She wanted to do Chekhov or Dostoyevsky? She had Lee Strasberg on her side? She was a mess, struggling with her own attractiveness, her actual sexual frustration, with weight, drugs, and the raging publicity she could neither control nor do without. Studios no longer had reason or the skills to look after their wayward stars, and no one ever knew how to plot a career line for Monroe, or have her remember it. Perhaps she did have a week of fun, with Colin Clark, the third assistant director on The Prince and the Showgirl (1957)—if only she had been as good or as understanding as Michelle Williams in My Week with Marilyn (2011).
She is funny and glamorous in 1953’s Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (was that Howard Hawks?); she is eye candy in The Asphalt Jungle (1950; call that John Huston’s way of noticing a girl); she is heartbreaking in Bus Stop (but that relied on Josh Logan’s kindness); she is a comic achievement and a figure of fun (not quite the same thing) in Billy Wilder’s The Seven Year Itch and Some Like It Hot (and that was Wilder’s lewd cunning); she was out of her depth in The Misfits (1961; put that down to Arthur Miller’s helpless signing off on their marriage).
Marilyn Monroe was never in charge, and that is why the public felt a helpless responsibility at the news of her suicide. Or, was it that? That’s where story crept in and fed the endless industry of autopsy and ghost-raising that goes from Miller’s After the Fall to Mailer’s Marilyn, from the Andy Warhol silk-screen series to Joyce Carol Oates’s Blonde, and to My Week with Marilyn. With so much more to come. The year 2012 will be the fiftieth anniversary of her death.
She was the twentieth century’s Lola Montès, less the real dancer and notoriety than the figure Max Ophüls established in his 1955 film. Her actual achievement, in stills and movie moments, was slight compared with the work of Katharine Hepburn, Barbara Stanwyck, Bette Davis, or Meryl Streep. But if anyone today is asked to do a painting of the history of the movies (or a book jacket), chances are they do Chaplin tipping his hat to Marilyn, with her standing over that subway grating in New York, where the rush of a passing train turned her white skirt into a parachute. She taught us to see that great images were lost children, and we walk on in dismay. She fashioned a strange experiment that showed reality was slipping. She might as well have slept with the Kennedys, Einstein, Shakespeare…or you and me.
Step back and to the side for a moment, and consider a child in the 1950s, and wonder how far he might be aware of some remote but important part of the world through the movies or other forms of popular culture. For the sake of convenience, take a boy who was ten in 1951 and ask what did he know about…Japan?
He knew next to nothing, except that the Japanese were a cruel and bad people. If he lived in Britain, his indignation (or horror) at the Germans was greater, but there was ample room to despise the Japanese. In the 1945 film Objective, Burma! (in which Errol Flynn’s Captain Nelson wins that war), there is this speech uttered by a Western journalist describing the Japanese:
I thought I’d seen or read about everything one man can do to another, from the torture chambers of the Middle Ages to the gang wars and lynchings of today. But this—this is different. This was done in cold blood by people who claim to be civilized. Civilized! They’re degenerate, immoral idiots. Stinking little savages. Wipe them out, I say. Wipe them off the face of the earth.
The boy didn’t know yet that that could have been Hitler speaking, and he had only a vague sense of what Hiroshima and Nagasaki had entailed. (He did not know it, but he was waiting on the sheer educational input of Alain Resnais’s 1959 film, Hiroshima Mon Amour.) But he had read a bestselling paperback of the age, Russell Braddon’s The Naked Island (1951), about Changi Gaol, a Japanese prisoner-of-war camp in Singapore, and an alarming parade of torture, abuse, and execution. Braddon was Australian, and the comparable film, A Town Like Alice (1956), from a Nevil Shute novel, had Virginia McKenna and the Australian Peter Finch in love in a similar camp. It moved the boy a lot that British Empire love could survive savagery.
There were not too many other films in that era that dealt with the Japanese as other than authority figures driven by a code of violence that seemed shocking and “unfair.” One of the biggest films of the 1950s ($17 million in rentals on a $3 million budget) was David Lean’s The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957), set in a prison camp in the Burmese jungle. It had a fascinating cast: William Holden was there again (to ensure U.S. box office), being Holden, charming, a ne’er-do-well, but resolute finally. Alec Guinness was Colonel Nicholson, a noble English idiot, yet curiously dangerous, someone who believes in building a bridge for the enemy. And Sessue Hayakawa (who had played a Burmese in Cecil B. DeMille’s The Cheat in 1915 and had a notable silent career) was brought out of retirement to be the Japanese camp commandant.
