The Big Screen

by David Thomson

  “Oh, tell him to drive around.”

  I told the driver to go to the Parc Montsouris, and got in, and slammed the door. Brett was leaning back in the corner, her eyes closed. I got in and sat beside her. The cab started with a jerk.

  “Oh, darling, I’ve been so miserable,” said Brett.

  That’s chapter 3 of Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises, published in 1926, when movies were still silent. Not that this kind of dialogue, with its sense of the unspoken, would be heard on-screen for at least twenty years. But the moment is cinematic: the transition from “slammed the door” to “Brett was leaning back” is a cut. Hemingway didn’t depend on being aware of that, and no one had yet used a sound effect to bridge two shots in a movie. But unconsciously, he was following the energy of film’s editing. So many fiction writers were. The value of the movies was simple and sweeping for writers: film helped you see your own scene in your head, and you could count on readers having the same instinct. Soon enough, literature would find that dispassionate observation as almost a policy or philosophy. Seeing was so potent and immediate, you could overlook its consequences. Nabokov once told his son that everything he wanted to write in the future was already there in his mind, “like film waiting to be developed.” We don’t really have film anymore, but to write a story is very often running a movie, or different cuts of it, in the writer’s head. As if he hadn’t had to think of it?

  “I am a camera.” No one is, but the technological shift it gave writing was profound, even if it might foreclose the potential of an inner life—Faulkner’s pressing concern. This is one of the things we should have been talking about to our childen for a hundred years. And our children are too old now, and too uncertain about having an inner life. We have “streaming material” all the time, and god knows what that sauna does to us, but maybe consciousness has been shelved. It’s something else we have to learn not to worry over.

  I have described how Hitchcock flowered as artist and entertainer in the 1950s. This progress culminated in the unacademic shock of Psycho (1960)—was that “movie” or “cinema”?

  Many people, including his studio, Paramount, had warned against this project: the material threatened to be nasty and gruesome, without Hitchcock’s urbane and attractive people—you couldn’t cast Cary Grant as Norman Bates (and I doubt Hitch could have brought himself to murder Grace Kelly). The shower killing and the looming mother seemed like exploitation, or Grand Guignol, as well as trouble with the censor. With his agent, Lew Wasserman, Hitchcock persevered. So long as he worked cheaply, using the crew from his television show, and staying in black and white, Psycho could be set up in a deal to make more money for Hitch than he had ever known before.

  Step by step, he crafted his way past the censor. He cast Anthony Perkins as Norman; the audience knew him as a soft-spoken, decent young man. He set up the amiable Janet Leigh to be slaughtered; she was mainstream, as well as a blond movie star. And Hitch did it as what he called “pure cinema”: a series of effects made out of camera angles and cutting, invitation and withheld information, a delicious ordeal. He also made it a personal venture. In the theater lobbies there was a lifesize cardboard figure of the director—familiar from his cameo appearances on his television show—warning that no one would be admitted after the picture had started. More than just an auteur, he was in charge of the show. And the $800,000 film had rentals of $15 million. Hitch walked away with at least $4 million.

  The reviews were all over the place. Psycho became a test case in the auteur debates; some said it was unpleasant, meretricious, ridiculous, and grisly, while at the other extreme it was regarded as a masterpiece, the introduction of breakdown as a subject, and a disturbing essay on the rhythm of voyeurism and detachment, suspense and distancing, in film history. Yes, we watched the story, to the point of nausea or compulsive reaction, but we followed the process, too, the way it was done. And in that analysis there was the start of a rare, chilly detachment. Was Hitch just a poker-faced entertainer or a modern genius?

  François Truffaut had no doubts. He had cherished Hitchcock’s films for years and had interviewed the maestro in the South of France during the making of To Catch a Thief. On June 2, 1962, between Jules and Jim and The Birds, Truffaut wrote to Hitchcock saying, “Since I have become a director myself, my admiration for you has in no way weakened; on the contrary, it has grown stronger and changed in nature. There are many directors with a love for the cinema, but what you possess is a love of celluloid itself and it is that which I would like to talk to you about.”

