The Big Screen - The Story of the Movies

by David Thomson

  Von Sternberg was skilled enough to light and photograph his own pictures, and no one knew more about luminous passivity, the capacity to let the camera in past your eyes. It may be that no one else found such intimacy in Marlene. And he directed her as if she were his slave or his dream: “Turn your shoulders away from me and straighten out…Drop your voice an octave and don’t lisp…Count to six and look at the lamp as if you could no longer live without it.” He is speaking to an actress, but he could be describing the moviegoer in the dark.

  He is maybe the greatest example of a director who appreciates that movie is a matter of beholding something you desire but cannot touch. And he prizes that as a sardonic joke. (Von Sternberg’s The Devil Is a Woman, 1935, would be remade later by Luis Buñuel as That Obscure Object of Desire, 1977, where Fernando Rey is so besotted he cannot see that his beloved is played by two actresses!)

  Von Sternberg must have guessed his way of working was doomed, because he didn’t believe in being serious. He was lucky to get six pictures in America with Dietrich. After that, his career trailed away. Did he care anymore?

  Frank Capra was a very funny filmmaker, and an unsurpassed entertainer, but his ambition was so intense he had no problems with caring. He was born in Palermo in 1897, and never made a Mafia picture. Coming to California at the age of six, he was later educated at what would become CalTech. He messed around in pictures for a few years and then, in 1927, he got a contract to direct at Columbia, securely in the second rank of Hollywood studios and led by Harry Cohn, a boss Capra loved to hate.

  Capra never abandoned the professional urge to entertain, and he was as good with actors as he was blessed by having the screenwriter Robert Riskin at hand. But he was obsessed with the question of social conscience (which is not always the same as having one). In the early 1930s, he made a string of intriguing pictures, often about sex and women’s status, and often with Barbara Stanwyck, with whom he was having an intense affair—notably The Miracle Woman (1931), Forbidden (1932), and The Bitter Tea of General Yen (1933). His breakthrough occurred in 1934, with It Happened One Night.

  Nobody liked the idea at first. And nobody wanted to play in the film. A dozen actresses declined—including Myrna Loy, Margaret Sullavan, Carole Lombard, and Constance Bennett. When M-G-M offered to loan a male star, Capra asked for Robert Montgomery. Louis B. Mayer said no, but then he thought to punish the cocksure Clark Gable, who required too much money, by sending him instead. At last, Claudette Colbert agreed to play the runaway heiress, with Gable as the reporter she falls for. The budget was set at $325,000 (Columbia was cheap and proud of it). Gable did the picture for just $10,000, while Colbert got $50,000. Gable was grumpy (not uncommon for him), but he liked Capra’s touch. “You know,” he said to Colbert, “I think this wop’s got something!”

  The picture opened in New York on February 23, 1934, and broke records at Radio City Music Hall. Then, without reason, business fell off, and the picture failed in many cities. But in the sticks it built steadily—and it is a film where urban smarts are mocked in favor of provincial good sense. The Capra common man was coming into view, and the public must have been flattered. It ended up with rentals of $2 million, a dazzling figure. Capra’s contract gave him 10 percent of the net profits, but net is not gross, especially when Cohn block-booked his picture with poorer studio product—so Capra felt he had been cheated, and being wronged was at his core.

  His bitter triumph was made complete at the Oscars awarded on February 27, 1935, at the Biltmore Hotel in Los Angeles. Capra won the award for Best Director. Robert Riskin won for his script. Then Gable won: “I feel as happy as a kid and a little foolish they picked me,” he said. Colbert won, but she was at the rail station about to board the train for New York. A car was sent after her. Studio publicists implored her to return, and so she did. She blurted out that she wouldn’t have been there but for Frank Capra, and she survived the stony smile on the face of Bette Davis (who had wanted the part and then been overlooked for Of Human Bondage). Then Colbert rushed off to get the train being held in her honor. At last, Cohn stepped up to receive the award for Best Picture. He admitted, “I was just an innocent bystander.”

