Hail the Conquering Hero (1943)
This was the end of Preston Sturges at Paramount—and, as you might suspect, it is one of his most brilliant and disconcerting pictures. Woodrow True-smith (Eddie Bracken) sits alone in a nightclub drinking. Enter six Marines, just in from Guadalcanal. Woodrow buys them a beer and tells his story: He was a Marine once, but then hay fever ruled him out. So he stayed away, writing home about being a Marine hero, while actually laboring in a shipyard. He told his girlfriend Libby (Ella Raines) to give him up because he’d found another girl. The Marines give him a uniform, an “honorable discharge,” and they take him home to Oak Ridge, California. Hail the Conquering Hero! His mother’s mortgage is paid off. There’s going to be a statue of Woodrow. He could even be mayor!
It’s typical of Sturges that he should expose the mechanics of heroism at just the moment when real heroes were returning. And it’s not just that he shows a system vulnerable to the spin and deceit of public relations. Rather, he marvels at a country where flatulent concepts like heroism, honor, and duty can get so out of control.
Of course, the truth comes out, and Woodrow is a little like a fallen hero in a Capra film, half expecting to be lynched. But his girl now realizes that he always loved her and the public won’t let him go. As one character observes to him, “Politics is a very peculiar thing, Woodrow. If they want you, they want you. They don’t need reasons anymore; they find their own reasons.” And truly it is that wanton, irrational energy that Sturges is seeing finally, and being dismayed by. This is a country determined to go crazy over someone—anyone. It’s the first serious warning about the loss of judgment in American public life, and it’s the shrewdest estimate in Hollywood of what the war was doing.
They used the old sets from Miracle of Morgan’s Creek on a project kept within safe budgetary limits. John Seitz was cameraman. Hans Dreier did the art direction, and the music came from Werner Heymann, with Sturges himself writing a song. The cast included William Demarest, Bill Edwards, Raymond Walburn, Jimmie Dundee, Georgia Caine, Al Bridge, James Damore, Freddie Steele, Jimmy Conlin, Arthur Hoyt, Harry Hayden, Franklin Pangborn, Vic Potel, and Chester Conklin.
In her first days of shooting, Ella Raines was not very relaxed. The Paramount people (notably Buddy DeSylva) grumbled and wanted her removed. But Sturges stood by his choice, and defended her in a big studio battle that extended to the question of why Sturges preferred his old familiar faces. There were those who thought it threatened the end of Preston Sturges. His new contract was being negotiated, and Sturges asked for a two-week window after every production during which he could leave. He had been a gold mine at the studio. But Frank Freeman resisted the two-week gap, and everyone was too stubborn to make a compromise. Sturges probably knew he could make a better deal elsewhere, but in fact he never had as fruitful a setup. If you’re inclined to like the man, then his self-destructive loyalty to Ella Raines is as touching as the way Sturges’s heroines love their guys.
“The only amazing thing about my career,” wrote Sturges, “is that I ever had one at all.”
Halloween (1978)
Haddonfield, Illinois, 1963. Michael Myers, aged six, kills his sister, Judith. Cut forward to 1978. Dr. Sam Loomis (Donald Pleasence), while driving to the asylum, tells a nurse that Michael hasn’t spoken a word since. Dr. Loomis thinks Michael is evil. So guess who is lurking in the dark at the asylum gates to steal the car and drive off? And guess where he’s headed? From the outset, there is a sweet, practical innocence about Halloween, coupled with the “I-dare-you” spirit of campfire stories told about the night that horrors walk the suburban streets of the Midwest. So there’s one joke in having Donald Pleasence (not always the sanest actor in sight) as the doctor in charge—and there’s another in him having the name of the John Gavin character from Psycho (the guy who actually captures Norman Bates).
Meanwhile, in Haddonfield, three comely teenage girls—Jamie Lee Curtis, Nancy Loomis (is the name why she was cast?), and P. J. Soles—are reckoning what to do on Halloween night. They’re too old to trick-or-treat. But two of the girls hope to get their treats indoors with their boyfriends. It’s only Jamie Lee who counts on a night of dutiful babysitting, and who isn’t ready to give herself away in sex yet. Jamie Lee is on the virginal side, but, children, if you want a steadfast babysitter who will protect you against everything, pick a virgin.
