In fact, we watch resistance fade: It is in the death of Henri Dickson, Akim Tamiroff’s unshaved private eye, the man who still dreams of telling himself that the seductress on his lap is Madame de Pompadour. It is the ultra-Godardian impulse that he lovingly spells out the system of control, like a man who wants to be Alpha 60 and close those great reproachful eyes in Karina’s face.
Amadeus (1984)
There was always a risk that a film made from Amadeus, the Peter Shaffer play, would seem like a gift album derived from it (with amazing location views of Prague, let’s say, as a bonus) instead of a movie made in its own right. You almost feel as if you’re walking out of the theater with a souvenir wig and your own piece of an autographed Mozart manuscript. You feel richer—and isn’t that the state to which art has been reduced?
The play opened in London in 1979 and on Broadway in 1980, and it was a coup in that, just as Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was offered as oblique, back-corridor access to Hamlet, so the fascinating story of Salieri got the benefit of having Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart in the middle distance as a bit of a buffoon. And in the increasingly decadent view of art as business in the 1970s and 1980s, the story of Salieri was a new modern classic. Because Salieri was the wannabe, the careerist, consumed in lust, duplicity, and intrigue, he was Tom regularly confounded by the helpless innocence of Jerry in those great cartoons. He was every gray eminence, from Ovitz to Eisner.
There’s no problem about the play’s being “opened up” to the full resources of décor, costume, and court panoply. A very pleasing illusion is conveyed—ersatz history—of being in Vienna at that time, smelling the wine and the shit, by a director, Milos Forman, who is a great metteur en scène, even if he can’t always find too much that is personal in the material. Forman would do a Valmont that is actually better at the eighteenth century than Dangerous Liaisons. And the casting was surprising and delicious. It’s not that Tom Hulce or F. Murray Abraham were unknowns (the previous year Abraham had been a lovely, sleazy Cuban gangster in Scarface). But Abraham’s Salieri is like a parched man being given water; we can feel the dried-up venom becoming juicy and even fleshy again. As for Hulce, he is childlike, so that it’s easy to miss his absolute certainty with just one thing—his music.
You could run the film for young people as an introduction to music, the creative process, and envy. As a whole, it feels as much like a Saul Zaentz picture as anything else—that is to say, the organization of a very good producer, a man who so mixes taste and economy that he could be Salieri himself. It follows from all this that Mozart is the true outsider or alien, a figure beyond understanding or polite company, an urchin. Of course the film won Best Picture, Best Screenplay, and Best Actor, as well as several other craft awards—eleven nominations and eight Oscars, including a nod for the superb photography of Miroslav Ondricek and a win for the art direction by Patrizia von Brandenstein and Karel Cerný.
The cast also includes Elizabeth Berridge, Simon Callow (who was the London Mozart), Roy Dotrice, Christine Ebersole, and Jeffrey Jones.
Amarcord (1974)
Americans especially loved Amarcord: In 1974, the Academy gave it Best Foreign Film, and the year after, Fellini was nominated for it as Best Director. Compared with American films of the mid-1970s, it was so optimistic, so serene in believing that all things shall pass. Yes, there were scenes of life under the Fascists, and they weren’t very pleasant. But the great floral head of II Duce himself was a thing of fun, of dream almost. The word amarcord means “I remember,” but the mood of the film is more that of someone saying “I wonder,” trying to forget harsh times or ugly truths.
More or less, it’s the memoir of Titta (Bruno Zanin), an eager teenager, as he recalls his life in a small seaside town in the Fascist period. There’s no war yet. The local cinema can show Astaire and Rogers and Gary Cooper. A year passes with natural and unnatural ceremonies: Fascist parades, snow falling, big-bosomed women giving Titta their nipples to suck—unlikely bits of theater. It’s an episodic film, although I do think there’s a conscious effort to suggest that fascism is an adolescent ideology. But nothing hints at why fascism had come to Italy, or at the process that would remove it. Fellini knew that bad time, of course, but Amarcord is a case of leaving nostalgia uninspected. Equally, it’s a movie that did nothing to disturb or chasten those thousands of Americans who spent their carefree summers in Italy.
