The Big Screen

by David Thomson

  In Hollywood in 1959 it was still possible to look on the bright side. Pillow Talk, a screen romance between Doris Day and Rock Hudson, had not been produced to make an ironic point with Wild Strawberries. Rather, it had been aimed at rentals of $7.5 million, the sum it reached. In 1959 the Hollywood major studios released 189 pictures. Weekly attendance fell to 32 million, and box office revenue was below $1 billion for the year, having been steadily over that amount from 1942 to 1957. And yet it was the year of Ben-Hur and Pillow Talk, On the Beach and North by Northwest, Porgy and Bess and Disney’s Sleeping Beauty.

  Of those, On the Beach was the only picture that addressed the real possibilities of 1959. Produced and directed by the earnest Stanley Kramer, it was a story about nuclear Armageddon in which Gregory Peck, Fred Astaire, Ava Gardner, and others faced the end of the world. The film was solemn and woeful, and in its views of a sunlit but empty San Francisco it was piercing enough. It was full of dire warning, presented as entertainment (it had rentals of nearly $5 million), and it left audiences speechless and depressed, if only because they felt so powerless.

  Of those 1959 films, the madcap one has survived best: North by Northwest, which is as funny and exhilarating as ever. People said it was a Hitchcock comedy-thriller, with Cary Grant playing himself—all true. But its daring bears closer inspection. It is a ridiculous story: witness the crop-dusting aircraft working semidesert “fields,” or the way in which the moment when the plot secret is spelled out is flagrantly smothered by the sound of an aircraft engine. Between the melancholy of Vertigo and the shock of Psycho, Hitch felt the place for a film that said aren’t movies ridiculous, especially when you’re having fun? North by Northwest is a parody of a suspense thriller. It’s camp, before that word was in common use.

  In the late 1950s, without discussion, America happened to produce some surprising pictures that asked, “How seriously do you take the movies?” Douglas Sirk was yet another German director who had come to America. He was born in Hamburg in 1897 (son to a Danish father) as Hans Detlef Sierck. He had worked extensively in German theater and done some accomplished and stylish melodramatic pictures—Zu Neuen Ufern (1937) and La Habanera (1937)—both with the beautiful Swedish actress Zarah Leander. He came to America in 1940 and made dramas, thrillers, and women’s pictures, with mounting success. Magnificent Obsession (1954) and All That Heaven Allows (1955), both starring Jane Wyman and Rock Hudson, had been great hits for Universal International, and they are films in which the personal crises are narrative cover for an unusual displeasure with American emotional honesty betrayed by social convention.

  Written on the Wind (1956) goes just a little further. It is the story of money, love, sex, family, and oil in Texas, and it opened only weeks after Giant, a bigger production, taken from the Edna Ferber novel, but grown in the same soil. Giant takes itself very seriously; there is only respect in that title. But Written on the Wind has a breath of satire or self-mockery to it.

  Its characters tremble on the edge of exposé: Kyle Hadley (Robert Stack) is heir to an oil fortune, but he’s a lost soul—alcoholic and without sexual confidence. He marries Lucy (Lauren Bacall), a decent woman from New York. She will come to love Mitch Wayne (Rock Hudson), Kyle’s amazingly stalwart and loyal best friend, but Mitch is lusted after by Kyle’s sister, Marylee (Dorothy Malone), a restless nymphomaniac in the habit of cuddling up to toy oil derricks. The film had a theme song, sung by the Four Aces, with this opening line: “A faithless lover’s kiss is written on the wind!” It was shot in florid, overdone color by Russell Metty. It has sets from a deluxe death hotel. The camera moves like a drunk. Malone won the Best Supporting Actress Oscar, and in 1956 audiences could take it straight if they wished, or they could see the expensive wallpaper beginning to curl off the walls. Here is part of a commentary on Written on the Wind from 1971, far beyond the estimates of 1956, yet piercingly apt and a model of how the ways of thinking about movies were shifting:

  In Written on the Wind the good, the “normal,” the “beautiful” are always utterly revolting; the evil, the weak, the dissolute arouse one’s compassion…And then again, the house in which it all takes place. Governed, so to speak, by one huge staircase. And mirrors. And endless flowers. And gold. And coldness. A house such as one would build if one had a lot of money. A house with all the props that go with having real money, and in which one cannot feel at ease. It is like the Oktoberfest, where everything is colorful and in movement, and you feel as alone as everyone…Sirk’s lighting is always as unnatural as possible. Shadows where there shouldn’t be any make feelings plausible which one would rather have left unacknowledged. In the same way the camera angles in Written on the Wind are almost always tilted, mostly from below, so that the strange things in the story happen on the screen, not just in the spectator’s head.

