The Big Screen

by David Thomson

  McLuhan did not become a cultural figure until the 1960s, with books such as The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962), Understanding Media (1964), and The Medium Is the Massage (1967). By 1975 he was “himself” for a moment in a movie theater lobby in Woody Allen’s Annie Hall (1977). Erving Goffman might have said this was not so much the real Marshall McLuhan as a presentation of him. Goffman’s work was beginning to develop a theory—whether naturally or through the steady exposure of so much imagery and acting—that we all of us were learning to play or present ourselves in order to be understood. This dry, academic approach was actually more provocative or instructive than the whole doctrine of the Actors Studio. After all, that was aimed at professionals, whereas Goffman had seen that acting is amateur and universal.

  Before sound recording, people had had so much less chance to hear themselves; that addition to film’s reality was as much an inducement to self-awareness as photography had been. A sidelight to that was the spreading culture of impersonation, by professionals, and by us, which only pushed actors into exaggerating their own voices. So vocal imitation became an entertainment, along with ventriloquism. Why not, and where’s the harm if James Cagney, or Jimmy Stewart, or Bette Davis, were “doing” themselves? Just as we say “good-looking” about some people, so actors had to be “good-sounding.”

  This feels like a game, and one the public joined in—we can all do a sort of Cagney (if we remember him), as well as Al Pacino in Scarface. But then consider the case of Marlon Brando. So many people who knew him said that if he talked to anyone for half an hour he began to take on their speech and mannerisms. It wasn’t usually malice or mockery; it was probably not conscious; and it was a long way from the teaching of the Actors Studio. But it was the helpless need in an actor to become someone else. There’s one film—Arthur Penn’s The Missouri Breaks (1976)—in which Brando displays this chronic versatility in a range of voices and personalities. In life he would often telephone friends in the voice of other people.

  This was but a prelude to dubbing and the ease with which film could put someone else’s voice in a player’s mouth. Industrially, dubbing was a practice to make foreign films more accessible. But there are creative possibilities, too: How often is Marni Nixon dubbing songs in the American musical? How much Debra Winger was there in E.T., and how much Mercedes McCambridge in Regan in The Exorcist? Or, at another level, why doesn’t Jimmy Stewart hear Kim Novak’s voice making sisters out of Madeleine and Judy?

  If we go back to Judy Barton in San Francisco, we may gain an extra perspective on Vertigo. Judy does a very good job as Madeleine. She doesn’t get an Oscar, but Scottie becomes hooked on her and he carries us along too, as watching builds desire. Scottie falls in love with her because he feels the possibility of another Madeleine. Alas, Judy knows her script does not permit this development. It is building toward a crisis where her flight and Scottie’s phobia will allow Gavin to toss the body of the real Madeleine (just as blond, just as gray-suited) from the top of the mission tower. So the real Madeline never appears in the movie: she is a corpse, waiting to be disposed of—thus Vertigo has an odd link to Psycho, where an old dead body is re-presented.

  Time passes. Gavin goes away. Scottie is a wreck. But Judy, like an idiot, stays around because she, too, fell in love in the course of her act. She had never been looked at so tenderly before, and it opened up her heart. This is where Kim Novak is so intriguing, for her own hesitation as an actress speaks to Judy’s vulnerability. It reminds me of that moment in Picnic (1955) when Novak in a mauve dress appears at the water’s edge at dusk for a Labor Day picnic and dances (to “Moonglow,” or the theme from Picnic) for William Holden’s character. As shot by Joshua Logan, it is a brief romantic idyll made heartbreaking by the way Novak, trying very hard, is not ethereal, or bound for Hollywood, but a girl from Kansas hoping to be as smooth as Ginger Rogers, but just a little too slow or shy.

  Back in San Francisco, Scottie does see the ghost of Madeleine’s face in Judy, though he can’t recognize Novak. So he takes Judy in hand and coaxes her back into being the image of Madeleine. Judy cannot resist, yet she knows her real self is being lost or ignored in the makeover. And when at last she is Madeleine again, in a wan green light, the scene is orgasm for Scottie and death for Judy. The actress has lost herself.

