Gertrud comes from a play by Hjalmar Söderberg. It is not only gradual and measured. In fact, it is four encounters that stress the same thing: this woman’s refusal to compromise. It is just that with every repetition the consequences and the feeling grow deeper. There are very long takes and simple, theatrical arrangements of characters, yet this is a movie, a photographed thing in which reflections in a mirror and a final, very wide angle come as comprehensive statements and insights. Dreyer’s control is immaculate, but it never seems to diminish the freedom in which Gertrud acts. So the film is destined, and recited as much as spoken, but it feels like the utterance of liberty.
Henning Bendtsen photographed it with a flashback and dream—and with a restraint that exactly suits the power of Nina Pens Rode in the central performance.
Giant (1956)
When I think of Giant in hindsight, the years and the acres of the Benedict story are as vacant as a Texas horizon. Yes, I can recall Rock Hudson and Elizabeth Taylor, his paunch sagging, her hair turning blue and gray, and I suppose that the film attests to the gradual, erosive way in which parents set in privilege become more open to doubt—or is it tolerance? I can conjure up a very melodramatic scene in a diner where Hudson is beaten up because he has brought a Mexican-looking kid—his grandson—into the place and expected decent service. I know that Dennis Hopper and Carroll Baker are Benedict children, the one trying to be a doctor who serves the Mexican people and the other flirting with that awful Jett Rink.
I daresay that screenwriters Fred Guiol (whoever he was) and Ivan Moffat (whom I knew as a faded English gent dining at Hamburger Hamlet, suave, funny, and noble) did a very clever job in bringing the immense Edna Ferber novel—it was a paperback too big to hold—down to a mere 201 minutes. I know that George Stevens (who did so many better films) won the Oscar for Best Director. It’s just that I can’t remember anything that happens in the film, apart from moments in the sea of size and the larger thought (or hope) that Texas might stay another place (this was seven years before Dallas became a cursed place everyone knew). It’s a film that passes like the Atlantic in the night as you fly to England—it must be there, and yes, if you woke, there it was, still unwinding on its screen. But all I can recall is that awful Jett Rink.
Jett is the unschooled hoodlum cowboy who has a scrap of land that, when he has looked at it long enough with his longing and his desire, erupts with oil. There is surely the inadvertent subtext in the film that, because by virtue of class, precedent (her marriage), and mere taste he cannot have Leslie (Elizabeth Taylor), Jett sits alone, day and night, masturbating his land until it comes and he is the new Texas. Not just a rich, black kid (Dean was wreathed in oil, and I can imagine he bathed in it before the scene), slamming big old Bick in the stomach and racing off to be the real, new Texas—to be Howard Hughes, even. I still see James Dean’s Rink the old man as one of the cleverest portrayals of Hughes on film: all power and no character.
No one is ever going to go back and watch all 201 minutes of Giant again. (God help us, there may even be a restored version at 221!) But every scene with Dean and every glimpse of Mercedes McCambridge as Luz, Bick’s rough sister, are like awkward, unsettled, unhealed real movie. Dean fought with Stevens, it’s said. I should hope so. And I wonder if there were moments in the life of George Stevens (himself an upstart once) when he marveled at how he had buried a real movie in this fatuous legend of size.
Gilda (1946)
The posters proclaimed, “There NEVER was a woman like Gilda!” but they might just as well have addressed the barbed novelty of the picture itself. There are so many ways in which it breaks uneasy ground. Ballin Mundson (George Macready) runs a nightclub-casino somewhere in South America during World War II. One night on the waterfront, he uses his “little friend” (a sword cane) to rescue a down-and-out tough, Johnny Farrell (Glenn Ford), from thugs. Is it friendship that begins between them, or more? Whatever, it seems excessive when Mundson sets Johnny up as his close friend and assistant. It is notably unclear what kind of film this is so far, and we are left with Ford’s weak grin and Macready’s scarred authority gazing at each other.