  For the first time, Columbia had won Best Picture, and for the first time in Oscar history a comedy had won and swept the top five awards. For Capra and the studio it was the beginning. Ahead lay Mr. Deeds Goes to Town (1936) and Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939), archetypal Capra pictures in their feeling for an America in which government is being subverted by cynical and corrupt leaders, so along comes the spirit of rural integrity, Deeds and Smith, Gary Cooper and James Stewart, who risk disaster and humiliation in their battle against compromise.

  These are crowd-pleasing but deeply ambivalent works, in which the comic touch can turn somber and even hysterical—Stewart filibustering in the Senate to defend his honor is excruciating and filled with Capra’s own paranoid instincts. On the one hand these pictures say they love the people, their natural decency, and the way it stands for American values. On the other, they fear the ease with which that crowd can be carried away by hatred and the lust for melodrama. Such pictures are still taught in American high school, and they have not faded as powerful shows. But they deserve warnings or caution, for they show how confused Hollywood and its best talents were over their place in an anxious society, coming out of Depression and anticipating war. As portraits of politics, the Capra films are so afraid of compromise that they seem poised for an urge toward extremism. And usually in a right-wing direction. So it was easier always for filmmakers to say they were mere entertainers and let the larger issues go fish. They still do that.

  That is far from the whole Capra story. Between Deeds and Smith, he won for Best Picture and Best Director again with You Can’t Take It with You, another comedy, from the play by George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart, and a film that has not survived as well as Smith and Deeds. In the late 1930s, Capra was nominated five times as Best Director. Then, after Meet John Doe (1941, another ambiguous picture about power and politics, with Gary Cooper anguished as the bum burdened by being a folk hero), Capra went into the military and made very effective propaganda films. He came back in 1946, with Jimmy Stewart, and they made It’s a Wonderful Life (1946) together.

  That Christmas perennial is a comforting piece of work (if that’s how you determine to see it). It’s a romantic comedy about a decent man and a marriage, about a cozy town and its community, but it’s a nightmare, too, in which George Bailey, haggard over his own failure as a small-town banker, is on the brink of suicide and is then shown what will become of his town without him. That vision is as credible and as damning as anything Capra ever did, and the lasting record of how perceptive and worried he was. After that, he went off the boil and, like many Hollywood people, failed to grasp the postwar mood. He became a government informer and an uneasy rich man frightened by the way America was going. But he had always been as suspicious of the huddled masses as he longed to believe in noble souls from the hinterland.

  No less esteemed and no less confused was John Ford. Sean Aloysius O’Feeney, or O’Fearna, was born in Cape Elizabeth, Maine, in 1894, the thirteenth child of Irish immigrants. As Jack Ford first, he did many jobs in pictures, including riding with the Ku Klux Klan in The Birth of a Nation. He was associated with Westerns in the silent era (when Westerns were common but not prestigious). To the end of his days, he stuck with the genre and turned Monument Valley (in southern Utah) into its ideal epic setting.

  But he would try anything, and in the 1930s his range included Shirley Temple in Wee Willie Winkie (1937) and Katharine Hepburn as Mary of Scotland (1936; they were devoted), as well as a couple of Will Rogers pictures and Victor McLaglen as The Informer (1935), for which actor and director won Oscars—you have to see that one to believe it, and you may decide it is insufferable, embarrassing, and the worst kind of stage Irishness. Far more impressive, at the turn of the decade, Ford delivered three mature films in a row: Stagecoach, Young Mr
. Lincoln (with Henry Fonda as Lincoln), and The Grapes of Wrath, derived from the John Steinbeck novel and the look of photographs by Dorothea Lange (though Gregg Toland shot it, and got a little over-pretty at times). The Grapes of Wrath is unquestionably a tribute to the people, even if it is sententious and self-satisfied some of the time. In hindsight, it seems odd that Rebecca won Best Picture that year, the second such win in a row for producer David O. Selznick, but a work blithely removed from the feeling of 1940 and which typifies Hollywood’s love of England, or is it olde England?

  Vidor, von Sternberg, Capra, and Ford were sketchily known as names, and at the time they worked, few people still could have told you what a director did. The public knew what actors did, and went to the movies for them. In any study of creative power or auteurship (a term that was not current yet), you would have to deal with the stars—with Shirley Temple as well as Bette Davis, with Gable as well as Gary Cooper.

