The Wind (1928)
The Wind is one of those silent pictures (made on the cusp) where much of the action is so dramatic, one is left only in suspense. And there are two endings (as if the production team was torn over what the picture was about). The tape I watched most recently has not just the happy ending that M-G-M called for but an elderly Lillian Gish appearing in an introduction—very pretty in color—lamenting the compromise they had to make. For Gish takes the line that Irving Thalberg entrusted her with the film. She was virtually its producer as well as its Letty.
Gish adds that she found the novel, by Dorothy Scarborough, sold it to Thalberg, and then wrote a four-page treatment that Frances Marion turned into a screenplay. Moreover, it was Gish who secured the directing job for Victor Seastrom (Sjöström as was).
We begin on the train going West. Letty is a lone traveler, coming all the way from Virginia—the destination is said to be Texas. Nothing is offered as an explanation of why she is making the journey, yet she is already anxious over the wind that batters the train windows and leaves dust everywhere. But a salesman, Wirt Roddy (Montagu Love) picks her up and warns her about the wind—the prospects of the wind are rather overdone, and when the train puts Letty off it is not in Texas but in the Mojave Desert. This is rather piling on. People and animals do live in much of Texas, where it can be unpleasantly hot and windy. They do not live or farm in the Mojave because life could not be sustained there. So the film cheats: when Letty meets Lige (Lars Hanson) there is a scene of them talking in the wind in which they both wear soft-brimmed hats that are going mad in the breeze. Fair enough: it shows the threat and the stress. But the other cowboys (like men in such places) wear the stiff-brimmed hats that Stetson made specially for that weather.
Letty is not happy in the West. She is not made welcome and she ends up marrying Lige, a rough, decent cowboy. Not that he touches her. It is around here in the film that you have to begin to ask yourself what the wind is symbolizing—and why did Letty go to live in the wind? Is it the sexual life she is afraid of? In which case, what should our attitude be? Lige reckons to save up the money and send her home—to Virginia (one of the few sane developments in the film). But Wirt Roddy comes back and has rape in mind. So Letty shoots him. It’s a powerful moment, but Wirt’s surprise is understandable. She has flirted with him earlier. What does she want?
Of course, people never get to say what they want. A few words would change this film. If that sounds sarcastic, don’t let me take away from the bravura distress of Gish’s performance. With airplane engines to whip up the wind, with Seastrom doing his sympathetic best, it’s a near masterpiece. But in the West people go West out of courage, adventure, challenge, and hope—and Letty is without those things. In the happy ending she decides to make a go of it. In the unhappy close—which Gish believed was the right one—she totters out into the wind and the roaring furnace.
Wings (1927)
Flying in the First World War may have been our last order of knighthood. There was a code of chivalry and honor and every combatant was as moved by the fresh wonder of flight as by the thought of death. Or is it that the movies make it seem so? Was the real fighting in the air just a matter of desperate speed, blind luck, and survival? Or are we right to remember the moments, as in Wings, when the German ace Kellerman (Carl von Haartman) lets David Armstrong (Richard Arlen) get away when his guns jam? That Kellerman is ancestor to the mythic Ernst Kessler (Bo Brundin) in The Great Waldo Pepper, and even the crippled officer who runs a prison camp in La Grande Illusion. Perhaps it was all a pitiless mess in the air—but legend says it was Wings.
William Wellman’s epic has not faded too much, even if it sometimes seems as if the First World War is being fought just to permit the rigmarole of fliers falling in and out of love with their girls and each other. So, on the one hand, it’s the story of “buddies,” Armstrong and Jack Powell (Buddy Rogers), in love with friendship, flying, and the same girl—Sylvia Lewis (Jobyna Ralston)—only because Jack can’t see yet that Mary Preston (Clara Bow) is the one for him. And for us—Bow is authentic sweetheart material, captivated by the fun and silliness in romance. In comparison, Ms. Ralston never gets her wheels off the ground.