Written by Fellini and Tonino Guerra, it is a display of charm done without much shame. It reminds us, perhaps, of Fellini the cartoonist, watching life go by and turning it into lively comic sketches. Everyone wants sex or romance, and there is one quite marvelous sequence where the dreams and desires are embodied in the passing of a great liner, the Rex, a Fascist achievement but a string of lights on the moonlit ocean and the very best show these people get. (You can feel the idea for And the Ship Sails On.)
But there’s the point. Fellini once was a real social observer and storyteller. Here he is a mere collector of material. He has withdrawn enough from story to give up its urge to judgment. So Amarcord discourages history or political thinking. The Fascists came like the snow or the blossom; you shrug and wait for the next season. It’s startlingly devoid of drama or self-criticism. And it begins to look very old-fashioned.
Of course, the two hours it takes slip by without friction. Fellini can make a scene in his sleep—but does he have to? And with Giuseppe Rotunno as his cameraman and Nino Rota doing his music, the film is never short of prettiness. Then look at pictures of Fellini as a real kid in Rimini and you’re struck by the sharp, hungry face and the desperate look. You know it wasn’t quite like Amarcord, and you long for the real thing.
American Beauty (1999)
On a lofty view of American suburbia, the dreamy voice begins, “My name is Lester Burnham. This is my neighborhood. This is my street. This… is my life. I’m forty-two years old. In less than a year, I’ll be dead.” It is an opening as good as that of Joe Gillis lying facedown in the swimming pool in Sunset Blvd., and in a way it is the same story: that of how the dream didn’t quite work out in practice.
The screenplay was by Alan Ball, a successful series writer for television, and it found its way to Sam Mendes, the English theater director, looking for a first film. Mendes, who generally had great difficulty reading scripts, read it several times in a row: “The strange thing was that at each reading the script seemed to be something else. It was a highly inventive black comedy. It was a mystery story with a genuine final twist. It was a kaleidoscopic journey through American suburbia, and a hugely visually articulate one at that. It was a series of love stories. It was about imprisonment in the cages we all make for ourselves and our hoped-for escape.”
That’s not an unfair description of the film that emerged, and I think it’s a just account of film in America reaching a complexity beyond that of Billy Wilder or Frank Capra or any of the American classical directors who might have been engaged to direct this film. American Beauty is not so much a fixed genre as a novel for the cinema. Nothing would seem out of the ordinary in a police report or a newspaper story, yet it’s the virtue of the film that we realize how far every mundane incident is spiked by uniqueness.
Though the tone is willfully serene—and Kevin Spacey’s narration as Lester is vital to this—American Beauty is a film in the school of Bigger Than Life or those fifties melodramas that knew something profound was out of joint in America. In the decades after—the age of civil rights, Vietnam, Nixon, the end of the Cold War—it was easy to think that that fracture would heal. It didn’t. Ordinary happiness is itself suspect in the very nation that values it most—indeed, that insists on it. This gentle but very sharp comedy is one of the films that returns to that subject.
Mendes directed like an expert, though he gave lavish praise to his cameraman, Conrad Hall, for letting things be so smooth. The score, by Thomas Newman, was Satie-like and a very important guide to the film’s equivocal mood. And the playing showed what years of
theater experience can lead to: Kevin Spacey dropped his supercilious manner and seemed very human, Annette Bening was magnificent, and there was a string of fine supporting work from Thora Birch, Wes Bentley, Mena Suvari, Peter Gallagher, Allison Janney, and Chris Cooper.
American Gigolo (1980)
No one was ever short of reasons for laughing at the poise of American Gigolo, yet it seems to me a fabulous, nerveless walk on the high wire, with Richard Gere managing at every turn to indicate the chic of his clothes. There is one shot where a greased drawer in Julian Kaye’s Los Angeles home slides open to reveal a chorus of sleek Italian designer shirts—the silent cry from the shirts is every bit as choral and liturgical as the response from a real choir in a religious piece. In other words, the wire being walked here is that in which high art turns into high camp. If you find that distasteful or farfetched, then I can only assume that you have never lived in contemporary Los Angeles. Apart from everything else—and there is a lot of everything else—this is one of the knowing L.A. classics in which Lies Allowed begins to turn into Lassitudes Anonymous. (It all speaks to the influence of the great Italian designer Ferdinando Scarfiotti on director Paul Schrader.)
