'Have You Seen...?'

by David Thomson

  The finale does have a classic tension, and it actually uses the space at the foot of the bridge very well. As to what the whole thing means, the film’s attitudinizing is so much stronger than its logic. It was an enormous hit. Although, at $2.8 million, it had gone badly over budget, it would earn over $65 million eventually. Nominated for eight Oscars, it won seven: Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor (for Guinness), plus screenplay, music, photography, and editing awards. The only loser was Sessue Hayakawa, but it was plain in this movie that his side’s point of view was less pressing.

  Brief Encounter (1945)

  This is a film in which two married people meet at a railway station and fall in love, a film that ends with the woman of the pair and her dull, decent husband embracing after she has “been a long way away.” The other man, a doctor (Trevor Howard), is going off to Johannesburg with a wife and two sons (none of whom is ever seen), and I cannot detect any evidence that the woman (Celia Johnson) is going to follow him. Except in her heart and her dreams. And that is exactly the point about a pair of “lovers” who never actually make love, but who meet at the railway station, have lunch, go to the cinema, and sometimes drive out to the country to stand together on a humpback stone bridge. They are unlucky, if you like. Their dutiful lives have been interrupted by a tempest of feeling—a most unfortunate encounter. Or is it the light of their drab lives?

  Brief Encounter does not go away, or date, even if it was always on the edge of self-parody and coming at the end of a war where adultery and divorce had begun to get under way in Britain, as anywhere else. It is a film with two warring winds: the heady romanticism of Rachmaninoff’s Second Piano Concerto, played by Eileen Joyce, and the precision and the grim clerical correctness of the railway system, where the trains come on time and the refreshment-room liquor license is scrupulously observed. Of course, each wind has its opposite: Ms. Joyce has to play the Rachmaninoff correctly; and in the railway station, the stationmaster (Stanley Holloway) will smack the barmaid (Joyce Carey) on the bottom when he gets a chance. It’s a theorem of order and explosion, yet the one thing the film omits (and it would be telling) is ruinous bomb damage in the provincial towns where the action plays. Didn’t that disorder edge lives into madness?

  The words are Noël Coward’s (it derived from a one-act play, Still Life), and just as surely as Coward loved the prim clichés of the middle class, so he is a harbinger of Pinter. Coward, David Lean, and Anthony Havelock-Allan did the script. Coward was a producer, too, and Ronald Neame gave a big assist. Robert Krasker shot it as a film noir: The majority of scenes are nocturnal, etched in shadow, and leaning toward the resolution in Anna Karenina. Trevor Howard and Celia Johnson are heartbreaking—I can’t quite omit the fact that she resembles my own mother. So I wonder about lives I ignored as easily as the stupid husband. And finally this, for what it’s worth: Lean was a Quaker, raised on order, and he went through wives like Len Hutton losing batting partners in Test matches against Australia.

  So is this a call to madness, or is it the last and gravest insistence on duty as part of the just war? It is a movie that waited for the lampooning of Monty Python and others. Yet it is an experience that survived that assault. Are we here to keep ranks or to explode them? I don’t think Lean could make up his mind, and the anguish shows in Celia Johnson’s face as if she were Sophie with her choice.

  Brighton Rock (1947)

  You can’t really talk about Brighton Rock without giving away the ending—but that’s because the ending they went for sells out the picture. Not that the filmmakers are to be blamed. On the contrary, they filmed the book faithfully, only to see the official censor in Britain step in to correct their work.

  Graham Greene’s novel was originally published in 1938, and it’s important to stress that its world is that of the thirties, when Brighton was a raffish, exotic place, smart yet tawdry, in a country otherwise set in gloom. It features the romance and the marriage of a boy gangster, Pinkie, and a girl, Rose Brown. He marries her to prevent her from giving evidence in a possible murder trial. But the relationship is complicated in that they are both Catholics with an unusual sense of the nature of guilt. It may have been to escape that odd overlay that John and Roy Boulting (director and producer) sought a treatment from the fashionable playwright Terence Rattigan.

