'Have You Seen...?'

by David Thomson

  I praised few names for the first film, so let’s do justice here: to Fred Roos for casting; to Dean Tavoularis for design; to Walter Murch for sound; to Robert Duvall, Diane Keaton, Talia Shire, Lee Strasberg, Michael V. Gazzo (not just brilliant but a late replacement for Richard Castellano), G. D. Spradlin, Richard Bright, Dominic Chianese, Gastone Moschin, and so on.

  We think of the two films as one now, and that’s a measure of how far Coppola took the opportunity of the second bite to amplify the first flavor. The two films have been reassembled to run in chronological order, and that has allowed many small gems to come back. But still, there is a grandeur in the two films on successive nights, on a huge screen in Zoetrope prints. Try to convince yourself that we have done better in the thirty years since and counting.

  Both films won Best Picture Oscars. Altogether they were nominated for twenty-two Oscars and won nine.

  God Is My Witness (1992)

  The movie enthusiast adores the idea of India—but the reality is overwhelming. And so we sail on blithely in the hope that the Indians may learn to make films such as we would expect from them. After all, their civil service is based on British models of trial and error, logic and system, so why shouldn’t they approach movies in the same way? So, it would be possible to compose a book like this with a nice handful of “Indian” films. Start with The River (that model of hope) and then offer three or four by Satyajit Ray—something from the Apu trilogy, Charulata, Distant Thunder, and so on. I had applied this pattern—and I believe in the Ray films—but I was nowhere near India.

  The Ray films come from “his” India—Bengal and Calcutta—and they are in every sense a minority taste in India. Yet for decades now, India has been the unstoppable source of film supply. You want a thousand films? The industry based in Bombay—or Mumbai—turns out that many a year. In a week, India sells seventy million tickets; in a year it gathers an audience a billion more than the audience in America.

  God Is My Witness—directed by Mukul Anand and starring the vacuously pretty male star Amitabh Bachchan—is one of those films (just one), an example of what the world laughingly calls “Bollywood.” In that label there is not just condescension but the recognition of a kind of unduly sweetened melodrama with censorship, of profusion and excess with an odious daintiness of ultimate moral character, that seems painful and restricted compared with our own great tradition of melodrama. In turn, apologists for Bollywood point to a film like God Is My Witness; you may say it’s ridiculous, but wasn’t the tug of war between desire and practicality ever so in the great melodramas of Stroheim, Borzage, Murnau, Stahl, Sirk, and so on? Look at Hollywood again, and can’t you see the mad mythic genres, the white lies, and the captivating charm?

  So is it just Ray and/or Bollywood? No. Over the years there have been worthy films, essays in greater realism—Mother India (made by Mani Kaul in 1957), the films of Mrinal Sen, and those of Shyam Benegal, the really heroic figure in that he works more or less within Bollywood while striving to present his audiences with fresh and challenging narrative material.

  At the same time, in 2007, a young American, Tim Sternberg, made a short documentary, Salim Baba, about a man who gives small movie shows in the Indian city where he lives—odds and ends of old film spliced together for a broken-down projector. A snatch of that “film” is like stolen smoke. For us, it is an experience from the 1890s, but in India, it is still happening. Lumière and Méliès might be working with the nuclear bomb as their light in a culture that happens to be centuries older than ours while still primitive by comparison. A thousand new feature films a year!

  Going My Way (1944)

  Going My Way doesn’t play much these days, no matter that it won the Oscar for Best Picture of 1944. It beat Double Indemnity and Gaslight, evidence that God was even then making a world for the righteous. But a world for those who feel good about themselves and their prospects in a next life doesn’t necessarily have much to do with religion. It’s more a matter of insurance. The numbers suggest that the United States is a country rich in religious feeling. There are many crowded churches and many parts of the republic where literal reading of the gospels can intimidate local lawmaking. There are even states where some inclination exists to abandon the teaching of evolution. So why doesn’t Going My Way play?