It was a mighty Paramount production, with weeks down in Texas waiting for the right combination of clouds in the sky. Wellman (a veteran of the Lafayette Escadrille) knew that you needed clouds to get perspective. Harry Perry was the head man in a team of a dozen photographers, most of them aloft during the brilliant dogfights.
The script is by Hope Loring and Louis Lighton and it has to give too much time (in 136 minutes) to the love stories. Never mind. The background story came from John Monk Saunders, who had been in the Army Air Corps and was a writer who specialized in fliers who had survived the war but with damage. It’s from Saunders and Wellman, I suspect, that the film derives its real force—as a symphony to flight and fliers, and the laconic view of a brotherhood almost bent upon death. The war will be won, but Wings knows that the finest of men may die. It is the debut of the “Right Stuff,” and nothing catches it better than the brief appearance of White (Gary Cooper), giving that curt salute so treasured by Hawks, among others, as he goes off on what must be his last mission—otherwise Gary Cooper would be starring.
It’s the top-notch air film, better than Hell’s Angels (and probably gentler on the staff). They say it cost $800,000—and it made that back several times over. So it had to win Best Picture-Production at the first Oscars, though Murnau’s Sunrise also won a Best Picture award that year for “Artistic Production.” Eighty years later, Wings is still a match for Sunrise.
Wings of Desire (1988)
In the cinema, we have several angels: there is Clarence in It’s a Wonderful Life, a novice and apprentice, but able to put in a good word for life; in A Matter of Life and Death, angels run the whole afterlife business, with a starchiness learned in the British civil service; and there was Claude Rains in Here Comes Mr. Jordan—being as cool and urbane as possible about the big surprise. But that only teaches one to see that Rains’s customary sangfroid was often verging on the angelic. After all, as the ultimate figure of law, order, and chance in Casablanca, you could say that Renault has his wings.
And here, I think, the idea of angels becomes very interesting indeed. Consider in how many films—especially those in which it has been moving, striving for flight, escape, or rescue—the camera is an angel. Think of the winged camera in Max Ophüls as being an angel that might want to catch Lola Montès in her perilous fall but can’t intervene. That would be breaking an angels’ rule. An angel watches, an angel sees, and we may presume that he or she prays. The rest is up to us.
That’s the way in to Wings of Desire, a film written by Wim Wenders and Peter Handke, and then directed by Wenders, a film that imagines the plight of people who, just because they watch over us, have to see so much failure and tragedy. So much, that perhaps they become involved.
We are in Berlin—as it happens, not long before the wall that split that city came down. Two angels, Damiel (Bruno Ganz) and Cassiel (Otto Sander), are about their work. They are interesting “men,” neutral, of course, objective, but given an extra glamour by the sepia tones that are their way of seeing. And when you look at Damiel, you see that Bruno Ganz could have been a contender, a god, even. So it is Damiel who desires more. He falls in love with a trapeze artist (Solveig Dommartin) and he thinks of coming to ground.
As photographed by Henri Alekan (he photographed La Belle et la Bête for Cocteau), this is a soulful examination of Berlin as a place aching for spiritual return. Wenders uses the architecture, the gargoyle figures, and even the stone angels (don’t forget Peter Falk), as companions to these human figures, and he sees a modern city where religious faith has to take its chances with so many other hopes and fears. So it’s a poignant metaphor, this idea that one or two noirish-looking onlookers are saintly, or waiting to plan our funeral.
I think the delicate idea falters a little
. Truth to tell, it needs more comic energy than Wenders seems ready to give it. But this is a special, thoughtful movie, a perfect setting for Bruno Ganz—one of the great unidentified (or unclaimed) actors of our time—and probably Wenders’s most interesting picture. Of course, it is also a very important step in the career of Peter Handke.
The Wings of the Dove (1997)
Did Henry James go to the movies, or with any sense of a narrative form coming into being just as he expired? He died in 1916, and it is far more likely that if he went to a show he would have gone to the theater, the arena in which he competed with a will but felt himself humbled and defeated. And yet, by a small stretch of history, one could imagine James living on long enough to see Murnau, Renoir, Antonioni—it’s enough to make one wish for his collected film criticism.
