In reality, this was not a foregone conclusion. There were many abduction narratives on the frontier, and though I don’t think any ended in murder, they often ended in misery. The abductees often made lives among those who held them captive, and did not settle back gracefully or gratefully into their former lives. Something like that happens in The Searchers, but (as far as we are allowed to see) the victim is Ethan Edwards. He restores Debbie to her home, though we are not permitted to know her state of mind at this turn of events. We see Wayne outside the door of her ranch—in Monument Valley country, which could not support any sort of agriculture. He is not invited in. Instead, he grasps an arm in a gesture borrowed from the deceased Harry Carey, the door closes on him and the film ends. Ethan is fated to wander the West without the comforts of home and family.
It is a harsh fate—a hero’s fate, bleak and lonely, to be suffered in silence. And possibly in pain unimaginable to us ordinary folk. It has been said that this ending is the most sublime moment Ford ever staged or Wayne ever played, and I will not argue the point. The film rises above its flaws.
Is it the best western ever? I don’t know. It transcends its genre, really. It tugs at us, haunts us in ways that few of its ilk do. It keeps some of its secrets close, rewarding our renewed attention from time to time in the mysterious ways that good movies do. Ford got his Oscars elsewhere. Wayne got his later, for the good humor of True Grit.
From the Wild West to the less-than-wild Alfred Hitchcock, in The Wrong Man (1956). Manny Balestrero plays the bass at the Stork Club—an anonymous sort of man of no importance. He finishes his gig one night and heads home, where he soon finds himself accused of a crime he did not commit. It will take him—Henry Fonda (he does keep coming up, doesn’t he?)—a very long time to prove his innocence. In the meantime, his wife (Vera Miles) goes insane. She simply cannot bear the pressure put upon them both by his being the wrong man. It is only by accident that the right man, as it were, is discovered.
The film seems to me entirely without precedent or follow-up in Hitchcock’s canon. There is no wit, no cheekiness, to be found in it; it is unrelentingly grim. Yet I think it as great as anything he ever did. It is undervalued by his following—sort of a “yes, but” in his large body of work. One thinks of the line in The Iceman Cometh: “What did you do to the booze, Hickey? There’s no damned life left in it.”
What the film has, though, is real tension. It simply has none of Hitchcock’s waywardness. We have no certainty that Mrs. Balestrero will ever be completely restored to herself. Sources are not definitive about what drew Hitch to the project, except that it’s a fine, creepy story with far more at stake in its unfolding than banter and wit and “suspense.” Death is not at stake here (is it ever, really, in a Hitchcock movie?), but life is. What’s that phrase in leases? The right to the “quiet enjoyment” of your rental. That is what’s disrupted by this film. And, curiously, it turns out that the real criminal bears only a vague resemblance to Henry Fonda—Hitchcock’s sly little joke on how hysteria or something like it can disrupt perception, cause us to not quite believe our eyes.
I wish Hitch had made more films of this sort. In its realism, it is as elegant as his better-dressed work. In my conversations with him, I learned that he was not a funny guy. If you wanted to discuss film with him seriously, and set that sort of tone with him, he was your man. He would go on endlessly about the techniques of film—the creation of style, or styles—appropriate to his subject matter. When he set aside the jokey manner he reserved for his television show and other public appearances, he was as serious and sober about movies as anybody I’ve ever encountered. He was truly a master. I don’t know if he ever thought of anything but film—not really. The Wrong Man is a masterpiece that is essentially without compare in the body of his work. In time, it will rise in everyone’s estimation.
Forgive me if I take on his films a little out of order here. North by Northwest came along just three years later, and it is, I think, the most elegant of Hitchcock’s four collaborations with Cary Grant. He had, I think, a need to somewhat degrade the actor in this film, a need to bring him low (before letting him off the hook). He had a great sardonic villain here (James Mason) and the divine Eva Marie Saint purring ambiguous invitations to Grant as he is chased from pillar to post mostly in an unwelcoming Midwest. The crop-dusting scene is a small masterpiece of efficient degradation. We love seeing Grant get his suit mussed. Better still, we love seeing his character, glib Roger Thornhill, discover such humanity as he possesses—more than you might think—under the impress of mass villainy. It turns out that he has the right stuff after all. It’s just that he previously had not been called upon to access it in his silly and superficial life.
