As he came to his last film, the story goes, working from the novel, La Femme et le Pan-tin, by Pierre Louÿs, with a script from Jean-Claude Carrière, Buñuel had expected to have Maria Schneider for the lead role—for Conchita. But she dropped out. Did she think it might be a dirty film? Whereupon Buñuel had the saving idea—the ultimate weapon in the empire of casting—to cast two actresses and let them alternate scenes. It is inspired. The comedy becomes more than twice as funny and the spectacle of a man of the world who cannot actually tell one Conchita from another is adorable. As for the ladies, they are a perfect match—like two naughty kittens, but naughty in contrary ways. And Mathieu—of course—is Fernando Rey—suave, unflappable, yet demented.
Serge Silberman produced. Edmond Richard did the photography. Art direction was by Pierre Guffroy. Editing by Helene Plemiannikov. Costumes by Sylvie de Segonzac. The film is altogether as stylish as something by Mitchell Leisen. Yet it remains a work from Luis Buñuel, the director of L’Age d’Or. And that film and this one know the same secret passion and frustration of the cinema—of wanting your Conchita but being on the wrong side of the bars. The rapport between Rey and Buñuel is immaculate, silent, and as touching as that between Hawks and Grant. And not so very different. Think of this as His Girls Friday.
Thelma & Louise (1991)
Everyone agrees that Thelma & Louise altered gender studies—but what about genre studies? For the sake of argument, consider it as a Western (it is set in that red-state area to the west of Four Corners). And consider that two comely cows take it into their heads that bulls (or horses) are having all the fun. So the ladies take to the road—the ampersand in the title is for their bronzed arms interlocked on the bench seat—and eventually do just about everything those self-conscious guys have been doing. Indeed, at the end of it all, when police roundup is certain, and when these cows are going to be branded and corralled or made into hamburger, they simply take off. Their car launches off one mesa into the bright blue light that once drew Ethan Edwards away from the homestead in The Searchers. Cows can be wild things, too, and they have their merciful freeze frame (just like Butch and Sundance).
This picture comes from a spunky script by Callie Khouri (it won the Oscar), smart enough to rework the genre while ticking off every set-piece scene. Geena Davis (at her most gorgeous) is wastefully married to a cheat and a bore, and Susan Sarandon (an older version of the model) whisks her away to liberty—and death. The turning point is an attempted rape of Geena (done all too well) when Susan comes to the rescue shooting. So off they go, pursued by a sour cop well played by Harvey Keitel. They get to feel the fresh air, shoot up a gas tanker, and eventually Geena gets her rocks off (the couple, we learn, have never had an orgasm in marriage) when she picks up a wild and slippery cowpoke, beautifully embodied by newcomer Brad Pitt.
If it’s a film about sisterhood as a new element in our discourse, then I think the suicide is as regrettable as the discreet absence of sex between the girls. Never mind: director Ridley Scott made this a very entertaining and good-looking movie, catnip to the liberal blue states yet funny enough and provoking enough to arouse the red ones, too.
The gallery of scummy men that the story needs are made up by Michael Madsen, Christopher McDonald, and Stephen Tobolowsky, but plainly the film works because of the girls. Davis and Sarandon were both nominated for Oscars (they lost to Jodie Foster in The Silence of the Lambs). Sarandon does the acting, but it’s Davis who exists and really changes in the course of the film. I daresay that Thelma & Louise did better than any other “feminist” film before or since, and one finds that the title pairing of names has passed into common discourse. Whether or not one can bump into them driving around Arizona is another matter—but the driving is good for other reasons, and fantasy keeps the road humming by. Why should we turn on fantasy just because women got hold of it? The film was not nominated as Best Picture, which feels a little mean and disapproving in hindsight. This was a real sleeper, making far more money than anyone had hoped for. And changing some minds.
Theorem (1968)
People remember Theorem as a Terence Stamp film, so be warned that he disappears halfway through. Worse still, by far, instead of having his very dry Cockney voice observing the strange world rather in the spirit of Alfie, he is dubbed. And when you dub some actors, there’s not much left except blue eyes and tight pants. You do begin to see what a very unnerving life it might be to be an angel of sex.
