An American Romance was undertaken at M-G-M, Vidor’s home studio, but several years after the death of Irving Thalberg, his natural patron. It was Louis B. Mayer who allocated a couple of years and at least a couple of million dollars to the archetypal story of an immigrant who makes his way by means of steel. It was a film that would have elements of documentary (it used or reassembled factory production lines), yet it would be as gravely beautiful as anything made by the Soviets in the 1920s.
As Vidor saw it, “I read the lives of Andrew Carnegie, Steinmetz, Knudsen, Walter Chrysler, and many others who had arrived in this country as poor immigrants and through democratic opportunity had worked their way to the top. I would have the immigrant Stefan marry a schoolteacher in Minnesota, who would bear his children when they moved to Chicago. These children would go to high schools, colleges, play football. Then their children would say: ‘My grandfather came from the old country, but my father was born in America.’ This is what I believe has made America strong, this constant process of rebirth and refining of its cruder basic ores. I would attempt to make metals and men analogous.”
The first draft was written by Norman Foster and John Fante (who were on the Orson Welles staff). Thereafter, a dozen people worked on the script, always guided by Vidor. It concerned Stefan Dangosbiblichek, who comes off a boat from Europe in the 1890s with $4. He walks to Minnesota to get a job in the Mesabi mines. He becomes Steve Dangos. He marries. He goes to work in the steel mills, and he rises to become a tycoon. He works for a safe automobile; he is against unions. But his ups and downs are settled by the Second World War and its intense appetite for steel.
It was Vidor’s hope to have Spencer Tracy as Steve, but the studio gave him Brian Donlevy instead. Donlevy is fine, busy, truculent, touching—but he is not a given, not immense, not a star. And Vidor believed that his plan to treat Steve’s inner life lightly needed an actor who could imply depths.
Just as he came to make the picture, Vidor took up painting. This inspired a Technicolor not seen before, in which the natural colors of earth and minerals and the hues of factories dominated. Harold Rosson did the photography, but it’s clearly the inspiration of Vidor, and thus begins the dynamic beauty of a film as much about earth and machines as anything else.
Vidor’s cut was 151 minutes. Mayer said he loved the film, but the studio cut it to 122 (it is not clear whether the longer version survives). Even at the shorter length, this is an amazing lost treasure, vital to the turbulent career of Vidor and a partner to The Magnificent Ambersons in a Dreiserian view of the American factory, its glory and its cultural drag.
Le Amiche (1955)
In the early 1950s, Michelangelo Antonioni made a series of broken romances: Cronaca di un Amore (1950), La Signora Senza Camelie (1953), and Le Amiche (1955). They were plainly departures from neorealism, even if they used a traveling-camera style that was reminiscent of Roberto Rossellini in the same years. The films owed something to Jean Renoir, and something to their literary origins. But in hindsight, they are most fascinating as a preparation for the breakthrough that occurred with L’Avventura, La Notte, and L’Eclisse. Much depends on memory, for the films are not easily seen nowadays. I suspect that they are impressive but flawed, and I believe that Le Amiche is the best.
It comes from a short story, “Tra Donne Sole,” by the noted Italian novelist Cesare Pavese. The screenplay was done by Antonioni, Suso Cecchi D’Amico, and Albe De Cespede. It is set in Turin, where Clelia (Eleanora Rossi Drago) has just returned to open a branch of the fashion house she has been working for in Rome. She meets a group of friends: the spiteful socialite Momina (Yvonne Furneaux), Mariella (Anna Maria Pancani), a potter named Nene (Valentina Cortese), and Rosetta (Madeleine Fischer), who has just attempted suicide. The action of the film covers the setting up of the new salon, Clelia’s love affair with Carlo (Ettore Manni), chief among the workers doing the decorating, and the eventual suicide of Rosetta.
