All of that said, this is an Ophüls film in the movement of the camera (photography by Ubaldo Arata) and the beautiful uncertainty of the actress (Miranda). Haunted by mirrors and physical impasses, she is like a bird in a dead end, bright and adorable, but waiting to be crushed. The music is by Daniele Amfitheatrof, who would work for Ophüls again on Letter from an Unknown Woman.
Une Si Jolie Petite Plage (1949)
It is late at night, too late to be out. A wretched local bus lances through the dark and the rain. It carries a passenger who has come to stay at the only hotel open in winter. The walls of the place are stained with moisture and decay. He is beautiful in a harrowed way. He wears a soaking raincoat and he is too tired to eat. He has the doomed face of Gérard Philipe, who would be dead at thirty-seven. Everyone in the town tells him, Oh, wait until morning, or wait until summer, or wait until you’re dead—it’s such a pretty beach. Nonsense, the place is hell, and you are caught in one of the gloomiest of French noirs, beside which Quai des Brumes (1939) feels like a merry weekend in Knokke-le-Zout.
Philipe’s character says he is a student, with a touch of consumption. But I think any moviegoer realizes that his problem is existential dread. There’s a speechless old man in the hotel who seems to recognize the newcomer. And then a day later, a pursuer arrives (it’s Jean Servais): He takes his meals in his room while Philipe eats in the bar—so Philipe is not even sure that he is being tracked. As a rule, in this town it rains—though sometimes it rains harder. And whenever it clears, we see the beach, a flat stretch of drab sand, a place where sickly ghosts might take their promenade.
Philipe’s character is a mass of indicators: There’s a gun in his luggage, but he sobs himself to sleep. He has a lifeless romance with the waitress (Madeleine Robinson). I’m not going to spoil what happens, except to say that Philipe plays an orphan, and the film carries a fulsome defense of orphans and those who take care of them—to stress that nothing like what happens in this film could occur in life. No comfort. You know it’s going to end on the beach and it does, with a last shot that defies belief.
Yves Allégret directed, and if there’s a load more atmosphere than substance, never mind—this is the kind of noir that leaves a lot of American films seeming like poseurs. Jacques Sigurd wrote the screenplay. Henri Alekan photographs it all with available light and a few stage lights—natural light in this place is nearly a contradiction in terms (it was apparently shot in Barneville-Carteret, in Manche, a place that might as well have closed down). Maurice Colasson did the grunge design, and Maurice Thiriet wrote the music.
The rest of the cast includes André Valmy, Christian Ferry, Jeanne Marken, Mona Dol, and Julien Carette (with a mustache). But it’s Gérard Philipe’s film, and the one thing it misses is his interior monologue—harsh, desperate, self-pitying, and riveting. Allégret tries to show the character objectively, but we need to hear the inner torment that is reduced to sobbing at night. His voice, glowing in the dark of his room like a cigarette, could be the chat of madness.
And every time Philipe walks on that beach, you feel the wind sanding at his fragile soul.
Le Silence de la Mer (1949)
All of film, I suppose, is straining toward a love story: The spectator desires that landscape, that house, that woman. To be very blunt about it, the being in the dark is not entirely crepuscular or nocturnal; it yearns to be up there in the light of the screen. But there is no direct way up there. And so, time and again, the great love stories on film are the impossible ones, the ones where gazing is the measure of eros (that’s the lesson we learn in the dark). It’s like Buñuel’s bourgeoisie looking at their receding dinner; it’s like the faces of Trevor Howard and Celia Johnson in Brief Encounter (which by the standards of postcensorship cinema is no encounter at all); or it’s like Jean-Pierre Melville’s Le Silence de la Mer, a beautiful debut, a film with snow on the ground to signal not just war but the way love has been turned into espionage by politics.
It is based on the novel by Vercors, published in 1942. Apparently, Melville, in London, read the English translation, published by Cyril Connolly. A German officer, Werner von Ebrennac (Howard Vernon), is billeted in the country house of an old man and his niece (Jean-Marie Robain and Nicole Stéphane). They respond to this imposition with silence. So the German talks about his love of French culture and history. When he talks of “Beauty and the Beast,” we suspect he loves the niece. We learn he has dropped his fiancée. And then after a leave he comes back and admits he has learned about the concentration camps and the real nature of the Reich. He volunteers for a posting to the eastern front. The niece says, “Adieu,” her one word to him. The story is told by the uncle, and it turns into the pages of Vercors’s underground novel.
