Act of Violence (1948)
A great film noir out of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer doesn’t sound quite right, a picture in which the “villainy” of Robert Ryan is left uncorrected is unexpected, and a film that begins to destroy your faith in humanism doesn’t feel like Fred Zinnemann’s preferred territory. Yet Act of Violence is all these things. Neglected for years, it is as unforgettable as the dragging sound of Ryan’s limp.
The film came from a story by Collier Young and a script by Robert Richards. We find a young married couple in a small Californian town outside Los Angeles—they are Van Heflin and Janet Leigh. They have a brief idyll. He is a respected citizen, based on war heroism. The sun shines. The world smiles. But then a limping menace appears—Robert Ryan, a gaunt man with little left in life but malice—and he is looking for Heflin. As it turns out, Ryan has a cause, for during the war Heflin behaved like a coward in a prisoner-of-war camp. Men were killed because of his betrayal. Ryan was wounded—and now he is implacable. Not even the pretty wholesomeness of Leigh and her family can prevent fate from taking its toll.
The action shifts to L.A. at night, and Zinnemann was justifiably proud of the location work there, with atmospheric noir imagery from cinematographer Robert Surtees. Another character appears in the city—a hooker, played by Mary Astor—and she is in a way the heart of the film, the one person who knows that bad character and bad luck usually prevail. As a rule, Fred Zinnemann’s films are about the community surviving as heroes stand by principle: The Army endures in From Here to Eternity even if Montgomery Clift dies, the town and law are intact in High Noon despite the civil betrayal. But in Act of Violence, there is a rare, bleak absence of hope, of lives that cannot avoid being destroyed by consequences. It is an unusual picture of the slow stain of war.
So it’s fascinating to see the crack-up in the Heflin character and the gradual way in which Ryan is reclaimed for battered ordinariness. To that extent, it’s a welcome change for Ryan, who was so often encouraged or allowed to be just a very nasty, if not psychotic, guy. But here he is something else: a helpless menace, yet not really possessed by uncommon powers or malice. Equally, Heflin—so often more interesting than his roles—gets a chance to explore panic and a wish to cover up his own past.
So here we have an eighty-two-minute picture, not quite an A movie, not quite a B, but a tough, tight script done economically and effectively, doing its damaging bit to present a real Americana, crowded with weak people and desperate compromises. Later in life, alas, Zinnemann did grander films with big themes and issues and a kind of official tidiness or optimism. Most of those films are nowhere near as absorbing or challenging as this small picture. By 1973’s The Day of the Jackal, Zinnemann was doing set-piece best sellers about empty figures. This is a story of real wrecks.
Adam’s Rib (1949)
It is the case that George Cukor did many successful adaptations, so it’s nice to be able to point out a few works that were movie originals: Pat and Mike, A Double Life, and Adam’s Rib. However, all three of those screenplays were by Garson Kanin and Ruth Gordon, who brazenly wrote their movies as if they had had a couple of years onstage first. Another way of putting it is to say that this team believed in situation, crisis, comedy, and humanity—but situation above all. Thus Adam and Amanda (Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn) are lawyers who are married, and who come to take opposite sides in a domestic-violence case involving Tom Ewell and Judy Holliday.
At first, Tracy and Hepburn are regarded as the sophisticated couple, with Ewell and Holliday the rednecks driven to violence. But as time passes, it is the fun of the enterprise to show that you pick sides at your own risk. So here we are in 1949, amid the dire Cold War, the threat of A and H bombs, et cetera, and Kanin and Gordon have a gem that foreshadows feminism, women in the workplace, and that crackling battle of the sexes for which Hepburn and Tracy were so suited. It was only about fifteen years ahead of Betty Friedanism!
You can hear Kanin and Gordon saying, “Well, you just film it, George”—as if nothing could be easier. And it is very hard to find a hint of strain anywhere, not even when Hope Emerson lifts Spencer Tracy up in court. When Cukor comes to the scene where Holliday (in jail) needs to tell her story to Hepburn, he reads the script and agrees it’s a little piece of theater. Except that he then gives it an uninterrupted nine-minute take, which is something only movies can do. Some said Judy had “stolen” the scene, but Cukor was entirely correct in his counterassertion that the scene belonged to her. That was the only way to play it. If anyone would have banned cutaway reaction shots from Hepburn, it would have been Kate herself.
