It was Beatty’s screen debut, and he is edgy, smouldering, and smart, but truly this was Natalie Wood’s vehicle, and she is absorbing as the girl who goes mad from not having sex. She was nominated for an Oscar and lost to Sophia Loren in Two Women. She was never again as good, or as central to a movie. Of course, she and Beatty very soon were having a good deal of sex, and Wood was not a slow starter. But in many actors there is a superb yearning for sexual glory (or splendor) no matter how many times they have it. In all those senses, this was a very happy teaming and one that Kazan surely understood.
There are several very fine supporting performances, not least Barbara Loden as Beatty’s sister—she would become Kazan’s wife, so the director could score, too; Pat Hingle as his father; and a radiant but nervy Zohra Lampert as his wife. The cast also includes Gary Lockwood, Sandy Dennis, Lynn Loring, John McGovern (as the shrink), Phyllis Diller as Texas Guinan, and William Inge himself as the clergyman.
The Spy Who Came In from the Cold (1965)
Just a few years after the great splash of James Bond on the screen, here is an attempt to argue that international espionage is a grievous and hurtful business—one better served by the eternally wounded look of Richard Burton than by the cocksure smirk of Sean Connery. It’s worth noting that John le Carré’s novel—pessimistic in every way—was faithfully served by the screenplay of Paul Dehn and Guy Trosper. Yet Dehn had already been one of the screenwriters on Goldfinger.
It’s a story of intrigue and intricate double cross, and of an attempt to discredit a Communist spy that goes wrong. When that burden is finally delivered it falls not just on Burton (one of the guiltiest of actors), but on Claire Bloom as his none-too-bright mistress. There is a set-piece scene of an investigative tribunal in Berlin (with Beatrix Lehmann as its head) in which the crushed anguish in Bloom and Burton (lovers in life) is very touching and in which the Le Carré message—of real lives being bandied about in espionage schemes—is fully delivered.
In many other cases, the cinema has not been able to resist a kind of humor in the espionage situation—of agile minds turning themselves inside out to do the double double cross first. Even in The Russia House, a touching love story, the scenes at the various intelligence headquarters are played in part for satire. But here, as in the later television adaptation of the George Smiley series, lives are broken and the girl is calmly shot in the rigged escape sequence.
Martin Ritt is not really the director one would have picked for this game of poker. Ritt liked to believe in trust and fellowship, and here the film really requires a level of mistrust that is closer to the gaze of Alan J. Pakula. So Ritt deserves high praise. He does not let the venture down, even if he might be accused of missing some of the English nuancing in the talk. A lot of help comes from the sunless black-and-white photography of Ossie Morris, culminating in a harsh Berlin wasteland where scathing searchlights make their tours of duty.
Burton and Bloom are very good as sacrificial victims, but the cast is richly endowed with supporting players: Oskar Werner is a Communist official whose arrogance is his undoing; Peter van Eyck uses his vulcanized baby face to excellent effect; and the shabby plausibility of British intelligence includes Michael Hordern, Bernard Lee, Robert Hardy, Rupert Davies, and an icy Cyril Cusack as Control. In the end, there’s something clammy or narrowly depressive about this film, but still it seems an accurate portrait of the real compromises and nastiness in such work. It’s a film that could encourage no one to enter that tricky service, and it offers a gallery of bleak cynics and broken people enough to make 007 curl up and die.
Burton was nominated for the Best Actor Oscar, but of course, the look of mortification on his face was specially sharpened by his experience of nomination and rejection.
Stagecoach (1939)
John Ford had not made a Western since 1926—the genre had fallen away as a source of A pictures in the 1930s. But it was restored to dignity by Ford’s Stagecoach, which crams everyone and every last little thing in, epic adventure and social commentary, including public transport running across Monument Valley. In the real America, that has not come to pass yet, though tour buses come and go and the guides have to explain that the Apaches from Stagecoach are actually Navajo.
