But it has extras: a very nasty Paul Reiser as a kind of scientist in charge, who wants to keep the alien alive; and Lance Henricksen, who is very touching as Bishop, the replicant who is ripped to shreds in his valiant effort to help Ripley. There is not enough time for much else, but Cameron served the franchise well: He delivered a blazing adventure film that made a ton of money and so stressed Ripley’s courage and resourcefulness that Weaver would get an Oscar nomination for it. So the sequel speaks to the insinuating muscle of the inner story, the subtext, that the bond between Ripley and the alien, and the strange play upon motherhood, is still there, pale and plaintive. When Ripley turns the flamethrower on pods of baby aliens-to-be, the ripe smell of necessary abortion fills the air, but motherhood is a far cry that lurks in Ripley’s gaze. She has a dream from the start of this film that she is pregnant by the monster.
So it proved, but alas Alien 3 and then Alien Resurrection proved dismal failures (though the third film is filled with intriguing ideas and beautiful, devastated imagery).
All About Eve (1950)
Whereas Sunset Blvd. was a first step toward autopsy for the film industry, All About Eve, made the same year, is by contrast a celebration of theater—of theatricality, acting, and great lines that may bring the house down. Of course, by the standard of 1950, caught between A Streetcar Named Desire and Death of a Salesman, this is old-fashioned theater. It is the well-made play par excellence, it is about people who will talk until they drop, and it has no ulterior motive beyond saying that the theater is a fiercely competitive place, and quite wonderful. The meanings for Sunset Blvd. are vastly more alarming. They even suggest that you might not want to be a great actress. All About Eve can see no other goal in sight as bright or commanding.
So it’s not really surprising that All About Eve got fourteen Academy Award nominations and six Oscars (the Sarah Siddons award, of course, it keeps for itself in perpetuity)—though, as the years go by, doesn’t every prolonged Oscars show cry out for the sardonic commentary of Addison DeWitt and the realization that this winner we see before us is a bitch on wheels? Eve won for Best Picture. Joseph L. Mankiewicz won for directing and screenplay (for the second year in a row). George Sanders won for supporting actor Bette Davis and Anne Baxter were both losers in the Best Actress category. So were Gloria Swanson in Sunset Blvd. and Eleanor Parker in Caged. The Oscar went to Judy Holliday in Born Yesterday. But it’s all acting.
Over the years, the objection has been raised that Mankiewicz was not a very interesting director in the sense of moving the camera, composition and cutting. It’s a fair claim, and there are films where this lack of facility gets in the way (even The Barefoot Contessa, I fear, seems pretty heavy-handed nowadays). But Mankiewicz could answer that when he had his script right and his cast in line, no one really noticed how static or plain the film was.
But that comes nowhere near conveying the pleasure of All About Eve. After all, it is as cinematic as, say, crosscutting to have George Sanders’s sarcastic comments daubed like a mustache on Anne Baxter’s Mona Lisa gaze. It is as visual as Marlene Dietrich praying in the gloom in Shanghai Express to see Bette Davis’s smug Pekingese face emerging from a thick collar of fur. And remember that this was not meant to be Davis. Claudette Colbert was the original casting, and she lost the role of Margo because of an injury. How would Colbert have been? Funny? Of course. Sophisticated? Surely. But was Colbert as vulnerable to hurt and envy as Davis? I’m not so sure of that—and Colbert was helplessly prettier, whereas in 1950 anyone could see that Bette Davis was turning into a gargoyle.
This is very much the theater before Kazan and the Actors Studio, but there was a theater then—and may be again. All About Eve is modest, self-contained, and brilliant. Could it be more? I doubt it, not with Mankiewicz putting it together, not with his eternally comic perspective on actors. But on the whole, I’d sooner poke fun at playacting than take it too seriously. I like the idea of Miss Caswell coming from the Copacabana School of Dramatic Art, and I love the happy look on Marilyn Monroe’s face as much as I cherish the sour demeanor of Thelma Ritter.
It was also, I think, a talky, snob film. It cost $1.4 million, and even after all the awards, its domestic rentals were only $2.9 million. Samson and Delilah did $11 million—as George Sanders might have purred, “And I was in both.”
