Still, Ingrid was nominated for an Oscar—her sixth nomination—and it may be that she found great comfort finally in returning to Scandinavia. As for Ingmar, it was easy at the time to think that this might be his farewell, too, for it gave no sign of the warmth that was still to come flooding into his vision. So Charlotte’s guilt is not really questioned, even though Ingmar’s own life had been a steady symphony dedicated to unremitting work and art.
L’Avventura (1960)
An excursion is promised—it will be an adventure. Anna (Lea Massari) has invited Claudia (Monica Vitti) for the day. Claudia sees that Anna is uneasy. Perhaps her love affair with Sandro (Gabriele Ferzetti) is in trouble. Perhaps it is just a passing phase. But Anna is moody, impulsive. With a party of friends, they take a boat and go sailing to an island near Sicily. (The film was actually shot on Lipari and in Milazzo, on Sicily’s north coast.) It is summer, but it is a gray day, overcast, beautifully photographed by Aldo Scavarda. The island has steep, rocky cliffs. The sea beats against the rocks. People realize that Anna has disappeared—or is it that she is simply no longer there? Presence is a curious thing in the cinema. Just because we are seeing Ilse and Victor talking in the Café Americain does not mean that Rick has ceased to exist. Or does it?
The others search for Anna. They wonder if she has had an accident. They cannot conceive how she could have departed from the island. But she was uneasy. There was something about her that signaled a readiness for her own adventure, or departure. Was it simply a mood, or something more substantial? The question hangs over the search, which director Michelangelo Antonioni conducts with every respect for place and space. Sandro is a disappointed architect; he sees things in terms of physical reality. And Antonioni has one of the great camera styles, built on respect for moving in space. Yet somehow Anna has defied that idealistic continuity, the context. She has vanished.
Famously, L’Avventura was booed at Cannes. Some people said it was the cerebral, pretentious version of the boredom or the spiritual dismay being addressed so much more journalistically in the contemporary La Dolce Vita. But L’Avventura was far more important in terms of the medium moving forward, and far more undermining in its suggestion that, well, if a character who was there has gone away, you have to get on with life or the film. You can search for her. You can search all your life, if you wish, and searching is an impulse in film’s form, because the looking goes on. Or you can forget, try to forget, and then wake up one day, bored, and never notice that forgetting has occurred. So Claudia will slip into the empty place the film has created. She will become Sandro’s girl, and in that way she will come to understand the uneasiness that Anna was feeling.
So L’Avventura is a very simple story, an idea from Antonioni himself, scripted by the director, Elio Bartolini, and Tonino Guerra. It turned out to be the first film in a great trilogy—L’Avventura, La Notte, L’Eclisse—a landmark in film history, stories of love and lack of presence that keep nagging away at happiness. You can see the films separately, but they are three versions of one concern and one moment in upper-class Italian society. And they are three attempts by Antonioni to believe in the radiance of Monica Vitti. Also with Dominique Blanchar, Renzo Ricci, James Addams, Dorothy De Poliolo. La Dolce Vita now is like an old shoe, ruined, found on a beach. L’Avventura is a fresh footprint, still warm.
The Awful Truth (1937)
In just a few years at the movies, Cary Grant and Irene Dunne go from The Awful Truth to 1941’s Penny Serenade. Now, Penny Serenade is in this book, and I think you ought to see it—if only to gain a better appreciation of The Awful Truth. It’s not that Penny Serenade is awful, but it’s the one where Grant and Dunne have a baby who dies and so they adopt—and then, Lord help us, they are in danger of losing that child, too, because they’re short of money and Grant’s on the irresponsible side.
There are tears in Penny Serenade, and I regret every one of them. The funny thing is that in The Awful Truth Grant and Dunne play a married couple (Jerry and Lucy Warriner) who don’t have any children. They have a dog instead, Mr. Smith, a wire-haired terrier, and when they divorce, custody of that dog is a serious issue. But they don’t cry over it, and I have to say that if I were a child, I’d far rather go with the Warriners than into Penny Serenade. The why of it is quite simply in the Warriners being grown-up about things. Our best comedies are about grown-ups and the way talk may keep them growing.