  Cooper has figured already in this chapter. He is the figurehead of Morocco, Mr. Deeds Goes to Town, and Meet John Doe. His other work includes an indolently suave Hickok in DeMille’s The Plainsman and his Oscar-winning role in Sergeant York. No one seemed more handsome, resolute, or taciturn than Cooper—don’t forget that Clint Eastwood was born in 1930, an ideal boy for watching Coop. Then discover that in real life, Cooper was unreliable, promiscuous, and rather cowardly. We know that now. But the 1930s could not handle such difficult truths, and the studios had a publicity machine to protect their properties. The system and the nation had not yet turned on their celebrities.

  And don’t forget the franchises, by which I mean the people or the teams who made a string of films that now look like all one film—Temple for one, but also the Marx Brothers, W. C. Fields, Laurel and Hardy, Mae West, and Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers.

  “Fred Astaire” is the Americanization of Frederic Austerlitz, born in Omaha, Nebraska, in 1899. He danced from childhood with his sister, Adele, and he broke into films in the early 1930s after initial estimates that he was not very good-looking and rather thin in personality. Of course, sound made more of him than it did of Jolson. I don’t just mean the singing voice, which becomes ever more endearing and ghostly. I mean the sly clatter of his feet. He made a debut in Dancing Lady (1933), with Joan Crawford, a vigorous but unappealing dancer. But then he settled at RKO, with Ginger Rogers, and they spun into a series as fanciful and lovely as the von Sternberg–Dietrich films: Flying Down to Rio (1933), The Gay Divorcee (1934), Roberta (1935), Top Hat (1935), Follow the Fleet (1936), Swing Time (1936), Shall We Dance? (1937), Carefree (1938), and The Story of Vernon and Irene Castle (1939). They reunited in 1949, at M-G-M, for The Barkleys of Broadway.

  Astaire did not direct these films. He did not write them, or seem to care that they were so lamely written. He was not credited as choreographer. But he dominated the films and then had the cool nerve to act shy or deferential. The films are black and white. This is the famous era of panchromatic black and white, printed on nitrate stock: it’s the medium for Fred and Ginger, von Sternberg and Dietrich, Toland and Welles. It is one of the finest inventions America ever made, and then it was largely abandoned.

  The Astaire-Rogers pictures take place on sets that feel like hardened cellophane, or film stock. Is that coincidence? And they have the songs of Irving Berlin, Jerome Kern, George Gershwin, and Cole Porter. Was that luck, or did the country produce a wave of talents across the board who joined forces in the musical? Were they the true spit of the 1930s? The results are unsurpassed and a defense of film to put beside Renoir, Buñuel, Bresson, or Ozu. Fred’s smile acknowledges the earliest impulse of the medium—hey, look at me move!—the thrill that gripped Eadweard Muybridge as it has any of us recording our child’s first steps or his making a mess with profiteroles.

  Astaire-Rogers were wildly popular, though as time went by, their films became more expensive and less profitable. Carefree perhaps, yet always linked to business calculations. Astaire would make other notable pictures after Ginger—The Band Wagon (1953), Funny Face (1957), Silk Stockings (1957)—and Ginger became a fine comedienne in the 1940s. But if you feel for the medium and its power in the late 1930s, you have to recognize how far they were a light unto themselves and cherished. Fred has been dead more than twenty-five years now. His films were foolish the moment they opened—seventy years ago and more—yet they are bliss.

  France

  With France, we have to start again, because the French know they invented cinema, and they live with a wry bitterness that says America then stole it away—as if theft could do anything except characterize an adolescent nation.

  Several French pioneer figures were devoured in competition with America. Moreover, the French cineaste has lived all his life with very mixed feelings about America. When Jean Renoir (son of a great painter) began to think of doing movies, his older brother Pierre (an actor) warned him, “The cinema doesn’t suit us [the French]. We must leave cinema to the Americans. French dramatic art is bourgeois; whereas the American cinema is working class.” Forty years or so later, when the French New Wave broke on the shore (with Renoir as one of its gods), the new young films were defiantly French, modern, and insolent, but they had a nostalgia for American forms and moods. That paradox renews a persistent question: Are the people of the world an unmodified block, a global village, a web or a net, or are they just as different, unique (yet alike), as snowflakes in a blizzard?

