'Have You Seen...?'

by David Thomson

  The authors must also have been alarmed that Nebenzal had hired in a trio of Hungarians to adapt the play: Léo Lania, Béla Balázs, and Ladislaus Vajda. So they sued. It was a famous case, and in the end Brecht lost and Weill won. The songs were to remain in their original positions in the show, but Brecht’s worries were countered by his characteristic duplicity.

  Fritz Arno Wagner did the photography, and it’s clear that we are in a world where décor and costumes are meant to fill every inch of the screen. But some of the cast had been retained from the original show, and so the realistic intimacy of the look of the thing keeps breaking down in the abrupt theatricality of Rudolf Forster as Mackie Messer, Carola Neher as Polly Peachum, Valeska Gert as Mrs. Peachum, Reinhold Schünzel as Tiger Brown, Fritz Rasp as Peachum, and Lotte Lenya as Jenny.

  3:10 to Yuma (1957)

  The title refers to a train, and I wonder whether the very artful Elmore Leonard (the young man who wrote this story) wasn’t having a little fun at the expense of High Noon. In that rather overdone classic, all hell will break loose when the twelve o’clock train hits town—and in this one the hellish dilemma is how a very nervous and reluctant deputy (Van Heflin) is going to get his prisoner (Glenn Ford) on another train with the gang watching and waiting for a mistake. All it proves is that movies and trains have usually liked each other.

  Leonard was only in his early thirties, still hooked on the Western genre, though the lazy wit and the taste for talking in Glenn Ford’s villain do show the way ahead for the writer. Indeed, this is one of the great talking Westerns. Heflin’s character, Dan Evans, is a failure, a farmer who can’t make it in Arizona, and who needs the danger money for getting Ben Wade (Ford) to jail (there was a famous one in Yuma—that’s where they had Robert Ryan in The Wild Bunch). But Wade proves very sophisticated. He’s like a devil tempting Evans with so many easy ways out—not least more money for doing the wrong thing. As such, this is one of the few pictures that ever dreamed of Ford as an articulate villain—and the experiment works so well it’s a marvel more people didn’t try him that way.

  The screenplay is by Halsted Welles, and Delmer Daves is the director. To stress the emphasis on character and claustrophobia, the film is done in black and white and given a nice noir feel by Charles Lawton, Jr., who largely ignores the famous blasting light of Arizona. But the very skillful tension is in Daves’s control, and it’s so well done as to be spoiled by the booming song, written by George Duning and sung by Frankie Laine. Of course, in the spirit of High Noon, there had to be a song, but that kind of production extra takes away from the wind and the silence that are proper here.

  Daves spends a lot of time getting the atmosphere of this barren part of the world, and weather plays an unusual part in the story. In a lot of this you can feel the natural inquisitiveness of Leonard, just imagining what it felt like in the legendary Wild West, waiting for the train and wondering if you were ever going to get a glass of cold water again. It does leave you thinking about what the Western lost when Leonard turned to modern Miami—and so on.

  The real ambiguity builds, and it leaves us maybe a little more interested in the Ford character than the Heflin. But that’s also a way of admitting how natural and real Heflin is, and how aroused Ford is by the lines he has. There’s also a very well done scene in which Ford effectively seduces Felicia Farr. The rest of the cast includes Leora Dana, Henry Jones, and Richard Jaeckel.

  Remade in 2007 with Russell Crowe as Glenn Ford and Christian Bale as Heflin. The remake had nothing of value from the original.

  Three Women (1977)

  The story got around that Robert Altman had reached a state of such confidence or euphoria that he reckoned he could make a film out of one of his own dreams. Of course, only a rather backward and very matter-of-fact sleep culture could be alarmed at that. Elsewhere in the world, people know that dream is a natural link to movie. But Altman made respectable noises to explain: “I didn’t dream the story, but I’d had this succession of dreams all in one night in which I was making a film with Shelley Duvall and Sissy Spacek and it was called Three Women and I didn’t know who the other woman was. It took place in the desert, and it was about personality-theft. And in my dream, I kept waking up and people would come into my bedroom—production managers—and I’d say, ‘Go into the desert and find a saloon.’ And when I did wake up, and realized that it was a dream, I was very disappointed, because I was really happy with what was happening.”

