'Have You Seen...?'

by David Thomson

  So it’s Fassbinder on a single set, filming his own play (based on one of his failed love affairs), getting the whole thing with the sweet camera movements in ten days, hustling cinematographer Michael Ballhaus to set up his lights in one hour instead of four. Petra (Margit Carstensen) is a fashion designer. When she wakes, the silent Marlene (Irm Hermann) is there already—seamstress, draftswoman, body servant, and sounding board for the endless, soured narcissism of her boss. A friend, Sidonie (Katrin Schaake), comes by, and she prompts the visit of a young model, Karin (Hanna Schygulla), as potential meat for Petra’s table. The designer has been married to men, but there’s no question where her real tastes lie. The central passage of the film is a prolonged sojourn with Karin in which their exotic harem costumes come and go like mood changes and in which Karin finally faces the tyrant down with her own power game. Whereupon, Petra is left with her mother and her daughter (they seem almost the same age and the same person—feeble adjuncts), brought to ground, lying in the carpet clinging to the telephone waiting for Karin to call like the woman in Jean Cocteau’s La Voix Humaine.

  Petra is very frightening and quite empty. Her clothes are fabulous, but Fassbinder hardly pauses over them. She does design as a way of getting at other women’s skin, and the claustrophobia of the piece is cannibalistic. But as a professed homosexual, Fassbinder photographs the women and their skins the way Pabst shot Lulu in Pandora’s Box. There are two-shots of Carstensen and Schygulla that are drunk with lust. An air of vampirism (at least) hangs heavy in the apartment and is supported by nude, hairless mannequins that have been drained of blood. And yet these women pulse with life, and Carstensen would never give a better performance. It is only when you reflect upon Fassbinder as the crazed yet very controlled anthologist of styles that you see how bizarre the fastidious extremism is here. Fassbinder made too many films for his own good. People could not keep up. And he has gone completely out of fashion. But Petra von Kant is unique and sensational—even if it could have used a few more lugubrious pop songs as commentary.

  Bitter Victory (1957)

  It can be argued that this may be the last occasion on which Nicholas Ray withstood his own willful disintegration enough to make one of his whole films. There were great sequences still to come, marvelous passages. But the fact remains that Bitter Victory—even with Curd Jürgens and Ruth Roman—is close enough to perfect, especially in the full-length version that is now available, which makes clear the full contrition and wretchedness in the Jürgens character and the absolutely bleak regard that the film holds for the job, team spirit, and “the war.”

  Of course, many would have said that the Libyan desert begged for color as well as CinemaScope, but Ray does brilliantly with the wide screen and a black and white in which, for most of the time, the sun itself seems wounded. And so two officers lead a desperate mission behind German lines, two men who love the same woman. Ray had wanted Montgomery Clift for the Jürgens role, and suppose, instead of Ms. Roman, that he had had an English actress—Elizabeth Sellars or Dorothy Tutin or…. Well, it’s no use now. Let’s just say that Jürgens is better than you fear, while Roman serves adequately in a world where women have an automatic rather than an earned exchange rate.

  And of course it says so much for Richard Burton—his career hardly the most illustrious in movies—that he holds the pain in place without having to exert himself. Was this a providential meeting of mutually inclined self-destructives? Whatever the answer, Burton is quite simply the most intelligent and fatalistic of all Ray’s doomed heroes, and by far the most tranquil about it. If only they could have kept each other alive and interested a little longer.

  Meanwhile, the commando raid is exemplary, and it shows how far Ray had command of editing as well as sequence shooting. And the film becomes itself on the journey back, with a gallery of English grotesques in the platoon, none better than the Punch-like Nigel Green, who has a madness to him that could have come from private whisperings from Ray himself.

  The set piece in which Burton’s Leith kills one wounded prisoner and then tries to save a dying man is unmatched in even Ray’s work for its tragic tone, and the effect here is greatly augmented by the magnificent music of Maurice Le Roux.

