'Have You Seen...?'

by David Thomson

  The original story was by Ben Hecht, and he got the first Original Story Oscar for it—a few years later, he would write Scarface, too. Hecht claimed to have strung together enough Chicago hoodlum incidents to make an eighteen-page outline. What made it tick, he said, was his catering to the public’s delight in gangsters and their dames. Thereafter, the writer said, it was all he could do to stop Sternberg from ruining it with sentimental touches—like “Bull” coming out of a deflowered bank with the loot, and giving money to a beggar.

  In truth, the two men worked better than that suggests, from a shooting script by Robert N. Lee. Sternberg encouraged a shameless integrity in his gangsters, a panache that was aimed at the public and which absorbs Bull’s generosity with ease. Indeed, to be a gangster in this light is to be a star—it’s something that seems to coincide with movie glory.

  Bert Glennon did the photography and Hans Dreier did the sets—one of which will be shot to pieces in Bull’s final standoff. But all that said, Evelyn Brent’s “Feathers” McCoy, the gangsters’ moll, is the film’s most striking relic now. Brent made three films with Sternberg on the eve of his discovery of Dietrich. And in Underworld she apparently wore underclothes with feathers sewn into them. The scene of her coronation is one of the first great insane raptures in Sternberg’s work—and hardly possible unless he felt something. But in his autobiography, she got short shrift:

  Perhaps she felt uncomfortable in the tickling garment, for at one time while I told her how to act, she threw a shoe at me. I had the shoe returned to her and asked her to leave the stage and walk back to her producer-husband. But he had seen some of the film, marveled at the transformation, and informed her that he was no idiot. So she divorced him, and continued with me to become a star. I liked her and after using her in three films I let her fly by herself, and she promptly plummeted to earth.

  Underworld U.S.A. (1961)

  When Samuel Fuller went to Columbia with the idea for this film, he did a grandstand version of his opening scene. The camera begins on the back of a woman. It cranes up to reveal a mass of women, scantily clad, arranged in the form of a map of the U.S.A. The woman turns to the camera and speaks. She is secretary-general of the union of prostitutes and her message is that the ladies of the night deserve some organization and some breaks for all they do to bring relaxation and consolation to the American public. Did he or did he not have the Columbia Statue of Liberty standing just offshore, naked?

  It gives one a sudden picture of Fuller on a stepladder with a revolver in his hand, doing the entire picture like a Lars von Trier essay/comic book in which everything takes place in one huge interior set, as if it were a political convention.

  Columbia suggested that this was pretty shocking and disgusting. OK, said Fuller, unabashed. There’s this guy, Tolly. He’s just a kid, and he sees his father rubbed out by the Mob. And he grows up and he sticks inside the Mob, but only because what he’s really after is revenge. And he sets out to kill the guys who murdered his father. At this point, happy at last, the studio gave Fuller the go-ahead—what greater gift can you give a man than honorable revenge? You might have thought that the first comic-book idea was shelved, but it keeps coming up in the speeches Fuller gives the bosses—about how they have this notion of paying their taxes, donating to charity, and just lifting their regular criminal enterprises up to the level of regular business. Underworld U.S.A. is still sadistic and disruptive, because of its notion that, if it’s organized, it’s hardly crime.

  The great bitter joke about the film is that Fuller chose upstanding Cliff Robertson as Tolly—the actor, married to an heiress, the guy who would play John Kennedy in PT 109, and the citizen who one day would start the end of David Begelman by telling the government about the fraudulently signed check. And the best thing of all is that Robertson makes a fine thug and lout, even if he lacks the distinctive whining voice of Richard Widmark in Fuller’s Pickup on South Street.

  Hal Mohr did the glossy black-and-white photography. Robert Peterson was in charge of the art direction. The cast includes Beatrice Kay, Larry Gates, Richard Rust—as a sleepy-faced hoodlum—and Dolores Dorn as the girlfriend, “Cuddles.” She and Tolly have a couple of nice scenes where he paws at her bruised face to see how much it’ll hurt. It’s not quite as raw as Pickup on South Street, but it’s seldom the case in a good Fuller film that the neurotic sexual urge in violence is neglected for more than five minutes. In truth, this is one of the last gangster films in which the gangsters are louts and people you wouldn’t take home—from now on, they were on their way to being gents and fashion plates. So an air of nostalgia is there in Mohr’s morgue photography.

