Well, he was just an IATSE guy doing his job. He didn’t necessarily have to like the movies. But still, we wondered, how could he resist them when we could not? In my later life I have known only one other person—the late writer Elizabeth Jane Howard—who was so supremely indifferent to the charm of the movies. We did many things together, Jane and my wife of the time and I, but I don’t suppose that in the course of a long period when we were, I think, best friends we saw more than three or four movies together. I do not know how our friendship prospered as mightily.
By 1939, I was pretty much seeing movies on my own recognizance, with or without Danny and Kenny, which is in itself a remarkable thing, come to think of it, as I was just six years old. My parents were hardly careless people—rather the opposite—but they thought nothing of parking me in a movie theater for the afternoon. Ushers were legion. I was never once “interfered with,” as the saying went. I just gnawed my Milk Duds and blissfully watched the movie (or sometimes it was a movie and a stage show starring Ozzie and Harriet or Spike Jones and His City Slickers).
It was a glorious era. A few years back there was talk about—even a book or two—dubbing 1939 the movies’ greatest year. I’m okay with that—the case can be made, not that it makes much difference. Movies ebb and flow in no pattern that I’ve ever been able to define. There are just cycles (or fads) that mysteriously come and go: westerns in, westerns out; film noir all the rage, then, briefly, out of favor; you know how it goes.
Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, Destry Rides Again, Only Angels Have Wings, Wuthering Heights—all were made in 1939, all of them worthy movies, still eminently watchable. But the alert reader will have noticed some omissions—Gone with the Wind, The Wizard of Oz and, straying a little further afield, The Rules of the Game. Can you imagine?
GWTW seems to me a faux epic—a great movie because its producer, David O. Selznick, kept insisting it was. And because it was so goddamn long (running time around four hours), everybody read the novel on which it was based and everybody was in a dither about Gable saying, “Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn.” I guess maybe you have to have been a grown-up to have appreciated all that, but of course, I wasn’t. I think I might have liked it better if Bette Davis had played Scarlett O’Hara. It needs her kind of lunacy to work. Vivien Leigh is too kittenish for my taste, too intent on ingratiating herself with the audience. The thing is finally too ponderous with Selznick’s ambitions for it. Anyway, that’s my minority report.
Wizard is a bit better, I think—wonderful character roles, a very good score, and I loved it when the Wicked Witch melted into a puddle. What’s not to like? Nothing, I guess. When my kids were little, I reveled in their fondness for it. But that’s finally the problem with it: It wants so desperately to be liked, it pants with its need to be adored. And to me the film grows tiresome in the process. Ease off, I keep silently crying—to no avail.
Finally there is The Rules of the Game to contend with. I came to slightly know, and to enormously like, its director, Jean Renoir, late in his life. Again, it was my Griffith book that brought me into the presence of this dearest of men. (He gave me the key elements of its ending.) He had enjoyed great, deserved success with his previous films, La Grande Illusion and La Bête Humaine, but this one, on release, was a disaster. It is a sort of romantic comedy, with many felicities—notably a central piece of a particularly brutal hunting sequence that quite transcends the lightsome air of the rest of the picture. It was cut and recut as war impended, then banned as, of all things, “a threat to morals” during the hostilities and wasn’t released until after the war. It was, indeed, thought to be lost. Elements, however, were found, and from what I’m told it was restored from eighty-eight minutes to its intended release length of close to two hours, its reputation kept alive by critics like André Bazin. Finally, a restored version (with one sequence still apparently missing) was presented at the 1959 Venice Film Festival, where, at last, it was belatedly acclaimed.
Shortly thereafter, I began wrestling with it. I still don’t get it—a state that I am not the least bit proud of. I have never felt so lonely in critical dissent. The Rules of the Game is ostensibly a romantic comedy, very well played by a cast that includes Renoir himself as a character who fussily interferes in the love lives of others, to make up—I think—for the emptiness in his own existence. It is a perfectly good premise. But the movie is, to me at least, distinctly unmerry, because, I believe, it keeps veering off toward an unwonted sobriety. I have tried so hard to enjoy this movie. I am aware of its several virtues. I take full responsibility for my failure to embrace it.
