The Big Screen

by David Thomson

  Perhaps neorealism was always a diversion. There is another Italian cinema, stylish and stylistic, literary and operatic, rich in gesture and architecture. “Grand cinéma” is what Visconti gravitated toward with The Leopard (1963) and Death in Venice (1971). From La Strada (1954) to Amarcord (1973), Fellini loved the grandeur of the picaresque. Sergio Leone made infatuated rhapsodies to the Western—above all, Once Upon a Time in the West (1968)—with mock symphonic scores (by Ennio Morricone) and pastiche violence. Pier Paolo Pasolini went from the austerity of The Gospel According to St. Matthew (1964) to lavish art albums: The Decameron (1971), The Canterbury Tales (1972), Arabian Nights (1974). Décor and moral decay make the tension in Bertolucci’s The Conformist (1970). And in Marco Bellocchio’s Vincere (2009) there is a sense of the political-cultural passion of cinema. It’s the story of Mussolini’s abandoned first wife, Ida Dalser (Giovanna Mezzogiorno), but it draws upon newsreel and the thunderous example of Mussolini himself as an actor or national presence. He longs to have life become a movie, and you know he would have appreciated The Godfather or Raging Bull. Mussolini and Joe Pesci is one of the meetings that demand computer-generated enactment. If it resulted in madness, that was predicted in the two great earlier works by Bellocchio: Fists in the Pocket (1965) and The Eyes, the Mouth (1982), both driven by the alarming Lou Castel.

  Ingrid Sees a Movie

  Ingrid Bergman was born in Stockholm in 1915. By the age of twelve she had lost both her parents, but she was strong—all her life people would marvel at her inner strength—and she was determined to go on the stage. She grew up tall and beautiful, with a dramatic energy such as few had encountered before. She began to make films in Sweden as an ingenue and she was under consideration for a contract in Germany with Ufa. (Her mother was German.) But in the New York building where David Selznick had offices, there was a Swedish elevator operator who had heard from home how glorious this Ingrid Bergman was. He passed on this opinion (elevator talk) to Kay Brown, who was one of the people who dug up things for Selznick. She had found Gone With the Wind, Rebecca, and later on she would notice the girl who became Jennifer Jones, but now she said, “There is this Swedish girl…”

  To cut a long story short, Kay Brown went to Sweden to meet Ingrid. She found a young married woman with a new baby. Would you really give this up to come to America on a chance? asked Kay Brown. Oh yes, said Ingrid, wide-eyed. It is a modern legend that people will do anything for the movies.

  She came. She came all the way across America. She went up to the Selznick house on Summit Drive in Beverly Hills on a Sunday, but David was at the studio—this was 1939 and he was working on Gone With the Wind. So his wife, Irene Selznick, looked after Ingrid (they would be friends) and took her out to dinner and a party. Still no Selznick. So Ingrid dozed, and then Selznick appeared. He looked at her and said, Oh my God, you’re tall, and your teeth, and you need makeup, and that name is too German. Whereupon Ingrid drew herself up to the full five feet ten and said, look, this is what I am; this is what you get. Selznick smiled and said, Okay, we’ll sell you as the natural woman.

  She became America’s darling in a matter of years. Selznick made Intermezzo (1939) and then loaned her out all over town: Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1941), Casablanca (1942), For Whom the Bell Tolls (1943), Gaslight (1944), The Bells of St. Mary’s (1945), Saratoga Trunk (1945). He even put her in a couple of his own films, Spellbound (1945) and Notorious (1946, one of her most moving portraits of victimhood). Saratoga Trunk is probably the only one you don’t know; the rest are classics, stepping stones in stardom whereby the world believed that Ingrid was not just natural, lovely, and saintly, but good, good, Good. So what does “good-looking” mean? the public still asks. In fact, despite husband and daughter (in America by now), Ingrid was a compulsive man-izer. When men liked her and said so, she was touched and generous and she slept with them. It’s a matter of reassurance: if strangers feel they must love a star, she may reward whomever she meets.

