Keepers: The Greatest Films of a Moviegoing Lifetime

by Richard Schickel

  This split was largely along generational lines. Theories abounded, arguments were expounded, books were written—and new kinds of films began to be made. “What is cinema?” Bazin repeatedly asked. And the answer came back, “Anything you want.” It was, putting it mildly, a heady time. It was also significantly different from other eras of large ventures in the movies, in that the impetus for the New Wave did not come, at first, from commercial impulses but rather from people who had about them a certain, well, purity—at least at first. Hollywood was faltering, but an alternative cinema was flourishing. The streets were alive with the stir of the new.

  So…Breathless, or, À Bout de Souffle, to be utterly correct about its French title, in 1960, by Jean-Luc Godard. Jean Seberg finally makes her belated mark. And Jean Paul Belmondo setting some kind of record for talkative sullenness. It is really a Frenchified version of a goodish American noir movie—never more so than when Belmondo confronts a poster of Humphrey Bogart and sighs, “Bogie.” How desperately he wants to be him. But he can’t. French, you know.

  It ends in nastiness—murder. But yet it seems to me rather a cheerful movie, smart-mouthed, sort of cheeky—and technically venturesome in that its sound was created entirely via post-synchronization: There were no annoying microphones cluttering the set. All of this helps to move the movie along at something like a breakneck pace. It’s really a cool little movie, with an underdeveloped undercurrent of angst that’s not too heavily laid on. I think, honestly, it is Godard’s best vein, and one he chose not to explore as often as he could and should have. He was soon deep into heavy-duty filmmaking. He lost and rarely regained his lightness of being—though some American critics stood by him. Personally, I lost patience with him. La Chinoise, Weekend—they seem to me joyless films.

  There is one film of Godard’s, however, that I dearly, maybe even perversely, love. That’s Bande à Part (A Band of Outsiders), from 1964. Yes, I know, it’s sort of a cheesy crime picture (though some critics huff and puff over it). Basically, a couple of students (Anna Karina and Sami Frey) and a friend (Claude Brasseur) learn of a cache of cash and plan to rob the mysterious lodger at her aunt’s. In this they do not succeed, and something like tragedy strikes. So far, so routine—the film is based on a not exactly upscale American crime novel. But it is a comedy of the highest order—giddy, insanely logical, occasionally murderous and, above all, relentless. It is, of course, a farce, played with great sobriety, with at least some of its people getting off without the cash, but at least with their lives.

  One wonders why this director succumbed to sobriety—for that matter, why so many do. There is no real answer—perhaps it’s just people telling them they have serious themes to explore. Then again, you know the saying: “Dying is easy. Comedy is hard.”

  29

  Bergman—At Last

  I had been seeing films by Ingmar Bergman well before I knew I was seeing films by Ingmar Bergman. He had made his first feature, Crisis, in 1946, and it was pretty good as I recall—sort of sexy in an earnest kind of way. But of course, I didn’t know who the auteur was—no one did. He was then one of a number of Scandinavian directors doing interesting work, offering glimpses of bums and boobs and a few sober reflections on sexuality that justified the nudity. In recent years, a few critics have suggested that maybe some of these pictures deserve a second look, though I’m not among them.

  It was not until Smiles of a Summer Night, in 1955, that audiences in Britain and the United States began to reckon seriously with Bergman. It was, I thought, a somewhat dim, but intricate, comedy that to me, at least, did not reach its full potential until it was remade as a musical (A Little Night Music, by Sondheim) in the seventies. Certainly it did not prepare us for The Seventh Seal, two years later.

  I absolutely hated it then, and I still don’t like it very much. Playing chess with death and a troupe of merry players consoling the populace, and lots of other pretentious twaddle, crammed into its relatively short running time made my teeth ache.

  I must concede I am not the ideal audience for this movie. I don’t give a hoot about debating the existence or nonexistence of God. But, of course, millions of people think otherwise. And I have to acknowledge that this is a subject that has never been taken up in such a—what can I say?—“showmanlike” way in the movies.

