'Have You Seen...?'

by David Thomson

  I suppose it’s a Western—there are cattle, wire fences, shoot-outs, and cowboy clothes. But it is more significantly the story of how Pearl is torn between gentle Jesse (Joseph Cotten) and rampant Lewt (Gregory Peck). In fact, Peck is far better than one might anticipate, and he is easily the most beautiful person in the film. There were sex scenes shot and cut, but it’s still not clear whether this was because they offended censorship or stretched Jennifer Jones’s “abandon” too far.

  All that said, the film is of a weird piece, with everything overdone, growling-beast music from Dimitri Tiomkin, a solemn narrative by Orson Welles, and a color scheme that is like the entire Kalmus family with fatally high fevers. You almost expect one of the lurid sunsets to catch fire in the projectors. It is beautiful, silly, and sexy, and for sure the film needs some kind of visual madness.

  I credit Vidor for the color, and we know the director conceived the sadomasochistic ending in which, fatally wounded, Lewt and Pearl reach out for each other across burning rocks. In the end, there is a ludicrous heat between them. As bystanders, the film has Lillian Gish, Lionel Barrymore, and Charles Bickford (very good), and no one is more adrift than poor Joe Cotten, who really gave years of his life to domineering men.

  The film cost at least $5 million, and it made that back—a tribute to advertising plans that called it “Lust in the Dust” and to the way Selznick formed a distribution company for this one film. So he took in cash but made a loss. At the same time, to slip past the bad reviews he foresaw, he released the film in a rush, multiple bookings years ahead of that scheme of the 1970s. Nothing worked. The film was a famous laughingstock, and deservedly so. But the violent color can still choke the laugh in your throat.

  The Duellists (1977)

  When Ridley Scott’s first film opened, the excellent critic Tom Milne warned, “Picturesqueness tends to be the downfall of The Duellists.” And it was painfully obvious that Scott had been not just raised but marinated in television commercials. Image after image from this picture (photographed in unending magic hour by Frank Tidy) seemed like advertising shots for the town of Sarlat and the Dordogne, Napoleon brandy, dark chocolate, truffles in autumn leaves, saddle leather, polished steel, and the dressing of beautiful women in 1810 frocks (all removed in time). The prettiness was delirious and inane and so showoffy as to risk the film’s being damned. But then the truth began to dawn: The obsessive handsomeness—claustrophobic, fusspot, morbid even—was a wondrous consort to the maniacal, humorless relentlessness of the story. It worked. It still does. Though you feel like a stuffed goose liver after seeing it.

  In 1800, Lieutenant Armand d’Hubert (Keith Carradine) of the Hussars is ordered to have a Lieutenant Gabriel Feraud (Harvey Keitel) confined to barracks for fighting a duel. Feraud takes offense and challenges d’Hubert to another duel. They fight and Feraud is wounded, but then the war carries them off in opposite directions. And so it goes on until 1816 (and the royalist restoration), with the ridiculous duel being renewed at intervals with an intensity that shows no sign of matching the aging in the combatants. Feraud is the madman in this. It is his brittle honor that demands death or satisfaction (though Feraud is innately dissatisfied and forever wronged). D’Hubert is more normal, more lazy, more inclined to forget. But he knows that nothing will appease Feraud—not even death, really. And so the two lives wait on each other.

  The film comes from a story by Conrad, “The Point of Honor,” and in this film the obsession is at least as funny as it is crazy. But obsession lends itself to film so easily. It is as if the destined plod of human journey and motive are allied to the succession of frames and the persistence of vision. I do not mean to be fanciful, but revenge is a topic that seems to breathe in film, and I do not think the daft reliability of madness in The Duellists would work as well on the page. Gerald Vaughan-Williams did the screenplay. Peter J. Hampton was art director. Ann Mollo did the set decoration and Tom Rand the costumes. William Hobbs deserves credit for the fights.

  Keith Carradine is not quite right (he’s too hip, too American), though that does make him seem more trapped. But Harvey Keitel is magnificent. This may be his greatest part. There are also several amused, languid men—Albert Finney, Edward Fox, Robert Stephens, Tom Conti—and a series of amazingly lovely women: Cristina Raines, Diana Quick, Gay Hamilton, Jenny Runacre.