  But Ingrid Bergman was not quite happy. She had an Oscar for Gaslight (and she is very sympathetic in that film), but she had made a lot of silly films, none sillier than Spellbound (a cockamamie story of psychiatry, with Hitchcock and Salvador Dalí and Gregory Peck), and she felt awkward playing a nun in The Bells of St. Mary’s. She was European still, and one of her lovers, the still photographer Robert Capa, had shown her the bomb sites of Europe. She knew how sheltered and unaware Hollywood was, and she was growing weary of stupid escapism, even if it had brought her liberty. She had seen Rome, Open City already in 1946 and been impressed, but now she went into a theater to watch Paisà and she came out having seen the light.

  She asked her friend Irene Selznick what to do and they agreed that Ingrid should write to this man Roberto Rossellini who had made the two films: “If you need a Swedish actress who in Italian knows only ‘ti amo’ I am ready to come and make a film with you.” If you feed people enough scripts, sooner or later they are going to start sounding and thinking like them. More than that, amid all the dedication to salary and entertainment, there are people who go into the movies for the sex.

  There’s no need to be too blunt about it, or too censorious, but we are talking about a way of life in which the not inconsiderably ugly Louis B. Mayer (Irene Selznick’s father) may have been getting midafternoon blow jobs from studio talent (beauty and the beast), and about the kind of screening room séance where we might all imagine being in the arms of Lana Turner or Robert Taylor (or both). Then there are actors and actresses who have to kiss rapturously for thirty-seven takes at a time and are inclined to get a little horny, though the actress may know that later that evening the director, too, wants to go over a few lines to get the mood right. Sexual possibility, the teeming virtual promiscuity behind a straight face, and actual sleeping around, are all in the air. So it’s not that Ingrid was so uncommon. But hers was the kind of letter people write if they are in a movie, and not just in the movies.

  There was a further paradox waiting to embrace Ingrid and Roberto. She was an international star who longed to find artistic integrity with a director who was not interested in money but who aspired to truth and art. He was an impoverished Italian director, compelled to work on wretched budgets with restricted crews, who dreamed of getting himself an honest movie star and some of that American money. There are earnest volumes in the film library that attest to the artist in Roberto Rossellini. Some of them are so hero-worshiping they may lose sight of the man who was a chronic gambler (and realists do not make good gamblers), a devotee of sports cars, a collector of spectacular women, and an habitué of expensive hotels. That Rossellini exists in the memory of his friends and in press accounts. The two seem at odds, but there is a synthesis: the same man can be a great artist and a fun-loving scoundrel bent on self-destruction.

  The Bergman-Rossellini story played out as scandal and tragedy, but with the benefit of time we must see it as farce, too, and the comedy begins in the tangle of opposed desires, with Anna Magnani as an indignant onlooker once she realized she was Rossellini’s former mistress.

  Ingrid and Roberto met at last and they agreed that they must make a picture together, a work of insight and beauty. Roberto would develop a story and a script. But gossips in the press noticed how the two of them conspired together—we are on the verge of the new age of trash journalism, paparazzi, and the breakdown in the defense of stars by studio publicity departments. In America, Ingrid had had the Selznick organization looking after her. In Europe, Rossellini had no such defense. If stars are going to be free, they may find themselves alone.

  Roberto’s idea was a love story, though a very unhappy love story, in which a refugee woman from Lithuania (to be played by Ingrid) is taken up by and married to a fisherman who lives on the island of Stromboli, a small, volcanic upheaval to the north of Sicily. Of course, the film would be shot on the island itself. For a moment, at least, before seeing the grim place, Ingrid thought this was sublime and exactly what she wanted. Anna Ma
gnani caused scenes and decided that she would go off and make her own volcano picture. Ingrid and Roberto drew very close.

  With money from RKO, Stromboli (1950) proved an amazing mish-mash of a film—very clumsy in parts, heedlessly operatic in others. It does not seem remotely real. It feels like Ingrid Bergman struggling to make a testament or stake a claim to righteousness. The shooting was said to be appallingly difficult and ridiculous, yet there are phenomenal passages in the film where Rossellini’s camera style and Ingrid’s innate histrionic ability soar together. And Ingrid got pregnant, because there was not a lot to do on Stromboli.