  It was a sensation, no question of that. It was a handsomely made film—some of its images are immortal, though there was a certain slickness about it. A consensus has grown that it is not a masterpiece. But at the time, I should have recognized the mighty ambition in it. Bergman was daring so greatly with it, you knew it risked ridicule with people like me. Woody Allen, his greatest admirer, has said that it doesn’t make any difference how you rank his films, and he is right. With a few exceptions, it is a body of work second to none. This was something I would have to begin acknowledging when in 1957 Bergman created what I am convinced is his first masterpiece, Wild Strawberries, a work entirely different in tone—except, of course, for its seriousness and its demonstration of range.

  Victor Sjostrom, Sweden’s greatest director prior to Bergman (and a protean actor as well), played Isak Borg, an elderly professor being driven by his daughter-in-law (Ingrid Thulin) to a ceremony where he is to receive an honorary degree. Along the way he encounters, in dreams and reality, significant memories of his not entirely happy past. They pick up some hitchhikers, including a vivacious Bibi Andersson, who reminds the old man of the great lost love of his past. Other relatives are also recollected. No great redemption ensues, though a greater understanding of this life, now obviously drawing to a close, does occur. Indeed, I think it is in Bergman’s refusal to suffuse the final passages with blinding light that much of its greatness lies. When we grow old, it is not possible to fully reform, to be what we might have been when we were younger. A little bit—some smallish grace notes—are what we can manage, and Bergman permits these to Sjostrom/Borg. They are enough to satisfy us.

  It was not, apparently, the easiest of shoots. The old actor insisted on quitting promptly at 4:30 in the afternoon, and he wanted his shot of whiskey just then, too. Bergman indulged him. Thus fortified, the old boy would occasionally return to work for a few shots. The result was one of the great naturalistic performances—and films—in movie history, or so I believe. Bergman would, of course, create more complex films, but none—dare I say it without sounding like a sentimental fool?—more heartfelt. It is so perfectly judged in that respect—so dry, so warm.

  In this period, culminating with Persona, in 1966, Bergman achieved an extremely potent mastery. He drew together a “stock company” of actors who were uniquely responsive to his will, led by Liv Ullmann, who was his lover and fellow resident of the island of Faro, off the Swedish coast. They made great films in this period—in addition to which she made two fine pastorals with Jan Troell in the United States. She also made a good deal of piffle, which for a time damaged her international career. She retreated to Sweden, and the pair eventually ceased to be lovers, but they remained friends for life. Better still, they were collaborators, notably on Faithless, a fine and complex film that she directed. It is not Persona—but what is?

  Persona may well be a great work, though it is also relatively short, frustrating and mysterious, too. In essence, a famous actress (Ullmann) loses the basic tool of her trade (speech) and is put in the care of a nurse (Bibi Andersson). By the end, the illness has been transferred from patient to nurse, and we have learned a terrible lesson: The artist must discharge her neuroses somehow; if she cannot do so in imaginative works, she will do so more destructively, by imposing them on other people. The high point of the film is a long monologue wherein the nurse recalls a day and night of sex on a beach that Pauline Kael has called, quite rightly, one of the great erotic passages in movie history, even though not so much as a button is unbuttoned.

  I have never read a fully persuasive critical account of this film. People seem to fall back in confusion before it—as I do, no matter how
often I encounter it. This usually argues some flaw in the filmmaking, and I suppose that’s possible. For such an elegantly made film, it is one that has engendered a surprisingly outraged critical commentary. But it is, nonetheless, a hypnotic film. If there is a lack of clarity in it, a lack of coherent conclusiveness to it, so be it. That’s why we are constantly drawn back to it—seeking the key to its elusive meaning. It is one of the movies’ great enigmas, and it is one that I have gone back to three or four times at least to arrive at the tentative conclusions I have advanced here.

  It seems to me that over the long haul of the next decades, Bergman for the most part embarked on a slow process of simplification. The development of his stories was certainly simpler and more direct on the whole, though they were not less terrible in many of their outcomes. They were also much less concerned with metaphysics, which was a great relief to me, at least. He did Mozart (delightfully, I thought) and marriage (not always a snarling tangle), and there is an intimacy of scale in these films that very rarely tightens to the claustrophobic. It actually expands most wonderfully in Fanny and Alexander to a potent mix of terror and charm.