Then Mundson goes away and returns with a wife, Gilda (Rita Hayworth). Suddenly, we are in a Rita Hayworth picture, yet we have backed into it. Gilda is beautiful, a little wild and reckless. She knew Johnny “before” and seems ready to resume the affair, but he is shocked and scathing toward her—cruel, as if he would prefer to disown her. Johnny stays loyal to Mundson and to his idea that Gilda is trash.
We realize that Mundson and his club are a front for Nazi operations. He goes missing, presumed dead. Johnny now runs the casino. He marries Gilda, but only as a way of keeping her confined in case Mundson returns. She takes her revenge by performing at the nightclub—this is the famous “Put the Blame on Mame” routine, which serves as a vicious rebuke to Johnny’s caution and masked gayness. Of course, in the last twenty minutes, the plot clears itself up magically, so that Johnny and Gilda may be left in some semblance of starry union. Except that nobody who treasures Gilda can ever believe a word of it.
For Columbia, this was a way of getting Hayworth back to work after the Welles marriage. And the film was arranged as that marriage died. The key executive at Columbia was Virginia Van Upp, Gilda’s producer, who gave a final rewrite to the Marion Parsonnet script from a story by E. A. Ellington. Is that where the twisted gender confusions come from, along with the flagrant portrait of a natural woman, a libertine, too sensual and honest for these crouched male figures?
There’s no clear answer, just the self-loathing in Ford’s performance (very unusual in that actor), the sardonic superiority of Macready, and the savage abandon of Hayworth. Photographed by Rudolph Maté and dubbed by Anita Ellis, she was at her greatest in the key number, wearing black satin (by Jean Louis) and long gloves, with hair to her shoulders. The whole film is fascinating, but the celebration of Gilda is quite remarkable. The design is by Stephen Goosson and Van Nest Polglase, and the supporting cast includes Joseph Calleia, Steven Geray, Joseph Sawyer, Gerald Mohr, and Ludwig Donath.
The film was a huge personal success for Hayworth, yet it trapped her, too, in ways she hated. Ever afterward, she said that men went to bed with Gilda and woke up with her. Charles Vidor directed, and “Mame” is as great a musical commentary on a poisoned relationship as the Cyd Charisse dances in Nicholas Ray’s Party Girl.
The Girl Can’t Help It (1956)
There are so many reasons for putting The Girl Can’t Help It in this book: as recognition of its director, Frank Tashlin; as some gesture toward the rock-and-roll picture; as one more sign of the swiftness with which pastiche overtook movies in the late 1950s; and as a way of remembering Jayne Mansfield, who was not just a more thoughtful version of Marilyn Monroe but a comic commentary on—nearly an animated version of—the extraordinary fantasy of her own body. Not to mention the stupid innocence of the title and its way of arguing that no one was ever to blame for the thing later revealed as sexual exploitation.
The Girl is plainly a new version of Born Yesterday. Agent Tom Miller (Tom Ewell) is hired by slot-machine king Fatso Murdock (Edmond O’Brien) to make a rock star out of his girlfriend, Jerri Jordan (Jayne Mansfield). Of course, Tashlin and cowriter Herbert Baker didn’t want to make Jerri a corruption-busting democrat. She is already well-enough developed to be the constant object of humor, or ridicule. In fact, Ms. Mansfield had a bust measurement of forty inches, and whereas the more normal thirty-five, say, could look enormously attractive on someone like Monroe or Novak, those few extra inches take us into the area of the grotesque and the stricken American embarrassment that greeted it.
Mansfield was educated and educable. She studied at the universities of Texas and California, and she was often heard to talk sense in ways denied to Monroe. And though she had serious ambitions to be an actress, she seemed to have had that other “intelligence,” the one ready to compromise with fate and allow herself to be portrayed as a cartoon charac
ter. Thus the infamous moment in this film when she holds two bottles of milk up to her breasts and says that she reckons she is qualified for motherhood. She was in pictures for a decade, and acted quite well once or twice, before age added to her excessiveness and she was treated as only a joke. She died in a car crash aged thirty-four, and in the process she was decapitated. The national comedians were hushed—waiting to hear if maybe other “comic” parts had been lopped off, too.
