Sunday, Bloody Sunday isn’t a great film, but it’s a lot better than Schlesinger’s more “daring” films (like Darling, which gets worse with time). And just as I give a lot of credit to the script, so I think the supporting players really assemble the air of crowded, untidy loneliness that is most intriguing and disconcerting—certainly far more than the dilemma of the central trio: Peggy Ashcroft, Maurice Denham, Vivian Pickles, Frank Windsor, Thomas Baptiste, Tony Britton, Harold Goldblatt, Hannah Norbert, Richard Pearson, June Brown, Caroline Blakiston, Bessie Love, and Jon Finch. The picture was photographed by Billy Williams, and Ron Geesin’s score also makes clever use of material from Così fan Tutte. Luciana Arrighi did production design and Jocelyn Rickards the costumes on a film where décor means much more than usual.
Glenda Jackson is ideally cast—even if that’s a way of wondering how such a mysterious movie career ever got off the ground. Peter Finch is touching and interesting. Whereas I cannot even recall what Murray Head looked like.
A Sunday in the Country (1984)
It’s intriguing, I think, that Bertrand Tavernier thought to make A Sunday in the Country when he was only forty-three. After all, there is so much pressure in the film business to behave younger than one’s actual age. So many stories seem to depend on their happening to kids. The conspiracy grows steadily: that “Life” (the big thing) is more eagerly felt and perceived by young people—or at least the age that has enough purchasing power to be lusted after by advertisers. Film directors quite often collect young wives (youth being what it is, they have to take on that challenge on a serial basis), and so they also like to find stories about young people.
So it says a lot for Tavernier’s own breadth of vision—his curiosity, perhaps—that his most striking film may be the wondering on the part of a forty-year-old about the life of an artist nearly twice his age. Monsieur Ladmiral (Louis Ducreux) lives in the country, though within reach of the Paris train. He has a good house and garden and a housekeeper, and since he is a painter—rather in the Renoir school—we gather that these attributes are his subjects, too. The film focuses on one Sunday afternoon, but the Pierre Bost novel from which it is derived is called Monsieur Ladmiral Va Bientôt Mourir. And although neither the man nor the movie is morbid, that sense of what is coming is there in the warm-colored air he enjoys.
It is 1912, a tragic summer of happiness in France or anywhere else in Europe. For we cannot help but know some of the ways in which the peace and the stable, apparently, contented society is going to come apart. A man may die reasonably happy—but only if he spares himself the wondering of all the ways in which his children may be destroyed. And that future pregnancy was available, I suspect, in Tavernier’s sensibility even before such films as Life and Nothing But (in which Philippe Noiret is a clerical military officer trying to keep track of the dead from the First World War) and Safe Conduct, in which the French countryside is the setting for Resistance violence.
What I’m trying to say is that Tavernier brings the mood of a novelist and a painter to film, as well as the historical sense of a man who is concerned to trace what has happened to France. A Sunday in the Country seems at first like a piece of nostalgia: the old man, his son and grandchildren, and even Irène (Sabine Azéma), his favorite perhaps, who does not visit often enough. His pictures are studies of the domestic life, yet the same subject nags at him and worries him. He feels its defects just as he suspects he may not be a great painter—I mean the kind of painter called great in history books.
Tavernier wrote this script with Pierre Bost and his then wife, Colo Tavernier. Bruno de Keyzer shot it, and Tavernier had the good sense to take his music from Fauré (who died in 1924). And it stands as a film about the artist, trying hard to be happy, and to be old graciously, but disturbed by the certainty that history has its own will. It is a sign of courage in any artist to look at old age—you get it in Welles, in Rembrandt, and Dickens, among others—but it shapes everything.
Sunrise (1927)
For years now, there has been such justified enthusiasm for the place of Sunrise in history that we may have begun to overlook what a very strange film it is. So, on the one hand, it is marvelous to see the streams of German and American cinema flooding together, and that, I suspect, was the overpowering reason why at the first Academy Awards Sunrise got an Oscar as the “most unique and artistic production,” no matter that Best Picture went to Wings. That “classy” Oscar has never been given again, though one can argue that the Academy is still beset by wanting both kinds of cake. But then, you have to say that the German-American tension is palpable in our confusion over where this story is happening. The titles talk of every place and no place. But the film has a very strong sense of City and Country, and I have to point out the oddity of a film where the country girl spends so much time in the city and the woman from the city mopes her life away in rural torture (until nearly the last shot).
