Keepers: The Greatest Films of a Moviegoing Lifetime

by Richard Schickel

  It’s possible that the film meant more to Welles than Kane did. He saw in it elements of his very recent childhood. It suffers from what we might term unearned (or premature) nostalgia, but that’s only a slight flaw. Another was not Welles’s fault—it was just not what people were expecting from him. There was, as I already implied, nothing visionary about it. It was just a solid film, of a kind that has always been something of a staple in American movies, though rendered here with much more than customary genre intensity. I don’t think it could ever have been a great hit, though the reviews were quite good and it received a number of Oscar nominations.

  At some point, I think, Welles smelled a flop from far-off Rio and began disassociating himself from it. And the studio backed off of it. Besides, there were many distractions: He was writing a newspaper column, doing his magic show, acting a bit and, in general, wishing to be understood not merely as a genius of the cinema but as a genius in pretty much all things. It took a toll. His film was radically cut, whole sections were lost and, finally, it was playing in some locales as a second feature to a Lupe Velez movie. It’s possible to argue that no one in the history of the movies suffered a mightier fall than Welles did between his first feature and his second.

  Yet, even in the damaged form in which we now know it, Ambersons comes close to being a great movie—and at the least it is a very good one. It has good nature and a genuine feel for the not-too-distant past. It has great sequences—the ballroom, for one. And Tim Holt’s character is really a fascinating little shit. This was not enough for Welles, of course, and I think it took something permanent out of him; “vaulting ambition” is one phrase for what went missing. The rest of his filmography is essentially split between genre crime pieces and Shakespeare adaptations, which were on the whole not particularly inspired. There was never to be another film with the go-for-broke spirit of Kane or the fullness of spirit that animated Ambersons at its best.

  It’s possible that this is a case of “too much, too soon.” It might have been better if he had worked himself up to Kane instead of leading with it. There are, of course, felicities in the later work. But so much of it was routine. In the end he was, I think, a great talker about movies, but only rarely a great maker of them. He became lost in his own mythology, and in his own vast weight, which rendered him a disembodied voice, intoning the banalities of voice-over, speaking to his acolytes, who helped him keep the dream of comeback alive when the hope of that was clearly lost. The genius had become, to be brutally frank, just another jobbing actor, and more than a bit of—yes—a ham. And kind of a blowhard.

  John Ford once called himself “a career man.” He wanted to be judged on the whole vast body of his work, which was brave of him, I think, considering how many pictures he made, among them some terrible turkeys. That was not the case with Welles. When in 1952 the British film magazine Sight and Sound began taking an international critics poll every ten years of the best films ever, Kane was not mentioned. By 1962 it had begun to top the list, and it has remained near that spot ever since. Ambersons began appearing near the top in 1972, and Vertigo has taken over for both of them in the most recent balloting.

  I’m a career man, too. Not wishing to take anything away from Kane, I’m inclined to judge directors by all their work, where Welles comes up short. Hawks, Hitchcock, Renoir, Bergman, De Sica, Ford and on and on—their contributions to film history are far larger than those of Welles. All of them have given us pleasure (and greatness) over huge spans of years. Careers require management, of course, and patience, and the ability to recover from downswings. And a bit of luck. But at the end of the day, I think the contributions of someone like Hawks or Hitchcock are more important than Citizen Kane. Their films set the tone for entire decades. Pleasure, multiplied a dozen times in some of these cases, needs to be reliable, something we can count on, inching us forward to setting genre standards, for example, while at the same time keeping a grip on the slippery pole in good times and bad.

  We don’t have to choose, of course. Kane and Ambersons are both great movies. They will endure and prosper. But let me pass a harsh judgment here: There is something wrong in Welles’s career path. With all his gifts, he should have done more. Not a dozen more great movies—that’s asking too much—but he should have done something more consistent, more challenging overall. It’s as if he somehow shrank back from the greatness that was within him, frittered it away. He was, in the end, flighty, wasteful, careless. There is such disparity between what he accomplished at his best and what he actually achieved over so many heedless years.

