'Have You Seen...?'

by David Thomson

  The story came from Cesare Zavattini, and he, Sergio Amidei, Adolfo Franci, and C. G. Viola were duly Oscar-nominated for Best Original Screenplay (they lost to Sidney Sheldon for The Bachelor and the Bobby-Soxer). What is so vital about Shoeshine is this decline in the boys and the way they hold to their great dream of having horses. They are already, in their way, part of the consumer society, but diverted and distracted by the pressures around them. Indeed, one boy will kill the other finally—the struggle for survival has become so intense.

  The two boys are Rinaldo Smordoni and Franco Interlenghi, and I don’t think their naturalness was surpassed in any of the neo-realist films. Justifiably, they are famous for seeming drawn from the streets—yet Interlenghi had a career waiting for him: in Teresa, I Vitelloni, and The Barefoot Contessa, and even married to Antonella Lualdi (a boy could get his horse).

  Today, the black and white of Shoeshine would be rejected by nearly every production. And so the anodyne color that has replaced it torments us with the thought that we have done away with poverty and the damage shown in Shoeshine. Nothing could be further from the truth. It is simply that we are too cool now, or too dishonest, to stomach “realism.”

  The Shop Around the Corner (1940)

  Onscreen—never mind the other place—there was an enchanting chemistry between Jimmy Stewart and Margaret Sullavan. They had found the mirror in which each one could look adorable. He craned over her and she arched back to look up at him. Their two voices dropped to a hush as intimacy took their breath away. So of course it is inspired of Ernst Lubitsch and Samson Raphaelson to launch this film on the notion that they can’t stand each other. It works deliciously. They rub each other up the wrong way, but we know that that kind of stroking is only prelude to a fonder friction. And their characters, Miss Klara Novak and Mr. Alfred Kralik, are quite safe, because in their dreams they still go to movies with Jimmy Stewart and Margaret Sullavan making like the trellis and the vine. And out of all this emerges something fit for Shakespeare or Mozart—that the head and the heart fall in love at different speeds. Which is not to say that reconciliation is certain. The one could easily crush the other. And when Klara looks into an empty mailbox and Sullavan’s wounded eyes widen, we are so close to tragedy we have to hold on very tight.

  The next matter of joy is the way Budapest is re-created on the Culver City lot, no matter that by 1940 I daresay a Lubitsch was taking or giving odds on whether the real city could survive a regime that took precedence over power plays at Matuschek’s. The aplomb with which refugees and narrow escapees preside over a dream Second World War in Hollywood is not the least measure of character and courage in the American movie. And, almost inadvertently (that is the Lubitsch touch—of happening upon the given), the delicacy of amatory affairs is not the least part of the whole code and structure of freedom that the war was being fought over.

  So this is a comedy in which earnestness or gravity endangers true love, and Lubitsch’s other touch—the casting wand—is able to see that both Stewart and Sullavan had a humorlessness, a stiff-backed pride, that would bring them so close to the lip of disaster. It’s not that Lubitsch really believes in true love, or in its ability to last much more than twenty minutes, but he does tremble a little at the thought that this lovely chemistry he finds himself with might be too high-minded to make a modest equation or a warm explosion.

  We are taught how to regard Klara and Alfred by the fond, yet wry attitude for all the supporting players—Frank Morgan is humbug, fusspot, and a real ruin discovered at Christmas in a quite Dickensian performance; Joseph Schildkraut is the fascist in the shop—if the brownshirts do come calling he is their man—and Felix Bressart is the eternal wall off which so many jokes and reaction shots need to bounce.

  Moral of it all: The Shop Around the Corner was nominated for nothing in 1940. Neither did Lubitsch ever win an Oscar. That’s how good Hollywood was then: The gems were smuggled out with the costume jewelry.

  Short Cuts (1993)

  There were those who complained that too much of the material taken from Raymond Carver short stories wasn’t exactly or faithfully Carver. And there were those who argued that this sweeping panorama (if white is all you can see) of life and death in Los Angeles was not very comfortable or inspiring. There’s truth in both claims: but Robert Altman always tricked and exploited and hurt writers; and he is head-and-shoulders taller than so many directors in that he never attended to the bromide that he ought to try to like people more. He could respond that anyone who treats actors so well must have a soft spot for humankind.

