The Big Parade (1925)
Two pictures, The Big Parade and Ben-Hur, secured the place of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer as the maker of prestige productions in the mid-1920s. Not that the pictures were alike: Ben-Hur lost a lot of money (though the crowds seeing it didn’t realize that), and The Big Parade made a fortune. It had been Irving Thalberg’s idea (just as Ben-Hur was a project that always had Louis B. Mayer attached). On a trip to New York, Thalberg had seen the play What Price Glory?, written by Maxwell Anderson and Laurence Stallings. He was deeply impressed by Stallings, who had lost a leg in France during the war, and he invited him out to Hollywood. When Stallings arrived, he had a five-page outline for a movie.
Thalberg assigned King Vidor to the project, and Vidor, screenwriter Harry Behn, and Stallings went back east by train as Vidor dug into Stallings’s memories. The film would be the story of James Apperson (John Gilbert), the drifting son of rich parents, who goes to France in 1917, meets a French girl, Mélisande (Renée Adorée), loses his two best friends, and is wounded in the leg. He goes home when it is over, but he can’t find it in him to renew an old romantic relationship. He realizes that his destiny lies in France, and so he goes back to find Mélisande.
The picture was shot around Los Angeles and in Texas, with John Arnold doing the photography and Cedric Gibbons and James Basevi the design. The studio had considerable volunteer support from Army contingents, and so there are scenes of massive troop deployment that came relatively cheap. According to the studio, the film cost only $382,000; Vidor claimed it was cheaper still. But Vidor was given every indulgence by Thalberg. He shot one scene of troops on a curving road, decided it needed a straight road for better effect, and restaged the whole thing.
The Big Parade is more martial and less tragic than we now feel the Great War was. This may be an American perspective—it may just be the urge to deliver an unprecedented spectacle. Still, it shows an American imagination being drawn to Europe, and not just because of a love relationship. The film made John Gilbert a big star, in part because of his manliness or even the romantic scenes (he teaches Adorée to chew gum), but because of the sense of an older, sadder, wounded man. There’s no doubt that Vidor had learned a lot just from listening to Stallings, and even if in 1925 the film was more important in terms of M-G-M’s future, still, there is some sense of a world calamity.
The cast also included Hobart Bosworth as Apperson’s father, Karl Dane and Tom O’Brien as his fallen comrades. There was an original music score by William Axt, and the picture ran 141 minutes; audiences complained that they couldn’t get transport home when the last show ended. It ran two years at the Astor in New York and grossed $1 million at that one theater alone. The studio reported a profit of nearly $3.5 million.
The Big Red One (1980)
When The Big Red One opened in 1980, director Samuel Fuller was sixty-eight. He had been nursing the project since his involvement with the First U.S. Infantry in the Second World War. Fuller had won medals, and he had survived, and he had become a moviemaker able to liberate so many of his memories of warfare. Thus, in The Big Red One, the Sergeant (Lee Marvin) makes the last killing of that war, unaware that a cessation had been declared four hours earlier. For Fuller fans, that seemed familiar and unduly mythic after the brutal opening of Run of the Arrow, in which Rod Steiger’s loner fires the last shot of the Civil War.
Run of the Arrow, although benefiting greatly from Steiger’s unsuitability as the lead, still feels like a work conceived the night before and then shot in a matter of a few days. Whereas The Big Red One has always felt like respectability triumphing over experience. I wonder how many of the classic age of American movie directors really needed lengthy preparation or extended meditation. Or did that uncommon advantage make them ponderous sometimes, too deeply premeditated, when urgency was a keynote to their style and their desperation?
Over the years, The Big Red One has grown. In 1980, it was 113 minutes long. There had been budgetary restrictions; the film had been compelled to shoot in Israel, as opposed to North Africa and Italy; and there were reports of episodes that had been cut, one involving Fuller’s wife, Christa Lang. At first, it seemed that Fuller was pleased with the 113-minute version, but then the story emerged that the film had been taken away from him and that the release version was the work of another. Fuller’s preferred cut was four and a half hours.
