Who the Hell's in It

by Peter Bogdanovich

  On the night, to a packed house—some people seated in the aisles and many standing in back—I gave a little introductory talk about Opening Night, and said I’d be happy to answer questions after the screening. The picture played terrifically. I couldn’t wait to tell John how “with it” the audience was all the way through, and that the weird sequence where Gena fights the fan’s ghost also had worked, that he was right to keep it in, though I had once told him I thought cutting it wouldn’t hurt. John had asked me, abruptly, “You think I should cut the ghost scene?” And I had said I thought that might be a good idea, might make things simpler for people. There was a beat or two and John said, “No, I’m gonna keep it in …”—almost as if he’d been testing me. I was going to go on to him about why this sequence, in fact, worked so well to put us in Gena’s shoes, to better understand her fear and guilt. When the picture was over, there was tumultuous applause, and I felt a little silly going up there, having been in the movie for about two minutes; but I did, and applauded with the audience, answered as many questions as I could—nobody left—told a few Cassavetes anecdotes, all through a translator, though a lot of the people understood English quite well. It was all very pleasant. Right after I stepped down, and the audience started to leave, the festival director took me aside and said they’d just been notified that, a couple of hours ago, John Cassavetes had died.

  John Cassavetes and Gena Rowlands as brother and sister in the last of Cassavetes’ own films as director (and co-writer, with Ted Allan), Love Streams (1984), a deeply human drama of some lost people in an out-of-control universe. In John’s amazing stage version, the large dog was played by an actor.

  The news was so shocking that I didn’t really react for quite a while. Apparently, he had gotten very ill, couldn’t breathe, was taken to the hospital, where things got only worse. He was in considerable pain. Gena was with him until the end. He had died right around the time we started to show the film. So maybe his ghost had made it to the screening after all. Certainly I felt his presence throughout, as everyone did, as everyone always does when seeing his films, because only John could’ve made them.

  The private memorial would be in a couple of days but it would have meant missing the weekend Cassavetes had arranged for us in Amsterdam. I could hear him telling me, for Christ’s sake, to stay there and have a good time, the memorial will all be funny stories about him! So we stayed in Holland, and heard what happened at the memorial from Gena, Peter, Ben and Al, that it was a lot of very funny anecdotes about John, everyone breaking up. I was asked to host, and help put together, an official tribute to John at the Directors Guild of America, which I did, and again, it was mostly laughs. Gena didn’t go to that one. She said she couldn’t handle seeing the clips of John. Some years later, I would be behind Gena as she entered one of many profoundly deserved tributes to her; on the screen were she and John in their first TV drama together, both very young, thin, gorgeous. Gena froze in her tracks, and stared at the screen in amazement. “God!” she said out loud. “We were both so young!” and she turned her back to the screen and waited till it was over. “I can’t look at that,” she said.

  In Amsterdam on the weekend he died, of course, like a lot of people from there to Los Angeles and around the world, we were thinking of John Cassavetes, each of us in our own way. And from February 1989 on, as Nick Cassavetes put it to me in the summer of 2002—“Jesus, thirteen years!” And he continued, “The world’s sure a darker place since then, isn’t it?”

  Referring to my ghost picture, I always remember that John had promised to be around, and since he always kept his promises, I have indeed felt his presence now and again. Once was in the morning prior to the DGA tribute when I could hear John’s voice telling me some things I should be doing during the presentation. I said, out loud, “You’re still directing!” and in my head I could hear him say, “What’d’ya think!?”

  Born John Cassavetes, December 9, 1929, New York, NY; died February 3, 1989, Los Angeles, CA.

  Selected starring features (with director):

  1955: The Night Holds Terror (Andrew L. Stone)

  1956: Crime in the Streets (Don Siegel)

  1957: Edge of the City (Martin Ritt)

  1958: Saddle the Wind (Robert Parrish)

  1964: The Killers (Siegel)

  1967: The Dirty Dozen (Robert Aldrich)

  1968: Rosemary’s Baby (Roman Polanski); Machine Gun McCain (Giuliano Montaldo)

  1970: Husbands (Cassavetes)

  1971: Minnie and Moskowitz (Cassavetes)

  1976: Mikey and Nicky (Elaine May)

  1977: Opening Night (Cassavetes)