  Altman did the script himself, with Frank Barhydt, yet I think the real structuring of the film was probably established in the editing. That’s where this extended ronde of L.A. stories really comes together; that’s how the artless resemblance in so many lives begins to mean more. In that sense, Short Cuts was a very influential film—it surely stands behind both Magnolia and Crash, two of the most striking films about L.A. in the last ten years, and both of them were composed as circling overviews where propinquity and coincidence—chance and meaning—have to be assessed and reconciled by the viewer. However, the comparison with those two films does point up a bizarre thing about Altman’s city—so palpably L.A. in most respects—which is its absence of black, Hispanic, or Asian characters.

  That’s what we don’t have—along with the question of why. (Was it really overlooked?) Let’s now concentrate on what we do have: There is the trio of boys who go fishing (Buck Henry, Fred Ward, Huey Lewis); there is the warmly lugubrious romantic pairing of Lily Tomlin and Tom Waits; there are the four friends, Chris Penn and Jennifer Jason Leigh and Robert Downey, Jr., and Lili Taylor, who will go to Griffith Park and feel the earthquake that ties the city together; there is the strange marriage of Penn and Leigh, with her doing phone sex like knitting while he gazes on like a crushed romantic—and his terrible response to this alienation; there is the family of Andie McDowell and Bruce Davison, their son, the weird traffic accident (such a slight passing—did it do damage?) and the grandfather, Jack Lemmon; there are Peter Gallagher and Frances McDormand; there are Lori Singer and Annie Ross—and how good it is to have Ross’s songs on the sound track. And still I haven’t come to Anne Archer and Tim Robbins, Julianne Moore and Matthew Modine, Lyle Lovett’s baker or the sisterhood of Madeleine Stowe and Julianne Moore, and the ginger flourish of Moore’s pubic hair.

  This is a world riddled with loss and tragedy. It is a place without much hope or daydream, things allegedly made in L.A. It is a film not too far from despair. But there was Altman, nearly seventy, introducing a masterpiece that told the film world, Look at the city, film what you see and feel, in ways that could change the history of movies.

  Show Boat (1936)

  Show Boat was a novel first, written by Edna Ferber and published in 1926. Carl Laemmle bought the film rights for Universal but did nothing because a stage show came into being, a musical, the book and lyrics by Oscar Hammerstein and the music by Jerome Kern. The cast included Charles Winninger and Edna May Oliver, with Norma Terris as Magnolia, Helen Morgan as Julie, and Jules Bledsoe as Joe. The songs included “Ol’ Man River” and “Can’t Help Lovin’ Dat Man.” Opening in late 1927, the stage musical ran 575 performances. Laemmle then paid some more for the song rights, and in 1929 he released the first film of Show Boat, directed by Harry A. Pollard and starring Laura La Plante and Joseph Schildkraut, with featured appearances from Helen Morgan and Jules Bledsoe. It was a failure, chiefly because it was not an all-talking picture.

  So Laemmle vowed to try again. He hired Zoe Akins to write a new script and he talked about Frank Borzage as the director. Few people liked the Akins script, so Oscar Hammerstein was engaged to do a new one. By then, at least $200,000 had been spent on the project. It was at that point that Laemmle startled most of show business by announcing James Whale (the master of horror) as director. Irene Dunne was set to play Magnolia—she had played the part in the road show. Charles Winninger beat out W.
C. Fields for Cap’n Andy. Helen Westley stepped in to replace a weary Edna May Oliver. Allan Jones was borrowed from M-G-M. And in two key respects, Whale insisted: He wanted Helen Morgan, no matter that her alcoholism had worsened. She got it for $3,000 a week, but she was to forfeit the role with one failure to appear on time and she would have to pay for a replacement. In addition, hearing that it had always been Jerome Kern’s wish, Whale insisted on Paul Robeson for Joe.

  Shooting began late in 1935, using three-fifths of the Universal lot, but at the moment when Carl Laemmle was offering the studio for sale. John Mescall (another drunk) was doing photography, and Charles Hall was art director. It wrapped in March 1936, $400,000 over budget and with fifty-five hours of material. And all the while, the sale of Universal was up in the air.