  There are people who categorize Bitter Victory as an antiwar film, but that is a disservice to Ray’s pungent, agonized intelligence. He knows that war is circumstantial and accidental, a fog bank under which we do some of our worst acts. No, Bitter Victory is antipeople—that is the real savagery it contains—and it is one of those films in which Nicholas Ray was able to set aside all traces of comfortable, saving “optimism.” He was a natural pessimist, and in this strange war film (made without a trace of anti-German feeling) he found the necessary cover for his real raid on the human spirit. I recall a time much closer to World War II when it seemed possible that Bitter Victory would date. Instead, its severity increases.

  Blackboard Jungle (1955)

  So maybe you had to be there at the time, but Blackboard Jungle was an extraordinary event. Coming at the same time as Rebel Without a Cause, it seemed to establish one ominous thing: that high-school students were so old, something must be wrong in the system. Sidney Poitier was thirty-one, Paul Mazursky twenty-five, James Dean twenty-four, Vic Morrow twenty-three, Corey Allen twenty-one. Only Natalie Wood and Sal Mineo were the right age. But if “kids” were getting that old in high school, surely something was holding them back.

  The film was director Richard Brooks’s adaptation of an Evan Hunter novel about delinquency eclipsing teaching in some New York City high schools. Brooks took the project to Dore Schary and M-G-M at a time when that regime was allegedly pushing back the flap on the envelope. Well, Schary jumped as if stung. In his autobiography, Heyday, he said he was gung ho to do it, but he admits that he soon had pressure from the MPAA to lay off—at the very least to have a coda in which the tough teach (Glenn Ford) comes on and says, “You think we have a problem? You should see the schools in the Soviet Union!”

  Brooks persisted: He felt he had a true subject, and he smelled authentic box office. With Pandro Berman as his most unlikely producer, and with Russell Harlan shooting it in black and white, it is a tough little picture in which Ford (as Richard Dadier—terrific play on that name) comes to a high school and finds trouble. It’s an all-male school (which avoids a lot of problems), and one in which the racial problems have had a shot of amnesia. Still, Dadier has to enlist Sidney Poitier finally to quell the unreachable Vic Morrow—and, as so often, Morrow was frightening and very good.

  There’s lots of pungent detail: Richard Kiley as a teacher in tears when the kids smash up his Stan Kenton records, Margaret Hayes as a teacher who courts rape, Emile Meyer as the school enforcer, Louis Calhern as a world-weary veteran, John Hoyt as the fascistic school principal, and Anne Francis as Dadier’s pregnant wife. In fact, M-G-M did roll out the troops. Yes, I’m sure it’s funny now and dated, but the exposed nerve was real. For its time, this film had a raw, gritty feeling not present in the more affluent circles of Rebel. It’s TV series like Welcome Back, Kotter that really lied about the school system and that pre-1939 thing known as education.

  All of this was good rabble-rousing stuff in a film that needed to be made. But the reason the film exploded is on the sound track. On the radio, Brooks had heard a record that flopped but that seemed to him urgent, rowdy, and just the music for his dangerous kids. It was Bill Haley and His Comets doing “Rock Around the Clock.” Given a second chance, that record went wild, and the future had begun.

  Black Legion (1937)

  Between The Petrified Forest (1936) and High Sierra (1941), Humphrey Bogart made twenty-eight pictures. I pick those two because The Petrified Forest was the first important notice he got, while High Sierra introduced the character that would make him famous. All of a sudden you see what a business it was that he was making something like five pictures a year, hardly knowing where he was going or who he was meant to be. Bogart hadn’t found that moment w
here the insolent kid stands in the doorway and feeds him the kind of lines he’d have been dreaming of—if he’d been that good a dreamer. But then the world clicked into place, and he became Bogey.

  One of those twenty-eight is Black Legion, and it’s a film so few Bogart fans know, you have to wonder why. You won’t believe it got made. There was this writer-producer at Warners, Robert Lord, who had been to the University of Chicago and Harvard and written for The New Yorker. And he wrote the story for Black Legion about an ordinary guy, a factory worker named Frank Taylor (Bogart), who loses a promotion to a man named Dombrowski. Frank starts to listen to a rabble-rouser on the radio, a man who preaches “America for the Americans,” and he joins the Ku Klux Klan. And it’s not a sanitized version of the Klan. It’s a version based on research, one that uses the same language in initiation oaths as the real Klan. And this was not too difficult to find out in 1937, because in rural areas the Klan was very active. Its membership was up because of the Depression, there were gangs of white-supremacist bikers, and there were lynchings.