Still, that is what our Terry let himself in for in Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Theorem. We are at the splendid house of an Italian industrialist (Massimo Girotti). The house is classical outside and moderne inside. The man lives there with his wife (Silvana Mangano), his daughter (Anne Wiazemsky), a son (Andrés José Cruz), and the maid (Laura Betti). No one seems to know who Terry is or how long he’s staying, but he moves in like some kind of old friend, and very soon he goes through the household in a sexual way as if it were zabaglione.
These seductions are all shot in a rather simple way, with chunks of Mozart mixed in with Ennio Morricone (not that you’d know it was him). The family all seem to feel that Terry’s the tonic that has changed their life, but although it’s 1968 there’s more therapeutic solemnity than flat-out sex. You may even come to the conclusion that the household is peopled with listless zombies—and so why doesn’t Terry do a lot more emotional damage? But he moves on, and they are all changed in ways that are probably significant if you lived in Pasolini’s head: The daughter goes catatonic; the son becomes an action painter who pees on his own pictures; the wife picks up strange young men; the father goes naked in Milan’s railway station. And the maid decides to be buried alive.
Pasolini has an austere reputation: He was a Marxist, a poet, a homosexual, and a murder victim—it’s a tough act to follow or gaze upon in cold blood. He had his moments, like The Gospel According to St. Matthew, and there is a profuse, carnal vitality in films like Arabian Nights. But Theorem is a key work and a crushing example of art-house gravitas. It rises to sublime heights of impossibility when it tries to lure Silvana Mangano into passages of wanton desperation—yet her false eyelashes remain as stiff and hieratic as the wings on a kite.
I am not being facetious in wishing that the whole thing had a voice-over delivered by Terence Stamp, not necessarily in character (it would be a bold friend of the film who claimed there was a character there), but as our Terry just in from London and telling us tales about making a load of lasagne like this. Am I saying it is pasta? No, not exactly—but I know how Italian cuisine can do wonders even with tripe, and I do think that Theorem is worth remembering as a lesson to us all about how addled art-house cinema can become.
Thérèse Raquin (1953)
Early on in Thérèse Raquin, Raf Vallone sees Simone Signoret for the first time. He assumes straightaway that she must be the sister to the feeble man in the house. Then, with hushed apology, he realizes that the two are partners trapped in an awful marriage. The whole film is there in a few moments. Signoret—in her early thirties, blonde, with dark eyebrows, a little heavy, a little sullen—is like a bomb. There’s an odd resemblance to Kim Novak, and Vallone’s character knows he’s seen this film before and it would be far wiser not to get involved in any sort of remake. But then there’s the impacted sexuality in Signoret, her look, her stare, the bomb that he can ignite. He’s lost.
Thérèse Raquin has suffered as a film according to the wisdom that Marcel Carné never did anything worthwhile after the war. Whereas this version of the Zola novel, made for the Hakim brothers, is well worth tracking down. Carné did the screenplay with Charles Spaak, and it’s offered as the kind of hard-luck story you might find under so many of those shabby Parisian roofs. Signoret is married to a weakling. They live with the mother-in-law—a small classic of malice and suspicion from the actress Sylvie.
The sexual charge in the setup scenes is palpable and really deserves more exploration. Something in the adulterous and murderous couple should change afte
r their crime—that’s why James M. Cain’s The Postman Always Rings Twice is better and nastier, because the man turns weaker while the woman grows more powerful. You can argue that Carné is at a loss once the husband has been thrown from the train—and in truth he rather gives the film to Paul Frankeur as the loathsome blackmailer who arrives on cue.
Never mind: This is a real picture until its midpoint just because of the carnal charge in Simone Signoret. Yet she had an odd career, and she was already in semiretirement so that she could the better look after her new husband, Yves Montand. Well, once he met Marilyn Monroe—only a few years after Thérèse Raquin—Montand showed how tough a care job he was. And Signoret never quite flowered. There’s not a moment in this film when she really smiles or turns her radiant sexuality loose. Did she lack the acting confidence to go with it?