I suspect that in the history of movies, many heroes are stillborn. Circumstances do not conspire to test their ordinary virtues. It is a large part of Hitchcock’s art: to get these fellows into trouble and show them to be made of sterner stuff than we ever would have imagined. It is here that we forge our identifications with them—sure, we could do whatever they’re asked to do in the realms of bravery and cleverness, if only we were asked. Therein lies the art—all right, the artifice—of North by Northwest.
One time Hitch let slip his discomfort with Grant to me. He was so smooth—too smooth by half, I think he was implying—and that made the director uncomfortable at times. (The heavyset director, the impeccable star—it’s understandable.) They were not bosom buddies. But they could collaborate brilliantly—one of the best director-star partnerships in movie history—and this is, to my way of thinking, their best and wittiest work. The plunge of the train into the tunnel that brings the film to its conclusion is simply a masterstroke—bold, funny and absolutely right.
“Come back, Sidney,” cries Emile Meyer’s corrupt cop. “I want to chastise you.” Sidney Falco (Tony Curtis) is not buying that invitation. He’s not expected to. That’s the way things are in Sweet Smell of Success (1957), which is one of the most genially corrupt movies in our history, and a huge, delightful surprise. It was written by Ernest Lehman, based on his thoroughly nasty little book, with the gleeful help of Clifford Odets. It was directed by Alexander Mackendrick, who had developed a nice little line of chucklesome English comedies but had never done anything remotely like this. Burt Lancaster is an evil gossip columnist, determined to break up the love affair of his sister and, incidentally, bring down any nice person who wanders innocently into his path, which he accomplishes with flea-flicking ease. It is among the meanest movies ever made in America—and therefore a flop when it was released. I love it very much.
Maybe this is where Marxism went to die. By that I mean that Odets, who had been in the distant past a Communist, and remained a man of the left for a lifetime, and Lehman, whose politics were certainly liberalish, understood that by this time formal allegiance to ideology was not viable—unless you count anarchy as a possibility. That’s the case here. There are hints of decency in the film, but they are limply stated, benchmarks to remind us that somewhere there are values of a better sort. But the nice people in the film are there to be squashed.
There are anecdotes of Odets madly writing dialogue on the set, quick, wise-guyish, baleful stuff, perhaps the better for being written in haste. Its rhythms are marvelous; they set the pace of a film beautifully shot by James Wong Howe. Its relentlessness is exemplary. It is a movie that revels in its own perversity. The world of Broadway press agents and their tribe is sufficiently distant from us that we can, if we like, regard it as a fantasyland—except that this is one of those rare movies that is simultaneously distant and achingly real. How Sandy Mackendrick came to be mixed up with these characters is a mystery. It’s a cruel masterpiece, and it is among the best films Lancaster, Curtis and everyone else connected with it ever did. It never lets up, and it never lets you down.
Vertigo came a year later. Nice Jimmy Stewart becomes afflicted with the illness in the course of a rooftop chase. After he quits the police force, a friend
asks him to follow his wife (Kim Novak), who has become obsessed with an ancestor named Carlotta Valdes, who killed herself a hundred years ago. Novak seems almost a sleepwalker. She falls into the water of San Francisco Bay, and Stewart rescues her. They fall in love. She escapes him, climbs a tower at a mission nearby and falls to her death, his vertigo preventing him from saving her. A little later, he sees a woman who is a dead ringer for her (Novak again), except that she is cheap and tarty. He wonders, though, if she might be dressed and coiffed and made into the simulacrum of his lost love. Thus the divine circularity of this movie.