The film was shot at Vercors’s own house in Villiers-sur-Morin, in Seine-et-Marne, in the early winter of 1947–48. The photography was by Henri Decaë, and Decaë and Melville together edited the picture. There are still disputes as to whether Pierre Braun-berger produced or just helped. Nor is it plain what it cost. Melville said 120,000 francs, with half of that going for the rights and the score, by Edgar Bischoff. It was not released until 1949, which suggests that the shooting was intermittent and fragmented. No matter, the intensity of the concept holds everything together, and the history of a Resistance situation merges with the universal capacity for desire and affection as contained in the mechanics of cinema.
That the German is “a good German,” no matter that this film comes so soon after the war, owes something to the real officer, Ernst Junger, billeted in the house of Vercors. But it is also an immediate sign of Melville’s realization that all manner of ambiguities live under uniform. As it is, Howard Vernon is the central actor in the film: He fills silence and nullity. But the silence endures. This film was one of the shared models for every director of the New Wave. Its methods, its light, its situations, and its grace are recurring gifts.
The Silence of the Lambs (1990)
Clarice Starling (Jodie Foster) is Southern, from white trash, an earnest girl who is hauling herself up from the dirt in the service of the FBI. She is not quite grown up. Her boss (Scott Glenn) recruits her to go to see the imprisoned Hannibal Lecter (Anthony Hopkins) in an attempt to gain insight or information on a serial killer, known as Buffalo Bill. The sequence that follows is a landmark in modern film. The prison is a nearly Victorian dungeon that still surrounds Lecter with ultramodern safety devices. Clarice must run the gauntlet to reach him—this gauntlet is sexual and moral. And when she reaches Lecter, he is cold, austere, reptilian, clerical (he is like a library compressed into human form—a computer). But he likes her. He smells her. He begins to slip into a paternal attitude to her. And she is like the pilgrim seduced by the dark magician. And if she succumbs—what chance have we?
While it is clear that Lecter is a monster, he begins to make the strange journey that was to be finalized in Hannibal, where he manages to serve up Gary Oldman’s brain while becoming like an uncle, or even a lover, to Clarice. For in truth, he does help her discover Buffalo Bill, and then at the end he melts into the crowd, the larger world—not just escaped from detention, but bent on following his archenemy (Anthony Heald) and having him for dinner.
Taken from the novel by Thomas Harris, adapted by Ted Tally, and directed by Jonathan Demme, this is a crucial example of the moral nature of an art being sacrificed to the requirements of a cold-blooded entertainment business. For this is horror (and it is often very disturbing) shot through with arch comedy and a furtive but self-congratulatory love story. The film was a great success in every way, but it seems to have fallen on the genuine decency of Demme and left him numb or stricken. He has never been the same again, and now seems incapable of the humanity or the daring of Melvin and Howard or Something Wild. Equally, he has never again returned to the macabre gloating of this film, or to that mixing of genres that can find a love story between Lecter and Clarice. Yet the movies have only themselves to blame, for film has been fal
ling in love with monsters for decades.
Thirty years after Psycho, the lock clicked home: The way in which that shocker had been entrusted to Norman Bates at the end was now fulfilled and celebrated by the insinuation of Lecter as almost the deepest presence and standard in the film. It’s interesting to recall that Anthony Hopkins (who is not onscreen for that long—not really long enough for a lead performance) said that once he had the look and the manner it was easy to do the rest. For it hangs on fascination in itself. If evil looks us in the eye, without shame or coyness, we are hooked.
It won Best Picture, as well as Oscars for Tally, Hopkins, Foster, and Demme.
Silk Stockings (1956)
I’m fond of Lubitsch’s Ninotchka, but put to some acid test I’m going to prefer Rouben Mamoulian’s Silk Stockings. I’ll try to explain, but first the history: Ninotchka was a hit film of 1939, and later on (in 1955) there was a Broadway musical adaptation written by George S. Kaufman, Leueen MacGrath, and Abe Burrows, with songs by Cole Porter. It starred Don Ameche and Hildegarde Knef. In the stage show, Ameche played a theatrical agent, and Knef’s Ninotchka is a Soviet commissar sent to Paris to protect the work of a Russian composer.