  So what emerged? It is a film in which Pinky Rose (Sissy Spacek) comes to work at a Desert Springs rehab center where elderly people take mineral baths. She is guided there by a Millie Lammoreaux (Shelley Duvall). I’d guess they are long-lost sisters to the two women in Persona: Pinky listens as Millie talks—and Millie is a singsong stream of clichéd consciousness, largely improvised by Duvall. They live together and they visit “Dodge City,” a fake Western theme yard outside Desert Springs. It’s run by a very macho cowboy, Edgar Hart (Robert Fortier). He has a wife, Willie (Janice Rule), speechless, but the painter of extraordinary murals—actually done by Bodhi Wind.

  We feel a tension, a struggle for power—Pinky wants to become Millie. But there is a crisis: the pregnant Willie delivers a stillborn baby; Pinky sinks into a kind of coma; Millie asserts herself as the leader of the trio; Edgar is killed in an unexplained accident, and the three women settle as a trio.

  If that is not enough basis for meaning for you, then Three Women is not your film. But if you are stirred at all by the film on the screen—with rainbow colors (by Charles Rosher) and the most fascinating interplay of tone, voice, and gesture among the women—then Three Women is a thing of beauty. I am in the latter camp, and I fear that the film’s liberation from tidy plotting has still not been appreciated. But I think it frightened Altman, too, for he never really returned to its limpid, dazzling liberty, even if dream was there—like another drug—in his life.

  Patricia Resnick worked on a script and was then dumped. Altman took credit for the script, which the actresses had done the most to work out—it was an Edgar-like gesture and hardly kind. Never mind: The film is extraordinary, and Duvall and Spacek were noticed. Spacek won Supporting Actress from the New York critics, Duvall shared Best Actress at Cannes. Diane Keaton won the Oscar as Best Actress in Annie Hall. The film is also notable for beautiful work from John Cromwell and Ruth Nelson (the one-time director and his wife) as an elderly couple. Three Women awaits rediscovery.

  Throne of Blood (1957)

  At the outset, we see a gloomy landscape lashed by rain and wind, and yet the sun is breaking through. It’s a literal rendering of Shakespeare’s fair and foul day in Macbeth, and it is a signal that the poetry of the play is more naturally delivered in language than as tricky weather systems. Throne of Blood is often described as one of Akira Kurosawa’s great coups—a vivid retelling of Shakespeare’s Macbeth that also incorporates elements of Noh theater. It’s still worth seeing, and there are unquestioned high spots, but I’m not sure that this is even the best movie of Macbeth.

  Washizu (Toshiro Mifune) is our main character, and you may be sure that he roars and snarls to perfection. He wears the clothes well. He seems like a warrior, and he is driven by some mixture of ambition and dread. As his wife, he has Asaji (Isuzu Yamada), playing in the Noh tradition with a makeup mask. She looks good, but actually fails to suggest the nagging, sexual force that urges her husband on. She is not a virus in his soul.

  Further, Kurosawa has elected to do much of his story in interiors that are bare of décor, spacious and bright. All of a sudden, the viewer may feel nostalgic for the clammy castle walls and the pressing medieval darkness of the Orson Welles Macbeth. Throne of Blood is a different film, indoors and outdoors, and while it does a fairly spooky forest, still it settles for one male ghost instead of the witches (and it’s the witches who help us understand Lady Macbeth). It’s only in the climax, as the forest seems to move, that Kurosawa soars and finds a final thrust that is not Shakespeare, y
et is very credible.

  Who would have thought that Kurosawa would fall down on the atmosphere? But who can judge now exactly what he intended? In certain respects, his translation is very close to the play—in others it departs. But was he aiming at a Japanese audience, or an international one? The Welles version was done quickly and very cheaply, but it has unassailable virtues: Macbeth and his wife should be in terrible blood-pact concert; Macbeth is a man who can shift from quiet to full force; and there is the poetry.