Julian Kaye is Richard Gere, and vice versa, and welcome to the realm of daft perfection. It was to have been John Travolta as the L.A. male prostitute, but for some reason that lovable guy ducked the show—leaving Gere in the part, one that did a great deal to establish him and to make clear his resemblance to flake. I have been hard on Gere in the past (if not quite hard enough), but I do allow a few occasions when he is good—in this film, Internal Affairs, and The Hoax—and then there is no one like him. It took courage to be an “American Gigolo” (one of the great high-concept titles), an expensive stud with stylistic aspirations who gets caught up in a very nasty murder case and nearly finds himself the fall guy but for the love of the fine wife of a senator, modeled by Lauren Hutton—and if more in our Congress were married to women like Lauren, dare I say that this country would be in a more wholesome condition?
Paul Schrader directs from his own script and puts his every love and desire into the picture, so it thrills to the pulse of disco music, voyeuristic sex, Robert Bresson, the L.A. light, the Polo Lounge at the Beverly Hills Hotel, driving on the freeway in a convertible, the “privacy” of Palm Springs, and the infinite blossom of corruption in southern California. It is often like an advertisement (shot with exquisite taste by John Bailey), and it delights in streamlining moderne-ism, and the sultry swish of the passing moment.
The whole thing is poised on an edge where collapse or public mirth are equal possibilities, yet it survives and brings its fatuous Sirkian plot to a lovely finale. Within the delirium of clichés and pretension, something absolutely true strides forward, personified by Gere’s lounging walk and his shameless attitudinizing. This was a new kind of riveting trash, and it has a fluency that Paul Schrader’s stop-start career has seldom regained. But if you want to know about America in 1980, then go to American Gigolo, and Raging Bull. There they are, on the far shore of AIDS, just wondering if would-be hoodlums might be seen in public wanting to do disco and wear the right shirt. Go for it!
American Graffiti (1973)
American Graffiti is still fun, and still an honest teenage picture from a time when teenagers kept their fun and their anguish decently to themselves in the certainty that they weren’t worth a hill of beans anywhere else. And they were right. There is a shy charm to American Graffiti, like a note to parents that says, “Don’t worry. We’re having fun. Everything will be OK.” It may not work out that tidily in practice, though it does here. Going away to Vietnam is the biggest danger the kids face, and the picture never thinks to ask the parents, “Why will we be in Vietnam?” Indeed, the parents don’t exist. But the kids are fresher and more appealing than so many other movie teenagers in that they know they know very little.
So let’s call the town Modesto, where George Lucas (born in 1944) was himself raised in years of American splendor when a kid could have a dynamic set of wheels, the blonde coasted by from time to time, and the sound track kept coming because Wolfman Jack was playing everything from Frankie Lymon and the Big Bopper to the Beach Boys and Del Shannon. It is 1962 (just before the Beatles), and we meet the gang. There is romance, racing, nostalgia already (these kids are backing into the future), terrific jokes, and a dead-on accuracy in Lucas’s control that ought to have given someone the shivers as early as 1973.
Coming out of the University of Southern California, Lucas had been the quiet kid, with Francis Coppola the talker. It was no surprise that as Francis leaped ahead with The Godfather, George bombed with THX 1138. a gloomy sci-fi picture about a world short on trust, warmth, and rock and roll. George does not like to bomb, and American Graffiti was a shift to something he knew—and something he guessed would sell. Francis was his godfather, acting as producer (with Gary Kurtz) and telling the studio to leave the kid alone. Gloria Katz and Willard Huyck joined Lucas on the script. Walter Murch did the sound mix. Verna Fields and Marcia Lucas were the editors. And Haskell Wexler (an old friend) was “visual consultant”—the photography itself is credited to Ron Eveslage and Jan D’Alquen, but today it’s regarded as a Wexler job.
