Body and Soul (1947)
In the years just after the Second World War, the boxing picture seemed like a way of using a recognized genre to make fresh, daring statements about man’s inhumanity to man, thus The Set-Up, Champion, and Body and Soul. The action in the ring was more brutal and realistic than ever before, and there were stories from Body and Soul of James Wong Howe on roller skates, using a handheld camera to get into the action. But, in addition, on this film, at least, the idea of boxing was taken up by some brave left-wing artists of real talent to dismantle a corrupt society. And so Body and Soul was a work from the new company Enterprise Productions, and an opportunity for the screenwriter Abraham Polonsky to give voice to his forebodings about what money was doing to a society.
Polonsky told the story of how he was visiting Enterprise (in the persons of producer Robert Roberts and John Garfield) and mentioned that a friend had just given up on a biopic about boxer Barney Ross, Jewish and an imprisoned drug addict. On the spur of the moment Polonsky sketched out how it could be done, and he was hired. It would be the story of a man who trades his soul to be a boxing champion. It was a crucial advance on Clifford Odets’s Golden Boy (should he box or play the violin?). In Body and Soul, the question is whether the hero is a sportsman or a licensed killer.
Robert Rossen came on board as director, and it’s fascinating that there was a clash over how the film should end. Rossen wanted the logic to persist. The boxer, Charlie Davis, should be killed by the gangsters after he has broken their deal to fix a fight. It was Polonsky who wanted and wrote the rat defiance of Charlie, holding on to his girl and challenging the mob, “So what are you going to do? Everybody dies!” Quite soon, this dispute was caught up in blacklisting issues, but it really had been Polonsky who felt impelled to give what he called a happy, proletarian ending in which the bum does the right thing.
You can feel these tensions throughout the film, along with the urge in a new company to have a hit and/or to make a trenchant, radical picture. Polonsky was a very good scriptwriter, but Rossen had been a writer, too, and a Communist, and I think it is the direction now that feels most daring. Above all, this is in Garfield himself, who has given up the rough kid of the 1930s for a real inner hardness. And you see it in his relations with his mother, the foreboding, gaunt Anne Revere, and in the girlfriend, Peg (very well played by Lilli Palmer).
The rest of the cast includes Hazel Brooks, William Conrad, Joseph Pevney, Canada Lee, Lloyd Gough, and Art Smith—all very good. Francis Lyon won the Oscar for editing, and nominations went to Garfield and Polonsky. It stands overall as boxing for real—with the baroque expressionism of Raging Bull still to come.
Bonjour Tristesse (1958)
Otto Preminger had discovered Jean Seberg when she was an inexperienced seventeen-year-old from Iowa for his film of Saint Joan. In fact, Seberg does a good job in that film but could not save it from seeming talky and static. The story then goes that, rather than give up on his own reckless choice, he put her in Bonjour Tristesse, which “everybody” regarded as a disaster. Everybody? Well, the darkest view on the film came from screenwriter Arthur Laurents, who bet Preminger that she would never be any good and lived to collect. If you’ve seen Bonjour Tristesse and have some doubts about the usually very smart Laurents, ask yourself how it was that Seberg suddenly became riveting in À Bout de Souffle, enchanting in a run of French films, and magnificent in Lilith.
Bonjour Tristesse flopped at a time when Preminger had little training for flops, and so the actress took a lot of the blame. Whereas the rather brittle Françoise Sagan novel makes a remarkable film, about a teenage girl who grows up as she destroys her playboy father’s relationship with perhaps the first mature woman of his life. Shot by Georges Périnal in an intriguing mixture of black and white (the present) and color (the past), Bonjour Tristesse is a rare picture of a spoiled child who infects the world with her malign selfishness. It is a very challenging part, and there are scenes of Seberg regarding herself in a mirror that take one straight back to the power of Preminger’s Angel Face. Indeed, in many ways it is the same character, and the Viennese director shows himself an expert at pathological behavior.
The setup is the more intriguing in that we become thoroughly caught up in the romance between Raymond (David Niven) and Anne (Deborah Kerr). Preminger makes humane and touching characters out of these people—and far better than the book—manages to show their fondness for Cecile (Seberg), no matter the damage she does to them.