The film won seven Oscars, including Best Picture. Guinness won Best Actor, and Hayakawa was nominated as Best Supporting Actor. He lost to Red Buttons in a film called Sayonara, a Marlon Brando picture in which American servicemen in Japan fall in love with Japanese women. (Miyoshi Umeki won the Best Supporting Actress Oscar playing Buttons’s girlfriend.) I believe that film provided the first Japanese women the boy had seen—though the man has to admit that he felt then the cinematic problem that “all Japanese people looked alike,” except in The Teahouse of the August Moon (1956), in which Brando played an Okinawan. Still, Sayonara was a breakthrough picture in allowing ordinary Japanese characters an emotional life beyond the anger and violence of captors and commanders.
There was little more, though the ingenious Sam Fuller did make House of Bamboo (1955), a film about American crime set and shot in Japan. As late as 1961, in a film often rhapsodized over for its charm, Breakfast at Tiffany’s, Mickey Rooney was allowed to deliver a toxically racist performance as the Japanese man, Mr. Yunioshi, who lives upstairs from Holly Golightly (Audrey Hepburn). Some people on that picture—the screenwriter George Axelrod, notably—fought with Blake Edwards, the director, about the characterization, but Edwards paid no heed. There were many complaints, polite complaints, but it was still part of Western attitudes toward Japan, I suppose, that people who look alike (call them a huddled mass) have to be polite.
But something else was happening. In September 1951 the Venice Film Festival awarded its top prize, the Golden Lion, to a film from Japan: it was called Rashomon, and it was directed by Akira Kurosawa.
Kurosawa was born in Tokyo in 1910. Having failed in a career as a commercial artist, he went into movies as an assistant director and then a screenwriter. He began to direct in the last years of the war—a disastrous period, of course, but he had done several films before Rashomon. Still, this was his breakthrough, a period piece in dappled black and white in which an incident of robbery and rape is described in turn by four different characters, with variations. The word Rashomon by now has passed into English-speaking wisdom to indicate any situation in which the witnesses’ testimony doesn’t fit.
The fame of Rashomon spread. It opened in New York in 1951, and in March 1952 it received the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film. (This was still an occasional, honorary award, initiated in 1948 with Shoeshine.) The Japanese consul accepted the prize for Rashomon, thanked the producer, but never mentioned Kurosawa.
Perhaps he hadn’t been home in a while, or didn’t know his own history. In America, a Japanese film had never won an Oscar, and it is hard to track down any prior Japanese picture that had had a commercial opening. But Edison and Lumière programs had been shown in Japan in the late 1890s, and their impact had been as complete as anywhere else, with this proviso: Whereas in the United States flicks were seen as lower class, film was treated in Japan as fit for everyone, especially the educated classes. By 1940, Japan was producing 500 feature films a year, for internal consumption in a country with a population of 73 million. The figure for American productions in 1940 was 363, for a population of 132 million.
To this day, despite the efforts of Japanese film promoters; of scholars and writers such as Donald Richie, Audie Bock, Mark LeFanu,
and Tony Rayns; and enthusiasts such as Susan Sontag, we know too few of those films to be sure about them. Rashomon inspired further discoveries in the 1950s, but I fear many readers will scarcely know the name of another “unearthed” figure, Kenji Mizoguchi. Born in Tokyo in 1898, Mizoguchi would die of leukemia in 1956. He made more than eighty films, and just before his death he was “discovered,” above all in France, with the release of The Life of Oharu (1952) and Ugetsu Monogatari (1953).