At the end, Clelia will return to Rome. The novel was altered here and there: For Pavese, Rosetta was the victim of overall boredom, but in the film she suffers from unrequited love. For the first time, Antonioni plunged into the sensibility and the company of women in a group, and in the 1950s on the art-house circuit the film was esteemed for its feminine psychology and its instinct for the bitchy behavior in a female group. To that extent, the very animated performance of Yvonne Furneaux (an actress who rather roamed around Europe) was thought to be central to the film. Seen now, however, the chief artistic interest is in the physical or photographic deployment of groups and the spaces between people. If that sounds cold-blooded, it helps suggest Antonioni’s very cerebral approach in the fifties. But you have only to think of Renoir to know that the spaces between people can be the signs of affection or misunderstanding.
The set piece is a long sequence on a beach—a kind of party—in which small groups form and break up. This was clearly a prefiguring of the long sequence on the island in L’Avventura and a mark of obsession with the ways in which people touch and do not touch in meeting and parting, and how those things can be read as signs of boredom or dismay, or of intimacy. With Antonioni, more than nearly any other director, those gaps are the focus of the film more than what is said and what is done. And they are the things we see and feel.
L’Amore (1948)
By 1948, Roberto Rossellini was entangled with Ingrid Bergman—he had made commitments to her as a person and as an artist. Above all, when she identified him as her and the world’s best hope of uncovering the truth in existence, he said yes, that’s me—and this is what I will do for you (Stromboli was only a year away). At the same time, personally and professionally, Rossellini was still deeply involved with Anna Magnani and making a testament to her bravura skills and her old-fashioned preeminence as a diva. I don’t think any other term serves to embrace her two nonstop performances from L’Amore, or to avoid the notion that Rossellini was ready to do just about anything to get ahead. In years to come, Ingrid Bergman must have longed for her new man to find material for her as rich as L’Amore.
Just 80 minutes long, L’Amore is in two parts. In the first, Magnani does the part of the Woman in Jean Cocteau’s one-person play La Voix Humaine, in which a society woman talks on the telephone with her ex-lover, imploring him to return. It is set in her bedroom and bathroom, and the only other living creature is her dog. The hopeless attempt to prevent the lover from marrying another woman ends with the woman knotting the telephone cord around her neck as a prelude to suicide—or had Rossellini just seen Edgar Ulmer’s Detour?
Rossellini and Tullio Pinelli converted the play into a film script, and Robert Juillard photographed it. The art direction is by Christian Bérard. Magnani is extraordinary, not least in the relentless ingenuity with which she dispels the very pat self-pity of the situation. The play is a vehicle for an actress, of course, yet in a way it’s an albatross around her neck, too, because her strength becomes overpowering. It is a model, obviously, for why the poor man has felt compelled to leave her: because she will not shut up or stop performing.
The second episode is more intriguing by far. It is called “The Miracle,” and now Magnani is Nanni, a simpleminded peasant woman, a goatherd, who is accosted and seduced by a vagrant (Federico Fellini), whom she mistakes for Saint Joseph. As in the first part, the man doesn’t really speak or contribute beyond impregnating the chatterbox idiot. Fellini worked on this script, and Aldo Tonti did the photography.
It’s not that the two parts don’t work together. They are stories of unrequited love and of a talking woman who hardly hears or notices the lack of response from the man. Yes, together they seem to worship Anna Magnani, yet there is also a streak of misogyny apparent. Who would really want to be trapped with either woman? And a trap is what the whole film feels like. Rossellini is reported to have signed over all income from the film to Magnani—it may have been a way of getting rid of her. But the scream of performance and theatricality is intense, and realism se
ems a very long way away.
L’Amour Fou (1969)
If ever anyone has the courage and the time to write a great chronicle of the French New Wave, I suspect that Jacques Rivette’s L’Amour Fou will emerge as the climax and crisis, the moment when it becomes clear that the load that had been carried by Truffaut and Godard had passed to the least likely of all of them. Rivette had made Paris Nous Appartient slowly. He seemed so much more withdrawn from the hurly-burly than Godard. Then he had prolonged censorship troubles over La Religieuse, adapted from Diderot and starring Anna Karina, but shocking to the French authorities. The film was banned. It was delayed. And still, it was thought to be rather esoteric—or a good deal less shocking than was promised.