Roger Hubert did the excellent black-and-white photography. Paul Bertrand was in charge of production design—there are cramped spiral staircases, mirrors and doors for hiding behind. Maurice Thiriet wrote the music. Carné knew exactly what he was doing—the direction is as fatalistic as could be—but still he fumbles the tragic fate of the couple and the way in which their brief liberated passion might turn sour or toxic. But that shift required the natural, poetic understanding of fate such as Carné had had to command in films like Quai des Brumes and Le Jour Se Lève.
There Will Be Blood (2007)
The credits say that it comes from Upton Sinclair’s 1927 novel Oil!, but only in the matter of reading and inspiration, I think. Of course, the next thing to be said is that inspiration may be a far more reliable impulse for filming a novel than the dogged stitchwork of “adaptation.” If Paul Thomas Anderson derived nothing else from reading Sinclair’s novel, he thought of that kind of place, of the juggernaut of oil beneath the barren soil, and the kind of man who could endure the place and command the force. Just like the last section of Greed, There Will Be Blood is a study in lethal human ambition and its searching for power in a landscape that speaks not just to the enigma of frontier but all the old moral questions that hovered over biblical desert.
So it’s worth noting that the Anderson who had been in love with human groupings (as in Boogie Nights and Magnolia) suddenly turns his attention to a man who has never seen a group he did not despise—including his real audience, the consuming public. And whereas in Magnolia, say, much of the meaning of the film lay in the interfolding of so many brilliant but effacing performances, so in There Will Be Blood we are in constant, unblinking confrontation with a single man and his force—a prospector who shifts his attention from silver to oil, who nags at the earth like a vulture with a corpse, one of the blackest figures in American film history, and an opportunity and a challenge to Daniel Day-Lewis.
His character, Daniel Plainview, uses the world as if it were his mirror, and he sees no one and nothing but his own ferocity. In turn, that prepares him to anticipate and preempt treachery and falsehood in others. What drives this paranoia? It is the simple need to be an American success, a figure of power, an engine in the land. Some people surmised that Day-Lewis was “doing” the honeyed voice of John Huston a lot of the time in the film. That is intriguing and plausible, for this is the Southwest desert such as Huston’s Noah Cross may have plundered it. But you might just as well “hear” the voices of Charles Foster Kane or George W. Bush for those are the lighthouses between which this perilous voyage steers its course.
Not enough happens? Couldn’t there be a stronger story conflict, like the preacher saving the man’s deafened son? Maybe. But I have to say that this is the most haunting film I have seen as I close the writing of this book, and I take it not just as vindication of the career of a man like Paul Thomas Anderson (now clearly the leader of his generation), but a sign that will and luck coexist still in America to make a resonant film about everything. Just as with Citizen Kane—or Greed or Magnolia or Chinatown—this could have been called “American.”
The photography by Robert Elswit is lucid and suffocating. Jack Fisk’s minimal design is vital. And the film has the best score in many years, delivered by Jonny Greenwood. In the cast, Day-Lewis has worthy aid from Paul Dano, Kevin O’Connor, Ciarán Hinds, and Dillon Freasier.
They Drive by Night (1940)
If you like Warner Brothers pictures around 1940, you can argue the occasional virtue of having three very strong male producers looking over a project—not just Jack Warner, official boss, but Hal Wallis, head of production, and Mark Hellinger, a journalist hired in to deliver a certain number of “tough” pictures, movies from a man’s world, as suited a studio that favored macho guys. Hellinger (1903–47) had worked on The Roaring Twenties, and They Drive by Night was one of his first personal projects.
He had a novel, The Long Haul, by A. I. Bezzerides, about brother truckers in California—it was a perfect setup for George Raft and Humphrey Bogart (with Raft as the number one banana). Jerry Wald and Richard Macaulay did the script, and Raoul Walsh was assigned to direct. It seemed like a standard Warners product, with Arthur Edeson on the camera, montages by Don Siegel, music by Adolph Deutsch. It started shooting and all went well, though Wallis was nagging Walsh to make sure the extra money they’d spent on some street market sets came across as “atmosphere.”
