Apparently, it was Mary Pickford who first suggested to Griffith the best-selling book Limehouse Nights, a collection of lurid stories by Thomas Burke. When Griffith read the book, he was struck by one story, “The Chink and the Child,” in which a wretched twelve-year-old girl, constantly abused by her illegitimate father, the boxer Battling Burrows, is taken in and cared for by Cheng Huan, “The Yellow Man,” lonely and sensitive, who lives in London’s Limehouse district and treats the child with a rare, exquisite delicacy. In the story, he kisses her. He contemplates her. But then Burrows finds out, and he descends on the scene of tranquillity. He beats Lucy to death. Then Cheng shoots the boxer and dies himself.
Griffith took this story, dropped the kiss, and raised Lucy’s age to fifteen. Even so, this is one of the first films in which the erotic charge in violence, the brooding affection in voyeurism, and the quality of torture are significant parts of the action. It is said that Griffith thought first of casting Carole Dempster (his girlfriend) as Lucy, but it is hard to credit that as a serious consideration. Lucy is a role not just crying out for Lillian Gish but almost unplayable by anyone else. Why? Because Gish’s own nature did not bring a sexual interpretation into play, and it is only if the scenes with the Chinaman are played as worship that they are tolerable. Equally, George Fawcett rehearsed in the role of Cheng Huan before being replaced by Richard Barthelmess. It is one of the great performances in silent cinema—spiritual, transcendent, melancholy—and hopelessly racist in ways that barely disguise the breathless sexual content in the prolonged scenes where Cheng Huan “attends to” Lucy. The kiss in the story was logical and proper, but it would have closed the film down.
That is one source of tension. The other is the quite shocking violence that Burrows (Donald Crisp) inflicts on the girl, a response in which the loathing is once more driven by smothered sexual feelings. The scene where he shuts Lucy in a closet is unbearably claustrophobic, so powerful that we want to escape the film. And it is a moment—the first in film history?—where you cannot miss the natural ties between the medium and cruelty. Billy Bitzer shot the film, but the still photographer, Hendrik Sartov, brought an artistic soft focus to many shots that is revoltingly beautiful. It’s the same old riddle: This is a film of such power, you begin to question the ethics of power—and the absence of any room left for thought by the enclosed tragedy and its reliance on cliché (as opposed to character). Anyone more imaginative than Gish might have shuddered to see the use being made of her.
Bugsy (1991)
Bugsy is what you might expect from Warren Beatty: a PBS tribute to the gangster as American entrepreneur, and an opportunity for this fatally shy actor to make one of our flashier scoundrels seem like a figure from Ernst Lubitsch. Of course, if you challenged Beatty that the picture is weighed down with sedateness and gentility, he would widen his eyes and wonder, “How can that be? I got Jim Toback to do the script.”
But Toback (that insouciant maverick writer-director, the enfant terrible of his own gossip) has seldom been able to do a picture about a man fucking every woman he sees or gouging enemies’ eyes without putting Mahler or Beethoven on the sound track. He is the Ph.D. hoodlum, the Harvard Rimbaud, that Warren always needed—and this film grows rather more out of their wary admiration society than from any notion that it would be sensible to work together.
Just like The Godfather and Goodfellas, Bugsy is a movie that aspires to the boy’s dream of being a gangster—don’t forget that Michael Corleone, given his choice, would rather sit in a deep chair, model superb silk suits, and droop just an eyelid to let minions know that so-and-so needs a knife in the back of his neck. And so the execution of Elliott Gould in Bugsy is done far away off camera, with shots ringing out like a loon in the night. It’s a pastoral killing.
It’s Beatty’s fond idea that Ben Siegel is really a great producer gently rising to his lifetime’s challenge: to found Las Vegas as the infinite money laundry his pals need. And Beatty does the visionary scenes with boyish passion—it’s like Clyde Barrow getting to be famous. Like Saul on the road to Tarsus, he sees the idea of the Flamingo as a burning bush waiting to go neon. And like the incredibly poor manager he is, he turns the surefire plan into an immediate disaster.
