'Have You Seen...?'

by David Thomson

  It is part of the baleful view of civilization, I fear, that the aborigine will be destroyed by the way in which the white girl disdains or ignores his courtship overtures. It is not that the girl is blamed for this, or condemned morally, though there is a glib flash-forward to her apparently happily married future (to a nice white) where she recalls the strange passion of the walkabout. I fear that it is Roeg’s rather empty-headed conviction that the two English kids serve to destroy the aborigine’s austere nobility. And therein begins the passionate limitation in Roeg’s intellect, the first great drag upon his remarkable cinematic sensibility.

  The script is by the apocalyptic playwright Edward Bond, and I suspect that Roeg meekly adopted his view of the wickedness or the antilife attitudes inherent in private school training. Whereas every urging in the glorious imagery encourages the girl to go native, to be a woman with her heroic rescuer. Another resolution—far more troubling—could have involved their brief bliss and then the way a rescuing white society tidied up the whole incident.

  Early on there is a strange, arbitrary wall that appears—it yields access to the city as easily as the outback. I wish there was more of it, and more evident dream. For in fact, it is the literalness that is sometimes plodding and which in turn points to Donald Cammell as author of the great flights of fancy in Performance. Still, Walkabout is filled with the dread and wonder that a civilized society can feel in the wilderness, and there are passages still so poignant and primeval that one longs to see Roeg’s version of the Bible (if Buñuel had done the script).

  Wall Street (1987)

  In Platoon, Oliver Stone had subjected Charlie Sheen to “adult” influences, and two ways to go in life. In Wall Street, the two sergeants are replaced by Gordon Gekko (Michael Douglas) as the master reptile of high finance and the sultry dream song, “Greed is good!” What does it say about Stone’s casting instinct or his human judgment that he should have elected Charlie Sheen for his innocent, everyman figure, the weather vane of modern morality? What does it say of Mr. Stone but that he loves to have his cake and eat it, to wallow in the darker side of life and to be disapproving of that self-indulgence? He is our Cecil B. DeMille.

  And yet Wall Street was one of the few American films to take on money and its making as subjects, and surely Stone was alert to the new rapacious mood of the eighties. It was uncannily shrewd to pick the streamlined self-love of Michael Douglas as the real silk suit in which Gekko would take a sin and turn it into a sermon. Thus, in Gekko’s “greed is good” routine, you could feel a terrible moral indolence rising in the theater. It was exactly what weakness wanted to hear. It was the new interpretation that saw Budd Schulberg’s What Makes Sammy Run? not as a condemnation of the movie world but as a textbook course on how to succeed in business without really sweating.

  There’s a wondrous greed in which Mr. Stone envisages the clothes, the décor, and the apparatus of success—it’s there in the sleek hairstyle of Michael Douglas; in the cool modishness of Daryl Hannah; and in the absolute contempt felt for the kind of blue-collar decency represented by the Sheens, father and son. So Oliver Stone thinks he despises wealth, just as he is bathing in it. It’s the moral schizophrenia in all his films, the how-I-love-the-thing-I-hate. In the end it is a tormented self-portrait that makes Stone unique in modern American film.

  The “plot” is thumpingly commonplace, as is the notion that Douglas’s character would take a second look at Charlie Sheen—the younger man’s haircut is ample disqualification. But they get together, and the film then follows a test case that may bring Gekko down. Whereas a movie with any profound interest in money would know that the Gekko is a creature where if one perishes, a second and a third springs up in its place. The real complexity of high finance is the wall that makes it impenetrable—the real wall in Wall Street, whereby few prosecutors can see a way of dismantling it.

  That’s why finance is so tough a subject and why Wall Street is like an advertisement, more interested in sheen for its own sake than Charlie Sheen’s aroused conscience. The meaning, you see, is that Oliver Stone cannot see a way of doing without money. Yes, he has a sermon against it, but one so witty, so sardonic, and so reptilianly winning—hence Michael Douglas and his Oscar—that we are sold.

