'Have You Seen...?'

by David Thomson

  The Tarnished Angels (1957)

  Fifty years later, how could anyone believe that Hollywood ever found the courage, the sense, or the madness to make a black-and-white CinemaScope picture of William Faulkner’s novel Pylon? You can hold the opinion that the literary pretensions of the Faulkner (with a great deal of reference to T. S. Eliot) join forces uneasily with studio melodramatics in the late fifties. But this is, quite simply, the best attempt at Faulkner ever made by the movies. Maybe that competition is less than intense. But maybe a mix of ambition and courage held sway then. How did that “archaic” industry, in so much more conservative a time, have a greater creative daring than we can muster?

  Of course, this is a Douglas Sirk movie, even if he needed to persuade producer Albert Zugsmith and his studio, Universal, to take on such a task. Yet it’s clear that Sirk had to make compromises along the way, as with Dorothy Malone and her parachute jump, when her filmy skirt went the way of all such things in a high wind. “I didn’t have him [Faulkner] work on the Pylon script, because I didn’t want it. And he didn’t want it either. Faulkner always maintained he never understood the movies. I had [George] Zuckerman working with me again [on the script], and I seem to remember that he was instrumental in selling it to Zugsmith: I think he interested Zugsmith in the Malone part, particularly the parachute jump. He (Zuckerman) understood that the story had to be completely un-Faulknerized, and it was.”

  One might write a book on that paragraph. Yes, the novel has been “focused” so that the flying Shumanns are a marriage coming apart, into which the New Orleans newspaper reporter is drawn as… a third party, or a healing influence? The Shumanns (Robert Stack and Dorothy Malone) do a daredevil flying act in the era, just after the First World War, when that was a significant American entertainment. Rock Hudson is the reporter—an intellectual drunk—who sees them as models in a gypsy society.

  It sounds garish and pretentious at the same time, but Stack and Malone are clearly aware that they are playing extensions of their characters in Written on the Wind, just a year before. There they were brother and sister; here they are married with a child, but torn apart by the crushing lack of confidence that is the emotional area where Sirk really joins with Faulkner.

  This is not a comfortable film (in the way Written on the Wind never hesitates over its own logic), but it is remarkable and beautiful. The flying is rather fake now, but the erotic image of Malone needs to be an isolated dream. Hudson is far better than anyone had a right to expect, and there are fine supporting performances from Jack Carson and Robert Middleton. But still, the project seems so unlikely that the film’s grace and gloomy momentum have to be experienced to be believed. And nothing can explain the certainty we have that Sirk understood Faulkner.

  Tarzan and His Mate (1934)

  Edgar Rice Burroughs (1875–1950) came along just in time. His first Tarzan book, Tarzan the Ape Man, was published in 1914, and by the end of the war Elmo Lincoln had acted the part for a movie. It is the story of an English aristocratic child stranded in the African jungle and raised by the animals. Only once really—in Greystoke (1984, directed by Hugh Hudson, but chiefly researched and written by Robert Towne)—has the original story been reimagined. Far more often, the picture business has settled for the myth: of a superhero, flawless in his ethical being, who has it in him to solve those African problems the script can concoct. As a rule, these have very little to do with Africa now, and do not divert Tarzan from Jane and a small white family in the woods.

  Tarzan was a fixture of silent cinema, and many different people played the part. But it was only in 1932 that M-G-M reckoned the hero had authentic appeal in big pictures. In 1931, Mayer and Thalberg chose Johnny Weissmuller for the part. He was a handsome brute who had won five gold medals swimming at the 1924 and 1928 Olympics. He would not have to act, but he could wear a loincloth, he could swim, and he was in terrific condition. No man in American movies had worn fewer clothes. Exactly the same could be said for his mate, Jane (Maureen O’Sullivan), in Tarzan and His Mate, not the first in the M-G-M series, but the best and by far the sexiest.

  Howard Emmett Rogers and Leon Gordon wrote the script from a story by J. Kevin McGuinness that had never exactly occurred to Edgar Rice Burroughs—but his longevity had been paid for in the contract. Harry Holt (Neil Hamilton) and Martin Arlington (Paul Cavanagh) are heading a trip into the interior, looking for ivory and for Jane—Harry’s girlfriend, who dropped him for Tarzan on a previous trip.