Someone drew Ford’s attention to a magazine story, “Stage to Lordsburg,” by Ernest Haycox (Lordsburg is in southern Arizona). No one is sure when Ford was reminded of Guy de Maupassant’s story “Boule de Suif,” in which a whore sleeps with a Prussian officer to ensure the safety of other travelers. But Ford had a notion of making the first Technicolor Western (working with Merian C. Cooper). Then there was a threat that Selznick might produce it. All of these things fell through, but Ford ended up with a Dudley Nichols script that he loved, and an arrangement to make it for Walter Wanger Productions.
They shot some of it in Monument Valley (being sold on the place by pictures sent from the Goulding family, who would build a lodge there), but the big Indian chase scenes were done on a dry lake bed in the Mojave (again, not a site for regular transport routes). That is where Yakima Canutt did his stunts, jumping from the coach to the line of horses; and then, as an Indian, falling from a lead horse and being dragged all the way under the coach on the ground. The chase scenes are very effective if a little stupid on the part of the Apache—they chase until they are shot, without another strategy.
The real function of the film for Ford was to present a cross-section of a hypocritical society that seems oblivious to the space, the wildness, and the new country. These are people secure in their greed and their bigotry. Thus, the Ringo Kid (John Wayne), the outlaw who seeks redemption, is not just the most natural American, but the one whose eye, skills, and character have become most attuned to the open spaces. He is a proper hero, and the film delights in the hope that he and Dallas, the hooker, may be “saved from the blessings of civilization.”
Ford took some relish in saying it was a film about a coachload of rascals, but there’s a clear, if not underlined, hierarchy of respect: he likes Ringo and Dallas (Claire Trevor); he admires the drunken Doc Boone (Thomas Mitchell); he feels nostalgia for the cavalry wife (Louise Platt), who happens to be very pregnant, and the Southern gent gambler (John Carradine). But the businessmen are despised—Donald Meek, Berton Churchill—while there’s a knowing fondness for the pros, the sheriff (George Bancroft) and the driver (Andy Devine).
Ford needled Wayne from start to finish (the star was also the lowest-paid lead on the movie), but the picture changed the actor’s status. Stagecoach did good business and it was nominated for Best Picture. Thomas Mitchell won an Oscar as Supporting Actor. Indeed, everyone is a supporting player, embalmed in a marinade of cliché.
Stage Door (1937)
As James Harvey puts it (his five pages on Stage Door in Romantic Comedy in Hollywood are bankable), the film “is like going to wisecrack heaven.” It’s one of those perfect American films where as little happens as possible but people (i.e., female people, here) simply exist and talk and give off a beguiling, dense air of gloomy pleasure. All the girls who live at the Footlights Club and who burn to get into theater complain about the place. Yet that’s all they want to do. It’s only when Terry Randall Sims (Katharine Hepburn) comes in sight and starts rhapsodizing over the dump that you realize how gauche she is. She’s like a John Ford woman set down in a Howard Hawks dormitory.
It was a play by George S. Kaufman and Edna Ferber that opened in 1936, with Margaret Sullavan as Terry. Kaufman believed the movie was superior because it had less romantic action with men, and a stronger sense of the wisecracking sisterhood. Above all, the movie is the clash between Hepburn, in that airy loftiness the audience was beginning to hate, and Ginger Rogers, as the smartest tongue of the crowd and the stinging cold water on every dumb gesture toward altruism or high sentiment that Terry can muster. That Ginger had been in sight since at least 42nd Street, but here she is one of the funniest women in American film, as edgy and sneering as Bogart—they might have b
een OK together. It’s a useful reminder that that utterly meek, following girl in Fred Astaire’s arms could give a lot better than she got.
The movie had quite a few changes for the good as it was written by Morrie Ryskind and Anthony Veiller (they got an Oscar nod), and then the whole thing was given to Gregory La Cava. Which is a way of saying that La Cava probably deserves to be numbered with the most proficient of American directors. The wiser and more wisecracking La Cava’s material became, the better he was as a director. He did what little was needed to fuel the rivalry (aka dislike) between Hepburn and Rogers, and he was a master of sustained group compositions in which gossip, a piece of clothing, or the idea of a good dinner can bring female minds alive. Yes, of course, the talk is tip-top, but the ability to let talk fly by and seem like life is something that only a few could pull off.