It’s fair to admit that in most of these sexual duels, the woman caves in first—to get a happy ending and to avoid real subversion. But along the way enormous fun is made of male arrogance, and Tracy has the great good sense to feel the pain and let the prospect of real tragedy sink in. One reason why Cukor’s comedies are so good is that he seldom set out if he didn’t believe in the human or dramatic substance. As with The Philadelphia Story, this could end very badly if Amanda goes another inch too far. As it is, self-pity is not entirely avoided.
There’s also a song from Cole Porter, “Farewell, Amanda,” with David Wayne caustic as the songwriter. As for Judy Holliday, it is a stunning debut in which we have to pick out her huge cunning from her lovely show as a dummy. Jean Hagen is also a lot of fun.
Adaptation (2002)
Screenwriters in America want it every way they can get it. They want the health scheme and the pension, yet they also regret having surrendered their copyright so long ago. Equally, they enjoy the reputation of being the ordinary, decent, regular guys in the picture business as well as the shunned geniuses. But sometimes you get a feeling that they wouldn’t mind the health plan and copyright, attention and worship and the reputation for being filled with lovable common sense. Enough, they say, of the jokes about the actress who was so dumb she screwed the writer! (You take your actresses where you can find them.) To put it yet another way, they’d like their name on a smash-hit franchise and on Charlie Kaufman’s droll Adaptation.
Adaptation was a late admission to this book—to be honest, it was the last, after a weekend spent with old friends, screenwriters both. They pitched me Adaptation just as if it were something they were offering to write, but then they sat me down with the videotape to watch it again. To tell you the truth, I fell asleep just as I had the first time I saw the film, but I remember thinking as I dropped off that Adaptation was very nice and unexpected and very clever and…
No, it is not as startling or transforming as Being John Malkovich, the earlier film written by Kaufman and directed by Spike Jonze. But I could see what my friends meant about the marvel of Kaufman—apparently a very shy fellow—mustering the authority and audacity to write a Sterne-like inquiry into the dilemma of a blocked screenwriter, in which the film itself is compelled to digress because of the writer’s anxiety. Thus, one Nicolas Cage—very untidy and sweaty—is attempting to write an adaptation of Susan Orlean’s book The Orchid Thief, but needs the cheery advice of his much more confident twin brother, a sweat-free Nicolas Cage. Incidentally, Charlie Kaufman plays with the idea that he, too, has a screenwriting partner, just like Cage’s Kaufman does—Donald Kaufman, who in real life seems to be serenely nonexistent.
We see the blocked screenwriter with Tilda Swinton (a very sharp performance as the executive who has commissioned him), with author Orlean (Meryl Streep), and even with the central character from her book, a piratical orchid hunter, John Laroche (Chris Cooper). The result is clever, amusing, and good-natured to all parties. It is a very odd film to come out of America, and it is a halfway witty elaboration on the ghostly identity of the writer in film. At the same time, its intricacy, its achieved comic and dramatic impact, and its intelligence are fairly slight when compared with Celine and Julie Go Boating, a film that effectively summarizes the whole place of movie fiction in our culture. Whether Jonze and Kaufman represent a new wavelet or an
authentic fresh hope remains to be seen. I am happy with what they—and a few others—have done, though again, I think they are trailing along behind a man like Paul Thomas Anderson (and not that far ahead of the Buster Keaton of Sherlock Jr.). But it is good for screenwriters to have and pursue enthusiasms, and to seem as daft and lovely as actresses.
The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938)
It may turn out one day that Robin of Locksley was a fraud, a drunk, or someone waiting to be put in a Sam Peckinpah film in which the forest of Sherwood is gradually being cleared by the Weyerhaeuser Company. Meanwhile, if you happen to live in a kingdom where your King Richard (Ian Hunter) has gone off on some reckless foreign adventure called a Crusade, it’s more than likely that the wretched, envious, lifelong supporting player, Prince John (Claude Rains), is going to do all he can to spoil camp life for the boys in Lincoln green.
