Keepers: The Greatest Films of a Moviegoing Lifetime

by Richard Schickel

  Dracula is an odd job, scarcely more than an hour long, badly acted by players taking long pauses between words so we can hear each one, and finished in haste. There may be a good print of it somewhere, but I’ve never seen it; it’s all murk and dimness in the prints we have. But under Tod Browning’s direction, it had something. It’s camp now, but at the time it was enough to start a trend that has never really died.

  Frankenstein, a year later, was something more. James Whale was the director, and the picture has a grace and gravity very far from the rather slapdash manner of Dracula. This is due very largely to the performance of Boris Karloff in the title role. He has his fears, particularly of fire, but the film depends on his innocence for its effectiveness. He literally does not know what he’s doing. He is, I think, conscious that he’s a sport of nature, and he’s angry about that, without being able to articulate what’s bothering him. Yet he’s also capable of great tenderness. It would have been easy for Karloff to rip and tear at this role, but he doesn’t. There is nuance in his puzzlement. We feel for him. And we are perhaps reminded that, of the classic horror films, this fairly loose adaptation of Mary Shelley’s novel has the best credentials. It is literate, it has a solid structure and it is given a well-acted, well-mounted production. This is a monster who is somehow not monstrous. Of the pioneers of this revived genre, it is a film that needs few apologies. There are others.

  For instance, King Kong (1933). I think it is one of the greatest works in the history of popular culture, for a lot of reasons. Most important, it is wholly original. Co-directed by Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack, it alone of the horror films of the classic era has no literary roots—except, of course, the “beauty and the beast” story. Indeed, though it has plenty of scary sequences, it is not really a horror movie at all; it is, if you will, a romance, the story of the greatest misalliance in the history of movies.

  Withal, it is a sexy story. Simply put, Ann Darrow (Fay Wray) is a stowaway on a voyage to Skull Island. In short order, she is staked out to placate the mighty Kong, who pretty much rules the place and has pretty much never seen so toothsome a wench as this. She writhes prettily and screams mightily, which only has the effect of enhancing her fair, blond form. He is an innocent, seduced by her incomprehension. You could also say that eventually there is some kind of attraction between them, though the movie never overtly speaks of this. Mostly the great ape, for all his thumping around, is a complete gentleman with Ann. What is on our minds as we watch is—how to put this?—a question of scale. He’s so big, you see. And she’s so tiny. We are not entirely unaware of the possibilities.

  No point in dwelling on this, of course. You know the rest anyway. Kong is captured, is put on display in New York, escapes and meets his famous fate atop the Empire State Building. He is so tender with Ann at the end. And the sequence remains a masterpiece of stop-motion animation by the great Willis O’Brien and one of the most masterly romantic conclusions in the history of film.

  And that’s not the end of its gifts. Its score, by Max Steiner, is the first fully symphonic score in the history of the movies—just as O’Brien’s work pioneered imagery we had never seen before—and it is a good one, at least by the nonexistent standards of the day. This is, to evoke the cliché, pure movie magic, yet it is hard to take it entirely seriously. I mean really—an ape and a girl. It’s preposterous. If you come right down to it, it’s B picture stuff, isn’t it? But the spectacle is overwhelming, even today. You don’t have to make allowances for it. Against all the evidence of your eyes, it works. That heart beats true, even after eighty years and many bad imitations. The movies, of course, are many things above and beyond King Kong. But some of their giddy essence is in it, too. The sheer joy of the thing, the fun of it and the sobriety, too, are things we do not find as often as we once did at the movies. And we are the poorer for it in so many ways.

  As we are the richer for Bride of Frankenstein (1935). It had taken Universal (and director James Whale) something like four years to come up with a sequel to Frankenstein, for reasons that are, to me, at least, unknown. But it was worth the wait. Bride is, I think, close to being a great film—if only for its wit. It was written by a couple of anonymous studio types, and it is impossible to say whence sprang the bickering tone of the thing. But it is palpably there, and the actors are responding to it, straight-faced, but with humor and self-awareness. Especially Elsa Lanchester as the title character, who is the great addition to the cast. Apparently, she learned her hissing speech pattern by studying the swans in London parks. But the sources of her shroud-like costume and her frizzed-out, erratically dyed hair seem simply to be inspirations of the moment.