  Sir Ridley Scott goes on, and he is a grand and versatile entertainer (Alien, Blade Runner, White Squall, Black Hawk Down) yet always likely to go on a prettiness binge.

  Earth (1930)

  You will have seen nothing like Earth, and so it is tempting to accept the words that come with the preservation of such films. And so the advice, or the warning, offered with Alexander Dovzhenko’s silent film is that “the story itself is secondary to the visually stunning and incredibly moving images.” I’ll come to the visual in a moment, but the story is not secondary. Made in the Ukraine, Earth is a propaganda film in which the machine from God is a rather crude tractor that may transform the working life of the peasantry in the area. One character, Basil, loves the tractor. After its first day of work, he literally dances in the village street in ecstasy. These are long shots at twilight, where the dust he kicks up is like gold, and the joy of the man is too directly dance-like to be resisted. Then he is killed—because the resistance to the tractor and to the larger organization of the farm system is very large. There will be a battle.

  And so this ecstatic 69-minute movie is an attack in that battle, and while I know far too little about the best way of farming the Ukraine, I have a most uneasy recollection that eventually millions died in the decision. So the story is vast, and part of its message is the question of how reliably this transcendent, poetic imagery can be trusted, or how far Dovzhenko has loaned genius and beauty to a harsh cause.

  That said, you have never seen land, sunflowers, apples, and burnished faces like these before. Dovzhenko does not often shift his frame (though he does track sometimes). He makes this film out of edited “stills,” in that the first composition in a shot lasts. But the rhythm of the editing is akin to the vitality of the images. At the very start a peasant dies like a man turning the last page of a book. Do people ever die that simply? I am convinced from seeing and feeling Earth that, yes, sometimes they do—and that perhaps they did in the Ukraine, where growth was the essential machine until the tractor came along.

  And once you yield to the power of form and light—to the shots of shiny grass waving in the wind; to the oxen, shot from a low angle as if they were battleships—then Earth is like a draft of water or sweet juice on a hot day. Are the people idealized? Yes. But without any feeling of contrivance or exploitation. You feel Dovzhenko loves these people—and one of the faces is that of his wife, Julia Solntseva, one of the great beauties in the history of film.

  Danilo Demutsky did the photography, and I defy anyone not to see and feel the passionate enthusiasm of early Bolshevism in it—it is like Dziga Vertov’s The Man with a Movie Camera (1927) in its direct transmission of wonder at how the world looks. That does nothing to alter the very forceful storyline of the film. But in things like the mourning of a wife—naked and helpless—there seems no veil or explanation needed. Let’s just say that Dovzhenko was from the Ukraine, the son of a peasant, and that his film was denounced by some authorities for being reactionary. Now you have to see it.

  Eastern Promises (2007)

  Gracefully, like a sweet assassination, as The Sopranos withdrew itself from our world—and perhaps gave a hint that the Italian mafia might be stale—here comes David Cronenberg’s Eastern Promises with the twenty-first-century version of offers not to be refused. The Russian mafia have landed, and with their wicked curved knives (ideal for opening an oyster or an enemy), with the deadpan cool that can stub out a cigarette on their own tongues, to say nothing of the wintry panache of Viggo Mortensen, we are equipped with a new villain we love to hate. And, as far as one can tell, this band has so much more footing in reality than the old Itali
an romancers.

  Eastern Promises is a very sly title for so magnificent a bloodbath, every bit as “academic” as A History of Violence—and look where that textbook approach ended. So maybe the first thing to be said is that, having gone down the long, clammy, and very unpromising backstreet of Spider, David Cronenberg seems to have looked in the mirror, noticed his gray hair, done some basic math, and asked himself whether he was compelled to make intractably private films forever… or could he start to have some fun? I know that Cronenberg for years gave off many hints of being above and beyond fun. His early work is fascinating, but his two Viggo Mortensen films seem to owe as much to Cronenberg’s shift in direction and identity as they do to the actor’s lazy-eyed patience, as in, I won’t kill you—just yet.

