'Have You Seen...?'

by David Thomson

  It is war, and we see French officers taken prisoner: Lieutenant Maréchal (Jean Gabin) and Captain de Boeldieu (Pierre Fresnay). We see a German air ace, Captain von Rauffenstein (Erich von Stroheim). Even as the film begins, if you know the basics of film history, you ask yourself, “Renoir and Stroheim on the same picture?” It is like Joyce meeting Shakespeare. But, of course, it was a job like any other, with Stroheim fussing a little at first and then doing as he was told. Together, they made a great line from 1919 to 1937, becoming strong and clear—the tradition (or is that just another illusion, too?).

  Rauffenstein is crippled, and every bit as imprisoned as his French guests. Every man has his prison, as well as his reasons. Attempts to escape are obligatory, and so eventually Rauffenstein will have to fire a fatal shot in the night air, and he and his victim, like daft experts, will assess its difficulty, its fineness, one dying, one broken. Then think of the comradeship in the camp, think of the mise en scène—the depth, the movement—when the inmates fall silent to see one of their fellows dressed up as a girl. Think of Gabin and Marcel Dalio as they escape, in a hideous quarrel and a helpless reunion. Remember the geranium in the fortress. I offered it once as an example of plants in movies. Why not? It is still growing.

  La Grande Illusion is a portrait of companionship, the company made by war, and one of the illusions is that that bond may solve war. Another is that war solves anything, or that the fatalistic conscience sees that and abandons war. War is full of stupid human hope. It keeps coming, like the urge for sex. So La Grande Illusion is just a prison-camp picture in which the organization of men lets lives wither and waste. “In 1937,” said Renoir, “I was told I had made the greatest antiwar picture—two years later war broke out.”

  Written by Renoir and Charles Spaak; photography by Christian Matras; design by Eugène Lourié; edited by Marguerite Renoir; music by Joseph Kosma. The roll of honor should include Dalio (as Rosenthal), Julien Carette, Gaston Modot, Jean Dasté, and Dita Parlo (who comes like fresh milk in the last part of the film). But the roll of honor is open: Everyone who sees the film is included.

  The Grapes of Wrath (1940)

  Here are some dates on The Grapes of Wrath: the novel was published in April 1939. Nunnally Johnson had his script in by July 13, 1939. John Ford started shooting it October 4, 1939. Picture opened January 24, 1940. Yet no one could say the film seems hurried. What that high speed indicates is, first, that Darryl F. Zanuck was behind the film as he had seldom been before. He wanted to see it—and to be seen for it. Second, that Johnson’s script was hardly altered in the course of the shooting. Third, that John Ford shot a complex picture with absolute authority and command of detail. And finally, that the editing, under Zanuck, was full of conviction. There was less than a year between the novel’s publication and its opening as a film.

  Within that context, it is nice to know this story: that Henry Fonda and Jane Darwell were more than ready for their last scene together, the farewell, with his assurance about being present in every detail of life. The two actors had seen their moment ahead on the schedule. Then Gregg Toland had to rig a small light for the match in Fonda’s hand. And Ford fussed with a few other extras he invented and kept them waiting. Then he did it—one take, and Ford walked away.

  The Grapes of Wrath came from the heart. Steinbeck felt the impulse and wrote the novel quickly. Ford and Zanuck approached it in the same way. And Toland shot it on his way to Citizen Kane, with sets by Richard Day and Mark-Lee Kirk. It’s not clear how far Ford himself had researched or seen the Dust Bowl, but he was moved by the script because of the way it reminded him of Irish stories. Time and again, Toland adds a mood of Dorothea Lang and the WPA. Ford got it right. It’s hard to draw much of a distinction between his movie and Walker Evans’s work on Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941, but planned years before)—there is an epic, pictorial quality in both, and maybe in the Ford you can see the faces of actors sometimes. But he delivered the message.

  It is remarkable that America was overtaken in the space of a year by two sensations like Gone With the Wind and The Grapes of Wrath—and they are together part of the country’s tribute to the Depression and having survived it. The cast includes John Carradine, Charley Grapewin, Dorris Bowdon, Russell Simpson, John Qualen, and many others from the Ford family.