There is no cohesion—Beatty is as polite as Irving Thalberg most of the time, but then ready to be a quivering psychopath. (Do you like my quiver? I got it at Cartier.) The conception needs to be more satirical, more of a battle between Toback’s pretentious violence (which can be awesome) and Barry Levinson’s supposedly hip managerial style as a director. So Annette Bening is sometimes at a loss—but why not? The film never decides whether she is the swindler skimming away so much money or Ben’s true love. Really, the only way to play the love story is with Bugsy as the chump taken for a ride. But as you may recall, it was on this film that Warren and Annette found love—and that’s another blanket that takes the life out of their warm bodies.
Ben Kingsley is Meyer Lansky—it feels like Sir Meyer Lansky. Harvey Keitel is Mickey Cohen. Bill Graham is terrific as Lucky Luciano. Joe Mantegna proves that George Raft was a nonentity. Ennio Morricone copies some of his old music. The film got ten Oscar nominations in major categories and won nothing big. More or less, after this Beatty gave up work for marriage and family. It’s all very middle-class.
Bull Durham (1988)
It will emerge eventually that this book has omitted dozens of baseball pictures, from Pride of the Yankees to Eight Men Out, from Field of Dreams to Fear Strikes Out, from The Winning Team (Ronald Reagan as Grover Cleveland Alexander) to The Pride of St. Louis (Dan Dailey as Dizzy Dean). The essential reason for this neglect is that, as any real follower of the game knows, it has become a television pastime in which we follow not just the game itself but its off-the-field spin, and the general attempt to suggest that these narrow-minded geniuses are great guys. Sport has to be live. The spectator must wait for the ball to go through Billy Buckner’s legs or for Zidane’s astonishing chipped penalty to score in the 2006 World Cup final. Movies remake everything—and this is fine, because they allow us to improve on the past, on what we did and how fine we were (it is a dreamscape). But you cannot re-create sporting incidents without humiliating your players and trashing their ease.
Bull Durham is a little different, in part because writer-director Ron Shelton (who came close to a serious baseball career himself) went to the minor leagues for his setting: the second circuit of small, spiffy ballparks in provincial cities, where there is none of the nonsensical pay scales, the agenting of idiot players, or the fatuous spin put on their ugly souls. In the minor leagues, you have nothing to do but play the game for the love of it. This is in North Carolina, where you can still feel how far baseball was a country game.
Shelton is so good on the atmosphere that we pardon him his settling on just three players (and his relative exclusion of blacks and Hispanics—since 1988 even the big game has become increasingly Hispanic). The one is Bull himself (Kevin Costner), the catcher, the rugged philosopher (far closer to Gary Cooper than the fellow in Pride of the Yankees), who is trying to control and direct Tim Robbins, as wild a pitcher as you’re going to see. That much is routine. But then there’s Susan Sarandon as the team follower who takes it upon herself to educate one of the players in sentiment, feeling, and all those things that may be important when the career is over. What a great game it would be if some government grant provided for a Sarandon (circa 1988) to soften the hard edges on so many obnoxious players.
This film is a modest pleasure, but it has enough of the real thing to be persuasive. At the same time, one has to make some gesture to Kevin Costner’s beyond-the-call-of-duty commitment to baseball. Field of Dreams is pure fantasy, but one of the great male weepies and one of the most cockamamie pictures about rural life. Then there is For the Love of the Game, in which Costner delivers the title as a veteran pitcher and wins his girl around again. Of course, the family life of sportsmen varies, but sometimes it reaches deep into the
field of horror. Just think how often the baseball bat is a weapon in American movies.
Bullitt (1968)
You can imagine Clint Eastwood (who was born in Oakland, California, and raised in the Bay Area) looking at Bullitt and asking himself, “Where was I?” Take a rebellious but absolutely steadfast cop. Put him in San Francisco, and suggest in his own minimal lifestyle that he is a liberal of that era. But then establish his conservative credentials in terms of his attitude to the law in an age when criminals are finding more and more loopholes. Throw in the vexation of city bosses who exploit the law-and-order issue for their own campaigning. This kind of on-the-street cop has superior officers for whom he has a grudging respect, but in so many respects, he is a lone-wolf operator. He is not doing it for the money, nor for the girl. He isn’t even committed to the switchback circuit established in San Francisco—not as long as they let ordinary motorists clutter up the Grand Prix circuit.