  Wanda (1970)

  Wanda Goronski is first seen as a woman in white walking past piles of coal slurry to a court in Pennsylvania, where she will be officialy separated from her husband and children. She has no objection to the depiction of herself at the hearing as incompetent. She lets herself be discarded, and she starts to drift. She is picked up by an angry man named Dennis. He seems to be taking painkillers all the time—booze and pills—and his temper is short. They become companions, except that there is nothing like companionship. He gets her to be the driver on a bank robbery he plans.

  Wanda was shot on 16 mm by Nick Proferes (he edited the film, too) as Barbara Loden wrote and directed it. When the film came out, Loden was close to forty and the second wife of Elia Kazan. In his memoir, A Life, Kazan said that she had had sexual cunning when young, and he cast her in his production of Arthur Miller’s After the Fall and in his film Splendor in the Grass. She was noted for her promise and her sexy edge—but sexy edge is not an uncommon commodity, and it can wear out. Loden wanted to do her own work. She became more like a feminist. She got the idea for Wanda from a newspaper story, and Kazan says she asked him to direct it. He said it wasn’t his kind of thing. He may have guessed she needed to do it on her own. Maybe he imagined she asked him.

  You can say that Wanda has as little style or flourish as its character has hope—that it is neo-realism, or like Cassavetes. But I think it is tougher and more lucid than either. It is a remorselessly bleak portrait of a woman who is never going to get self-respect, let alone the credentials that might command respect. The film doesn’t say why. We meet Wanda as a failure, as someone who has surrendered to her own incompetence. And she might be a victim, but only if she was more sentient or vulnerable.

  In a way then it’s natural that Dennis (Michael Higgins) becomes the center of the film, though it goes on long enough after his death for her passivity to be reasserted. It is a stark, unforgettable picture, full of pain and absurd humor—on the way to the bank, but lost, Wanda is stopped by a policeman. He tells her to present her license at the station. She asks him the way to the bank. The photography is rudimentary. There is no music. Loden has allowed herself to look as plain and hopeless as possible.

  The picture won a prize at Venice. It played on the art-house circuit, and she and Proferes tried to set up another film but without any success. She developed breast cancer and she died in 1980. Kazan writes of her as a fierce woman and one of the few who never really yielded to him. It’s a lack of compromise that shows in her film. The color on Wanda seems to be fading. I don’t know how carefully the print is cared for. If ever there was a film with “lost” as its natural terminus, this is it. So guard it. Look at it. And remember her name.

  War and Peace (1956)

  No, of course, you can’t film War and Peace, least of all with Audrey Hepburn’s plaintive voice as Natasha. When Audrey is hurt, she sounds wounded. But when Tolstoy’s heroine is hurt she begins to grow up. It’s all very well for Natasha to be the kid swept off her feet by Prince Andrei. We want that to work. But when Andrei is Mel Ferrer, one can only conclude that Audrey’s own private life was beyond our imagination. I’m not sure if any actress existed in 1955 who could have made a decent Natasha—or who could have done it in the English language, thus satisfying the first box-office requirement of a weird epic approach with Carlo Ponti and Dino de Laurentiis as coproducers.

  That said, there is a great deal on the credit side, and nearly all of it has to do with King Vidor. To start with, Vidor was never afraid of anything, and if a movie director is intimidated he might as well go home. Second, the war, the retreat from Moscow, and the Russian guerrilla campaign under Kutuzov are brilliantly handled. Then there is the unexpected
fact that Henry Fonda—awkward, shortsighted, far from a man of action—is actually a decent Pierre, and one who sharpens the need for a better script.

  Under Carlo and Dino, six people were credited on the script—Bridget Boland, Robert Westerby, Vidor himself, Mario Camerini, Ennio de Concini, and Ivan Perillo. Almost certainly the numbers reflect division and defeat. How one longs to see a single strong writer doing the whole thing—Graham Greene, say—there is the voice that could make Pierre deeper and sadder. Yet Greene was also a movie person, quite capable of supplying Vidor with enough physical activity.

  Added to which, the picture is very good-looking, with Jack Cardiff doing the first unit and Aldo Tonti on the battle scenes. The set design is by Piero Gherardi, who would later do such good production design for Fellini. And the music is by Nino Rota—though he quotes liberally from Tchaikovsky along the way.