  The film, like early M-G-M Tarzans, employed some African footage from Trader Horn, but the “true” jungle was now built in the studio—immense tree trunks, fronds, vines, and ferns and secluded lagoons where T and J might skinny-dip. The lush photography is by Charles Clarke and Clyde De Vinna. The clothes were to die for: leather loincloths and bras that must have relied upon stickem to get past the censor. There is a lot of flesh on view, with clothes slashed to the waist, and no one at the studio failed to see the potential or use the old principle that people who had gone native—even respectable people with oiled bodies and false eyelashes—had an excuse for losing their clothes. Cedric Gibbons directed, and it’s surely valid that his wife—Dolores Del Rio—had pioneered the Jane role with nude swimming in Selznick’s Bird of Paradise (1932).

  Weissmuller held the part until 1947—too long. By then Tarzan was B picture material, with a lounge-lizard hunk, Lex Barker. But in the early thirties, this was adult fare. Tarzan the Ape Man was 99 minutes; this is 92. The original cost $660,000 (more than Red Dust), and it had profits of close to $1 million.

  A Taste of Cherry (1997)

  As A Taste of Cherry begins, it is all rhythm—and just because Abbas Kiarostami’s film seems “plain” or “simple” should not exclude the chance of something very sophisticated in that rhythm or the patterning. So the film relies on gear changes and cuts that take us from a view of Badii (Homayoon Irshadi) driving his white Land Rover to shots from his point of view in the driver’s seat. And this is an intriguing contrast between narrative drive (or command) and the passivity or the openness of the world.

  Except that, as he heads out of Teheran, Badii’s road becomes narrower and dustier. At one point, he drives off it and relies on the enthusiastic help of a bunch of workers to lift him back onto the “road.” Badii is calm, purposeful, yet sad, I think. He also has an air of class and education not simply due to ownership of a Land Rover. In the city, his vehicle is surrounded by young men offering themselves as day laborers. But he turns them down. He is looking for someone a little different—more of a loner, is it, or someone deserving? For he is looking for someone who will bury him after he commits suicide.

  He picks up a soldier and repeatedly asks for his help, but the soldier refuses. He is not articulate. He is not drawn to say that suicide is wrong. But he doesn’t want to be a part of it, and in the end he runs away. But then Badii finds Bagheri (Abdolrahman Bagheri), who seems more agreeable. Yes, he will do the deed. But then, as they drive on, Bagheri becomes expansive about the beauties of life—he talks of the taste of mulberries as one of those pleasures no man should give up on.

  Is there a contract? It’s not quite clear. Badii drops Bagheri off at the National History Museum, where he works. But he talks of doing it that night. Then at night—as if he were an actor in a film—a car comes for Badii and drives him out into the hills and his grave site. But in the morning he is still waiting. Soldiers are carrying out an exercise. A film crew is at work. Badii—or the actor—waits.

  A Taste of Cherry won the Palme d’Or at Cannes in 1997, and it was a high point in the surge of Iranian cinema. It is only 99 minutes long, and it is filmed in rough color (by Homayun Payvar). It is characteristic of Kiarostami in that it offers a story situation from which it then withdraws a few degrees, as if to suggest that a kind of documentary is being shot. And so the story yields to the openness of life as a whole.

  There’s no doubt about Kiarostami’s eye or his fruitful sense of cinematic repetiti
on; he is a man obsessed with a quality of mystery or uncertainty in life that has found an interesting model in filming. It’s still not quite clear whether this is his sole intent—or a manner and an allusiveness to which he is driven by conditions in Iran. Whatever our eventual answer, Kiarostami is an important new figure, and at the least a minor master.

  Taxi Driver (1976)

  It tests credulity that Travis Bickle was in the Marines for more than a few minutes. Are we meant to suppose that he is lying, or that Paul Schrader and Martin Scorsese shared a horrendous view of that institution? The question is worth asking in that Scorsese generally longs to be one of the gang, among the goodfellas, in the web. It pains him that natural allies fall apart in Casino. The envelopment of family appeals to him. But Travis expects to be alone—indeed, he knows he is alone even if some dream woman from the streets (Iris or Betsy) yields to his ominousness for a moment. Taxi drivers are alone. They have passengers now and then, but nothing really detracts from the knowledge that they are driving alone to nowhere, circling.