It is a silly game making lists of the best films ever made, but anything I can do to draw Ugetsu to your attention will benefit you. There are two men, Genjurô and Tôbei, the one a potter, the other ambitious to be a samurai. In the sixteenth century, in a time of great strife, they leave their village and their wives as Genjurô travels to sell his pottery. Tôbei stumbles into the role of a warlord, and then one day finds that his abandoned wife is now a prostitute. Genjurô is waylaid by a strange princess, the Lady Wakasa. He goes to live with her, but she is a ghost. He escapes and hurries home to what seems like desolation, but then the camera moves and we find a hearth, a home, and the wife. But she is a ghost, too—murdered, as we have suspected. Next morning Genjurô is alone with his child.
In framing and camera movements, in a concurrent simplicity of action and complexity of feeling, Mizoguchi is not just in the class of Jean Renoir. He is a master of narrative cinema, of moral consequence, and especially of stories about women. The wife in Ugetsu is played by Kinuyo Tanaka, a great actress, and Wakasa is Machiko Kyô, who played a few years later with Brando and Glenn Ford in The Teahouse of the August Moon, one of those daft American views of Japan.
If you want a list of Mizoguchi films to track down—and we are still in the age of introductory lists, though there are good DVDs available—it would include all of these: The Story of the Last Chrysanthemum (1939; could this be the best film made in Hollywood’s great year? Or is it Renoir’s La Règle du Jeu?), The 47 Ronin (1941), Utamaro and His Five Women (1946), Gion Music (1953), Sansho the Bailiff (1954), Chickamatsu Monogatari (1954). It makes the 1950s seem rich, doesn’t it? No wonder: by the time of Mizoguchi’s death, 1956, Japanese film production had recovered from defeat in the war and was back to 500 again. In America by 1956 the number was down to 210.
The story has only just begun. In the year of Ugetsu, Yasujirô Ozu made Tokyo Story. Born in Tokyo in 1903, Ozu was an unruly kid who got a plum job as an assistant cameraman and began directing in the silent era. He would prove an unmatched observer of that subject often skirted in American pictures: ordinary family life. He developed a withdrawn, quietist camera style, filming in long shot in long takes, from a lower level than is customary, and letting characters move and interact in the frame. Some are tempted to think of it as “very Japanese,” but in truth it is very cinematic and totally devoted to characters, actors, and the mood of interiors.
Tokyo Story is about parents who travel to Tokyo to see their children. But the children rather ignore or disdain them, not really out of unkindness but just in the natural way of youth and self-centeredness. Only a widowed daughter-in-law (Setsuko Hara) seems interested in them. They go back home. The wife falls ill and dies. That is all—there are no bank robberies, car chases, or chainsaw massacres. Satan does not appear. But such things are rare in life, too. Toward the end, one character admits, “Isn’t life disappointing?” and it’s like the voice of Chekhov, as well as the dark secret Hollywood never wanted to give away. Ozu is as important as Mizoguchi, as consistent and human, and as great an artist. From I Was Born But…(1929) to his last film, An Autumn Afternoon (1962, a year before his death), he is to be seen and pursued.
I should not shortchange Kurosawa. No Japanese director made such an impact in the West. But no Japanese director was so familiar with or so stirred by Western classics, especially the films of John Ford. In 1990 he received an honorary Oscar, presented by George Lucas and Steven Spielberg, who had both learned a great deal from Kurosawa’s samurai films. Spielberg called him “the greatest living filmmaker.” The list of his films is long and honorable, but I will stress the early to mid-50s and two films made back to back: Ikiru (or Living), from 1952, and Seven Samurai, from 1954.
The same actor, Takashi Shimura, is in both films. In Living he is a minor city official who discovers he is dying of cancer and tries to establish a small playground for children. In Seven Samurai he is the leader of the band of warriors who come to the aid of a village threatened by bandits. In Living he is humble, crushed, and nearly helpless; in Seven Samurai he is robust and triumphant. The one film is a restrained view of suffering; the other is fully engaged with combat and valor. It is hard to believe the same man made both. But it is hard to believe anyone made either. We simply sit back in awe.
In January 1954, in Paris, a film magazine, Cahiers du Cinéma, published a lengthy essay, “Une Certaine Tendance du Cinéma Français” by a young critic named François Truffaut, who was opinionated, a very good writer, and determined to make his name and to define a kind of cinema he wanted to occupy as a director. The essay was reworked several times at the suggestion of the Cahiers editor, André Bazin, but it never lost its fierce attack on the allegedly sedate, literary nature of recent French cinema.