  With the Welles version, you feel Welles’s terrible commitment to Macbeth’s bloody ambition. You feel the urge to trample natural order and make an alliance with witchcraft. But those things are just gestures in Throne of Blood, a passing incident in a Japan beset by warlords. The language of Shakespeare is the difference because it takes us into an unrelieved confrontation with evil. By contrast, Toshiro Mifune is a big, noisy bully (his besetting liability as an actor). But Welles makes a noble man who has sold his soul. Yet in the history of film, Throne of Blood has the exotic advantage. It’s different, and in the end it is a lot less than Shakespeare. Photographed by Asakazu Nakai, and also starring Minoru Chiaki, Akira Kubo, Takashi Shimura, Takamaru Sasaki, and Yoichi Tachikawa.

  Tillie’s Punctured Romance (1914)

  In My Autobiography, Chaplin refers to Tillie’s Punctured Romance, without naming it or giving any indication of its importance. For at just over 70 minutes, it was the first feature-length comedy. It was a success. It does not offer Chaplin as the Tramp character. And, yes, you’ve probably guessed it—it was a vehicle for someone else. So, in his book, it’s enough for Chaplin to dismiss the unnamed venture as not having any special interest.

  Marie Dressler (1869–1934) was Canadian, and she had been a veteran of the New York stage since 1892. She was a large woman who could quite easily be made to look like a man or be a figure of fun. She was also a very clever comedienne with a great following. Tillie’s Nightmare was a stage play she had started doing in 1909: she played a flat-faced drudge who had dreams way above her station. And in Tillie’s Punctured Romance—which was a Mack Sennett production—she was the poor, unsuspecting dunce (with a rich father, looking like half her age) who is deceived by the City Guy, a rather nervous fraud and womanizer, played by Mr. Chaplin.

  The differences between the City Guy and the Tramp are not too many. The City Guy is better dressed, and he often wears a boater. Most distinctive of all, he has a quite different smile, one that shows too many teeth and ends up being quite unsettling. He is a gigolo and a cad, and Charlie must have known that he was gathering scant sympathy. Not the least element in his becoming the best known and most beloved person in the world was his desperate longing for love and attention. There are always actors who enjoy being nasty, and relatively minor in stature. But with Chaplin you feel the grievance and the damage it is doing to him. His access to sentiment is dependent on the thought that he is a fine, sad fellow. Yet he has a wicked streak of cruelty and cannot resist teasing the lumpish Tillie.

  As for Dressler, it’s clear that she is very accomplished, full of detail, and humor—but whereas Tillie, say, could attract sympathy onstage, she begins to let down the tremendous mass appeal of movies. She isn’t sexy enough—and as if to point that up, the film gives the City Guy Mabel Normand as an accomplice and girlfriend. Even in poor prints, you can see Mabel chattering away in the silence, nudging Charlie like a naughty chum. They have chemistry—and in life it’s easy to suppose they had a lot more. Indeed, Mabel looks like a sauce pot and a lot of fun. And she doesn’t threaten Charlie in the way that Dressler does. Charlie knows he looks nasty next to the big lump, whereas Mabel flatters his spark and flair.

  What does all this prove? That careers moved in fits and starts. Sennett obviously believed he could make Dressler a big star. It didn’t happen, or not until sound, when she made a return (teaming with Polly Moran) and then became a real actress. As for Normand, she got involved in tragedy and scandal. She almost certainly did drugs. And she was dead in 1930 aged thirty-four. And then there’s Chaplin.

  Time Regained (1999)

  Raoul Ruiz’s Proust film, made as the century closed, is like a museum. There are many passages of the film where, for no apparent reason, there is a lapping movement on the screen—the camera goes this way and that, like waves making their attempt on the shore; or whole sections of a seated audience seem to shift sideways, and back again—not so much very important people as driftwood. It’s possible, and required, I think, to relate these movements to the streaming or the fluidity that Ruiz puts beneath the credits, or the sea itself at Balbec that ends the film. But there’s another comparison, just as useful: that we, along with Marcel Proust, are strolling through a museum that is the embodiment of Proust’s novel and Ruiz’s film.

