Of course, the idea of a movie about the home front is so obvious, we have to wonder why it took so long. Everyone who was alive then, or half remembers the reality, remembers being told that the civic mood was benign and supportive as it would never be again. There was a neighborliness and a willingness to help others that simply defied all set British notions of privacy or solitude. In truth, Boorman’s Rowan family lives in the suburbs—it is not quite the London we see ablaze in Humphrey Jennings’s classic documentary Fires Were Started. This is not a target area, then, but somewhere the Germans might look to dump bombs on their way home.
But the great skill of the photography (by Philippe Rousselot) and the production design (by Anthony Pratt) is to suggest domes of blast and glare, pits where buildings have gone and the sky is a mess of searchlights and balloons. The kids are warned to stay in and keep to the shelters, but the light show is too beckoning—and bombing soon made a community of ruined but barely guarded houses where rats (boys and the real ones) could go in search of plunder.
The family is disrupted—there is an American boyfriend, and you see once again how quickly societies can change once in combat. But the second part of the film retreats a little to the Thames-side home of the grandfather (Ian Bannen), a man who is protecting everything possible against the damage of war. As for the kids, most notably Bill Rowan (Sebastian Rice Edwards), they exult in the adventure and they hardly notice danger in their wild unpredictable glee. The Germans are mentioned, but they are not vilified, not even when one kid is shot down (and played by Boorman’s son).
The cast also includes Geraldine Muir, Sarah Miles, David Hayman, Sammi Davis, Susan Wooldridge, Jean-Marc Barr, Derrick O’Connor, and Annie Leon. The music is by Peter Martin. Ian Crafford edited the film, and Shirley Russell did the costumes with loving care (and every coupon she could find). Boorman was Oscar-nominated for the script and for directing, and the film won a Best Picture nomination. It is also, I suspect, the closest Boorman has come to an international hit—what’s more, despite its subject, it is one of the most lighthearted and cheery of his films.
The Horse’s Mouth (1958)
Question: For what film did the same person receive an Academy Award nomination for adapted screenplay, and the Volpi Cup at the Venice Festival for best actor? Answer: Alec Guinness in The Horse’s Mouth, playing Gulley Jimson, perhaps the most explosive, cantankerous, and ungraspable artist ever presented on film. Jimson is the central figure in a novel by Joyce Cary, and one who so won the affections of Guinness that he felt compelled to do the screenplay and promote the making of the film.
For, in truth, this film is not very English—it has no respect for artists or their table manners. Instead, it believes in Jimson as a genius but a rascal, an unreliable, dangerous, and thoroughly uncouth figure. Among geniuses he is in the category of Renoir’s Boudu or Salier’s Mozart, and it always seemed a bit of a shame that Jimson’s paintings for the film were done by a painter named John Bratby, a kitchen-sink realist of modest achievement in the 1950s. Just think what more the film might mean if it had Lucian Freud nudes as its set pieces, some of Francis Bacon’s trapped figures, or a few of Stanley Spencer’s visions at Cookham.
Guinness is fiercer than he usually allowed himself to be, and I’d guess that that release is part of the appeal. Even so, some English audiences were pained by the film’s vulgarity, its clear suggestion that Jimson lapped up sex like hot soup, and the idea that so barbaric and antisocial a figure might be doing valuable pictures. Jimson scrounges and looks for walls that may bear his murals. To that end, he is a kind of terrorist—gruff, unshakable, and devilish.
Guinness’s old friend Ronald Neame directed the film and showed not for the first or last time that he was a deft filmmaker, with humor and a good eye. Arthur Ibbetson did the photography. Anne Coates edited the picture, and Bill Andrews was in charge of the art direction. The music included extracts from Prokofiev’s Lieutenant Kije suite—whimsical, jaunty, insolent, and suddenly suffused in glory.
It would be no shock if Michael Powell had done the film, for it really is a lovely piece of English eccentricity and one more proof of how versatile Guinness could be onscreen. He needed to play men with secrets, and Jimson qualified very easily. More than the other great English theatrical knights, Guinness knew the potency in film of characters who seemed out of reach, or beyond improvement. Gulley Jimson is not a man you’d take home.
The excellent, rather scruffy cast includes Ernest Thesiger, Renee Houston, Kay Walsh (once wife to David Lean—and Nancy in Oliver Twist), Mike Morgan, Michael Gough, Robert Coote, Veronica Turleigh, Reginald Beckwith, and Arthur Macrae.
The Hospital (1971)
It plays very little today—perhaps because the mechanics of hospitals as well as the sociology date rapidly. But on looking through the list of Academy Awards, one finds that for 1971, George C. Scott got a Best Actor nomination for The Hospital, while Paddy Chayefsky won Original Screenplay for it. So long as your health is good enough to preclude the need to go to a hospital soon, this has to be on your list. I have heard stories of audience members who laughed at it so violently that they ruptured parts of themselves and so faced exactly the kind of treatment they had learned to dread.