The Awful Truth is Columbia in 1937, a script by Viña Delmar (an interesting writer, also on Make Way for Tomorrow), directed by Leo McCarey. The Warriners live stylishly and on the expensive side. And there are indications that they carry on a little on that side: He has been somewhere for two weeks, and she was out all last night. Not that when they divorce, anyone else suddenly emerges, demanding to be loved. They are in love already—a fool could see it. Still, Lucy does get talking with Dan Leeson (Ralph Bellamy), who is in Oklahoma oil—and gets the most terrible shakedown for just showing his nose and offering banal good cheer. He works for a living, and the Warriners have never stooped to that.
But Dan Leeson is the kind of stooge that can be quite useful in comedies of remarriage—for that is where we are going. Jerry and Lucy want the fun back in their life together, and their life together does go on, despite the judge’s separation order. They think about each other. They are better at talking than most people—throw in telling tall stories and getting away with them. They also have Mr. Smith. They have divorce, too, which in their hands resembles a tricky new dance, or a way of falling over each other in public.
Yes, films like The Awful Truth present a blithe portrait of wealth and of divorce. But like most of our vital comedies—and this is one of them—it is rooted in the mystery of marriage and the desirability of two people’s being together. So she is slightly smarter than he is—but he was smart enough to choose that. Grant and Dunne do it here without a trace of neurosis or yearning. It’s a professional relationship, like dancing, and it turns out brilliantly, a film in which people chat for 92 minutes and every conceivable matter has been dealt with. And that is one of the heights of optimism in American life and film.
Baby Doll (1956)
Had informing loosened Elia Kazan’s screws? Had he lost his mind? “Baby Doll was a lark from beginning to end”! Had humor slipped into this most earnest body of work? For some reason (could it have been an urge to get better acquainted with Carroll Baker?), Kazan began writing this script himself from a couple of Tennessee Williams short stories. It had a glowing central image: Baby Doll Meighan (Ms. Baker) in a grubby white slip in her crib, maybe sucking her thumb—nineteen and as yet unrelieved of her virginity, despite marriage to Archie Lee Meighan (Karl Malden), with a horn as large as the actor’s nose. But Archie Lee had agreed to wait until his bride was ready. And in his frustration, he had burned down the cotton gin of Silva Vacarro (Eli Wallach)—an Eye-talian, an outsider and not one of us. Whereupon, Mr. Vacarro comes looking for revenge and ponders the most suitable way to take it.
Kazan tells how he coaxed a reluctant Williams to watch a rehearsal at the Actors Studio, and when the playwright saw Carroll Baker, he agreed to go to Mississippi with the unit to touch up the dialogue, if he could have a swimming pool. So everyone got something out of it, including Ms. Baker, who got a splashy start to her career. (Truth to tell, she was already twenty-five.)
So the film was shot in Benoit, Mississippi, with Boris Kaufman doing the photography and Richard and Paul Sylbert in charge of the tattered décor. This was a time when America was discovering the real South, thanks to movies, and it was usually impoverished, hot, sticky, and sex-obsessed. Or was that just the directors? Anna Hill Johnstone came up with the various child’s night garments worn by Baby Doll. Kenyon Hopkins wrote the music. There was a speech consultant to make sure you couldn’t quite understand everything the Southerners said.
And as far as can be determined, it is a comedy on sexual paranoia. “Many people said it seemed like a European movie,”
said Kazan—the final insult to the South. Karl Malden seems to have been given sweat pills. Eli Wallach plays it like a fine young cockerell. And Carroll Baker exhibits a kind of stunned vacancy that suggested she might have been up all night. As Kazan noted, it was Cardinal Spellman who came to the film’s rescue—“a contemptuous defiance of the natural law,” the great man announced. Who had thought it was that funny? Of course, the cardinal had not seen the film. “Must you have a disease to know what it is?” he demanded. Meanwhile, all over the world, the horizontal stills and posters of Carroll Baker in her crib became a model of lewdness.
