'Have You Seen...?'

by David Thomson

  Popaul was a soldier once, and the butchery he was exposed to then has wounded him. It requires some steady bloodletting. You might assume that his work satisfies the urge, but no; Popaul is a killer, a murderer, and like a loyal dog, he almost lays clues about his guilt at the feet of his mistress. She knows he is the killer—doesn’t she know everything?—and yet she has discounted the possibility that he might have to kill her. Or is she perhaps tempting fate? Does she look at him with that serene insolence to see if his knife could carve her?

  Le Boucher is proof enough of Claude Chabrol’s intelligence, and his ability to let psychic depths unfold on the strength of very little action. It is only the first step of awareness to say that these two people need each other—that they are in love. But what is the balance of the desire? And is the film a tragedy or a work of ironic aplomb? It’s a picture to be seen repeatedly over the years, one that trains us to observe carving style and table manners. There’s a way in which it makes Hitchcock—the obvious model or point of reference—seem rather coarse.

  It’s not that Chabrol was always this good, but the point should be made that he is an expert, chronic entertainer and a very intelligent man. I think his work is variable, along with the degree of his caring. But somehow on those hot, dusky evenings in the Dordogne, when Stéphane Audran was still his wife, he knew he was at the brink of something wonderful and monstrous.

  Boudu Sauvé des Eaux (1932)

  At the end of Jean Renoir’s La Chienne, Legrand the failed lover and successful painter saunters away: He will not be blamed for killing his Lulu, but he cannot take credit for the pictures that are starting to sell. Allow that a year, or a generation, passes—perhaps it’s only a day. Now he is Boudu, gentle, amiable, yet dangerous, Paris’s subtle answer to King Kong, a tramp, or a bearded leaf carried by the wind or the current. Every poetic tie is possible, because Boudu is once more Michel Simon at the height of his creative power.

  In many ways, the mood of La Chienne has simply moved a notch or two up on the social scale. We are in the household of Monsieur Lestingois (Charles Granval), on the banks of the Seine. He is a bookseller, with a wife (Marcelle Hainia), a housemaid (Sévérine Lerczinska), and time to watch a splendid hulk of social rejection, Boudu, who then opts to enter the Seine. Boudu seems mildly suicidal, though he has an ineffable, unsinkable buoyancy that makes drowning seem very unlikely.

  In a splendid clash of heroism and awkwardness, Lestingois rescues Boudu and takes him into his home. This is exactly the kind of good-natured disaster to which Lestingois is prone. The same is true, I think, of Renoir as a whole, with whom motive or intention so seldom comes home straight and true. Irony, chance, accident are all prepared to do their creative mixing. It follows that there is a wryness, or ambivalence, in the film’s view of benevolence or the social responsibility that foreshadows politics. Renoir was only five years away from his Popular Front period, but Boudu is a warning note about making your charitable attitude to a tramp too earnest.

  Boudu is savage, priapic, uncontrollable. It’s not just that he will seduce wife or maid—and Simon now is as naturally lecherous as he was shy in La Chienne. He will butcher his new friend’s books. He will polish his shoes on the tablecloth. He threatens madness in the tranquil foolishness of the Lestingois household. He has to go back to the river. Long before Renoir’s journey to India, it is clear that Boudu is the river, the eternal fluidity that is a metaphor for passing time in which all anecdote and morality swim along.

  The camera moves from side to side, it gazes through dusty space, it links one room with another, and it tracks the back-and-forth of meetings. Film by film, you feel Renoir’s camera like a pen that is shaping the prose of classical cinema, the way that seeing equals description. That is why these very small pictures, sketches shot off the cuff, remain as fresh and piercing as great short stories. The American remake of Boudu, Down and Out in Beverly Hills, has so many of the elements in the original, just none of the air that holds them together and not a glimmer of the lyrical sadness that knows Boudu is, quite simply, not civilized.

  The Boy with Green Hair (1948)

  In the postwar breakup, they started making pictures that were like fairy tales. You could call The Boy with Green Hair a fable (it came from a magazine story by Betsy Beaton), in which green equals Red: Before the film started production, its producer, Adrian Scott, was subpoenaed by the House Committee on Un-American Activities, and its two writers, Ben Barzman and Alfred Lewis Levitt, were named in proceedings. Dore Schary invited Joseph Losey to come to RKO to make the picture when Losey was at M-G-M doing very little.