Set in Paris and the Riviera, and filmed there and in London in CinemaScope, this is one more of those films that put the lie to the canard that Scope was ill suited to intimate space. In addition, a great deal is gained from the melancholy score by Georges Auric and the designs of Roger Furse. As so often with Preminger, the romantic attitudes of the characters are beautifully summed up in their use of space and movement; indeed, the link to Angel Face is borne out in the resemblance to the earlier Daisy Kenyon and Fallen Angel. Far from heavy-handed, Preminger sometimes showed a lightness and a sympathy with the woman’s point of view that remind one of Max Ophuls.
The supporting cast includes Mylène Demongeot, Geoffrey Horne, Walter Chiari, Martita Hunt, Roland Culver, Jean Kent, Juliette Gréco (who sings the title song against Saul Bass titles), David Oxley, and Elga Andersen.
Les Bonnes Femmes (1960)
In the first flood of the French New Wave, it was not easy to place director Claude Chabrol. I’m not sure if it has become any easier over the years. With Eric Rohmer, he was the author of a striking book on Hitchcock. In print, he had made fun of big subjects and Stanley Kramerism—of generalization. Yet here was Les Bonnes Femmes (The Girls), apparently a cross section of young women in Paris in 1960 as seen in a quartet of women working, or waiting, in an electrical appliance store. Yet as time goes by, Les Bonnes Femmes seems one of the most mysterious and involving films of that heady period. It may even be a film that haunts Chabrol—seventy-six now, very active, but perhaps a creature of habit. And whereas Les Bonnes Femmes is very much about lives on the edge of a prison called habit, its mercurial, detached eye is acidic and new still.
Chabrol had made a couple of films already, Le Beau Serge and Les Cousins—strong, tidy, rather moral (almost Rohmer films). Les Bonnes Femmes was startlingly different: Its women were all pretty, or more, but they were foolish, limited, and small-minded, without any hint of condescension or malice in the filming. They were girls with their dreams. Jane (Bernadette Lafont) can’t see beyond guys. Rita (Lucile Saint-Simon) is so set on marriage, she doesn’t see that her fiancé is an idiot. Ginette (Stéphane Audran) has a dream of being a singer, but the public act is something she wants to keep secret. And Jacqueline (Clotilde Joano) dreams of a dark stranger—and gets him (Mario David).
Chabrol wrote the script with Paul Gégauff, and no one is romanticized in any way. Sometimes there is a hint of the girls as feeble insects, but that is always offset by the fond ways they are photographed or perceived—by Henri Decaë. And of course Paris, or the passing street, is very much a part of this film, even if Chabrol’s Paris is closer to Jacques Rivette’s than François Truffaut’s.
The four also make a circle, a ronde, and the film is content to see the wheel turn without passing judgment—except to say that women, without a god, are desperately deprived in their choices. Not one shot is feminist here, yet in hindsight you can see where Chabrol’s feminism came from. There isn’t really a decent or worthwhile man in view! Or one without violence.
Later on, Chabrol took up other guises: He could be Hitchcock, he could be a connoisseur of inner subtleties, he could be sardonic and even a little grotesque. But none of those moods really matches the glassy slippage in Les Bonnes Femmes, the way Chabrol seems to say, Just let a little time pass, and beauty will age just as placidity will be surprised. It’s a film Robert Bresson might have made if he had been more willing to admit to a liking for light, camera moves, and the look on a woman’s face. Of course, in 1960
the film was called unpleasant and misanthropic—it’s neither. But it sails close to that cold wind. And it’s more disturbing than anyone can explain.
Bonnie and Clyde (1967)
This is one of the most influential films ever made in America, in that it took an archaic genre—the 1930s gangster film—and reinvigorated it for the moods of the sixties. It was an antiestablishment picture, a love story, and a ballad for sexual fulfillment, a parable about getting people to take notice of you and being famous in America, and still it was a gangster picture. It was reaching out for everything it could get, and nothing was quite the same afterward. Sex and violence, the willingness of Miss Bonnie Parker to give good head, and the presidential smirk on Warren Beatty’s face were all smeared together in a strange triumph, all the stranger in that it was only by being shot to pieces that these two lovers really got it on together.