  This doesn’t have to be tragic. I’ve already quoted Susan Sontag’s amused view of the shifting pseudo-reality in I Love Lucy, and television was a never-ending celebrity show. I don’t just mean that players such as Lucille Ball, Jackie Gleason, and Burns and Allen became constant variants on themselves, playing with what we thought we knew about them. In addition, so many television shows, I Love Lucy included, were loaded up with “guest stars,” celebrity appearances, where it was plainly John Wayne or William Holden or whoever, being himself but presenting himself in simple written sketches. Beyond that, television developed a kind of personage never known before: the “host,” always the same, always appealing, always intriguing, the ringmaster, yet never central or in the story. (That was how Ronald Reagan had hosted General Electric Theater.) The acme of this line was Johnny Carson, who took over the Tonight Show from Jack Parr in 1962. No one else occupied so many hours of viewing time, or became so familiar and endearing, while remaining enigmatic—and without cracking up. It is a remarkable career, and it offers maybe the most abiding model of manhood: funny, smart, cool. (McLuhan said TV had to be cool because that was the temperature of the medium), completely recognizable yet ultimately unknown.

  Just about—Carson kept control of the balance in seeming immaculate but being close to empty. He had something we see in Cary Grant: a photographed ease, an illusion that filled Grant himself with envy. Both men had lives littered with problems, and distress. Was it possible, through television much more than movie, that they and the audience had been habituated and misled by the way stories on-screen seemed to settle problems? It was the way they stood, looked, and smiled—the way Johnny would play an imaginary golf shot, and you knew it landed on the green. Here is Joan Didion, a sharp observer of film’s culture and a screenwriter, talking about American politics in that light. This is from an essay of 1968–70 called “Good Citizens”:

  Social problems present themselves to many of these people in terms of a scenario, in which, once certain key scenes are licked (the confrontation on the courthouse steps, the revelation that the opposition leader has an anti-Semitic past, the presentation of the bill of particulars to the President, a Henry Fonda cameo), the plot will proceed inexorably to an upbeat fade. Marlon Brando does not, in a well-plotted motion picture, picket San Quentin in vain: what we are talking about here is faith in the dramatic convention. Things “happen” in motion pictures. There is always a resolution, always a strong cause-effect dramatic line, and to perceive the world in those terms is to assume an ending for every social scenario.

  That was forty years ago and we may hope that our best films have become looser, more open-ended, less subject to “scenario,” but don’t we marvel at the many public events that have been turned into their own scenarios, scripted and available to be “read” by the public? Gesture and pose persist in politics, the more so when the politicians have digested the affect of Henry Fonda. They play themselves because they believe they get elected through their televisual persona. The week I am writing this, in the immediate aftermath of the Tucson shootings (January 2011), one senator has proposed that at the State of the Union address, members of Congress should not sit on their party sides of the House, but loosely, untidily, throughout the chamber, to show “solidarity” and civility.

  It is a nice idea, and may make a touching scene on television. Do you wonder if you haven’t seen it already, in a Frank Capra picture? It feels like a screen moment, having little to do with the deeper pit of politics—unless you still fall for the efficacy of big scenes and getting it all “sorted out.”

  The first troubled studies of performing lives in which real existence might be overshadowed
found company in early visions of the “life story” or even the personality as tradable items. In Norman Mailer’s Hollywood novel, The Deer Park (1955), a handsome but damaged flier, Sergius O’Shaughnessy, comes to Hollywood from the war. He meets stars and directors—an actress on the rise, Lulu Meyers, and a director of quality dragged down by pressure to testify (Charles Eitel; say it out loud)—but the novel turns on the way Sergius may sell his very life story to the movies so that some actor can play him (with amendments, with loss of control, but with great reward). Or should he take the part himself?

  Life stories were big in the movies of the 1950s: Jimmy Stewart had few popular successes to match The Glenn Miller Story (1954); a baby-faced actor named Audie Murphy played the most decorated American soldier from World War II, also named Audie Murphy, in To Hell and Back (1955). These were extensions of the “biopic” genre that had been popular since the 1930s (with Paul Muni playing so many heroes), but the newer films were edging into celebrity with very little self-awareness, and when John F. Kennedy appeared in America, it was suddenly apparent that someone might be a personage and a newsreel figure at the same time (and might get elected on the mixture).