  In its full version it’s 208 minutes, not just good-looking, but beautiful and crammed with outstanding supporting performances: Vittorio Gassman as Anatole (Audrey feels his charm, for sure); Anita Ekberg, surprisingly good as Helene; Oscar Homolka (never better, as Kutuzov); Herbert Lom a somber Napoleon; Wilfred Lawson as Bolkonsky, Barry Jones as Rostov, Helmut Dantine as Dolokhov; and John Mills quite haunting as Platon.

  The film got just a single nomination—for Vidor’s direction. And I would not deny him that much credit, for this War and Peace has a fluency and a power that no one had reason to expect. But the strength is in all the support and in the most challenging scenes—the huge movements of people. Audrey Hepburn was by then a major star as well as someone the public liked. But it is her presence that sets the film wrong. Imagine the young Jeanne Moreau instead—her English was good enough—and this could have been more than an unexpected pleasure.

  Waterloo Bridge (1931)

  In 1930, Robert Sherwood’s play—about an American soldier in England in the First World War and a prostitute—did far better in London than New York. A movie version was fabricated in 1940, to capitalize on Vivien Leigh’s new fame. By now she’s a “ballet dancer” and he is Robert Taylor. Mervyn Le Roy directed and it was a straight love story. The 1931 version got lost in the rush—it seems that M-G-M bought it up and refused to let it be seen. And it has only recently come to light.

  Universal got Tom Reed to do a treatment of the play, but director James Whale didn’t like it at all—and having directed Journey’s End in London and lived through the First World War, Whale was a very good test of the material. He was able to get a fresh writer, Benn W. Levy, and although the film is only 71 minutes, and opens up the cramped play rather too deliberately, it remains a very interesting pre-Code portrait of a hooker who has the chance of rising above her station.

  Arthur Edeson does the photography. Charles D. Hall does the sets and makes a good contrast between Myra’s place and the lush stately home to which her soldier boy belongs. Bette Davis appears as an ingenue, and there are good performances from Enid Bennett and Frederick Kerr as the soldier’s parents. The soldier is Kent Douglass, who would later become Douglass Montgomery—and truth to tell he’s not up to the level of his partner, Mae Clarke, the girl in whose face Cagney had planted a grapefruit in Public Enemy. This was after Rose Hobart had been cast. She was set in it for a while but then the studio declined to pick up her option and she went off in a huff.

  Mae Clarke seemed like a star-in-the-making then, yet her long career (she only died in 1992) never made it as far as stardom. A few years after this she was plainly a supporting actress. Still, she’s very appealing in Waterloo Bridge, and we feel the strain as well as the honesty in a girl who is truly a prostitute and who has to admit it finally. The attempts she makes to be ladylike are intriguing, and yet they never bury the sordid nuances. It’s fascinating above all to see Bette Davis watching her. Davis was a beginner—Whale apparently did not like her very much. But she has terrific confidence in the film and you realize that Clarke is very insecure. That works for a while, but then it begins to betray the story.

  Only a few years later, of course, Davis was Mildred in Of Human Bondage—an unrepressed performance—and I think there were things in that that she lifted from Clarke in Waterloo Bridge. It makes the juxtaposition of would-be stars so poignant, and it stresses the daring and the confidence that finally distinguish the great ones. Waterloo Bridge was cut in Britain, and the hooker was said to be a chorus girl. In America, it did better but not enough to lift Clarke out of her rut. How often she must have wondered about Myra as her dark mirror image.

  Way Down East (1920)

  Lottie Blair Parker’s play Way Down East opened in New York in 1898 and passed into the popular repertory. It is said that the actress Phoebe Davies played the lead role over four thousand times. Anna Moore (Lillian Gish) is sent from her country village to see relatives in the city. There she encounters Lennox Sanderson (Lowell Sherman), a cad. He seduces her and pretends to marry her. Only when she declares her pregnancy does he reveal the fraud of the marriage. Anna’s mother dies. The baby dies. Anna wanders around New England until strict squire Bartlett (Burr McIntosh) hires her as a servant. Well, she falls in love with the squire’s son David (Richard Barthelmess). But Sanderson lives nearby and gossip carries the ugly story to the Bartlett house. Anna flees into winter and the snows and David eventually rescues her from the ice floes on a nearby river. Sanderson is exposed and ruined. Everything will be all right. Won’t it?