  The movie was nominated for seven Oscars, including Best Picture, but it won only for Ford himself and for Jane Darwell as supporting actress. That meant she beat Judith Anderson as Mrs. Danvers in Rebecca—a nonsense, but no greater than Rebecca beating The Grapes of Wrath for Best Picture. Sixty years later, The Grapes of Wrath still looks like an earnest and touching attempt by the film industry to honor years of national hardship and sacrifice, and Fonda’s Tom Joad is timeless and true and a key warning of how a society may make outlaws out of its best material.

  Grease (1978)

  Grease is here not just because any large machine needs lubrication, nor even because of its stupefying success on stage and screen. It is here because I like it, and because it showed how camp attitudes could resurrect the good-natured ethos of old musicals and rearrange the universe so that being in high school was really equivalent to being in a musical. And once you’re there, you can see that its being from Romeo and Juliet (West Side Story) or a Jungian analysis of fairy tales (Into the Woods) are bonuses. Just being there is all right, too. Making a musical doesn’t need to be literary or distinguished. And so at last we found a way of making peace with the lovely “emptiness” of the Astaire-Rogers films. Singing is as good as talking; dancing is better than dying.

  The stage show, by Jim Jacobs and Warren Casey, opened in 1972 and ran for 3,388 performances. In other words, rock and the modern pop industry were old enough for satire and nostalgia. And here is a musical where the extra distance or remove of the screen was better than the stage. Grease is one of the first films where watching it is like being a clerk at a video store, or having access instantly to all the films ever made. “Look at me, I’m Sandra Dee” is only the most obviously self-referential song. “Hopelessly Devoted to You” is a witty reflection on “rapture” songs. The whole idea of a couple torn between being Elvis and Ann-Margret or Troy Donahue and Sandra Dee is what the film is about. And with all these silly role models knocking around, there’s no need for real character. Sandy and Danny (the lead kids) are Barbie dolls, and we can change their clothes and songs to suit our mood.

  The movie was produced by Robert Stigwood and Allan Carr. Bronte Woodard wrote the script, helped a good deal I suspect by Carr. Bill Butler photographed it. There was a discolike feeling of songs running into each other and a kind of kid-Fosse dancing directed by Patricia Birch. Randal Kleiser directed (he would never really do anything again). Of course, the casting was crucial: John Travolta is Danny, and in Travolta the idea of a James Dean–like aggression or menace is a hoot. Danny is cuddly, gentle, and cute; in turn, Olivia Newton-John’s Sandy manages to be the safe sweetheart who puts on tight pants and foxy makeup. Their combined gestures toward sexiness are full of charm and sweetness and the essential coded promise of never needing to grow up.

  The songs are not very good, but they work. They’re like instant juke-box selections in a diner from high-school days. No wonder Grease is such a favorite high-school production. The supporting cast is full of jewels: Stockard Channing as Betty Rizzo, Kelly Ward as Putzie, Jeff Conaway as Kenickie, Didi Conn as Frenchy, Eve Arden as Principal McGee, plus Frankie Avalon, Joan Blondell, Sid Caesar, and Edd Byrnes. The stage success was matched. Grease on film got nearly $100 million in rentals.

  The Great Dictator (1940)

  It seems that Alexander Korda was the first person to suggest that Charlie Chaplin take a shot at playing Adolf Hitler—or, rather, a common man mistaken for the Nazi leader. The screenwriter Konrad Bercovici actually provided Chaplin with a six-page treatment in which the little fellow—a barber, perhaps—is mistaken for the Dictator. Always claiming originality, Chaplin settled out of cour
t with Bercovici and used most of his ideas. And as the film took shape, it was a simple case of mistaken identity attached to a sermon. At last, Chaplin accepted sound, so that he could address the world. Artistically, that was disastrous: The “silent” comedy of The Great Dictator remains wicked and subversive, while the sermon brings the film to a halt.

  Biographer Kenneth Lynn established the lie in Chaplin’s My Autobiography where he claims to have been motivated by Hitler’s invasion of Russia. In fact, the Nazi-Soviet nonaggression pact occurred just before filming started and had a crushing effect on the Popular Front in the United States—but still Chaplin proceeded without any challenge to Russian cynicism. It would be an item in the case against him as a Red sympathizer.

