'Have You Seen...?'

by David Thomson

  This is a movie, even if made for television, and one of those works that take us into serious duration. I know that some works by Rivette or Béla Tarr are of such length that a few people sigh and regret their lack of humor or economy. Tinker, Tailor is 290 minutes and it might be longer. If it were, it might be easier for people like me to understand what is happening, and why? I have seen it a couple of times over the years and I have the gist of it: It is a suspenseful and quite gripping playing out of an endless male ritual, the spy game. Let’s say it’s examining some hidden chalice so very closely, and talking about it in such rapt, cryptic ways that it never needs to be spelled out. It could be God, homosexuality, the rules of the club, a game of snooker, or a smell in the air.

  It is adapted from a John le Carré novel by Arthur Hopcraft, and as far as I can see it has been done with tremendous fidelity and worship—and as if entranced by Le Carré’s dogged, misogynist, and rather limited style. In theory, of course, the safety of the world is in balance in that the British Secret Service is supposedly sending George Smiley against the Soviet Karla. I don’t think anyone really believes that tosh anymore—or sees it as less far-fetched than James Bond. Espionage is a sport—a very English communication system that works on denial, secrecy, and then astonishing coup. It means very little more than the average Harold Pinter play—and you can think of the dialogue as the raw material that Pinter turns into his own ping-pong. Self-parody is close at hand, and would be rampant but for the allegiance of that band of brothers, the English supporting actors, to which brotherhood, I daresay, Alec Guinness (Smiley) saw himself as patron saint, or chief D’Ascoyne.

  Is it “cinematic”? Well, not really. It’s not just that it’s a series of talking heads so much as listening heads, all directed by John Irvin with the kind of concentration that solves crossword puzzles. Yet I could watch it day after day, and I actually see the brief bouts of “action”—Smiley entering a restaurant, or looking at the weather—as so much escapist flimflam. The key to enjoyment, I think, is the grave affinity between English actors putting on a brave yet tight-lipped show and spies, forever fondling small talk and adverbs as if they were tickling their privates. It is very English, very well done and cloud-cuckoo-land. Yet Guinness seems to have believed it as gospel of a sort, and his choir includes Joss Ackland, Michael Aldridge, Ian Bannen, Anthony Bate, Hywel Bennett, Bernard Hepton, Michael Jayston, Alexander Knox, Ian Richardson, Terence Rigby, George Sewell, John Standing, Patrick Stewart, Nigel Stock, and Thorley Walters. Bless them all. How and why the cast does not also include Cvril Cusack, James Villiers, or Robert Hardy I cannot explain. Siân Phillips is there as Anne Smiley—the Lucretia Borgia of the whole saga—and Beryl Reid is lovely as a neglected bit of crumpet.

  Tirez sur le Pianiste (1960)

  It was not that Les 400 Coups had been lacking. Still, there are first films with a joy or danger that is never regained (examples? Malick’s Badlands; Citizen Kane even; Toback’s Fingers). Then there was the undeniable fact that 400 Coups was autobiographical—that engine might carry uncertain talent in its first thrust. And it was about a child. What would happen if François Truffaut yielded to adults? For all of those reasons, the suspense that attended Tirez sur le Pianiste was even greater than that which greeted the first film. Almost without drawing breath, here was something else as fresh as spit—or was it blood this time?

  Moreover, in the story of the piano player who is a bit of a gangster (Fingers, anyone?), Truffaut had identified shyness as his central emotional subject. That would last all his career, yet it had bloomed in the person of a tremendous performer: the music-hall chanteur Charles Aznavour, who gave his sad face to the camera with the uncritical loyalty of a dog. More than that, Truffaut now explored the unhappy love affair—surely his forte onscreen—and the quite tragic loss of the Nicole Berger character, the first fatal woman in Truffaut’s work, and the proof of women being magic just because of that instant in which they may be snuffed out.

  Tirez sur le Pianiste was taken from the David Goodis novel Down There, in a script by Truffaut and Marcel Moussy, though I doubt many people would have recognized that. It employed Raoul Coutard as cameraman (in black and white and Dyaliscope again), and it reiterated the poignant beauty available to that format. Truffaut thought hard about image, and he went over to color as a habit quickly enough, but no friend to black and white can forget the emotions—harsh yet fragile—in his lurching camerawork and the gay, trigger-happy way his films could cut away or iris in and out on details. Truly, the screen was dynamic and he had a feeling for the image so total that he made Godard look orderly and calculated.

