It was ugly. Lean retreated into himself, the group yapping at his heels. Pauline was like that—basically a bully, and a relentless one when she sensed weakness. Her trick was to pretend she was telling the brutal truth, which everyone else was too cowardly to do. A lot of the time she was just showing off for her coterie—the Paulettes, as Richard Corliss immortally dubbed them.
Lean did not make another film for fourteen years, and he put it about that his treatment on this occasion was the cause of his silence—which was nonsense. Worse—from my point of view—he blamed me for leading the charge against him, when the opposite was true. I tried to make amends, mostly by writing part of an overenthusiastic Time cover story about A Passage to India in 1984. But still, it was as shameful an hour or two as I ever endured as a critic. My defense? I was too young and green to command the meeting, tell everyone to just back off.
My peculiar chronology now happily brings me to Red River (1948), which is, in my estimation, the best cattle-drive western of them all. John Wayne was initially a little dubious about young Montgomery Clift playing opposite him. He seemed awfully willowy to the Duke—and he was fairly young at the time. But Hawks persisted. He thought that if, eventually, Clift took a poke at Wayne, the sheer surprise of the act would startle the older actor, leading to a fight that would demonstrate their love for one another—which Joanne Dru helpfully points out to them, even though at the moment she has an Indian arrow planted painfully in her shoulder. Walter Brennan is crankily along for the ride as cook and conscience to the venture, his main question to Hawks being whether to wear his teeth in or out. The latter, of course. Much funnier.
It’s a joyous, quite linear movie, unfussy, the way Hawks liked them to be. And more than Stagecoach, it established Wayne not just as a star but as an institution, a force of nature. He is just such a powerful presence in the picture—humorous, difficult and forced by Clift to work hard to keep up with his canny, counterpunching portrayal. His surprise when Clift finally abandons his passivity and strikes back at him is a great movie moment.
Wayne had been a footballer at USC and had a summer job at Fox Studios—mostly tugging and hauling—a big, handsome guy you couldn’t help noticing around the lot. He did minor bits and pieces there, and then, the story goes, Raoul Walsh observed him handling heavy props with a light touch and gave him the lead in The Big Trail (1930), a so-so western in which he was awkward but somehow authentic. Thereafter, he worked regularly—some small parts in biggish pictures, and vice versa, but mostly westerns, some of them of the singing variety, hard as that may be to believe. He was nominally a star—but only nominally. He was, as we all know, rescued by Stagecoach in 1939, given at last a star’s entrance by John Ford. This might be a good moment to reflect on the question of masculine beauty. By the time he was making the cavalry westerns and the other epic works of his maturity, he was rather a heavy screen presence. He looked okay, but he was scarcely a dreamboat. He was by now a good actor, alert to the ironies of his screen persona. We just plain liked him. Anyone who could woo flinty Joan Didion to sympathy was obviously a man of parts.
But think back to 1939, and the sheer beauty of the man. Yes, beauty—no other word will do. Some of it was owed to the panchromatic film stock, which made everyone look better than life. Then, too, there was the standard of the time—no man or woman dared aspire to stardom without possessing extraordinarily good looks, which is no longer always the case. The entire Hollywood system, from directors to grips, was, in effect, a conspiracy to present everyone in his or her best light.
I have no idea if Wayne was a likable man, but some glancing contact with him made me think he probably was. He at least had a sense of humor. And there was an ease, a grace, to him that was very winning. He came to define—as much as anyone—what stardom was. He made his share of lunky pictures—too many of them, because he was a bear for work. But you also have to say that within his genre limits, he made a great many fine and memorable movies, ones that I would happily throw into the machine tonight, reveling in that flat voice, that dry humor and a certain quizzicality. He was not the greatest actor of them all—there were men of greater subtlety working in Hollywood’s golden era—but he was sui generis: There was a power in him and an anger (see The Searchers, for example) that is beyond compare. He also faced down the cancer that carried him off at the comparatively young age of seventy-two with exemplary courage.