  It’s unclear whether Douglas Sirk intended all that in 1956. But in 1971, Rainer Werner Fassbinder—the most radical of the young German directors of that age, and the delighted demolition artist of melodrama—saw that film, felt the satirical edge and the contempt for that world of money, the very source and image of the advertising that was dominating the television screen in America.

  Or take Otto Preminger’s Anatomy of a Murder (1959). The courtroom drama was a staple of American entertainment. Perry Mason was a television show that had begun in 1957 in which, week after week, Mason would defeat the addled efforts of the Los Angeles district attorney, Hamilton Burger. Innocent viewers believed the show was “educational” in that it gave guidance on how trials worked, and of how reliably justice was done!

  Otto Preminger was a far warier man: in Laura (1944), he had dismantled a murder mystery to reveal the hero and heroine (Dana Andrews and Gene Tierney) as very ordinary and awkward people caught in a dream. Preminger took little at face value. Anatomy of a Murder (1959) was from a novel, but on-screen it was a breakthrough. To start with, the defense lawyer (played by Jimmy Stewart) was a sly trickster, ready for any maneuver; the accused man (Ben Gazzara) was plainly possessed by hostile impulses; and the wife (Lee Remick), whose honor the accused was defending—he killed her rapist—was so flirtatious you had to wonder at what had happened. Anatomy proposed several fresh things about the law and movies based on trials. It said the law was a game in which the best player wins, because we can never be sure about truth.

  Preminger kept the film at a level of smart entertainment. It has a superb score by Duke Ellington—it even has Ellington playing piano in a tavern in an upstate Michigan nowhere town. It has George C. Scott and Eve Arden. And to play the judge, in a characteristic marketing coup, Preminger enlisted Joseph N. Welch, the attorney known to America from the televised Army-McCarthy hearings. That’s where Welch had asked McCarthy, “At long last, have you left no sense of decency?” Anatomy of a Murder deserved its big success, but it is clear about one message: keep your critical faculty sharpened, because the scheme of Perry Mason is monotonous junk likely to make an idiot out of you.

  Or look at Howard Hawks’s Rio Bravo (1959). This was a John Wayne film, and Wayne’s career seemed sacrosanct. You had to believe you were in the West, where everyone played by the rules of the genre. Of course, not so far ahead—in films such as Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch (1969)—we would learn that the West was nasty, dirty, and a place where no one played by any rules. But Rio Bravo is less an authentic Western than the amiable eavesdropping on a group of friends in 1959—not just Hawks and Wayne, but Dean Martin (the least nineteenth-century persona America ever put in cowboy clothes), Ricky Nelson, Walter Brennan, and the intensely immediate Angie Dickinson—there was no smarter woman on the American screen then—on a set where they are pretending to make a “Western.”

  The gap doesn’t show, though Hawks had been kidding his own genres for years. But in Red River you do believe you are on a cattle drive. In Rio Bravo you know you are on a Hollywood lot.

  The greatest coup of this shifting moment comes last. In that same 1959 the irrepressible Billy W
ilder said suppose you pull the leg of such things as the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre, the sturdy outlines of the gangster picture, male star authority, Cary Grant, Edward G. Robinson, George Raft, and the whole legend of Marilyn Monroe. And why not make it subversively gay, too? I am talking about Some Like It Hot, which really was made in the same year as Ben-Hur.

