And just because The Snake Pit is so much more sophisticated than Spellbound, and so truly horrified at the damage that can be done, you feel the pressure of public need and education. What remains fascinating and challenging, I think, is how far the fantasy-laden air of cinema was ever the right medium for that process. Are people sitting in the dark for their enlightenment ever going to find a way out? Does the medium eventually offer to treat the sick mind or glamorize it?
Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937)
In Paris, in 1935, to receive an award, Walt Disney and his brother noted that one theater was playing a program of six Mickey Mouse shorts. Take it as a whole, said Walt, and that’s a feature film. I suspect the idea of a full-length animated story film had been nagging at him much longer—there were examples in Europe. But it was the Paris revelation that started him off. Back home, he called an evening meeting of the company and said they were going to do Snow White. He reckoned it might be done for $250,000.
Thus began the most speculative period in the history of the Disney organization: Would a public sit still for a picture that turned out to be 83 minutes? There was a huge increase in the number of hired draftsmen. There was the creation of a multiplane camera that gave an added impression of depth. People worked six months on a minute of film. Above all, the Disney people had to work out the story components: a simple story that carried over an hour; attractive central characters, easily identified with; answer the question, Is it for adults or children?; find a way to get songs in, and to draw it so well that it felt like life. Disney was sure that if audiences noticed the artificiality they would never stay in their seats.
You can’t blame Disney for coming up with such sweet, middlebrow answers for all those questions. He didn’t realize that he was redefining the nature of movie entertainment and putting animation in a box from which it still has trouble claiming an adult audience. Disney was a pioneer, of course, but a conservative—it was like finding the Americas and calling them the USA.
Of course, it’s not far-fetched to think of 1937 films still playing: It was a year that produced The Awful Truth, Stage Door, The Prisoner of Zenda, and Easy Living. Although Snow White cost close to $2 million (a million of which, Walt said, was research and development), it grossed $8 million worldwide, more than those four together. Of course, it had Technicolor—and I’m sure that that innovation was the key spur in Disney’s thinking.
The next key was getting character right—and having seven unique dwarfs was vital. As for Snow White, the animators used a young dancer, Marge Belcher, as a physical model—she would become Marge Champion—and they gave her the voice of eighteen-year-old Adriana Caselotti. We know now that the voices of animation figures are very important in the process of identification.
The one question never settled—Is it for children or adults?—resulted in equivocation, and that may be the most important thing Disney ever didn’t do. He said, Why not both? And what that ended up with—I think—was something deeply intuitive of the movies: adults who responded like kids.
The Academy was bewildered. No Best Picture nomination; a nomination for the score; no song nominated; but one Oscar and seven miniatures for the breakthrough.
Some Came Running (1959)
Nineteen fifty-eight was the year of Gigi. It won the Oscar for Best Picture. It was the one time that Vincente Minnelli won for Best Director. It got nine nominations and nine Oscars, and we are supposed to curl up like contented spaniels when we hear it. It makes me sick. I despise its prettified view of Paris. I find the Lerner and Loewe score grating. Leslie Caron has always been a mystery to me in films. And Maurice Chevalier delights himself more than he ever will me. The only thing I like in the film is Hermione Gingold, whose voice in “I Remember It Well” is the single thing in this fluff and organdy that might have passed the inspection of Colette. If you love Colette, Gigi is ghastly. If you don’t love Colette, put this book aside.
Which is an introduction to my tribute to Some Came Running, where the same Minnelli was able to put aside “the musical” (his alleged forte) and explore the thing for which his talents were best suited: the psychological melodrama. In this case, it is a novel by James Jones, turned into a script by John Patrick and Arthur Sheekman. This is not a big story, despite the superb use of CinemaScope and décor to explore character and situation—this was an area latent in Minnelli, and so often frustrated by the garish codes of the musical. It’s a story about small-town Midwest America (Indiana), of compromise, failure, and crushed hopes. In so many ways it’s so much more useful or instructive a film than Gigi.