  It was that curious Lucy/Lucille syndrome peeping through again, and it was Groucho Marx on You Bet Your Life (begun in 1950) behaving just like Groucho Marx. In 1957, Joanne Woodward won the Best Actress Oscar for a film called The Three Faces of Eve—more talked about than seen, maybe—playing a woman with three distinct personalities. The film was dark and gloomy and it was said to be a sad portrait of split personality. But it was also a hint about the habit of acting out your moods. Paul Newman put on a tour de force playing Rocky Graziano in Somebody Up There Likes Me (1956)—he did his own boxing as well as his own talking and kissing. Wasn’t that his own smile? (How much of a role did actors own?) By 1963 one of the uncontrollable forces in American film, Jerry Lewis, played opposite roles in The Nutty Professor. It was said to be a new version of Jekyll and Hyde, plus a comedy! But it felt like the confession of a demonic soul made by performing.

  Screen presence was being talked about for the first time. That was nothing as intense as acting; it was being there, letting yourself be photographed, or being nearly as helpless as the camera. In Walker Percy’s novel The Moviegoer, published in 1961, there is a lovely capturing of this state of being. The book’s title refers to an unresolved young man who spends too much time watching movies, and Percy sees that as a kind of estrangement from real life. Early on there is a haunting passage in which the young man is observing the streets of New Orleans when “Who should come out of Pirate’s Alley half a block ahead of me but William Holden!”

  Holden is an instructive figure of the 1950s in his engaging way of being his own unpretentious icon. So long as he didn’t act too hard, he was marvelous. We are not quite sure whether the moment in Percy’s novel is the real thing (a celebrity sighting), a dream, or a guest spot (where Holden appears as himself without having a part or a script).

  But Percy knows his Holden—or should I say ours? “He is an attractive fellow with his ordinary good looks, very suntanned, walking along hands in pockets, raincoat slung over one shoulder.” This is exactly what Holden did so well: be casual, be relaxed, be “on.”

  People notice him and are enchanted. They become his helpless extras for a moment, until “Holden has turned down Toulouse shedding light as he goes. An aura of heightened reality moves with him and all who fall within it feel it.”

  That is a piercing description of movie magic, the empty gesture of heightened reality, and our romance with it. But inside Holden there may have been less light. When he died, aged sixty-three, he was alone in his apartment in Santa Monica. He was drunk apparently—he had had drinking problems for years. He fell and cut his head on a bedside table. He bled to death. The body was not found for four days. It is the kind of awkward conclusion that is not supposed to happen to movie stars.

  From about 1950 onward, the first generation of picture people began to die. By then, many of them were what was called old-fashioned. But they had invented a medium and given their lives to it, and some of them sensed that the medium was changing so fast they were in danger of being forgotten. All of a sudden there were funerals all the time.

  In July 1948, D. W. Griffith died at the Knickerbocker Hotel on Hollywood Boulevard. He was seventy-three, broke, boozy, and his last wife had just walked out. As Lillian Gish put it, “He idealized womanhood on the screen, but when he had to live with it he could not make the adjustment.” The body was taken back to Kentucky to be buried. Writing of the grave site, Richard Schickel would say, years later, “We have new ways of seeing and thinking and perhaps even being which literally did not exist until the man who lies buried there began his work.”

  In 1950, Al Jolson died, the man who had uttered the good news and the bad news—depending on your point of view. An unmatched celebrity in his time, he may be unknown to young people today. In 1954 three beloved figures, stalwart supports in fine films, died: Sydney Greenstreet, Eugene Pallette, and Lionel Barrymore. In 1955 we buried James Dean and Theda Bara; and in 1956 it was Alexander Korda and Bela Lugosi, a pair of Hungarians who had made it to the big time.

  On January 14, 1957, Humphrey Bogart died, so physically reduced he went up and down his house in the dumbwaiter. Greer Garson had heard him coughing at a party and told him to get to a doctor. Was it the smoking that he had done so much to glamorize? One cherished shot from The Big Sleep is two cigarettes together on the edge of an ashtray, still smoldering. He was fifty-seven. In Paris, in May, Erich von Stroheim died: an assistant to Griffith, the maker of Greed, the commandant of the prison camp in Renoir’s La Grande Illusion, and Max to Norma Desmond in Sunset Blvd. In October, in Los Angeles, Louis B. Mayer died. Since his removal from M-G-M he had labored to make a great movie, Joseph and His Brethren, but it never reached preproduction. He had presided over fifty pictures a year, or none.