  It would have been no wonder if the pressure had crushed Whale—and he had his critics (Irene Dunne included). But the film is wonderful, and leaves no doubt about why the stage show prospered or why the work has become a classic. Robeson’s “Ol’ Man River,” scripted by Akins as a set piece with camera movements, is transcendent—the grandeur of the treatment (a 270-degree pan shot) only inspires Robeson (the two men got on very well). But Helen Morgan’s “Bill” tops it, and is as quiet and modest as “Ol’ Man River” is large. It is our best assurance of Morgan’s talent, a profound comment on mixed race, and one of the great, sad torch songs in the history of the musical.

  M-G-M remade Show Boat in 1951 with Kathryn Grayson and Howard Keel, and with Ava Gardner mouthing “Bill” as Annette Warren did the singing. (Lena Home was considered—and denied.)

  Show People (1928)

  There’s a delightful moment in Show People, when Peggy Pepper (Marion Davies), a hot newcomer at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, gets to have a meal at the studio commissary. The place is packed with real stars and director King Vidor allows Peggy a lovely, sidelong stare at none other than Marion Davies herself. The look on Peggy’s face—awed, wary, but skeptical—says it all. Peggy can handle this one.

  It’s a famous story, how William Randolph Hearst took a fancy to a girl in the Ziegfeld Follies, Marion Davies. He formed a company, Cosmopolitan, to make her pictures and, after a few years based at Paramount, the company moved over to M-G-M in 1924 because of the great friendship between Hearst and Louis B. Mayer. It is said that Hearst lost a good deal of money on Cosmopolitan, but in part at least that was because his lover’s esteem for Marion preferred to see her in large dramatic roles, whereas anyone who knew her judged that comedy was her forte.

  By the time of Show People, Marion was past thirty, though Hearst’s fondness had not waned any more than his creative misinterpretation of her. Still, Show People—under the guise of being a satire on Hollywood—is the film above all that shows how mistaken Hearst was. It was the second film she made for King Vidor at Metro, following The Patsy, but it was still officially a Cosmopolitan production, the story of Peggy Pepper from Georgia who launches herself at Hollywood and becomes “Patricia Peppoire,” a grand lady of the screen. It was written by Agnes Christine Johnson, Wanda Tuchock, and Laurence Stallings, but Vidor was intimately involved in that he had become a favored guest at San Simeon, the estate Hearst kept up the California coast, where Marion was first lady.

  Without reverence or foolishness, Show People makes a lot of fun at Hollywood’s expense—particularly at pretension and any tendency to forget one’s roots. So it was Vidor’s intention to have Patricia brought back to Peggy’s common sense by William Haines throwing a custard pie in her face. This was to remind her of her humble origins in comedy. However, Mr. Hearst went very quiet whenever this pie was mentioned. He thought it unbecoming. He could not bear to see his Marion humiliated. And so he spoke to Mr. Mayer, Mayer spoke to Vidor, and all Patricia gets is a gentle soaking from a soda syphon.

  It doesn’t detract from the fun or the naughtiness of the film, and it leaves us in no doubt that Marion was a very good comic mime—she does Chaplin very well, no matter that she had probably been Chaplin’s lover earlier. John Arnold did the photography. There was a synchronized score, but no dialogue, and the supporting cast includes William Haines, Dell Henderson, Paul Ralli, Tenen Holtz, Harry Gribbon, Polly Moran, and Albert Conti, as well as every Metro star they could round up (including King Vidor). But no one persuaded Mr. Hearst to take a bow.

  The Sign of the Cross (1932)

  “Bib-lit” is mercifully light on the ground these days, but in a world afflicted by bank closures and food lines, thoughts of sin and the sinning class could be stirred. No one had more history in this than Cecil B. DeMille, and as it turned out The Sign of the Cross is one of the more intriguing social commentaries of 1932, even if one is not quite sure whether it is a Marx Brothers film or not. No, it can’t be—it moves too slowly.

  There was a play, by Wilson Barrett, which seems to owe a few centavos to Henryk Sienkiwicz’s Quo Vadis? in that it involves Christians, lions, and Nero. Waldemar Young and Sidney Buchman shrugged off whole libraries of “research” to come up with a script in which a noble Roman, actually named Marcus Superbus (Fredric March) falls for a coy handmaiden (Elissa Landi), and thereby rejects the sinuous offerings of the Empress Poppaea (Claudette Colbert), whose sexual energies are not exactly fulfilled by Nero (Charles Laughton).