  I write as someone who, in the late 1970s, had the pleasure of welcoming Lillian Gish (a good deal sharper then than Anna was in 1920) to the community of Dartmouth College and taking her (with press accompaniment) to the banks of the White River (or was it the Connecticut?) there to marvel over the courage of those doing that scene nearly sixty years earlier. Still, I have to tell you that Way Down East is tough to take (the general version that survives is over two hours and the latest DVD is the 150-minute version). Griffith adapted the play, with Anthony Paul Kelly, and he had Billy Bitzer and Hendrik Sartov to photograph it for him.

  There’s no doubt that the melodrama is coherent, in the sense that the story can be followed. But if only it could not be predicted in every detail! If only the characters were more than their captions. I’m not sure if the period of the story is meant to be 1896 or as much as a hundred years earlier. Miss Gish may have splayed herself on ice floes (and white planks) for days at a time while the great finale was filmed, but she cannot make the story plausible or interesting. Whatever one’s final opinion of Griffith the pioneer in films like Birth of a Nation and Intolerance, here he is in 1920 peddling material that never had a chance of being taken seriously. Nor is it really that good a vehicle for Gish. Anna does everything that her stupid society expects of her. She never demonstrates the least ability to be original or herself—to be a unique living person. So Gish goes through the repertory of expressions for the melodrama.

  The one interest that is left, and which hangs over a lot of silent cinema, is that sentimental urge to trust country people while being wary of city folk. At a far higher creative level, that myth is still working in Murnau’s Sunrise. But the fact remains: there was a weird bond between the new, technological medium and the old reactionary humbug that rural people were more sincere in their feelings. Silent cinema was dragged into the future kicking and screaming against progress—the very thing that it best demonstrated.

  The Way We Were (1973)

  It might be easier to know what “we” are expected to put up with from Hollywood junk if we knew exactly who “we” are meant to be. But in the film that endures, “we” is a concept borne on Marvin Hamlisch’s soupy theme song, lyrics by Marilyn and Alan Bergman, that suggests “we” are all on the same ship of fools swept over time’s Niagara by hurt feelings, Jew or Gentile, Red or suntanned, Streisand or Redford. So why make waves when we have “memories”—or residuals?

  Let’s try another tack: If Robert Redford had an ounce of the integrity or intelligence he likes to wear, he’d have taken gro
ss offense at being asked to play Hubbell Gardner in this film. Why? Because the character in Arthur Laurents’ novel, which Laurents adapted for the screen, is a sun-baked jerk, a natural athlete, sweet-looking, a charmer, flirting with the arts, and just about good enough to compose his own epitaph: “He was like the country he lived in. Everything came too easily to him.” There it is, the all-time piercing of the southern California balloon, the crunch on charm.

  Laurents tries to persuade himself and us that this empty paragon falls for Katie Morosky (Streisand), Jewish, radical, aggressive, Jewish. They meet at an Eastern university, and then some years later during the war an affair sets in. Hollywood beckons and we know that Hubbell is going to turn into a limp mix of Robert Redford and Sydney Pollack (our director), but he and Katie marry so that the romantic melodramatic tide can come in full and creamy. HUAC doesn’t like Katie. Katie doesn’t like Hubbell sleeping around and writing shitty pictures. So, despite being pregnant, she leaves him. This allows a few-years-later reunion, of course—by which time Hubbell is writing for television.

  Now, clearly, by the inside standards of Hollywood in 1973, this was the kiss of death. But Hubbell still looks gorgeous and costarry and, really, something in this silly film needed to give him skin disease or make it clear that he is a cretin and just the kind of career story that helps explain why “we” are in the mess we’re in. Hubbell Gardner has the ease and charm of a press secretary smoothing over a president’s lies.