At that point, Rivette made his magnificent documentary on Jean Renoir and then, with Georges de Beauregard, the producer who had defended him on La Religieuse, he made L’Amour Fou—without the least sign of contrition or compromise. L’Amour Fou was and remains deeply shocking in the old-fashioned sense: It is about two people, lovers once, who tear each other to pieces. If you care to put it that way, you can say it is a simple story. Sébastien (Jean-Pierre Kalfon) is rehearsing a production of Racine’s Andromaque. His wife, Claire (Bulle Ogier), is cast in the leading role of Hermione. But she walks out. She says she cannot endure the invasive pressure of the television crew that is filming the rehearsals—though this filmic attention (not uncommon in the sixties, with the decade’s rage for vérité shows) is only a metaphor for Rivette’s own filming. For, in truth, Kalfon and Ogier were actually working together on an Andromaque for the stage at the same time. The fusion of latencies in the words rehearsal and performance had never been so complete or so deranging. For we see the love between Sébastien and Claire reduced to tatters. At the end, they destroy their own apartment. There were stories of a nearly helpless and dangerous turmoil in the real actors. Don’t forget Renoir’s intuition about life and theater as a wrestling match. For him that was often tricky yet humane and funny. For Rivette, it is the dark night of the soul, and something he can’t take his eyes off.
He produced a film of 4 hours and 12 minutes. I have not seen it in years (and it is hard to see), but I suspect that it is the most intense ordeal Rivette has ever made. Beauregard protested: This was far too long for the material. He begged for a shorter version. Rivette obliged but insisted that duration was central to the agony. He was undoubtedly correct, and in the end the audience proved that: They preferred the long version, they ignored the short one. It is a landmark in modern film and in the medium’s anguished treatment of love and performance. And it was a sure measure that, for a moment at least, the most precious ground in movie belonged to Rivette. The quiet one was ready for boldness.
Anatahan (1954)
At the age of sixty, Josef von Sternberg took himself to Japan to make a perfect film. Such an announcement is in character, of course, but what did he think he had been making before? Jet Pilot had been shot but not yet released; Macao (1952) had been released under his name, but some of it had been reshot by Nicholas Ray. He had not had a proper release since The Shanghai Gesture in 1941, and that is his most louche, perverse, and insolent Hollywood production.
Was Anatahan a formal experiment? Yoshio Osawa and Nagamasa Kawakita appear to have issued the invitation on behalf of Daiwa Productions. Sternberg and his family were exquisitely entertained in Japan, and members of the royal household attended his lectures. Of course, the subject of his film had been chosen in advance. But as the director knew, what does the subject matter when such an intense style will be brought to bear? He could have added that, since he spoke no Japanese, all communication would have to be through translators. That would have meant trouble to many practitioners, but to Sternberg it was simply a refinement of purity.
The film was made in Kyoto, a proper feature film of 92 minutes about the juxtaposition of a group of sailors and a married couple on a jungle island long after the Second World War is over. Sternberg was the producer, the director, the writer, the photographer, and the narrator of the film, though it’s notable that Japanese talent was also credited in all departments except that of direction. It was not filmed on a deserted island. Indeed, the essential characteristic and beauty of the venture is that it is all done on sets, with the trees and foliage of the jungle constructed and rendered synthetically. I remember it as an intense film, very beautiful, of gazing faces and spied-upon scenes, with the light playing upon a jungle of cellophane. It was said that Sternberg regretted being compelled to use real water—everything else was artificial.
The film was not released in America for years. It was butchered in Britain. But in France it was received with awe and wonder. Such reactions are perhaps just extensions of Sternberg’s complete ownership of the project. He was only sixty, and the film is that of a man in complete control of his medium. A day may yet come when Anatahan is rediscovered—though I would be quite happy to continue to think of it as a mythic film, an ideal to which everyone else might aspire.
Sternberg comes down to us as a monster of folly and arrogance, largely because of the tone of his book, Fun in a Chinese Laundry. But the proof was there on the screen. Films were about light, a large enough subject, surely, that human nature should wait its turn. Equally surely, the great waiting face is that of his Marlene. Not hers. In herself, she was some kind of German woman, dull, bourgeois, good-natured, generous, actual, physical. Whereas Sternberg taught us to see that she was also a ghost—eternal, enigmatic, ungraspable.