Steve McQueen nearly let Bullitt go. “I never liked cops in my whole life,” he once said. “I figured they were on one side of the fence, with me on another.” But this was a film made for McQueen’s own production company, Solar. Though his friend Robert Relyea was credited as executive producer, McQueen made all the important decisions, including the hiring of Englishman Peter Yates to direct (McQueen had seen and liked Yates’s Robbery) and the script (by Alan Trustman and Harry Kleiner), taken from a novel, Mute Witness, by Robert L. Pike. It was McQueen who picked San Francisco (just to get away from Warner Brothers), who chose Jacqueline Bisset (there must have been a reason), and who discovered on a midnight motorcycle jaunt in the city that there were hilltops where a vehicle actually took off.
Bullitt and Delgetti (McQueen’s close friend, Don Gordon) are given the job of looking after a crook turned state’s witness, to keep him alive for the trial. Congressman Walt Chalmers (Robert Vaughn)—hiss!—is leaning on them hard to get this done. But whaddya know: Someone inside is working for the outside (a good reason why Frank Bullitt doesn’t talk to too many cops), and the witness is offed. Or was he the witness? Don’t worry. If you can’t follow the plot, the cars will soon be coming over the hills like seabirds looking for fish.
Scholars in San Francisco will tell you that the great chase scene is an immense cheat: One location cuts into another with impossible aplomb. Who cares, if you’re producing the film yourself and driving is what you really like and you know these ten minutes are going to be the money scene. The picture went way over budget, and it probably cost $1.5 million. Nuts, it had rentals of $19 million, and who took the biggest part of the $19 million? Well, probably Warner Brothers, but they had a battle on their hands.
So it’s daft and essential, and only a few nondrivers don’t watch it every couple of years. Also with Robert Duvall, Simon Oakland, Norman Fell, and George Stanford-Brown.
Bus Stop (1956)
The wisdom is out now that this is Marilyn Monroe’s best film. No, it’s not as good a picture as Some Like It Hot, but for Wilder, Marilyn was there without quite being in or of the picture. Whereas in Bus Stop she is intrinsic; she is vital to the structure and the feeling; it’s a movie about her.
A lot of this comes from writer George Axelrod, who managed to be infatuated with Monroe while holding the opinion that she was clinically nuts. He wanted to take care of her, and he reckoned in all honesty that in adapting William Inge’s play, he had improved on Inge. The play had opened in 1955, with Kim Stanley as Cherie and Albert Salmi as Bo, the cowboy she meets at a bus-stop diner in Kansas.
Once Axelrod and director Joshua Logan knew that they were doing the film with Marilyn, they acted accordingly. After Axelrod’s first draft, he worked with Logan to make Cherie a better fit for Marilyn, but they knew that the long dialogue scenes would be a grave test for her confidence. She never really questioned lines, but she had a terrible time remembering them. So Logan sometimes did dialogue scenes with an assistant directly feeding lines to the actress. They never cut, and they edited the conversations together later.
In addition, I’d guess that newcomer Don Murray presented very little threat to Monroe—she was better with actors who didn’t intimidate her. He was raw, and very effective in Bo’s dumbness—for once Marilyn was not the dumbest character onscreen. More than that, her tatty costumes and the film’s garish color scheme were very flattering to her. Marilyn was not naturally tidy, just as she didn’t often keep a trim figure. So blowsiness suited her, and Cherie wasn’t set up as a sexpot—she was a person.
The set piece added for the movie was the song “That Old Black Magic,” and it was Logan’s kind decision to film it live—Marilyn is actually singing—instead of in a playback where she is miming. He guessed that the miming would be a technical ordeal. And he found that in really singing, she flowered. It is perhaps her best passage in film, and proof that she excelled in songs.
Betty Field played the diner’s owner—onstage it had been Elaine Stritch—and the rest of the cast includes Arthur O’Connell, Hope Lange (who later married Don Murray), Eileen Heckart, and Hans Conried. It would be argued that Monroe never again handled dialogue scenes with such skill, and certainly there were occasions when her problems with simple script brought films to a standstill. Maybe Logan and Axelrod were unusually tender spirits. Maybe the role of Cherie was one that pierced all the barriers Marilyn liked to set up. Still, it’s a film in which she seldom puts a foot wrong, where she seems central instead of just a dirty joke or a curiosity.
