Cut forward maybe forty-five years and there I was in upstate New York, hoping to interview Joan Bennett—the woman in the window. And there she was in her living room sitting beneath the selfsame portrait. Alas, she hardly remembered what it was: her memory was gone and she would be dead in a few years. But don’t take it for granted the dream of the movies won’t come to you sometimes with a perfect present.
Nunnally Johnson wrote the script, and he was quite bitter in resisting Fritz Lang’s feeling that this whole story should be a fantasy or a dream. Johnson was a smart man, a good writer, and a loyal, funny friend to many—in short, a good guy. Few people ever laid such charges at Lang’s door. Still, trust the artist. Lang’s method was always to stage every event as if he were quoting it from the scrapbook of dream images—what I mean by that is that the brilliant compositions always underline themselves; they are in italic, and thus a touch suspect, more haunting than reliable. And the dream structure places The Woman in the Window in that precious category of films that define cinema itself.
The suspense is tender, mocking, ironic, the violence is performed, and the outbursts of passion are like phrases of music, nearly. And so you imagine the “orchestra” of film technicians—fifty of them, maybe—laboring over the beauty of it all. The cameraman is Milton Krasner, the art director is Duncan Cramer, the clothes are by Muriel King. And somehow all those elements are like skins to the dream, layers of flesh or silk, the amazing texture that makes you feel you could reach out, touch and stroke, or pick up the crucial scissors yourself.
Fritz Lang’s is not the easiest career to grasp or like. His genius is very formal, and he often deserves the charge of being formulaic and humorless. But The Woman in the Window is one of his signal films. Of course, its narrative setup is very like that of Fatal Attraction, and it’s when you put those two films side by side that you see the difference between art and sensationalism, real eroticism and just having two movie stars who will pretend they are fucking. There’s hardly anything that Lang didn’t do long ago, in the days when fucking was just a matter of wondering.
A Woman of Paris (1923)
A Woman of Paris was the first picture Charlie Chaplin delivered under his arrangement to be part of United Artists. And it’s an odd start—not a comedy, and a film in which Chaplin himself plays only a very small role. It wasn’t what UA expected—least of all Mary Pickford. Yet it was Chaplin making a new start: a full-length film, aiming at romantic sophistication—and, deep down, it was a self-portrait (as if Chaplin could make any other kind of film). At first, no one was really satisfied. But the critics admired it and many filmmakers hailed it as a model for where films might be headed. It’s in answering that question that A Woman of Paris remains most intriguing.
It’s the story of Marie (Edna Purviance), a country girl who goes to live in Paris, and who is involved romantically with two men—Jean Millet (Carl Miller), a melancholy painter, who is guarded by his mother; and Pierre Revel (Adolphe Menjou), the “richest bachelor in Paris,” an insouciant womanizer. Chaplin clearly saw the two men as aspects of himself—agonized artist and near libertine—and Menjou’s performance is based on Chaplin himself. Moreover, in casting Edna Purviance, he was looking back on a long relationship that had ended with Chaplin marrying Mildred Harris, and hoping to free himself from Edna by launching her career.
So it’s the story of sophisticated people, and one can feel Chaplin’s instinct—that educated people relate to each other more quickly and with more irony. So, this is a film searching for a more rapid, internal level of storytelling. In many places, you can feel the cutting jumping ahead of the dialogue titles—as if half-glimpsing the idea that can be unspoken. But will the unsophisticated people be able to follow it? So it ends up tortured and striving, a film reaching for tacit understanding, but never quite getting it. For instance, Chaplin wanted to convey that, on and off, Pierre lives with Marie. He came up with Pierre keeping a stock of his perfumed handkerchiefs at Marie’s house. Not bad, but one or two words of dialogue—a sigh, a grunt—could obviate the need for all the acting out. In other words, it is silence that is blocking the synapses and making the story so naïve—A Woman of Paris is a decade after Dubliners!
And it’s not that Chaplin had the greatest eye for anything except comedy or pathos. He doesn’t actually see sophistication. But he is trying hard, and the attempt is fascinating. It has great rewards: the ending—where a hay cart (Marie) passes a swish new car (Pierre), without either one noticing—is really ironic and without smug underlining.