I’m tough on the director for the way he treated her, but that doesn’t mean that Tashlin (a key figure in the career of Jerry Lewis) wasn’t very funny and smart with human talent that was “over the top.” Nor does Mansfield operate with any self-pity.
Funnier now, in most ways, is the attitude the film and Twentieth Century Fox took to the new music. The fact that Tom is an agent allows the film to be a parade of rock acts, filmed in color and CinemaScope and covering a bizarre range: Fats Domino, Little Richard, Gene Vincent & His Blue Caps, the Platters, the Treniers, and Julie London, who is said to be playing “herself” and seems uneasy. The cast includes Henry Jones, John Emery, and Juanita Moore, not to forget Tom Ewell, who found a short-lived glory as the limp straw meant to stir the big blond drinks of Americana.
The Glenn Miller Story (1954)
There’s a sweet irony in the way in 1954—with rock and roll sounding faintly, like drums beyond the horizon—the Glenn Miller sound reached its last great swan song—“String of Swans,” if you like. And there is absolutely no irony at all in the film’s credo that big-band leaders are the sweetest guys in the world. Some spectators still hold the opinion that the loss of Miller was the most devastating blow to American sentiment and coziness in the entire war.
That The Glenn Miller Story proved so enduring a favorite (rentals of $7.5 million, twice those of Singin’ in the Rain) has to do with these strokes of luck, but it owes more to the sweetness of the music and the cunning with which Jimmy Stewart could take on the martyr-to-be insouciance of this guy who just longed to put a clarinet on top of a sax section. There are those who look at the hard-jawed face of the real Major Miller and divine a strict manager, a fusspot perfectionist, and something other than the world’s greatest sweetheart. It doesn’t matter, for just as the Miller band stayed together long after “swing” had collapsed, there’s little doubt that this cuddly movie ensured the band’s longevity.
Of course, the picture was made by Anthony Mann, who in the same period was revealing a much tougher, nastier Stewart in films like The Far Country and The Naked Spur. So the subterfuge of it all, and the view of Glenn as a guy who deserved his own music, is plainly from cloud-cuckoo-land. It’s not until Scorsese’s New York, New York that we get a bandleader as coldhearted as that profession requires.
But this picture is more than postwar nostalgia or merciless syrup pouring out of the “Little Brown Jug.” It is also a fond account of genius slowly surpassing all its obstacles; the scene in which Miller hears the way to do “Moonlight Serenade” is worthy of Amadeus. Beyond that, the treatment of the military band, and the scene in the English hospital where they keep playing through an air-raid, amounts to one of the great martial moments in American film. Indeed, Mann loves this music as much as he does the landscape in the Westerns. The affection is in the detail.
June Allyson is the sweetheart and the wife, and I have to say that she and Stewart manage to be fur on flesh in a quite excruciating and shameless way. (I have a strange dream of a Hans-Jürgen Syberberg movie in which Adolf Hitler watches The Glenn Miller Story and kills himself as it ends.) There is also a version of “Basin Street Blues,” with Louis Armstrong, that could leave a wide-eyed mind wondering why and how America has ever had a race problem. So this is phoney-baloney, but you can know the picture shot by shot and the deceit still works. There’s a clue here to the power of music in films that no one wants to hear or admit.