  Some Like It Hot was written by Wilder and his colleague I. A. L. Diamond, vaguely mindful of a minor German film of the 1930s but locked into America in 1959. Two hard-up musicians (Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon) witness a gangster firing squad. On the run, they take jobs as bull fiddle and tenor sax in an all-girl band where Marilyn is the hapless singer, Sugar Kane. The action shifts from Chicago to Florida, states of the movie mind. Curtis goes after Marilyn, gets her on board a yacht, where he does a Cary Grant–sounding millionaire who is impotent. Sugar makes every attempt to give him a hard-on—yet again she is the oblivious dirty joke in her own picture. Meanwhile, Lemmon is pursued by an aging playboy, in the person of Joe E. Brown.

  I’d like to think everyone knows Some Like It Hot in the way they know Sunset Blvd.—when Wilder hit a home run it was gone forever. You can see the film tonight and it has not dated. You may marvel that the absurd censor let so much get past him—he was losing confidence. You may need a little commentary to catch the allusion to the MCA talent agency, when Jules Stein and Lew Wasserman were just midwestern operators. You may need footnotes on how the son of Edward G. Robinson tosses a coin under George Raft’s nose, with George snapping, “Where did you pick up a cheap trick like that?”—when it came from Raft’s performance in Scarface (1932). But you’ll get the point: Wilder’s sharp mind has seen not just that sexuality is so slippery and appealing no one can claim perfection. This is a mainstream film that says, “You might be gay,” as well as, “For Christ’s sake, what have the movies done to us?,” and it does so with the full velocity of barbed entertainment.

  Some unexpected observers could feel the shift in the reliability of old truths and virtues. Saul Bellow, writing in Horizon, would say, “Plain goodness, blunt badness, the honor of strong silent men, simple love, and classical jealousy went out of fashion. Hollywood went on making action pictures, of course, but significant actions became harder to find as we entered this present age of disarray.”

  Out of the screen comes sound, breathing, and music, and the first streaks of light on skin. Or is it dawn?

  Not the least wonder in Hiroshima Mon Amour (1959) is that it begins at night, in bed. As a rule, our films build up to love. We do not realize it yet, despite the title of the film, but the bed holds a French woman and a Japanese man. We see the bodies, or parts of them, and they are crystalline nearly. Is that the perspiration of lovemaking or the ashes from some burning? The script calls the residue “cendres atomiques,” but when you first see encrusted arms you do not know that yet. The bodies might be buried, in the night or in their love, and the flesh might be decomposing. The title is a riddle to be answered.

  You hear a piano refrain. It is by Giovanni Fusco, probing, questioning, feeling, wondering. You see the skin change. The cinders seem to run, like sweat or putrescence, like rain or moisture or film’s dissolve. And the voice of the man says, in French, “Tu n’as rien vu à Hiroshima. Rien”—“You saw nothing at Hiroshima. Nothing.” But we are trying to see.

  The nature of our engagement has been laid down: we are asked to look very closely, to identify something strange happening to skin, and yet we are told by a voice that shares the beat of the piano that we have seen nothing.

  A woman’s voice answers that she saw everything. She saw the hospital at Hiroshima. As if we are watching a documentary, the screen shows us a hospital—you know what a hospital looks like. But the man tells her, “Tu n’as pas vu d’hôpital à Hiroshima. Tu n’as en vu à Hiroshima.” He is denying her, yet the rhythm of claim and response is also like the touching in lovemaking: touch me, please—yes, touch me there. Even though he insists on her ignorance, there is tenderness in the telling. Even though the film is in French, you are alerted to a rare feeling for the rhythm in words and speech. You are looking, as if your life depended on it, in this nocturnal embracing, but the words are like kisses.

  The opening of Hiroshima Mon Amour begins to teach us how to attend; it is the same with every real film, or every departure in film. The night talk is very erotic. It speaks of love in the act of breathing. So these people never need to say they are in love. We know. We have felt it, even though they are a French woman, Elle (Emmanuelle Riva), an actress come to Hiroshima to make a film about peace, while he, Lui (Eiji Okada), is a Japanese architect who has met her. But their bodies are so alive with metaphor—Are they damp with love’s heat? Are they rebuilding or acting? Are they turning into something else in radiation? Or are they dead already, buried? So much fluidity, but we have not seen their faces yet. There is more talk in this night, about how it was ten thousand degrees at the Place de la Paix, the heat of the sun. In documentary-like sequences, we see the story of August 6, 1945—there is even a clip from a Japanese feature film about the horror—as well as hospital footage where patients live with warped faces and sheared-off limbs.

