'Have You Seen...?'

by David Thomson

  Ray and Mitra were learning, along with their actors, and there were those—François Truffaut, for one—who declared they had no patience with such slow accounts of peasant life. Ray does seem slow early in his career, and in part that’s because he rejects scenes of action in favor of long moments of sadness and reflection. That changed as he grew older, and as the dramatic instinct quickened so it became easier to see Ray’s tender regard for all his characters. He was a shy man, and he honors shyness above many things in his films. But the films have not dated, and in general there was a move from the East—from Tarkovsky and Sokhurov, as well as Ozu and Ray—that we needed longer to look at some things for the necessary feelings to sink in. Indian cinema, meanwhile, is the most active on earth—in great part because the country has a population that still needs the communal movie experience we have lost.

  Written on the Wind (1956)

  This is perhaps the most respectable example of that dauntingly unrespectable tradition—the social melodrama, another quest for love and happiness that only proves the tormenting punishment held in reserve for Americans by insisting on their pursuit of happiness. And so we have the trembling image—half-satire, half-hysteria—of Dorothy Malone as a Texas oil heiress who has everything but understanding, cuddling a model oil derrick. Throw in a color scheme that is straight out of Freud, dazzling tracking shots that are the specialty of Douglas Sirk, and a theme song by Victor Young and Sammy Cahn in which the close harmony of the Four Aces hits us with “A faithless lover’s kiss is written on the wind!” (I knew I put it somewhere!)

  But just as that celebrated women’s picture Mildred Pierce tells us so much about American society circa 1945, so Written on the Wind is an enticing key to the locked closets of Eisenhower’s nation, musclebound on power but terribly shy of its own guilty secrets. Kyle and Mitch are boyhood friends, but just as Kyle is the heir to a vast oil fortune, so Mitch is the lower-class kid who has become the family’s trusted operative. Mitch is adored by Kyle’s sister, Marylee, but Mitch is so decent and noble a guy that he can see Marylee is Big Trouble and an alcoholic slut in the making because while she has derricks to hug there are none to go to bed with.

  And then Kyle meets Lucy from the East and marries her and—wouldn’t you know it—Mitch and Lucy fall quietly, discreetly, and impassively in love. Kyle begins to sweat. He can’t make Lucy pregnant. He can’t swing that heir. And he begins to suspect Mitch. Then Lucy does get pregnant. And Kyle turns nasty.

  All of this is from a best-selling novel by Robert Wilder and a script by George Zuckerman. But it’s the casting that is so fabulously intriguing. Dorothy Malone had always been a provocateuse, eager to lead, ever since the Acme bookstore in The Big Sleep. Robert Stack was a he-man with a glass jaw. Lauren Bacall revealed—in Sirk’s gaze—her primness. And then there is Rock Hudson playing the stalwart. Yet surely Sirk, who made eight films with Hudson, knew his innermost yearnings. And thus the real secret text in the film is the unspeakable attraction between Stack and Hudson, and the relative emotional homelessness of the women.

  Russell Metty’s photography puts a seething tension in the décor and in the actors’ gestures—there is an espionage-like mask always about to crack. There’s no doubt that this power has survived, and it was made clearer by the films of Rainer Werner Fassbinder. Still, it’s fair to say that the excitement of Sirk’s great diagnoses of an unsound wealthy America came in the 1950s when the films were new. There’s a way in which—polished as the films are—they feel like rehearsals moving ever closer to their own heart of darkness.

  W.R.: Mysteries of the Organism (1971)

  It has been an interesting discovery in doing this book that several films established as radical some decades ago, but not always seen in the passing years, take your breath away as you come back to them when checking on whether they deserve a place in the 1,000. So, as I planned lists toward this survey, I penciled in W.R. without too much thought. At the moment when I began teaching film, it was the rage. I then met Dusan Makavejev and became friendly with him—I believe we once talked about a kind of “Cinema Inferno,” a film in which a child film buff in war-torn Yugoslavia hunts for the final reel to The Wizard of Oz (which he has never been able to see).