While we are on the subject of westerns—or perhaps I should say more-or-less westerns—I want to mention a group of three from this period.
One is virtually unknown and unsung. No Name on the Bullet (1959) is one of a small raft of low-budget action pictures that Audie Murphy made after he returned from World War II as America’s most decorated soldier. He had a baby face and was from Nowheresville, Texas, but he was authentically tough. An example: A bunch of TV cowboys were amusing themselves by having a quick-draw contest and, so the story goes, asked Murphy if he’d like to join in. “Sure,” he said, “if you use real bullets.”
John Huston liked his affectless quality and starred him effectively in some A pictures, but he settled into Bs for the most part in the fifties. I found him there in the aforementioned movie. He plays a guy mostly sitting on his western porch, not doing much. But just the same, he’s scaring the daylights out of the town. Obviously, he has deadly business hereabouts, but he’s in no hurry to conduct it or, in fact, to identify who his eventual target is. This means virtually everyone in town is in a dither, as they are all possible victims.
The film is seventy-seven minutes long and is directed by the action master, Jack Arnold, and it has a twist ending that is very satisfying. I’m not arguing that it is a forgotten masterpiece or that Murphy is a great actor neglected (though he did come to a premature end). But there is an unpretentiousness to him that is very satisfying—more so than you will find in pictures that huff and puff far more grandly than his did.
Movies of this sort—never many, but on the other hand not a few, either—were one of the pleasures of moviegoing up to the 1960s. When the studios were grinding out B pictures (often in series like Dr. Kildare), they clung to a certain standard. They were testing grounds for directors and stars, and these people worked hard and took them seriously. They offered a way up, and also a place for the audience to stay in touch with treasured retainers. There were few undiscovered masterpieces at this level of American filmmaking, but there were few major disappointments, either. This was the place where many solid talents waited to make the transition to television and the belated stardom it afforded them.
The second film is Gun Crazy (1949). It’s a Bonnie and Clyde sort of story, starring John Dall and Peggy Cummins—not exactly big-time stars. It was written by the odd couple of MacKinlay Kantor and Dalton Trumbo and directed by Joseph H. Lewis, a reasonably reliable B picture operative who somehow attained auteur status in France (go figure). The lead characters are precisely what the title says they are—quite coldly so. They work for a while on the right side of the law, in carnivals and the like, and then slide over to the dark side, eventually staging a series of robberies that lead to their demise. It is a very chilling little movie. They share a passion for shooting, of course, but not, it seems to me, for one another. Yet the movie has attained cult status—deservedly so. There are very few films in which the protagonists’ mad passions are not for each other but for…I guess you could call it a hobby of sorts. They are, in tandem, a whirlwind of destruction.
In any case, the movie eventually attains a sort of cool frenzy that is quite rare, especially in this era. It’s possible that everyone connected with it just simply forgot that Dall and Cummins should have shown some passion for something other than those shiny firearms, which are the sexiest things in the picture. That, however, works well for the film, which was made in low-budget haste. Sometimes what you leave out of a film is what gives it some special (possibly lunatic) quality. It was one of what are said to be eighteen movies—there are doubtless m
ore—that Trumbo worked on during his blacklist years, at cut rates and in something of a manic way. There are pictures of him writing in his bathtub, cigarette in a jaunty holder. (He died of lung cancer.) There was no time for nuance; there was only time for one central, pretty big idea, to be explored at breakneck pace. As a result, Gun Crazy becomes one of the few movies to say something worthwhile about, well, America’s gun craziness. I love its bleakness, its blankness, its meanness.