  There are side quotes—the music box that plays music from Max Ophüls’s Lola Montès. There is the tenderness of Georges Delerue’s score and the jangling assertion of the café piano. But the speed with which asides and inserts could come and go, and the electric shift in mood from romantic to absurd, from lyrical to tragic—those things are still models for any filmmaker and a sign of how quickly film can work (this is a complicated movie of only 80 minutes). Marie Dubois is warm, Nicole Berger haunting, and the gangsters are so funny and yet so alarming. I find an extraordinary nostalgia in the mere sound of Delerue’s music—and something just as compelling in the young man’s amazed rapture at finding he could do anything with film. In a few years, it was clear that Godard was the more interesting artist, but the spearhead was Truffaut, and he was as sharp and challenging as any weapon.

  Titanic (1997)

  First things first: In advance of the opening of Titanic, it was widely predicted as a disaster worthy of the great ship itself. Its budget had reached at least $200 million. In early distress because of that, the load and the copyright had been taken on by two companies, Fox and Paramount. At an early screening in Los Angeles, there was a good deal of gallows humor from those running the show that pink slips were not far away—and maybe worse. Whereupon, one or two critics came out of the 194-minute screening and said, Well, it’s not that bad. And I still feel that way: It’s not as awful as you think it’s going to be. It went on to get domestic rentals of $324 million with worldwide earnings of as much as $900 million. And it’s not that bad.

  On the other hand, it is not a fraction as inventive as The Terminator, not nearly as exciting as Aliens, not as mysterious as The Abyss, and not as fascinating as all the stories that are told of the Titanic itself, that big story of 1912.

  Does the James Cameron film look like 1912? Yes, I suppose so. The production design work (by Peter Lamont), all the art direction, and the costumes (by Deborah Scott) are coldly accurate, just as the model of the ship and the digitized animation of the sinking are relentlessly thorough. Does it feel like 1912? Not for a moment. Because the recreation is all external. There is so little sense of period or class in the script and its understanding, and in 1912 most tales of horror from that sinking ship had to do with class differences. All Cameron has done is make a notional (but fanciful) bonding between an upper-class girl and a lower-class boy, while imposing all the malice of class on the Billy Zane character. In short, there is no sense of real history. (Atonement would do the same thing.)

  But what Cameron has done is to devise a story arc that binds the past to the present and which gives us something to root for, no matter that we know how the story will end. So the girl, Rose (Kate Winslet), is alive still today in 1997 (and played gamely by Gloria Stuart), so that she can come to the aid of Bill Paxton as he attempts underwater recovery of the wreck. This is a good try, and the film gets away with it, though I’m bound to tell you that Ms. Stuart was two when the Titanic sank, and Cameron makes it clear in the nude-drawing sequence that Kate Winslet was better developed.

  The “thrill” of the present looking at the past is feeble, I think, but it went a long way to giving the impression that the film was different. After that, it was painfully clear that a large audience existed that was uninterested in the history yet deeply impressed by the effects work of re-creation.
And when the ship sinks, the spectacle is undeniable—just as the underwater sequences are clearly the ones that interested Cameron the most.

  The acting doesn’t really exist, yet it is said that Leonardo DiCaprio was made a sensation by the film. So be it. That did pass. The rest of the cast includes Kathy Bates (as Molly Brown), Frances Fisher, Bernard Hill, Jonathan Hyde, David Warner, Victor Garber, and Suzy Amis.

  To Be or Not To Be (1942)

  The point may be obvious. It may gloss over fine issues of taste. But in some total conflict, if one side is making To Be or Not To Be in the middle of a war and the other is not—you know which side to root for. No, there are no Nazi equivalents to this film, no film in which the Goethe Institute, let’s say, sends a Schubert lieder singer on a tour of the United States and she tries to conduct an affair with a spokesman for the Bund. (You’re tempted by the sound of it? But only because you’ve grown up in a culture addicted to irony, sarcasm, self-effacement, and that essential ingredient of American acting once identified by Kenneth Tynan—its Jewishness.)