  By this stage the press was in a frenzy. Ingrid had deserted husband and daughter. Roberto had forsaken his wife and children. There was an outcry, with people saying that Ingrid had betrayed the public who believed she was a nun and a saint and Ilse from Casablanca. She was denounced on the floor of the House by John Rankin, a loudmouth from the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), and from pulpits all over the world. In February 1950, Ingrid had a son by Rossellini. She got a divorce in Mexico; Roberto got a divorce. They managed to marry. In America, Bergman’s husband, Petter Lindstrom, won custody of their child, Pia. Ingrid next had twins. (Isabella Rossellini is one of them.) And the lovers were trapped.

  Roberto may have hoped they would all end up in Hollywood, where he would direct Ingrid Bergman pictures and drive a sports car on Mulholland Drive at sunset. But Magnani got there sooner, and won an Oscar for The Rose Tattoo (1955). Ingrid was effectively blacklisted in Hollywood, not because of actual political inclinations, but because of the scandal and the disbelief among America’s stanchions of decency. Stromboli was a bust at the box office. Ingrid suddenly found herself with three young children, and she was edging up on forty, which can be daunting for those known for a natural look. They had only each other to make films with. They became increasingly unhappy because Roberto continued to play around with other women and because Ingrid realized her crushing mistake. But this is a moment for close and fair attention when, amid mounting hostility and regret, they made a few important films that still wait to be discovered by the smart filmgoer.

  In Europa ’51 (1952), Bergman plays Irene, a society woman whose young son dies unexpectedly—seemingly from emotional neglect. Irene begins a kind of breakdown, and she spends time with a Communist magazine editor who educates her in how the poor are living. Irene grows closer to several poor people, with the result that her husband (played by Alexander Knox) has her confined to a mental hospital. The film has traces of awkwardness (especially with the sound and the quality of the acting), but here at last is genuine social realism and the simple plot embodies the moral crisis of a rich woman in Italy.

  In Viaggio in Italia (1954), Bergman and George Sanders play a married couple on the edge of divorce. They come back to Italy to arrange the sale of a property that represents their happiness. In the process, they visit Pompeii and come a little closer to the need for reconciliation. Once more there is a feeing of strain—Sanders by every account was miserable during the filming and very uneasy over Rossellini’s attempts to improvise. Ingrid may have been more flexible, but in her diary she makes it clear that she found Rossellini’s spontaneity disarming and unhelpful. Yet the film is complex, challenging, and often very beautiful. It is a step toward a kind of novelistic filmmaking, with the inner life made manifest in gesture and movement. It is a prelude to Antonioni.

  In Fear, or La Paura, Ingrid and her husband (they speak German) run a chemical factory working on new painkilling drugs, using rats as experimental victims. The wife (named Irene again) is having an affair with a musician. Then a young woman approaches the wife and says she, too, is in love with the musician. She starts to blackmail the wife. The wife cracks under this strain and comes close to suicide, before realizing that the husband is behind the blackmail. It is the least of the three films, yet once again the situation is fascinating (and the cross-reference to Gaslight seems deliberate).

  These films did no commercial business, and on their first release they received very little critical attention. Ingrid was increasingly unhappy, and beginning to see if she could get back to Hollywood. At last the marriage broke down. Roberto would move off toward documentary and work on historical subjects made for television. Ingrid came back into the mainstream in a film called Anastasia (1956), a piece of ahistorical hokum in which she plays a lost woman who agrees to masquerade as the last of the Romanovs, the tsar’s daughter Anastasia. But is she the real Anastasia, too? Have your cake, and eat it: she was back in Hollywood. And she won her second Oscar for a performance in a film that comes close to betraying the substance of Gaslight.

  After which Ingrid and Roberto went their separate ways and the middle-aged Bergman became a conventional fixture again on-screen and -stage: Indiscreet (1958), The Inn of the Sixth Happiness (1958), The Yellow Rolls-Royce (1964), and Murder on the Orient Express (1974). Her radicalism was gone as quickly as it had appeared. Her habit of making films that were scarcely concealed comments on her own life and career resumed in Ingmar Bergman’s Autumn Sonata (1978), in which she plays a concert pianist who has neglected her own daughter (Liv Ullmann) and has to face recriminations. I do not want to subscribe to the notion that Europa ’51, Viaggio in Italia, and Fear are great films, but they are palpable imprints of a passion going cold (an unusual subject in movies in the 1950s) and studies in marital unease. They are pictures that nowadays have rather more to offer than the supposed classics of neorealism, and Europa ’51 suggests with pitiless clarity that the middle class cannot cleanse its conscience simply by enjoying Bicycle Thieves. One way or another these films testify to the fact that the pursuit of cinema still depends on story, acting, and faith in the inner life and not on doctrinaire claims for realism. But the way in which Bergman and Rossellini hoped to change the trajectory of their careers is a reminder of how muddled the quest for glory becomes when it bestrides money and art.