There was one unexpected factor. Ann Sheridan plays a girlfriend in her usual way. But the trucking boss, Alan Hale, has a wife who takes a shine to Raft and ends up killing her husband, with Raft framed for it. If you looked at the script quickly, you could say it was a femme fatale on her way to being a snake. Raoul Walsh had wanted Catherine Emery in the part, but Hellinger guessed that it deserved someone better. He had seen Ida Lupino as the blind girl in The Light That Failed, and he persuaded Warner and Wallis to go for her.
And so a routine picture, with Walsh getting the rough life on the road, the truckers’ camaraderie (it’s very pro-labor), and the atmosphere, turns into a court scene where Ida Lupino goes mad on the stand—not by giving a big, outpouring performance. All she does is go quieter, more private, and more intense. It is a staggering piece of work, the arrival of a major actress, and it nearly throws the film off balance—for what Lupino implies is that the men in Warners pictures, and maybe the studio as a whole, should watch what is happening to women more closely.
So Warners put Lupino under contract, and were so ready to promote her that in her next picture—High Sierra, a breakthrough for Bogart—Lupino got top billing. But Lupino delivers a person in They Drive by Night enough to stop the film in its tracks. The man’s world, perfectly rendered by Raoul Walsh, has yet to appreciate the implicit social criticism—that living with monotonous tough guys may drive women mad. By the time Lupino got to direct—in the 1950s—she had fixed on these “dames” and made them the center in stories about the difficult position of women. It was Bette Davis and Olivia de Havilland who broke the contract system—but Lupino did her bit to change pictures.
They Live by Night (1949)
Maybe the most extraordinary thing about They Live by Night is that the film was finished and ready but waiting on the shelves at RKO for the best part of two years before it got released. Of course, it’s a classic now, and clearly one of the great American debuts. But if Nicholas Ray had any incentive to believe that an angel of doom attended him, here was the opportunity. Long before the end, doom was in his system, like rot. But he had his reasons.
Early in 1947, the producer John Houseman found Edward Anderson’s novel Your Red Wagon and loved it. He passed it to his friend, Nick Ray, to do a treatment, and in time Dore Schary gave it the go-ahead. Charles Schnee was brought in to turn it into a screenplay, but Ray got the directing job, in part because his musicological research had built up a great feeling for the Southwest in the Depression. He and Houseman were old friends, and it’s clear that Houseman foresaw something out of the ordinary (he had been involved in great debuts before).
But he had not guessed how Ray would flower. A famously uncertain man, often confused or w
andering in talk, Ray became enthused by visual storytelling from the first day, when he determined to use a helicopter to do the opening shot. This was groundbreaking, dangerous, and hardly appreciated by set attitudes. But Paul Ivano helped, and in the end they got an arresting and urgent shot that set the pattern for realism lit up by emotional intimacy.
Though the film is a love story—that of two young people, Bowie and Keechie (warrior names), who never have a real chance at life—Ray got George Diskant to give it the new noir look. Albert D’Agostino was in charge of set direction, and Darrell Silvera did the sets. Ray treated the young leads, Farley Granger and Cathy O’Donnell, as emblems of romance and surrounded them with a battered cast that seemed rough from country life. This emotional atmosphere is very touching, and it marked the start of the Ray style—bold, but trembling with hurt feelings. He could make events, flat in the script, spring to life. And his casts became not just servants to the story, but parts of it.
The supporting cast is brilliant—Howard Da Silva, Jay C. Flippen, Helen Craig, Will Wright, Marie Bryant (the singer), Ian Wolfe, and so on—and there’s hardly a scene in the picture that doesn’t feel like a fresh egg, just cracked open. You can say the picture is gloomy and a little sentimental, and Granger especially looks too pretty for it these days. But the mixture of tenderness and violence, of Depression grimness and romanticism, was undreamed of then.
RKO was bewildered (as Howard Hughes took over). There was much argument over what to call the film; Your Red Wagon and Thieves like Us were possible titles. And it didn’t get released until late 1949, when it suddenly got rave reviews—from Richard Winnington, Dilys Powell, and a young writer named Gavin Lambert. There was a remake in 1974, Thieves Like Us, by Robert Altman.
'Have You Seen...?' Page 139