  Frank Butler and Frank Cavett wrote the screenplay, from a story by the producer-director Leo McCarey, in which Father O’Malley (Bing Crosby) is a priest who writes and sings songs and who employs that tactic to win over a disapproving father superior (Barry Fitzgerald) and a gang of local kids. (McCarey took pride in telling the story of a cardinal who had said the film was “gently disrespectful.”) Under a false name, the priest sells his songs to a music publisher, thereby gathering funds for the church. Wouldn’t you know it, a girl he had known—just a little—before he put on the collar is now a top singer, and she gets the Philharmonic involved. All of this is unloaded with exactly the lazy charm that Bing Crosby had so much difficulty mustering in real life. Ah, but that’s another story altogether, as Barry Fitzgerald would mutter.

  Buddy DeSylva produced the picture. Lionel Lindon and Gordon Jennings did the photography. Hans Dreier designed the sets. And the hit song—written by Jimmy Van Heusen and Johnny Burke—was “Swinging on a Star,” performed by Bing and the Robert Mitchell Boy Choir. Of course, Van Heusen and Burke didn’t actually write the bits from “Silent Night,” the “Ave Maria,” the “Habanera” from Carmen, or “Too-ra-loo-ra-loo-ra” (allegedly an Irish air).

  The picture had domestic rentals of more than $6 million. It won Oscars for Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor for Crosby, and Best Supporting Actor for Barry Fitzgerald. “Swinging on a Star” won Best Song. Paramount and McCarey were so giddy with glee that they went straight into a sequel, The Bells of St. Mary’s, in which the Bingle comes to the aid of a run-down parish led by Sister Superior Ingrid Bergman. In this one, Bing sings “Aren’t You Glad You’re You?” (a song that I have been told nearly made it into Double Indemnity… yet they lie). The Bells of St. Mary’s was nominated for Best Picture, too. It didn’t win and may be best known now as the movie Michael and Kay have just seen in The Godfather when he hears about the shooting of his father (not a good day).

  Leo McCarey could be a sublime director of comedy, as well as the touching Make Way for Tomorrow. He had a grand theory of “incidents” making movies, with one incident leading to another, and he understood human nature in real and practical terms as a sort of evolutionary process. But not here.

  The Gold Diggers of 1933 (1933)

  There was a time, while preparing this book, when I felt sure I was going to go for Footlight Parade in this spot—the spot being a second Warner Brothers/Busby Berkeley musical after the inescapable 42nd Street. After all, Footlight Parade has James Cagney in a masterful role and three Berkeley routines—“Shanghai Lil,” “Honeymoon Hotel,” and the truly delirious “By a Waterfall.” But it happened that Turner Classic Movies (as so often) came to my aid by showing all three films in a row one night. Of course, part of what I am saying is just to observe that all three films came out in one year—the first year of FDR and in many respects the worst year of the Depression—and they have a nerve that simply refuses to be depressed. (The RKO musical is coming up, but it never risked the political attitude of these films.) Let me add this: that Darryl Zanuck inspired them all, and that somehow he, Berkeley, and the attitude at Warner Brothers leave you with the fever dream that the three films are a great fruit-stand of breasts offered to the camera.

  Anyway, I determined that The Gold Diggers of 1933 had to be included. For here is a film that opens with the puppy-fat insolence of Ginger Rogers singing “We’re in the Money” and closes with the magnificence of Joan Blondell starting off the “Remember My Forgotten Man” number. Mervyn LeRoy directed the film, but it seems clear that Busby Berkeley did both these numbers, and you have to wonder how far he ever bothered to reconcile them—or to attempt it. For the fir
st number is brazen, hedonistic, and mercenary, no matter that the coins themselves have become the girls’ guarding clothing—each girl has three coins to cover (or price) their erotic zones. Couple that in-your-face symbolism with Gingers screw-you stare, and you marvel how a studio reckoned an audience would or could take it in 1933—and it is the direct opening.

  But you get your payback with “Remember My Forgotten Man,” which may be the most radical, progressive, and outraged number ever put onscreen in a Hollywood picture. It has a gallery of female voices and images, ranging from an old woman in a rocking chair to Blondell and the black singer Etta Moten. All of which turns into studio shots of First World War soldiers marching in the rain and then coming back shattered and wounded. And that is the finale. We never go back to the story. “Forgotten Man” rises to the height of its criticism, and the film is over. It’s breathtaking. You wonder in hindsight why Zanuck, Berkeley, LeRoy, and the others were never called by HUAC.