In Fuller’s book A Third Face, published in 2002, five years after his death, he proclaimed himself deeply attached to the epic length and hopeful of a director’s cut someday. He sounded ominously close to the self-importance that is derided in his best films. He had got posterity: “My longtime dream had finally come true. That The Big Red One now existed, even in an abridged version, was miraculous and, without any doubt, my most important achievement. Future audiences and film historians will judge it for themselves. All I ask is that they be given the opportunity to see the movie I lived, wrote, directed, and edited with my heart and soul—the entire four-and-a-half-hour movie—before they render their final judgment.”
In 2004, thanks to the efforts of Richard Schickel, a “restored” version was released at 158 minutes long. I think it merely extends the problems of the first version: a grandeur and nostalgia that are in part autobiographical but also the result of a Sam Fuller who has listened to too much critical commentary on himself. The Big Red One enlarges vanities in Fuller, and it loses his crucial sense of survival at all costs. Fuller’s own real war was a just war. But the Fuller who worked so hard in the 1950s knew that such thinking was humbug.
The Big Sleep (1946)
The chemistry uncovered in To Have and Have Not had to be repeated for the screen, even if Bogart and Bacall had their own setup eventually to be known as marriage. And although Howard Hawks may have felt jilted, or outmaneuvered, there were those who knew that the chemistry had started in his mind. And so, in due course, Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep was sufficiently realigned so that it could be a series of sneering, needling, loving set pieces between actor and actress. The result is the best example we have of snapping backtalk as a metaphor for sex.
Not that this movie is unkind or unfaithful to Chandler. The esteemed trilogy of screenwriters—Jules Furthman, William Faulkner, and Leigh Brackett—guessed how decisively Chandler worked in scenes: Open a door and you met a shot; ask a question, and you got a tougher question back; and why should life not be a puzzle if the air of mystery is stealthy and seductive enough? It’s pretty clear that, on first impression, no one could make sense of the Chandler plot or care about it. If Hawks was right, you just made each scene so damn interesting no one bothered, and then at the end you eliminated several people and had your guy and his girl upright but writhing, like the smoke from two cigarettes.
But we know now—thanks to the discovery of a print released to the U.S. forces ahead of commercial release—that there was pressure to explain it all. And the explanation is so tedious it seems unkind to the troops. So it was abandoned, and suaveness was allowed to reign. After all, confusion is in the mind of the beholder, and if Bogart elects not to notice it, then it’s not really there.
So this is Philip Marlowe coming to the Sternwood house, where the General gives him his job, and Vivian and Carmen give him a feel. The chase will involve two bookshops, one fake, the other a paradise for bookworms. There are suspect photographs. There are Agnes and Joe Brody. And finally there will be Canino and Harry Jones. You don’t have to follow it all any more than you need to follow a road at night: You do follow it, but you don’t care where you are going. Meanwhile, Marlowe and Vivian play a very high-class game of tennis whenever they meet, and this dread noir world keeps rocking with laughter. The Big Sleep is a mystery, a noir, a love story, and an absurdist comedy—and when Bacall sings “And Her Tears Flowed Like Wine,” it’s a musical. It’s whatever it pleases. It’s about as much fun as anyone could have in 1946.
Sid Hickox photographed it. The music is Max Steiner. The art direction is Carl
Jules Weyl. And the rest of the cast had better be in heaven (or some other closed court) adlibbing fresh takes till the end of time: John Ridgely, Martha Vickers, Charles Waldron (Sternwood), Dorothy Malone (at the Acme Bookstore), Peggy Knudsen, Regis Toomey, Robert Steele (Canino), Sonia Darrin (Agnes), Louis Jean Heydt (Joe Brody), Elisha Cook, Jr. (Jones), and half a dozen knockout girls to get you from A to B. Forgotten your alphabet, Marlowe?
The Birds (1963)
Alfred Hitchcock was far better suited to small worries than big ones. In which case, I think it is wiser to see The Birds not so much as an alarm being raised about birds—or any creatures, winged or not—taking over the world but, rather, a nagging revery on why Jessica Tandy and Tippi Hedren have such similar hairstyles. In which case, The Birds was an uncommon amount of investment and time spent on real seagulls, special effects, and even painting the passing circumflexes of aggressive crows onto the film stock.
