'Have You Seen...?'

by David Thomson

  Not even their loved ones would accuse the Coen Brothers of consistency, and for myself I gave up long ago hoping for a “straight” picture from them—one they believed in and expected us to treat with the same respect. On the other hand, there are times when their sense of pastiche strays out of play on that side of the field: The Hud-sucker Proxy, The Man Who Wasn’t There, The Ladykillers. These are rather grim occasions, so we must all recollect those days when the pastiche and the pistachio are perfectly in balance: Miller’s Crossing (where the levels of satire do not impede the Dashiell Hammett force of the original) and Fargo, where absurdity and revulsion are hand in hand.

  The wintriness of it all is beautifully captured by Roger Deakins, and the production design by Rick Heinrichs is hideous in just the right way. Out-of-date disco music burbles on throughout the film. And as always, the Coens did everything else—the venerable Roderick Jaynes is once more credited for the editing, but I think that’s only a way of paying some of the blackmail money for a matter that really should not be discussed any further here.

  Many people treasure every stammering self-contradiction from William H. Macy as Jerry, but I would add the real moral shading that remains. He is a scoundrel, and in the end amiability is as nothing. Steve Buscemi and Peter Stormare are to die for, literally. I adore Harve Presnell as the father—he feels and we feel he should be singing his lines. And the cast is right all the way down the line. But is that enough for Frances McDormand as Marge, probably the smartest cop on the American screen in the 1990s? Well, some have contemplated charging the Coens with kidnapping—with shanghaiing a wife (Joel’s) and sister-in-law so she can only appear in their films. They have made grudging concessions over the years. Still, I would work her till she drops. She got the Oscar, and I hope she’s allowed to have it two days a week at least. The screenplay won, too.

  Fatal Attraction (1987)

  There was a short era in which Michael Douglas was our Joan Crawford. He resembled Joan because he yearned to be a man to the full, a career man, a man with independence, and yet a man who was sometimes carried too far by the zeal of his identity. Thus, in Adrian Lyne’s Fatal Attraction, he was Dan Gallagher, a happily married man and a publisher. Of course, we ought to have caught that clue: It was already too late for a man to be happy and a publisher. Let us simply say, then, that Douglas was ideally cast, with a wife, Beth (Anne Archer), and a child and a job that expressed the cutting edge in his strong gaze. (I am not being ironic or facetious: Just imagine for a moment being the son of Kirk, looking in the mirror as a child and seeing the daft, helpless rhyme but knowing that Kirk will always outstare you.)

  Anyway, wife and child go off to Long Island (God’s gift to adultery). And it’s not long before Dan’s imprint gets a new employee: Alex Forrest (Glenn Close), whose hair is done by the woman who did the Bride of Frankenstein, and who is just the kind of temptation that is too much for Mike. They have a wild night in her loft apartment that involves things like sitting in her sink with the water running. This may not sound fantastic, but Mike does “fantastic” every bit as well as Joan did: “I know this is wrong, but I have to do it.”

  Fatal Attraction was written by James Dearden as an enlargement of his own short film, Diversion. Dearden gets the screenplay credit, but we know that Nicholas Meyer did a good deal of work uncredited, and we know that the producers, Stanley Jaffe and Sherry Lansing, Lyne, and everyone else was in great confusion as to how to develop the setup and end it.

  Alex turns out to be unusually needy. She says they are in love—and it did look like movie love. She says she wants Dan. She says she understands him—and you can believe that. Until that point, the story is so interesting it could take many different endings. After all, a solid marriage has been undone. Why shouldn’t mad sex have its fling? Suppose these scumbags are in love? The film rather shrinks from its feminist brink by having Alex turn nuts, as screwed up as her hair, and dangerous. The film then becomes a mere suspense melodrama—though not a bad one.

  It works because Glenn Close eats the film up and because it gets at a true and beloved weakness in Michael Douglas. A man I know said it was every man’s worst nightmare, which suggests that too many men in the 1980s were worrying about the wrong thing. But there’s no doubt that the movie hit the adulterous portion of the nation right in the privates. Everyone was nominated for an Oscar except Mike—but he was winning that year in Wall Street: it cost $14 million and did $70 million in U.S. rentals.