Alas, the performances are tough to take: Edna Purviance was pretty, and she seems good-natured, but she isn’t a beauty who draws us in. She has one great scene: reading of Pierre’s engagement to another, but declining to notice. But that’s all, and the film didn’t ignite her career. Carl Miller is grave and charmless. Only Menjou really captures the spark of the picture.
Woman of the Year (1942)
There is hardly a movie that played so large a part in a star’s career (and transformation) than Woman of the Year. Quite simply, it is crucial in the remarketing of Katharine Hepburn, a process willingly entered into by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer but plainly driven by the star herself. And along the way, she met Spencer Tracy. It was the start of her immense popularity. But something was lost and you can see it go in the course of this adroit picture.
One day, the young writer, Ring Lardner Jr., visited a friend on the set of Tom, Dick and Harry, which was being directed by Garson Kanin. Kanin said he had an idea for Kate Hepburn, a picture to follow The Philadelphia Story that might be instrumental in killing off the box-office-poison legend attached to the actress. Kanin suggested that Lardner develop the idea with his brother, Michael Kanin—the idea of Hepburn as a Dorothy Thompson-like columnist, a smart modern woman.
They worked hard together on a script and made a novella out of it for easier reading. The novella was in the voice of the male sports writer who falls for the woman, and it was called The Thing About Women. Garson sent it to Kate, and she jumped at it. She took it to M-G-M, to Louis B. Mayer, and did the deal herself—$100,000 for her and $100,000 for the two writers. Joseph L. Mankiewicz was assigned as producer and it now seems certain that Hepburn herself asked for George Stevens as director—instead of her favorite, George Cukor. She wanted a more manly approach; she knew the project needed a director who would sympathize with the guy. She was lining up for her own subjugation.
She asked for Spencer Tracy to play the sports reporter—she had asked for him before on The Philadelphia Story. Tracy was committed to The Yearling, but when that was postponed he agreed to do Woman of the Year. They met on the steps of the Thalberg Building. She said, “Mr. Tracy, I think you’re a little short for me,” and Mankiewicz told her not to worry, the actor would cut her down to size. True story? Who knows? It smells of good writing, but who can resist that?
The next important thing was the way Hepburn looked in the picture—she looked beautiful and sexy, and that comes from Stevens, from cameraman Joseph Ruttenberg, from Adrian on clothes and Sidney Guilaroff on hair. She consented to this treatment—to glamour. She showed her legs as Tess Harding and she let Tracy beat her up in a figurative way. He took the shine off her.
More than that, Stevens changed the script in which Tess had been Sam Craig’s superior all the way. Whether pushed by Hepburn or not, he made an ending (written by John Lee Mahin) in which Sam gets the better of her and she has to make breakfast for him as he waits in bed—just to show that some sexual revolution wasn’t in the offing. The writers protested (they would get an Oscar), and they were allowed to doctor the new ending. But its thrust remained. Katharine Hepburn had been brought down, and eternity opened up before her.
A Woman Under the Influence (1974)
Married to the actress Gena Rowlands, John Cassavetes often asked her what she’d like to do. In the early seventies, she talked about a play that dealt with the new ideas about women—feminism. Cassavetes was not a card
-carrying feminist (he disliked separate interest groups), but he wrote a play for Gena, and when she said that this play would be draining, demanding, exhausting, he wrote three plays. It was the process that led eventually to the script called A Woman Under the Influence.
Nick Longhetti (Peter Falk) is a sewer foreman—this film is one of the few efforts to deal with an authentic working-class experience. He would say he is a man’s man, which means he is most comfortable with men. So he works late on an emergency job when he was supposed to be taking his wife Mabel (Rowlands) out. One of the crew asks him, “Did you call Mabel?” “How am I gonna call her?” he asks—he is incapable of explaining or apologizing. The other fellow says that Mabel “is a delicate, sensitive woman,” whereupon Nick jumps on him, “Mabel is not crazy!”
There is the heart of the film. Mabel is being driven toward madness by a man who cannot deal in the terms of her “sensitivity.” This is a marriage with noise but no communication, yet Cassavetes wants to believe it is a union of deeply kindred spirits, joined by affection and experience. What the film spells out—helplessly, because it is afraid to face this—is that the two people are unsuited to marriage and to the crowded emotional demands of family life.