All of which is a way of saying that at a certain moment when very young, I came to a fork in the path and followed movies rather than Henry James. I do not seek pity or forgiveness so much as the understanding that the choice remains hanging in the air. That is why I offer Iain Softley’s The Wings of the Dove as the best example I know of James on film. No, the race is not crowded, though I can imagine other films having their backers—The Heiress, for instance, or Merchant-Ivory’s The Golden Bowl.
The novel is set in 1902. Kate Croy loves an impoverished newspaper writer, Merton Densher. But he is too poor to be married. Kate makes a friend out of Milly Theale, American and an heiress but not well. Kate urges Merton to take an interest in her, and the mix of kindness and unkindness is utterly Jamesian. Milly falls in love with Merton, and though she learns of the plot against her she does leave money to him. When that check comes through, Kate poses this test: Merton must take the money or swear that he is not enthralled by Milly’s memory. The love between Kate and Merton is over.
I tell the story because in James, so often, the arc or the circle of the story is the fatal enclosure. What distinguishes the Softley film first of all is a kind of confidence in the lethal tale that knows it can do without the immense written bedding in which these feeble lovers lie. The film is 101 minutes; the book is 500 pages. There can be no useful equation in which the one becomes the other. The only reason to begin is because Softley has been overpowered by the story and a need to tell it.
On that basis, this Wings of the Dove is an unbearable psychological thriller, set in London and Venice, so remorseless in its tracing of human intrigue and so sure of the survival of something finer that it reminds me of Bresson’s Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne—there are similarities in the plot. Softley has done nothing else to match this (though he is an intriguing director). No one has seen or used the sinister air of disease in Venice so casually—the ghost of Luchino Visconti should have to see this film every day.
And then there is the central trio: Helena Bonham-Carter, Linus Roache, and Alison Elliott. Believe me.
The Winning of Barbara Worth (1926)
It was a novel first, The Winning of Barbara Worth, written by Harold Bell Wright in 1911, and depicting drastic floods on the Colorado River. It sold nearly 3 million copies—and is forgotten today. But the Colorado was an endless crisis and question mark. As the melting snow came down from the Rockies so the lower stretches of the river flooded. At the same time, all that hydroelectric potential was being lost. The Wright novel was so big, Sam Goldwyn had to pay $125,000 for the rights.
He was inspired equally by show business and patriotism and he was certainly prompted by the 1922 conference of western states that first agreed to build a dam on the Colorado. So Goldwyn got Frances Marion to turn the novel into a film, and he asked Henry King to direct. Barbara Worth (Vilma Banky) is the adopted child of desert ranchers. Willard Holmes (Ronald Colman), from East Coast money, comes West with a view to use the Colorado for irrigation. He also rivals local boy Abe Lee for Barbara’s love.
The story hinges on where to build a town—high or low, thinking of floods. Worth goes high and calls the town “Barba.” There are Wild West battles between the factions and in due course a great flood comes. But all is settled finally and Barbara and Willard will be married.
At King’s insistence, the unit moved out to make a tent city—actually called “Barbara Worth” on maps of the time, near Gerlach in the Black Rock Desert (the site today of the Burning Man Festival). This ensured a great sense of veracity (with George Barnes doing the photography) mixed in with newsreel footage of actual floods. It’s likely that Goldwyn was deliberately taking on Greed (which bore his name), but in this case the natural drama of place smothers the romantic story. And Ronald Colman looks decidedly out of place in the desert heat.
That’s what led to the great discovery of the film. The role of Abe Lee was set for Harold Goodwin, but he was doing The Honeymoon Express for Lubitsch and that ran over. So the search was on for a natural cowboy. It unearthed Gary Cooper. At first King hired him as a rider. But when Goodwin failed to appear, Cooper was asked to do the scene when the exhausted Abe arrives with news. Goldwyn protested: it was a big scene and Cooper was a novice. But King stuck to his guns and even Goldwyn was amazed at the naturalism of “Coop.” “He’s the greatest actor I have ever seen in my life,” raved the boss, a contract shaping in his mind.