  In 1958 we lost two models of attractive men: Ronald Colman, and Tyrone Power, who actually dropped dead in Spain (sword in hand) while filming Solomon and Sheba for King Vidor. The descendant of actors, Power was forty-four. For 1959, the list was merciless: Cecil B. DeMille, Lou Costello, Ethel Barrymore, Preston Sturges, Errol Flynn, and Victor McLaglen. Flynn was fifty, though we were told he had used his time to the full. With Power and Flynn gone, what would become of sword fighting? In 1960, Clark Gable died, along with Margaret Sullavan and Mack Sennett. Gable was fifty-nine and there were cautious suggestions floated in the press that his heart attack had followed the physical exertion of doing The Misfits in the Nevada desert for John Huston and having to wait so long for his costar Marilyn Monroe. There was no reason to believe those stories (especially the hint that Monroe might even have been Gable’s love child), except that going to the movies had always been a matter of believing in the stories about these people.

  In 1961, without much warning, unless you had been watching his face, Gary Cooper died. He was only sixty, but he had been here forever it seemed. He had been silent once; he was a fatalistic fellow in Wings, Tom Brown saluting Dietrich in Morocco, Mr. Deeds, Wild Bill Hickok, Beau Geste, Sergeant York, John Doe, Lou Gehrig, Howard Roark, Will Kane in High Noon. So many of America’s heroes had needed him. Though something of a mess in life, he had walked or gazed across the screen and conveyed decency and virtue. Today, for good or ill, you could hardly ask an actor to “do” those things so simply, or with so little irony, and not be laughed at.

  All but one of the deaths I’ve listed were received as the passing of veterans, even if so many of them were young by today’s standards. Only James Dean seemed snatched out of youth, and that departure was a key step in the public relations for Youth as a newspaper topic. But on August 5, 1962, there was the loss no one has ever explained away.

  Norma Jeane Mortenson (or Baker) was born in Los Angeles in June 1926. Her mother had been a negative cutter at a couple of studios, and that’s where the Gable rumors came from
. So she never had a father to speak of, and her mother was somewhere between disturbed and crazy. Norma Jeane was raised in foster homes, orphanages, or with friends, and she dropped out of high school at sixteen to marry a man who worked building aircraft.

  Men began to take her picture. She was always in her glory in stills, like a kid raised on fan magazines and their suspended moments of desire and splendor. When she moved on film, in real time, she often became more awkward or exaggerated. But she was enough of a pinup girl—and there was a luxuriant but tasteful spread for a nude calendar—that she was signed up by Twentieth Century–Fox. They decided to call her Marilyn Monroe. She was one of the last studio fabrications and she would die still attached to Fox in anger, grief, and litigation.

  She would marry Joe DiMaggio, the model of baseball, and then Arthur Miller, the intellectual, leftist playwright. It was a search for happiness, but a kind of nationwide casting, too. There were also affairs with, at least, the agent Johnny Hyde, Joe Schenck (a boss at Fox), Elia Kazan, Marlon Brando, Frank Sinatra, Tony Curtis, Nicholas Ray…Norman Mailer never quite got over the frustration that he was not included and he wrote a rhapsody to her that was driven by his never knowing her.

  What was she like on-screen? More or less, fifty years after her death, everyone has seen some of Marilyn’s films. A lot of them were thankless studio assignments. In many she is being mocked by her own pictures, a dumb blonde who doesn’t get the joke. She had a funny cute voice for film, so she clung to it. She knew every way of looking sexy for a camera, yet she was hurt when Laurence Olivier told her, “Just be sexy,” on The Prince and the Showgirl (1957). There were dark opinions, too. George Axelrod, who scripted The Seven Year Itch (1955) and Bus Stop (1956) for her, believed “She was psychotic. Once you got to know her, one couldn’t feel sexy about her…You just wanted to comfort her, say, ‘It’s going to be all right, child.’”