Frank Sinatra is a would-be writer come home from the Korean War, and this is one of his most heartfelt and modest performances—not least because he had the sense to trust the power of his supporting cast and resist any urge to intimidate them. So Sinatra is one in a group that includes Shirley MacLaine (never better or quieter), Dean Martin (in that emerging realization that he was an actor), Martha Hyer, and Arthur Kennedy, who never gave a performance that didn’t deserve attention and master classes.
Vincente Minnelli was a great director, and I believe he was at his best when least distracted by those famous elements of design and decoration. Throughout his career, he pursued dramas, but few had such good material as this one, let alone the right cast. Some were painfully preachy, like The Cobweb and Tea and Sympathy. Others got overlooked simply because Minnelli was supposed to be a musicals man. But in maybe his best musical—Meet Me in St. Louis—he had also shown a respect for character and ordinary settings that flowers in Some Came Running.
So when people see Sinatra, Martin, and MacLaine together, they easily think “Rat Pack” and find this film disappointing. Try it again, and long after the sugar conceits of Gigi have dissolved, you will find that Some Came Running is about life. But Minnelli was a modest man, endlessly loyal to a studio that thought it knew what was best for him.
Some Like It Hot (1959)
First things first: There was a precedent—Billy Wilder remembered a silent German film, Fanfares of Love, in which two guy musicians had joined an all-girl band. I see no reason not to esteem the essential dirty mind of Wilder in guessing that this was going to be fruitful one day. After all, in the basic voyeuristic trick of the movies, guys in the dark watching girls in the light—the girls don’t know the guys are there. They treat them like sisters.
Whereupon Wilder and I. A. L. Diamond got to work with the added hook that this would be a couple of guys fleeing from the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre—they saw it! So the film becomes a sex comedy, while it is also an opportunity for parody of the gangster film. To Wilder, parody was next to character assassination. This was the man who had cast Erich von Stroheim as Gloria Swanson’s director. So George Raft would play a version of himself. Edward G. Robinson’s son would toss a coin under Raft’s nose, and anything else anyone could think of would be crammed in, with the ultimate threat being that the gangsters convening in Florida (at the Coronado Hotel in San Diego, in fact) might recognize Joe and Jerry, thus demanding their masquerade as Josephine and Daphne.
I think it’s clear that eyebrows were raised over the female impersonation and how to do it. Was it possible, in 1959, to get two name actors to be knockout dames? Remember, too, that Frank Sinatra was the first thought for Daphne. Jack Lemmon and Tony Curtis have made it clear over the years that doing the film was not a piece of cake. They were hours in makeup. They had to wear steel jock straps. They were teased unmercifully—not least by Wilder. And they had to wait and repeat everything until Marilyn got a decent take. Jack and Tony were by instinct quick studies. Once they had their take on the “girls,” they knew what they were doing. And they cover a range: Josephine is pretty spiffy in a Kay Francis sort of way, but Daphne is out of English pantomime. In other words, you’d have to be as dumb as Marilyn to believe she’s a girl. Anyway, it wasn’t quite Sinatra’s thing—and Frank under makeup is not a pretty thought. (Note: Wilder had had the dream long
enough to think of Danny Kaye and Bob Hope—and they could have been hot.)
In great personal distress, Marilyn barely got away with it. Mitzi Gaynor was standing by—but with Mitzi Gaynor Some Like It Hot could have gone home. Marilyn is perfect because she doesn’t get the masquerade—what that says about Wilder’s esteem for her is not pretty either, but Billy Wilder was not a nice guy.
I suspect, literally, that no one knew the film was a gay breakthrough. If they had guessed, they would have taken fright. But here is another film from the late fifties that blows up every convention it can see and discloses miracles in the explosion. Everybody’s perfect.
Something Wild (1986)
One of the functions of the movies has always been to take a representative figure from the middle of the middle class, the nerdy, safety-first brigade that makes up the huge majority of humanity, of us, and expose him to risk—great danger, or great delight. Thus the film says, Would you dare to do this—are you brave enough for something wild? It is an offer that turns upon the secret longing in the safe and the secure to be outlaws, to walk into the dark or the unknown, or to get to be with Melanie Griffith in her prime without a word of explanation or “sensible” preliminary getting-to-know-her first. In other words, will you jump in the deep end without knowing how deep it is, whether you can swim and whatever the actuarial odds on rescue? To be brief about it, film provides a chance to gamble with danger.