  It has to be said that Samson Raphaelson—Lubitsch’s preferred writer—chose to be unavailable for this project, because he feared that it would end in charges of bad taste. So Melchior Lengyel shaped the idea and Edwin Justus Mayer wrote the script about a Polish acting company in Nazi-occupied Warsaw that has a hard time doing Hamlet, but which gets drawn into a masquerade against the Nazis that may help win the war. This is the company led by Maria and Joseph Tura (Carole Lombard and Jack Benny), when he is doing Hamlet and she has a Polish flier after her and she tells the boy to rendezvous in her dressing room just after her husband begins the speech “To be or not to be…”

  What follows is nothing less than a farce in which the Nazis are the butt of the humor, but in which “So, they call me concentration camp Erhard, do they?” is relied upon to get repeated belly laughs. Some find it too much. I suggest that its brilliance lies in the concentration on actors at the heart of the story and the casting genius that saw how far the already wounded face of Jack Benny could consider no greater crime against humanity than walking out on his big speech. And then there is Carole Lombard, ravishing, sexy, happy, and glorious in her gowns. She was dead shortly after the film finished shooting, and it may be that that took away from audience numbers as much as any question of taste.

  Alexander Korda was a coproducer on the venture and Vincent Korda did the sets. Those gowns are by Irene, and Rudolph Maté did the photography. The faultless cast also includes Robert Stack, Felix Bressart, Lionel Atwill, Stanley Ridges, Sig Ruman, and Charles Halton. Of course, it is an artifice, protected from the real horror of war. But it has moments when to see the Turas—vain, self-centered, essentially small-minded—is still to recognize how far cinema and egalitarianism can amount to models of ordinary decency. The American cinema has made few lastingly useful political statements, and it has often taken fright at the risk of trying. To Be or Not To Be is the sort of film that would have earned murder gangs if the other side had won. It is still brave, and it still bespeaks a wholesome insolence in many Americans toward tyranny and the way of life ready to rationalize the death of flirtation.

  To Catch a Thief (1955)

  It’s clear in hindsight that To Catch a Thief was a holiday film—either because Hitchcock felt inclined to let the Riviera guide him, or because he saw the possibility of Grace Kelly exchanging one kind of stardom for another. There’s no attempt to explore or dissect the Cary Grant character: He remains as upright and untouched as an Oregon pine—the sort of business his character, John Robie, claims to be in. Of course, one can see another angle in 1955: that several of these people, Robie included, were in the French Resistance, where there was a license to kill and steal (the cook, you recall, was a strangler. In all his films made in the 1950s, Hitch took his men apart. But Robie is never short of breath, let alone put under stress. He stands there and takes Grace Kelly’s pale blue kiss, and he deflects her line, “Would you prefer a leg or a breast?” as if he were on probation.

  All of which leaves the Riviera robbery plot like something from a previous age. Talking of which, let’s admit that Cary Grant was several months older than Jessie Royce Landis, the mother of the Kelly girl. Now, I like Landis in the film, especially the way she laughs at Grant when he loses his roulette chip, and doubly so when she stubs out a cigarette in a fried egg. But there’s an inescapable hint of the perverse in that scene where Cary and Jessie are flirting, but Grace is the real object of attention. Hitchcock in a nastier mood might at least have played with the possibility that Robie was drawn to mother and daughter.

  For the rest, there is really just Grace Kelly to look at, and to grieve over. Who knows what satisfactions Monaco gave her? It’s plain for anyone to see, I think, that she was both horny as hell and an amazing comedienne. The film is flimsy, but she sprawls through it like a wild, sexy girl home from finishing school and ready to seduce every man in the household, and any woman who gives her a second glance. Kelly did three films for Hitchcock, and this is the one in which she is most carefree, most nakedly available, and every bit as desirable as her own diamonds. I’m not sure if any actress since has been so celebrated for her glamour—and not much else.