It was the actress’s great moment. She did Giant and a few other pictures. She was very sexy in Station Six Sahara for Seth Holt, and she actually played Jean Harlow in the sixties. But for a giddy moment she established that there were two things over which most of America lives in a cloud of ignorance: sex and the South.
Baby Face (1933)
Lily Powers (Barbara Stanwyck) is discovered living in Erie, Pennsylvania, and the first tough attitude in this punchy little movie is that that’s no place for a human being to be. Which is not common. Hollywood usually flattered and idealized the outlying provinces in the great dream of small towns and countryside that are in fact alien to nearly everything Hollywood cares about. And in 1932–33, Erie must have been tough. Lily is prepared. Her father runs a bootleg-liquor operation, where she turns the occasional trick to give the customers something extra. She is hard-faced and soft-dressed, if you know what I mean, and while Stanwyck was always pretty, there is no denying the cynical edge on this film. She hates her father and sees no way out of her bitter life. But then the father is killed in an accident—his still blows up. And Lily moves on, ready to deserve her surname.
What follows is what has brought Baby Face back into circulation in those gleeful festivals that seek to celebrate “Pre-Code” toughness and candor in American pictures. Lily has an elderly gent who advises her with bromides about a woman’s natural power. So she decides to sleep her way from entry level to penthouse in a skyscraper business organization. This is accomplished with speed and verve and a target-shooting amusement that reaches its peak when the young John Wayne proves to be one of her horizontal stooges—though he plays a very decent guy.
But at the top, Lily meets Courtland Trenholm (thrill to the name—played by George Brent). And he is on to her. He knows her game and transfers her to Paris. But then it turns out that this is so that he can romance her all the better. He marries her! The company goes bust. There is a brief moment in which she says, Tough luck, Courtland. But then something happens—it’s that old Pre-Code cowardice. Lily suddenly snaps to. Decency surfaces. She sells her jewels. She hurries to Trenholm’s side. Because—can you guess?—she loves him.
In other words, Baby Face becomes a Wise Woman, which is not as good a title. If we wonder what such a picture was trying to do, it’s important to realize that the story came from no less than Darryl F. Zanuck, the head of production at Warners, and Gene Markey, who would produce some pretty sappy pictures while doing his best at being married to Joan Bennett, Hedy Lamarr, and Myrna Loy. Was the picture a gift to Stanwyck, or the throwaway joke of two Hollywood guys? And how did they look at themselves in the mirror with that excruciating happy ending?
Alfred E. Green directed, and it is only 76 minutes. If it looks hard-bitten today, I suspect it’s because of how little we get the real robustness of the early thirties. It’s not actually daring in things done or seen. The crucial stuff is offscreen—though you can’t wipe away the merciless look on Stanwyck’s face.
Baby Face Nelson (1957)
Director Don Siegel always claimed that Baby Face Nelson was a horrible film to make because he was allowed only $175,000 to do it; because Mickey Rooney was the most unpleasant person to work with he ever knew (there was good competition); and because Rooney was itching to take the picture over and finish it according to his splendid vision of a little man with a big gun. So this minor masterpiece escaped by the skin of its teeth, and—just like Brando on The Godfather—Rooney sold off his percentage on the picture before it went big.
What Siegel saw was that Rooney, at thirty-six, was a great star on an unstoppable downslide, a mixture of energy, remorse, and hatred for the world that was the perfect recipe for a psychotic gangster. And because of that lucid, not very fond, understanding in an onlooker, we have one whole picture that gets Mickey Rooney and that may be offered as an alternative to the nearly insane fragmentation of his life and work.
According to Siegel, there was a script ready to go—by Irving Shulman—so bad that the director said, Let it go. So he hired in an old friend, Daniel Mainwaring (who had just done Invasion of the Body Snatchers for him), and gave him two weeks to come up with something better. They then had seventeen days for Hal Mohr to shoot it, and on the last day, working against the clock, Siegel said, he did fifty-five setups.