In so many cases, the gamble and its ordeal are heightened—they come as Horror, or a step beyond the abyss. But in Something Wild, the challenge is altogether human, humane, and deeply interesting. Jeff Daniels is our nerd—a nice guy named Charlie, decent but weak and fearful, conventional, yet a poet of action in his own shower. And then life becomes the shower. In the form of a “Lulu” (the name is emblematic and onomatopeic in cultural history), looking a little like Louise Brooks, and offering her Charlie not just “fun,” but raptures that are exactly aligned with his repressed dreams. In other words, this Lulu is the phenomenon that Charlie has dreamed of but dreaded most of his life. And the film sinks in its big juicy hook for no better reason than that Melanie is intensely desirable and utterly direct—me, try me. What she offers is the obliteration of common sense—and in her clear urge to rape the camera, if necessary, she is an irresistible impulse.
But the real, inner cunning of this film—of the script by E. Max Frye, and Jonathan Demme’s direction—is that as the runaway couple go into the hinterland (New Jersey and Pennsylvania), so Melanie slips back from Lulu to Audrey, sans wig, a more real, crushed woman with a very nasty menace in her life (in the form of Ray Liotta). And that’s when Charlie has to learn what courage is really made of.
So, yes, there is a nice, cozy American moral (and morale) at the core of it all, and Charlie and Audrey will end up as the loves of their life, if that’s what you want to believe. They will be happy together, and I’m not convinced that even the resources of Melanie can prevent a life so settled it may harden into rock, habit, and premature death. But Demme is plainly a kind man, not quite ready to grasp the surreal flame and risk being burned. Suppose Melanie remains wanton, depraved, the angel of death? Suppose Charlie’s wild weekend restores him to a preset-tied family situation? Then Something Wild comes close to real horror—the idea that every mundane life in America could go mad.
As they say, it’s a matter of taste. But even if you need to forgive the tidy ending here, there’s no doubt about it: Something Wild is like an injection of some very powerful drug. You lose control, and inhabit the paradise of powerlessness. That’s the movies. (And Margaret Colin is super.)
The Son of the Sheik (1926)
He was only thirty-one when he died. Filming The Son of the Sheik in the Yuma desert a few months earlier, he had complained of fatigue and a pain in his side. He was exhausted by his own success—he had made fourteen major films in the years since The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (1921). To this day, it is a matter of controversy how far he knew to look after himself, or let himself be pushed around by more powerful people. There were times when he looked older than his actual age. And even if he hadn’t yet asked himself this question, the issue hovered—how was Valentino going to say lines like “I may not be the first victim, but by Allah I’ll be the one you remember!” as he closed in on some patently Caucasian beauty posing as an Arab slave girl? If ever any great star faced the ridicule of being heard, it was Valentino, not John Gilbert—and not just because the voice might be high, sleepy, or too accented, but because the ethos of his lines and his screen character were so perilously archaic.
It was presumably because of that that Frances Marion had done a script for The Son of the Sheik that was clearly a parody of the original (made in 1921), even though it was adapted from a sequel novel by Edith Maude Hull. It was only when Paramount explained that Vilma Banky (a Rudy favorite) had been hired that a new script had to be written. This included the old sheik, Ahmed Ben Hassan, who had won Lady Diana five years earlier, and his son—in fact, Marion’s first idea was for twin sons, but Valentino said he’d prefer to double up as father and son.