  Well, things turned out rough in Dusan’s country and his health has not always been of the best. So meetings became fewer—and he has not made enough films for someone of his extraordinary mind. And sometimes the films one has loved once are disappointments. Not this. W.R. is wicked, exuberant, funny, sexy; it is just one more film to suggest that the early seventies was a hell of a time, when all over the world it seemed there were brilliant minds finding quite new and startling ways to put films together and trap us in the middle of the experience.

  Of course, 1971 was during the Cold War, which was harsh and cozy by turns, but which certainly allowed for more vigorous comedy than our current attitude toward Russia. W.R. means Wilhelm Reich, in one sense—the amiably dotty American theorist on sexual suppression and the creator of the orgone box. A good deal of the film traces his uneven life and shows various attempts at the enactment of his theories. In turn, this cuts against and into the story of Milena (Milena Dravic), an exemplary and liberated Yugoslavian girl who wants to assist and participate in the sexual liberation of a Soviet skating star.

  In fact, Reich’s kindred figure in the film is Josef Stalin, a massive if somewhat frozen sexual presence and a version of a political ice age in Makavejev’s guerrilla thinking. It’s clear he prefers Milena to Stalin, but it’s equally apparent that the film realizes how very eccentric Reich is. The virtues of his thinking have not dispelled his comic isolation as an intellectual figure in the American hinterland. But Makavejev is and was a satirist who was reconciled to the likelihood of any deeply thoughtful person coming across as a madman (in the U.S. as much as in Russia).

  At just 86 minutes, and photographed by Pega Popovic and Aleksandar Petkovic in a kind of instant color, W.R. is less a self-conscious film than a rabid examination of consciousness happy to try any method that comes to mind. Its origins lie in agitprop theater, and maybe in Serbian/Slav folklore as much as in the coded structures of television and advertising. There were thoughts and plans for Makavejev to make something—anything—in America, and it is plainly our loss that he was not made more welcome. He was never going to be a natural storyteller, but as a student of psychology, history, and ideology he is a fascinating commentator on fallacy and phallacy alike. But he is seventy-six now, and so it is up to books like this to insist on W.R.: Mysteries of the Organism.

  The Wrong Man (1957)

  “In 1952, I think,” Hitchcock told François Truffaut, “a musician at New York’s Stork Club went home at two o’clock in the morning. In front of his door he was met by two men who hauled him off to different places, like saloons, and asked various people there, ‘Is this the man?’ Anyway, he was arrested and charged with a hold-up. Though he was completely innocent, he had to stand trial, and eventually, as a result of all the trouble, his wife lost her mind and was put in an insane asylum.”

  Manny Balestrero is a stooped bass player, and we see the long fingers of Henry Fonda plucking at the strings as we hear the heartbeat of his music in this most mysterious of Hitchcock films. It’s not that the master hadn’t often teased us with stories of people of absolute innocence outraged by accusation. It’s not that we ever forgot Hitch’s story about how his father once had him locked up for an hour or so in the local police station. But the stories of outraged innocence are so often pitched on the edge of comic absurdity (The 39 Steps, North by Northwest) and I don’t think there is a laugh in The Wrong Man. Indeed, you can hear in Hitchcock’s own account of it how close this is to the expected horror of Kafka—one day, two men just took him away. It’s not even that they had to say they were policemen. But don’t we all deserve and expect, somehow, to be quietly apprehended—and never seen again?

  So, it’s immaterial that The Wrong Man is based on a re
al case when its entire atmosphere concerns an appointment foretold, or an arrest in the ordinary way of things. The mood goes through disbelief to anger to dread and all the time that blank air of normalcy beckons. Won’t a time come when it seems proper? That’s when we notice that the wife (Vera Miles) is not quite herself—and realize that Manny’s ordeal has yet one more twist to take: that his wife will go crazy. And it’s then that you feel how close this world has come to Bresson. For getting what you deserve—such a stalwart principle in American film—has gone out the window. And even if Manny is cleared, with that haunting moment when the right man walks forward and occupies the outline of the wrong man (like Hitch fitting his own silhouette on the TV show) still there is no mercy for the wife. Perhaps she will get better. But perhaps she can never recover from this glimpse of bad luck. How are you going to muster the nerve to go out tomorrow?

