Renoir had reached fluency by then. He knew how to see his world; he had established the grouping of people and space and the rhythm of long shots. You can speak of it as mastery, or you could use the language of la caméra stylo, a theory formulated after the war by Alexandre Astruc (novelist, critic, and exceptional filmmaker—his Une Vie [1958], also from Maupassant, is a film worthy of Renoir). La caméra stylo means a way of writing with film, a kind of natural, eloquent, but unforced prose style—beautiful without seeming posed or chosen. Renoir’s camera always indicates a casual human observer who has magically been given privileged vantages.
But mastery in film can often push a director toward bigger or “more important” subjects. It’s not quite that Renoir struggled with that dilemma. Still, he was a professional who wanted success or attention, and in practice he chose worthy subjects—Les Bas-Fonds (from Maxim Gorky); La Marseillaise (1938; an amiable, untidy version of the French Revolution based on the writing of the song); La Bête Humaine (1938; from Zola); and La Grande Illusion (1937), so telling a sermon against war and for friendship that it was actually nominated for Best Picture by the American Academy.
I am not as uneasy with La Grande Illusion as some other writers: the great Cuban writer Guillermo Cabrera Infante, thought its “cowardly pacifism” was “quite overrated.” “Cowardly” is too much, but “overrated” is helpful. The film is a little too tidy or arranged. We are in a German prisoner-of-war camp. Two of the French prisoners are Boeldieu (Pierre Fresnay) and Maréchal (Jean Gabin). Fresnay is allowed to make Boeldieu a cut-and-dried aristocrat, whereas Gabin’s Maréchal is a starry man of the people—not just common but dangerously archetypal. This is bearable, but then you reach the best (and worst) thing in the picture: Erich von Stroheim as von Rauffenstein, commandant of the prison, and a flying ace who has been invalided into this depressing post.
The point of the story is that a bond exists between Boeldieu and von Rauffenstein that is more significant than the ties among Frenchmen: class works. I think Cabrera Infante is correct in saying this is a throwback to the Great War (so relevant to Renoir himself) but alien to the mood left by the next war and at odds with Renoir’s deeper sense of human isolation (if we all have our reasons we are alone). Von Stroheim is superb, enchanting, and immaculate—pick your own label, but serve it with ham. He is not a mess, and Renoir’s greatness lies there. But von Stroheim was a problem for Renoir:
We had an argument about the opening scene in the German living-quarters. He refused to understand why I had not brought some prostitutes of an obviously Viennese type in the scene. I was shattered. My intense admiration for the great man put me in an impossible position. It was partly because of my enthusiasm for his work that I was in the film-business at all. Greed was for me the banner of my profession. And now here he was, my idol, acting in my film, and instead of the figure of truth that I had looked for I found a being steeped in childish clichés.
As they fought, Renoir wept and said he would give up directing the film! You see how devious this genuine man could be—he was a director. Of course, von Stroheim yielded and then “followed my instructions with a slavish docility.” Maybe, but the film can never quite shrug off the noble sentimentality attached to Rauffenstein and his indefatigable resolve to be a tragic hero—or a drama queen.
La Règle du Jeu was not nominated for Best Picture—that is a more promising sign—but its aristocrat, Robert de la Chesnaye (played by Marcel Dalio, a prisoner in La Grande Illusion), is one of the greatest messes in film history. Better still, the film was a complete flop, released at a time of chronic uneasiness in France (July 1939), and only upsetting audiences the more.
This was not a literary adaptation, but an original, written by Renoir himself, with Carl Koch and Camille François (uncredited). Renoir hoped it would be “a good little orthodox film,” not a big subject. He added that “It was a war film, and yet there is no reference to war.” It’s a fascinating distinction, and a reason why in July 1939 the picture unsettled audiences afraid of war. Just a few months later the outbreak of European war helped build the audience for Gone With the Wind—though that movie has more confidence in heroines and society than Renoir could muster.