  We will come to that in its time. In the meanwhile, there is the matter of Pauline Kael’s argument to consider. She was not entirely pleased with Persona, which was her privilege. She concedes it its “ingenuity” but finds audiences being encouraged to let the movie “happen” to them rather than to engage with the film critically. She has some kind of a point here (hence the wide variety of interpretations offered for the film). But still, this was a remarkably fecund period for Bergman. It’s possible that no director has ever made so many films of such high quality in so short a period (from 1973 to 1983). Kael was always more of a ditherer in her reviews than she liked to let on, and in this instance—even more than usual—she did not come firmly to grips with her material. It eluded her, and we can sense her frustration, which reflects our own. This movie tests us as few others do critically. In some sense it is the film that we have to conquer, and never fully do. That’s the best thing about it: its insolubility. There are a very few movies that we will never “solve.”

  30

  The Criminal Life

  David Thomson calls Anatomy of a Murder (1959) “perfect.” He is not a man easily given over to such superlatives. I don’t think he means that this is a perfectly elegant film or that Otto Preminger was his favorite auteur. What he means, I think, is that it was a well-executed, intricate adaptation of a well-plotted, very popular, rather witty best seller with a lot of good actors—young, old, in between and led by canny James Stewart—easing gracefully along in their traces. Repeated mention was made of “panties” (they were a significant plot point), there was stunt casting that actually worked (Joseph N. Welch, the flinty lawyer who as much as anyone brought down Joe McCarthy, played the judge in the film with expert waspishness) and George C. Scott was Claude Dancer, from far-off East Lansing, wonderfully snarky, a man we were going to have to contend with in the near movie future. Did I mention Eve Arden? She was sharp as a tack, as usual. Duke Ellington was beyond cool. It was fun, smart and tricky, and everybody we like in the movie basically gets screwed, which is okay—it’s plotted so that no lasting harm comes to anyone. Wendell Mayes’s script is sharp, and it is realized gorgeously by the extraordinary cast. (There was often a lot of good acting in Preminger’s films.)

  Anatomy is Preminger’s masterpiece, though peace on the shade of Andrew Sarris, there were not as many of those by Preminger as the late, great critic thought. Preminger made Laura, of course, a rather elegant and cloudy romance, and a group of crime stories—including Fallen Angel, Whirlpool and Where the Sidewalk Ends—that were modest, expert and glum, before succumbing to less-than-divine adaptations of fat-headed best sellers (Exodus, The Cardinal, In Harm’s Way) that were of dubious merit, though I guess he thought they were important films. He was a supreme cynic, but also a man who carried himself as an artist no matter what anyone else thought.

  Preminger wanted to be a middlebrow (though he thought he was being some kind of intellectual). So he huffed and he puffed and made it to that state, leaving behind his best self except, instinctively, this once. You can watch the film as many times as you like with some kind of pleasure. Do not, however, go near The Cardinal or anything else with a Saul Bass title design. These designs were handsome; the problem is that they were almost always the best thing about the movie.

  In this period, a change of sorts came over film noir. Charlton Heston, always intellectually ambitious, conceived a film to star Orson Welles, who was also signed on as director. The year of release was 1958, and it was called Touch of Evil. Welles bulked up (more than usual, if that’s possible) to play a corrupt cop who contrives to get Heston’s wife (Janet Leigh) into a peck of trouble; basically she is tied to a bed and subjected to some really scary humiliations by a gang of goons led by Mercedes McCambridge, herein one of the most sadistic females in the history of the movies. Leigh is plucky, but you’re never in doubt that her danger from this cackling harridan is real. Universal didn’t know quite what to do with the finished product, so they released it on the bottom half of the bill, where it was discovered by a privileged few.