  More than ever before, Chaplin went beyond his set group of actors: Jack Oakie was cast as Benzino Napaloni, the ruler of Bacteria; Henry Daniell would be Garbitsch (a version of Goebbels); Billy Gilbert would be Herring (Göring). Paulette Goddard would be the barber’s girlfriend, Hannah (named after Chaplin’s mother); and Charlie would play both the barber and the Dictator, Adenoid Hynkel. Karl Struss was hired as director of photography.

  There were complaints and threats from life, Germany about the use of figures from life, but no one in America stood in Chaplin’s way. There are comic set pieces—most notably the balloon ballet, and stuff with Oakie—that deserve to be in any anthology on Chaplin’s genius. But the atmosphere of the film is odd. The Nazis look and sound like Americans. The landscape is glaringly wrong. And in the long speech where the barber addresses the world, the shading was fatal. For the speech does not quite attack Hitlerism. It complains at changes in modern life that were apolitical but that had long been part of Chaplin’s naïve creed:

  “The way of life can be free and beautiful, but we have lost the way. Greed has poisoned men’s souls—has barricaded the world with hate—has goose-stepped into misery and bloodshed. We have developed speed, but we have shut ourselves in. Machinery that gives abundance has left us in want. Our knowledge has made us cynical; our cleverness, hard and unkind.”

  The intellectual community found fault with the film, saying it lacked a refined argument, but in 1940 the masses devoured it and were moved by the cheeky affinity between a humble barber and the monstrous Hynkel. The deflating satire came from the English tradition, though it was one that America knew well. So the film may be misjudged as arrogant and crude. But no one else in Hollywood dared do it—and, as if inspired by rivalry, The Great Dictator is Chaplin’s bravest moment. It took in $5 million and was his last great hit.

  Great Expectations (1946)

  There have always been reasons for admiring Great Expectations in the English canon. For years, the BFI used the sequence where the boy Pip encounters Magwitch in the desolate marshlands as a perfect example of editing. Well, maybe, though today it is impossible to avoid the calculation of that effect and far more tempting to concentrate on the décor, whether it is real marsh or a movie creation (a set with a glass painting). The awesome feeling of the child’s dread is far more in the setting than in the cutting, and so Great Expectations is more interesting as an example of atmosphere than of Lean’s academic cutting (he was an editor who became a director).

  The film is much more of a travesty or a cartoon than Lean’s Oliver Twist, but Great Expectations is so much larger as a novel, and Pip is a character beyond the earnest approach (and the age) of John Mills. In so many films of Dickens, it helps to have the central figure as a child. Onscreen, it is hard to miss that Mills’s Pip becomes self-satisfied, a bit of a snob and a simpleton. We make so much more allowance for the children. It doesn’t matter that they don’t quite act; indeed, it helps. And Pip suffers helplessly in every scene he shares with Alec Guinness’s Herbert Pocket. Was Guinness a thief or an innocent? Just watch the way he comes upstairs in his first scene, and then revel in the pious kindness with which he corrects Pip’s coarse manners. You could say it’s Dickens’s fault—he was so uninterested in plain heroes.

  Of course, I haven’t mentioned the things most people actually remember about the film: the world of Miss Havisham, and the astonishing fact of Jean Simmons as Estella. I can never quite believe that the Havisham scenes were not affected by Cocteau’s La Belle et la Bête (made the same year). The diagonal of the great table is the same, and the enchantment is built on the same kinds of magic trick. It’s atmosphere again, and Martita Hunt’s performance is actually rather posed and prim compared with the icy haunting of Wilfred Shingleton’s art direction.

  But what could Hunt do without Jean Simmons—in fact, a robust seventeen, but the personification of serene childish spite. Her scenes with the young Pip remain a lovely rendering of the bitter hopelessness of childhood crushes—and a fine study in Dickens’s notion of malicious beauty. It’s a hopeless task for Valerie Hobson, trying to be the grown-up Estella. It’s a marvel that Lean’s genius—and his undoubted instinct for sexuality—didn’t insist on Simmons making the shift to adulthood herself (though maybe Estella would then have to come closer to Angel Face!).