So here are the man (George O’Brien) and his wife (Janet Gaynor) living in the country. But he is deeply tempted by the woman from the city (Margaret Livingston), and he is on the point of murdering his wife when his conscience strikes. So instead of losing her in the lake he takes the wife to the city, and they have a grand time—let me add that I think their fun far exceeds that of the audience. When Murnau decides to be happy and funny, an audience can quickly lose interest. Nevertheless, all thought of his murderous attitude has left by the time they come home. But then there is a storm on the lake and the wife is lost. Irony of ironies? The woman from the country can’t be sure what is happening—until the husband sees her and tries to kill her (one subtext not much discussed is his violence and his clear urge to kill someone).
The story (“a song of two humans”) seems to me hokey and very “silent pictures.” I know, one is supposed not to care or notice—look instead at the ravishing sense of the city (way ahead of anything of that time) and the superb traveling train shot into the city. I love it. But once I’m looking I can’t help but notice the endless girlishness of Janet Gaynor and the fake spirituality ladled over a dark story.
I think the film was a stepping-stone, and Murnau was dead before he could touch ground. The art direction—by Rochus Gliese, Gordon Wiles, Edgar G. Ulmer, and Alfred Metscher—is phenomenal, and from a far more sophisticated film. The lighting (Charles Rosher and Karl Struss) and the camera movement are glorious. There are entire sequences here that see the medium altering. But the song of the humans is much harder to take and it stays obstinately in place. It’s the scenario that is the problem: by Carl Mayer from a novel by Hermann Sudermann. What Sunrise needs is a grasp of character as subtle as the mise-en-scène. That would not come for years yet, and you can argue that it came in France and Japan more than in America. But don’t doubt the impact of Sunrise on Hollywood—these are the first modern camera movements, carrying us toward desire.
Sunset Blvd. (1950)
People often tell themselves that Sunset Blvd. (the actual title) is a film noir, so let’s say up-front that it’s also a romance in which two broken dreamers get their heart’s desires—that’s one big reason why it made a musical. How so? Well, Norma Desmond has her comeback, on her own terms, and even if Norma is a famous crazy, Gloria Swanson delivered the pathos of a woman who is only in her early fifties. That ponderous screenplay she has labored on falls aside with one ecstatic traveling shot as she moves like a snake longing to wrap itself around the charmer’s flute. She is ready for her close-up and once more having an affair with a camera. She is last seen, advancing, insinuating herself upon Confidential magazine and the entire library of scandalous celebrity—it is high time for a sequel, The Trial of Norma Desmond (of course, she gets off).
That interpretation may be sardonic, but it’s obvious, too. The vindication of Joe Gillis is a little more oblique, but it’s so much more lasting and interesting. For here is a ruined screenwriter: He needs Nancy Olson to rub his twisted nose in the mess of his idealistic youth. So all he wants now is a job a
nd a killing. He gets both. The man who can’t dream up a viable story line becomes the best pitch he’ll ever hear. He is the story, and it is Billy Wilder’s sour valedictory to let the ghost of Gillis tell the story, facedown in the gelid swimming pool, exactly the Hollywood reward that Joe gets only in his dreams. And so this breathtaking portrait of Hollywood failure is wrapped up in rueful, ruined success.
Famously, Louis B. Mayer scolded Wilder for biting the hand that had fed him. But the Oscars shunned the picture, and it was not originally a great popular hit, even if it caused a stir. For 1950, it was an audacious satire, and so much tougher than The Bad and the Beautiful, where the system and the showbiz optimism are left intact. But in Sunset Blvd., there is enough cruelty and madness for everyone. Joe Gillis is not to be saved from doom—he loses his car, but his soul went earlier. And Max von Mayerling represents the role of the bereft, humiliated onlooker (and the kindest person left in this world). The sore thumbs are Nancy Olson and Jack Webb, dismissed as perfunctory nice guys and effective nonstarters in the Hollywood jungle.