At the outset, two young writers, Robert Benton and David Newman, had been so impressed by the new French films that they wanted to write an American picture in which the mood changed as swiftly as it did in Truffaut. Benton was from Texas, so he knew the Bonnie and Clyde story. The pair offered their first script to François Truffaut—he doubted that his English was good enough. Then it went to Jean-Luc Godard (think of his Pierrot le Fou). Only then did Warren Beatty hear about it, and he knew it was right for his debut as a producer. He brought Arthur Penn on board, and when the picture went off on location to Texas, Beatty enlisted Robert Towne to do rewrites all night. Beyond that, I think you would have had to be there to say where it all came from.
But Penn was an electric director of actors then, and passionate with violence. Beatty saw the film as a story about celebrity. Benton and Newman had wanted C. W. Moss (Michael J. Pollard) as the third in the outlaw bed, and while that troubled Beatty, he liked the notion that Clyde was sexually squeamish. And when in doubt, they gave the picture a violent gear shift, so laughter came so close on the heels of violence that the audience was captivated. Of course, Warner Brothers was bemused. It thought the film was a disaster. And on a first opening it did poorly. But Pauline Kael came in with a passionate plea, and the film took off like a rocket in London. Truly, the novelty was so great that the audience had to feel their way in.
Penn shot Bonnie and Clyde as skirmishes, indoors and out. There’s not a flat or plain scene, though the mood is on its private switchback and the mounting sense of doom is scary and deserved. The film felt like an escaped wild animal, and in the finale you feel the beast being put down and getting laid.
Beatty and Dunaway cling to each other like Fred and Ginger. Michael Pollard was inspired casting. Gene Hackman and Estelle Parsons are Punch and Judy. But don’t forget Gene Wilder and Evans Evans, Denver Pyle and Dub Taylor. Dede Allen did the brilliant editing job. Burnett Guffey, an old-timer, delivered fabulous, sensual color photography. Theadora van Runkle did costumes that became mass market. Dean Tavoularis made his debut as a great art director. And the wheels on the cars went plink, plank, plunk to that banjo music.
Boogie Nights (1997)
Perhaps the first point to make is how remarkable that it took the “respectable” motion picture business so long to try the shadow world of pornography as a subject. Then recollect that in Paul Thomas Anderson’s brilliant and very poised film there is hardly any “real” sex—I mean the kind of happy, relieved, self-discovering sex that couples tend to have in most of our movies. In other words, the manufacturing of industrial sex has eclipsed the authentic thing. That is a truth with one exception, and it’s crucial: in the midst of the porn production, Little Bill’s wife seems utterly unimpressed by the hard-core celluloid job. She just wants a small closet where she can rut away with anyone and everyone. And when Little Bill glimpses that, he is devastated by the horror and kills everyone involved—himself included.
What are we to make of that, especially those of us who have unmistakably used movie sex as a vital part of our sentimental education? It sometimes seems to me that one of the most fascinating things about sex in the movies—and no one can deny the creepy affinity that exists—has been to educate a large public in how to regard and exercise sex in an age when its widespread use became not just possible but a source of enjoyment (and indeed, in some cases the epitome of all pleasures). And so, for the period up until the ruin of censorship, sexuality was, like horror, a thing all the more potent for being so reticently shown. And then moviemaking (the respectable pursuit) had to ask itself what it was doing when Amber Waves and Dirk Diggler (or figures like them) could do it in the long shot and the close-up in the same half hour, with little more feeling than that of vague family fondness (and that rather distant warmth is maybe the most shocking and disturbing thing in Anderson’s film).
So this was an amazing choice of material, long before one faced the actual depiction of life at the Jack Horner studio. And while Anderson shows the virtual disintegration of the Horner approach, and the savage reeducation of most of its witless members, still the film leaves open the larger question: is sex a real physical thing, or is it always in the head?
All of which omits to say how very funny so much of Boogie Nights is—the sexual smoothness of Rollergirl (Heather Graham), for instance, is entirely human yet lodged in the annals of satire. And Mark Wahlberg is so undeveloped in most other respects that his humungous proportions in one part amount to a cartoon triumph of comedy. Burt Reynolds is sublime as Horner—it is a very telling sign of the passing of one cultural era to another that Warren Beatty declined that role! For the rest, the Anderson stock company was taking shape: Julianne Moore (more stunned than stunning as Amber), John C. Reilly, William H. Macy, Philip Baker Hall, Philip Seymour Hoffman. (Does the guy only hire triple-decker names?) No, there’s Don Cheadle, Alfred Molina (terrifying), Robert Ridgely, and several others.
