This is not too far from an adequate synopsis of Stroheim’s Foolish Wives, a film of which we have no more than a third of what he intended. His New York premiere seems to have been for a 210-minute version, yet the AFI restoration in the early 1970s was about 75 minutes. There are mixed accounts of how the film fared, though physical ruin speaks to the way several states made butchered versions to appease the fierce moral attacks (the fan magazine Photoplay called it “an insult to every American”).
The film is famous for Stroheim’s relentless attempt to rebuild Monte Carlo in California, a plan enhanced by the outstanding work of designer Richard Day but clearly rooted in Stroheim’s aesthetic: The audience had to believe they were there. The vast sets accounted for more than $350,000 of the final $1 million budget. But that same year the entirely fanciful film Robin Hood cost more, and the public was thrilled by the result. Foolish Wives was a bolder and more aggressive venture, because its theme was so critical of mass society and its protagonists were such fringe figures.
It’s also true that throughout his career Stroheim courted popular dislike by himself playing one of those outsiders and by gloating in his own offensiveness. A subtler type—an actor like Richard Barthelmess, say—might have made the cynicism so much harder to dismiss. And in atmosphere and mise-en-scène, Stroheim is often far ahead of the melodrama (this is true even in Greed). If only he had trusted his eye for nuance more, and if only he had been prepared to make his characters at least as appealing as the outsiders and gamblers who figure in Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises—which comes only three years later.
So today, the viewer cannot do much more than survey the wreckage and see how un-American and naturalistic Stroheim was, and how easily his situations could be relocated to modern America. Suppose New York and a great hotel had been used instead of Monte Carlo. Suppose our new version of the film was set in Las Vegas.
The extraordinary photography is by Ben Reynolds and William Daniels. There was an original score by Sigmund Romberg (now mostly lost). And the cast includes Robert Edeson, Patsy Hannen, Maude George, Mae Busch, Al Edmundsen, and Cesare Gravina. Here is the first sign of an American art made in defiance of its paternal industry and as a challenge to most Americans. It’s a film about a moneyed society where there is no other god—and America has not yet signed off on that bleak definition.
Forbidden Games (1952)
Aline of refugees winds over a bridge and through the French countryside, strafed by large formations of German fighter planes. The parents are killed. The pet dog is killed. But a little girl survives. She is taken in by a farming family, and she makes friends with a little boy from that household. They start by burying her dead dog, and then they organize a private graveyard for animals, stealing crosses from the more official burial grounds. They are found out, and the little girl is sent away for adoption. The last shot is of her, in tears, as she hears the name of her young friend, “Michel,” being called out.
Forbidden Games was a big event in its time. It won the Academy’s award for Best Foreign Film; it won the top prize at Venice, and another prize at Cannes; and it was a considerable box-office success. Of course, this was a time when relatively few adult films had children as central characters. Today the film is not always quite believable, and in part that’s because it tends to be shot in an adult style rather than from the children’s point of view. We know a good deal more now than we did then about a child’s regard for death, and today it feels a touch too convenient that the orphaned girl shifts her feelings to animals so quickly and tidily.
René Clément, the famed documentarian, made the film from a novel by François Boyer and collaborated on the script with Jean Aurenche and Pierre Bost. Forbidden Games seems to have come from a very genteel conception, compared with, say, Roberto Rossellini’s Germany Year Zero, made a few years earlier. The French film may be too self-consciously “adorable,” and no one could fault the two children—Brigitte Fossey and Georges Poujouly—for prettiness or charm. Moreover, once the film is under way it’s hard sometimes to remember that this is a France at war.
These are serious criticisms, in the face of which you have to realize how many good and sane people were deeply moved by the film—and by its winning guitar music by Narciso Yepes. The photography is by Robert Juillard, and it does seem to be set rather farther from Paris than that line of refugees might have reached.
I suppose Forbidden Games was interpreted as an antiwar film, and certainly its unusual emotional force had to be given some meaning. But the “games” are very private, or enclosed, and I’m not sure how much the rest of us can make of them. It occurs to me that the film could have a very different meaning if we were clearly living under German occupation, in a city, with soldiers evident.