Meantime, there is Gunga Din to think about. Which still seems to me among the best adventure spectacles ever made. Cary Grant, Thuggees on a rampage, Sam Jaffe as the title character—and pretty much the whole kitchen sink of action tropes. It’s masterfully directed by George Stevens and full of badinage about marriage that threatens the palship of Grant, Douglas Fairbanks Jr. and Victor McLaglen. It’s bliss.
Then, from the same year, there’s Stagecoach, the first western John Ford shot in Monument Valley and the film that finally made John Wayne an authentic star. It is a very shapely western, well written by Ernest Haycox and Dudley Nichols, and well played by a cast including Thomas Mitchell, Claire Trevor and John Carradine. The coach is loaded with types, but they’re played with great conviction. When we first see Wayne, he’s twirling a rifle, flagging down the stage. In his hands the weapon looks like a toothpick. In what seems like about ten seconds, the Indians are attacking, and the fight between them and the coach riders is about as well staged as any such movie encounter—equaled, but not exceeded, in the future.
Some wise guys were later heard to wonder why the Native Americans didn’t simply shoot the horses as they thundered along in pursuit of the stage, which is the kind of question “realists” are always asking at the movies. But, of course, carried along by the action, we never thought to raise it. Probably the Indians didn’t either, what with all the excitement. John Ford’s thoughts on this matter were of the practical variety. He conceded that, in reality, the Native Americans would probably have plugged the ponies, but that would have left him with a movie about two reels in length, which would have been absurd.
Decades later, I met Ford. He had taken to his bed for his last illness, but he had known D. W. Griffith, and he agreed to discuss him with me. He had been instructed by his doctor to cut down on his cigar smoking, and he was doing so by cutting the stogies in half—and chain-smoking them by lighting the second half from the stub of the one he had just finished. He recalled falling from his horse, being knocked unconscious and awaking to find himself cradled in Griffith’s arms. There were other anecdotes, which I judged quite believable. It was too late in his life for him to gild any lilies. At one point he asked me if I had any ambitions to direct. At that point I did not, and told him so. He glowered at me, perhaps thinking of other writers, like Peter Bogdanovich, who were then being bitten by the directing bug. “Why not?” he groused. “Everyone else wants to.”
Eventually, I did begin to direct—documentaries, not features. But he was the first person to propose to me this slightly ridiculous idea, which, I must admit, would gnaw at me from that day forward. To him, I think, it was not a silly idea. Directing was in the range of human possibility, so why not have a go at it, if you were so disposed? I never pass his house without thinking of him—and of the hats on the coatrack in the front hall, waiting for the old boy to come downstairs, grab some headgear and go out to make a picture, which, of course, he never did. He died in 1973.
I cannot leave him without mentioning what I think of as one of his best pictures, Fort Apache (1948). It stars Henry Fonda as Owen Thursday, an angry and permanently ambitious cavalry officer shunted off to the eponymous military base, his career in shreds, but not his ambitions for a return to past glories. It is, I think, one of Fonda’s best performances—unbending. He is meant to be a version of George Armstrong Custer, bu
t harsher, more ruthless. He refuses to treat the Indian tribes in his vicinity with care and understanding, despite John Wayne’s amelioratory efforts. We gradually realize that he is a man seeking immortality through martyrdom, which he gets, while Wayne and a wise old Indian watch the slaughter from a nearby bluff.
I want to pause a little longer over Fonda, who may be the best actor of the movies’ Golden Age—not the most beloved, just the most expert in his astonishing range. Consider: the sobriety of The Grapes of Wrath, the lunacy of the herpetologist Hopsie Pike in The Lady Eve, a variety of presidents and cowboys, his beloved Mister Roberts, about whom he came to blows with John Ford, who threatened the film’s integrity with cheap jokes and sentimentality. This says nothing of his stage work, or of the soft-spoken integrity of, say, Twelve Angry Men, or the long-delayed Oscar for On Golden Pond.
