do your best to regard this film with the eyes of 1954, and to see the astonishing vigor from Kurosawa that goes into every frame and meeting. I suspect that by the time he made Seven Samurai, he was well aware of and much in love with tropes from the American Western. But then consider the things that are uniquely his: the restless camera movements, the urge like that of a mettlesome horse, to be galloping and moving; the intense, burning close-ups and the way in which the cadet samurai can look at the weary master and say, “You are simply great!,” and we feel the justice of it, but understand the sad smile on the master’s face. There are the lovers on the forest floor, spread-eagled and surrounded by wildflowers. There is the terrible look on the face of the kidnapped wife as she realizes her husband is about to rescue her. There is the sudden use of slow motion (so that you wonder if you really saw it). And the sounds of running water, of bird cries, of the wind and of Toshiro Mifune’s snorts of derision for everyone—himself included. These images and sounds are like moments in Shakespeare.

  You can say that the film was a canny attempt to win Western audiences—and it undoubtedly achieved that. But over fifty years later, you can marvel at the rich black-and-white, the natural sounds, the drumbeats, the hooves on the ground and the music. It is a landmark in action films, but in its treatment of heroism, too. These samurai work and some of them die, for mere food. You wonder if they may seize the village, or be turned on by the villagers, for there is not too much trust between those parties. But the integrity of the contract prevails. There has always been a vein of cinema in which people do the right thing. And Seven Samurai comes as that notion was being treated with cynicism. But there is no denying or forgetting the faces of these men. They are the seven samurai, and they have found themselves. They do not need to say so, because we understand it.

  7th Heaven (1927)

  Austin Strong’s play 7th Heaven opened on Broadway in 1922, and it was a smash hit for nearly two years. It could be set anywhere, but in fact it’s Paris—what it’s palpably not is anywhere in the United States. Diane is a waif of the kind that depends on being unable to speak and not inclined to think. Her sister tries to force her into prostitution as a way of getting along. But she is saved by Chico, a sweet-smelling sewer worker, who takes her up to his seventh-floor heaven. They fall in love, but then war comes along—it has to be the First World War. Chico goes off to fight, and Diane takes a job in a munitions factory. She thinks Chico has been killed and starts seeing another man, Brissac. But then Chico comes back—blind. So he does not notice Brissac.

  Onstage, the key parts had been played by Helen Menken and George Gaul. When Frank Borzage was given the assignment by Fox, he auditioned or tested a lot of players. He was looking for chemistry, and he emerged with Janet Gaynor and Charles Farrell. Benjamin Glazer did the screenplay, and he deleted the threat of prostitution at the start, just as he downplayed Brissac as a rival at the end. Moreover, he introduced a heavy religious element. For example, Diane and Chico stage their own marriage, and then finally a great deal too much is said about how good God has been to them.

  The picture is a landmark in one sense: It inaugurated the Gaynor-Farrell partnership. It won an Oscar nomination for Best Picture, and Borzage actually took the Best Director prize. Gaynor also won Best Actress (though for three films—this, Street Angel, and Sunrise). Alas, it seems like a picture stranded on the far side of the sound barrier. Borzage is genuinely impressed by the love felt between separated people, but he lets the film work more at the level of sentimental separation than that of dream. In other words, Borzage is slow and cautious with his own effects. He does not seem to feel the wind of our desire lifting and carrying the characters.

  Ernest Palmer photographed the picture, and Harry Oliver designed the overly pretty “7th Heaven” itself. It’s also surprising to see how much screen time is given to events in the war during which Chico seems like an ordinary enough guy, capable of surviving. As it developed in the thirties, Borzage’s style was to surround his lovers with a drab darkness and wait for the light to find them. His touch then could be extraordinary. But 7th Heaven is too good to be true, and it has the effect of making the characters and the actors seem listless.

  Of course, the characters need to talk, and I think that the gap between their poverty and their dreams should have been developed more. Gaynor is plainly the heir to Lillian Gish, but Gish had lost her treasury because of her sober decorum. So 7th Heaven is meant to be a shrine, but increasingly it feels like a prison. Desire has been ensured at the end, but can there be sex? In the cinema, can a blind person have life?