We come now to The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948), which you will recall is about Humphrey Bogart going bonkers digging for gold in Mexico while Walter Huston, indulged by his son, the director John, steals the picture with what is probably the greatest goatish performance in the history of the movies. The problem, of course, is that they find their treasure. This drives Bogart’s Fred C. Dobbs into paroxysms of paranoia. That is a state of mind not rare in the movies, but I’d venture to say that Bogart forever defines it. He snivels, he snarls, he is from the outset of Treasure “unsound,” if we may put it mildly. We also feel sorry for Tim Holt—deft, calm and doomed as the only sane member of this party. If the fortune hunters had not found gold, it’s just barely possible that Fred C. Dobbs could have clung to his sanity. But they do—and round the bend he goes. His attempts to protect his “goods” (his share of the treasure) are mad as well as manic. In effect, he cedes the picture to the elder Huston, without quite surrendering it to him.
Huston was a great character man. He could be kindly, dignified and, yes, a very respectable Abraham Lincoln for D. W. Griffith. But he didn’t let slip the bear within until this movie. He danced, he capered and yet he was keeping this ill-assorted bunch on as even a keel as possible. The subtext of this performance is, I think, its lack of expectation. He has been hunting for gold all his life, with no great success. Now, at last, it is in his hands. But if experience has taught him anything, it is that something can always go wrong. He is prepared for that, even good-humored about it. He is the locus of the film’s irony—huge, of course—and no one has more richly deserved his Oscar than Huston.
The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, though based on a very sober novel by B. Traven, is, in its screen incarnation, a great shaggy dog story. Huston won Oscars for writing and directing it. It was not an instant hit, but enough of us loved it from the start to keep it alive. I was just fifteen years old when I first glimpsed it. Yet its ironies were not all that difficult to comprehend. It had its surface madnesses to amuse us, but beneath them there was something deeply, elusively squirrelly about the picture. Few movies are so perfectly pitched on the borderline between farce and tragedy.
25
Fasten Your Seat Belts
In 1950, the nature of screenwriting changed—a little. I continue to contend that the great age of that art or craft was the 1930s. Risking a generalization (with obvious exceptions), I’d say that the writers of the earlier era were at some pains to write a spoken rather than a written language, unless they were adapting some high-toned novel or play. Especially in comedies and romances, their words tended to be casual, off-the-cuff, a pretty good imitation of the way people spoke in real life—but, of course, edgier, a little more pointed. Bringing Up Baby is a good example, but there are dozens of others. Unless we’re talking about the Marx Brothers or some other highly stylized—that is to say, surreal—sort of film, there was a kind of bemused murmur to the dialogue of the typical light American film. The writers weren’t going for zappers most of the time. That’s what made such minor—but delightful—movies as Easy Living and Hands Across the Table (and dozens more) so engaging. Maybe easy to take is the right phrase for them. Bob Hope’s frantic gag comedies, endlessly going for the boffo, are examples of what we are not talking about. They are a sort of illustrated radio—lots of good jokes, lots of not-so-good ones.
As we’ve seen, during the war—Sturges excepted—the movies lost much of their sense of humor, and they didn’t regain it with the ending of hostilities. The lightsome actors of the 1930s were still around, but they wanted to make The Lost Weekend now. Humor simply stalled or went soft and sentimental. Maybe it was because the performers and the writers and the directors were older now.
Into this breach there eventually stepped some wits of a different kind—notably Joseph L. Mankiewicz and Billy Wilder. They were up out of the writers’ buildings, where before the war they had written some notably funny movies. During the war they wrote some notably sober movies. Now they wished for something more mordant.
Take All About Eve, for example, or Sunset Blvd., both from 1950. These movies are, I think, written more than spoken—very polished. Gemlike, you might say. “Fasten your seat belts, it’s going to be a bumpy night.” “Why do they all look like nappy rabbits?” That sort of thing. People did not speak like that in real life, but we could be persuaded they might. (The lines above are from Eve.) Upon repeated exposure, such lines at times seemed arch, even perhaps oddly sentimental, or sententious. But Bette Davis was a marvel in the film, clinging hard to her slightly fading stardom while fighting conniving Anne Baxter to a draw (I guess) in the title role. Mankiewicz wanted to be witty in the film, which he often was, but he also wanted to say some important things about life in showbiz’s faster lanes, which worked out less well on the whole. But it was something new, and people liked it at the time, though I think it has not worn well with the passing years. It didn’t sweat a lot, though—give it that—and like its predecessor, A Letter to Three Wives, it won for Mankiewicz the best writing and best directing Academy Awards simultaneously, an unprecedented and unduplicated feat. He hung around quite a while, an endlessly witty man who eventually became essentially blocked as a writer-director, but still a gallant figure. One always wished him well.