  1981: Whose Life Is It Anyway? (John Badham)

  1982: Tempest (Paul Mazursky)

  1983: Marvin and Tige (Eric Weston)

  1984: Love Streams (Cassavetes) Other films he directed:

  1960: Shadows

  1962: Too Late Blues

  1963: A Child Is Waiting

  1968: Faces

  1974: A Woman Under the Influence

  1976: The Killing of a Chinese Bookie

  1980: Gloria

  1985: Big Trouble

  16

  CHARLIE CHAPLIN

  Told once that as a director his camera angles were not very interesting, Charlie Chaplin responded, “They don’t have to be interesting—I am interesting.” If ever there was an actor’s remark, that’s it, and so Charlie Chaplin is included in this book, though, of course, he also wrote, directed, produced (and even scored) virtually all his own work. At the peak of his success, from about 1917 through the mid-thirties, Charlie was the most popular, deeply beloved human being on earth, maybe in the history of the world. His silhouette as the Tramp is one of the most famous images of the twentieth century.

  On the screen, I was first introduced to him by my father, who took me to see some of his shorts (1914–18) at the Museum of Modern Art in the mid-forties when I was about five, but I didn’t meet him in person until 1972, when Charlie was eighty-three and had only five more years to live. We had a few exchanges, and I even visited him and his beautiful last wife, Oona O’Neill (Eugene O’Neill’s youngest daughter), at their imposing villa in the hills above Vevey, Switzerland, and would ultimately direct the shooting for a documentary that included what was probably the last shot of him walking off (with Oona) into the sunset.

  Chaplin had walked off into his own final cinema sunset way back in 1936 with the by-now legendary ending of Modern Times: the Little Tramp and the Gamin (his third wife, Paulette Goddard) heading away from us, hand in hand, down the long, long road into the future, and the past. Charlie had invented and developed his immortal Tramp character during the first two years of his life in movies, having started in pictures in 1914, with Mack Sennett’s resonant Keystone company (after coming to America with a popular British vaudeville troupe). Within the initial year—either as actor or, rather quickly, actor-director—he was seen in thirty-five two-reel (twenty-minute) comedies, though sometimes in supporting roles. By 1915, he was already popular enough to be wooed away with much more money by Essanay—from $175 a week at Keystone to $1,250 a week at Essanay (plus a $10,000 bonus). In one year he made fifteen shorts—including gems like The Bank, A Night at the Show, Carmen (his first to exceed two reels), and, announcing what was established by then, The Tramp.

  Charlie Chaplin and six-year-old Jackie Coogan in one of the climactic sequences of The Kid (1921), Chaplin’s first feature and the most successful picture made since D. W. Griffith’s landmark The Birth of a Nation six years before.

  Just over a year later, his success had become so great that the ante went up again when Mutual gave him an as yet unprecedented $10,000 a week (plus a $150,000 bonus) to make twelve two-reelers yearly with complete artistic control. This resulted in his first masterpieces, including such classics as Easy Street, One A.M., The Pawnshop, The Cure, The Rink, and The Vagabond (1916–17). In 1918 First National hired him for eight films at one million dollars; most of those
ran to three or four reels, memorable for things like the World War I satire Shoulder Arms, and A Dog’s Life and The Pilgrim. His first feature, The Kid (1921), became the second-biggest-grossing film of all time after the epoch-making The Birth of a Nation (1915), which more people saw in theaters than any film in history. In 1923, Charlie became co-founder—along with Douglas Fairbanks, Mary Pickford, and D. W. Griffith—of United Artists, for which he produced all his subsequent feature masterworks, such as The Gold Rush (1925), The Circus (1928), City Lights (1931), and Modern Times, the four final Tramp movies.

  Using dialogue for the first time, he made only three more, progressively less popular, pictures before being asked not to come back to America: The Great Dictator (1940), Monsieur Verdoux (1947) and Limelight (1952). Orson Welles used to say it was not until after the poor reviews had come out on Monsieur Verdoux (and equally bad box office) that Chaplin added, following his own screenplay credit: “Based on an idea by Orson Welles.” My parents always used to say—echoing a popular European sentiment—that if only Chaplin had made The Great Dictator three or four years earlier, Hitler might have been laughed out of existence and World War II prevented. In fact, Chaplin had been showing off his Hitler impression at Hollywood parties for years before he ever did it for the camera.