  Losey set to work and would later blame himself for letting the metaphor grow. In the original script, the green hair stood for racial prejudice, but as they developed the movie, its message became inflated until it stood for a vision of peace. At that point it took on aspects of being a kind of children’s crusade venture. Indeed, RKO sold it as that after their new owner, Howard Hughes, had done his best to iron out the message.

  So it’s a story set in small-town America, a place Losey associated with the bigotry of the country. He had wanted to go on location—even to his own hometown of La Crosse, Wisconsin—but the studio said they couldn’t afford that. Losey did manage to keep Ben Barzman on the set, but the loss of Scott was severe: He was regarded as a great producer-writer after Crossfire. He was replaced as producer by Stephen Ames, a businessman and a Technicolor stockholder. But that worked out well, for Ames supported Losey in every situation where he wanted Technicolor to try something they weren’t used to.

  George Barnes did the photography, and the sets were by Albert d’Agostino and Ralph Berger, though Losey used John Hubley to consult in the overall design. Losey had wanted to use 16 mm and blow it up to 35 mm, and that would have come close to halving the budget (about $900,000, eventually). As it is, the picture looks the way it should—like a kid’s vision of the world.

  The studio added a song to the sound track—“Nature Boy,” written by Eden Ahbez—and while a Nat King Cole version of it became a hit, the song did little to clarify the film’s subject. You still meet people who saw the film as kids and are still wondering why the boy’s hair turned green!

  Dean Stockwell was hired as the boy, and though Losey found him difficult and suspicious, he gives a fine performance. Losey had wanted the Irish music-hall performer Albert Sharp as Gramps, but the studio had Pat O’Brien with nothing to do, so he got the job. In other lead parts, RKO supplied Barbara Hale and Robert Ryan. Ben Lyon’s son, Richard, got a part, and the cast also included Walter Catlett, Regis Toomey, Charles Meredith, David Clarke, Billy Sheffield, Dwayne Hickman, and the young Russ Tamblyn.

  Brazil (1985)

  In the midst of Ronald Reagan’s America, Universal—Brazil’s American distributor—gave every indication of being unwilling to release this huge, untidy satire on a crushed state. A battle ensued in which critics Kenneth Turan and then Jack Matthews fought for the film, and its director, Terry Gilliam, went on many American talk shows (sometimes with the earnest Robert De Niro) to speak on its behalf. The subsequent book by Matthews is well worth reading as a portrait of studio indecision. But of course Universal had to be careful: Though it only shared in the investment with Fox (distributor in the rest of the world), the movie had cost $15 million at least. And movie companies are so fastidious.

  Well, the fuss has passed, and Brazil now stands as the prototypical example of the tricky career of Terry Gilliam. Yes, he had done other things before, like the Monty Python films and Time Bandits (which was a hit). But Brazil was a departure and probably the most personal picture he had done to date. It was a 1984-ish fantasy about a country—Brazil, or what you will—in which antique industrial mechanics had come to the aid of modern thought control in a most ingenious and alarming way. In turn, this was a very good vehicle for Gilliam’s teeming visual imagination, but an inadvertent demonstration of his problems with narrative.

  It was not an easy
picture to set up. But Gilliam fell in with producer Arnon Milchan and writer Tom Stoppard and, despite fundamental differences of approach, they got a screenplay—which Gilliam then offered to Charles McKeown to be improved (or to spell out those things that Gilliam “understood” about the material but had difficulty conveying).

  Twenty years later, after a series of Gilliam pictures in which the same problem of communication has shown through, one has to be a little wary of taking sides. Brazil is a visionary picture, often hilarious and frightening. Could it have been more coherent and more forceful? I think the answer is yes, and I don’t necessarily accept the argument that “coherence” is always going to impede or hobble “vision.” Terry Gilliam, I suspect, is an artist whose glorious talent may work best when he is executing everything himself. Put him down in a collaborative medium, and his chronic problems will recur. You can take the side of the artist or the system—or you can understand that one of the most severe tests in moviemaking is communicating clearly with strangers. That local test is a harbinger of the great directorial challenge: getting audiences to feel what you see.