  Fat City (1972)

  Whenever you hear someone telling people about the great run of films America made in the early 1970s, and they get to the list, and they begin to feel fatigue, just wait for a pause and say, “And Fat City. John Huston’s Fat City.” At that point the kids frown, and they admit they’ve not seen Fat City. “Right,” you say, “and you never even heard of Fat City!”

  People were saying that Huston hadn’t had a good film or hit since, well, since too long. Then producer Ray Stark gave him the go-ahead to do a low-down boxing picture. Huston picked Leonard Gardner to adapt his own novel, set in the hot towns in California’s San Joaquin Valley, about two boxers: Billy Tully, on the way down, and Ernie Munger, on the way up. If anyone had read Gardner’s book apart from Huston, they’d have known it was a big downer. At first, there was thought of Marlon Brando as Billy, but he wasn’t interested, so Stacy Keach got the job. Jeff Bridges was then cast as Ernie after an “audition” where all he had to do was meet Huston in the Prado, look at some pictures, and chat.

  The result, filmed largely in Stockton (design by Richard Sylbert), is probably the most honest boxing picture ever made, with lovely shabby color photography (by Conrad Hall) that looks like paper used to wrap a burger. Huston had several real fighters around to help (Jose Torres, Curtis Cokes, Sixto Rodriguez), and he liked to put his actors in the ring with the pros sometimes so that we’d feel we’d seen the real thing. In addition, Huston was not well; this was one of the first films where he was reported sitting on the set with an oxygen cylinder as his squeeze. Added to which, Stockton is the sort of location that many directors would pass on.

  Still, we haven’t got to the thing that people recall about Fat City, which is Susan Tyrrell—fat, boozed, blowsy, and so good as Billy’s would-be girlfriend, so out of her mind with hope and depression, so used, so soiled, so lifelike, you could conclude that every movie ought to be done again. Candy Clark is also very good as the girl in Ernie’s life.

  And it’s a film with a moment. There was a 2 a.m. call at a café in Stockton. The crew set up. Huston seemed to be asleep. “All of a sudden his eyes bolted open, and he said, ‘I’ve got it. Have you ever been at a party when for a reason everybody just stops? When all of a sudden it’s all a tableau? You’re alone in eternity for a moment?’ ”

  The cameraman said they could do it as a freeze-frame. No, said Huston, “I want the cigarette smoke to continue going. I don’t want it to look like a stock frame. I just want everybody to stop.”

  As Bridges put it, “Everybody thought he was in a trance, receiving messages from god knows where.” And he really hadn’t made a good film for years.

  Faust (1926)

  Faust has been with us for centuries as a mythic narrative model. We have it as drama, opera, ballet. It fits every medium. And it is, surely, the underlying impulse in so much movie history: that of a genius who is given the world—limos, blondes, and terrific money—in return for his talent. Indeed, you can get yourself into a state of mind that reckons nearly every interesting movie ever made is a version of the Faust situation: Citizen Kane (we will give you everything, young man, but see how everything only reminds you of loss); The Godfather (so you want to be head of the family—prove it by destroying the family); Sunset Blvd. (so you want a screenwriting job—here it is); City Lights (you want the blind girl to see—all right, but then she won’t notice you); Sullivan’s Travels (you asked for reality?).

  So it’s intriguing that the direct assaults on Faus
t have been very few, and more remarkable that if you want a movie that “does” Faust properly, you need to go back to the F. W. Murnau version, which is eighty years old. It was made for Ufa, and in fact it was Murnau’s last German picture. A month after Faust opened in Berlin, its director was in Hollywood. Lotte Eisner suggests that the first thought at Ufa was to have Faust directed by Ludwig Berger; that plan involved Conrad Veidt as Mephisto and Lillian Gish as Gretchen. But Eisner says that Emil Jannings was determined to play Mephisto and reckoned that Murnau was his most likely supporter.