The movie rights went to M-G-M, where it would be Arthur Freed’s last production. Leonard Gershe and Leonard Spigelgass wrote the script, going back to Ninotchka wherever they could and turning the male role into a movie producer. Freed appointed Rouben Mamoulian to direct, largely because he was Russian and had worked with Garbo. And it was Mamoulian who coaxed Fred Astaire to take part. Initially Astaire had felt he was too old. But Mamoulian insisted they were doing a love story, where dance was the love. Eugene Loring was doing choreography, but Hermes Pan was brought in to work on the numbers involving Astaire. The female lead was Cyd Charisse, though her singing was dubbed by Carole Richards. Robert Bronner did the photography, in CinemaScope.
There are three big dances. In his hotel room, Fred talks to Ninotchka about love. She says in Russia it is “chemical reaction.” Whereupon, he breaks into a six-minute version of “All of You,” in which she wears a long, belted jersey dress and in which his seductive moves draw her into an irresistible delight. The impassivity of Charisse (her normal acting state) makes a fascinating contrast with the voluptuousness of her body, and it is a fact, I think, that the ideological meeting of liberty and discipline ends up in liberty’s favor, but only in the most relaxed formalism of a pas de deux.
The second is a solo dance for Charisse in her hotel room, as she puts on the various pieces of capitalist lingerie she has secretly acquired. It is one of the most purely erotic dances in the American musical, and it is akin to an aria on sexuality.
Third is achievement, marriage, bliss: It’s Fred taking Ninotchka onto an empty film set and then leading her into “Fated to Be Mated,” a routine with some exhilarating camera movements and edits to dramatize the unison and the happiness of the two together.
Those three numbers are the spine of the film, and very supple. But there is more: Janis Paige as the cartoon version of a movie star; Astaire doing “The Ritz Roll and Rock,” which he persuaded Cole Porter to write for him; and the three commissars Jules Munshin, Joseph Buloff, and Peter Lorre doing “Siberia,” with Lorre hanging on to two chairs for support.
It was the end for Freed, for Fred and Cyd (their last musical), and for Cole Porter (his last show). All of which is a terrible letdown to this alleged celebration of America’s capacity for thinking pink and beating the Reds.
Silkwood (1983)
Silkwood may be the first movie for which director Mike Nichols worked to make an accurate sense of place and social climate vital elements in a picture. So many of his earlier films give up those things to establish a witty air of “stage” where the drama is unfolding. Thus, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? would probably work better on a more stylized set (as opposed to the attempt at a real house), and The Graduate makes a mess at anything more than a cartoon California. But in Silkwood, we feel we are out in the desolate places of Oklahoma, and in the unnoticed dark fields of the republic, where ordinary life goes on. To match that feeling of place, Silkwood is deliberately slow—as if to suggest the very gradual onset of horror in the minds of its characters.
Of course, it is based on real events, and when the film came out there was an unavoidable controversy over how accurate the script by Nora Ephron and Alice Arlen was—whether as journalism or as paranoia. That moment has passed and so now it’s easier to see this movie as a study in the way certain modern corporations reckon to mislead their own employees. The horror comes in the sheer details of radiation poisoning, and the harsh methods applied to detect it or guard against it.
But the real strength of the film is the decision to let Karen Silkwood (Meryl Streep) be a wolflike maverick, sexy, insolent, and rebellious, but casual and lazy, who finds a stiffening of her own spine as she realizes how dangerous her everyday, boring work is. This is a striking piece of acting just because it cuts itself off from so many obvious sources of sentimentality. There, too, it shows a development in Nichols, who had tended to make films about caricatures, or people separated from their own motivation—think of Mrs. Robinson in The Graduate.
So the film works because of the subtle contrasts between the hippie untidiness of the place where Streep, Cher, and Kurt Russell live and the sterilized nuclear factory, and by the way these décors build into a profound philosophical antagonism. Cher was better than anyone expected, and Russell does nothing to get in the way. But then one has to note the very good supporting cast—Craig T. Nelson, Diana Scarwid, Fred Ward, David Strathairn, Tess Harper, Ron Silver, and so on.