  Sing a Noir Song

  Do you feel like a noir tonight, or a musical, the two genres that flowered after the war? You want both?

  Martin Scorsese’s New York, New York, which was regarded as a failure in 1977, opens with the news of VJ day hitting New York in August 1945. In all the joy and frenzy, guys and girls are kissing each other and looking to make out on the curl of the mood. We notice one such encounter, and it’s weird: she is Francine Evans, a singer with a band, and Liza Minnelli (who was born in 1946) does a pretty job delivering a girl who doesn’t think to argue with the sweet sentiments of her songs.

  But she is pursued by this wild guy in a Hawaiian shirt, Jimmy Doyle (Robert De Niro), who will not let her go. Does he really want her, or does he just crave the challenge of winning her? He is torrential, a mile-a-minute talker, yet at the same time secretive or shut away. He might be crazy, or acting crazy to divert that aberrant energy. He is too much for her. But he will marry her. They have a child. Then the marriage comes apart—did it ever really come together except as his big show—because he is selfish, sinister, and a little psychotic. He plays tenor sax and will open his own jazz club while she becomes Doris Day—or Liza Minnelli, an adored movie star. She’s fond of him always as she sings about “Happy Endings,” but she’s rueful, because she has learned there is a solitude and an intensity in Jimmy that doesn’t do happiness or being together. He talks all the time or he says nothing. Francine is from the church of the musical, and Jimmy is film noir, together in one picture. It’s the best movie Scorsese has ever done about a man and a woman.

  “Noir” today may be the best known and most honored of American movie genres, and you can make a case for it as the most culturally influential. But in the era when the best noir films were being made, the word would have meant nothing in America except an affected way of ordering your coffee. Noir enters American English consciousness only from French writing on film, above all in the book by Raymond Borde and Étienne Chaumeton, Panorama du Film Noir Américain, 1941–1953, published in 1955 (but
not translated into English until 2002). It is one of the first examples of French eyes recognizing truths in American film, a search in which America itself was negligent for decades. What Borde and Chaumeton saw as noir was “oneiric, strange, erotic, ambivalent and cruel”:

  Oneiric, relating to dreams—The Woman in the Window (in which Edward G. Robinson dreams he’s in a disastrous melodrama); Point Blank (where the dying Lee Marvin has a dream in which his honor and prowess are vindicated—it’s another part of the dream to call him “Lee Marvin,” instead of the character’s name, Walker); Citizen Kane (in which a man dreams over the moments of his life and wonders if he meant anything).

  Strange—Rear Window, where amid boring everyday routine in a New York City courtyard a man begins to wonder if the neighbor across the way has murdered his wife—or is the watcher dreaming?

  Erotic—The Woman in the Window, where the dream involves Robinson’s fantasy woman, and the director’s (played by Joan Bennett)? Double Indemnity, where the crime has its roots in the sexual attraction between Fred MacMurray and Barbara Stanwyck.

  Ambivalent—Out of the Past, where the apparently good guy, our guy (Robert Mitchum), knows an honest woman and a bad one when he sees them, but still he can’t make up his mind, and has given up caring.

  Cruel—Detour, when a man driving across the desert in a back projection has the rotten luck to pick up a woman from hell ready to tear him to pieces and then die on him. Of all the lousy luck! But luck in noir has become the poisoning of providence in movie romance. This is the one genre that admits we’ll lose.

  During the war, there was a gentleman’s agreement in Hollywood to ease off on making gangster pictures, because they might present the nation in a poor light. But later, many noir films were B pictures, shot quickly on low budgets, because the noir areas of the screen saved on décor. There is a legend that Detour was shot in six days for around $50,000. The truth is not as striking, but it’s still typical: it cost $100,000 for a sixty-eight-minute film and seems to have been done in fourteen days. Its director was Edgar G. Ulmer, who had come to America in 1927 as part of F. W. Murnau’s team on Sunrise.