  In those first fragments of film or domestic newsreel shot by Louis and Auguste Lumière the populace is seen as a busy crowd, lively and idiosyncratic—it’s like looking at the Parisians in impressionist paintings (some of them convivial groups by Auguste Renoir). Those moving photographs seem to be a measure of passing time and human vagary; the mood is comic, curious, and sympathetic. Years later, in La Règle du Jeu (1939), Jean Renoir would pass this verdict on his turbulent and tragic house party: everyone has his or her own reasons. And you can feel that as optimism in the father’s paintings, in the Lumière fragments, and in the French tradition of still photography that stretches from Lartigue to Cartier-Bresson (who was Jean Renoir’s assistant sometimes in the 1930s). We all have our different reasons, but the light is shared.

  In films as varied as Metropolis, Strike, Man with a Movie Camera, Triumph of the Will, and even Mr. Deeds Goes to Town, we have felt the tendency to regard the crowd as a force, or a shape—it may be cheerful or merry; it may be sullen and poised. That threat involves an aspect of huddling in which the light no longer sees individual faces. Whereas, the light in France—or in its paintings and photographs—is often warmer, more general and generous; it may even have a touch of democracy to it.

  The condition is more subtly borne out in the case of Georges Méliès, the most notable instance of the magician turned moviemaker before Orson Welles. Méliès was born in Paris in 1861 to a boot and shoemaker who catered to the fashionable bourgeoisie. It was during his military service, at Blois, that Méliès visited the home of Jean-Eugène Robert-Houdin, who, though retired, had been the leading stage magician in France. Méliès was fascinated by the collection of tricks and contrivances Houdin had on show, and soon thereafter he went to London to study at Maskelyne and Cooke’s Egyptian Hall, probably the leading magic theater in business in the late nineteenth century.

  It was in 1888 that Méliès got together 40,000 francs and purchased the Robert-Houdin theater (on the Boulevard des Italiens) from the great man’s widow. The theater was busy, but not commercially successful. Méliès was already intrigued by the potential of photographs. He grasped that, among other things, the photograph was a way of altering our faith in reality, the essence of magic. Antoine Lumière, father to the brothers and owner of a photographic business, had a shop above the Robert-Houdin theater. So it was no wonder that Méliès should attend their first professional screening of movies with a projector—at 14 Boulevard des Capucines, on December 28, 1895.

  The Lumières’ material was what we would call “documentary.” It
was a cinematic record of things that proved the viability of the cinematograph. It would take a strict historian to deny the legend that an eager Méliès approached the Lumières and asked to buy or rent their machine, to be met by the wintry assurance that it had no commercial future. Méliès never wavered. For 1,000 francs he bought a camera from Robert Paul in London, and soon he was on his way.

  What followed is one of the outstanding early careers in film. From 1896 to 1912, he made hundreds of short films, most of them inspired to show his audience something even more wondrous and mystifying than his repertoire of stage tricks. In the process, in a primitive way—by double and multiple exposures, winding the film back in the camera; by matting different images together—he laid down the essence of a special effects system that would last for decades. But he also built fantastical sets and put many actors in fanciful costumes. So the aspiration to the miraculous is always offset in Méliès by a cheerful but untidy or improvised human action. He was a technician, to be sure, but he was as fond of people as any showman who relied on the loyalty of audiences. Some of his films are Jules Verne-ish, with trips to the moon and many other dream places, but they feel like homemade amateur theatricals. There is a nice messy reality to them, plus the bravura flourish of the voice that cries, “Ladies and gentlemen…Before your very eyes!”

  Méliès was endlessly productive and truly inspired. What’s more, he had a greater readiness for using the camera simply to record reality than is generally reckoned. But he was not a sophisticated businessman. There was an early enthusiasm for his pictures in America, and Georges soon sent his brother Gaston to handle those affairs. In time, Gaston began making Westerns out of San Antonio, as well as handling his brother’s films. But those films’ whimsicality and their literary roots were not always to American tastes, and the Mélièses’ interests fell foul of the Motion Picture Patents Company, which liked to ban or fine productions that had not used their approved equipment. That monopoly was restrictive inside America, but it fell most harshly on foreigners.