Look at it this way: Mitch Brenner (Rod Taylor) finds Melanie Daniels (Hedren) in a San Francisco pet store. He is attracted, so is she, but their flirtation is not quite natural—it begins to reveal the cracks of insecurity. So Melanie follows Mitch “home” to Bodega Bay, where he lives with his mother, Lydia (Tandy), and there’s a schoolteacher in the town (Suzanne Pleshette) who’s obviously a burnt-out flame from Mitch’s past, frightened off by the mother and by Mitch’s reticence about going beyond Mother’s wishes. May I say in passing, or remind you, that The Birds followed Psycho in Hitchcock’s career, a film much concerned with ways in which the mother-son relationship can get tangled.
And Melanie and Lydia do have the same hairstyle—a front wave swept up off the head, with little vertigo curls at either end. And the mother is unhappy about Melanie, just as Mitch is nervous about claiming her while Mother is disapproving.
That is when the birds start to attack—and, by implication, it is what drives them. This all comes from a Daphne Du Maurier short story (set in England, with simple farming people). The script is by Evan Hunter, though he and Hitch did not get on too well as the project advanced. Once the birds take wing—with classically Hitchcockian shock effects tinged with comedy, as when the birds gather on a playground monkey bars—the movie is a prolonged and very taxing ordeal, in part because birds are spiky, alien, unpredictable, and ungraspable. And the climax of the ordeal is one in which Melanie (and even Hedren herself) is subjected to a kind of onslaught or rape—hell to film, and traumatic in impact. So a stricken Melanie becomes the child of the mother.
We know now that this strange drama was exacerbated by Hitch’s infatuation with Tippi Hedren, in many ways the inevitable outcome of his lifelong adoration and torture of actresses. It is also instructive that The Birds comes after the huge success of Psycho, so he was unbridled, and the film was more abstract than anything he had done before. It was also his last unflawed film.
So it’s an extraordinary, very troubling picture—not just because of the irrational hostility of the birds, but because of the deep-seated neurotic explanations for their aggression. It is as if Hitch had at last elected to act on his most insightful reviews and had admitted sexual insecurity as his subject. All in all, it’s not just a brilliant if rather academic film, but something tinged with embarrassment—ours: We wonder if we should be watching. And these birds attack the eyes.
The Birth of a Nation (1915)
Do we need to see it? Yes, of course. But should you see it, or sit down with it, unprepared? No. The Birth of a Nation is a piece of history. It’s like the site of the Battle of the Little Bighorn in eastern Montana. You can’t honestly walk the ground and reexperience the battle, but in recent years archaeologists have dug up bullets from the old war, and in their gathering places they have worked out the story of what happened. It’s not quite decent or American, but it involves beleaguered groups of Custer’s Seventh Cavalry shooting themselves rather than face the wrath of Crazy Horse. And, of course, years later, once the lesson was learned, the Sioux were nearly wiped out.
The Birth of a Nation is claptrap, racist, and wrapped up in the worst kind of melodrama. So lesson one is simply how much show business atmosphere influenced early (and all later?) filmmaking. It is the work of an unreconstructed Southerner, made at a time when it was automatic for white extras to put on odious blackface to become “the other.” And do not forget or let anyone fail to mention that the huge audience response to The Birth of a Nation led to a resurgence in the Ku Klux Klan and to a rise in the incidence of lynchings in those parts of the United States where that was considered sport.
Is it also a galvanic gathering of countless small inventions in cinematic storytelling that D. W. Griffith and others had been working over for five years or so? Yes. And is it a momentous gamble on the part of the theatrical business to exist and flourish as something above and beyond the riot of nickelodeon arcades? Yes. And did it directly lead to the development of fortunes that would very soon bankroll what we call the studio system? Yes. So, beyond doubt, is this a turning point in the evolution of the capitalist enterprise and the modern storytelling known as movies? Yes.