Brigitte Fossey had an ongoing career as a teenager and a young woman, without really making a great impact. She was always pretty and appealing. It might be a stronger film if the children were less perfect.
Force of Evil (1948)
In all the upheavals that were occurring in American cinema in the years after World War II, no film is as vibrant or beautiful as Abraham Polonsky’s Force of Evil. Many films made in those years incurred the charge of being made under a “Red” influence, of being critical of the structure of the U.S.A. In most cases, such charges were somewhere between ludicrous and wishful thinking. But of Force of Evil one may utter the exultant, championing cry: “This is it—the real thing! This is a thing that tears the capitalist sickness of the country to shreds.” And it was released by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, with Mr. Mayer in charge.
Polonsky was one of the most brilliant young men ever to get into American film. Born in 1910, he had served with the OSS in World War II and then returned to Hollywood. For Enterprise, he had written the boxing exposé Body and Soul and received an Oscar nomination. But he wanted to direct, and the actor John Garfield made that possible by committing to this picture. It came from a novel, Tucker’s People, by Ira Wolfert, about the numbers racket. Polonsky took the book and turned it into a classic film, great parts of it written in blank-verse dialogue that is so striking still, it is a joy to sit and listen to the movie. Moreover, the elegance of the talk makes a beautiful and very suggestive contrast with the squalor of the material.
Joe Morse (Garfield) is a Mob lawyer who works for Tucker, king of the numbers game. There is a plot whereby on July Fourth the number 776 will win. This will break most of the small, independent banks and allow Tucker to take them over. But Joe’s brother, Leo (Thomas Gomez), runs such a bank, and Joe tries to save him from being busted. This confrontation of family and efficiency, coupled with Joe’s falling for Leo’s secretary, Doris (Beatrice Pearson), will bring the whole house tumbling down.
For a cameraman, Polonsky had George Barnes (a Hitchcock veteran). After a few days, Polonsky asked him why all the footage looked so pretty. That’s how we do it, said Barnes. So Polonsky argued and asked Barnes to look at Edward Hopper paintings. “Ah, single-source lighting!” said Barnes. “Why didn’t you say?” And so the picture has a stark look that is exactly attuned to the rigor of the talk. More than that, in just 78 minutes, it manages to be a complete portrait of corruption and its destruction. Of course, it is served up as the end of the Mob—and we all want that, don’t we?—but there has not been a picture since, not even The Godfather, that spells out the essential systemic quality of organized crime. It is being organized that makes it distinctly American.
In time, Polonsky was savagely blacklisted. But this is among the greatest directorial debuts we have. It is also Garfield’s most astringent and least sentimental work, and he is matched by Gomez, Pearson, Roy Roberts, Marie Windsor, and Howland Chamberlain.
Forrest Gump (1994)
I wonder whether the mental condition of Forrest Gump in 1994 (going from simplicity to sublimity) did not approximate that of Ronald Reagan as he sank from office into Alzheimer’s? In other words, the curious mixture of handicap and optimism in Gump rang a be
ll, not least in the conclusion that that was what American politics had sunk to. Of course, there was fantastic skill employed in the picture. Eric Roth’s screenplay was artful to a degree, especially in the coddling of sentimentality, mindlessness, and an unconscious reactionary spirit. Indeed, within the “life is just a box of chocolates” theory lay a wish to simplify everything—to home in on common sense and human nature—that was really a reliance on conservatism in any crisis. The comparison with Reagan is not made idly, for that virtual president would have enjoyed the estimate that political alignments were specious, finally. In the end, you were American or not, pals or hostile. Beyond that lay the old bugbear—You’d better be American (or agree with me)—that was the hard iron hand George W. Bush would enclose in a Reagan glove.