  Laurence Olivier once said that “genius”—if that’s what afflicted Welles—is a terrible waste of time. You spend too much time serving its primps and poses, not enough time doing the hard work required to serve its demands, its exigencies. Eventually it eats at your soul, hollows you out. You become spin-driven by your own pomposity. You become, finally, fatuous, a joke everyone but you is in on—though they dare not speak of that to your face. The possibility that Welles was not a genius at all presents itself. Maybe he was just a very talented guy self-deceived by too early success, running endlessly to catch up with an inflated image. In which case he becomes a very American tragedy—a spellbinder for those who wish to be spellbound. Leave him at that—this careless, infuriating fellow.

  But note this, too. I have devoted as many words to him as I have to nearly any other figure in this book. Looked at hard, he’s a two-movie talent. He doesn’t deserve all the books about him, when his competitors, and equals, are given such short shrift—if they’re lucky, one or two hasty, skinny volumes by nonentities. He keeps getting the last laugh.

  And somehow, we let him have it. Somebody left the door open once when he was voicing a commercial about canned goods. The mask slipped and we heard the self-loathing in the backchat he had with the guys making the recording. It was far from pretty. But it was what querulous truth he was capable of at that late date. This is America—we will go on selling the product when it is long past its due date, which is roughly when unadmitted farce turns into what can conveniently be termed some sort of tragedy.

  18

  Don’t You Know There’s a War On?

  Oddly, almost all of the best movies of the World War II period were only inferentially about the war. I think the exceptions would include Ford’s They Were Expendable(1945), that somber, excellent hymn to dutifulness, though it was not released until hostilities ended. And perhaps Air Force, Howard Hawks’s drama about a Flying Fortress that takes off in peacetime and flies smack-dab into World War II. The script was by Dudley Nichols, and it has the distinction of being perhaps the most civilized war film ever made. There were certainly good movies made between the end of 1941 and the summer of 1945. But they were mostly musicals and melodramas. (If nothing else, film noir takes root in this period.)

  Air Force (1943) was apparently made at the behest of “Hap” Arnold, a famous flier and commanding officer of the air corps, who wanted a celebration of, well, yes, the Air Force. The specified service was then just a branch of the army, and the Hawks-Nichols notion was simply to have a Hawksian group go airborne. The biggest name among the actors was John Garfield, playing a malcontent who can’t wait to muster out, which is due to happen within days or weeks. Before the picture is over, he naturally becomes a full-hearted, not to say gung-ho, member of the team. The rest of the cast is composed of good character players (Harry Carey prominently among them), and their dialogue is crisp and brisk in the Hawksian manner.

  The airplane keeps being waved on across the Pacific, finally seeing action in the Battle of the Coral Sea, in May 1942. Two scenes stand out (in my memory at least). In one of them, two American aviators are shot out of the sky, as they dangle helplessly from their parachutes, by a grinning Japanese in his Zero. We thought: Was there no depth to the depravity of this enemy, commonly referred to as monkeys and similar terms in the movies? (The Japanese in our war movies were almost universally—and racistly—portray
ed as subhuman.) The other, longer sequence is the death of John Ridgely, pilot of the plane, and a sort of near-miss star. He is laid out in a hospital bed, and his dying is couched in terms of takeoff procedures (“wheels up,” “into the sun”—that sort of thing). It’s a weirdly effective scene—tight-lipped dialogue in the manner Hawks preferred, and there was more to it than we knew.

  For it was written by William Faulkner. His only Hollywood credits were for Hawks pictures—they shared a love of hunting and other manly pastimes—and the director conceived the idea that Faulkner was just the man to write this scene, despite the fact that he had returned to Mississippi. Faulkner agreed and knocked the thing out quickly enough. (Once you’ve got a metaphor, writing is easy.) A little later, the writer and the director were on the phone, and the former flushed the toilet for the latter—it was the good use to which he had put Hawks’s money. Up to then his plumbing had been strictly of the outdoor variety. The Nobel Prize was only seven years in Faulkner’s future.

  It is possible that my fondness for Air Force is based simply on the fact that I was ten years old when I saw it—ripe for the picking. But it’s a well-made, if highly improbable, movie. If you return to it today you’ll probably like it—and somehow Faulkner’s ghostly presence in its mix does give it a certain weight.