  He proposed eight days or thirty hours of recorded interview toward the making of a book that would assess every Hitchcock film and all the director’s ideas about the medium. As soon as I’ve finished The Birds, promised Hitch. They sat down together for a week in August in Hitchcock’s bungalow at Universal, with Helen Scott (one of Truffaut’s most valued friends and consultants) present to help with translation issues. They talked for six days, and the book was not published until 1966, in part because it contained spectacular illustrations with frame-by-frame analyses of certain sequences. There had never been a book like it before, either in celebration of an individual director or in its close attention to the celluloid detail Hitch had given his life to.

  This book became a key text in the mounting number of university seminars on Hitchcock, backing up the 1964 publication of Robin Wood’s Hitchcock’s Films—and Wood was a writer close to the Movie magazine group. By 1967, Hitch was sixty-seven, and there was a somber irony in the way his films became less interesting as he was the more esteemed. Was there a connection? The audience mood of the 1960s was changing rapidly, and directors of Hitchcock’s age ran the risk of losing touch. The man who had made such inroads on censorship with Psycho, and judged its titillation to the frame, began to seem clumsy or overwrought with sexual violence by the time of Frenzy (1972), in which his interest in disturbance felt out of control and uncomfortable.

  Hitchcock never won an Oscar for Best Director, though he was given the Irving Thalberg Award in 1967 and the AFI Life Achievement award in 1979, the year before his death. But he was at the pinnacle of success in the early 1960s as he made The Birds (1963) and Marnie (1964), and sat down for the Truffaut interview book. The inhibited voyeur was never drawn out of his shell. To study Hitchcock’s films is to feel the deep yearning for his actresses and the concurrent suppression of it. Hitchcock had wanted Grace Kelly to return for Marnie, but the protocol of the principality of Monaco would not permit it. So he used Tippi Hedren again, his actress from The Birds, and made a crude pass at her. That is her account of it, but it is not really doubted. She rebuffed him, and Hitchcock was left crushed in his moment of glory. It was a strange and embarrassing revelation that the man in charge might be not just an omniscient auteur—someone who always had the whole picture in his head—but also a desperate person crying out from the back room of his being. Rich as it is, the Truffaut book does not discover that man. Hitch was too professional, too superior, too Hollywood, to let him be seen or to own up to his pressing subject, the loneliness.

  The question often arises with Hitchcock as to how well he understood himself. Planning everything in advance, and claiming to be a little bored during the shooting, could be a droll way of not noticing yourself. Or was he just the wry if slightly wicked entertainer he found viable in public relations?

  In 1964, he had an exchange with Vladimir Nabokov on ideas for collaborating on a picture. They came to nothing, though some plans were put forward on both sides. Hitch suggested a plot concerning a woman in love with a defector. The correspondence includes this, from Hitchcock:

  Anyway, Mr. Nabokov, the type of story I’m looking for is an emotional, psychological one, expressed in terms of action and movement and, naturally, one that would give me the opportunity to indulge in the customary Hitchcock suspense.

  “Naturally.” But by 1964 Hitchcock had revealed so much about himself—not least the passionate voyeur, as intense as Humbert H
umbert beholding Lolita. Could it be that some film directors, if they are to gaze with such longing, are safer and freer if they don’t ask too much about their own motives? Is it possible that a similar liberating restraint applies to us, the viewers? One of the charms in “I am a camera” was always its insinuation that if you become that mechanical you may not need to think or question what you are doing. The same facility is useful in torture or playing golf.

  Perhaps stricken artists did make the movies. That would help account for why the pictures were not the same anymore. Ingmar Bergman had breakdowns. Alfred Hitchcock was expected, and himself expected, to preside over a series of successes and offer his famous dry remarks, like, “It’s only a movie!” Which was the easier path?