Just how close this all comes to queasiness is spelled out in the old reminder that Montgomery Clift could have been “our” Joe Gillis. Clift’s fear made Holden a star, but it saved the project. The romantic in Clift could hardly have avoided the horror of real sex between Joe and Norma—and there we are into a psycho horror film waiting for Robert Aldrich or something close to nightmare. It is Wilder’s virtue that he keeps the picture comic—and that’s why it’s less a wounded noir than the first vision of a world in which all feeling waits to be ridiculed. So it’s a hint of Some Like It Hot, and a first sense of how “story” and its variants have smothered real life.
Sweeney Todd (2007)
It’s all very well for the ghost of Benjamin Barker to return from imprisonment in the colonies with a flash of white in his dark hair and the light of vengeance to illumine his ruined life. Still, even the great fans of Sweeney Todd (and I am one of them) have to gulp when his need for revenge and his right to it turn into the wanton throat-cutting of innocents (and women and children are spared only because they have less need to shave). No one is innocent in this world? Is that what the play is saying? Why then does it have at least three characters—with lovely, plaintive songs to sing—who are innocent or unnoticed? In the show itself, that awkward transition is masked by a comic song, “A Little Priest,” in which Todd and Mrs. Lovett play cooing word games over the menu description of their latest pies. It is a funny song, normally done with dainty, macabre malice on the stage, but it knows that it’s pulling a fast one on us, too. And what if the doing of that song isn’t quite as sinister-comic as a tango for lame lovers? What if the voices are sublime—and quicklime?
Johnny Depp sings like… well, like Jack Sparrow, I fear: offhand, casual, apologetic. These can be endearing qualities in life but they are not the building blocks of Sweeney, much less the stirring grandeur of “Me, a Star” that fills the “Ballad of Sweeney Todd.” (And so that great opening—as full of tragedy as bravado—has been dropped from the film. It is not a good start.) Helena Bonham Carter is the youngest and sexiest Mrs. Lovett anyone has ever seen—she is like the slut from Fight Club gone into trade, though in this case it would seem to be the wrong trade. All the odder therefore that she and Sweeney never get it on—and never soar in their duets.
Alan Rickman, who acts well (of course he does) has a voice so feeble that the entire role of Judge Turpin suffers. And yet Jamie Campbell Bower can sing—and so “Johanna” escapes the butchery.
And what can director Tim Burton offer in place of the music? Blood, my dear, though granted the Gothic pewter look of Dariusz Wolski’s London, it is not quite real blood but a kind of liquefied lipstick—red for danger. And there’s a monotony with the throat-cutting that killed the film’s box office and not just the beards of London. You want this Sweeney Todd to be good, and you feel that Sondheim has left his great work up for grabs. Some regarded it as close to a masterpiece, but I fear it’s a wretched hash and a surfeit of arty pessimism in place of tragedy. There are actions that can be indicated onstage in a gesture that are indelible. Spaced out on film they become torture.
Sweet Smell of Success (1957)
Before going overboard on this picture, I have to admit that Marty Milner is a stiff as the “cool” guitar-playing boyfriend, and I can hardly think of a duller band for him to be playing with than the Chico Hamilton Quintet. This is 1957, and there was a lot of really dangerous jazz then in New York; some of it was all black, and could have offered a way of life fit to pump raw vitality into this very controlled and negative picture. But those problems are modest compared with Susan Harrison’s sister and the idea we are supposed to accept, that J.J. Hunsecker is so hooked on her as to be deranged. It just doesn’t work, any more than the possibility that Tony Montana goes insane at the thought of anyone having sex with his sister (in Scarface). Hunsecker and Montana (now there’s a movie) are so much into control that the idea of sex holding their attention is fanciful.