  I will digress for a story that I find somehow irresistible. Faulkner, Hawks and Clark Gable were heading out for a weekend’s hunting, and the talk turned somehow to writing. They started listing the greatest living American writers, and Faulkner added himself to the group. Gable pretended ignorance—“Oh, are you a writer, Mr. Faulkner?” To which Faulkner deadpanned this response to one of the world’s most famous human beings: “And what do you do, Mr. Gable?” I can’t guarantee the truthfulness of the story—my source for it is the ever unreliable Hawks—but I want it to be so. Let’s let it stand, shall we?

  They Were Expendable is based on a best-selling book by William L. White, which records the devastation of Motor Torpedo Boat Squadron Three in the months immediately following Pearl Harbor. It is about John Bulkeley, renamed Brickley in the movie and played with great restraint by Robert Montgomery, with John Wayne as his number two, fuming his way impatiently through the snafus of war. They have a mission: to prove that their fast little boats can be used as offensive weapons in the war, instead of being confined essentially to picket duty. This they amply prove, particularly in ferrying General Douglas MacArthur out of the Philippines to command the entire Allied war effort in the Pacific.

  But there is more to this story than routine military adventure. Ford met Bulkeley in England, rode around with him in his little boats and conceived a story of larger dimensions, which was written by the veteran Frank Wead. In essence, the movie is a hymn to dutifulness, as I said earlier. By its end, every PT boat in the squadron is destroyed. Their sailors are all, as it were, unhorsed. We see some of them taking up rifles, determined to fight on as foot soldiers in a war that, at that time, seemed a lost cause.

  The movie is notable for its refusal of sentiment, which is fairly rare with Ford. There’s a restrained love affair between Wayne and Donna Reed, pretty much tossed away, and there is very little badinage of the kind that was endemic in war movies. It is, as these things go, tight-lipped. I think its best sequence comes at the end. Wayne and Montgomery are ordered to Australia, and they must board the last plane bound for down under, which means that two other fighting men will have to decamp, possibly to their deaths, certainly to a long stay in a prison camp. Their fate sealed, the two soldiers exchange only a few words before deplaning—Wayne and Montgomery are simply given a number to call, a letter to deliver. We get it—no words need be wasted.

  That’s the way it is throughout this movie—no big speeches about war aims, very few corny songs on the track. We see, in the distance, Japanese ships and planes, but we never get a close-up of the enemy. That’s not what this film is about. It’s about sticking to your guns, about doing your best when supplies are short and hope is nonexistent, except in the longest possible term. The movie is simply a marvel of restraint, in a genre in which that quality was the rarest of commodities.

  But if ever a movie was ill served by history, it is this one. The war was suddenly over as it was about to go into release—the atomic bomb, you know. It was instantly old hat. In the fall of 1945, no one wanted to see a war movie, though the reviews were not bad. It had—and has—its champions, but essentially it was ignored, as it still is. Do not count on a rediscovery.

  Do not count on a discovery, either, for what I think is the best film dealing directly with the war, André de Toth’s None Shall Escape (1944). It had a re-release a few years back on DVD, but essentially it is a lost cause, as much of this director’s work is. He operated in what I suppose we might call the A-minus range—pretty good actors, decent scripts and taut production values, but nothing that caused a studio to enthusiastically get behind his films. This one was written by Lester Cole, later to be one of the Hollywood Ten, and it starred Alexander Knox (most famously of Wilson, a year later). The film is set at a postwar war crimes trial (a rather imaginative stroke, that), and it records Knox’s career as a Nazi officer. He serves rather decently in World War I but is rendered restive by Germany’s postwar difficulties—inflation and the like—so he becomes, in time, a hardened Nazi, unsalvageable by Marsha Hunt as his lover. By the end of the picture he exhibits no redeeming qualities.