  The Seventh Seal (1956)

  The Seventh Seal is one of the most important pictures in the history of international cinema. It gave a huge boost to intellectual dating, chess, and medieval studies, and it made Bergman a controversial yet austere figure all over the world. It was to see the earlier work of Ingmar Bergman that I joined the National Film Theatre in London in 1957—and while that quest was heartfelt and patient with long lines, it was also pretentious and social climbing, a way of insisting that the cinema was as serious as any of the arts. S
o Bergman laid the foundation for international art-house theaters in a way that Fellini, Antonioni, and the New Wave capitalized on. There was also the fact that, in its time, the medieval allegory and the game of chess with Death were a dramatization of the fate of a world that had bought into atmospheric nuclear testing and the bullying defiance of the Cold War. Anyone could see that there was a lot at stake, and The Seventh Seal referred to biblical apocalypse with the confidence of Elmer Gantry.

  The time is the fourteenth century. A knight (Max von Sydow) has returned from the Crusades. Like so many noble people a decade after Hiroshima and the opening up of Auschwitz, the knight has lost his faith, though his squire (Gunnar Björnstrand) still prays out of habit. Death appears (Bengt Ekerot), tall, pale, in black robes. It is time for the knight to die, but he challenges Death to a game of chess to delay his end. Meanwhile a troupe of players are attempting to bring comfort and consolation to an oppressed people, threatened by the Black Death. It sounds like an epic, but it was 96 minutes and astonishingly modest by the standard of Hollywood budgets. The film played and played. The knight goes his only way, but the players (Nils Poppe and Bibi Andersson) live on.

  Bergman was not quite forty when he made The Seventh Seal, and in hindsight there are ways in which his mastery then was as slick as it was austere. I don’t believe the film endures as a masterpiece, but that has nothing to do with its astonishing impact at the time. Bergman had already become the dominant figure in a country where film and theater were interlocked, and he had his company of actors working happily in both mediums. Time has proved their quality and their eminence. In Gunnar Fischer, he had a great black-and-white cameraman—and, of course, Bergman had not yet tried color.

  So, if you were there at the moment, I suspect you’d have a hard time seeing The Seventh Seal again. But if you’re a good deal younger than the film, then its intellectual showmanship is very impressive. The really remarkable thing is how, in finding a great audience (with invitations to do what he liked), Bergman also discovered the prospect of doing much better work. But the ability to look at your own success and establish higher standards is a definition of art. And this is unmistakably art.

  The Seventh Victim (1943)

  The producer Val Lewton had had three B picture hits in a row at RKO—Cat People, I Walked with a Zombie, The Leopard Man. So the studio bosses called him in for congratulation, and told him that his next film would be an A release! Terrific, said Lewton, because, as a matter of fact, the next story was one especially close to his heart. What will that be? asked the bosses. The Seventh Victim, said Lewton. Great title, they agreed: who is going to direct it? Whereupon Lewton explained that Jacques Tourneur, director of the first three, was unavailable. Mark Robson, said Lewton—Robson had edited Cat People, but he had never directed before.

  We can’t have a novice director on an A picture! said the studio. Lewton could have made a change. But he was firm: He stood by Robson. So the studio said it would be another B picture—71 minutes for a cost of under $200,000. Perhaps it was for the best: No one ever knew what a Val Lewton A picture would look like.

  The Seventh Victim is not so much a horror picture as a yearning for death—and once death has become desirable, fear hardly counts anymore. With a script by Charles O’Neal and DeWitt Bodeen, The Seventh Victim is the story of Mary Gibson (Kim Hunter). She is an orphan who comes to New York in search of a vanished sister, Jacqueline (Jean Brooks). Mary makes a team with her brother-in-law, Gregory Ward (Hugh Beaumont). It turns out that Jacqueline has joined a cult. The other members try to kill her. But Jacqueline will take her own life. Mary and Gregory are left together.

  As I said, death in this fable is a desirable destination. Little by little, the nihilistic mood takes over the film—not in a macabre way, not as the spell exerted by witches or devils, but as a necessary conclusion to all the vain fuss of life. Every horror film ever made or planned should look at The Seventh Victim because of its extraordinary grasp of spiritual emptiness, the beckoning alternative to action and activity.

  It was shot in twenty-one days in May 1943 with a team that Lewton had come to trust: Nicholas Musuraca as director of photography; art direction by Albert S. D’Agostino and Walter Keller; set decoration (very important in a film where objects are heavy with dread) by Darrell Silvera and Harley Miller; music by Roy Webb. Such teams were not uncommon in the great studio days: The factories employed the same workers. But Lewton’s pictures have a common style, that of a mixed longing and apprehension, that we are not accustomed to seeing as the mark of a producer. In truth, there is very little internal evidence to say that Robson did direct this picture—or that Jacques Tourneur did not. The case for Lewton as auteur is very strong.