Shot in the La Sologne area in a sunless late winter, La Règle du Jeu is a country house film. La Chesnaye and his wife, Christine, have invited a group of society friends to the country for the weekend. This includes his mistress, Geneviève, and a transatlantic flier, André Jurieu, who blurted out his love for Christine on the radio as he landed at Le Bourget. Another member of this extended family is Octave, everyone’s friend yet an isolated and classless figure. He and Christine have known each other since childhood, and Octave is willing to be go-between and amateur ringmaster to the whole weekend. He is played by Renoir himself, limping a little in a shabby raincoat and the battered hat the director preferred. So he is a director on camera as well as off, and palpably the other actors enjoy this game and its theatricality. In addition, Renoir fell in love with his script girl, Dido Freire, so he had a reason for acting. She would become his second wife.
Octave has another side to his life. His shifting status takes him below stairs, too, into a romantic intrigue that matches that among the classy people. The gamekeeper, Schumacher, has a wife, Lisette, who is Christine’s maid. Lisette is a flirt, and her eye will fall upon Marceau, a local poacher and thus Schumacher’s worst enemy. As the weekend rolls out, so the several romantic affairs and the two classes become tangled in what seems at first exhilarating farce, but which will end as bleak tragedy—but not before Octave and Christine have declared their love. In a Mozartian whirl of assumed costume and mistaken identity, one character is shot by another—I won’t name them, for some of you will not have seen the film (and you must).
Every sort of spatial relationship—of foreground and background action, and of the depth of field that covers them all—is put to work. The film feels utterly spontaneous, but of course it is carefully contrived. It’s just that liveliness conceals the care. (This is a key to the best cinema.) And the collision of comedy and mishap is like a real accident. This fatality is foretold in the famous shooting sequence when the house party goes out with their guns to build a funerary pile of birds and rabbits. This is shot and cut as if by Eisenstein, though I think its unexpectedness (in a Renoir film) is more painful than anything in Soviet film.
La Règle du Jeu is graver and funnier than La Grande Illusion. Together, the two films capture the mood of the late 1930s. But changing history is not a reasonable aim for movies. They should be content with helping us to see life. Some viewers jump to the conclusion that the shoot sequence in La Règle du Jeu is a plea against hunting and shooting (and eating meat?). I don’t think that’s the case. Rather, Renoir is intent to have us see how animals die (animals were hurt during this filming) and to show us how more or less decent people do it. Everyone has his reasons. The spoiled rich shoot pheasant and hare, and soon they will live in an occupied country (that fear surely existed), but they are not evil or fit to be condemned. They are foolish.
They are like Octave, who hardly know what he wants or how to get it, or like La Chesnaye, who needs boundaries but no fences, who hopes to keep a mistress and a wife. There are two great moments for the film’s La Chesnaye, and for Dalio, who plays the part. This man (Jewish) collects elaborate moving-part toys (an unforced comment on film directing and its perilous distance from life). He has a new acquisition, an organ with dancing figures, and he offers it to his guests like a show. The mixture of pride and modesty is enchanting. But then, finally, after the other shooting, La Chesnaye appears at night on the steps of his château as another shattered impresario:
“Gentlemen, tomorrow we shall leave the chateau weeping for this wonderful friend, this excellent companion who knew so well how to make us forget that he was a famous man. And now, my dear friends…it is cold, you are running the risk of catching a chill and I suggest that you go inside. Tomorrow, we will pay o
ur respects to our friend…”
The chill was real. War was only weeks away. In 1938, Renoir had said his film would be “an exact description of the bourgeois of our time. I want to show that every game has its rules. He who breaks them loses the game.” But after the war, he realized, “I was deeply disturbed by the state of mind of French society and the world in general. It seemed to me that one way of interpreting that state of mind would be to avoid talking about it directly and tell a light-hearted story instead.”