  This is the one where Colbert takes a bath in asses’ milk. The man who handled that scene was DeMille’s top designer and costumer, Mitchell Leisen. DeMille wanted an effect whereby Ms. Colbert’s nipples might fleetingly appear, like bubbles, above the milk. So Leisen and the actress had a lot of fun measuring and pouring, while DeMille—apparently—was in the wings trying to get a glimpse. Colbert takes her bath like a good sport, and it’s apparent that she’s wearing nothing. But then, under the lights of Karl Struss, the bath began to demonstrate the fermentation process that makes cheese. The story is that Leisen and Colbert went out to dinner, and while they were out the milk hardened so that a visitor to the set thought it was marble, fell in, and was only just saved. You don’t have to believe all this, but the surge in yogurt sales in Los Angeles plainly dates from this period.

  What you cannot avoid believing—because it’s there onscreen—is the unbridled way in which Laughton seems to say to Colbert, “Well, if you’re the empress, I’m the queen!” In other words, he gives what is the most flagrant and fleshy portrait of an abandoned homosexual spirit seen in an American film until that time. DeMille was said to be unsure of what was happening. He tried to direct Laughton, but it was impossible. And at the end of it all, when DeMille asked Laughton whom he wanted to play next, Laughton answered, “You!”

  Rome burns, Nero plays the harp. Christians are gnawed by lions—Leisen said they used prime rack of lamb to get the lions interested. (Otherwise, Leisen said, they were inclined to chat about the last film they’d made.) DeMille reissued the film in 1944, with fresh scenes and a prologue written by Dudley Nichols. Apparently he had had a vision that the Nazis were like Nero. It is a business terribly vulnerable to visionaries. But Nero and Poppaea are more than they seem: They are the first onscreen portrait of the Hollywood marriage where he’s gay and she’s viciously carnal because of it. And you can still see that today.

  La Signora di Tutti (1934)

  The Italian movie star Gaby Doriot (Isa Miranda) tries to kill herself. The process of the operation to save her is the threshold to flashbacks on her life. As a girl, she is taken out of school by her parents, because of a scandal, and sent to the country. She meets Leonardo (Memo Benassi), the son of a banker, Roberto (Federico Benfer), and a crippled mother. It is while Gaby is involved with the father that the mother (Tatiana Pawlova) falls down stairs and dies. The banker then takes up with Gaby in a long period of travels in Europe. His business suffers, and he is tried for fraud. It is while he is in prison that Gaby becomes a film star. Coming out of prison, the banker tries to see her new film, La Signora di Tutti, and is killed in a street accident. Leonardo returns and Gaby realizes he loves her—even though he has
married Gaby’s sister, Anna (Nelly Corradi). Gaby dies during the operation.

  Max Ophüls was invited to make La Signora di Tutti in Italy by the publisher Angelo Rizzoli. The film came from a novel by Salvatore Gotta, and the script was written by Ophüls, Hans Wilhelm, and Curt Alexander. Italy was already a Fascist country, in which—we assume—the Italians could hardly do “good work,” and yet here is a Jewish exile arriving and making a near masterpiece.

  Anyone can see how easily the structure of La Signora di Tutti fits that of Lola Montès, more than twenty years later. This is a more personal story, and it is far more attentive to individual details as well as the Freudian interpretation of a woman loved by father and son—but don’t forget how in one episode the teenage Lola makes off with her mother’s lover. Lola Montès is far more aware of its archetypal parable and gloomier about show business. Indeed, the operation is a more conventional, Hollywoodesque way of telling its story—and so much less intriguing than the life as a circus act formula.

  But Ophüls is already fully aware how “everyone’s woman” belongs least of all to herself. Gaby does not just surrender her real name. She consents to being a dramatic element in the overbearing lives of others. And so, the resort to acting and films is a good metaphor for the kind of personal helplessness Gaby feels. She becomes other people when her own freedom of decision is taken away. And notice how, all through, her ability to fly creatively is weighed upon by the terrible accidents that make others earthbound.