I met him a few times, and he seemed to me a hard man—reserved, ungiving, perhaps caring deeply for nothing except his art. Let’s think again about that ramrod in Fort Apache. He sits while the Native Americans are forced to stand. He wears a stupid kepi to keep the sun from burning his delicate neck. In the history of the movies, there is no more unyielding a figure than Owen Thursday, nor one more foredoomed. We know he must die; it’s just a question of when—pretty much quickly and ignominiously. It is one of the most abrupt massacres in the long history of bad movie endings.
Whereupon the movie takes a surprising turn. John Wayne is addressing a gathering of journalists gathered around a painting of Owen Thursday’s last stand, assuring them that it is authentic in every detail. They buy into this lie, because by this time Wayne has decided to buy into it as well. The film ends with the cavalry riding past the camera in a permanent heroic review. “When the truth becomes legend…” and all that crap.
Ford believed it, though. He believed, that is, that this country requires its heroic myths to survive. At some level it is an appalling thought. But such is the skill with which the picture is made that you can accept it, as just an ordinary western, especially if you are fifteen years old when you first encounter it. (You didn’t expect to find moral complexity in westerns at that time.) You are left wrestling with it—mildly—for the rest of your life. It doesn’t exactly haunt you, but it stubbornly sits there—John Ford’s not inconsequential contribution (he would go on to make similar ones) to the ongoing debate about how much truth we can stand when faced with the question of what lies we need to sustain to keep our ambiguous American democratic faith alive.
17
Masterpieces
You may well ask, “Where’s Disney?” Good question—especially since what is probably my best-known book is about Walt and his works. This period was, I think, the highest of his studio’s times. I mentioned that the first movie I ever saw was Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. There was some anxiety in our household as we set forth one Saturday night for the Parkway Theater to see it. This tension was not shared by me. My father wanted to make sure I would not be frightened by the big, potentially scary images projected from the screen.
Fat chance. I loved them. What could be better than this? As it happened, the next movie I saw was Rulers of the Sea (1939), which starred Douglas Fairbanks Jr., who much later in life became my friend. (I even helped him write a sketchy book.) The film was about a trans-Atlantic steamship race, and I thought it was the cat’s meow, though on mature reconsideration a few years back, it turned out to be a pretty thin and underproduced movie, the sort of thing Fairbanks Jr. made too many of in his on-again, off-again career as a second-class matinee idol. (He really liked idling about in London, involving himself in mysterious enterprises that never seemed to amount to much.) He was a genial, dapper and well-met fellow, and I passed some happy times in his company, though he frequently pretended that I was somehow hard to find; nothing could have been further from the truth. It was just that he sort of mislaid me from time to time, only to reappear, with a merry cry, after an absence of a few months. In his later years, I sometimes thought, he had all the pleasures of being a movie star without having actually to bother to do much work at his nominal trade.
Pinocchio is the first great movie I ever saw, though I didn’t know it at the time (1940). No one did. Everyone seemed to like it, this story of a puppet who wants to become a real boy. It has lovely Harold Arlen songs and a genial Jiminy Cricket who acts as his conscience, but it was received basically as just another Disney movie, having just enough comedy to get away with that misunderstanding.
That, however, doesn’t reckon with the movie’s darkness: Among his many misadventures, Pinocchio is swallowed by Monstro the whale, for godsake. Throughout the film he is in constant peril. I seem to remember that at the time there were complaints about its lack of fidelity to Carlo Collodi’s original story, about which I cared nothing, since I had never read it. I could see the darkness of the story—not just the whale, but the escape from Pleasure Island, to name just one other powerful example. There were lightsome touches, of course, but the picture was laden with doom—or, more properly, I suppose, constant threat. Disney would never return to that level of menace. The coming of war had something to do with that, and maybe other distractions (the theme parks and so forth) played a role, too. Or possibly the thing in some way scared the master. There were hints here of a darkness to which animated film might aspire, but which could be dangerous to the form, not to be lightly undertaken. Fantasia (of the same year) was safer, prettier, and with some exceptions (“Night on Bald Mountain,” for example), it would not scare the little pants off Disney’s prime audience of children.