  But Brazil is a major work, in which inventive exuberance is often at odds with the filmmaker’s wish to make grave and tragic points. Gilliam loves to do “art”—it’s like exercise, and it may be that he needs a very firm controller. The film is photographed by Roger Pratt, with production design by Norman Garwood (though I think a lot of its beauty comes from Gilliam, who sought out antique industrial buildings and turned them to modern use). The cast includes Jonathan Pryce, De Niro, Katherine Helmond, Ian Holm, Bob Hoskins, Michael Palin (brilliant), Ian Richardson, Peter Vaughan, Kim Greist, and Jim Broadbent.

  Breathless (1960)

  And so, after five short films and nearly a decade of writing on film, Jean-Luc Godard came to make his first feature film with a studied, aggressive, and dismissive new ease. Notably, he came a little after François Truffaut and Claude Chabrol, and he had both of them on board as helpers and guarantors of talent. But he had a producer, too, Georges de Beauregard, who said he was ready to help. So Godard cashed in on a promise, and Truffaut wrote a four-page outline about a young Frenchman and an American girlfriend who had had a summer together and shot a motorcycle policeman. With four pages from Truffaut (whose Les 400 Coups had been a hit at Cannes in the spring of 1959), Beauregard put up 500,000 francs (about $48,000). In return, he got Chabrol the job of “artistic supervisor.” A quarter of that budget was immediately passed over to Jean Seberg, the Otto Preminger star who had lingered in Paris after Bonjour Tristesse and who had married a young Frenchman, François Moreuil. Jean-Paul Belmondo came after that, and must have been paid far less—the first reason for his savage scowl.

  The two are like comic-book icons. He is razor thin and deeply tanned, in odd assorted clothes, smoking all the while, yet not inhaling—he leaves clouds of smoke wherever he goes. He is Bogartian, stopping at mirrors to perfect the mannerisms of a star only two years dead, but his lifestyle is that of the Bogart before the images he adores. For Michel Poiccard, alias Laszlo Kovacs, is impulsive, wanton, urchinlike, and given to antic, sensationalist behavior and runic, intellectual commentary on himself. Driving recklessly in the South of France, he finds a gun in the car he has stolen and shoots a cop. It is all very casual: We see the deed in the dappled, late-afternoon light, but it feels as remote as a column filler in an old newspaper.

  Then he’s in Paris with her—“New York Herald Tribune,” Patricia Franchini cries out, cropped, flirty, tee shirt and jeans, the American doll, with false eyelashes, perfect makeup, and Berlitz French. He tells her she is a tramp in words she doesn’t understand, and it is clear immediately that a Godardian misogyny—a dread of romance—keeps them apart. But they talk and they play bedroom games, and they play a kind of hide-and-seek with continuity errors and jump cuts. Young people in a movie had never looked like this: It was cool, and whether Godard would ever admit it or not, it had a deep debt to Americana (the film was dedicated to Monogram).

  They shot fast with hardly any lights in August and September of 1959, with Pierre Rissient as assistant director. At night they used Ilford HPS, a new stock, and there it was, tossed on a plate like a fried egg, the new Paris, the thing that held so many New Wave films together—their love of that bitter city. Raoul Coutard shot it (he was Beauregard’s man), and his astonishing skill was vital. So were the broken fragments of jazz by Martial Solal, and the laconic antiaffection that cut 2 hours and 15 minutes down to 90 minutes almost at random. That’s how the new editing worked. Breathless was a sensation, but it was nothing yet. Hardly a millimeter of Godard’s heart had been revealed.

  Bride of Frankenstein (1935)

  Just as Henry Frankenstein is seeking to create fresh life after death, so Universal—with a hit on their hands—struggled to think how the monster (dead at the end of the 1931 original) could live for another day. So they cut his last death scene from existing prints and trusted that the public would forget. John Balderston and William Hurlbut took on the new script, in which a mate should be found for the monster. James Whale was the director again—no one seems to have doubted that requirement—and he sought a little touch of respectability by having the same actress play both the bride and the figure of Mary Shelley in an 1818 prologue.