  Hal Wallis, the production chief at Warners, backed it. Lord guided it into being. Abem Finkel and William Wister Haines did a screenplay from Lord’s story, and Archie Mayo directed the picture. Mayo was not a strong director, but give him strong scenes and he could be very effective. Black Legion would be a scorching crime drama, and a frightening picture of an ordinary guy’s shift toward fascism, even if the Klan wasn’t a pressing reality in society. But Warners made the film and took on the risk of local attack. And it is possible that Bogart does some of the best acting of his career, good enough to help explain the violence of In a Lonely Place.

  And in all the great wave of nostalgia we once had for old movies, and especially those of Humphrey Bogart, isn’t it interesting that Black Legion is seen so seldom? Yet it survives—and Lord got an Oscar nomination for his original story. George Barnes photographed it, the art direction was by Robert Haas, and Bernhard Kaun wrote the music. The cast includes Dick Foran, Erin O’Brien-Moore, Ann Sheridan, Robert Barrat, Helen Flint, Joseph Sawyer, Addison Richards, and Eddie Acuff. Henry Brandon—the actor who would be Scar in The Searchers—played Dombrowski.

  Graham Greene wrote: “The horror is not in the climax when Taylor shoots his friend dead, but in the earlier moment… when he poses romantically with his first gun.” There’s a Fascist in every kid, and this one gets life imprisonment.

  Blackmail (1929)

  There is a great production still from Blackmail, taken at the Elstree studio, with Alfred Hitchcock standing beside Anny Ondra, the German actress hired for the picture. There are a couple of feet between them, yet they are worlds apart. Alfred—fat, tousled, villainous, very intense—has his whole being focused on the earphones he is wearing. He could be listening to a message about the end of the world—or the start of a new one. And Ms. Ondra is simply speaking, emoting, uttering. He may be hearing her, but he is infected with some far more potent virus.

  Hitch was a graphic artist, a designer, a man who always liked to storyboard as much as possible. But he was like a dog in heat with sound. The meeting tells us a lot about Hitch’s appetite for novelty and technology, and it alerts us to his hearing, too—not just talk, effects, and music, but the stealth of room tone, the pressure of ambient sound. He was a gossip with story, and gossips can hear a guilty sigh.

  Blackmail was overtaken by sound, so there was a half-and-half version as well as one with full sound. It’s the story of a police detective with a girlfriend who finds herself compelled to knife a rapist rather than surrender. Her fellow gets the investigating job. It all turns out OK in the end, of course, though Hitch favored a “depressing” ending, to mirror the film’s opening, where the detective locks his girl up and then meets a colleague in the washroom. They’re washing their hands, men of the world. “Seeing that girl tonight?” the friend asks. “No, not tonight,” says the hero, “I’ll just be going home.” Casual, macabre, official duty smothering private life—it’s a sign of things to come.

  Anyway, Charles Bennett and Benn Levy did the script from a play by Bennett. Jack Cox was the cameraman. Yet obviously, the fun and games was with microphone and earphones. Above all, Hitch fashioned a scene where the guilty girl (Ondra) comes home and the talk becomes a blur, with the word knife becoming sharper and more emphatic the more often it’s used. It’s no way to treat a good word, and a sign of a certain dottiness in Hitchcock. Far more interesting, Anny Ondra spoke English poorly, so Joan Barry stood just out of frame, speaking the lines that Anny was mouthing. Now, that is a real dream.

  But the film is well worth seeing, if only because you see a master getting the hang of a new trick. The story is very silly, and nothing in the movie compares with Hitch’s telling Ondra a dirty joke (it happened to be filmed) and seeing her reaction. That inadvertent intimacy was the way to go with sound, and Hitch soon caught on. With Sara Allgood, John Longden, Charles Paton, and Donald Calthrop.