  The result was reckoned to be far too pleasant, with a weird happy ending. So the Boultings then turned to Greene and asked him for a screenplay of his own. Greene obliged, and above all the resultant film catches the tense mood of the seaside town and rival gangs. Without too much trouble, it became a postwar film, coinciding with the cosh and razor gangs that were prevalent in England after the war. But Greene, naturally enough, included all the Catholic references. To be brief, Pinkie, on his way to death, leaves the very innocent Rose with a recording made at a pier stall. What it actually says is to this effect: I want you to think I love you… but I hate you. This is true to Pinkie’s evil, and it is a shocking conclusion. The British Board of Film Censors could not endure it, and the Boultings were compelled to reshoot the ending so that the record sticks and repeats on “I love you.” Does everyone feel better?

  The greatest failure of this ending is that it betrayed the startling performance by Richard Attenborough as Pinkie. He was twenty-four at the time, though he looked younger. But it is a fearsome performance, one of several throughout his career. Carol Marsh plays Rose, and it is, in truth, a very tough part, chiefly because Rose is more a symbol than a real teenager. Hermione Baddeley is Ida, the woman who helps track Pinkie down, Greene felt she was too theatrical, but I think she works. The rest of the cast includes William Hartnell, Nigel Stock, Wylie Watson, Alan Wheatley, and Harcourt Williams.

  The American version was not censored (the film was called Young Scarface). That gives you the idea of how it was sold and removes the great difficulty of explaining the sticks of jaw-breaking confectionery known as Brighton rock.

  Bringing Up Baby (1938)

  The shooting of Bringing Up Baby lasted ninety-one days, which was some forty days over schedule and ridiculous—unless they were having fun. People at RKO were shaking their heads in a gloomy manner long before the film opened. The overages to Cary Grant and Katharine Hepburn had pushed the budget to nearly $1.1 million, and the wiseacres knew that no Hepburn film had a chance of recovering that. Moreover, they pointed out, in a fairly simple (if insane) story involving a few people, a leopard, and a dinosaur skeleton, how could it have gone forty days over schedule? So the film, which grossed $715,000 in the home market, was doomed. It was a loser and a contributor to Hepburn’s reputation as “box-office poison.” Yet maybe it’s the most fun ever had in Hollywood.

  I am writing this entry shortly after having attempted Greed—and I feel driven to some comparisons. Greed is a famous ruin (if that’s what you want to see) that lost about the same amount of money as Baby. Yet Baby survives—which is a plus. What’s left of Greed is still, I think, a momentous film. And that is often put down to Erich von Stroheim’s rebellious daring. He defied the studio system because he wanted to tell the Truth. But look at Baby with wise, fresh eyes, and I think you will have to agree that its sentiments and its philosophy are more daring than those in Greed. Indeed, it says that life is lunacy, so that the diligent reassembly of a dinosaur skeleton (the pursuit of knowledge) means very little compared with getting your bone into a warm box. Having fun. And the film survives. And it is just a touch funnier than Greed.

  This is not an attack on Greed but an effort to suggest that Hollywood is seldom more usefully serious than in its best comedies. You can dismiss Bringing Up Baby by saying it is “only” screwball and by pointing out that leopards hardly happen in Connecticut. The advice to people to have fun of a certain kind in 1938 may be judged frivolous, or it may be the acme of common sense. But do not be deceived: Within the magnificent frolic, the inspired and inventive dementia (that’s what needed an extra forty days), Baby speaks about life, energy, and the equation
of the two. And when David Huxley (Grant) admits to Susan (Hepburn) that the collapse of his skeleton, his engagement, and his rather grim, glued-together life hitherto has been “fun,” something profoundly American and movie-ish is being offered. It’s up to us whether we take it or leave it.

  Dudley Nichols and Hagar Wilde did the script. Russell Metty photographed it so that no one could miss the noir gathering in the Connecticut woods. The support players are Charles Ruggles, Walter Catlett, Barry Fitzgerald, May Robson, Fritz Feld, Leona Roberts, and George Irving, with Jack Carson and Ward Bond, as well as a dog and a leopard. The entire venture was overlooked by the Academy, but it still feels as if it was made last night.

  Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia (1974)

  This is the last real film by Sam Peckinpah, and probably the least known—early reviews were so bewildered and so affronted by its violence and its singular interest in Mexico. But this is the last film sustained by a large parable-like arc in which honor surpasses money, and in Warren Oates’s clear impersonation of Peckinpah himself it is a tribute to a dying breed. That had always been the termination point in Peckinpah’s legends, but here he finds the duality of Mexico—ancient and primitive, yet lit up by progress—his perfect setting. Death is there from the start: Alfredo Garcia will never say a word. His head is just one more Mexican artifact, provenance unknown but suspicious.

  A Mexican boss, El Jefe (Emilio Fernández), has a daughter who has been made pregnant by Alfredo. The boss offers a million dollars for the seducer’s head. Two businessmen take up the quest, Quill (Gig Young)—though Quill says his name is Fred C. Dobbs—and Sappensly (Robert Webber). In turn, these men offer $10,000 to Bennie (Warren Oates), piano player in a bar, to find Alfredo. He goes off with his doomed girlfriend, Elita (Isela Vega), because she used to know Alfredo, too. Many corpses later, Bennie will die a spectacular death, having forgotten to carry away the million dollars.

  Bennie is driven by the loss of Elita, one of the most poignant and complex heroines in Peckinpah’s work. But behind Bennie’s dark glasses, his cheap patter, and his shark’s grin, he has always known that the whole search for Garcia was a pretext. Deep back in the film there is an ideal world. It consists of a love relationship, some good drinking, a car on the open road. But Bennie knows that its benefits have been corrupted, and he forms a bizarre, ghoulish brotherhood with Garcia and his severed head. It is the only secure male partnership in this testament of a director who has given up on everything.

  Scripted by Gordon Dawson and Peckinpah, the film has Helmut Dantine as executive producer and as one of the gangsters. The death wish had overtaken Peckinpah by now. He would mouth any lie to get his money, and then he would revile the system. Bennie is forced to watch his girl be raped. He is buried alive. He is blown to pieces. But he delivers the head and, in effect, does it for free.

  Coupled with macho attitudes, this fatalism can easily win enemies for Peckinpah. That’s how this picture was dismissed. But you have to study the passing beauties it uncovers (photographed by Alex Phillips, Jr.) to appreciate Bennie’s torched appetite for life and the pain he feels for all the opportunities that have passed. Peckinpah was drunk on spirits just as his pictures are drunk on the fading light. And drunkenness leaves one terribly vulnerable to being juvenile. But in a cinema that so often makes an idiot of itself over strong men, Peckinpah had no rival in fashioning wasted trash who trusted no one but themselves and knew that worse times were coming. It’s not just his hero that is dying; it’s the prospect of any more honest films.

  Broadway Melody of 1940 (1940)

  It is too much to ask a film to be perfect, or even good, most of the time. The process is so inherently flawed that we must be prepared for twenty minutes of fragrant sunshine in an otherwise overcast afternoon. It is enough to remember the day by. And it is another lesson: Be alert, for your life’s sake. You must see, otherwise the thing may go unnoticed. So if you happen to be writing Mahler’s Eleventh Symphony on that afternoon, don’t miss the 19½ minutes of perilous sunlight as the gray clouds prepare their fatal attack.

  But with films, it is our habit to say that this one is good, that one a masterpiece, whereas maybe the most truthful approach would say that in John Frankenheimer’s I Walk the Line there are two or three minutes when the look on Tuesday Weld’s face is from some other film, a film made by William Faulkner, while the rest is, well, decent filler. I think once we got into that way of looking, we could all build an anthology of moments while admitting that elsewhere a film rests or glides downhill. So, in Broadway Melody of 1940 (a 102-minute picture), there is 9 minutes and 43 seconds of “Begin the Beguine.”