  It’s a wonderful performance by an actress who never quite got her due, full of weird energy and waywardness. You never quite know what’s coming next with her, but whatever it is, it is always a surprise and a delight. It’s not too much to say that she is a sexual hysteric. She’s drawn to Karloff’s monster, and also fearful of him. He, on the other hand, is more soulful than he was in the original film. He is facing a life of utter loneliness. Put simply, he needs a bride, and for him it is love at first sight of her. He is also somewhat more civilized than he was in the first film—he can speak a little, is capable of friendship and loves music. The film is not screwball, but there’s an element of comic wariness in the approaches and withdrawals of their relationship that goes down well—a weird but palpable sexiness that is a little bit like the way the people in romantic comedy at first hate each other before they hook up.

  As for Karloff, this is a very rounded performance. He is, of course, capable of anger and outrage, but the most interesting thing about him is his innate gentleness. Quite literally, his character did not ask to be born, or created, or whatever. He is forever puzzled by his ambiguous status and doing his best to come to grips with it. In life, the actor was a kindly man, and here he was operating under huge physical restraints—tons of makeup and painful prosthetic devices, all designed to enhance his hugeness, his essentially grotesque qualities. At the same time, his innocence, his sense of cruel victimization, had to be maintained.

  But this is a horror film. For all the admiration that has been heaped on it—especially in recent years—it is an outlier, not taken entirely seriously by cineastes. There is no disposition to value genre pictures highly. “Yes, but…” attaches itself to films of this kind almost automatically. So the performances of Karloff and Lanchester (and others in the fine cast) tend to be overlooked. In retrospect, we want to snicker at them, to see them as guilty pleasures, rather self-satirizing. But these were—no other phrase for it—serious artists. Probably, at the time, it was just a rather silly job for them. But they were skilled professionals, and they were working at the top of their game. We need to remove all the asterisks from this film, to see this as a serious enterprise, beautifully made by actors, directors and writers and featuring performances that are, quite frankly, unimprovable. “It’s only a movie, Ingrid.” But, by damn, it is in its way a great one—its appeal somehow close to the heart of what the movies can be in their giddy, corrupt, commercial essence.

  The Invisible Man (1933) is another success in the genre, its conceit carried out with high spirits and real élan. A fellow learns the secret of not being visible to his fellow citizens, which gives him obvious advantages, criminal and otherwise, over his fellow citizens. It was the talking-picture debut of Claude Rains, and at the relatively advanced age of forty-four, it made him something of a star, which was odd in itself, in that only on those rare occasions when he put some clothes on did he become visible to the audience. Mostly his is a vocal characterization, and a great one—Rains had one of the most flexible and elegant voices in the history of the cinema.

  He had, for many years, been a reliable stage actor—at one point he had been Charles Laughton’s teacher—and he got this part because Lon Chaney, who had been scheduled for it, had died in 1930. Rains was alive to all the role’s comic possibilities—an
d is superb. Under James Whale’s direction, Rains is particularly alert to the befuddlements of ordinary citizens confronted with a character they cannot see but who is manifestly, mysteriously present in their lives. I’m going to go out on a limb here and propose that Rains may be the best character actor in the history of the movies.

  He was slight of stature, so he could never aspire to the heroic. He was known to have a taste for the bottle and for the habit of marrying unwisely, and with some frequency. He was often paired with Bette Davis, and they were apparently chastely, inordinately fond of one another. He acted prodigiously, relentlessly, effortlessly, and his range was astounding.

  We remember him best as the merrily cynical Captain Renault in Casablanca, but there is so much more—corrupt senators, lovelorn Nazi agents, mean-spirited district attorneys, father figures by the yard, possibly best of all in the title role of Mr. Skeffington, a Jew hopelessly in love with Davis in the severely underrated wartime romance of the same name. I truly believe there was nothing he could not do—except, as I said, be a flat-out hero. (Naturally, he never got an Oscar, though he had four nominations.) He never gave a bad performance. On such careers is the routine magic of the movies built. You almost never notice players like Claude Rains until they are gone. You simply expect the excellence that he routinely delivers, without fuss or feathers.