  In 1952, informed by the State Department (while traveling by ship to Europe) that because of moral and political reasons—he was a suspected Communist and had just been married for the fourth time, to a teenager (Oona O’Neill)—he would not be admitted back into the country which had made him rich, but of which he had never become a citizen, Chaplin vowed never to return. Having sold his share of U.A. in 1955, Chaplin made—ten years apart—only two more pictures in his life, both shot in England (where he’d been born in 1889), and both not really worth including in the canon: A King in New York (1957), his last starring role, and A Countess from Hong Kong (1967) with Marlon Brando and Sophia Loren obviously trying to mimic Chaplin much as child-actor Jackie Coogan had in The Kid; they were not successful at it.

  For twenty years, from 1915 through 1936, Chaplin held his audience—which was the whole world—captivated and bewitched to laughter and tears. Modern Times was his last great success, after which he steadily lost touch with the very pulse of the people. Even when he re-edited and reissued two of his greatest silent successes (with both critics and public), Chaplin essentially destroyed the artistic integrity and brilliance of his original work: the 1942 version of The Gold Rush, with music and added commentary by Chaplin, is dreadful, and the 1969 revised version of The Circus, with Chaplin singing a terribly corny ballad, is no better. Unfortunately, these are the only authorized forms the Chaplin Estate lets us see. And it’s ironic that this essentially silent movie star made two of his best features after sound had well taken over and he had bravely refused to conform: City Lights and Modern Times.

  Only Chaplin’s fifth feature-length film, City Lights, was released early in the third full year of all-talking pictures, and though it had numerous sound effects, a synchronized score, several sound jokes including some sardonically squeaky babble at the beginning, it is essentially a silent movie, the second to last one made. His own Modern Times (1936) takes honors as the last—although some dialogue is heard, and Charlie does sing one entire song—albeit of French-accented gibberish. Everybody had warned Chaplin that City Lights was a terrible risk, since, while he was shooting it over a period of nearly three years, the craze for sound films had exploded and entirely transformed the picture medium.

  But Chaplin’s gamble worked. Released just as the novelty of talking films was wearing off, City Lights became a huge box-office success, prompting Variety in 1932 to note that the picture’s grosses showed “that Chaplin was right about silence on the screen,” and, indeed, comparing the overall figures for sound films versus silents, concluded: “Silence in pictures, after all, was golden. It represented in money from some individual pictures much more for their makers than any talker to date …” The reason, the trade paper argued, was “the gigantic possibilities of silents, with the world market to pick from, as against talkers with outlet narrowed.” The article’s headline, “SOUND FILMS SHY BIG SILENT SUMS,” was prophetic, for although there was no turning back for the industry, movie attendance, after rising precipitously in the first year of full sound, soon dropped just as sharply, and never again reached the extraordinary peaks of the silent era, during which Charlie Chaplin had been and would always be the golden boy.

  There are pangs of nostalgia for the lost Eden of the silents below the surface of City Lights that still are palpable today. Since talkies had so definitively taken over, Chaplin felt the need to subtitle his movie: “A Comedy Romance in Pantomime.” Like most of his stories, City Lights has the Dickensian-Victorian sentimentality Chaplin so often recalled. The blind flower girl central to the plot was a pretty dated concept even then, but within the atmosphere of fable evoked, and the dreamlike quality natural to silent movies, it still works now. And this is tempered by the sharply satirical element of the millionaire who only when drunk recognizes and loves the Tramp; when sober, he wants nothing to do with “the little fellow.” Both Virginia Cherrill as the blind girl (the lovely actress would later become Cary Grant’s first wife) and Harry Myers as the millionaire are exceptionally believable.

  I first saw City Lights in Manhattan when I was twenty-four and the picture was already thirty-two years old. On my movie-file card, I gave it the highest rating and raved: “One of the sublime achievements in the history of the movies. Perhaps Chaplin’s greatest work, certainly the one in which he alternates comedy and tragedy with the most incredible facility and success. Several times it is achingly funny, and at least twice truly heartbreaking. Of course, the ending—the final close-up—far surpasses its reputation, and sequences like the boxing match are unparalleled hilarity. A great and beautiful film, certainly among the best dozen ever made.” This was long before I saw Buster Keaton’s Battling Butler (1926), in which Buster does a boxing match that is definitively funnier than Chaplin’s, and from which Charlie definitely “borrowed.” Nevertheless, the concluding scene in which the blind girl—her sight now restored thanks to the Tramp’s sacrifices—first sees her unknown benefactor is still extraordinarily touching. Writer James Agee called the concluding shot of Charlie looking at her hopefully, with a flower to his mouth, “the greatest piece of acting and the highest moment in movies,” which certainly remains a valid judgment.