  Boris Karloff was also taken for granted, and the point of the sequel was to squeeze more value out of his pathetic personality. This time, against Karloff’s purist instincts, the monster would talk, smoke, and whistle a tune. As for the bride, Whale looked back on his circle of friends in London and picked Elsa Lanchester: bluestocking, cabaret artiste, and the wife of Charles Laughton. (When Laughton saw the film, he praised his wife’s pretty pointed ears.)

  Whale himself devised Lanchester’s look: the electrified hairstyle standing straight out from the head, and the body swathed in white muslin—a mummy, but sexy. Lanchester said she learned her character’s frightening, hissing way of speaking or uttering from the swans in Hyde Park. There was less of Henry Frankenstein (in part because Colin Clive had become an unpredictable alcoholic), though the teenage Valerie Hobson was cast as his ladylove. To beef up the “human” cast, Whale introduced Dr. Pretorius, “necromancer, scientist, and grave robber,” and cast Ernest Thesiger, one of the most open and self-mocking homosexual actors in the English theater. In his way, Thesiger is every bit as exquisite and far-fetched as the monster, and his wit brought a great deal of personality to the film, just as it was the first hint of smart skeptics making these horror films.

  Then there is the old blind man (O. P. Heggie) who takes in the wandering monster and teaches him smoking and music. Theirs is a wondrous odd-coupledom, and a partnership in which Whale’s own gay proclivities may be read. The new film had a rather lighter, more conventional photography, from John J. Mescall, as well as a complete and original orchestral score by Franz Waxman. In so many ways, Whale and Universal were bent on carrying the myth toward a new kind of reality—satirical, yet still frightening. But after this second film (another success), the story slipped back toward the gruesome and the crude. The idea that the monster might be a parody gentleman was forsaken, as if too alarming for the audience. But here, for a moment, we can see the monster and his bride as the ancestors of so many grotesquely happy pairings in television sitcoms. (Don’t all private worlds look a little odd eventually from the outside?)

  It is a sad reflection on Elsa Lanchester’s originality that this fierce beauty is probably the best-known work she ever did.

  The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957)

  The Cold War was especially bleak, and nuclear testing in the atmosphere recognized no limits. So the middle-brow idea gathered that war was a very bad idea and a cruel tease to the hopes of those who might promote it. And so The Bridge on the River Kwai says, Suppose that British prisoners of war detained in the jungles of Burma were ordered by their captors to build a rail line and a bridge. Then suppose that a British commander began to take pride in the good wor
k of bridge-building. Soon enough a commando strike force is organized to go upriver to eliminate this curious kind of Colonel Kurtz from Surbiton.

  When Sam Spiegel discovered the French novel, by Pierre Boulle, writer-director Henri-Georges Clouzot held the rights. Carl Foreman wanted to write it, and Spiegel got involved by finessing the blacklisted writer. Howard Hawks was considered as a director, but he judged the project poor box office—let the English do it, he said. And that’s how David Lean, essentially a director of small, literary films at that point, came into the reckoning. It was Spiegel’s special talent to get Columbia to fund the picture at about $2 million, despite the opposition of Harry Cohn.

  As it turned out, it’s intriguing to see the modest “irony” of the material opened up into an epic. That supposes two levels of action: the events at the camp, including the effective torture of Colonel Nicholson (Alec Guinness) by the Japanese, and the team (Jack Hawkins, William Holden, Geoffrey Horne) coming through the jungle.

  Foreman did the script with Michael Wilson. Jack Hildyard did the color photography, most of it in Sri Lanka, and Malcolm Arnold did the music. Like many British war films, the direction is very stiff, or fixed—it’s as if war immediately deprived Brits of their ironic faculty. Equally, the bridge building is rather routine, though the film does develop an unusual struggle of wills between Nicholson and the Japanese camp commander (Sessue Hayakawa). One trouble is that the eventual meeting is only being delayed, though Nicholson’s stubborn response is clearly predictable. Still, by 1957, the British prisoner-of-war-camp picture was so clichéd a genre that it is very hard to know how anyone really behaved. But there is a huge gulf between Holden in this film and the Holden in 1953’s Stalag 17.