In fact, that scene was so good it stole the picture and was dropped to save Colman’s face! But the significance to history was clear: the Boulder Dam would be built (the Act funding it passed in 1928), and here in advance of sound, a hard-bitten economy of speech founded in inward belief was clear. Cooper was eclipsing Colman, and the “silence” that came to life in sound pictures could convey uncertainty, shyness, and doubt. The fatal gap between declaration and sub-tiles (so redolent of dishonesty) was gone forever.
The Wizard of Oz (1939)
Harold Arlen was thirty-three, and he had been engaged to do the songs for The Wizard of Oz with Yip Harburg as lyricist. It was a fourteen-week contract for $25,000. And Arlen was changing. In 1937, after years of debate and hesitation, he married Anya Taranda, a showgirl, not Jewish. He loved her enough to overcome that family obstacle. But he was stricken by it, and then Anya fell ill in the mind. But that was not quite yet. She was driving him down Sunset—he liked to be driven so he could close his eyes and let swoops and lines of song fill his head. At Schwab’s, he asked Anya to stop the car. He got out, but he never made it inside. On the sidewalk, outside the drugstore, he wrote the basic line of “Over the Rainbow.”
When they came to film that song, Judy Garland, their Dorothy, was sixteen. Her eager breasts were strapped down. She wore the braids and the gingham dress of a Kansas child. But no one could subtract from her woman’s voice, or the way it grasped the grown-up wistfulness of Arlen’s melody. Victor Fleming was directing the picture. But suddenly there was a crisis down the street at the Selznick lot. George Cukor, the director of Gone With the Wind, had been fired. The picture was on hiatus. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer had a lot of money invested in it and so Victor Fleming was assigned to take over. But Fleming hadn’t quite finished on Oz yet so he hurried and then Louis B. Mayer asked King Vidor if—as a great kindness to his old studio—he’d come in and finish.
So Vidor came in and looked at the barnyard set and he knew it would be in sepia like all the Kansas scenes. And roughly there had been a plan for Judy to sit on a bale of hay and sing the song—or mouth it to the playback. But Vidor heard the song and he felt the line in Arlen’s music, the search almost, and so he added a twist—Judy would move across the set, and the camera, holding on her face, would move with her. And so they shot it.
The picture went to its first preview and studio people fidgeted during the song. “Why is she singing in a barnyard, of all places?” they asked. And Louis B. Mayer gave the order, “Lose the song.” Arlen and Harburg were crazy with anger and grief. A few others—like Arthur Freed—thought it was a pretty song. The song is in the film. It won the Oscar for Best Song that year. And I think it is the moment where a very strange, confused movie puts its foot out on the ground
and says “Home!” For the rest of her life, Garland could not get off a stage or a nightclub floor without singing the song. And no one should kid you that her life was better than wretched, yet maybe when she sang the song she was “home.” And to this day, when that melody lifts, like eyes looking up at the sky, and you feel Judy or Dorothy becoming a woman, anyone who ever loved Hollywood is home.
You know the rest.
The Woman in the Window (1944)
Richard Wanley is played by Edward G. Robinson, so he’s fifty-one in 1944, which makes him a touch elderly to have Bobby Blake as his young son—he says good-bye to his family at the rail station as they go off for the summer. And then he’s on his own. He has a bachelors’ dinner where old chum Raymond Massey teases him about his liberty. It’s late at night (he had fallen asleep in his chair at the club) when he goes out on the empty street and stops to admire the portrait of a woman in a nearby art gallery. It’s strictly photorealist, but she’s lovely and then the woman herself floats into view on the glass of the window. And… well, one thing leads to another and soon Mr. Wanley has had to kill someone, in self-defense.
'Have You Seen...?' Page 156