  The Black Stallion (1979)

  There was a type of film once, far more common than it is now, that parents and children could see together in perfect company. That does not mean they see or feel the same things. For instance, as a little boy follows The Black Stallion, it is delightful that this crusty, fussy little man—his name is Henry Dailey—should materialize to train the great horse and its kid rider. He is such a character. Whereas the father (and the grandfather) are weeping gently over the Las Vegas chance and the rare suitability—that the actor playing Henry is Mickey Rooney.

  It is 1946 (though it could be anytime). A boy, Alec (Kelly Reno), and his father (Hoyt Axton) are on a ship sailing the Atlantic. Also on board is a magnificent, high-strung horse, a black stallion, guarded by Arabs. The ship sinks. The boy and the horse wash up together on the shores of a desert island. They become friends. They are rescued and restored to Flushing, New York, where the boy’s mother (Teri Garr) lives. The horse finds Henry. The dream develops that the stallion should race. He is taken up by radio hypester Jim Neville (Michael Higgins) and called “the Mystery Horse.” There comes a big race where the stallion goes up against Cyclone and Sun Raider at Santa Anita.

  The story, from a book by Walter Farley, was made into a script for executive producer Francis Coppola by Melissa Mathison, Jeanne Rosenberg, and William D. Witliff. Carroll Ballard was hired to direct—and Ballard is one of our great directors of wild life and boyish romance. The burnished photography is by Caleb Deschanel. Aurelio Crugnola and Earl Preston did the art direction. Robert Dalva edited. Carmine Coppola wrote the music. The producers were Fred Roos and Tom Sternberg. I do not always go so deep into credits, but Sternberg, a friend, once captivated my young son at the dinner table—a son who had to have the film’s race sequence played every day—by showing him a statuette of Bucephalus that figures in The Black Stallion. Real people make movies.

  You don’t have to be Wittgenstein to see that horses are glorious. Or Mozart to know that a final race can settle every speck of drama available in the show. You don’t have to be Tolstoy to see that a boy—or anyone—given a story at a certain age may be saved and set free by it, and at the same time charged with the deepest kind of responsibility to tell story. You don’t have to be Degas to recognize that in nearly every sequence here there is emotion painted in light. An Olivier, I daresay, would stand back from this film and have to admit the raw genius of Mickey Rooney. I don’t know what happened to Kelly Reno—I hope he’s well and happy somewhere. And I certainly don’t know what happened to Mickey Rooney—but I believe in him, and I think that’s all he ever wanted. And the horse, Cass Ole, where is he? Riding in the sky with all the others—with Tom Mix’s Tony, National Velvet, Sea Biscuit, and Barbaro.

  Blade Runner (1982)

  As for me, you can have all the Indiana Jones films if I can keep thirty minutes of Blade Runner. I prefer, and find so much more pathos and interest in, Harrison Ford when he sometimes wonders not just whether his girl is a replicant but whether he, Rick Deckar
d, might be one, too. The place is Los Angeles. The time is 2019—not that long to wait now in a city desperate to escape the past. Deckard is hired to find and eliminate a group of escaped replicants—this in a place of immense skyscrapers, whispering holograms, endless rain, and a street level of trash, garbage, and spicy-noodle stands.

  The story comes from Philip K. Dick’s novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, translated to the screen by Hampton Fancher and David Peoples. There are Dick experts who complain at things left out. I don’t know Dick (you knew this already), and I love what is left in: not just the strange mix of tawdry and trash in the future world (production design by Lawrence G. Paull and Syd Mead), but the profound uncertainty as to which people have “integrity” and which do not. In the most direct sense, Deckard has to know or guess, and he lives with the mystery as to whether Rachael (Sean Young) the inventor’s daughter, and “special”—is someone he can love or may have to kill. (The vexed career of the glorious Ms. Young was never as well served as here.)

  So the agent’s grim progress by way of one replicant after another—Brion James, the staggering Joanna Cassidy, the amazing Daryl Hannah, and the truly noble Rutger Hauer—is not just his task, but seemingly the destruction of the most vivid people in the film. It’s hard to ascribe all of this to a director as detached and versatile as Ridley Scott, yet this was the first occasion on which I felt that Scott is so good a director he could handle nearly anything. He is our Michael Curtiz—and we still don’t quite know who Curtiz was.