Mabel goes away to a hospital, and then she comes back. To a welcome that is desperate, full of yearning, but unsuitable. Nick is probably more troubled or dysfunctional than Mabel. His work is an escape, like the friendship of guys—and it is very structured. In her home life, Mabel lives out a chaos that is destroying her. With more money, more resources of intellect, Mabel would try to discard the “influence” of Nick. But they both live a warm, close style of family life that is virtually confusion.
So this is not A Doll’s House (from which the wife must walk away). Nor is it a story about a man needing to save himself. Rather, it’s a study in wounding togetherness that would be better ended but that hangs in place because of the dogma of company. Cassavetes longs for people to be and stay together, when everything recommends separation. I think he feels the Longhettis are in love—but they’re in prison. And to experience the film is like watching two beasts keep bumping into each other in a cramped space. It’s touching but exhausting.
The film was shot slowly in family-like circumstances. There were several people doing camera: Mitchell Breit, Gary Graver, Caleb Deschanel, Fred Elmes, among others, and the camera is not unlike these characters, blind but striving to see. A Woman Under the Influence is the closest Cassavetes had to a breakthrough—it got nominations for direction and for Gena Rowlands and it probably earned close to $10 million on a $1 million budget.
The Women (1939)
There was a joke going the rounds in late 1938 that the M-G-M picture of The Women had been devised as a suitable and merciful dumping ground for ladies who had not been cast as Scarlett O’Hara. And several eventual stars had been very interested: Paulette Goddard (the favorite until Vivien Leigh showed up), Joan Crawford, Norma Shearer (in theory), and Joan Fontaine (more likely as Melanie—which went to her sister, Olivia de Havilland). But what really paid off in the joke was that by the time the cast was assembled, dressed, and ready to go, they had George Cukor as their director—just after his firing from Gone With the Wind, allegedly for giving too much time to the actresses.
It was a hit Broadway comedy from 1936, written by Clare Boothe—though George S. Kaufman helped get the show mounted. The idea comes from Nevada’s 1931 law offering quickie divorces, the legislation that gave Reno its brief claim to fame. Norma Shearer wants a divorce because she found that her husband was having an affair with a shopgirl (Joan Crawford). Of course, she only learned this because the spiteful Rosalind Russell set it up that way. (The concept is full of the notion that women are best employed as their own enemies.)
Anita Loos and Jane Murfin did the script and they tried to stress bitchiness and catfights as much as possible. But compared with the original play, the language of the movie was toned down far too much. The dullest moments are whenever anyone turns “sincere”—a warning gong needs to be sounded. After that, the worst thing in the picture are the clothes (by Adrian) and the daft decision to interrupt the crackling action with a fashion show sequence, an attempt to get Metro involved with Technicolor and a subtle suggestion that they, the women, are lovely if they elect to shut up. Of course, divorce was relatively new in 1939, or risqué still. It’s likely that the whole leverage has dated a lot in an age when people think they’re behaving however they want.
Cukor doesn’t overwork, but he likes his cast and lets them romp. Oliver T. Marsh and Joseph Ruttenberg did the high-key photography, and the picture contrives a fanciful and flattering view of Reno. (The real adventures of would-be divorcées, learning to ride and fly and gamble, must have been more interesting.)
Shearer is decent but out of her league. Goddard is as pretty and funny as she was in life. Russell steals the picture. But Crawford enjoys her nastiness to the hilt. The cast also includes Mary Boland, Lucile Watson, Phyllis Povah, Ruth Hussey, Virginia Weidler, Florence Nash, Margaret Dumont, Marjorie Main, and Hedda Hopper. Look as hard as you can—you won’t find a man.
What’s really missing is the clublike league of powerful women in Hollywood, the way it civilized the frontier town, and its gradual development into several demure lesbian relationships. After all, if movie fostered that dopey way of gazing at women, why shouldn’t some dames fall for it, too?
Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown (1988)
It’s a great title, one that puts the era of screwball romance and post-Franco Spain in the same jostling madhouse with happy acknowledgments to all those films that have been bold or reckless enough to put “women” in the title, from Cukor’s 1939 Road to Reno jaunt, The Women, to And God Created Woman to Desperate Housewives. Of course, Pedro Almodóvar is Spanish, surrealist, outrageous, sexually inflamed as a young terror, and still the kind of beloved enfant terrible who knows enough of the gay perspective to put women in their place—on a trembling screen where laughter always threatens the pathos.
Pepa (Carmen Maura) is forty-plus and still ravishing, a redhead who wears pink (with orange, green, and lemon accessories), and a woman who does lip-synching in the Spanish film industry—we see her working on scenes from Johnny Guitar (that uncertain guide to life). Well, her man dumps her (he leaves the message on a phone answering machine) and so the woman has 88 minutes of crisis, trying to chase the guy down while looking for someone else and remembering where the drugged gazpacho is. As always with Almodóvar, the film is a study of shoes, skirts, thighs, hairdos, lipstick—no one has ever surpassed this scruffy, half-deaf urchin’s adoration of women, or so persuasively indicated that the secret equation of l’amour fou is homosexuals gazing at women. This is a Spain designed to make General Franco shudder in his grave—preferably to a mambo rhythm. It’s like TV in that it’s live, throwaway, and a weird mixture of junk and speed. But Almodóvar’s secret credo is “not to be bored,” and he knows that film is friendly to anyone who will try anything.
Is he Buñuel or Lubitsch? No. He can never quite bring himself to be the sucker for atmosphere that those two giants managed. Almodóvar is very productive, however, and there’s no doubt but that he has altered the way Spain regards itself and the living tradition of screwball feeds on new jitters. It was nominated for the Best Foreign Picture Oscar and it won the European Film Award for Almodóvar and Maura. It’s the anchor to his place in international art-house cinema. He works through florid coincidence and bizarre juxtaposition and he surely rivals Buñuel and the serene surrealist openness to the most unlikely things sitting together at the same table.
He worked for years with Maura, and helped us see what a volatile and versatile personality she is, but Women also uses Antonio Banderas and demonstrates Almodóvar’s unprejudiced appetite for glorious babes and hunks. He is at the same time a man who understands the nightmare world of AIDS and the daft golden age of Sternberg and Jean Negulesco (Woman’s World and The Best of E
verything, ironic titles before that genre had been generally conceived of). But it is Almodóvar’s special cozy homeliness that is at the root of his warmth and his sympathy for freakishness and all other disorders.
The World of Apu (1959)
In the third part of the Apu trilogy, following Pather Panchali (1955) and Aparajito (1956), Apu (Soumitra Chatterjee) is living in the city in great poverty. He wants to be a writer, but he needs to get a job. Then one day he goes to the country to see his friend Pulu. It happens that a marriage has been arranged during Apu’s stay, but when the groom arrives it is painfully clear that he is insane. It does not matter the cause, if the marriage is canceled the bride will be disgraced and cursed. Apu, an educated man, protests this primitive attitude. But he changes no minds. And so he steps into the vacancy and marries the young bride (Sharmila Tagore).
They go back to the city to live and the bride puts on a brave face, no matter how distressed she is by their poverty. A son is born, but the mother dies during childbirth. Apu goes away, helpless, bitter. The baby is looked after by the grandfather. This is a movie rooted in Indian custom yet devoted to the example of De Sica and Italian neo-realism (a great influence on writer-director Satyajit Ray). By the time Apu returns from working in a coal mine, his son is alienated and intransigent. But the prospect of reunion and a new friend brings them together. So Apu walks into the future with his young son. The train he heard in the jungle as a child remains a vivid symbol. Once the train meant escape. Now the grandfather holds the boy’s toy train in his hand as the boy begins to forget it.
Photographed very simply by Subrata Mitra, and with music by Ravi Shankar, the Apu trilogy shows Ray’s preference for distancing drama—for instance, we do not see the young mother dying in agony. We have to read Apu’s face to measure the loss. Still, this trilogy holds a deserved place in the history of humanist cinema, and if Ray never approached the level of, say, Mizoguchi or Ozu, still he helped introduce the idea of Indian film to the world—not Bollywood, but an Indian movie that could be identified and seen outside India.
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