No, this isn’t history, and don’t look for any kind of peasants’ revolt in this gloss on Olde England. As soon as Richard comes back, our outlaws are bending the knee and tugging the forelock. This Robin Hood is as much of a monarchist as the David O. Selznick who wept when that other “David,” Edward VIII, abdicated.
Enough. In Hollywood, history is just a matter of his story. And I’m not sure if this kind of thing was ever done better. First, equip yourself with a man-child, because the average five-year-old is going to want to watch this splashy revel in stained-glass colors again and again. And since you’re going to be watching with him, you want a movie in which freshness comes back like the dew every morning. Once or twice, plug your ears and simply gaze upon the dye-rich Technicolor—not just the greens but the violet and mauve of Maid Marian’s gown (she is Olivia de Havilland), the reds like spilled strawberry jam on a white cloth. Then close your eyes to get the most out of Errol Flynn’s charming twang, the hiss of arrows, the click-clack of dueling swords, and the flawless enthusiasm of the music by Erich Wolfgang Korngold. Korngold was a child prodigy who wrote operas, and maybe we do him a severe injustice by not knowing that music. On the other hand, his score (it won an Oscar) is not just the perfect accompaniment to this adventure; it is its bloodstream. When people bleed in this film, they bleed music. When they laugh, they sing.
You have Alan Hale as Little John, Eugene Pallette as Friar Tuck, Una O’Connor as Marian’s maid. Then there is Basil Rathbone as Sir Guy of Guisborne, a fencing match for Flynn’s Robin—the faster they fence, the quicker our hearts beat. This is one of the great duels in film history, and honestly, what is sword fighting but pure fun? And Errol Flynn? Yes, he was a joke, but no one laughed or enjoyed it more than he did. And he moved as if hearing the lovely mingle of his own chuckle and Korngold’s flourish.
Michael Curtiz directed—and it looks as if the film is directing itself. There are only seven or eight Curtiz films like that, and they’re all different. So maybe it’s time we thanked Curtiz and saw that he was not merely lightly likeable but a genius who copied the blithe lack of self-regard in Errol Flynn. Sometimes knowing everyone wants you is enough.
Advise and Consent (1962)
Here is the calm antidote to the rising hysteria in Frank Capra’s Washington films. For whereas his idealism was a brittle front for reaction, self-pity, and a refusal to play ball with politics, so this Otto Preminger film is a cool, ironic portrait of an argumentative chamber set on compromise, bargaining, and a final adherence to the virtues of the Code. Democracy is hard work, not righteousness. It is always middling, muddled, and sociable—and very seldom extreme, fierce, filibustering, or based on the incredibly naïve beauty of James Stewart in 1939. Preminger’s ideal senator is homely, sarcastic, seasoned, weary, and ready to deal—witness Seab Cooley (Charles Laughton in his last performance).
Preminger bought the film rights to Allen Drury’s 1959 novel early on, and asked Wendell Mayes to make a script of it. Mayes found the novel very conservative in tone, and he and Preminger wanted to make a picture that was not partisan except in its appreciation of the American process and its checks and balances. Two politicians are caught by life. Robert Leffingwell (Henry Fonda), in the running for Secretary of State, lies to the Senate about his past as a Communist. It is the lie, not the history, that ruins him. Brigham Anderson (Don Murray) has a homosexual past, and again it is the reluctance to be true to the rules and the clubbiness of the Senate that brings him down.
Above all, in Preminger’s chamber, men who sit on opposite sides of the aisle are joined by space and camera movements. They believe in their commitment to the process, no matter the fierce separation of personal opinions. And nothing works better in the film than its spatial integration at the time of crisis, and the way in which “opponents” become players on the same side, or in the same game. It is not so much a forum for brilliance as a place where association and agreement can be made shining examples. And, of course, Preminger the historian of controversy put his finger on issues that meant a lot in 1962—a Red past or a gay subtext.
The picture is beautifully photographed by Sam Leavitt in black-and-white Panavision (a choice that means the film is not seen much today). But the frame lends itself to space, and the monochrome deromanticizes the political figures (or the actors playing them). Above all, Preminger feels for Lew Ayres as the vice president taken too much for granted, and as the man uneasy at being promoted when the president (Franchot Tone) dies.