The Godfather (1972)
So many things are on show here—how a pulp novel, adapted by its author, Mario Puzo, and by the director, Francis Ford Coppola, becomes a landmark. Then there is the miracle that the same picture could be one of the great American films, an immediate and widespread critical success as well as the most successful picture ever made in America. Don’t forget that for a few years The Godfather was our box-office champion, just as it became a model for many people seeking to be glorious (and impassive) but rich in Hollywood. And notice how it stands for a brief era when the details of our evil could be inspected without moral relief being insisted upon. Michael Corleone is the hero. He is the boy meant to be saved from the family’s life but who himself rescues the family in a crisis. He is the outsider drawn into the hallowed interior darkness of Don Corleone. That is a place created by photographer Gordon Willis and designer Dean Tavoularis but that ultimately is the celebration of a Nixonian efficiency, of the many dirty means serving the vital end of family obedience and extended power. It is the movie that half realizes how far its hopeful novelty has become a new tyranny.
I say “half realizes” because I doubt anyone could claim that the intent or meaning of the film is clear. After all, we identify with Michael through the oldest tricks of the medium; we become his soldiers and supporters. In that sense, the influence of Bertolucci’s The Conformist was enormous, for that was the breakthrough film in which a would-be decent or ordinary fellow becomes an accomplice to every weakness he dreads in himself. And it’s worth adding that The Godfather carries on the tradition of a world of the sick spirit rendered in décor and light that was established in The Conformist by art director Ferdinando Scarfiotti and cinematographer Vittorio Storaro.
Control is the film’s grail, but that does not mean it is always palpable. Indeed, The Godfather goes through several stages, like a movie testing the styles of the forties and fifties, before it climaxes in the astonishing fusion of baptism and slaughter. That is an editing solution to some narrative confusion, but it is also a passage of exhilarating nihilism, so shocking that it may have stranded Coppola for the rest of his artistic life. He could hardly be ordinary again, no matter how hard he strived.
Of course, Coppola was uneasy at first as the director. A replacement was ready. But the picture made him strong, and in turn the cast became his family. There is no need to praise the inspired casting or the flawless performances, but still it should be stressed that this is a story about Michael, and Al Pacino’s is the guiding performance, that whispers to all the others. Compellingly entertaining, The Godfather is still as beautiful as it is mysterious. No other American classic so repays repeated viewings. How odd that American film offered this last song of vindication just as it delivered its most foreboding message: the corruption of the state. For years, Hollywood films were happy and positive; now it has grasped eternal unease. Has the America that followed been fit for “movies” or songs, or is it just too sunk in its own dismay?
The Godfather, Part II (1974)
Why should Paramount not make a sequel when the first film had been so successful? Equally, no cynic of remakes would have doubted the eventual truth: that the second film would do much less well. Not that this history deterred a third film one day, a minor work not to be mentioned in the company of the first two. Still, the phenomenon for the critic is that Part II is in many senses the bolder work—not just filling in the story gaps from Puzo’s novel but building an explanation of how this America came about and of how desperate innovation grew into the most baleful and conservative measures. Notice how far this transition—the shift from hope and arrogance to fatal gloom—repeats the emotional journey of Citizen Kane, that earlier film full of warnings about being a success in America.
But there’s something else that needs to be said: that the darkest attributes and the chilliest manners of the Corleones are dwelled on here with gloomy relish. The darkness that Gordon Willis created for the first film was authentically Italian, walnut brown, churchlike. But the darkness here is more mannered. Its wearers begin to stroke it and admire its sheen. Ther
e are prolonged shots of Michael in his solitude that are reverential as well as crushing. There is a depressive quality to the film, especially as it can find no way out of its labyrinth. In other words, the film cannot come up with a way for the Mafia to be ousted, or for their sardonic nihilism to be disproved. And you feel the weight of despair settling on Francis Coppola himself, like earth falling on a coffin.
At the same time, there are vivid set pieces, beautiful flights of movie: the recreation of Havana and the Sicilian passages, with Robert De Niro feasting on the small acting ploys that Marlon Brando had established in the first film. There is the classic Senate committee of investigation. There is Lake Tahoe in winter as the perfect setting. And there is the eventual tragedy of Fredo—not just John Cazale’s great performance but the brother who clearly stands for Francis Coppola in his childhood.
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