  In the end, that’s what The Wrong Man is about—the way in which nihilism or inertia can smother being and activity once bad luck is proved as a principle in the world. Of course, it is the film made before Vertigo, which only goes to sharpen the question, Do we earn all our bad luck? Or is there a fate that sometimes plays the game of getting us, too?

  Wuthering Heights (1939)

  Emily Brontë’s great novel, published in 1847, has had a strange career in the movies: there is the Buñuel film, Abismos de Pasión (1950), sufficient to remind us that the novel was always a favorite of the surrealists and is a testament to forbidden or mad love; there is the Rivette film, Hurlevent, that touches on the novel; there have been two British versions, one with Timothy Dalton and Anna Calder-Marshall, the other with Ralph Fiennes and Juliette Binoche; there is even Devotion, a Warner Brothers biopic on the family, with Olivia de Havilland as Charlotte, Ida Lupino as Emily, and Arthur Kennedy as their brother, Branwell.

  And there is the William Wyler picture, with Laurence Olivier and Merle Oberon, the famous one that got nominations for Best Picture, Best Director, for Olivier and for Geraldine Fitzgerald. The one where the Yorkshire moors north of Haworth are replaced with the rolling Conejo Hills of California. It was a Goldwyn production, and for once Wyler was unable to find or hold on to its saving reality. It is a terrible film (genteel and restrained) that seems to have no idea what the book is, how it works, or where its greatness lies.

  The story of the film is bizarre. Ben Hecht and Charles Mac Arthur did a script on vacation and on spec. They got Walter Wanger interested in it, and Wanger had a mind to cast Charles Boyer and Sylvia Sidney. Then he quarreled with Sidney and sold the script to Goldwyn. All that mogul knew was it had to be directed by William Wyler. Wyler suggested Bette Davis. Goldwyn insisted on Merle Oberon, and then thought of Laurence Olivier. Searching in England, Wyler found Robert Newton and knew he was right for the part. It was a brilliant decision, for Heathcliff must be far from handsome—he must be rough, poor, and nearly ugly. Of course, Wyler thought of Vivien Leigh as he met Olivier, but he couldn’t see her rising higher than Isabella. The proper casting? Newton and Wendy Hiller—but then Goldwyn would never have made it.

  He tried to change the title, which he could not understand, but was told it was a classic and had to stay. So he worked away at everything else. Gregg Toland was hired to give it a shadow and candlelight look. The great out-of-doors was entirely wrong. Olivier was a matinee idol. And Merle Oberon was a travesty. Wyler grilled the actors. He went for take after take, as if he knew that the secret of the book was not coming across. But it is a book about houses as prisons as well as places of security. The outside—the open—is liberty itself, a world of spirits. And it is a ghost story. But its style should be rough, simple, and stark. Wyler made it a love story whereas it is a book about the hopelessness of love written by a young woman disposed to blow the china set called Jane Austen to smithereens. It is in no way a comfortable or classic novel. It is a book about ecstasy and loss.

  The rich supporting cast includes David Niven, Flora Robson, Donald Crisp, Hugh Williams, Leo G. Carroll, Miles Mander, Cecil Kellaway, and Rex Downing.

  Yankee Doodle Dandy (1942)

  In 1939, George M. Cohan was sixty-one and ailing. He was also the supreme figure in the history of American musical theater—a songwriter, an actor, a singer and dancer, a playwright, and a producer. His heyday had been from about 1910 to 1930 and his great moment was America’s involvement in the First World War and his 1917 song “Over There.” In December 1939, he consulted with a play about his own life, Yankee Doodle Boy, written by the young Walter Kerr. It never made New York—the timing was off. But by 1941, the state of the war had changed. So Cohan tried to mount a movie about himself: he nearly got Goldwyn and Astaire to sign on, but Fred felt it was not quite him. Then a friend suggested Jimmy Cagney. Plainly, this was good casting, but Cagney was the more interested because he was being charged as a Communist. So Jimmy’s brother, William, went to Warners. Cohan got $125,000 and 10 percent of the gross. Cagney got another 10 percent. A staggering contract.