Of course, Michael Myers, in a mask, will stalk Haddonfield this night. Those casual fun-loving girls will pay the price for hoping to be entertained, and Jamie Lee, with old-fashioned pluck and ingenuity, will stand up to Michael Myers and the heavy pressure of terror. It all rises to a demented climax and a fearsome scene where Michael seems to have trapped Jamie Lee in a closet. But then Loomis appears. He puts a bullet in Michael. The youth plunges to the street. Survivors draw breath. They look around, and Michael’s corpse has gone. The sequels want him.
Halloween is simple, good-natured, and sturdy in its conservative morality, a part of which is the certainty that the mentally disturbed are going to be dangerous until the end of time. Written and directed by John Carpenter and produced by Debra Hill, it was made for peanuts and it had rentals of $18 million. It needs the gutsiness of Jamie Lee Curtis and it made her a quasar if not quite a star. As photographed by Dean Cundey, it is quick, moody, and evil-minded in the way of smart high school kids. We are a long way from real evil or the meaning of horror. But the series would run to eight films, and it would inspire so many other horror franchises for horny teenagers. Carpenter was a good director of action, and the editing is on to every trick in the goosing repertoire. In hindsight, there’s regret that Carpenter’s talent didn’t flower. But, as Dr. Loomis might have put it, if America is prepared to pay you a small fortune for putting on the frighteners, be a public servant.
Hamlet (1948)
In taking on Hamlet (with the J. Arthur Rank company paying for it), Laurence Olivier was under some pressure to cut the text. His film is 155 minutes, whereas the Kenneth Branagh version (1996) is 242 minutes. The Branagh is in color, too, but still I think it is a less powerful film. The Olivier cuts (including Rosencrantz, Guildenstern, and Fortinbras) are forgivable, and the black and white is a happy, noir accident. For, actually, Olivier resorted to it only because he was having an argument with Technicolor and was determined not to give them the pleasure. As a consequence, this Elsinore (mounted at Denham) is a deep-focus labyrinth, and a far more satisfying place than might have been achieved by palatial color. Indeed, the place looks as if it is being filmed as an impressionable young actor’s remembrance of Xanadu.
Olivier cut the text himself and generally followed the approach of his 1937 production at the Old Vic. Naturally enough, Vivien Leigh had been eager to play Ophelia, but she was too old and so the part went to the very young Jean Simmons. After much uncertainty, Gertrude was awarded to Eileen Herlie—though Herlie was twelve years younger than Olivier (and six years younger than Leigh). Herlie is the most serious limitation on the film’s cast, and it’s a marvel that Olivier nowhere comments on the possibility of casting Vivien—perhaps it would have crushed her vanity, though “Mummy” was one of his pet names for her. Basil Sydney is Claudius, and he does well enough, but in hindsight one regrets that the sexual tremors are not more apparent in that triangle. Olivier was sexually minded, and the treatment of Ophelia and lying between her legs actually involved some cutting when the film reached America.
What really works is the blond Olivier prowling the dark corridors and delivering most of the essential speeches. Yes, the play is curtailed, but Olivier as an existential hesitator is very effective and the engine to what was a crowd-pleasing film. Henry V is a bolder film, and truer Shakespeare maybe. But the success of delivering a decent Hamlet was greater still, and this is a landmark in Shakespeare productions onscreen, the proof that anything can be done.
The capper on that effort, of course, was winning Best Picture (The Red Shoes was Rank’s other contender that year). Ol
ivier also won the Oscar for Best Actor, and other statuettes went to Roger Furse for art direction and Carmen Dillon for sets. The picture had cost £574,000 (way over budget), but in time it broke into healthy profits with rentals of $3.25 million in the United States alone. It was during the filming that Olivier was knighted.
Felix Aylmer is Polonius, Terence Morgan is Laertes, Norman Wooland is Horatio, Peter Cushing is Osric, Patrick Troughton is the Player King, Anthony Quayle is Marcellus, and Stanley Holloway is the Gravedigger. The music was written by William Walton, and the picture was photographed by Desmond Dickinson.