  Gold Diggers is a 96-minute movie, written by Erwin Gelsey and James Seymour from a play by Avery Hopwood. Sol Polito photographed it. Harry Warren and Al Dubin did the songs—there’s “Pettin’ in the Park” and “I’ve Got to Sing a Torch Song,” too. The cast includes Dick Powell, Ruby Keeler, and Warren William.

  The Golden Coach (1953)

  The ship from Europe comes bearing the Viceroy his greatest prize in life: a golden coach. But on the same ship, Camilla and her boyfriend, traveling players, have discovered that that coach is the most comfortable cabin on the ship for spending the night with a friend. It is a real carriage, but it is a stage, too, and The Golden Coach is the movie above all in which Jean Renoir identifies the ongoing pulse of theatricality. There are shapes in life, repeated and sometimes learned from, and they are the DNA of drama and story. Of course, the discovery was there long ago, in La Règle du Jeu, when a house party of friends and lovers could hardly stop themselves from falling into the routines of burlesque, melodrama, and even tragedy.

  The Renoir of the 1950s does not really want to know about tragedy—he has paid his dues there already. So this picture in some Spanish South American country in the eighteenth century is a “romp” that hardly notices poverty, plague, or prejudice. You could rip it apart on those grounds, but that would be to miss the high comedy of a vivacious actress pursued by a viceroy, a bullfighter, and her own man. Who will win her? The audience, of course, the only people to whom any actress can ever hope to be faithful.

  Renoir wrote the script with Renzo Avanzo, Giulio Macchi, Jack Kirkland, and Ginette Doynel, from a play by Prosper Mérimée. Bravo. Credits are a fine thing, like contracts and insurance certificates. Claude Renoir did the gorgeous harlequinade of photography. Mario Chiari was production designer, and I would guess that if the director was ever in any real doubt over what to do, he simply played himself a little Vivaldi.

  The Golden Coach is the first film in a trio—French Cancan and Elena and the Men are the others—which all say the same thing: that the show must go on. But it harks back to Renoir’s The River and to much earlier films in its awareness that the show is not just a play people write and perform but a design in nature, a wish to catch the light, a phrase of music, and the look on a woman’s face.

  It is a radiant film, an easygoing masterpiece, a game if you like, a fond cage for its own monster, Anna Magnani, and for Renoir’s vision that he, his father, his nephew—who knows how many more—straddled a hundred years with no greater urge or purpose than to say, “Stop the light! Look at that! Have you seen…?” In the end, it is like the daily miracle of seeing a baby born, with 90 percent of his or her nature there already in the smoky eye, or seeing a curtain go up and realizing that people who are just names in credits have prepared a world and a life for you there, like a great hotel room, like a carrosse d’or.

  Anna Magnani is often shy, pensive, tender, and often not. Also with Duncan Lamont (very good), Odoardo Spadaro, Riccardo Rioli, Paul Campbell, Nada Fiorelli, and Dante. And so, it is 1953, and here is the last Renoir in the book chronologically. You see: I left some out to show you how balanced and judicious I can be.

  Goldfinger (1964)

  Goldfinger was the third of the James Bond movies, from a novel published in 1959. This is hardly the place to get into the complicated backstory to Bond onscreen, and I doubt that the films have enough intrinsic interest to justify the effort. (I am proposing to let this one film stand for the entire franchise.) But history makes it clear that Bond hesitated in going to the big screen. Ian Fleming’s first novel featuring the character, Casino Royale, was published in 1953, nine years before the film Dr. No was released.

  Nor are the books really like the movies. Fleming’s Bond is more English, more conservative, bleaker, and less funny. Somehow, somewhere along the line, a series of books about a fantasy agent in the British secret service became the Bond franchise: spectacular, international, sardonic, cool, and essentially apolitical, with Bond as the kind of remorseless womanizer who never feels a thing. Did Ian Fleming make this shift? Was it Harry Saltzman and Cubby Broccoli, the producers? Was it the directors of the films and Sean Connery? Was it screenwriters Richard Maibaum and Paul Dehn? Or was it Kevin McClory, a curious writer and Irish adventurer, once a buddy of John Huston’s, who waged a legal battle over the years with Fleming and film studios and who actually has a credit on Thunderball?