And enough people understood the fabulous trick: Stage Door was nominated for Best Picture and La Cava got a nod for himself. So did Andrea Leeds, who plays probably the sappiest part in the outfit. Never mind, with Rogers and Hepburn doing Flynn and Rathbone while sitting down, this is pure entertainment and probably as fine a show of feminist glory as you’ll find. Also with Adolphe Menjou, Gail Patrick (a La Cava favorite), Constance Collier, Lucille Ball (whatever happened to her?), Eve Arden (magnificent), Ann Miller, Ralph Forbes, Franklin Pangborn, and Jack Carson.
Stalker (1979)
In the late 1970s, though it was rusty, porous, and dilapidated in so many places, the Iron Curtain still stood, so it was possible to take Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker as an immense, obscure meditation on strictures on freedom. Some said the film was so difficult to elucidate so that it would exhaust the patience of censors. But today, the Curtain is folded away for future use and one is left to recognize how far Stalker—despite its enormous metaphorical reach—simply reflects the appearance of decay, of chaos, of seepage, a universal malaise. Indeed, the rising moisture in Tarkovsky’s work could even be the prospect of some flood set off by global warming. It is hardly the case that this situation, or its characters, are merely Russian, even if Tarkovsky the artist takes us back to the traditions of Dostoyevsky, and the great poets of Russian art, from Dovzhenko to Andrei Rublev.
His world is one of desolation, ruin, and breakdown. Nearly all structures are destroyed, abandoned, and repossessed. Thus, “home” has become a very unreliable concept. It is said that somewhere in the center of the world, a great meteor has landed and left a “Zone” which is guarded by police. Yet no one really knows why, or what the Zone holds.
The action of this very gradual, ruminative, 161-minute film is that of the Stalker (Aleksandr Kajdanovsky) taking two men, a Writer (Anatoli Solonitsin) and a Professor (Nikolai Grinko), toward the Zone. They argue and dispute over the right way there, over what may be there, and whether it is worth going. You can argue that the quest is as extensive and muddled as life itself, beset by the everyday doubts and neuroses of anyone who has ever sought to search for anything. As they reach the Room, or what may be the Room, the Professor says he has a bomb to destroy it. The Writer declines to enter the Room, as if afraid of what it will reveal about his inner desires. The Stalker wonders if anyone else can ever share his faith in the Room.
So what seemed in 1979 like a model of totalitarianism in decline may now be seen as liberty in tatters. Tarkovsky had reached a rare eminence at his death in 1986—he was only fifty-four and his intense spirituality, his immersion in beauty, and his tendency toward a lack of humor had raised him to a pinnacle of poetic or noncommercial cinema. It still remains to be seen where he will stand as film grows older. But he is a strange mixture of Eisenstein and Bergman (and very conscious of those twin traditions). His great films are as absorbing as any made—and I use that word advisedly—in that the feeling of all things moving slowly toward liquid is as powerful as it is creepy. It may be that the Room—if you ever get there—is an infinite, if dank, enclosure in which an uncertain number of strangers are watching the works of Andrei Tarkovsky. Equally, it may be that as malfunction of one kind or another covers the world, we may have a hard time distinguishing the Room, the Zone, and the local multiplex. For myself, I am in awe of the power—yet I have an itch to see Bob Hope playing the Stalker.
A Star Is Born (1937)
The legend is that A Star Is Born was made by a man, David O. Selznick, who so loved Hollywood, or who was so captivated by its romance, that just a few years after a movie full of warnings and unexpectedly dark views of lasting fame in pictures, he virtually reenacted its story by discovering a star of his own—he renamed Phyllis Isley Jennifer Jones, just as this movie takes Esther Blodgett and makes her Vicki Lester—and then slowly succumbed under the great burden of his “mistake.” For every star turned on, another has to be turned off.