Anatomy of a Murder (1959)
Not the least delight of this magnificent film is the discovery that way up in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula Edward Kennedy Ellington is playing piano at a local tavern—as well as pumping one of the great scores into every pore of this picture, like heat insulation for those cold climes. The swoon of music when we first see Lee Remick’s “raped” wife is not just delicious and appropriate, but a sly warning to all members of the audience to behave like jurors.
The jazz is there for Paul Biegler (Jimmy Stewart), a country lawyer who would just as soon go fishing or listen to the “Black and Tan Fantasy.” Stewart is droll and lovable, but be careful—he’s actually as sharp and cold as the knife he uses to gut his fish. And he sees what we see: Lieutenant Frederick Manion, as cool and insolent as the young Ben Gazzara himself, and Laura Manion, who would flirt with a fire hydrant.
The trial that ensues is a test for us all. Panties are involved—panties ripped off in a brutal sexual act or tossed aside with sexy enthusiasm. But as Joseph Welch’s judge quietly insists, get your laughing over with: “Panties” are going to come up, and a man’s life, maybe two men’s lives, may hang on them. The fact that this judge is played by the man who first rebuked Joseph McCarthy on television may have faded away somewhat now, so gather the children in a circle and explain to them how Otto Preminger, our director, is identifying not just heroes but a full respect for the law. You could add that Preminger was himself the son of a great Viennese jurist.
After that, stand back: even in Michigan, and in black and white (shot by the unsentimental Sam Leavitt), your kids can enjoy Stewart and George C. Scott fencing in court, and the point will dawn on them: that the law, sir, is a game, a kind of ping-pong, in which good players usually come through. But still we are a society that believes in the law. And so this model courtroom melodrama is also an honest testament to America and its brave attempt to spread a little justice around.
As always in such things, Preminger’s camera style prefers deep space and groups of people, so that we have to decide where to look while clinging onto every word. The one sentimentality in the film, perhaps, is that northern Michigan ends up seeming as Athenian as Ford’s Monument Valley terrain. (Preminger has too much taste to get into redneck life.) Still, it is no lie to honor a country and a system that can produce such things as George C. Scott’s sotto voce, Stewart’s injured innocence, Eve Arden, panties, and Duke Ellington’s music yarning away in the background like
a wiseacre in some Faulkner story.
It’s not going too far to call this film perfect—not just as a passing show, but as a tribute to reason, irresistible impulses, and that rare gambling game that was the young Lee Remick. Enjoy.
Andrei Rublev (1966)
Imagine a movie life of Shakespeare. How can film capture the sixteenth century? Is that era determined by how far a man can walk? In which case you could do Shakespeare with a steady tracking camera and a heartfelt sense of duration. Or was the sixteenth century a matter of how many violently disparate ideas a Shakespeare can hold in his head? In which case you need a charged montage scheme, endlessly tidally energized and forever leaping at poetic allusiveness.
How would they have made films in Russia in the fifteenth century? It seems to me that Andrei Tarkovsky was as much fascinated by such questions as by the difficulty of knowing for sure what the painter Rublev did or what he was like. After all, research is too far away. So what Tarkovsky does in this truly epic film is to redevise incidents from the painter’s life that amount to the trials and ecstasies of any painter at any time. Above all, he ponders: Shall an artist make art, or must he attempt to be involved in the most obvious and painful political dilemmas of his age? Does it matter? For if his art is so strong, even if he puts it aside, won’t the art continue to make him? I don’t think it’s going too far to say that Andrei Rublev was an experience that determined the way in which Tarkovsky lived his own life.
Scripted by Tarkovsky and Andrei Mikhalkov-Konchalovsky, the film tracks the life of a great icon painter. The Russia behind that life is tormented and tempestuous: It is like the four movements of, say, Shostakovich’s Tenth Symphony playing simultaneously. Having befriended a mute girl, he kills to save her life—and then vows to end his art. But then he observes and participates in the casting of a new bell, and he begins to work again.
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