  Just like A History of Violence, Eastern Promises believes in narrative suspense and the moral content of astonishing action. The story is set in London. Naomi Watts, a hospital midwife, delivers a baby, and the mother, a teenage girl, dies. The doctor finds a diary and a clue that leads to a Russian restaurant in London. It is owned by Armin Mueller-Stahl, one of whose employees, Mortensen, has the task of looking after Mueller-Stahl’s unstable kid. Is the whole thing one great web of conspiracy? Yes. Will things culminate in Mortensen naked but for many tattoos fighting for his life in a Turkish bath? Yes.

  There’s a way in which the latent familiarity and the brutal shock of situations place this film in a genre tradition begging for exploitation. We might even get real Russians in the cast before long! The script, by Steve Knight, is very knowing, save for one concession to making us feel good. It would be unfair to point it out in advance, but you’ll see it and you’ll flinch. Never mind; this is noir material as fresh and foul as the insults on the lips of Chelsea F.C. supporters.

  Mortensen becomes a major star. Naomi Watts demonstrates her readiness to be secondary, and rather more tired than beautiful. Mueller-Stahl goes straight into the hall of fame for polite monsters. And it’s very nice to see Sinéad Cusack and, above all, Jerzy Skolimowski, in supporting roles. Vincent Cassel is outstanding as the unstable kid.

  East of Eden (1955)

  Several things have to be accepted at the outset. This is not Steinbeck’s novel—it covers only the “modern” section, and it omits altogether many people’s favorite character, Lee, the Chinese house servant. It is also a James Dean film, as if, for both artistic and commercial reasons, director Elia Kazan realized what he had in his hands and elected to side with Cal Trask, the Cain figure. Because of that, both brother Aron (Richard Davalos) and the father, Adam (Raymond Massey), suffer as characters or as objects of our sympathy.

  What’s left is a parable about the adorability of the Cain character—and, of course, there were reasons at the time for Kazan to see himself as a bad boy, a betrayer, a Cain. The Trasks live in the farming country of Salinas: Aron is a good boy with a very nice sweetheart, Abra (Julie Harris). Cal is a slouching, sly dark spirit; he feels unloved, awkward, and afflicted. Adam is a prig, upright, doing his best—and only readers of the book know that he lost his wife, Kate (Jo Van Fleet), in part because of her waywardness but also because he was a domestic tyrant.

  The time is the brink of America’s entry into the First World War. Adam is pursuing a quixotic attempt to freeze farm vegetables. The shrewd Cal, seeing war on the horizon, plants beans to make money. He gives that money to his father as a gift and a sign of love, no matter that his father—who serves on the draft board—is horrified at having to send young men to their death. There is a strange reversal in family affairs. Adam has a stroke. Abra turns to Cal. And Aron, lost, goes off to war.

  I have heard stories about young people today finding Cal a self-pitying bore. They have a point. But that’s a reading that altogether misses the extraordinary emotional force of the film in the 1950s, and the way Cal signaled the kind of outlaw kid from the sixties and seventies. You can see Dean acting if you resolve not to be involved, and there’s no doubt about his cunning, his wolfish unfairness. But to maintain that resolve is more than I can manage. There were some of us for whom Dean in this film was the determining and turning-point performance of the 1950s.

  Let me add that the film is also a sign of real art coming to Kazan. The color and the Scope (by Ted McCord) are very eloquent—for example, in the whole sequence in which Cal goes to Monterey on a foggy day to find his mother. And Jo Van Fleet gives one of several very fine supporting performances, along with Burl Ives, Albert Dekker, Lois Smith, Timothy Carey, and Barbara Baxley.

  Paul Osborn did the drastic adaptation and did it well. James Basevi and Malcolm Bert did the art direction. And Leonard Rosenman wrote a new kind of score, identifying with Cal as much as Kazan did in every shot. Dean is still amazing, but so is Julie Harris, who was older than Dean (thirty to his twenty-five).

  Easy Living (1937)

  Jean Arthur opened six films in a twelvemonth period, from April 1936 through March 1937: Mr. Deeds Goes to Town, The Ex-Mrs. Bradford, Adventure in Manhattan, More Than a Secretary, The Plainsman, and History Is Made at Night. This was the factory system at the height of its powers, when someone like Miss Arthur was expected to be as fresh as the first rose. Her contract with Columbia allowed her to do some outside films, and she told studio boss Harry Cohn she wasn’t going back unless her material improved. So she told Paramount she’d do a picture for them. About the same time, a screenwriter and nightclub owner took a story by Vera Caspary and turned it into a screenplay called Easy Living. His name was Preston Sturges. In her first scene, Jean Arthur was riding down Fifth Avenue on an open bus when a fur coat, thrown from an upper window, fell on her head. At last—a touch of class!