  It is a Norman Taurog film—good for you, Norman. Suffice it to say that out of some very silly plotting maneuvers, Fred Astaire and Eleanor Powell (his partner after Ginger but, alas, for only one film) come together. The movie is black and white, and the beguine sequence (music by Cole Porter, of course) builds as follows: A soprano sings the song, giving tasteful vent to its exotic atmosphere. Then Fred and Eleanor appear in the mid-distance, he in a Latin dance costume, she in a long white dress, to do the beguine. The movements are sinuous, Latin, and very romantic. And we steadily see them reflected in the dark, lacquered floor. There is then a brief interlude as four women pick up the song, and then it happens.

  Fred and Eleanor come back, in the foreground now—he’s in a white tux, black tie; she’s in a swirling white frock that stops at the top of her calf. Now it’s a flat-out tap version of “Beguine,” one of mounting speed and exuberance, with a gaiety and an energy so great that if you’d been Hitler in 1940. you might have looked at this and called a halt. Fred and Eleanor had no artillery, no cavalry, no infantry. But they had the assurance to do this dance as if in the front parlor, for millions of people. And as it ends, there’s a quite enchanting moment where the dancers stop and Eleanor’s loose white flower of a frock keeps dancing for a second and a half.

  The film was made at M-G-M, and I will not weary you with the story or claim that Eleanor Powell was an actress of any great note. George Murphy is the second male lead. And it is heaven. I see no reason why there couldn’t be a small corner in your house where this scene is playing on a loop all the time. After all, if you had a Rembrandt, you’d put it on your wall for as long as you could see, wouldn’t you?

  Brokeback Mountain (2005)

  In the summer of 1963, two pretty simple cowboys—Ennis Del Mar (Heath Ledger) and Jack Twist (Jake Gyllenhaal)—get the assignment to herd sheep on Brokeback Mountain. We might be on the brink of one of the unasked questions in Western mythology: How boring was it to be a cowboy? Well, so boring that they start to have sex—though these are guys so simple and so strict in their upbringing that they discount love from the outset. They are fucking the nearest thing in sight.

  Back in “civilization” (small-town Wyoming), they revert to type: Ennis marries Alma (Michelle Williams); Jack goes back to Texas and marries Lureen (Anne Hathaway). They have family lives. But the two cowboys, once separated, are in love, even if they hardly know a way to express it. Over twenty years, they have a few seasons together, and then Ennis learns that Jack is dead. The story is about an accident, but in fact Jack was killed by a homophobic gang.

  This comes from a story by Annie Proulx, which is terse, tight-lipped, and fatalistic; there is less “love” in the story than there is in the movie. Ms. Proulx is a very fine writer, in part because her own sensibility is so violently at odds with that of the Wyoming she describes. Not that the story is an attack on Wyoming. It’s more a matter of don’t be too surprised if these things happen to you. It’s a kind of writing that doesn’t need two earnest, good-looking, and very smart young actors as the boys—and if you don’t think they’re smart, look again and see how much they can load into underplaying.

  What that means is that Brokeback Mountain doesn’t work for me as a movie. Why? Essentially because the yearning it invokes is so great that there’s no reason why these t
wo thwarted lovers don’t quit Wyoming and go off to Los Angeles together. Still, there are those who feel that the script (by Larry McMurtry and Diana Ossana) and the direction (by Ang Lee) are so profound that the social importance of the film’s subject carries all before it.

  But what is the subject? That gays should be able to live as they like? That these two guys need to distinguish between love and satisfaction? Or that the general level of education in Wyoming is a disgrace? Proulx’s story is a splinter pushed under the skin. Lee’s film is a raft on which poor boys may sail to freedom. My own guess is that good movies should not have such a reliance on timber, whatever form it takes.

  Rodrigo Prieto did the photography, and you will hardly be surprised to hear it’s like an ad for Wyoming. The acting is heartfelt, though I feel the actresses come off best, with far easier roles. As for Lee—who has begun to look less like an artist lately—I feel only his detachment. My guess is that ten years from now this will look like a very odd picture.

  Broken Blossoms (1919)

  If you want to give a young modern audience the chance to appreciate D. W. Griffith, let me suggest passing over Birth of a Nation or Intolerance. Show them Broken Blossoms instead. But go carefully: With too many films like this, there’s not enough air to breathe. For it is cliché and melodrama raised to the level of tragedy.