As yet, American leaders cannot quite rely on, or expect, the widespread phenomenon of Gumpism. Though we may come to it. But here was a simpleton’s story told with great charm and adroitness, and with the early signs of a digitized technology that could have Gary Sinise as a legless Vietnam vet without a flaw or a seam showing, without awkwardness or loss. The naked charm and the veiled authenticity were uneasy traveling companions—yet you can see the same mix of openness and secrecy (or lying) in the kind of administration a Reagan aspired to. Above all, the personal charm of Tom Hanks in the lead was calculated to disarm the audience’s critical faculty. It was the Reagan method again: ordinariness and likeability taken to a lowest common denominator that cannot be challenged. Gump is too naïve to be cunning; would that the same could be said of his creators. Hanks had risen gradually to the eminence of a kind of Jimmy Stewart. If only Robert Zemeckis or other directors had risen to his support in the way of a Capra.
The curiosity is that the Hollywood that made Forrest Gump almost certainly considered itself vaguely liberal, and probably voted Democrat. But the allegiance is so unreliable when the custard philosophy is hiding or denying the real muscular differences and antagonisms of politics. But Forrest Gump was worse than that. It was the ongoing dream that this America was doing very well, despite every external and internal indication that American identity was cracking at home along with its influence abroad.
It happens that this is the fourth entry in a row I have written in which there is the same clash between sumptuous cinematic power and intellectual emptiness—GoodFellas, The Silence of the Lambs, JFK, and Forrest Gump. And I fear that it shows a condition in American culture whereby our “art” has become helplessly subservient to our insecurities. We have been telling profound lies to ourselves, with sublime oblivion and the flourish of empty good nature. “Have a nice movie!”
Fort Apache (1948)
Fort Apache is the first film in John Ford’s cavalry “trilogy,” and though it is set nominally in Arizona and filmed in southern Utah (in Monument Valley), it would seem to be set in Montana, scene of the Battle of the Little Bighorn—known in Sioux history as the Battle of the Greasy Grass, because the summer grass was so slippery underfoot. You can say that Ford was prepared to play around with factual details for the sake of the pictorial, for movie, but bear that looseness in mind as we proceed. Fort Apache is not just casual with its facts; it is mad for epic and legend.
The film centers on a version of Custer’s Last Stand. Lieutenant Colonel Owen Thursday (Henry Fonda) arrives at his new posting, Fort Apache, with his daughter, Philadelphia (Shirley Temple). He is lofty, stern, by the book, and in love with military glory. He behaves badly in the community. He resists the implications when his daughter falls in love with a mere sergeant-major’s son. He strikes an unfortunate contrast with the more natural, amiable, and discerning Captain Kirby York (John Wayne), and he insists on treating the Indians as stupid hostiles.
Thursday makes an ass of himself in small ways and large, but in the final, disastrous event, he leads his men into massacre. In the aftermath of that, while there is no disputing Thursday’s rash judgment or his mistake, the film endorses the attitude of men like York in rallying to the legend: that Thursday was brilliant and courageous, that he took a loss so the white man’s destiny should be fulfilled, and that the view of him as a hero should be preserved. This is done because it is the Army way, and good for the Army—and because, it is assumed, America depends on this notion of valor and service.
This is a crucial incident in Ford studies, and it is returned to in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. Let me make an analogy. It may yet emerge that at Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo, American forces (allowing that term to cover the military and security agencies) used torture and other malpractices in interrogating suspects. If that is so, then the truth must come out. There is no kind of Rumsfeldian “code” worthy of being protected. In other words, it is not enough for the film to admit Thursday’s mistake quietly while holding to the legend of military duty. We do need the facts, whether they are that the cavalry’s mission against the Indians was to make the West open for white free enterprise, or—as has been discovered on the site of the Little Bighorn—that in the last stand many men in Custer’s Seventh Cavalry shot themselves rather than submit to the “horrors” of Sioux dispatch, a sign of the immense racist gulf between the two sides—the gulf that made for their war.
Fort Apache was written by Frank Nugent from the James Warner Bellah story “Massacre.” It was photographed by Archie Stout. James Basevi was the art director. The cast also includes John Agar, Ward Bond, Irene Rich, George O’Brien, Anna Lee, Victor McLaglen, Pedro Armendáriz, Guy Kibbee, Grant Withers, and Movita Castenada.