  Unfaithfully Yours (1948)

  It seemed so promising. As Preston Sturges really set up on his own, away from Paramount, he was seized upon by Darryl Zanuck and Twentieth Century Fox. This left Sturges in the invidious position of being the third-highest-paid man in America (at $8,825 a week)—and third feels vulgar and competitive. The material Sturges found to entertain Zanuck was an old project, The Symphony Story, about an orchestral conductor. He is English and plainly based on Sir Thomas Beecham. He has a beautiful young wife, American, and he naturally develops some suspicions that she is being unfaithful to him. This melodrama was to be enacted through a single concert in which the music and the fantasies that went with it spelled out nothing less than him murdering his wife, to be followed by redemption and forgiveness.

  This conductor, Sir Alfred De Carter, was meant first for James Mason—handsome, attractive, jealous, impulsive. Alas, Mason could not make the date, and so Sturges turned to Rex Harrison instead. It was a good match and the two men fell quickly into friendship, though Harrison in those days did not easily win audience sympathy. The wife’s role was offered to Gene Tierney, and when she thought it too small it ended up with Linda Darnell, ecstatic to be working with Sturges. Other parts went to Barbara Lawrence, Rudy Vallee, Kurt Kreuger, Lionel Stander, Edgar Kennedy, Al Bridge, and Julius Tannen.

  The three pieces of music were Rossini’s overture to Semiramide, the reconciliation theme from Wagner’s Tannhäuser, and Tchaikovsky’s Francesca da Rimini. This was a lot of music and a lot of fantasy to go with it. Might there have been warning signs of a cultural overload, or even a lesson to be learned from Monsieur Verdoux that, whatever its secret urges, the public was uncertain about killing your wife and expecting a laugh from it?

  It turned into a very big picture, one that cost as much as $2 million and left Sturges with a cut of 126 minutes. Zanuck intervened and about 20 minutes were dropped. There were even notions of titles to explain the music and the fantasy. Harrison was very good, but just as the film came to be released his mistress, Carole Landis, killed herself—a test even for Sturges’s robust satire. The picture opened and did disastrous business. Later on, Sturges recalled seeing a play with his father as a boy. The father laughed helplessly throughout, and Sturges innocently congratulated them on having seen such good work. Nonsense, said the father, it’s awful.

  “It was years before I understood what he meant,” wrote Sturges. “Then I forgot it and very stupidly made Unfaithfully Yours. The audiences laughed from the beginning to the end of the picture [they didn’t]. And they went home with nothing. Because nothing had happened. He hadn’t killed her; he hadn’t killed himself. It just looked that way. The audience ate my seven-course special and went home hungry.”

  The Unforgiven (1960)

  Seeing it years later on television, John Huston felt compelled to turn off The Unforgiven and to conclude it was the worst thing he had ever done. Well, some of us can supply a moderate list of Huston films far less worth seeing, and his own dismissal of it may speak to a rare disappointment, or a feeling of what might have been. At any event, it was a Ben Maddow script from an Alan Le May novel. It’s not just that Maddow was a writer Huston liked (The Asphalt Jungle), but Le May (the brother of Strategic Air Command supremo Curtis Le May) was also the author of The Searchers. And that film and T
he Unforgiven are clearly related: In the Ford film, Natalie Wood has been kidnapped by and married into the Comanches; while in The Unforgiven Audrey Hepburn is a woman who has lived with Kiowa Indians before being “rescued” by a white family.

  Huston complained that The Unforgiven was “bombastic” and that its racial tension or irony had been dispersed by the Hecht-Hill-Lancaster team that produced it. Yet that is not really so. Audrey Hepburn does a creditable job in her difficult role, and there are fine performances from Lillian Gish, Charles Bickford, John Saxon, and Joseph Wiseman. If there’s a problem staring out of the film, I think it’s Burt Lancaster, who may well have dragged the script toward making him a dull hero as well as a love interest for Hepburn. I suspect that Huston’s dismay comes from that kind of battle.