  So in a real sense, Taxi Driver begins as the gangishness of Scorsese and the question in his own haggard eyes as to whether he can stand the initiation of looking at the worst things (like the high-angle autopsy of slaughter)—he can!—and the solitariness or the isolation of Paul Schrader, who saw the vivid yellow cab as a premature coffin and a symbol of paranoia, a place where the rearview mirror takes us straight into the driver’s bleak soul.

  It is a great idea, or clash of ideas, and the two authors had the ferment of Robert De Niro to fill the gap. And here is the first American film in which the modern city, noirishness, and the religious impulse sit together as naturally as cards in the three-card trick. The streets gasp with smoke or steam, and in the dank air it turns into Bernard Herrmann’s rueful saxophone—his last and maybe his greatest score.

  It rises naturally to its appointed and electoral climax in which, as if he were running for demented office, Travis may save Iris to win the city—but saving Iris eliminates so many voters and introduces us to the frenzy of blood that Scorsese needed. That is disturbing enough, but then there is the coda, where the damaged hero is back, lonelier than ever, still driving, still searching out the heart of isolation.

  Taxi Driver is a great film, in which there was a clear and willing glimpse of disorder as the heart of America. And I doubt that Schrader or Scorsese could have done it alone—so the lesson emerges that even in this symphony of isolation, the contacts in life are vital if mysterious. The gesture toward urban realism exists, but the film is hallucinatory, beautiful and scarring. It is emotional at every turn, and it is a Bressonian attempt to ask whether any soul can save this city—or must he turn into an avenging angel?

  Extraordinary photography by Michael Chapman, with exact performances from Albert Brooks, Cybill Shepherd, Jodie Foster (so knowing as to be terrifying), Peter Boyle, Harvey Keitel, Leonard Harris, and Joe Spinell. I watch the film again and again, unsure where it will take me this time. Or whether it is a return journey.

  The Temptress (1926)

  When the meeting occurred of the Mayer family with Garbo and Mauritz Stiller, Irene Mayer only had eyes for Stiller. Garbo seemed just a shy girl, but Stiller “frightened the life out of me. He was an awesome physical sight—enormously tall, with a very craggy face; a head, hands and feet huge by comparison even with his height; his voice had the rumble of something from under a deep mountain.” At that moment, 1925, Stiller might have been the most sophisticated filmmaker in the world. He was Louis B. Mayer’s target, though when they all sat down for Stiller’s latest, The Atonement of Gosta Berling, the boss knew he had to have Garbo, too. Or Garbo above all. By the time he got to America, Stiller was a tall, rather sinister-looking outcast. The word was out that he was gay—he didn’t command Garbo.

  He got his shot, or ten days at it: He was to direct Garbo in her second picture in America, The Temptress. She was to play Elena, a femme fatale, very physical, a woman who would be reduced to following the one man she loved when he disapproved of her. It was from a Vicente Blasco Ibáñez novel, with a lousy script by Dorothy Farnum. Antonio Moreno was the male lead, and Stiller went to war over his mustache. Moreno said, I cannot survive without it (he may have been right), and he won the studio battle. Stiller was laughed at on set because he confused “Action!” and “Cut!,” and the picture was beginning to look very florid and dangerously sexy.

  The opening passages of the film are far and away the most beautiful and seductive. The story wasn’t really Stiller material, but you feel a great eye in that opening and a kind of lethal frankness in Garbo. Then Stiller was fired. Fred Niblo came onto the set. People waited to see if Garbo would quit. She did not—we don’t know what pressures were applied. Thereafter The Temptress gets sillier and sillier. Garbo has moments: There’s a banquet where her breasts look as if they’re on the menu; she lets a baby win her heart; and she wears all her clothes with flamboyant disdain.

  But there’s a ponderous passage in Argentina, where Robledo (Moreno) goes to build a dam. It is said that the film used some footage from Hoover Dam, but it’s hard to believe. There’s a whip fight with Moreno and another man that is faintly nasty. Lionel Barrymore plays a melodramatic villain. The story drags on over the years and only comes to life at the end. Robledo and his fiancée come to Paris. He is a famous dam builder now. Garbo is there on the streets, looking the worse for wear. Moreno notices her, but she is too far gone. Instead, she sits at a café, thinks she sees Christ (tall, gaunt, not long for this world—it should have been Stiller), and gives him a ruby ring. Most distributors hated that ending so they got another in which Elena snaps to, realizes it’s Robledo, and they’re happy at last. Stiller died in 1928, back in Sweden. He was forty-five. At last count, just ten of his nearly fifty films survive. He was a great director, but he is now known as the laughingstock who came as Garbo’s baggage.