  Murnau worked from a script by the poet Hans Kyser that went back not just to Goethe but to older versions of the legend. And we know that Murnau did a lot to amend that script and that he brought into the film its extraordinary romance with light. From the outset, as we see the great bat of Mephisto over the German city, this is a film that thrills with light and shadow and the ravishing ways in which light can be diffused. It’s clear from the film that just as the Devil was dark, so Faust meant light to Murnau—and the conflict operates in those terms. This makes it (thanks to the photography of Carl Hoffmann) one of the most intensely beautiful of the silent films (yet one that needs good prints if it is not to seem blurred and misty to a ludicrous degree).

  The sets are by Robert Herlth and Walter Röhrig, and they are, once more, surfaces for the light. So it’s intriguing to see Murnau’s Faust and Sunrise together, for the latter is the same light and dark but as if those spirits had sprung from man alone, without divine assistance. Gösta Ekman plays Faust, and Camilla Horn replaced Gish as Gretchen. That is a place to remind the reader of a brilliant 1982 documentary, made by Hedda Rinneberg and Hans Sachs, in which the elderly Ms. Horn watches scenes from Faust. Her responses are not just those of an actress and Narcissus. They give a powerful sense of how a German audience in 1926 read Faust: as legend, as horror story, and as modern morality play. (It was not that they didn’t have another real-life version about to open.)

  F for Fake (1974)

  This book is not meant to include documentary films, and F for Fake may fit under many people’s definitions of documentary. After all, isn’t it at least an essay on the matter of fraud, as witness the forged masterpieces of Elmyr de Hory, the Clifford Irving autobiography of Howard Hughes, and many events in the career of Orson Welles himself, not least the furor in 1938 over the radio broadcast of The War of the Worlds? This is a nonfiction film in which Welles offers to tell the truth for just so long before he yields to his chronic destiny—storytelling—with an amazing shaggy-dog tale that seems to implicate Pablo Picasso and Oja Kodar.

  More than that, with its three-card swiftness of hand, its constant editing stealth, and the several moments in which someone or other looks at us with an arched eyebrow and asks, “Are you believing this?” there is none of the comforting gravity of documentary. This is the work of a man who, very early on, made the best newsreel obituary there has ever been, for a man who never lived. Documentary for Orson Welles is like a magician going before an audience, his hand on his heart, beginning with “Ladies and gentlemen…” And expecting to be believed. Documentary is the routine examination of the sleeve, and the history of sleeves, as a nudging reassurance that of course there’s something up there even if you can’t see it. Magicians hardly deal in documentary, for it is against their religion to give evidence on how the tricks are done.

  In fact, the film doesn’t give you enough time to really judge the value of de Hory’s paintings, just as it doesn’t allow you enough of Irving’s book to decide whether it was impressive—and a fake autobiography could still be a valuable biography. So Welles is gracious and friendly to the other magicians without ever quite taking them under his black cloak. His own magic, in this film and all the others, is what we treasure, and all he is doing really is to tell us to believe in story because it’s the most effective way of getting at truth. That’s why Welles always knew that Citizen Kane was a game when it came to talking about William Randolph Hearst or Chicago financier Harold McCormick or any of the others who may have been Kane’s inspiration—but a profound, predictive truth in the case of George Orson Welles.

  There’s something else to be said about F for Fake, which is that by the early 1970s, there was perhaps no better way of doing fresh fiction than as pseudodocumentary. The comparison with Nabokov’s Pale Fire is telling, for that fraudulently academic presentation of a poem was itself a whole world done in fiction. But there are other comparisons still: with Jean-Luc Godard’s Histoire(s) du Cinéma, with Chris Marker’s great CD Immemory, and with that Borgesian construct, the library itself, in which all the history books are just witness to story. His story.

  Fingers (1978)

  In 1978—having done the script for Karel Reisz’s The Gambler; written a book, Jim, about a white guy breaking into the life of football star Jim Brown; and teaching here and there—Harvard man James Toback burst into screen life with a momentous directorial debut, Fingers: truly violent, visceral, disturbing, and destructive of calm. In hindsight, Toback’s relentless and good-humored self-promotion has tended to dilute his own rawness, just as his material and his method have come to seem more calculated. He became a character instead of a demon. Truly, to be an enfant terrible past the age of forty can be very awkward—and Toback had given sweeping guarantees about never making it past forty. So I have to say that the great promise of Fingers has not been fulfilled. But Fingers was always far more than promise. It is a shocking, great film that gets under the skin and beneath the schooled nervous system of America.