The essay became part of the Cahiers rationale for celebrating American films, and a spur to the gathering of what would be called the “nouvelle vague,” the New Wave. Moreover, it was the kind of attack that might have been launched in other countries—in America even, if it had possessed a serious film magazine or the intellectual respect for film that had existed for decades in France. Such an attack might have been aimed at the mounting irrelevance of, say, Three Coins in the Fountain (1954), Love Is a Many-Splendored Thing (1955), or Friendly Persuasion (1956)—all Best Picture nominees. Still, in France the fuss Truffaut caused could obscure the extraordinary work being done in the 1950s.
One of the greatest of directors was emerging, a man so single-minded and austere in his work that he likely never noticed Cahiers du Cinéma or much else going on in the France of the 1950s. Robert Bresson was born in Bromont-Lamothe in the Auvergne in 1901. He had tried to be a painter, and entered movies in a modest way in the 1930s. During the war, he had spent a year in a German prison camp.
So he was in his forties by the time he began what he regarded as his true work: Les Anges du Péché (1943), about a community of nuns; and Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne (1945), taken from a Diderot story, scripted by Bresson but with dialogue by Jean Cocteau. Hélène (María Casares) is dropped by her bored lover, Jean (Paul Bernard). In revenge, she sets up a meeting between Paul and Agnes (Elina Labourdette), who is close to being a prostitute. Only when that love has led to marriage does Hélène reveal the truth to Paul, yet he responds far better than the plot expects.
Les Dames is not typical Bresson: it uses significant actors; it has a lusher camera style than he would work toward; the dialogue is sharp and theatrical; the story is built on surprise; the melodrama is not denied. It is still a masterpiece, a “woman’s picture,” if you will, cut through with classical severity, the emotionalism countered by the dispassionate distancing of the filming. If we recall that is also a time of intense, barely restrained melodramas such as Mildred Pierce, Brief Encounter, and Duel in the Sun, Bresson shows a startling disciplining of that essential cinematic genre and condition.
Bresson was launched on an immense and perilous discovery, antithetical to all commercial impulses: that the emotion may be more powerful if reined in. He called for “not beautiful images, but necessary images.” Our cinema is still grappling with this—and Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne was a drastic failure in 1945, a year of natural exuberance (and recrimination) in France when Marcel Carné’s Les Enfants du Paradis, a tribute to French theater and theatricality, was the picture of the year.
Bresson paused six years, and then in 1951 he released Diary of a Country Priest, from a novel by Georges Bernanos, about a priest who is dying in a grim rural parish, haunted by the problems
of some of his parishioners. Now the actors were nonprofessionals, playing not quite as amateurs (he called them models) but without attempting to act out the inner situations. More than the Italian neorealists at work in those years, and more than that other contemporary approach, the strenuous naturalism of the Method, Bresson had discovered a principal that had always existed in the thing we call underplaying (a method found in players from Gary Cooper to the Japanese actors in Ozu and Mizoguchi). It says that if the situation is strong enough, and the face eloquent, there is no need for acting: simple presence will guide the viewer into the feeling and the idea. (And are there really any faces that are not eloquent? Bresson avoided professionals, and did not like to cast anyone more than once.)
Beyond that, Diary of a Country Priest shows Bresson’s growing interest in simplicity or minimalism. He rarely moves the camera or bothers with expressive angles. He is more and more interested in sound, often off-screen sound—the scathing rake in the garden outside a window makes an anguished confessional all the more potent. Bresson would say, in his aphoristic and absorbing book Notes on the Cinematographer, “When a sound can replace an image, cut the image or neutralize it. The ear goes toward the interior, the eye to the exterior.”
Cocteau said the Diary was less a film than the skeleton of a film. But if you care to follow its strict ways, the feeling was overwhelming and enough to suggest that too much regular movie feeling was overdone, trashy, or bogus. Diary was about the spirit as seen in what Paul Schrader would call “a man alone in a room.” (Taxi Driver has that motif “Are you talking to me?,” and Robert De Niro improvised that line from Schrader’s script.) Bresson was often regarded as a Catholic artist. But his true inwardness was in his dedication to cinematic essence and abstraction.
The Big Screen Page 39