Of course, A Star Is Born was heavily indebted to Selznick’s earlier What Price Hollywood?, where Constance Bennett was the discovery, and it was a collecting place for many rueful anecdotes about Hollywood history (its generosity and its cruelty).
The screenplay was credited to Dorothy Parker, Alan Campbell, and Robert Carson, from a story by Carson and William Wellman, but when Wellman got his Oscar for the story he admitted that really Selznick deserved his name on the prize. Furthermore, we know that such apprentices as Ring Lardner, Jr., and Budd Schulberg had a hand in it here and there. Howard Greene handled the Technicolor photography, and to this day footage from the movie is used as “documentary” material on Hollywood in its golden age. Lyle Wheeler did the art direction. Max Steiner wrote the music. And William Wellman brought energy and fatalism to the directing.
So Esther (Janet Gaynor), from the sticks, comes to town, longing to be in pictures. And she rescues a falling star, Norman Maine (Fredric March), from undue embarrassment when he is drunk. In turn, Maine takes her up, as discovery and then as love-mate. They marry, thus infuriating the studio publicist, Matt Libby (Lionel Stander), but as “Vicki” rises so Norman sinks deeper into alcohol. The benign studio boss, Oliver Niles (Adolphe Menjou—Oliver was the O. in Selznick’s name), cannot save Norman. He walks off into the Pacific, like Captain Oates walking into the snow in 1912.
When the film was made, Gaynor was thirty-one and March forty—so he still seems in his prime, while she feels a bit too mature to be the ingenue. And Hollywood has not yet cast the film as its script requires: with a real newcomer. Gaynor is pretty, plucky, and very adept at the teary stuff, but really Maine is the great part and March has several very powerful scenes, not least those in the sanatorium where he seems to have seen his own future all too clearly. Stander is excellent as Libby, and this was one of the first times the key studio role of publicist had been properly identified. Menjou is smooth and not very believable. The cast also includes May Robson, Andy Devine, Edgar Kennedy, and Owen Moore. It was nominated for Best Picture and there were further Oscar nominations for Wellman, Gaynor, and March. Of course, “Vicki” wins an Oscar in the picture and announces herself as “Mrs. Norman Maine.”
A Star Is Born (1954)
Long before the loving attempt at restoration made by Ron Haver, A Star Is Born was a curiously fragmented work—or something that didn’t really fit its own title. This is not all bad, for there is a magical warmth between Judy Garland and James Mason in that he was a characteristic professional, happy to do anything to help her, while she will always be one of Hollywood’s great self-inflicted crack-ups. So the effort to present “Vicki Lester” as an ingenue, as a star who might be born, is close to absurd. It’s not just that Garland was thirty-two when the film was made. It’s more that she looks overweight much of the time, puffy and rather used. This is patently someone at the end of a seventeen-year career that swallowed her childhood and exhausted many of us. It’s not just what the public knew—it’s what we see and feel. This is to say nothing of the imperfections of WarnerColor and the fact that cameraman Sam Leavitt was a strange choice for a film that needed glamour.
This labor of love was produced by Sid L
uft, who was Garland’s husband at the time—but this choice of material hardly gives one confidence in Luft’s judgment. On the other hand, I wonder if the kindness of George Cukor and his steady encouragement of the insecure was ever better used. Cukor has a host of great performances to his credit, but in this case Garland and Mason are clinging to the wreck of a film, and Mason—I think—is enchanting (he lost the Oscar to Marlon Brando in On the Waterfront, which is not really a fair contest).
Even more problematic is the silly story, the reluctance to update it since the 1937 version or to admit the reality in Garland’s presence. Moss Hart’s screenplay is faithful to the original (a work of many hands, but credited to Dorothy Parker, Alan Campbell, and Robert Carson). This is a sappy view of Hollywood both in its view of lucky starlets and in its load of studio cruelty—all of which comes from Jack Carson’s nasty publicist, Matt Libby, and none from studio boss, Oliver Niles (Charles Bickford). In 1954, four years after Sunset Blvd., surely we deserved a studio setup where the publicist did what the boss ordered.
'Have You Seen...?' Page 131