  With these classics, horror established itself as a genre in a few short years, and it would never again be absent from our screens. It would, however, for many years be a B picture genre. Not until the 1970s would it once again become a major film form. Until then, it was pretty much Lon Chaney Jr. as the Wolf Man, paired now and then with the delightfully incomprehensible Maria Ouspenskaya. She had once been a leading member of Stanislavsky’s immortal company but came to the United States in the twenties to work on the stage and to Hollywood in 1936, where she won Oscar nominations and the delighted regard of audiences enjoying an acquired taste. Chaney profited from that, too. His transformations into the hirsute antihero were touched with a sort of sadness. Poor guy, he couldn’t help what happened to him when the moon turned full and his beard began to grow.

  12

  What’s Funny About That?

  Sometime in the 1970s, working occasionally as a writer and producer on television documentaries, I met Frank Capra. I liked him. A little later I made a film about him for my series The Men Who Made the Movies. From time to time we appeared together on television and in other public forums.

  In the decade or so before World War II, Frank had been arguably the most famous movie director in America, and one of the most prominent. Oscars were his, as well as the good opinion of decent mankind. He said, with a certain false modesty, that what he made was “Capracorn,” but his films were cheerful, and suited to the somewhat forced optimism of the media landscape of the time. He served honorably in the war, making propaganda films, and came home to Hollywood expecting to pick up his career where he had left it a few years earlier.

  That, however, was not to be. By and large, his movies now seemed merely corny and out of touch. He was felled often by “cluster” headaches and by commercial failure. He made his last feature film in 1961, Pocketful of Miracles, and retired without making an announcement to that effect. He was trotted out on state occasions, and the rest of the time he lurked in La Quinta, near Palm Springs, full of restless energy and seeming good cheer. You would never see Frank Capra down in the dumps. In time, an autobiography, The Name above the Title, appeared, relentlessly upbeat and, some people said, not entirely truthful, but a good read nonetheless, which he obviously enjoyed promoting.

  Whereupon good luck played a decisive hand in his life. In 1946 he had made a film entitled It’s a Wonderful Life. It starred James Stewart, Donna Reed and a wonderfully malevolent Lionel Barrymore. It is, as you doubtless recall, the story of a small-town savings-and-loan operator, eking out a living and dreaming of far-darting travel and adventure, but pretty much stuck in the quotidian. It has a fussy angel, and it shows what would have happened to his little town and his loved ones—all of it grim—had he not stuck it out in Podunk.

  It is a fairy tale, and it did not do much business when it was released. But then—a mighty Capraesque touch here—someone forgot to copyright the thing and it became free programming on television in the 1970s, Christmas cheer all around. There was no money in it for Capra, but that didn’t matter. It was widely—no, universally—understood as a masterpiece of sentiment. And it completed one of the unlikeliest comebacks in the history of show business. I don’t know if the film is brilliant or far less. It simply is, for better or worse.

  I entered Frank Capra’s life again. His sons talked NBC into doing a documentary about Frank, and I was asked to write it, working with a prince of a fellow, Carl Pingitore, who signed on to direct it. The idea was to create a warmhearted portrait of a man who created warmhearted films, good-natured and chucklesome, but with strong, liberal-minded messages.

  Capra’s films are superbly written, mostly by Robert Riskin, but with a fine contribution (Mr. Smith Goes to Washington) by Sidney Buchman, and they are wonderfully played by the likes of Barbara Stanwyck, Jean Arthur and Gary Cooper—people who can make dialogue sound witty (or at least perky) even when it’s not. Critical opinion, such as it is, has turned against Capra. David Thomson states the most negative case: “a hypocrite. A careerist and credit grabber, a rearranger of the facts, a liar. A reactionary, a bogus liberal, an anti-Semite, a self-serving fabulist and an informer. And a big admirer of Mussolini.”