All Quiet on the Western Front (1930)
Erich Maria Remarque’s novel was published in 1929, and it became an international sensation. As never before in the history of combat, the daily texture of military life (and death) was spelled out—perhaps because the condition of the First World War was so static. The same dreadfully plowed land was the site of friendly trenches, then enemy lines, and back again. If the soldier survived, he found a grim archaeology in the mud. Moreover, the casualty figures in that war had ripped apart the social fabric of Europe. It may be that the poetry of the war was more trenchant and shocking, but All Quiet on the Western Front had the broad brush of a best-selling novel. It was the duty of the film industry to live up to that challenge. And it was fitting that Carl Laemmle, Jr., at Universal, born in Chicago but the son of a German, should be resolved to produce a film from the novel—and to maintain the thrust of Remarque’s narrative by following a group of German soldiers as they move from school to death.
It was always intended to be a big production, with an eventual budget of $1.2 million. Lewis Milestone was hired as director (he had been on a wartime film unit), and it was hoped that he would clarify the contributions of a great many writers. Maxwell Anderson did the major adaptation of the novel, but several other people, including George Abbott, had a hand in the writing. Milestone’s most remarkable contribution is not exactly what the film is about, but anyone who knows the film remembers it. In the great frontal assaults, Milestone used very exciting tracking shots, moving with the advancing soldiers. (All his life he loved that shot—he also used it in Pork Chop Hill, about the Korean War.) But, truth to tell, the shot is arousing. It associates the movement of the attack with the energy of the camera. It makes us feel that the attack will be successful, whereas the opposite is the grim message of that war—and to get the opposite effect, just look at Stanley Kubrick’s doomed tracking shots in Paths of Glory. In other words, the reality—of rows of men cut down—is still rather avoided in this celebrated antiwar film.
What remains is the progress of the soldiers (a group that includes Louis Wolheim, Lew Ayres, Slim Summerville, and many others). They are German, yet they are universal, too, and although their talk is very stilted, the description of their tragedy remains powerful—you have to realize that such scenes had never really been played before. Moreover, Ayres, only twenty-two, had a freshness that made the loss of him nearly unbearable.
The camera work was done by Arthur Edeson and Karl Freund, and Edeson was credited with developing sound cameras light enough for Milestone’s traveling shots. Everyone saw the film. It made a huge profit and won Best Picture and Best Director for 1930. But it’s a tough experience these days, in great part because the audience has to face its own defiant appetite for “war scenes” no matter the logic of pacifism. The single temptation of war on film is to make it look easy. Sooner or later, most war films become recruiting material.
All That Jazz (1979)
This may be the ultimate work in the “gotta dance, gonna die” subset of movies where people pursue their art (or their section of show business) against all sane advice that it’s killing them. In fact, Bob Fosse lived eight more years before exactly the pattern of insane work and a bad heart outlined in this film claimed him. The only other film he made in that time is Star 80, an oddity, without the exhilaration that was Fosse’s sole reason for living. If Fosse had died in middance on All That Jazz, it’s hard to believe that his producer and close friend, Daniel Melnick, would not have honored his star by filming and including his fatal attack.
The story, scripted by Fosse and Robert Alan Aurthur, is that of Joe Gideon (Roy Scheider),
a man cutting a film about a comedian (the reference is to Lenny Bruce) and putting on a stage show, driven by the battling rhythms of the dance and his own heart. He smokes hard. He works harder. He has a history of angina. What adds to his particular condition is his chronic habit of fucking his female dancers—and that, of course, is as dangerous a celebration of the heart as eight-hour days of dance rehearsal. Thus, as he rehearses new dancers, Joe is watched by Audrey Paris (Leland Palmer), his ex-wife. He beds a young dancer (Deborah Geffner) and is discovered in bed by his “steady” girlfriend, Kate Jagger (Ann Reinking, a Fosse girlfriend). In life, Fosse had three wives, all dancing partners—Mary-Ann Niles, Joan McCracken, and Gwen Verdon—and others.