Are there still passages of authentic excitement? Yes, the battle scenes, the rapist chase scenes, and even the pondered killing of Lincoln all quicken the pulse. On the other hand, Griffith was always working by the mundane mathematics of 1 + 1 = 2. He put shows together in steady accumulation. I don’t think he grasped the incendiary, surreal, internal dynamic of psychic outrage or delight in editing. So the film now seems slow, methodical, and merciless, like Scott dragging sledges across the South Polar plateau.
Yet reading and research tell us so much more. The way Woodrow Wilson was sent out of his mind by it only hints at the public frenzy. The stories of Louis B. Mayer crooking Griffith on the New England take is a manual for industrial procedure. And by 1915 there were works in other arts of such majesty, fineness, and profundity that it was easy to conclude that this new lightning was what would keep the public frenzied and fed, as opposed to enlightened. All the important questions are there. So, yes, you should see this appalling movie.
The Bitter Tea of General Yen (1933)
The Bitter Tea was the movie that opened New York’s Radio City Music Hall, on January 11, 1933, only a few months after the debut of Josef von Sternberg’s Shanghai Express. Despite passing references to the Chinese as “all tricky, treacherous, and immoral,” Frank Capra’s film is actually much more sympathetic to China, chinoiserie, and another way of thinking than the Sternberg picture. It is altogether a fascinating picture and one much helped by a knowledge of local history.
The project was set to be filmed by Herbert Brenon, with Constance Cummings in the lead role of Megan Davis, the fiancée of an American missionary in China, who becomes infatuated with the Chinese warlord General Yen. The source was a novel by Grace Zaring Stone, and there was a script by Edward Paramore, Jr. But either Brenon fell out at Columbia or Capra edged him out. He wanted the project for himself, and for the lead he was drawn to cast Barbara Stanwyck—the woman who had rejected Capra after a love affair that lasted through Ladies of Leisure, The Miracle Woman, and Forbidden.
In fact, Capra made changes in the script so that the General drinks the poison tea rather than rape Megan or lose her. The balance of their relationship—starting in her frozen distaste but then going through a fevered dream sequence (not in the novel) in which Yen is both rapist and rescuer—leads to several long dialogue scenes, not always well written, but very daring for 1933. I think it’s possible that Stanwyck was troubled, and that she is a touch too prim because of her awareness of Capra’s private agenda—for he was surely trying to win her back. So Stanwyck tries to be the missionary when everything in the film calls for a creeping abandon in Megan. When I say everything, I mean above all Nils Asther’s Yen, one of the most attractive figures in early sound cinema—witty, fatalistic, and very smart.
Columbia threw money at the film. It has great impressionistic scenes of warfare and chaos, as well as sumptuous pala
ce interiors where the décor is immaculate. Most of the film is nocturnal, and Joseph Walker’s imagery is lustrous and erotic—in addition, Capra’s eye for angles is acute and still modern. He frames action beautifully and always on a diagonal line to the key to a scene. In all, Columbia is reckoned to have spent $1 million on the picture—and still no Academy attention. It only played eight days at Radio City. Women’s groups protested the love story, and the film was actually banned in Britain and the empire.
Of course, the interracial love is not conventional, and Asther lifts the film into a range of feeling that still works today. There are also fine character studies by Toshia Mori (in what you might call the Anna May Wong role, but much better) and Walter Connolly as an American moneyman who works with Yen.
The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant (1972)
In a claustrophobic apartment where the white shag carpet is beginning to grow up the walls to claim the baroque murals, to the of rhythm Pandora’s Box and in the vile scheme of Trucolor turned toxic, it’s Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s stunned day in the life of Petra von Kant. I think it’s stretched out half an hour too long at 124 minutes, though without some boredom it might not quite be itself. But it still works, both as a flagrant slowed replaying of daytime soap opera and the world of Douglas Sirk, and as a macabre projection of how people like Petra see themselves. In other words, this is a camp reappraisal of a certain type of melodrama, but it’s real, too, from the moment Petra wakes up in a sweat of congealed face cream, calling for orange juice (that being the color blood takes on in this chemistry). There’s a lot of poker-faced humor in the approach, but it’s crazy for anyone to think that the hectic Fassbinder did not care deeply for people. As just a parody, this would be ninety minutes too long.
'Have You Seen...?' Page 17