The film cost $750,000, grossed nearly $50 million, and keeps on earning. It is, in my opinion, the best film Lucas has ever made, a delight and by now a movie that can safely be shown to children. The only pretentious thing about it is the title—though it’s a very good title, too. As to life, it is sober, modestly hopeful, and quietly beautiful in observing the rapid pinball of hopes and dreads. But surely once upon a time “Modesto” must have meant that kind of place.
The cast is a who’s who, or by now a who was that: Paul Le Mat at the center as Milner, Ron Howard, Richard Dreyfuss, Charlie Martin Smith, Cindy Williams, Candy Clark, Mackenzie Phillips, Harrison Ford (as Bob Falfa), Bo Hopkins, Kathy Quinlan, and Suzanne Somers as the blonde in the T-Bird.
An American in Paris (1951)
Art for art’s sake? A way of reviving the tourist trade? A conspiracy on the part of Impressionist art dealers? One more curious episode in the career of Vincente Minnelli? Or a tribute to the great influence of Powell-Pressburger’s The Red Shoes, a film that had its biggest initial response in America? It’s worth noting, I think, that the M-G-M film has its self-contained ballet sequence—in just the same way as The Red Shoes. Well, not really. The Red Shoes is a dance film, of course, but it is an opera, too, and a trembling melodrama. Its ballet sequence is a model for the whole film and for its sense of the war between love’s passion and art’s rapture. It is the core of a film that is really about the most important things in Michael Powell’s life.
Whereas An American in Paris is about the allure of art and its prestigious decorative display. It’s as empty at its heart as the love affair between the Gene Kelly and Leslie Caron characters is flimsy. Does that seem unfair, or beside the point? The answer may rest in how great our demands are for the musical. Is it a “pure” genre—one where dance, music, décor, and movement are everything—or does the story matter? I know that The Red Shoes and Silk Stockings move me, that the story of Singin’ in the Rain and Funny Face have always interested me. Whereas, with the Minnelli film, the title says it all. It is a film about a situation, not a drama.
Still, this was plainly the most important production from the Arthur Freed unit at Metro. Minnelli would direct a film in which design was vital. The photography was by John Alton and Alfred Gilks; Orry Kelly, Irene Sharaff, and Walter Plunkett did the costumes—with exquisite taste borrowed from so many Impressionists, but essentially from the spirit and color clashes of Toulouse-Lautrec; Cedric Gibbons and Preston Ames did the art direction. On the other hand, Gene Kelly was the lead and composed the dances. The music was by George and Ira Gershwin—not just the big ballet number, but “ ’S Wonderful,” “Our Love Is Here to Stay,” and Georges Guétary’s “I’ll Build a Stairway to Paradise,” which has its fans.
; Nominated for eight Oscars, it won six, including Best Picture, but not Best Director, and one for Alan Jay Lerner’s screenplay, as generous a nod as the script is hard to find. I know how much Minnelli cared about this subject, but I feel none of the commitment that is so resonant in Lust for Life. I’m not sure that the most interesting aspects of the film aren’t those involving the superbly melancholy Oscar Levant. And of all the great M-G-M musicals, I wonder if any of them is now looked at less often than this. In so many polls of our great movies, Singin’ in the Rain has replaced An American in Paris as the big one—yet Singin’ was not even nominated for Best Picture.
An American Romance (1944)
Time and again with King Vidor, we witness titanic and contrary storms. It is the conflict of mother love in Stella Dallas and the mother’s feeling that she must sacrifice for her child. It is the uncertainty as to whether a film is about me or mine—the egoism that drives Lewt and Pearl to die just out of reach of each other’s arms in Duel in the Sun. It’s the difference between the overwhelming social togetherness of Our Daily Bread and the haunting solitude in The Crowd. And it’s why King Vidor is, at his best, exhilarating and desperate at the same time. Like Howard Roark in The Fountainhead, he is a builder who may tear down his own construction.
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