Of course, it’s more than a lighthearted story, but comedy should be a very serious business. That balance was beyond French audiences in 1939. The film was attacked. Renoir cut it down from 113 minutes, but it made no difference. In 1940, with Dido, Renoir went to Rome at the encouragement of the French government to make a film of Tosca (with Michel Simon as Scarpia). He began it, but then Germany struck at Belgium and Holland. He left Tosca to be finished by Carl Koch, and hurried back to Paris. Just before the German invasion Renoir and Dido went to the South of France, and then to Tangier and Lisbon on the way to America.
No film he made there is without interest, but none is quite French or American—or truly Renoir. He was perplexed and then dismayed when some in France regarded him as a quitter after the war. Everyone has his reasons, though this is the moment to defend another fine French director, Marcel Carné, who made moody noir films in the late 1930s—Quai des Brumes (1938) and Le Jour Se Lève (1939)—who stayed in France (and was afterward mocked or attacked for being gay and some kind of collaborator), and who made Les Enfants du Paradis as the war ended. That sweeping period re-creation and tribute to French theater is still one of the most beloved of French films. It may owe as much to its screenwriter, Jacques Prévert, and to its cast (Arletty, Jean-Louis Barrault, Pierre Brasseur, Pierre Renoir, María Casares), but it is as much a landmark and a celebration of France as Olivier’s Henry V was of England.
Renoir came back. He lived in France for part of the 1950s and he would make three subtle and profound films—The River (in India), Le Carrosse d’Or (with Anna Magnani), and French Cancan—in all of which the balance of life and theater tilts toward the latter. These are early modernist films in which the filmmaker realizes he cannot make a movie without admitting it. The director is a presence in the work. In other words, realism, or narrative naturalism—his great goal for much of the 1930s—is a bit of a fraud. Thereafter, Renoir went to live in Los Angeles, in Benedict Canyon in Beverly Hills, on a property he planted with olive trees to remind him of the South of France. That’s where he died, in 1979.
American
Orson Welles was born in Kenosha, Wisconsin, in 1915. He was the son of an inventor and a musician. Neither parent was exactly happy or a success, and neither of them lived after the boy was fifteen. Orson was a large, brilliant, precocious child such as other children hated. He had these parents and an older brother who was of disturbed mind. Richard Welles was ten years in an asylum. He died in 1975 in poverty. Apparently he and Orson had met just once since 1938.
It’s hard to offer a diagnosis, but the flights of exhilaration and the slumps in Welles are suggestive. Was he bipolar? Is that relevant? It is if we are prepared to see in Welles one of the cinema’s most heartfelt attempts to find lasting meaning and value. If we want to know whether the movies might be important, then Welles is central and tragic. For every complaint that Citizen Kane is chilly, mechanical, and show-offy (and it has those traits), it is crammed with unbearable feelings. These range from Bernstein’s recollection of the girl he saw on the ferry one day and has never forgotten, to the mother’s face as she gets ready to send her boy away, to the revelation that “Rosebud” stands for a lost childhood. It is always loss—from a man who seemed to others so richly endowed.
Welles drew with skill and flourish. He was an expert and devoted magician. He was a talker who rarely lost fluency or grammar; he could be a charmer alike to men and women; and he was one of those people in whom the lack of formal education led to a forbidding knowledge of nearly everything. But I’m not sure he believed in a lasting tie in his life. He turned friends into enemies and waited for betrayal. He was a stranger to his own children.
He was determined to be out of the ordinary. But one way to start with Citizen Kane is to treat it as a film like any other. In 1941 the American picture business released 379 films. That total has not been matched in any year since 1941, and it was surpassed only in 1937 and previously in the last years of the silent era—in 1927 more than 500 movies were released by the factory system. Of the 379 put out in 1941, 44 came from RKO. On the studio files, Kane was project 281, and when it was released, its MPPDA certificate was 6555.