Of course, it’s a subject that we all prefer to forget—and clearly it owed its movie existence to the recent example of Three Mile Island. But its power comes not from the situation, but from the true portrait of a trio of rednecks suddenly having to think. Notably, it was not nominated for Best Picture—Terms of Endearment won, and Shirley MacLaine won for Best Actress over Streep. Cher’s was the popular nomination, though she lost, too. These days, Silkwood is still a gripping picture whereas Terms of Endearment is a mystery.
Since You Went Away (1944)
With its four-word title and its span of meaning, Since You Went Away was David Selznick’s most significant follow-up to Gone With the Wind, and it was also the producer’s contribution to the war effort. It was characteristic of Selznick’s favored view of life that he regarded war as a panorama of women left at home—as opposed to that of the men who went away. Of course, historically, even though they were not of the same year, the Selznick picture was eclipsed by Goldwyn’s The Best Years of Our Lives, a film that did not neglect men or the begging scenes of reunion. Indeed, for a film as ambitious as this (172 minutes, despite wartime restrictions) and with the hope of making a total statement, it is striking how dark, depressive, and forgotten Since You Went Away now looks. Is it because of the presence of Stanley Cortez and his fondness for darkness, or is it Selznick’s natural melancholy, that the film looks like a film noir in which the menace never quite materializes?
The film was taken from Margaret Buell Wilder’s book about a family of women left behind, and it inspired Selznick to do the whole screenplay himself. Alas, that’s where the enterprise breaks apart. For Selznick is fatally committed to likeable, ordinary people, and that in turn promotes so many long-drawn-out scenes of small talk. Nothing really happens—which may be true to the very domestic situation, but makes for lassitude in the film, especially when its few men are as nice and polite as Joseph Cotten and Robert Walker.
The look supplied by Cortez cries out for building neurosis and edginess in the women—not just sexual or romantic frustration, but a kind of alienation or loneliness in which the women are advancing on crack-up. The sociological truth of World War II is that it altered the position of women, their attitudes to work, love, family, and self. But those strains hardly figure in Since You Went Away because Selznick is far too devoted to the
passivity and the self-sacrifice of women.
The intelligent view might have had that when the men came home, they would find their woman changed—not even the Goldwyn film really faces that. And, as I say, the undermining is there in the imagery and in a plot structure that needs one disaster after another in the third hour if survival is to count for enough. It needs Antonioni, perhaps, someone who can show an overall mood turning sour or hollow. As it is, the film is a proof that Selznick hardly understood the world or the audience after 1939. The central trio—Claudette Colbert, Jennifer Jones, and Shirley Temple—are a lot too good to be true, or compelling. It would surely have been in accord with the facts if some loyalties had lapsed and some loves been lost. But Selznick was not grown-up enough to grasp those changes—no matter that his life was rife with them at the very same time.
The Singing Detective (1986)
I realize that The Singing Detective was not exactly a feature film, but a six-part television serial that played on the BBC in November and December 1986. Still, it seems to me such an achievement, with so great an influence, that it would be absurd to bypass it. As it is, a good deal of British material in this book was made ostensibly for the small screen. But it would also be fanciful to do a book like this without including something from Dennis Potter—so why not go for his masterpiece?
Potter wrote it, yet it’s fair to say that in the entire production that followed, he was regarded as the “author” of the piece—and not just because he and his hero had illnesses in common. This was regarded by the BBC as a “play,” and Jon Amiel, the director, took it as his task to serve the writer. So it’s the story of Philip Marlow (Michael Gambon) in bed, in hospital, with a dire skin disease that is disabling. One strand of the work is hospital life in which he is being treated (there are fates close to death, yet more torturing) by Nurse Mills (Joanne Whalley). Another strand is the kind of thriller that Marlow writes, which tracks the seduction of his wife, Nicola (Janet Suzman), by the nasty Mark Binney (Patrick Malahide). Yet a third strand is the childhood that Philip knew in the Forest of Dean, which will turn on another marital betrayal.
'Have You Seen...?' Page 127