  This is not perverse, or far-fetched. Imagine yourself at a museum to see an exhibition (they call them shows these days) of the work of some painter, or movement, or some moment in the ages. Just as we are used to seeing Monet’s Rouen Cathedral in different lights, so in such a show we see people at different ages. Turn a corner, and a woman may shift from novice to crone—only the eyes give the kinship away. There is even a moment in Time Regained where one character has two separate ages on his face—one side much older than another—and so as he turns in the turning commotion that is the engine of the film, he becomes his older self. Time Regained is not easygoing, no matter that it was a big-budget French-Italian-Portuguese production, with big stars. It is not easily followed if you don’t have an outline of À la Recherche du Temps Perdu in your head, or on your lap. But it is maybe the most arresting film you will ever see about time’s alteration, and our obsessive, childlike notion that it surely stands still while we move.

  Of course, it says something of forbidding importance that a work finished in 1922. if only by the death of Proust himself, is so far beyond what film reaches now in matters of narrative organization, the ebb and flow of duration, the experience of time and memory. (What can it be that film does better?) And certainly Ruiz has confined himself to the last of the seven volumes, and then contrived to let many themes and situations from the book’s past seep back into being.

  His materials are the words of the book, a quite sumptuous photographic recreation in which we feel we are in a gallery on Tissot and Sargent in which the desires of the painted figures dictate our attention. I praise décor or production design a lot in this book, because the world created for films is neglected—here there is superb work by Bruno Beaugé and photographer Ricardo Aronovich. There is even a credit for “snow and rain.” Marcello Mazzarella is Proust, Catherine Deneuve is Odette (at so many ages), Emmanuelle Béart is Gilberte, Vincent Perez is Morel, Pascal Greggory is Saint-Loup, Marie-France Pisier is Mme. Verdurin, Chiara Mastroianni is Albertine, John Malkovich is Charlus, and the rest includes Edith Scob, Arielle Dombasle, Dominique Labourier, Mathilde Seigner, and Patrice Chéreau as the voice of Proust.

  A Time to Love and a Time to Die (1957)

  “I have never believed in Germany at war,” said Jean-Luc Godard, “so much as watching this American film made in time of peace.” Of course, Douglas Sirk, the director, was also Detlef Sierck, born in Hamburg, and raised in German theater and film. The material is a novel by Erich Maria Remarque, actually titled A Time to Live and a Time to Die, and Remarque was present on the film, less as a writer than as the actor playing the professor. Said Sirk, “Some critics blamed me for not portraying the Hitler period more ‘critically.’ What was interesting to me was a landscape of ruins and the two lovers. But again, a strange kind of love story, a love conditioned. Two people are not allowed to have their love. The murderous breath of circumstances prevents them. They are hounded from ruin to ruin.”

  And just as in his romantic melodramas, Sirk constructs the passage of a mobile, inquiring camera passing through décor that is a deranged comment on the lives being observed, so this film is a somber but beautiful series of tracking shots through rubble
and the shattered framework of buildings in which we see the ironic growth of a small, plain love. By Sirk’s own standards, these are the humblest and quietest of lovers—they cannot avoid feeling that the time itself is at odds with love and how wistfully lucky they are as a result.

  A young soldier, Ernst, comes home on leave from the Russian front—but “home” is a mockery now, a place very hard to find in the larger context of homelessness. He meets a girl, Elizabeth. They marry and have a brief idyll—it would make a lovely double bill with Minnelli’s The Clock—before Ernst goes back to the eastern front, where he meets his death. There are Nazis in the film, but there is not much conventional laying on of guilt. The ruined city is a destroyed culture; that is the explanation for where we are. The lovers intuit that they have only moments to claim for themselves.

  Sirk famously made films about people in love, yet threatened or undermined by the experience. The love is operatic sometimes. I suspect that these two are the quietest of Sirk’s lovers. That owes a lot to the lack of starriness, glamour, or even great charm in John Gavin and Liselotte Pulver. It is not simply that they are restrained—they seem afflicted by their physical world. And to that extent it was vital in Sirk’s strategy that the filming be done in Germany. In response, Germany turned a cold shoulder to the film. As Sirk put it, Germans were too deeply into self-pity to feel pathos for these characters.

  No matter, it is a fine and touching film, with Russell Metty and Alexander Golitzen making the ruined world. There are good backup performances from Jock Mahoney, Keenan Wynn, and even the young Klaus Kinski as a Gestapo man.

  Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy (1980)