  The film has felicities above and beyond its B picture budget, beginning with an opening sequence—some three minutes in length—that is one long, dazzling tracking shot that proceeds through a lot of elegant moments that are almost thrown away. The movie may have been based on a fairly trashy mystery novel, which Welles rewrote, but he still had plenty of directorial chops at that point. The movie’s final edit was a studio job, dissatisfying to Welles, and forty years later (!) a restoration was made from his notes that, most significantly, removed the credits from the opening sequence and tightened the film up in many minor but significant ways. It is no longer a blighted film. It is a tight, tough, tricky movie, which is what it started out to be before everyone started futzing with it—a first-rate second-rate piece of work, perversely sexy and enjoyable. It was a harbinger of some things to come.

  It was almost a decade later that Bonnie and Clyde came along. It was five years later that the first of the Godfather pictures arrived, and two years after that Chinatown appeared. There are never many game changers, but there don’t have to be. Influence is not a matter of quantity; it is a question of impact.

  In the sixties and seventies, film noirs continued to be made. They did not have their former impact and became a predictable part of the Hollywood mix—which was not so bad. Warren Beatty to the rescue. It was two young writers, Robert Benton and David Newman, who had the idea for Bonnie and Clyde, and they enlisted Beatty in it. Arthur Penn was reluctant, but Beatty is nothing if not persistent, and eventually Penn signed on.

  In the making, the picture became both more brutal and funnier than it had been in the beginning, but in its first release it was dimly, even fecklessly, received. Bosley Crowther thrice attacked it (ensuring his long-delayed demise as the New York Times’ film critic). Pauline Kael rose to its defense, and many critics (me among them) re-reviewed it more enthusiastically than we had at first. It became a cause célèbre. Robert Towne did rewrites and Beatty fought for and won a re-release, which ensured Oscar nominations and eventual prosperity.

  Penn recalled being utterly confident that he knew exactly how to direct the picture, how to mix the comedy and the bleakness of it and to create one of the great ensemble casts in film history. The hail-of-bullets ending is without parallel. It simply tears your heart out. There is an exchange of looks between Bonnie and Clyde as they acknowledge their demise that is sublime.

  The book on which the Godfather movies are based was a mighty best seller, deservedly so. I remember gulping it down in one long sitting, with brief breaks to gobble down sandwiches. I remember thinking it was sort of trashy, yet I was helplessly in its thrall. The first film derived from it was made in 1972. There is Brando, suddenly paying attention in one of the most gripping character parts in movie history. In the se
cond part (1974), Robert De Niro builds on what Brando laid out. (The third film is negligible.) Al Pacino is masterful as the son meant to escape the crime family—to be perhaps a senator—yet hopelessly, helplessly caught in its toils. The casting is ever perfect in these films. Here, Francis Coppola is a great director.

  Most gangster films, of which formerly there were so many, are rather small in scale; Cagney, for example, was mostly seen running a fairly modest operation. An example: There is a still in which sharpshooters are aiming machine guns at him while he rather casually awaits their fire. This is not a guy, we think, running a major crime syndicate. It suited Hollywood in the 1930s to play organized crime as an anomaly—“shame of a nation” and all that, but not a genuine threat to our comity. If not that, the gangsters were seen as “nut jobs” (in Cagney’s phrase), people not just beyond the law, but beyond sanity as well.

  The Godfather films changed the scale of organized crime in the movies. They presented crime as a business like any other. Its leaders spoke on equal terms with the leaders of other major enterprises. They dared to contemplate marriage with women of completely respectable families. They might think of the Ivy League for their children. They might, in a generation or two, think of leaving the life of crime entirely for the law or even politics. Yes, of course, “wet work” was sometimes still a regrettable necessity and handled with due dispatch.

  I don’t suppose any of us thought the pictures told the literal truth about how organized crime was actually organized. One imagined that Robert Duvall’s calculating lawyer was more the norm than James Caan’s hothead was—though that scarcely mattered. What still matters is the yearning to go straight on the part of Michael Corleone and the hopes his pop harbors for him in that regard. If there is tragedy in these films—and I think there is—it lies in the failure to shake off that yearning. One has to believe that the grandchildren have their summas from Harvard and their Wall Street partnerships and that the stories they hear of the criminal past sound like tall tales, something the dotty old codgers make up to verbally enliven an otherwise uneventful past.