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969)
Both made in 1969, Butch Cassidy and The Wild Bunch end in immense shoot-out battles south of the border, where our guys get it. Except that that’s not quite right. In Peckinpah’s film, the bunch are shot to pieces in the Mexican village, leaving just Sykes (the old-timer) and Thornton (the hunter). But in George Roy Hill’s film—or should we say the Paul Newman–Robert Redford friendship schtick?—the two guys are saved from fragmentation and death. They become a frozen still photograph, preserved in the aspic of legend. It would be interesting to hear a few Peckinpah characters watching a movie with an ending like that.
So we print the legend and shuffle aside the facts; the disease gets a bigger hold on us. Even in 1969, the apparent fondness for the Western in Butch Cassidy was tongue-in-cheek, a touch camp, and the very thing that was going to leave the genre stranded. You could argue that the film was a few smart, modern fellows having fun with the idea of making a Western—so William Goldman does a script that cunningly links period and immediacy, just as George Roy Hill pulls out every modish way of “placing” the past. As for Newman and Redford, well, they’re obviously pretending, aren’t they? They’re protected against the damage of believing in that stuff. So they’re updating it. That’s why Katharine Ross can look pretty much as she does in The Graduate, and why Hal David and Burt Bacharach can throw in “Raindrops Keep Fallin’ on My Head,” just so we don’t forget that this is 1969, when the hits kept coming.
And the whole thing was very pleasant, as easy on the eye and ear as Newman and Redford lost in the hope that they were doing something for the ages. Maybe they were: The film has an entertaining sheen, a painless ease, that keeps it in the repertoire. But I think its very success made it harder to do authentic Westerns, and in the eye of history I’m happy that The Wild Bunch stands beside it as an example of a great American movie—one that smells of corpses, not cologne.
Strother Martin is in both films, you may observe. In Butch Cassidy he is shot down just after he has proclaimed, “I’m a character,” and it is an unkind rebuke from a film that wants everyone and everything to be a self-captioning version of the legend. Whereas in the Peckinpah film, Martin is an odious, all-too-plausible man, brimming with a character we despise. It’s a crucial difference.
Butch won Oscars for its script, the Bacharach score, and that song, all of which are smart and fake, and for Conrad Hall’s photography, which is far more creative even if it did begin to show that “magic hour” migh
t be a marketable commodity (available as a spray in the Sundance Catalog). As for Newman and Redford, they were given fatal encouragement to stop thinking and start posing.
Cabaret (1972)
Cabaret, Sally Bowles, and Christopher Isherwood go on and on, but somehow it never comes out quite right. Cabaret was a 1966 Broadway opening (more than 1,100 performances) in which Joe Masteroff adapted the play I Am a Camera, by John Van Druten, itself adapted from Isherwood’s writings about Berlin in the early 1930s. But Cabaret was a musical, with music by John Kander, lyrics by Fred Ebb. Hal Prince produced, Jill Haworth was Sally Bowles, and Joel Grey was the master of ceremonies at the Kit Kat Club. In 1951, in I Am a Camera, Julie Harris had played Sally Bowles. That was filmed in Britain in 1955 by Henry Cornelius, with Harris playing Sally again.
The thing about Cabaret was to place as much of the action as possible in the club, in lurid, expressionistic settings that were like George Grosz in Matisse colors. And whereas the real model for Sally Bowles had been a modest performer in some pretty low dives, the Kit Kat now became a spiffy place, and Sally was… well, she was Liza Minnelli in the film, a star who could hardly claim to be going unnoticed. Indeed, it’s much more likely she’d be the talk of the town. But in the 1950s, Julie Harris’s Sally was a far more pathetic character than Isherwood had ever intended.
What’s missing in all these adaptations is the plain fact of Isherwood’s ego and homosexuality. Few lives have left less to the imagination. Isherwood pursued the lower levels of Berlin entertainment, looking for rough trade. Sally was just one of his acquaintances. And all the while, of course, Germany was falling apart, getting ready for you know what.
'Have You Seen...?' Page 23