It was a failure, critically and commercially, when it was released in 1958. Today, as mentioned previously, it has supplanted Citizen Kane atop the Sight and Sound poll of the world’s best movies. I’m not sure I’d go that far, but it is a very fine movie. It also has its implausibilities. Discussing it, David Thomson says that if you want perfect logic, you should perhaps be reading novels—you are not, as he writes, “a creature of the cinema.” He has a point. The movie has a certain chill that’s not fatal to our pleasure in it—we love being manipulated in certain circumstances.
We are fond of saying that we “love” movies, by which we mean, most basically, forgiving them their implausibilities—yes, their stupidities—because they are just so damn much fun. Vertigo is not a movie of this sort. It is not cuddlesome; it is deadly serious. If you are not prepared to deal with it in that way, I think you will possibly emerge from it puzzled, put off, needing to see it more than once, as most of us do. It is not a movie to love. It is a movie to “respect.” This is a movie that cries out for an asterisk of some sort. But also for an attention more unwavering than most.
28
To Live
The 400 Blows appeared in 1959. Seeing it for the first time was one of my most memorable moviegoing experiences. So it seems curious to me that both the director, François Truffaut, and the film that launched his fame (The 400 Blows won the best picture prize at Cannes the year it was released) seem to be somewhat discounted now. Partly that’s because he died before his time. Partly it’s because some of his later films (Day for Night, The Last Métro), though pleasant and popular, did not seem quite the major events the audience expected—not quite the thumping statements that a director of his supposed stature was to bring forth on a regular basis. Partly it is because he made five films featuring the protagonist of The 400 Blows (Jean-Pierre Leaud always played Antoine Doinel), all of them nice enough, none of them as potent as the first film.
I think The 400 Blows remains an extraordinary film that is diminished in retrospect because it seems to be a rather simple tale, though in fact it is more complex than it at first seems. On one level it is the story of a boy with a powerful oedipal attraction to his mother, who is also a wanderer, getting into and out of trouble, sometimes comically, sometimes not so comically, on a pretty much ad hoc basis. Basically he is on the run in this movie, which ends with him at the seashore, unable at last to run any further. We never dislike him; he retains our sympathy, and he retains our exasperation, too.
If that were all there was to The 400 Blows, it would be a minor film, maybe even a cult film (which it may be in danger of becoming). There are, though, other layers to it. In particular, it is a movie—not really a “film,” with all that implies—that has a quite inspiring open-endedness. This boy is so improvisational, constantly inventing and reinventing himself, never settled, always on the move. There are very few movies in which we are less certain about the outcome than we are in this one—how a scene will play out, let alone how the whole picture will “come out.”
Truffaut was, by all accounts, a shy, not to say skittish, man. When he was shooting Fahrenheit 451 in London, he took all his meals in his hotel room, leaving it only to go to the set. Afterwards he said he had no impression of actually having been in the city. I don’t think he was exaggerating. Later, he loosened up somewhat (wives and children have a way of doing that to a man), but his diffidence was large, if not particularly forbidding.
I don’t mean to suggest that Truffaut made anything less than a number of fine films, or that many of his failures were anything but interesting, and often stimulating. But I do believe that in some sense his career was disappointing. Recent writing about him has about it a “yes, but” quality—Jean-Luc Godard’s reputation going up while Truffaut’s goes down. Reputations are such strange things, aren’t they? Truffaut gave us in the beginning such pleasure, such promise. Now there is something grudging in the talk about him. You cannot gainsay his accomplishments, which are of first importance in the history of cinema. But they seem now less than they were. You wonder if his repute can recover, or if he is drifting down the page toward the footnotes. I hope not. There is much loveliness in his work.
A female friend of mine will strike me upside the head if I ignore The Seven Samurai herein. This is not a problem; I’m deeply fond of this 1954 movie, so relentless in its action. (Forgive me for jumping around in the fifties.) But Akira Kurosawa is, I think, something more than a mere action guy (though he is, God knows, masterful with it, especially with the mass movement of crowds and the staging of heroic action). What I most like about the film is its air of derision; Toshiro Mifune seems always to be asnort with that quality.