  Arthur’s character is named Mary Smith, and she is a very ordinary, decent, nice girl. But once she has a fur coat—though she seeks its rightful owner—she has moved up in the world as surely as it fell down. The assumption follows that she is loaded, important, and not entirely nice. She is probably somebody’s mistress. Mitchell Leisen got to direct the film, and he had the smart urge to leaven the wordplay a little with slapstick. After all, if you’re on a Fifth Avenue bus one minute and in a world of fur the next, anything ought to be able to happen. The result is one of the great screwball comedies, quietly—for 1937—nursing a whole set of questions about how much money, or its reputation, has to do with “easy living.” It’s a sweet, collapsible phrase; after all, it can mean dissolution, not far from Berlin in 1923, or just living with an easy state of mind. If you paired the film with My Man Godfrey, you’d have a beautiful portrait of money in New York—as well as a very happy audience.

  Edward Arnold is the rich man who tossed the coat. Ray Milland is his son, with whom Mary Smith clearly sees a way ahead. There is a great scene where Mary is shown a hotel suite that is deemed worthy of her fur coat it is a small palace designed by Hans Dreier and Ernst Fegté—and as she explores its shining white dimensions, she collapses in a chair and just says, “Golly!” It is one of the sweetest moments in Jean Arthur’s career, but it is also a desperate American attempt to keep its wits in the face of plenty and luxury. It’s a scene that should have played every day at the HUAC hearings as those beavers in defense of our nationhood searched for Red influence in our movies.

  The fur coat and the other clothes are by Travis Banton, Ted Tetzlaff did the photography, and the cast also includes Luis Alberni, Mary Nash, Franklin Pangborn, Barlowe Borland, and William Demarest. You can see the later Sturges stock company taking shape, and you can feel his naughty hand treating the stock market like a wobbling blancmange.

  Easy Rider (1969)

  In the late 1960s, the Roger Corman organization had made a number of “biker” films, including The Trip and The Wild Angels. Peter Fonda was on the road to promote The Trip. One night in a Toronto hotel, he was looking at a photograph of himself and Bruce Dern in that picture—he may have been on his own trip—and got the idea of a road picture, of two bikers and a drug deal. He called up his pal Dennis Hopper and outlin
ed the film. “You direct it,” said Fonda. “I’ll star.”

  Roger Corman was interested, but two things stood in the way: He wasn’t sure that Dennis Hopper could direct a whole film (history has hardly proved him wrong), and he was nervous about a picture that so clearly advocated the selling of drugs. So he hesitated. Whereupon Jack Nicholson told Hopper and Fonda to take their baby to BBS (Bert Schneider, Steve Blauner, and Bob Rafelson). They sat down with Schneider and said it would cost $325,000. Schneider wrote them a check on the spot, for The Trip and other biker pictures had earned serious money.

  You might not guess this from the film, but there was a script. It is Terry Southern’s position that he wrote most of it—for $350 a week and no points. Hopper and Fonda shared in the writing credit (and hogged the points), but Southern said it was he who took out the barnstorming, trick-riding part of the treatment and made it a drug-deal picture. He also strengthened the role of George Hanson, the lawyer who rides along with them, based on William Faulkner’s Gavin Stevens.

  So there it was, ready to go. But Dern (a man dogged by bad luck) turned down the Hanson role, wanting more money. Then the part went to Rip Torn, but he had another commitment and a short temper. So Jack Nicholson ended up in the role that altered his career.

  It was a road shoot, lasting seven weeks, traveling from Los Angeles to New Orleans. László Kovács did the photography, and the cast included Luke Askew, Luana Anders, Phil Spector (as the connection), Karen Black, Toni Basil, Robert Walker, and Sabrina Scharf, as well as people met on the road. The editing was assigned to Donn Cambern, but it was done by a committee that included Hopper and Fonda, Bert Schneider, Jack Nicholson, and Henry Jaglom.