So the alleged “plot” of Sweet Smell of Success is fatuous, and the second half of the film is actually a good deal less compelling than the first. It doesn’t matter: The exposition of the movie, its uncovering of a real Manhattan, and the seething relationship between J.J. and Sidney Falco—that remains one of the great setups in American film.
Yet where did it all come from? The script is a combination of an Ernest Lehman novella and Clifford Odets supposedly sitting in a trailer as they were shooting typing up dialogue. The talk is brilliant, and there’s no question but that the original impact of the picture was that of a comedy double act who were steadily cutting each other to pieces. And while I’m happy to give a lot of the credit for that to director Alexander Mackendrick (Boston-born, but raised in Scotland), I have to say that Mackendrick never again got close to that sort of talk. So maybe something unusual belongs to the toxic chemistry between Burt Lancaster (J.J.) and Tony Curtis (Sidney Falco)—in Tony especially; there’s a feeling of him having seen the first night’s rushes and knowing he was home at last. As for Burt, is this one of the few films that really ruffled his soft-voiced intimidation and dug into the disturbed personality?
James Wong Howe’s nocturnal photography is Weegee-like and very New York—his command of the light is the first plain proof of poison in the air. The Elmer Bernstein music is fine, but very melodramatic. There are good supporting performances from Sam Levene, Barbara Nichols, and the odious Emile Meyer. There is an undoubted conviction about the mood and ethics of a particular place. But what makes the movie famous are those sublime shots of J.J. at his table, with glasses for armor, and Tony settling in beside him, glowing at the smart of every fresh insult. I’m not sure that American film had ever previously suggested that people could be so nasty—and have so much fun with it.
And it’s the title—for the movie does stink of drains and deodorant. But not enough to mask the rats and the flop sweat.
Swing High, Swing Low (1937)
Sometimes a very simple thing, a line or an image, holds a film in the collective memory—so Swing High, Swing Low is the one where Carole Lombard reclines in the crook of Fred MacMurray’s arm as he plays the trumpet. He’s Skid and she’s Maggie, and that will do it as a touchstone of romance, and its fragility.
It comes from a play, Burlesque, by George Manker Watters and Arthur Hopkins, which opened in 1927, with Barbara Stanwyck and Hal Skelly in the leads. In the play, Skid is a comedian and their marriage turns on his wandering eye until she goes to New York to reclaim him. (There was an earlier movie, The Dance of Life—very good—with Skelly and Nancy Carroll.) What’s remarkable about the 1937 movie is that that happy ending is given up; indeed, it’s fairly clear at the end that, though they are reunited onstage, Maggie divorced him long ago and Skid is a wreck, not far from death. Their song plays on, “I Feel a Call to Arms,” but the old image is a farewell, not salvation.
For Paramount: Arthur Hornblow was produc
ing with Mitchell Leisen directing. The script, by Virginia Van Upp and Oscar Hammerstein II, recasts the story so that the couple meet, literally, as a cruise ship goes through the Panama Canal. With opposite movement and extreme verticality separating them, she is a hairdresser on board and he is a sentry. But from the start there’s a perilous insouciance about him that clearly needs guarding. A superb scene follows—one of the great café scenes—where Skid plays a very hot trumpet and she is so held by it she hardly notices a young Anthony Quinn trying to pick her up. Mitchell Leisen says they used the two best trumpet players in town to do the sound track, but he omits to say who they were. (Suggestions?)
The interior photography, by Ted Tetzlaff, is lush and moody, and the whole film feels very noir for a romance. The erotics are there not just in the famous pose, but in the ravished gaze Carole Lombard has for the trumpeter. Hans Dreier and Ernst Fegté did the sets, and Travis Banton did the chic, deco clothes. These people are not rich, but they live in moderne sets above their station. It’s the visual equivalent of their musical talent in what is really a tragic love story.
Dorothy Lamour is the chorus girl Skid falls for—and why not? Charles Butterworth is Skid’s pal, and Jean Dixon is a good wisecracker as Maggie’s girlfriend. The strong cast also includes Harvey Stephens, Cecil Cunningham, Charlie Arnt, and Franklin Pangborn.
'Have You Seen...?' Page 135