Hamlet (1964)
Everyone does Hamlet now—and it’s hard to be empty with that play, though it easily goes wrong. It wouldn’t amaze anyone if Tom Cruise had a go, or Johnny Depp. I’m sure people whisper the poison in their ears. We have Mel Gibson and Branagh, and we can take the vanity-plates quality to such works. So it’s arresting to see a Hamlet made not for the central actor, but for us all, in the certainty that this play speaks to us and our society as well as any ever written. The film made by Grigori Kozintsev is like a very high-class state theater rendering of the play. Yet it’s a real movie, too.
So it’s interesting to note that Kozintsev had dreamed of doing a Hamlet since 1923: He had planned an abridged mime version with the Factory of the Eccentric Actor. That failed, but in 1954 at the Pushkin Theatre in Leningrad, Kozintsev did a version (employing the new literary criticism of Jan Kott) that was clearly the basis for this film. So this is not just Hamlet’s dilemma but the portrait of a diseased Denmark, a place where the unstable prince’s pretending to be mad may hasten the symptoms of real illness. Compared with Olivier, therefore, Innokenti Smoktunovsky is not so much a lone romantic figure as a victim of group malaise.
This is ensemble playing in a scheme of black-and-white CinemaScope not nearly as atmospheric as the Olivier version but more stark, and in many ways more intriguing. The sets are beautifully matched with real exteriors of stormy seas, rocky cliffs, and forlorn castles. This is a Hamlet for which the “where” matters a great deal and seems to bear out the failure of so many personal relations.
The text comes from a translation by Boris Pasternak, and since the film is only 140 minutes (13 minutes shorter than the Olivier version), it’s the more impressive that this version includes so much and yet makes the family story so gripping. Great speeches are shortened, yet everything is done to compress the drama—there’s more Ophelia than usual, a lot of the players, but a brief appearance by the Ghost. The photography by Jonas Gritsius is outstanding, and I have to say that I think this is the most compelling of the film Hamlets. A great deal of the martial mood and the sense of warped destinies is supplied by the exceptional music by Dmitri Shostakovich, who had known and worked with Kozintsev since the film The New Babylon in 1929.
Of course, the poetry is lost, or distanced, though the sepulchral Russian voices seem very well suited to this interpretation. For Kozintsev, Hamlet becomes a political play. Olivier was striving for a Freudian portrait. The play can handle all comers. But for anyone searching, and unaware, Kozintsev’s Hamlet and his subsequent King Lear are major works. Grant, too, that this severe, restrained Hamlet is the same year as the unrestrained I Am Cuba and it’s easier to feel the vitality in Russian film waiting for the age of Tarkovsky and Sokhurov.
Hangmen Also Die! (1943)
Bertolt Brecht arrived in Los Angeles from Finland in July 1941. No one had done more to help that journey than Fritz Lang (he had heard so much about Brecht from Peter Lorre). So, in the New World, the two men walked their dogs together. Lang enthused about the ideal society of California. Brecht reckoned that it was just high capitalism. In fact, both men needed a job, and it came in the form of producer Arnold Pressburger (a Czech), who urged a resistance story set in Prague. Then, on May 26, 1942, Reinhard Heydrich, the Nazi chief in that area, was assassinated in that very city. In addition, Pressburger suggested a quisling character in the story who might be tricked into helping the resistance.
Lang and Brecht worked on the script on the beach. Brecht had a deal for $8,000—Lang had a contract for $50,000, which included $10,000 for his script contributions. So they didn’t exactly get on: Brecht’s script tended to be didactic; Lang was looking for a story line. Eventually, Lang brought in John Wexley to smooth the script out. And Brecht liked Wexley at first—Wexley spoke German. They were going to call the script Trust the People (not exactly a Hollywood code). But then Brecht got the impression that he was being eased to one side, and Wexley made it clear that he would claim primary credit.
The whole thing is a drama in itself (or a novel), and it ends with Brecht in fury and contempt, suing for anything he can think of and going before the Writers Guild. Yet, as Lang admitted later, there were clearly several scenes (involving Walter Brennan’s character) that only Brecht could have written. What Brecht lamented was the casting of the story in Hollywood conventions, the use of regular studio actors, and an overall absentmindedness about the Jewish question.