The studio got George Fitzmaurice to direct—for several years he was the man Valentino wanted. George Barnes did the photography. William Cameron Menzies was the art director and Hal Kern the editor. In the story, the father is a much older man, and Rudy apparently took delight in adding lines to his face and gray to his hair. But the son is our boy again, captured and tortured in one flagrantly masochistic sequence—he is strung up and whipped—and then the silent rapist in a classic scene that involves him and Yasmin (Banky) in a tent, with the ritual stripping of belt and knife and a lurid view of her eyes as he closes in. Fitzmaurice brings in the wind as a potent erotic force, and there is no denying the suggestiveness of the scene. But silence keeps it at a distance where there is no room for nuance or hint. There’s no doubt it worked for female audiences, but the whole thing is on the brink of embarrassment. Four years later, eroticism had moved forward light-years to find the glances and the cryptic words of Dietrich and Cooper in Morocco.
But by the time The Son of the Sheik was in general release, the god was dead. On August 15, 1926, he was rushed to hospital with a ruptured appendix. On August 23 he died. A hundred thousand came to his lying in state at the funeral parlor. The new picture did extra good business, and it was easier at last to see that a curiosity had passed. He died in debt, but the income from the movies easily covered that up. And so it is that he is “known” still, if not always seen, the great lover and the secret pouf. He picked his moment.
Sophie’s Choice (1982)
William Styron died this week (November 2006), and I suspect that many people were reminded of that long passage in the film of his Sophie’s Choice in which Meryl Streep’s white lace face presides over a dark background as she describes the occasion of her choice. How else would you film that moment? With Sophie in “real life,” surrounded by mindless color and objects? Or as a voice-over? I ask these questions because I think something happened with the movie that was very far from the hopes of Styron, his careful director, Alan J. Pakula, or even the admirable Ms. Streep. The recollection of that moment at Auschwitz became a “scene,” something enacted, something carefully considered, discussed, and played out—whereas, maybe, in life it could only be blurted out. I think what I am asking is whether a situation like the choice, in novel and movie, can be decently rendered in fiction without becoming an event, a great aria and a distancing of the reality in which our admiration of Ms. Streep (utterly deserved) confuses our response to Sophie Zawistowska.
I am not suggesting that things like the choice—and worse—did not occur. But I am not sure they can, or should be, made orderly, let alone beautiful—and the passage I have described is beautiful. There is a part of me—the Godardian part, perhaps—that would say simply have Ms. Streep pick up the text and read it in as flat a way as possible. The acting might be less—the reality might be more pointed.
It
is something to think about in the course of a very moving picture, the story of a young writer, Stingo (Peter MacNicol), who meets a haunting couple, Sophie and Nathan Landau (Kevin Kline), lovers yet warring partners. Stingo comes to love them both, and as he does so the full story emerges—Sophie’s trauma and Nathan’s schizophrenic illness. Pakula wrote and directed this and produced it with Keith Barish, and it is an exemplary adaptation of a rather untidy novel. The Auschwitz scenes are extraordinary, yet they take us back to the problem discussed above that I think Nathan’s illness may be the most frightening thing in the film. Why? Because it is more present, or more unsettled, I suppose. Film is less kind to the facts of the past. It likes to convert them into nostalgia but it tends to suggest that the facts do not matter because they are not now.
Some people say this is Pakula at his least effective—but it is foolish to ignore the extra ambition here. And just because Streep is “great” is no reason to blame her for being an actress. It could be said that Streep’s intelligence already affords the chance for the unbearable to become manageable. Néstor Almendros shot the film wonderfully. George Jenkins did outstanding work on production design. And if it is seen rather seldom these days, it is not because anyone has forgotten what it is about or what it means. It stays in the culture, and it is that rarity: an American response to European experience.
Streep won the Oscar. That the film was not even nominated as Best Picture or for Best Director was not just monstrous, it was absurd. But I think too many people were too uneasy.
The Sopranos (1999–2007)
The first thing to be said is, Don’t exaggerate your own fear of movies that run four hours, six, twelve, or twenty-four. After all, The Sopranos was eighty-six hours of film or story or screen time, drawn out over seven seasons and eight years, and at the end enough of us were watching and sliding off the sofa with screen-nearness-itis, desperate to see the ending first. And then, when blackness took over, there was a week nearly in which most talk was related to what that shutout had meant.
'Have You Seen...?' Page 129