  The Ten Commandments (1923)

  It’s all very well to marvel that Cecil B. DeMille made The Ten Commandments in 1923—and he’d have gone to eleven or twelve, if God had had other ideas. But don’t forget that he repeated the process in 1956 (and got a Best Picture nomination for it). Not that those who recall Charlton Heston’s Moses in the second picture have any idea of the chutzpah of the first.

  The original Ten Commandments—story by Jeanie Macpherson, DeMille’s favorite writer—is 146 minutes long, and it is two stories: the biblical adventure, with the Israelites quitting Egypt; and a modern story—as if the dire example of Intolerance had hardly been digested. In the old story, Moses is Theodore Roberts, Rameses is Charles De Roche, Miriam is Estelle Taylor, and Pharaoh’s wife is Julia Faye. This involved enormous statues of sphinxes, a Golden Calf fit to be Rudolf the Red-Nosed Reindeer, and the erection of a city in the dunes at Guadalupe (near Santa Maria) in California.

  Bert Glennon and Peverell Marley handled the photography, though Ray Rennahan did the two-strip Technicolor sequence at Guadalupe. The art direction was by Paul Iribe, and the costumes were by Howard Greer and Clare West. On the matter of costumes, one has to add DeMille’s high relief that the biblical stories took place in hot climes where women were not obliged to wear too many clothes. Indeed, Estelle Taylor as Miriam sometimes needs little more than her husband, Jack Dempsey, would have worn in the ring.

  The modern story is more fully dressed and a lot more amusing. The sturdy, Bible-reading McTavish family takes in a waif. They are Mother (Edythe Chapman), John (Richard Dix), and weakling Dan (Rod La Rocque). She is Waif (Leatrice Joy)—and Dan quickly sneaks off with her, headed for the fleshpots. They meet ruthless adventuress Sally Lung (Nita Naldi), a brazen hussy who has escaped from a leper colony! Dan develops leprosy. He shoots Sally and escapes. Whereupon Waif is reunited with John, who reminds her of the Ten Commandments and what a really handy guide to clean living they are. They will marry and populate the world—leprosy-free.

  It was a huge popular attraction, and we can only explain
that by the exoticism, the flesh on view, and the cheerful willingness to sort through our sins in the cause of human redemption. The picture cost $1.8 million, largely because DeMille went crazy over making Guadalupe impressive. We don’t really know whether it was profitable in its time—though we know what DeMille said. At the very least, he survived well enough to take the biblical story by its horns again, give it 220 minutes, all in Technicolor, and only spend $13.5 million on it. The worldwide gross was $80 million—but there was no modern story. Had DeMille given up on us, or did he think we were better behaved? Another question: As the history of the movies and the fate of the world drift in opposite directions, will anyone ever do The Ten Commandments again? Of course—Kieslowski’s The Dekalog is the answer.

  The Ten Commandments (1956)

  Cecil B. DeMille’s first Commandments was in 1923, when the film ran 146 minutes. In his 1956 remake, the length had swollen to 220 minutes. Yet the grand old man held firm—not for him The Seven Commandments, or any compromise. This was 1956—the year of The Searchers, Bigger Than Life, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, The Wrong Man, Attack!, The Killing, Lust for Life, and The Girl Can’t Help It. And yet, the films nominated for Best Picture that year were Around the World in 80 Days (the winner), Friendly Persuasion, Giant, The King and I, and The Ten Commandments. In a book that often refers to the Academy Awards, there has to be a moment when we observe that the Academy didn’t know what was going on in its world.

  Or is that right? Of the five films nominated in 1956, only Giant and The Ten Commandments get in this book—Giant because it is still worth seeing for episodes, and The Ten Commandments because of its existence. 80 Days, I suspect, is seen by no one. Friendly Persuasion (no matter its Quaker message) has been forgotten, and The King and I has dwindled into an image of Deborah Kerr and Yul Brynner dancing.