You hear quite generally, still, that it was made on an unprecedented contract. That is relevant, but it exaggerates to claim that Kane was made with more liberty than any other American film. The contract between Welles and RKO (signed on August 21, 1939) called for several unusual freedoms. Welles and his associates were invited to make a film of their choice. Still, the subject had to be approved by the studio, and there was a budgetary limit to what could be spent ($500,000). With those approvals, Welles had the opportunity to do the picture as he liked, and he had final cut—the studio could not interfere with the finished film. In return, Welles would be paid $100,000 for writing, directing, producing, and acting in the picture, and he would receive 20 percent of the profits. In fact, it was a two-picture contract; on the second picture, he would be paid $125,000 and would receive 25 percent of the profits.
At the time, half a million dollars was not unduly generous: Bringing Up Baby (a relatively simple comedy) had cost over $1 million; How Green Was My Valley (which would beat Kane for Best Picture) cost $1.25 million; Gunga Din (made at R.K.O.) cost $1.9 million; The Wizard of Oz cost about $2.7 million. A regular A picture at RKO was reckoned to cost out at $800,000. In other words, George Schaefer, the executive who made the contract, had placed the Welles project at below-average cost and insisted on studio right of approval on the material—which was duly exercised. In view of all his tasks on the picture, Welles was hardly being greedy. But something often missed in Welles is that he seldom complained about or understood money. He was never quite a film star, but he was a celebrity and a boy wonder, and he was what the studio wanted, ready to deliver in every possible way for a modest salary.
So “carte blanche” does not adequately describe the contract, except in the way it departed from the norm in which a director was hired, given a script and a cast, and moved out before the editing. Granted Welles’s talent as already displayed on the stage and on radio and in the October 1938 production of “The War of the Worlds” on CBS Radio (the sensation that prompted the contract), it seems a tribute to Schaefer’s business acumen. Moreover, if the picture lost money on its first release—which it did, though not excessively—think of what it has earned in the seventy years since. Beyond that, Schaefer behaved like a prince and a friend.
But now study real independence. When Chaplin made The Great Dictator (1940), he took his time and paid for it all with his own money, or money he could raise. (It cost about $2 million.) On Gone With the Wind, David O. Selznick allowed the venture to override his business sense and planning. What had been reckoned at first as a picture to be made for under $2 million turned into a $4.25 million expense. Selznick found that extra money as best he could, and he made a distribution deal with his father-in-law, Mr. Mayer, in return for Clark Gable and cash. He hired and fired writers and directors; he changed his mind every morning. In calling for reshoots, in enlarging the script and the running time, Selznick tolerated no discipline. Final cut was always going to be his, unless someone got to his throat first. Both he and Chaplin were rewarded: their pictures made enormous profits. But Hollywood in that era allowed for this much indulgence and gambling. It was possible to proceed in a resolutely unbusinesslike way—against that, Project 281 was under control and an intriguing bet. In 1939 you could have found people who reckoned Welles was
more talented than Selznick.
In the event, Welles’s first scheme, to do Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, was set aside, despite a script and a good deal of preproduction work, just because the studio estimated that it might cost $1 million. There were other false starts (The Smiler with a Knife and Mexican Melodrama) before Welles and Herman Mankiewicz started working together in February 1940 on the idea of a picture based on the life of some notable American. It was to be a fictional figure, yet based on fact. After that decision, the writing moved ahead significantly, but not according to contract terms: Welles had the assistance of a Hollywood professional who was getting $500 a week.
Years later, in her lengthy essay “Raising Kane,” Pauline Kael argued that Mankiewicz rescued Welles from uncertainty. The boy had not known what to do, he was being made fun of in the town that resented his special opportunity. So the old pro Mankiewicz had come to his aid. This was mischief on Kael’s part, her urge to be different, and even an early desire to bring Kane to heel, to shake it from its pedestal as the “best film ever made.” It was also the story fed to her by John Houseman.
The Big Screen Page 20