As the years have worn on, my regard for Pinocchio has grown. There is in it a beautiful balance of the light and the dark, a confidence in its pacing that is near to sublime—no sappiness. It is, I believe, the studio’s masterpiece. I’m sorry there have been no other films from Disney that have aspired to this one’s felicities. But I’m very glad this one exists, if only as a signpost on a road not taken.
Which brings us, for no reason other than the calendar, to the greatest movie ever made. I speak here of Citizen Kane. And I speak with a degree of irony. It is a very good movie, of course. It has never failed to reward me over the many years I have seen and reseen it. It is surely better than How Green Was My Valley, which won the best-picture Oscar that year, though in its way that was not at all a bad film.
Is Kane really the best film ever made? You would get some arguments about that in the foreign territories, I imagine. I think to some degree we are still playing catch-up ball with Kane. It was well received critically when it opened in 1941 (a strange, notable exception was James Agee), but it was not a great success at the box office, and though it received a number of Academy Award nominations, it won only one—deservedly—for the Herman Mankiewicz–Welles screenplay, one of the most intricate and elegant ever devised. Of course, the film deserved so much more. I think we should have recognized its greatness more fulsomely at the time; it remained a kind of rumor until it came out of hiding in the 1950s and ’60s. At that point people started calling it the greatest movie ever without thinking too much about it. They also placed it at the center of the Welles legend. He had stumbled so badly (or so it seemed) in the intervening years—so much promise unfulfilled, so many promising deals down the drain, not to mention those wine commercials, or the weight, or the nonsense with Merv Griffin. It is possible to see Welles as the most legendary failure in modern American culture—one of them, certainly.
Citizen Kane is simply the faux rise-and-fall biography of a man who owned a chain of newspapers, scandalously based on the life of William Randolph Hearst, all denials to the contrary notwithstanding. It is very funny (we tend to forget its wit), wonderfully acted by Welles’s Mercury Players and wonderfully stylized visually by Gregg Toland’s great deep-focus photography. It is a film whose visual snap fully matches the dance of its dialogue. Pauline Kael famously called it “a shallow masterpiece,” and I suppose there’s some truth in that. But which of us would n
ot prefer that to the ponderousness of movies that lose their breath and fall limp upon the ground? Besides which, how many movies are “deep” masterpieces? It’s a status to which quite a few aspire, but few attain.
The world was Welles’s oyster as of, say, 1942, more or less. Hollywood did not much like him because, it was thought, he had not paid his dues, eaten his humble pie. The Oscars were payback. Perhaps the writers, traditionally the odd men out in the town, could afford to be more objective about this matter than its grandees—you know, not give the kid all he was due. People were saying that the movie he was finishing, The Magnificent Ambersons, was pretty good. Welles needed just to settle down and finish it. All would be forgiven at next year’s Academy Awards.
Instead, Welles—famously—blew town. He would complete post-production long-distance, from Rio, where he was on some sort of goodwill mission that Nelson Rockefeller had set up. Welles’s editor, Robert Wise, sent him cuts by mail, with Welles calling and writing his responses while he was having fun in the sun. To say that he was distracted is a wild understatement. He needed to be in Los Angeles, getting his fingers dirty, but try telling that to a twenty-six-year-old genius, which he believed himself to be.
Wise toiled at his task and fought the fight for the picture as hard as he could, but he was young, too, not yet the major director he would become, and the previews were not successful. It’s an oddity about Ambersons: Unlike Kane, it does not announce itself as a radical departure stylistically. It is just an adaptation of a rather conventional Booth Tarkington novel, well enough liked by readers, and in Welles’s version a well-made movie, too—the story of a prominent small-town family’s snotty scion, played by Tim Holt, getting his comeuppance.
Keepers: The Greatest Films of a Moviegoing Lifetime Page 12