Some films are just for seeing, and some are for talking about. You could run a seminar on the nature of film after Boogie Nights.
Born Yesterday (1950)
I don’t mean to suggest that Born Yesterday alone could protect the Constitution from those who mean it harm. Still, it is hard to imagine within the confines of, say, The Godfather or The Sopranos a Billie Dawn–like character, whose sharp memory and developed conscience could bring down a Harry Brock and his corruption. After all, the movies have taught us to think of Billie Dawns as corpses found on urban wasteland in the opening sequence of foreboding pictures. So it’s worth stressing that Born Yesterday, the play by Garson Kanin, was a triumph in the age of HUAC.
The play opened in February 1946 and ran for 1,642 performances. Harry Brock was played by Paul Douglas, Billie by Judy Holliday (after Jean Arthur backed out), and her teacher Paul Verrall by Gary Merrill.
Harry Cohn bought the play for Columbia, with Holliday set for the lead and George Cukor directing. A script was done by Albert Mannheimer, but everyone involved agreed that it hurt the play. So Kanin was hired on to doctor it, on the understanding that he would receive neither pay nor credit (which helps you see that Brock was Cohn). In fact, Kanin managed to open up the one-set play and arranged several scenes in and around Washington, D.C., to good effect. Broderick Crawford was natural casting for Harry after his success in All the King’s Men, and William Holden was given the part of Paul—thus, in 1950, Holden had two films in which it is his delicate task to get divas to see the world straight (the other was Sunset Blvd.).
Of course, it is Holliday’s film, and Cukor and Kanin (with Ruth Gordon) had prepared the way for this with Judy’s scene-stealing debut in Adam’s Rib. Yes, Holliday was a comedienne, but Cukor always understood that that quaver in her voice was real feeling and might even be pain. It’s tempting to compare her with Marilyn Monroe, who might have done a decent job as Billie in the hands of a Cukor. But Marilyn’s emotionalism was vague. Holliday was always pitch perfect. She is a little like Meryl Streep in her accuracy, and both can be accused of overcalculation. But what’s clear is that an intelligent if muddled woman existed behind Hollida
y’s terrific acting, whereas Marilyn had a way of doing “dumb” to ward off any penetrating assaults (or the question of what was inside her). I think she might have grown tedious in Born Yesterday, whereas Holliday always understood the play.
The film is still a delight, despite some obviousness once the setup is digested. And it works because the underdog is so appealing. Holliday won the Oscar for Best Actress, defeating not just Bette Davis and Anne Baxter in All About Eve, but Gloria Swanson in Sunset Blvd. It was as if the Academy had asked itself, Which would you prefer in elected office?
There’s a remake, not just depressing and stale but without any sense of the politics as real issues. Melanie Griffith was reasonable as Billie, but John Goodman and Don Johnson were helpless as the guys.
Le Boucher (1970)
Have you noticed that butchers regard it as their right, and even their duty, to flirt lightly with their women customers? It is as if the cutting of bloodied flesh is too potent or magical to be accomplished without a word. The husband has provided, of course, but the woman will cook the meat, converting rawness to tenderness. And the butcher—the man whose apron is heavy with blood—has the special cut just for her. It was a dangerous exchange, and in our food markets now the meat is precut, wrapped in plastic. It needs only to be taken away. Anonymity has done it all. But I remember butcher shops where there was sawdust on the floor and the handsome butchers had a private word for every woman.
This is the background to Claude Chabrol’s magnificent and mysterious Le Boucher, set in the savage beauty of France’s Dordogne region, a part of the world where food is taken very seriously. There is a school-teacher, Hélène (Stéphane Audran). She certainly seems omniscient enough to be a great teacher, but she is not local. She wears Parisian makeup. She smokes in the street. She is quite content—I mean, she has no apparent neuroses—but she is from a more sophisticated place. And she knows that the butcher Popaul (Jean Yanne) is in love with her to such an extent that he is bound to betray himself.
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