  Kate Buford’s biography of Lancaster notes that it had originally been a Delbert Mann project, with a script by J. P Miller. When that team was scrapped, Huston and Maddow came on board, but Buford suggests that Huston was more interested in the Mexican location than in the picture itself. The results onscreen (very well shot by Franz Planer) are too atmospheric to be written off. And the link to The Searchers (all in a time when American attitudes to race were altering by the moment) is too intriguing to abandon the picture. Suppose Hepburn and Lancaster were both miscast, or a sign of unhelpful directions in the material. Suppose that the leads might have been Robert Ryan (a more implacable man) and Susan Kohner (someone who could have been Kiowa). Suppose that romance horrifies the Ryan character and threatens him.

  I’m guessing, and this may be too fanciful or generous. But the picture as we have it is full of hints of something very interesting and disturbing—and the thing that troubled Huston may have been the loss of that possibility. What makes the argument worthwhile, I think, is the whole vexed matter of the way the Western genre stopped short instead of taking on issues and topics from modern American life. That tragic error could still be remedied—the roots of modern America are all over the West still, and it’s hardly as if the racial issue has been settled. I have a hunch that the full story of what happened on The Unforgiven could help the troubled movie endure.

  Unforgiven (1992)

  Very few American movie careers have been so carefully massaged as that of Clint Eastwood. And Unforgiven was the film that decisively ushered him into any establishment he cared to recognize. The man who had done Rawhide, the Leone trilogy, and the Dirty Harry films, as well as a steady supply of entertaining pictures that don’t force their way into this book, came into gray eminence with Unforgiven. It won Oscars for Best Picture, for Best Director, and for Gene Hackman as Best Supporting Actor. And you could look at Unforgiven and hope that the famous male supremacist had welcomed old age, human limits, and mortality into his life. If you were a little more sentimental than Clint has ever been.

  It was a script by David Peoples that Eastwood’s company, Malpaso, had purchased in 1985 and done nothing with. Even when the movie went ahead, Eastwood never met Peoples or conferred with him. He just did the script, because Clint likes the minimum of fuss. It is the story of Will Munny (Eastwood), a widower of sixty who lives in a shack in the middle of a prairie with his two young children. Times are hard, Munny is broke, but he was a gunfighter once and so he yields to an offer from a band of whores in a faraway town to do a job. To this end, he leaves the children to fend for themselves in the middle of the prairie—there must be another film about what happened to them.

  As he rides on his mission, he picks up two supporters: Ned Logan (Morgan Freeman) and the Schofield Kid (Jaimz Woolvett). The latter is a flash braggart; the former is old enough to be a somber Man Friday. When they get to the town where the whores have been wronged, it is under the control of Sheriff “Little Bill” Daggett (Hackman). We see him humiliate and thrash another gunslinger, English Bob (Richard Harris). And at first Will Munny gets the same treatment. Ned is whipped and killed by Little Bill. The Kid proves helpless. Only Munny can get revenge. But now he seems feeble with a gun, too old, too slow… Until by some magic, the elixir of lethal speed and the mantle of the angel of death return to him (and us). He vanquishes Little Bill.

  Well, yes, in outline and three-quarters of the way this is a welcome visitation of adult moods and fears. Munny is shown to be a wreck of himself. There is stern talk about the stupidity of courage and the ordinary habit of cowardice. You think maybe Munny is a dead man, and those kids are orphans talking to the wolves. But then Clint cashes in: To respectability, he adds the luster of his very own killing machine, still firing on all cylinders. And the Academy fell for it.

  It’s a Malpaso picture, directed and produced by Clint, photographed by Jack Green, with décor by Henry Bumstead. Hackman and Freeman are terrific. Frances Fisher (Clint’s squeeze at the time) is one of the whores. And he does look as if he’d been dragged backwards through a bush. But it’s much less a change or a breakthrough than a shrewd hand-washing operation.

  The Unknown (1927)

  Tod Browning (1882–1962) is one of the most intriguing figures in early horror. Born in Louisville, Kentucky, he ran away from home to join the circus, and he was a contortionist and clown before being drawn to the movies. He acted for Griffith and became an assistant. At some point he seems to have recognized his own destiny was in creating suspense and grotesquerie.