  The script job was given to Robert Buckner, with Cohan’s request that his private life be omitted! Buckner absorbed a great deal of material from Cohan—but it was a tough grind, with very little humor. So the script was passed over to the Epstein brothers. They stressed the relationship between Cohan and his wife, Mary (Joan Leslie). They cut out a pack of Cohan cronies and they added comedy. But it was Buckner who had set up the framework of Cohan telling his story to Franklin Roosevelt—a role Cohan had played in I’d Rather Be Right, the 1937 Rodgers and Hart musical.

  You can read the script and still wonder whether this was a viable project. But you have not yet encountered the glee with which Cagney took the part by the scruff of its own neck and shook it until it possessed him. I do not minimize the work of director Michael Curtiz—he was in charge of so many great entertainments, in such a range of moods, that he has to be honored. James Wong Howe shot it. But Cagney estimated that not many people really knew or recalled how Cohan had moved. So Cohan would be Cagney. John Boyle worked on the dance numbers, but Cagney was a trained hoofer and the toy soldier exuberance comes from him and it determines the way Cohan moves in the nonmusical scenes.

  Thus it is that a mere name in theater history is one of the great moving images in film history—strutting, his ass pointed outward, his head jutting forward. It is punchy, elegant, dainty, and dangerous all at the same time. It was also a blessed choice, for which Cagney won the Oscar. For the rest, Joan Leslie is sweet, Walter Huston is very good as Cohan’s father. The cast also includes Richard Whorf, Irene Manning, George Tobias, Rosemary DeCamp, Jeanne Cagney, Frances Langford, S. Z. Sakall, Walter Catlett, and Eddie Foy Jr.

  Yankee Doodle Dandy premiered on May 29, 1942, at a gala that raised $4.75 million in war bonds. On November 5, Cohan himself died, a happy man.

  The Year of Living Dangerously (1983)

  Australia has its own view of the world, one that has no choice but to live in the Pacific. The Year of Living Dangerously is one of the few films that spring from that point of view, and asks us all what we know about Indonesia. More than twenty years after the film was made, do we know much more collectively? You can hope that the era of Sukarno has passed, and that is the crisis of Peter Weir’s film, but now we know that Indonesia has a formidably large Islamic population, even if it is not “like” Arab countries. And we know that danger still lives there. How long is it before we see the equation between the danger and our ignorance? After all, elsewhere, we have lived to regret deposing one tyrant and his terrible order.

  It’s a story about an Australian journalist, Guy Hamilton (Mel Gibson), assigned to Jakarta in 1965. He is helped there by Billy Kwan, Chinese-Australian (Linda Hunt) and an endlessly mysterious figure. He also meets and has an affair with Jill Bryant (Sigourney Weaver), who is attached to the British embassy. But the situation deteriorates in Jakarta. Guy is badly hurt and he and Jill only just get away in time.

  The story came from a novel by C. J. Koch, and Koch, Weir, and Dav
id Williamson all worked on a script that leaves a healthy place for the romance and is generally content to equate Indonesia’s unfamiliarity with the mysteries of strange societies. But Billy is a remarkable character, torn in his own allegiances, very eager to be accepted, and almost the embodiment of complicated insights in his mixed racial identity and his considerable gender intrigue—it was clear that he was being played by a woman, even if sexual ambivalence was not a large part of the role.

  But the other thing is that just as Peter Weir showed a terrific appetite for the erotic relationship that coexists with suspicion on both parts, so it’s a film (a little like The Third Man) where we learn to trust no one and nothing. The feeling of menace or paranoia is very strong—and it comes in part from just one shot of “Sukarno” watching Guy. It’s an actor, of course, and the film was shot in the Philippines, but there’s a powerful sense of documentary implications.

  The Billy character is himself fascinated with Javanese puppets and the role of puppet master, and sometimes this adds a bit too much “mysterioso” to nasty confrontations with crowds and police who do not speak our language. Of course, this was an Australian film financed by an American major (M-G-M/UA), and the sexiness of it all was played up along with the old notion that the East is a strange place. But Weir is too good to shuffle it all off like that, and in hindsight I’m inclined to guess that he might be just the filmmaker to get at a story that exposes the awkward gap in the way Europeans and Islamists think and feel. Also with Michael Murphy, Bill Kerr, and Noel Ferrier. Hunt won a Best Supporting Oscar (quickly—actor or actress?).