Forty Guns (1957)
Pointedly, Forty Guns is set in Tombstone, Arizona, in the early 1880s—that is Wyatt Earp territory. The Battle of the O.K. Corral occurred in that frontier mining town in 1881. And the Earps were a trio of brothers who tended to wear severe black clothing. So here is Sam Fuller, writer and director, introducing us to Tombstone and three Bonnell brothers, dressed in black. Is this a polite way of handling the Earps? Not at all; this is Fuller taking a given in Western history and turning it into a savage comic-book analysis of sex and violence. As he said himself, this is not a Western setting out to enlarge our sense of history, but a film in the psychodynamic tradition of Duel in the Sun, The Furies, and Johnny Guitar. When anyone uses a gun in Forty Guns, phallic energy is out to hit us in the face.
Alas, the people who love the Western because of its encouragement of guns tend to be humorless and very guarded in their sexuality. The blatant symbolism of Forty Guns did not speak to the uncovered energies in the genre—but Duel in the Sun was written off as ridiculous more than ten years earlier. To this day, it remains very difficult for a film to take on the equipment of the Western genre and deal with sex. So Forty Guns has survived as a part of the rowdy, maverick tradition of Sam Fuller. It still comes as a shock to those fantasists who have never fired a gun themselves—as if it had broken the rules. But isn’t it more likely than not that the urge to sex was vital and imperative in the history of the Western? In John Ford’s The Searchers, the violence of Ethan Edwards can be interpreted as a kind of terrible sexual suppression in a man who cannot love his sister-in-law and may want to kill his niece; in that light, the film could be a sexual opera—and cannot be understood without hearing that music.
Fuller’s picture opens famously with one of the longest tracking shots in the history of film, and don’t think tracking shots aren’t phallic, either. It’s led by Jessica Drummond (Barbara Stanwyck), the local boss and rancher empress, introduced in a way fit for Sternberg. Her kid brother, Brock (John Ericson), is a hoodlum, based in Fuller’s eyes on the gang from Rebel Without a Cause. The Bonnell brothers come to town, and Griff (Barry Sullivan) is as attracted to Jessica as he hates Brock. Her former lover, the feeble sheriff (Dean Jagger), hangs himself in humiliation. And we are headed for a climax to match the opening when Brock uses Jessica as a shield against Griff, only to learn that the gun has its answer to everything.
Joseph Biroc’s camerawork makes a feast out of the tracking shots, yet I wonder if
Forty Guns finally doesn’t look a bit too conventional. Does it need the lurid color of Duel in the Sun or the more aggressively expressive décor of a different kind of film? It’s a picture that might work better on a stage than on a prairie. But that decisive artistic boldness within the Western is hard to come by. Even artists as reckless as Fuller feel a duty to real horses and dust. The West is a legend (of course), yet we believe we know how it must look.
42nd Street (1933)
The great thing about the early Warner Brothers musicals is that they look like the gangster pictures out of the same studio. The story here is inane, absurdly convenient, and filled with a certainty that in show business no one ever gets hurt—even if Bebe Daniels breaks her ankle and can’t go on, that’s a good thing, because it teaches her that she ought to be with George Brent. And how was George ever going to get that across? Without anything to sing or dance, without even his mustache, he sometimes gets left out of some cast lists. But then look at the picture, look at the shadow the false eyelashes leave on Ruby Keeler’s taut face—it’s like a scar. The light in the pictures lets you know that showbiz is plenty tough; it’s just that these kids will never blink.
And never forget that 42nd Street was a Darryl Zanuck production. The happy-go-lucky story line is juxtaposed with increasingly fanciful dance numbers from Busby Berkeley that take the show over and lift it toward some new genre. If only, you feel, Zanuck had put Berkeley on a real gangster picture and told him to do the shoot-outs as production numbers! Imagine those flowering O’s of girls’ legs with Paul Muni blasting the petals away—she loves me, she loves me not.
'Have You Seen...?' Page 49