It is in one sense a simple film—just the samurai defending a village that is annually set upon by raiders intent upon rape, murder and general destruction. Yet you can watch it as often as you like and never tire of it.
It is a measure of Kurosawa’s range that the film that came before Samurai was so different from it: Ikiru, which translates as “To Live.” He was a director who made every sort of film, which is why, I think, he is somewhat discounted by the critics. No one doubted his mastery of many film forms or his energy. But I think a certain dubiety clung to him. His curse was to be prolific, especially when he was contrasted with such competing Japanese masters as Ozu and Mizoguchi.
Energy is, I believe, the most mysterious force in filmmaking. Some people have it and some people don’t, and observers tend to fret over it unduly. Shouldn’t he slow down? To which I reply, Why should he? We cannot escape our internal rhythms. Why not surrender to them—an epic one year, a chamber piece the next? Especially when the overall quality remains high.
Ikiru (1952) is quite a simple film: An elderly man, sublimely played by Takashi Shamura, learns that he has cancer and has only a few months to live. He has done little in life, but now he devotes his last months to building a small park. This he accomplishes, a small affirmation achieved. He will die content. And we are moved more than we think we possibly can be.
Is it a “great” movie? I suppose not. It does not bowl you over; rather, it tugs at you—quietly, insistently, persistently. Yes, we will surely die, but somehow we will sit on a swing in the rain as it approaches, doing better than we ever imagined we would.
We are not quite done with minimalism yet, with Tokyo Story (1953) unconsidered. According to one source I consulted, Yasujirō Ozu’s masterpiece consists of just twenty-four shots, only one of which moves—very slowly. I pretty much have to take it on faith that it is his masterpiece, for his films are difficult to see in the United States. Mostly, his camera stays close to the ground, quietly observing people in conversation. Nothing, in the usual sense, “happens” in the movie. Some elderly people visit Tokyo for the first time to see their children (which is undoubtedly also the last time they will visit them). They are shunted about. The mother becomes ill on their trip home and dies. Their widowed daughter-in-law—altogether the kindest person in the film—makes funeral arrangements and is urged by her father to remarry. She doubts she will. The end.
Yes, it is a masterpiece, though I’m not altogether sure why. People mention Chekhov when discussing it, but that somehow seems inadequate. “Humanity” is evoked to not entirely satisfactory effect, either. I have never seen a piece about it that adequately explains its mystery, the way it grips you so tightly. Maybe it has something
to do with the way it forces you to lean in, to try to discern what it means. I am tempted to see it as a sort of mystery story about the often banal ways we try—and fail—to communicate with one another, though we wish it were otherwise. There is so much silence in this movie, so much loneliness, too. I remain in thrall to Tokyo Story, but it is ineffably sad. Everyone somehow means so well and fails so miserably to connect in any but the most routine and frustrating ways. I think it is one of the most poignant films I know. And also one of the most haunting. I wish I could come more firmly to grips with it.
Setting aside the prodigious outpouring of work from Japan, the New Wave—or the Nouvelle Vague—was the most important body of work in the cinema of the moment. To oversimplify, it was the product of a generational revolt of sorts. That is to say that during the war, Europe was cut off from the rest of the world’s films, and its own films seemed somewhat sclerotic, particularly to its young cineastes. Then, with the end of hostilities, a pent-up flood of film—particularly from America—was unleashed. No longer were these writers and scholars obliged to write wistfully about movies dimly glimpsed from afar. The possibility of actually making movies of a new and different kind arose. Subject matter expanded, and so did stylistic options. Films became looser, freer. The tradition of the well and carefully made traditional film—which had its glories, naturally—was discounted, not to say held in contempt.
Keepers: The Greatest Films of a Moviegoing Lifetime Page 20