  Could more have been made of it all? You bet it could have. Suppose, for instance, that Kelly and Grant had joined forces as jewel thieves and cleaned up the Côte d’Azur. Yes, that’s a fancy, but it’s worth recalling that Hitch had Kelly in mind a few years later for the chronic thief in Marnie. Sooner or later, if she’d stayed in pictures, someone had to get at the duplicity beneath the blancmange in Kelly. She would have to be on the other side of the law, stealing to get her orgasms. As it is, here, she does all she can to give a signal of that. But, as I said, Hitchcock was on holiday.

  To Die For (1995)

  In Little Hope, New Hampshire, and yet from the eternity of TV fame, too, Suzanne Stone turns to us—direct to camera—the freshest sundae, all pinks, creams, blondes, and custards, and goes into the lovely ad lib confession on what she did to her husband, when any idiot can see that why she did it was, quite simply, to be a sundae show on TV, to be not just the weather center in Little Hope, but the Whether Center in America (the question being whether Suzanne is just guilty or delicious—her show is called Your Guilty Pleasures, in which on reality TV you get to go through with the deepest, darkest longings you’ve ever had).

  Well, no, the glorious To Die For doesn’t quite reach that far. It stays in Little Hope with those grungy kids when its own great vaulting esprit indicates the chance that Suzanne could GO ALL THE WAY—she could be Up Close & Personal, she could be a Katie Couric, so wide-eyed and pretty that she can take in all of America in what amounts to the first TV blow job.

  It’s a brilliant try, taken from a dark, witty novel (based on a real case) by Joyce Maynard and very well scripted by Buck Henry, even if it falls short of some final manic, cartoon surge where one murder makes Suzanne a killer hit. It needs the zest of Network, that satirical energy, and the understanding that Suzanne Stone really is modern America—pretty, sweet, shallow, and a killer-diller.

  It may be that Gus Van Sant was not quite the director for that kind of satire. He seems as interested in Joaquin Phoenix as he is in Nicole Kidman, and that’s understandable at the New Hampshire level, because Phoenix is outstanding and very accurately observed. But Nicole—in claiming her own identity and naughty-flirty presence on our screen—was reaching for the stars, not just the George Segal figure, but the Robert Redford stiff from Up Close & Personal and a kind of Clintonian president who sees her and sighs, “Santa Monica!”

  So the parents are cameo treasures, but the film lingers with them too long. And really Matt Dillon needs to be disposed of more quickly. Suzanne is the Bad Seed grown up, and Nicole is like a candy rocket willing to soar over the mediascape, shedding light and her panties wherever she goes. A masterpiece was in prospect—instead we have a very nice, tart, daring comedy and the sublime insight tha
t so long as Suzanne is confiding in us, direct to camera, mouth to mouth, she can get away with anything.

  So this was Nicole Kidman’s real debut, yet look how far the business held back from putting her in more outrageous comedies, let alone pictures in which she rose like bubbles in champagne to the level of mass murder. Here is a unique sensibility, seductive and devouring, and all too often Ms. Kidman would be fobbed off with earnestness or cuteness. Terrific support from Illeana Douglas, Maria Tucci, Casey Affleck, Alison Folland, Dan Hedaya, and David Cronenberg.

  To Have and Have Not (1944)

  Published in 1937, To Have and Have Not is the closest Ernest Hemingway ever came to a political novel. Harry Morgan dies at the end with the gasping cry, “One man alone ain’t got a chance.” But in the Howard Hawks film, seven years later, a man alone—call him Harry Morgan—while he claims to be hard up, seems to be dressed by the J. Peterman catalogue; he has a boat and a sidekick named Eddie; he is insouciant about the war and taking any stance toward it; and he gets this odd girl, or “look,” prepared to teach him to whistle. So To Have and Have Not is the Warner Brothers wartime movie in which Humphrey Bogart stays “above” the war.

  There’s more to it than that, but don’t overlook the breathtaking charm of Hawks electing a story which has some nasty signs of Gestapo-tainted Vichy and still disdaining the war. So Harry Morgan is a relic from a sweeter past, hiring his boat out to ugly American fishermen, and getting along. At the hotel, the owner (Marcel Dalio) would like him to help some Resistance people—but resistance to what? Meanwhile, Harry has “her” on his hands, lolling in his doorway, and tossing insolent remarks at him along with boxes of matches and looks that might burn a man’s toupee off him.