  Goldfinger would trace the attempt by the villain (Gert Frobe) to rob Fort Knox. The first draft was written by Richard Maibaum, then Paul Dehn came on board to do rewrites, and finally Maibaum came back. The sets were by Ken Adam; the director was Guy Hamilton. I credit the two men in that order because décor and gadgets were becoming increasingly important to the franchise. Indeed, cars (product placed, of course), technical gimmicks, and special effects were gradually swamping any realities of espionage, let alone politics. The Bond films came into being in the Kennedy years (and JFK’s listing of one of the books in his bedside reading helped), but they went out of their way to look and feel very different from the political realities of the 1960s (so many of which would have been beyond a rugby team of Bonds).

  But by the time of Goldfinger, the sexual innuendo of the series had become more blatant. Thus the piquancy of Goldfinger’s spy girl (played with mischief by Shirley Eaton), who, having yielded entry to Bond, is covered in gold paint—her sex like Fort Knox. Then there is the bizarre character of Pussy Galore (Honor Blackman), as if Bond could subvert even the lesbian urge.

  This is also the film with Oddjob (Harold Sakata) and his hat, and the brief threat to Bond’s privates from a laser beam. It beggars belief that these films go on and on when you recall that lasers once were the cutting edge of technology. Goldfinger has a worldwide gross of $125 million (on a $3 million budget) and its success ensured a steady stream of the films, all held in place by Sean Connery’s icy sadism and every schoolboy’s notion that a pun is the essential riposte to international affairs and inhuman conflict. Music and theme song by John Barry, sung by Shirley Bassey.

  The Gold Rush (1925)

  With Douglas Fairbanks one day, Chaplin was looking at still photographs of men trekking through deep snow on their way to the Yukon gold rush. He had also read something about the fate of the Donner party in the earlier California rush. And so the pictures and the legend of cannibalism stewed in his mind, and the result was The Gold Rush, not just one of the great silent comedies but a very telling nightmare on the immense disturbance of reality that was caused by gold. Chaplin’s routines are often self-contained, but there is a pervasive amazement or alarm throughout his work that nature and human nature can be so violently shifted by the discovery of a silly thing called wealth. This playing dice with fate is far better handled in City Lights, but it is there in The Gold Rush and in the way Chaplin stressed the matter of needing to eat to survive when gold is inedible.

  The influence of the still photographs was enough to persuade Chaplin to find real snow, so he scouted Truckee, California (in the Sie
rra Nevada), and did a great deal of shooting there, having to build roads in the process and shivering in the tramp’s costume in the authentic cold. A major problem arose with his casting of Lita Grey as the music-hall girl. But when he got Grey pregnant and was obliged to marry her, he dropped her from the picture and brought in Georgia Hale.

  Of course, the set pieces are the heart of the film, notably Charlie’s dance with the dinner rolls; his application of haute cuisine to a boot in order to make a meal for Big Jim (Mack Swain), with Charlie sucking on the nails to get the last “meat”; and Jim’s hallucinatory vision of the Tramp as a hen, fit to be roasted, with Charlie imitating the herky-jerky movements of that bird. Then there is the superb extended nightmare of the cabin on the brink of a precipice, where safety is put at risk by the slightest movement. You can argue that the comedy in the film is isolated and concentrated in numbers that are like dances in musicals. But they all contribute to the dread of madness; and in turn, the transformation of life and fortune during a gold rush is regarded as something beyond reason.

  Rollie Totheroh shot the film, on location and in the studio. Chaplin amassed over 230,000 feet of film, which he edited down to 8,500 feet, or about 82 minutes. (In 1942, he went back to the picture, shortened it by about ten minutes, and introduced a score.) When it opened, it was on its way to rentals of $6 million, with Chaplin himself keeping about $2 million in personal profit. Today The Gold Rush is still very funny to the newcomer and intriguing to anyone who knows it well. Kenneth Lynn, a Chaplin biographer, has suggested that Charlie was influenced in part by knowing of Stroheim’s attempt in Greed; this is very likely, and it may explain why the two films play together so effectively.