  The Unknown is part of his famous alliance with Lon Chaney at M-G-M. The setting is Spain, probably in the late nineteenth century. We see a circus in which Alonzo the Armless (Chaney) does a knife-throwing act. He throws with his toes (the way he smokes his cigarettes), and his first two knives take away his assistant’s dress so that the next ones can outline her pretty figure. The girl is Joan Crawford, by the way, with a terrific suntan and huge shining eyes. She seems pretty and wholesome, but she has one hang-up that comes as a surprise in view of her candid gaze: She really can’t stand those guys, like the strong man in the circus, who want to run their paws all over her.

  Of course, Alonzo loves her from afar, and she does regard him as a perfect gentleman. The script is by Waldemar Young, from a story by Browning, but I have to say that the script is not nearly good enough. I know this is only 1927, and we are at M-G-M, where a film had to be fit to be shown to Mr. Mayer’s teenage daughters. But still, the cult of Browning seems to me charitable in the extreme and blind to some frissons that a real Spaniard (call him Luis) might have picked up on in 1927.

  The girl is attractive but frigid. Alonzo is a great lover but without the means of holding his love. So their “intercourse” is in the knives and—what else? Well, suppose that Alonzo has a habit of coming upon her while she is sleeping and smelling her fragrant body with sometimes a cold kiss placed on her warm thigh. Can you imagine the granite face of Chaney lost in that quiet rapture? Can you see the cutaway to Crawford’s dreaming face—with just a flutter of her eyelashes? Here is a magnificent story of desire and frustration, with the knives coming closer at every performance. Perhaps before the end, at night, he even licks her wounds.

  Alas, that is not The Unknown. For as soon as its situation is set up, Alonzo is revealed as a fake. He has a familiar (an ugly dwarfish man) who helps him take off the harness that binds his arms down. Alonzo has arms! It’s just that on both hands he has a double thumb—all the more useful in his other trade of strangling. He is a killer hiding out. End of interest. The film is only slightly over 50 minutes, and it remains more of a curiosity than a developed work. But in the chemistry of Crawford and Chaney there was such potential, a truly perverse film that Mr. Mayer might not have noticed if his daughters were smart enough to keep their pleasure silent.

  The Usual Suspects (1995)

  When you round up the usual suspects, the gang’s all here. In other words, start with the rudiments of one genre, and you may be establishing the mood of another. Or, film noir goes into screwball comedy. As the author of a novel, Suspects (1985), in which the characters are figures from film noir who enter into a new fiction, I am not the most o
bjective observer of Bryan Singer’s highly entertaining film. Yet I may be in an unusually favorable position for seeing how intense pursuit of film (and its very set codes, the genres) leads to the eventual collapse of those forms and the emergence of something new.

  So some critics charged that The Usual Suspects was too clever for its own good, and far too much of an inside joke. But the film did quite well, thank you, which suggested that enough people were sufficiently conversant with genre rules to see them broken, while still taking pleasure in the playing of old tricks. The Usual Suspects works—and holds attention—as a mystery and a caper film, just as much as a metafiction on those themes.

  Five guys are rounded up, five nice types: McManus (Stephen Baldwin), Keaton (Gabriel Byrne), Fenster (Benicio Del Toro), Hockney (Kevin Pollak), and Verbal Kint (Kevin Spacey). They are being interrogated, on suspicion or in anticipation, and yet we begin to feel that the gathering—the arrangement, the lineup—is just a casting call for another job yet to be done, one that involves that mythical Hungarian master criminal, spell it which way you like, Keyser Söze.

  Note that everything is aboveboard: As photographed by Newton Thomas Sigel and designed by Howard Cummings, this looks like San Pedro and its waterfront. There is a ship at dock which may have loot. There will be a firefight there. There is a pretty girl in the offing (Suzy Amis). There is a mood of dread, a couple of pushy, cocksure cops (Chazz Palminteri and Dan Hedaya), and the unlikely pairing of a character named Kobayashi and an actor called Pete Postlethwaite.