  Personally, I think The Kid is his best feature. This now eighty-three-year-old example of Chaplin’s unique genius with pathos comedy still retains its magic glow, as the Tramp tries to bring up a six-year-old orphan, in an exhilaratingly fresh performance from newcomer Jackie Coogan, carefully coached, maneuvered and manipulated by Chaplin. The reason the picture was such a resounding success in its day is still quite evident: the potent mixture of irreverent slapstick comedy with a profound sense of squalor and tragedy remains an unbeatable combination. On the screen, Jackie and Charlie will always remain wonderfully larcenous as they, often hilariously, brave the cruel world. In his own grim childhood, Chaplin had been a poverty-stricken kid—his father dead, his mother driven insane—dancing and clowning on London streets with his half-brother for a few shillings. These horrific beginnings are nowhere more sharply drawn than in The Kid, one of the glories of the silent era, and among the great American movies.

  Chaplin in his first Tramp movie of the talking era, City Lights (1931), though it was essentially a silent film; he buys a flower from the blind flower girl (Virginia Cherrill, Cary Grant’s first wife) whose sight he eventually helps to restore. It was such a box-office success that Variety made a point of its having out-grossed most talkies.

  We met at the 1972 Academy Awards presentation, when Chaplin returned to America for the first time in twenty years in order to receive a Special Oscar. It was his second Special Oscar; the first was for The Circus at the very first awards ceremony in 1929.I had been aske
d to supervise the editing of a montage of clips from Chaplin movies that would precede his appearance on the TV stage. Bert Schneider, one of the producers of The Last Picture Show (for which the picture, four actors, the script, the photography, and my direction had been nominated that year), had partnered in a company that was going to reissue all the Chaplin films in America, and Bert wanted to know what I needed in order to cut together the sequence. Just an editor, I said, plus a list of the specific Chaplin pictures I would use; I’d seen almost all of the work by then and was pretty familiar with it. We hired the young man who had been my editor on the AFI John Ford documentary we’d finished a year before: Richard Patterson and I were used to working together, and the montage took shape very quickly.

  We covered all phases of Chaplin’s career—from the classic two-reelers of the teens through the feature masterpieces of the twenties and thirties. These were not cut in chronological order, but rather with a kind of emotional flow, and the concluding big chunk was four and a half unedited minutes from one of the very moving last sequences of The Kid, as Jackie is taken away from the Tramp by the law, and Charlie chases over rooftops to steal him back, finally wrapping him into his arms. The concluding image in our montage was from The Circus (released during 1928, the last year of silent movies), and kind of an extended metaphor not only for Chaplin’s own particular art—both broad and subtle comedy, and pathos, born out of calamity or dire tragedy—but for the whole of show business. We ended, therefore, with probably the most poignant image in all of Chaplin’s movies: the circus wagons gone, the Tramp alone, with only a torn paper star blowing off as he turns and walks away while the sun sets on the silent screen.

  Our montage ran thirteen and a half minutes and after it was submitted to the Academy, Bert was notified that while they liked it, they couldn’t possibly run such a long section of film on a live show. Bert called me into his office to tell me and asked what I thought we should cut. I said we’d made it as tight as possible and that we needed all of it for the impact I felt certain it would have. But, he said, they were refusing to run it at this length. “Bert,” I said, with heavy emphasis, “it’s … Charlie … Chaplin.” Bert thought a moment, nodded, called the Academy president, and told him we couldn’t cut any of it. The response was that they simply couldn’t run it that way, to which Bert replied, “OK, then Charlie won’t come.” They ran the full version. And during those final few moments of The Kid and The Circus, there wasn’t a dry eye in the house. At this point, Chaplin had not been able to walk down a lot of stairs, so when the montage was over, the screen went up and Charlie was discovered standing there, with his bowler hat. The audience went wild.