Prague was built at the General Services Studio, with William Darling as art director and James Wong Howe as cameraman. It’s good-looking, but you can smell budgetary limits, as opposed to a setting that ought to be nightmarish. Worse than that, there are too many placid or well-fed American actors—Brian Donlevy, Brennan, Anna Lee, Gene Lockhart, Dennis O’Keefe—who simply don’t convey the desperation in the resistance situation. Brecht saw Hollywood details everywhere, and he wanted many more refugee actors in the cast (including his mistress, Helene Weigel).
In the end, Wexley won the Guild arbitration and got the screenplay credit, while Lang and Brecht shared story credit. The general press reception was as good as it was predictable. This was a major war-effort movie: It concludes portentously with “This is NOT The End.” But the critic Manny Farber, for one, found the picture awkward, and truly, granted the thriller aspects of the material, as well as the presence of Lang and Brecht, it is not the film it might have been. But the score, by Hanns Eisler, is marvelous, and in the supporting cast you can find Lionel Stander, Margaret Wycherley, Alexander Granach, and Hans von Twardowski as Heydrich.
Happy Together (1997)
A full ten years after Happy Together, even his greatest enthusiasts begin to wonder aloud whether Wong Kar-Wai can deliver the masterpiece he seems capable of let alone the string of masterpieces such as easily identify Mizoguchi and Naruse. Those masters took the family group, and the secret antagonism of men and women, as their subject. Wong Kar-Wai is cooler and more modern, and Happy Together is about two gay men who have gone to Argentina together. Wong said it was a way of missing the fuss that attended Hong Kong’s change of status. But in truth this film has very little political context or interest. It’s far more a model picture of the new loneliness where a person can go nearly anywhere he can think of.
So, although this picture stresses “Together” and has the pop song as a final theme, it’s most impressive as a picture of two boys alone and together. They are gay lovers, to be sure, but it’s a competitive love, struggling for dominance or authorship. And it’s no surprise when the film separates the pair before the end and has one of them talking about the other. I think Wong Kar-Wai is more interested in that lone attempt to make sense than in a truly integrated existence in Buenos Aires.
That said, Wong Kar-Wai has a great eye and ear—one of the characters is impressed at how different people sound, and the film as a whole responds to salsa and tango as well as the permanent mistiness of the Iguazú Falls. These are guys who work in cheap restaurants, and domesticity as a whole is countered by the steady habit of eating out. They are not the best educated kids in the world, though they are street-smart and hip. They could be in any café you care to name and they could talk to anyone. But their rhythms are different, and Wong is a master at getting things like that: The one (Tony Leung) has an inward resource that the other (Leslie Cheung) simply lacks—and in the end the film does cleave toward introspe
ction and a voice that wants to define the impact of company and assess it in the framework of intellectual solitude.
Very little happens—hardly anything in the way of story. Yet we know these guys and their limits, and we see that one of them has at least a nostalgia for the literary or intellectual placing of things. Who knows whether Wong Kar-Wai will ever work that out for himself. The very quick, deft photography is by Christopher Doyle, Wong’s regular coworker, and they are certainly happy together.
You could call this postcard cinema—or is it e-mail? Messages voiced in the shared night by two guys who wonder whether their existence and travel can challenge marriage, say. The tone is wistful, elegiac, and steadily interested in the world. But I’m not sure whether Wong has the nerve or the need to face the old challenge to make masterpieces—the habit that Kenji Mizoguchi and Naruse nearly took for granted. It’s odd, because he has the skills.
A Hard Day’s Night (1964)
In the terrible history of the movie exploitation of young singing sensations, there is no pity and little joy. Consider, for instance, the astonishing vitality of one Elvis Presley and the malignant spirit that insisted on his films being so bland, so enervated, so absent of all the things that made Elvis remarkable and dangerous and sexy. Once upon a time, the cinema was to celebrate those antisocial forces, but with Elvis they served as a plaster cast to keep his body and his spirit still. You could argue that Performance approached the bristling flower of Mick Jagger with far more panache. But Jagger is an actor in that film, and not the Stones. So I think it’s time that Richard Lester received proper praise for finding a movie form that was wildly flattering to the Fab Four, generally smart and hip with film’s possibilities, plus a reminder that having a real director might not hurt.
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