Sunset Blvd. is to me quite a different case—if only because it is that rare instance of a movie narrated by a dead man; offhand, I can’t think of another. Down on his luck and chased by the cops, Joe Gillis (William Holden) ducks into a driveway on the title avenue and enters the weird world of Norma Desmond—“I am big; it’s the pictures that got small”—played by Gloria Swanson, possibly filling in, it is said, for Mary Pickford. She is a onetime silent picture star rattling around in a mansion and encouraged by Gillis (who has a perfectly nice romantic foil in Betty Schaffer, played by Nancy Olson). He is a weak man, seduced by the older woman, and they get to canoodling. Every once in a while, silent picture stars of her era come over to play cards, and pretty soon she is buying him clothes, riding him around in an ancient car and thinking of a comeback, which he encourages.
What sends her around the bend is a call from Cecil B. DeMille. She thinks he wants to cast her. In fact, it’s not DeMille but a studio functionary who wants to rent her car for a scene DeMille is shooting. DeMille keeps calling her “young fella,” which doesn’t help much. Then the lighting guy, Hog-Eye, turns the light on her and gives her her moment. And her ruination.
It is from time to time a funny movie, in a weird sort of way. Norma is forever poised perilously on the edge of madness, and Holden is using her (though he’s under the impression that he’s a nice guy and at the same time a sort of genial cynic). He does not love her, but on the other hand he doesn’t have much to do, either. He is—well—feckless, an idler. At worst, he thinks she’s probably something of a neurotic, not so different, perhaps, from other women he may have toyed with in the past. Madness is simply beyond his ken. Until, of course, it’s too late. And he is dead and she is entirely crazy and, you will recall, “ready for my close-up.”
A lot of people—inside and out of Hollywood—hated the picture. It was never a great commercial success. There was, putting it simply, no one to like—except perhaps Ms. Olson, and there was not enough of her. There was a pre-release screening of the film at Paramount, and the word was awful. Louis B. Mayer was present and held that the film was unreleasable. Wilder is said to have told him to go fuck himself. Mayer suggested a fund to buy the thing up and bury it. The film just sort of fizzled, except amon
g the cognoscenti, like James Agee, who among other observations noted that movies about Hollywood seemed to be better than novels about them, which is likely true.
But there it is—Sunset Blvd. Mordant, by God. Always ready for its close-up.
It is still 1950, and along comes All the King’s Men, written and directed by Robert Rossen. It wins the best picture Oscar, as well as the prizes for best actor and best supporting actress. It does not, however, win the best director or writing Oscars—they are denied Rossen because of his politics.
He was forced to wander wide, largely abroad, in search of work in largely inferior films that did not cohere into the very good career that might have been his. Rossen had been a playwright and a very successful screenwriter before turning to directing with Body and Soul, in 1947. He had been a Communist, but had come to a bitter break with the party around the time of All the King’s Men. Some of its members, it is said, visited when he was preparing the movie, urging him to abandon it. Whatever for? he wondered. It seemed to him impeccably anti-fascist. Well, er, that was the problem: In a certain light, Willie Stark could be seen as a Stalinist figure. Rossen sent the party members packing, but their association cost him the personal honors that were almost automatic in these instances.
Rossen also suffered from ill health for some years and died at fifty-eight. But he kept working, in good times and bad, and seemed to me rather gallant. Rossen was the first movie director I ever met, and I probably should say that I liked him. I liked this film, too, though most people do not. It is something of a lost film. In fact, I think it’s better than the novel it is based on.
Keepers: The Greatest Films of a Moviegoing Lifetime Page 18