  Hitchcock sounded English still in the 1960s, but he took America for granted as a place to work. Still, England was becoming attractive, or necessary, to several American filmmakers. Although American visitors might not appreciate this, it was only in the late 1950s that Britain began to regain prosperity and confidence after the war. That money would let young people buy records of the new music—the Beatles, the Stones—and it ran over into design, clothes, sex, drugs, and moviemaking. The look of the country changed in the early 1960s. Clothes suddenly lost their uniform drabness. And filmmakers notice such things. There was also a wave of new writers in the theater, and even on television: John Osborne, Harold Pinter, John Hopkins, Dennis Potter. Sometimes they were called “angry young men,” and the anger was directed at the remnants of an archaic England, but it was full of high spirits and new ideas, too. To Americans, increasingly disenchanted with their own country, this vigor and candor was very appealing in a Britain that could still seem safe, pretty, and cheap.

  Some Americans had had a tougher time. Joseph Losey had a lengthy period in London. He married Englishwomen and had English children. But he had not really arrived of his own volition. Born in La Crosse, Wisconsin, in 1909, Losey attended Dartmouth and Harvard before working for ten years in the theater. He traveled in the Soviet Union and the rest of Europe and became a Communist. Having directed Clifford Odets’s Waiting for Lefty in Moscow in 1935, he came back to America and helped with the Living Newspaper project and a scheme called Political Cabaret. Losey was in the line of educated, creative liberals in the 1930s when communism seemed a natural response to the threat of fascism.

  Then he served in the Signal Corps in the war and afterward, at close to forty, he started to direct films in Hollywood: The Boy with Green Hair (1948), The Prowler (1951), a remake of M—small but adventurous films. The Prowler, say, is apparently a standard noir story about a creepy cop (Van Heflin) who preys on a woman who has reported a prowler. It turns into a downcast love story with intimations of a sick society. The remake of M (1951), set in Los Angeles, with David Wayne in the Peter Lorre role, was attacked as being opportunistic. But it is a worthy picture and one of those noir movies aimed at the real corruption of America.

  Then, in the early 1950s, Losey had to get out of America because of the blacklist. He ended up in London and struggled to survive. He worked in theater, and doing television commercials; he made a couple of pictures under pseudonyms; and he began to gain a more critical awareness of Britain. He collected a few sympathetic people—a production designer Richard MacDonald, the jazz musician Johnny Dankworth, the actors Stanley Baker and Dirk Bogarde. Losey was proposed to direct a Bogarde picture in 1954, The Sleeping Tiger. The actor was wary, but then he looked at The Prowler, and a friendship began. Losey’s films became more personal and uneasy—Blind Date (1959), The Criminal (1960)—and he directed Eve (1962), in Italy, with Baker and Jeanne Moreau. But The Servant was the picture that made it clear how much was changing.

  Robin Maugham’s novella of The Servant had been published in 1948. Its portrait of a servant taking over his master was said to be too shocking for a movie then. But around 1960, Harold Pinter, just beginning his career, was asked to try a script by the director Michael Anderson. That plan fell through, but then Dirk Bogarde wired Losey (in Venice for Eve) and said the script was intriguing. Losey looked at it and started writing notes.

  “There was a meeting,” Losey would say later,

  with Dirk, his business manager, Harold, his agent and myself at the Connaught Hotel. I confronted Harold, who was—if anything—no less arrogant because he wasn’t sure that he was Harold Pinter yet. And he said, “I’m not accustomed to writing from notes and I don’t like this.” He thought that I was going to try and dilute his theme. As for Dirk’s business manager, he was afraid that I was going to make it, as he put it, “a completely homosexual picture” which would discredit Dirk, who was still a big English film idol.

  The venture nearly came apart that night at the Connaught. But Losey and Pinter were made for each other: the new screenwriter and the director ready to get his teeth into the meat of English society, with Dirk Bogarde reckoning to preserve his cover but eager to show his range as an actor, something not permitted in his prolonged run of British war heroes or as Simon Sparrow in the popular Doctor in the House movies. Losey and Pinter worked on the script. They brought it up to date: as recently as 1959, in the trial of Penguin Books for obscenity in publishing an unexpurgated text of Lady Chatterley’s Lover, the prosecuting lawyer had raised laughter in court when he’d asked the jury whether this was a book they’d let their wife or servants read. There were still servants in Britain, but there was growing mockery of the old class privileges and a new, young voice abroad—you got it at the BBC, at Penguin Books, the Royal Court Theatre, in the Manchester Guardian newspaper and in Private Eye (started in 1961), and at the new English universities, the “redbrick” schools that were not “Oxbridge.” (The universities of Sussex, Warwick, East Anglia, York, and the Open University were all started in the 1960s.)