The result is a uniquely American action film in which the central figure is hero and villain, where he is permitted to do anything he can think of, because we all know that he will be eliminated finally. What a hundred years of this has done to American ethics is another matter. But it has led to an outburst of national energy and frenzied desire that is as interesting and threatening as a Charlie Parker solo or a Jackson Pollock painting. With three minutes or a frame to fill, Parker and Pollock go crazy. Rooney does the same. He behaves as badly as he can think of—and he was a natural master at delinquency.
So this is a far more searching and challenging film than, say, the liberal humanism of 12 Angry Men (made in the same year) and so painfully anxious to draw America closer to enlightenment. Of course, the irony is that Henry Fonda’s thoughtful paragon, never sweating on that hot day, may be defending someone as gleefully guilty as Baby Face.
There is never a dull moment or a still frame, and Siegel offsets his helpless worship of Rooney with a number of fond glimpses of rare character—thus Carolyn Jones as the girlfriend and Sir Cedric Hardwicke relishing his own slumming as a crooked doctor. More than that, this is a noir B picture with a gallery of the great small-part actors: Ted de Corsia, Emile Meyer, Tony Caruso, Leo Gordon, Jack Elam, Dabbs Greer, John Hoyt, and Elisha Cook, Jr.
The Bad and the Beautiful (1952)
Producer John Houseman once said he never had a picture that went as smoothly as The Bad and the Beautiful. (He didn’t realize then that David O. Selznick was considering suing the project for defamation in its treatment of the egomaniacal impresario, Jonathan Shields.) Houseman said the idea came from a treatment by George Bradshaw about a life in the theater obviously based on Jed Harris. Houseman thought, Suppose it was a Hollywood story; and he got production head Dore Schary interested, too. At which point Houseman asked Charles Schnee (he had done Red River) to write a script.
As the story begins, Shields (Kirk Douglas) is in disgrace. He has betrayed everyone he ever knew. But studio manager Harry Pebbel (Walter Pidgeon) tries to rally the old loyalists: a director, Fred Amiel (Barry Sullivan); a writer, James Lee Bartlow (Dick Powell); and a movie star, Georgia Lorrison (Lana Turner). This allows for a tricky flashback structure that recounts the ups and downs of the Shields studio. The “witnesses” still dislike him, but in the artful last scene, having all said “no” to a new picture with Jonathan, the three heads are clustered around one phone as he makes his pitch.
We know what will happen—whether it should or not. The Bad and the Beautiful is true to Hollywood in having its cake and eating it. For yes, it says, there’s a lot that goes on here that is “bad,” but don’t forget that these people are “beautiful,” or if that doesn’t quite fit, then what they do is beautiful. Whereas Sunset Blvd. could see damage in film, the attitude of The Bad and the Beautiful is, if you’ve had a good time, forgive and forget. It’s strange, for Houseman was both insider and outsider, a real professional but able to see things amiss in the system.
Vincente Minnelli directed everything with flourish and inside jokes,
and there is a bravura sequence where Lana Turner nearly kills herself in a car crash. This is shot by Robert Surtees, who won an Oscar for his work.
The casting was easy once Metro had agreed to borrow Kirk Douglas—and this lovable rogue is pretty close to Kirk’s self-image. In addition, Gloria Grahame was hired to play the writer’s Southern wife—and she won a supporting actress Oscar for it. If anything, the supporting cast is more fun than the leads, with Gilbert Roland, Leo G. Carroll, Elaine Stewart, Paul Stewart, and Ivan Triesault, plus Louis Calhern as the voice of Georgia’s father (a Barrymore-like figure).
The Bad and the Beautiful was a second-thoughts title. They were going to call it Tribute to a Bad Man, but the studio said that was a Western. And so they all begged the question of whether Shields is a bad man. Fifty years later it’s not as easy. In the latest King Kong, for example, Jack Black says, “You can trust me—I’m a movie producer!” and the house comes down.
The film got six nominations and won five, including for Schnee’s script, but nary a nod for David Raksin’s lovely score, music that is now redolent with the swoons and wistfulness of old Hollywood.
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