The ultimate female figure in All That Jazz is Angelique (Jessica Lange), the “Angel of Death” and a sardonic commentator on his own coming demise. Scheider does a superb job as Fosse, grasping the exact fusion of mortality and attraction. The film has a very high-production look—photography by Giuseppe Rotunno, production design by Philip Rosenberg, and fantasy designs by Tony Walton. There is also a lot of good music, assembled from here and there. What is missing is the sense that Fosse has some great work in hand, and here we face the dilemma of the choreographer and the dancer.
We take it for granted that Fosse moved to the beat in a very special way. We do not doubt the influence of his dance styling on Chicago, Cabaret, and Dancin’. But did he ever manage to take over or conceive of an entire musical? Cabaret is the closest thing on film, but it has this wide gulf between the stuff inside the club and the love story beyond that. Fosse obviously had an immense ego; making All That Jazz almost requires the man to blind himself to the distress of children and family. And there is a kind of self-glorification that really needs choking off in a film set in a broader context. But you know that people in the business—and maybe, above all, people who spend their lives dreaming of getting a break—watch All That Jazz once a month. It always ends the same way.
All the King’s Men (1949)
A new All the King’s Men arrived in 2006, and the world wondered why, why? Yet in the years since the first version, we have had opportunity to respect the destiny of Southern governors—Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, to say nothing of Lyndon Johnson, who may be a better fit for Willie Stark, the central figure in Robert Penn Warren’s novel, which had an astonishing reputation once for quality and which led to a movie that won Best Picture in its day.
It was hard to think that the makers of the remake (producer Mike Medavoy, writer-director Steven Zaillian, actor Sean Penn) had spent very long with the original, or that anyone now can judge that the Robert Rossen film of 1949 ever recovers from the limits (or is it the assurance?) of Broderick Crawford as Stark. When he first appears, he’s a quiet, calm family man with firm convictions and little political style. Foreseeing what is coming (the whole reputation of being made in the image of Huey Long), one might hope for ambiguity—until there is a finger-licking close-up of Stark chewing a chicken leg, lost in a revery of fried chicken, and plainly capable of anything except good acting.
What now seems cripplingly trite and convenient is the way Stark’s progress toward taking over an unnamed Southern state is offset by Burden’s Landing, the enclave of old money and high-mindedness where Stark seems more than ever the hollow ranter. This place consists of a noble doctor, a pure judge, a lovely Southern belle, and the film’s narrator, Jack Burden, an outcast from privilege who has gone away to be a newspaper writer.
We can suppose that Jack is a radical, searching for a new kind of leader, and there’s something about the dark weakness of John Ireland that is right for the role. But Jack is a stooge of a character, and an observer who sees the humbug in Stark very early. So his “agony” of disillusion is specious and his corruption is unfair.
There’s little sense of the countryside or the South. But cinematographer Burnett Guffey fills the frame in packed compositions with sweaty faces and avid eyes—and that’s where we come to Mercedes McCambridge as the political manager, Sadie Burke. She talks of being a smallpox victim and having a hard face as a result, and there are mirror scenes where she ruminates on her lack of beauty—Joanne Dru is the film’s forlorn saucer holding that milk. McCambridge is sharp, frosty, always thinking. You’d say she steals the film, if there was enough to steal.
So it won Best Picture, though Joseph Mankiewicz won the writing and directing Oscars for A Letter to Three Wives. Crawford and McCambridge won Oscars, and Ireland was nominated. Why did Rossen not get Best Director? How about, he didn’t deserve it? Nice try. I suspect he lost because by 1949–50 he was blacklisted and marked down. If only this limp picture left any reason for the forces of reaction wanting to destroy him.
All the President’s Men (1976)
Even Ronald Reagan opined that the movie of All the President’s Men lost Gerald Ford the 1976 election—and I suppose you can argue that Rocky Balboa and Jimmy Carter were the two great mavericks of the bicentennial year. On the face of it, you would not think that the Carl Bernstein–Bob Woodward book that tracked their Washington Post campaign against Richard Nixon’s Watergate would make a compelling or coherent movie. After all, it was a very tangled story, calling for a host of minor parts, and everyone knew the ending in advance.