  The film of The Servant is about sexual confusion, raw power, and intimidation, but it’s also a critique of a society that was passing away and an early event in what would soon be known as “the sixties.” Leslie Grade put up about £140,000 for the movie (Losey got £15,000 and Pinter £3,000) and it was shot at Shepperton Studios, where MacDonald did a series of elaborate adjoining sets—the rooms in the Chelsea house—so that space and décor could be explored in the filming. Later on, the critic Penelope Gilliatt would say the film made the house “almost malignant.” The young man, Tony, was James Fox; Bogarde was Barrett, the manservant; and Sarah Miles was the “sister” brought down to town to help destroy Tony.

  When The Servant was finished, the money people were scared: Bogarde had never dared be this nasty or perverse. The sex was palpable, and class was viewed as a rotting carcass in a Francis Bacon painting. The film played at the Venice and New York festivals and it opened in London on November 14, 1963 (just months after John Profumo had admitted lying to the House of Commons in the Christine Keeler affair). Philip Oakes in the Sunday Telegraph called it “the best film of the best director now working in Britain,” and it was hard to separate its attitude from the impending end of Tory rule (after thirteen years).

  The Servant was not isolated. In 1958 the playwright John Osborne and the director Tony Richardson had formed Woodfall Film Productions, and their films included two Osborne plays—Look Back in Anger (1959, with Richard Burton as Jimmy Porter) and Laurence Olivier in The Entertainer (1960)—and A Taste of Honey (1961, with Rita Tushingham), The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner (1962, with Tom Courtenay), rising toward Tom Jones (1963), which won the Best Picture Oscar for 1963, made a star of Albert Finney, and sent a few people back to read Henry Fielding.

  Olivier doing Archie Rice was the kind of audacious “slumming” that had pushed Bogarde into risking The Servant. The upper class of English actors was feeling the temptation of new material: by 1975, John Gielgud and Ralph Richardson would open in Pinter’s No Man’s Land. Just as important was the strain of new young actors and voices, many of them provincial and “uncouth” to old ears. John Schlesinger did A Kind of Loving (1962), Billy
Liar (1963), and Darling (1965, an uneasy teaming of Bogarde, Laurence Harvey, and Julie Christie), not a fluent film now but judged a marvel in its day. Lindsay Anderson made This Sporting Life (1963, with Richard Harris), and Karel Reisz made Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1960, with Finney).

  These were grittier films than Britain had had before, working-class stories often, with darker visions of life and its prospects. When most of the films were successful on both sides of the Atlantic, it only made British ideas and London talent attractive to Hollywood money. Many of those talents would go to America, sooner or later, but another American, Richard Lester, in London to do advertising films and some shorts with Peter Sellers, became the director of two inevitable smash hits: the Beatles films A Hard Day’s Night and Help!

  There was another, momentous American landing in Britain. Stanley Kubrick was born in 1928 in the Bronx. He was a brilliant kid and a precocious still photographer who was contributing work to Look magazine by his late teens. He started making his own movies in the 1950s, doing nearly every job on them, and he graduated to Fear and Desire (1953), a mini-epic on combat; Killer’s Kiss (1955), a rather maudlin story about a boxer in love with a beautiful but unreliable blonde; and The Killing, an immaculately precise account of a racetrack robbery, just eighty-three minutes, and a big influence later on Quentin Tarantino. Then, for actor-producer Kirk Douglas, he made Paths of Glory (1957), a stylish First World War story as pitiless as it is handsome. Because of Douglas, he got to do Spartacus (1960, replacing Anthony Mann), but everyone knew that hymn to freed slaves was Kirk’s special property.

  At which point the New York and Hollywood man determined to film Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita, but resolved to make that heartfelt elegy to Americana in England—and thus, Home Counties roads vanishing in the mist stand in for the bright West of all that driving and motels where Lo takes Humbert, so long as he thinks he’s taking her.