  In the film’s most powerful sequence, a group of Jews are awaiting transport to virtually certain death in a concentration camp. To my knowledge, this is the only vivid, visual reference to the camps in a film of that era—though they were sometimes alluded to, rather mildly, in dialogue set well away from the front. (In Frank Borzage’s The Mortal Storm, Frank Morgan is imprisoned in a camp, but it is shown as no harsher than a medium-security American prison. In Mr. Skeffington, Claude Rains is an American Jew imprisoned in a German camp while visiting there and losing his sight as a result, but that happens offscreen.) In his autobiography, Cole is prouder of the fact that he slipped into this sequence a couple of lines from La Pasionara’s famous speech about it being better to live on your feet than to die on your knees. The film was nominated for the original-story Oscar. Harry Cohn, the head of Columbia, which produced it, was alarmed that the movie seemed to be “controversial,” but he was pleased enough by its good reviews. Within its low-budget limits, it is a good movie. As Fats Waller immortally put it, “One never knows, do one.”

  De Toth, whom I came to know many years later when we served together on a Directors Guild committee, was, by then, long since retired from directing (his last movie—as producer—was released in 1970), and he was probably best known for House of Wax, the best 3-D movie ever, though this is not saying an awful lot. He was a Hungarian émigré and one of several one-eyed directors (John Ford and Raoul Walsh were among the others). How the eye was lost is in some dispute—maybe in a skiing accident, maybe in some sort of political incident. He was a cranky old guy and a lot like his best films, in that there was no bullshit about him. “Sardonic” is the best word I can find for him. I came to like him a lot. I never asked him why he stopped directing prematurely. The most I ever got out of him was that every year until Ford died, the great man called him on his birthday, a gesture André appreciated.

  He made a bunch of movies, none of which are bad—a tougher trick than you can imagine—and three of which are superb. In addition to None Shall Escape, there is a little masterpiece called Pitfall (1948), with Dick Powell as an insurance investigator—and, yes, he’s sardonic, not to mention depressed (Powell was expert at this kind of heroic flaw), toying with Lizabeth Scott while defending his home and family (his wife was played by the lovely Jane Wyatt) against the depredations of Raymond Burr’s truly spooky private eye. It finally comes out okay, but not full-heartedly so. It was among the first to bring film noir style (and substance) to the suburbs, and it ends on an ambiguous note. We are left wondering if, in th
e long run, the Powell-Wyatt marriage can be saved. (I’d say don’t bet on it.)

  19

  Children of Paradise

  It is 1945. The war is over. You wonder if the movies have a future to match their past. You know—television coming on, whole new patterns of leisure announcing themselves. But we have a movie to match the moment, Les Enfants du Paradis, which is almost never referred to by its completely serviceable English title, Children of Paradise.

  It is, by any standard, an amazing film, beginning with the fact that it was made at all. Marcel Carné directed from a script by Jacques Prévert. It was shot in Paris and Nice toward the end of the occupation. Its principal set was a quarter-mile-long street (built from scratch), which was peopled by at least 1,500 extras (some say there were 1,800 players at work some days). It is over three hours in length and required eighteen months to shoot. It is an epic by any standard—though it does not take up an epic topic; it merely tells a sublime show business tale (the “children” of paradise referring to those who occupy the cheap seats, in the furthest reaches of the balcony).

  The picture was plagued by problems political as well as logistical. It employed Jews and anti-Nazis, who literally had to mail in their contributions, and its star was the sublime Arletty, playing a fictional “grande horizontale” called Garance, involved with three men based on true figures and portrayed by Jean-Louis Barrault, Pierre Brasseur and Marcel Herrand. As it happened, she was, offscreen, in love with a Luftwaffe colonel, though she remained committed to France. She was intended to characterize the very spirit of French theater, but when the war ended she was jailed as a collaborator and was unable to attend the film’s premiere. She said, in effect, that she had always been true to France, but the heart has reasons that transcend mere politics, and she was forgiven—not least, perhaps, for her insouciance. And for her eyes—so wise and perhaps slightly mocking. She did not work often, and then at least as frequently onstage as on-screen. She played in A Streetcar Named Desire in the theater (and worked with Sartre, too), became blind, wrote a memoir and lived to be ninety-four. To me, she is an immortal, and this film is her masterpiece.