  So what is left? Oliver Twist is by far the better film, but largely because that Dickens could have been writing for the movies and because the story of a foundling child is so much more concentrated. The real loss of the movie Great Expectations is that, a few scenes apart, it is proof that Dickens was an artist and Lean an illustrator.

  The Great McGinty (1940)

  It was The Biography of a Bum at first, but years later someone at Paramount claimed that “bum meant something awful in Australia,” and so the film became The Great McGinty. But linger a moment for a character: Edmund P. Biden, to be known as Preston Sturges. There he was in the 1930s, somewhat adrift as a writer—a playwright and a scenarist—with an itch to direct, no matter that he was assured that the profession was unseemly in a gentleman and entailed getting up absurdly early. Still, the Bum (inspired by political stories he had heard at the knee of an old judge) tickled him enough to think directing might be the light: “It was to be my entering wedge into the profession, my blackjack. After that, it was simple. It only took six years.”

  There is the insouciance of the man you must come to love if this book will mean anything to you. With a meager five-hundred-word allowance, I cannot trace all the Bum’s ups and downs. But eventually the Sturgeses had William LeBaron of Paramount to dinner. Louise Sturges did wonders with every course, and LeBaron sat back at last and said that if Sturges could make a meal like that, then surely he could make a film. Such is the lot of wives. Such was the attitude of executives toward their own product.

  So Sturges became a Paramount worker: $10 for the script (ten times his asking price) and a humbling sum to direct. (If he ate that well, he presumably had private means.) Sturges reworked the script and faced a great dilemma in a scene where he had to show that McGinty had never taken sexual advantage of his young “bride” (taken on for political face). The solution—walking into the linen closet to speak to her instead of his bedroom—may have alluded to some of Sturges’s own romantic escapades, and it showed how far he had the Lubitsch touch, as well as the greatest drop shots Hollywood has ever known.

  McGinty was his debut, and I will not scold observers who regard it as a warming up, but the Sturges style was there, along with his taste for loyal and steady crewmen and eccentric actors. William C. Mellor shot the film; Hans Dreier did the art direction, Frederick Hollander the music, Edith Head the clothes. The central players—Brian Donlevy as McGinty and Akim Tamiroff as The Boss—were backed up by Muriel Angelus, Allyn Joslyn, William Demarest, Arthur Hoyt, and Louis Jean Heydt.

  In 1940, a year of general election in the Greatest Democracy God Had Yet Permitted, it is encouraging to observe the open treatment of a political system where a vote has the bargaining power of about half a bowl of warm soup. McGinty is a nonentity, voted into office, who tries to go honest, and the film was once meant to carry this moral motto: “I propose to show that honesty is as disastrous for a crook as
is knavery for the cashier of a bank.” At a mere outlay of $400,000, there is wisdom indeed for a great nation on the Cusp of Crisis.

  The Great Train Robbery (1903)

  Edwin S. Porter was born the year before Charles Dickens died—and died the year that Citizen Kane opened. He was a gunnery officer in the Navy and then a collector of varied careers, nearly all of them dependent on technical expertise. As such, he was taken on by the Edison Company with the task of trying to invent an effective projector. It was in that pursuit that he started to make short-story movies, a model of the emerging narratives that turned the wonder of spectacle into stories with character involvement, suspense, and a tidy moral ending. He was a giant in his day and then a forgotten man for at least twenty years before his death. But amid the hundreds of titles he made, or produced, there is The Great Train Robbery.

  This is a 12-minute piece, coherent in nearly all respects, about a plan to rob a train and the eventual capture of the robbers. It manifests elementary screen geography, approximate cutting on action, and a respectful fondness for the long shot. It is the cinema before Griffith, and the state of play that allows us to think of him as a master, a magical possessor of insight as an engineer who saw ways of making the stream of cut images more fluent, speedy, and compelling. Thus, the only reason to look at Porter nowadays is as a sign of his times and a measure of how history was working itself out.