  Jimmy Angelelli (Harvey Keitel) is an aspiring concert pianist. We see his audition at Carnegie Hall, and it is a disaster, because Jimmy is Jekyll and Hyde. On the one hand, he is his mother’s son—she is Manhattan wealth and culture, as well as a stern taskmistress and someone he can never please. She is Marian Seldes. But for his father, Ben (Michael V. Gazzo), Jimmy collects underworld debts and applies brutal pressure.

  Question: Is this mixture of artist and hoodlum a dysfunctional problem or is it actually a split-level paradise such as Toback—and others—adore? Fingers comes on as if the duality is a great ordeal—one multiplied when Jimmy meets a pale, dreamy girl, Carol (Tisa Farrow), who is also one of the kept women of Dreems (Jim Brown), an intimidating black stud. So the film, I think, is the fairy story of an educated white Jew who is drawn intensely to everything he has been told to hide from: wild women, violence, blacks, trash music, and existential outlawry.

  The whole thing plays out in Manhattan, dynamically filmed by Mike Chapman against a sound track that goes from Bach and Chopin to the Chiffons and the Drifters. Fingers came early on in the history of American independents, and it had a terrific influence, because it did everything with such panache, wicked amusement, and greedy appetite. It’s not for every taste, and it is certainly not for Dr. Jekyll’s polite society—but isn’t that why the doc experimented?

  Made for a little over a million dollars, shot very fast, and just 90 minutes long, Fingers is a magnificent example of pulp cinema and one of the best things Harvey Keitel ever did—he went naked in this one long before we’d become depressed by his body. Brown is as thunderous as he was on the football field. Tisa Farrow and Tanya Roberts are sex switches. Marian Seldes is steel, and Michael V. Gazzo leaves us wondering why he wasn’t used far more. Also with Danny Aiello, Ed Marinaro, Georgette Mosbacher, Carole Francis, Lenny Montana, Dominic Chianese, and Tony Sirico.

  Fires on the Plain (1959)

  Κon Ichikawa’s film begins, before its credits, with a blunt, head-on discussion between an officer and the central soldier (Eiji Funakoshi). The soldier has tuberculosis. He has no chance of surviving on the battlefield. But there’s every chance he’ll be taking crucial rations from soldiers who might endure. He is therefore an outsider, a wanderer—and in great part Ichikawa’s remorseless classic is a study of this scarecrow who can hardly coexist with any of the human groups on offer.

  The place is the island of Leyte in t
he Philippines. The time is February 1945. Whereupon I can begin to hear modern moviegoers in their splendid isolation saying, Oh, you mean the kind of films Clint Eastwood made in 2006—Flags of Our Fathers and Letters from Iwo Jima? Well, of course Eastwood’s two pictures concerned the desperate battle for Iwo Jima (all the more senseless in that it was simply an atoll airfield) and the equally ugly attempt by propaganda to make the Iwo Jima flag-raising stand up for fund-raising, too. But do I really mean to tell you that Japan itself had already taken on this kind of subject—with all the extra conviction and horror you might expect in a people who were there—at the time?

  Ichikawa was a very versatile director: He could go from the epic canvas (as here) to close studies of inner obsession. He never makes Leyte look as tragically beautiful as, say, Mizoguchi might have managed. Needless to say, he never does those huge-screen-and-five-hundred-landing-craft shots that Eastwood’s special effects can manage. But if you want to shudder at the look on gaunt faces considering and reflecting on cannibalism, then Fires on the Plain is the only film. Eastwood’s Iwo Jima battle film is awfully like a Warner Brothers job from 1945 in which all the roles have gone Japanese while actually being informed by Western codes.

  Fires on the Plain is universal in its antiwar message, but it begins and ends with Japanese experience. There is an American soldier briefly on view (with dialogue by film scholar Donald Richie), and we see how Filipinos are reacting to the use of their land. But essentially this is a story about a company that no longer has even combat as a unifying force. Their story is ordeal, honor, and starvation, with the shocking realization that honor means so little.