  This indictment is based largely on a biography subtitled “The Catastrophe of Success,” by Joseph McBride, who started out an admirer and went over to the dark side in the course of writing his book. To put it mildly, Thomson’s is a “yes, but” proposition. And one that could be applied in large part, I would think, to the majority of movie directors, a breed not known for being shrinking violets. Who among them are not, for example, careerists and credit grabbers? And fabulists, too. Who, among a much larger segment of the population, do not, alas, grow more conservative as they age (though I do not think Frank ever became a full-on reactionary)? As for his liberalism, I do not for a moment distrust it, particularly during Frank’s glory years. He was a man of large and simple passions. He was never a director of secret subtexts. What you saw on the screen in those days was what you got. And when it comes to Mussolini, well, there was a time when George Bernard Shaw, among others (including the saintly D. W. Griffith), thought well of him, too.

  Even so, the single-mindedness and animus of McBride’s book is astounding. It is a book rendered stupid by a kind of bigotry that is rare in modern biography. And no one is going to issue a corrective—not at this late date, not on behalf of a director slipping down history’s page. I can only say that McBride’s Capra bears little, if any, resemblance to the Capra I knew.

  Which brings me back to the film we were making back in the seventies. We had a lot to work with. It Happened One Night (1934) remains a first-class romantic comedy—Gable grumpy, Colbert ditzy and full of a kind of wayward (and ageless) charm. Pictures nowhere near as famous (The Miracle Woman, about evangelism, and American Madness, about a hard-pressed idealistic banker) were more powerful than anyone except Pingitore and I knew going in. The Deeds-Smith-Doe trilogy was as strong (and troubled) as I had remembered it. Arsenic and Old Lace (1944) was a slightly hysterical farce, with Cary Grant at his best and—what the hell—we had It’s a Wonderful Life to top the whole thing off. Ours was scarcely a great film, but it seemed to us entirely respectable.

  The network disagreed. They said the film was not, you know, funny. We pointed out the simple truth: Capra was not, for the most part, a funny guy. He could be a charming guy, but his themes were deadly serious. Edward Arnold’s fascist in Meet John Doe (1941), for example, was a truly menacing figure, who should alone give the lie to the notion that Frank was sending secret, admiring messages about men of corrupt and corrupting power.

  F
rank’s passion for his work remained palpable. He never faltered in his commitment to it. There was not a slack frame in any of it, at least in his finest period, and I reveled in his intensity. There was greatness in the work. You could not turn away from it.

  That did not entirely have to do with his themes and ideas. The main thing I observed during this passage was that his films were masterfully directed. For a decade he was, I think, one of the two or three great American directors—sequences like the concluding wedding scene in It Happened One Night and the great rally in the rain in Meet John Doe are, I think, among the most privileged moments in American cinema. Working on the TV film, I found myself increasingly lost in such bravura filmmaking—though, interestingly, audiences didn’t seem to notice that, so lost were they in the sentiment and idealism of the pictures. You had to get some distance from their immediate impact to appreciate their craftsmanship.

  In its little way, our film was a troubled production. I didn’t get on very well with one of Capra’s sons, and the network’s lack of confidence in the enterprise grew apace. We all tried hard, I think, and the film was by no means a catastrophe. It was just mildly disappointing. Eventually, we turned it over to the network and moved on to other matters. I have no doubt that Frank was disappointed by this result, but on those rare occasions when he put in an appearance, he was resolutely upbeat.

  I lost touch with almost everyone I worked with on the show, though I remained friends with Pingitore and Capra. The show remained notably absent from the network’s schedule, and I assumed that it would never be broadcast. Two or three years slipped by, and to be honest I pretty much forgot about the thing. It was no more than a minor disappointment. But television shows—even ones that everyone loses confidence in—do cost money, and networks understandably want to recoup some of their costs. So, of all things, the show was scheduled on a Christmas Eve, when the potential audience for it was about ninety-seven people, all of whom were shut-ins. To my knowledge, it was never announced in the press, let alone reviewed. It was not repeated or sold overseas or otherwise exploited. It is, I venture to say, one of the most thoroughly ignored programs in the history of television.