  The acting is superb—above all Jean Brooks as Jacqueline, very beautiful, sultry, and doomed, yet fated not to have a great career. Kim Hunter is very good, and there are fine performances from Tom Conway, Isabel Jewell, Evelyn Brent, Erford Gage, and Ben Bard.

  Sex, Lies, and Videotape (1989)

  In hindsight, I daresay, the title Sex, Lies, and Videotape is like a generic definition of (or recipe for) American independent film—though you could go for further inclusive brevity still, and call it Acting for Free, which is a fairly accurate description of a great deal of what now passes for film or movie. Watch the person closely and try to decide whether he or she is more “into” life or acting. Do they wish to be assessed as pretenders or liars?

  When writer-director Steven Soderbergh stepped up to receive the Cannes Palme d’Or in 1989, he is reported to have said, “Well, I guess it’s all downhill from here.” Wiser words than he ever guessed. Nearly twenty years later, we have had three Ocean’s Eleven films to assess what the young name director can kill time with rather than pursue anything as slight, or as dangerous, as the original Sex, Lies, and Videotape.

  Soderbergh may now regret the full-length diary of his first film that was published as a backup to its great success as a Miramax release. For here was a movie that nearly didn’t get made, with the money coming in as bits and pieces, and the novice auteur having to do all he could to hold “creation” together under the multiple stresses of the occasion. And if you go back to the film itself, it’s remarkable how piquant and astringent it still is—the story of a foursome, in love and in sex, bound together by suspicion and videotape recordings in which they either reveal themselves or discover how impossible that ambition is. What emerged, I suppose, was an odd air of triumph—the way in which a slight idea and uncertain plans could carry a movie project all the way to Cannes and considerable box-office success. What got buried, I fear, was a much more fascinating lesson on acting—that it was in a position to take over from all other types or versions of behavior. The clearest proof of this was the way in which James Spader (the eccentric engine of the film) was set on a career where his genuine novelty was flattened out in foolish eccentricities. To see the film again is to remember the feeling that Spader was about to become exceptional—whereas now he is just a cul-de-sac of oddity.

  Walt Lloyd photographed the film. Cliff Martinez did the music. Soderbergh edited the film, and the other players were Peter Gallagher, Andie MacDowell, and Laura San Giacomo (with Ron Vawter excellent as the therapist).

  It’s too late for the sad jokes about what did happen to Soderbergh—except to say that he remains an observant, wry intelligence, which is a long way from being a creative artist. Soderbergh is that glum reality that now sits patiently behind the fuss of so many rather self-serving independent directors—he is and was a producer. And through thick or thin, the business history of the American film has been to defend and enrich and secure that slug of a fellow.

  Sexy Beast (2000)

  There have been several gangster films from Britain in the last fifteen years or so which speak to the perverse charm of some criminals being prosperous citizens. Too many of them have been miserable excuses for attitudinizing and violence. But there are some exceptions, notably the come
dy of Love, Honor and Obey (by Dominic Anciano and Ray Burdis) and the phenomenon of Sexy Beast, where the violence and the comedy are literally inseparable. It’s a little hard to tell from this novel film how promising director Jonathan Glazer is—and his second film, Birth, also flirted with prospects it couldn’t always reach. Still, Sexy Beast may be the first film in an authentically surrealist career. It has to be seen because there is no other film like it.

  “Gal” Dove (Ray Winstone) is a retired thief, and now a pillar of the Costa del Sol. He lives there in his villa with his wife, Deedee (Amanda Redman), and a couple of friends, Aitch (Cavan Kendall) and Jackie (Julianne White). He basks in the sun, his belly and his fat face at risk of burning. They lounge in the pool. They have the easy life.

  But then the word comes that the Mob in London require one further job from Gal, and they are sending Don Logan (Ben Kingsley) to persuade him to toe the line. Don is a beast, a nutter, a force beyond restraint or predictability. People are afraid of Don, of his ranting talk, his foul mouth, and his unquestioned proclivity for nastiness. He is also an actor. Kingsley got awards and nominations for his Don Logan, including a Supporting Actor Oscar nomination. This flagrant air of performance is used to offset the exceptional danger in the man, and it has the uncommon effect of making Don as hilarious as he is frightening.