But those two, and even Laughton, accommodate themselves to what is truly a group portrait. The man who makes this Senate work is actually the majority leader, Senator Munson (Walter Pidgeon), far more urbane than Lyndon Johnson but a nod to that Texan for his major impact on Senate affairs. His chief assistant is played very well by Paul Ford—and with supporting players like Peter Lawford, Gene Tierney, Burgess Meredith, and George Grizzard (as the only villain in sight), the starrier names (Fonda et cetera) are tamed by the casting.
The African Queen (1951)
The C. S. Forester novel had been published in 1935, and there had been movie interest from the outset. Charles Laughton and Elsa Lanchester had thought of doing it together, and then Warners bought the property for Bette Davis. But in 1950, Sam Spiegel and John Huston were able to buy the rights together and float the movie as a Horizon-Romulus production (Romulus being a British company able to send sterling to British East Africa, where the film would be based).
Huston asked his chum James Agee to write a script, and Agee is credited, but it seems that most of his work was unusable and had to be supplanted by the joint efforts of Huston and Peter Viertel. Forester had always been in doubt over his ending (the English and American versions of the novel had different finales), but Huston settled for a happy ending in which Rose and Charlie succeed in their mission to dispose of a German gunboat. A good deal of the filming would be on the Congo River, and it was a heroic, adventurous venture—there is a book by Katharine Hepburn, and there is Viertel’s less than flattering portrait of Huston in the novel White Hunter, Black Heart.
Spiegel and Huston were rascals who never trusted each other, but the picture was delivered—thanks to the photography by Jack Cardiff (a Technicolor triumph) and the art direction of Wilfred Shingleton, but also to the long-suffering attitude of all those on location. Humphrey Bogart was uncertain about taking on Charlie Allnutt, and purists have always had some amusement over his cockney accent—but Huston knew there was a weasel in Bogart, if not a rat, and he happily coaxed the creature out into the light. As for Katharine Hepburn, apart from falling half in love with Huston on the venture, she decided at first to do the relationship as a battle. So Huston had to take her aside and caution her: Be a lady, don’t allow Charlie to be your equal, be like Eleanor Roosevelt.
Would we recognize that from the picture? Probably not. Rose and Charlie are opportunities for eccentric acting; they are an odd couple more than real people. And the problems over their nature are more or less disguised by a great deal of physical action, from manhandling the boat in leech-infested waters to combat with the Germans.
For most of the time, it is a two-man show and so odd that plausibility hardly comes into consideration. Let’s just say they got away with it.
Even with two big stars and shooting on location in Africa, the film cost barely $1 million, and it took in more than $4 million. Bogart won an Oscar (defeating Marlon Brando in Streetcar, Montgomery Clift in A Place in the Sun, and Fredric March in Death of a Salesman). Hepburn and Huston were also nominated, but the picture did not get a nod, probably out of a healthy dislike of Spiegel—something Huston and Bogart learned to their rue as their returns on the laborious project were first delayed and then squeezed. Huston and Spiegel never worked together again, though this had been their third picture.
L’ge d’Or (1930)
Here is the first great film that begins with an essay on scorpions—from which the scene shifts to an absurd desert island, a pile of burning rocks being adopted in the name of Christendom… the saving bishops become skeletons. The History comes back with a second Empire. The foundation stone for a church is laid, with ceremony and dignitaries. Then a cry is heard. Not far away a man and a woman are lying on the ground, “lasciviously rolling in the mud.” Though the action will switch to what is called Imperial Rome and a world of social gatherings, concerts, and jewel-wearing not unlike that of Ernst Lubitsch, these muddied fuckers are the trouble in paradise—or are they the paradise nearly buried in trouble?
L’ge d’Or is 63 minutes long. I suppose it is a feature film, and I do think that playing it in the same room as Lubitsch’s Trouble in Paradise would be an interesting experiment—I like the idea of that film’s Herbert Marshall, his walk so proper despite his wooden leg, rolling up his trouser leg (with a smile to the middle class) and unscrewing the rifle he uses for a false limb.
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