But then William Goldman delivered one of the most clarifying screenplays in Hollywood history, and Alan Pakula directed it with a paranoid subtext that whispered, Look, just because righteousness and reporting won the day, don’t relax or begin to feel comfortable. What the film as a whole did was to say, Look, Washington is men and women like these, all busting their guts to be successful. So it’s dirty tricks and shabby honor. It’s like show business: Anything could happen, and it probably will. It’s in this movie that we met for the first time such figures as Karl Rove and Scooter Libby, George Stephanopoulos and James Carville. In other words, the undergrowth of a city and a system had been indicated, and that left no room for comfort.
So it’s a film noir with a happy ending, which goes against a lot of rules. On the other hand, it’s also two cub reporters looking like major movie stars. My guess is, it’s a better film without Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman, but that was becoming a truism by then, and Redford was a coproducer getting the movie made. Still, imagine Robert Walden and Stephen Collins (who are in the picture already), and I think it feels braver and more unlikely. It’s so hard in this era to believe that Redford could be denied, and he’s so unlikely to offer any evidence of hunger.
Therefore, it becomes a maze that’s a treat to follow. Alan Pakula directs every last detail out of it, and one has to suppose that he’s the root of the quite exceptional casting. But consider the work from these people: Jack Warden, Jason Robards, Jr., playing Ben Bradlee as if he were Babe Ruth, Jane Alexander (Oscar nominated), Meredith Baxter, Ned Beatty, Martin Balsam, Nicholas Coster, Lindsay Crouse. I come to Hal Holbrook last. His Deep Throat is superb, wintry, bleak, and plainly corrupt down to his esophagus.
Gordon Willis did the photography, which runs from his customary noir gloom to the hospital-like brightness of the Post office. George Jenkins in turn built a set that had real journalists fooled.
The movie was a big hit, which may have toppled Ford and may have built up a false sense of security in liberals. For many others, I suspect it was a textbook on how to get what you want in Washington. Rocky beat it for Best Picture and Best Director—enough to let anyone know that the United States was insane. The only Oscars the film won were for Robards and for Goldman’s script.
Alphaville (1965)
Eddie Constantine was forty-eight in 1965, but he looks like a thousand-year-old lizard in Alphaville. And it was a great piece of casting in which this iconically weathered face and presence could get away with being just a little flat in delivery—after all, he is talking to a computer, so it is a certain politeness to seem stilted. But in raincoat and fedora, with a face like the surface of the moon, he is ancient, prephotographic, absolutely emb
lematic. And it’s as if Jean-Luc Godard and actress Anna Karina had seen how, to accommodate Lemmy Caution’s offer of love, her Natasha Von Braun needed to be simply the most winsome face, eyebrows curled like quotation marks, reading Paul Éluard’s Capitale de la Douleur as if it were a street guide.
And so precinema meets silent cinema in a film where the reigning voice is disembodied—the endless, merciless Godardian brilliance of Alpha 60 himself, the being so sage, so embodied in time, and so mint in condition that Lemmy and Natasha can inhabit the most vulgar of comic books that cinematographer Raoul Coutard can find in Paris by night. For this portrait of the future was committed to doing no more and no less than filming contemporary Paris in the most passive or obedient way. The sci-fi comes not just in the drab seductresses who linger like dust in every hotel corridor, or the swimming pools where state assassinations seem like rough swimming lessons. But this is a film where modern office architecture is comment enough on the various processes of dehumanization.
It begins with music (by Paul Misraki, an important deepening of Godard’s tone or attempt) and with Alpha 60’s warning (a mixture of doomsday Kubrick and the society for the preservation of John Ford): “There are times when reality becomes too complex for Oral Communication. But Legend gives it a form by which it pervades the whole world.”
And what better register of diseased pervasiveness is there than this lovely, croaking voice-over—not just as in “superimposed on” but “above” and the natural position of “fucking us”? And it is heartbreaking—just as much as the sight of Gestapo marching on the Champs-Élysees—that Alphaville is Paris, for the New Wave had among all its moral principles the notion that Paris belonged to them. They claimed it as the Impressionists had done, or as novelists from Proust to Céline to Hemingway would. But every image of Alphaville says, See how the city has surrendered already, and see how resistance is futile.
'Have You Seen...?' Page 5