  Alain Resnais (born in Vannes in 1922) had been a documentarian previously: he made two films about Van Gogh (one won an Oscar) and Guernica; Les Statues Meurent Aussi (about African art), made with Chris Marker; Night and Fog (about Auschwitz); and Toute la Mémoire du Monde (about the Bibliothèque Nationale). These are pictures about forgetfulness and the obligation of holding on to memory. Hiroshima Mon Amour is his first feature film, and he had asked the novelist Marguerite Duras to write the script.

  The first passage ends. The sound level changes, from night to day, from reverie to life. It is the morning after the night of love and talk. She says she is from Paris. And before that, from Nevers, in the Loire region. A little later, the man is sleeping in the hotel bed. She is on the terrace, in the sun, wearing a kimono and drinking a cup of coffee. She comes back into the room and sees his arm, twisted a little oddly the way he is positioned. There is a cut to another arm at a similar angle, long ago, but not so long ago. In the war, when she was younger and had longer hair, in Nevers, she was in love with a German soldier. But he was shot dead, his arm was caught, and in her wretchedness she was abused, her hair chopped off, her face marked with dirt, or was it excrement?—the things that were done to collaborators. In Nevers.

  In that first glimpse, we are shown only a fragment of Nevers—but we have been trained to watch closely, so we see it, we feel it. But as the war goes on, we get more of the past. We see her riding her bicycle on the wooded country roads hurrying to meet her lover, and there is a tumbling lyric tune on the soundtrack, written by Georges Delerue, quite different from the Fusco piano and the pulsing reed refrain we heard in the night. It’s a lovely interlude, like a movie moment. We see her with cropped hair, shut in a cellar as punishment, licking at the walls in her distress.

  There was a widespread fear in the late 1950s that came from the state of the cold war and the way in which two great powers were testing larger and larger bombs in what was called the atmosphere. This spoke of dangers to us all that we could not see or measure, but which were poetically delivered in the images of bodies that might be decomposing (or being remembered). Just the use of “Hiroshima” made this a film about war, even if it had no battles. The name Hiroshima is like a placard pushed in our face or a button pressed in our brain. “Auschwitz” is the same. And if the war is rendered as simply the story of two lovers broken apart, one lesson of that is why did anyone think you could make relevant films about war that put all their stress and imperative on courage? Is that an American habit? Other countries think of war in terms of luck.

  As Hiroshima Mon Amour progresses, the conceit builds that the two characters, Lui and Elle, are really named Hiroshima and Nevers. They are the crises in the woman’s life and they are the evidence for an assertion—it seems simple to utter, but it is profound—
that human beings can relate such things. They know to scan “now” and “then.” They have names and they live in time. You can still see Hiroshima Mon Amour, and Riva and Okada look as young or as perfect as they did when they shot the film (in 1958). But he is dead now—he was in Teshigahara’s Woman in the Dunes; he died in 1995 of a heart attack. Riva is still alive. She is in her eighties, and perhaps in her way she looks like the old Japanese woman in the film. If you know the picture, you know what I mean. Later on, the lovers pursue each other in the city, and there is a moment when they come to rest on a bench with an old woman sitting between them. They talk. They are filmed. But it is a mystery as to whether the old woman was cast as an eavesdropper—or was she simply there and did Resnais ask her to wait while the scene was filmed? I love the moment because it is not clear whether she is fictional or documentary. But she looks at the actors as if they might be aliens who have elected to intrude on her existence.

  It isn’t just nostalgia, or a sense of history, that realizes Hiroshima Mon Amour is more than fifty years old now. It isn’t just that the world has found other things to worry about beyond the half-lives in radioactive fallout. Hiroshima is still a given, less a place than an event, a screen and a scream, thrust into our discourse as something that might deafen us or crush us. The youthfulness of these lovers means more now, now that the actors are leaving us, and their passion can only become more touching as each year passes.