Dr. Herbert Bock (Scott) is chief of medicine at a city hospital. His personal life is in chaos, but he tries to keep sane by doing a decent job. The hospital for which he is responsible is only a mirror of his personal chaos. The benign attempt to bring comfort and healing to the unwell is steadily ridiculed by the inept performance of this hospital. What goes wrong is the result of bureaucracy, clerical confusion, human error, and chance. That this panorama is not just funny but hilarious owes little to clowning or slapstick (though sometimes a doctor and nurse will screw in a patient’s bed) and everything to the tenor and language of Chayefsky’s screenplay. The great realist and miniaturist of the 1950s (Marty) has become a satirist on a broad canvas, but a writer of such explosive humor that I far prefer him sour to sweet.
It turns out that Dr. Bock’s hospital houses a serial killer, the father of a very strange, English-sounding, hippie-prophet, Barbara Drummond (played with such sensual élan by Diana Rigg that the problems of the character vanish). They become lovers, and she is all for taking Herbert off to the woods to a very simple life. But Herbert is used to urban chaos, and in the end he stays and presumably has plans either to reform the hospital or to put up with it. That he will likely die in one of its beds seems certain—from natural causes or avoidable error is the only open question.
This is a formidable comedy, absolutely apart from those TV series that do good work dramatizing the procedures of a hospital while assuring you that the staff are human (ER and so on). This is a grand satire on liberalism and every attempt to have a health policy for a race of animals that are error-prone, self-destructive, and doomed. Arthur Hiller directed. Victor Kemper photographed it. But you can ignore such things. This is a film about a man hoping to fall silent—for his scathing eloquence is the measure of the hopelessness of his hopes. Here is proof, if you doubted it, that Scott was the actor of his generation. As for Chayefsky (with Network still to come), he was a kind of genius. Also with Barnard Hughes, Nancy Marchand, Stephen Elliott, Donald Harron, Roberts Blossom, Frances Sternhagen, Robert Walden, and Richard Dysart.
House of Bamboo (1955)
More or less, no one in that other world—the respectable domain of arts and leisure—has ever heard of House of Bamboo, let alone seen it. So the first thing to say is, get yourself the chance to see it: Ideally, that means on a big screen, where the CinemaScope photography can be seen and felt. The camerawork is by Joe MacDonald, who was an expert at Twentieth Century Fox and who therefore had to photograph far too many dull, worthy films. I do not give him credit for House of Bamboo. The passion for form in the picture, for dynamic, changing compositions, and for the unique way in which Japanese interiors can have paper walls that instantly rip apart to reveal fresh shapes—all these
things are Samuel Fuller, and Fuller alone, and they are his greedy eye for the marvels of form that arise whenever different races try to live together. Years ahead of his time, when it looked like miscegenation more than friction and misunderstanding, Fuller was attracted to interracial stories. Thus, the alleged innovations of, say, Ridley Scott’s Black Rain (not a bad film) all fall away if you have seen House of Bamboo first. And it was made thirty years earlier.
So when you look at the film, the first thrill is just to witness and inhabit Fuller’s command of the screen and the image. And, truth to tell, he was so restless, so quick, so inquisitive, he can leave even Nicholas Ray and Anthony Mann looking overcomposed. But then go further into the trite story of a rancid loser (Robert Stack) who has to act as nasty as he can to penetrate the austere, samurai-like circle of former American soldiers who have made a crime syndicate in Japan. Especially, take note of Robert Ryan’s cold, intellectual, and cripplingly organized boss. As a rule, Fuller liked to give his own energy to lone wolves (Steiger in Run of the Arrow and Widmark in Pickup on South Street). But here, Stack’s character fulfills that function and then leaves fresh ground for the meeting with Ryan (Sandy Dawson is the character’s name), who is an unusual figure in Fuller’s work, just because of his cerebral detachment.
What does this meeting mean? Well, some observers have remarked on a half-buried homosexual bond, and that is one of the few things from which Fuller really did flinch. Yes, his guys can love each other, like links in a chain or man and dog. But man to man troubled him, I suspect, and so in many of his films there is a bond that remains closeted—though Fuller generally was all for ripping aside every sham and tearing down every door. Of course, Ryan is invariably a haunting presence in most of his films—but he stands in House of Bamboo for what is a new world for Fuller, one in which nearly every problem could be thought through. And all of a sudden, the role of women in Fuller’s films seems limited, conventional, and apologetic.
How Green Was My Valley (1941)
Richard Llewellyn’s best-selling novel about life in a Welsh mining village presented Hollywood with many problems. The novel was a story of family, but set against a background of labor strife in which the miners fought a losing battle with the coal-mining industry. In a project taken on in the first years of war, Twentieth Century Fox had grave reservations about making Britain look bad, and time and again Darryl Zanuck gave the order: Stress the family story and play down the labor issue.
As so often, Zanuck took a very direct, personal hand. There had been first thoughts of shooting in Wales itself, but war and the weather reports killed that. There were also early scripts, by Ernest Pascal among others, that proved disappointing. Philip Dunne was asked to report on the script and thus he got the job himself. He devised the flashbacks and the voice-over and worked very closely with William Wyler, who was scheduled to direct and who prepared the picture in detail. The script Dunne wrote was too long, and it seems that Zanuck himself did the final editing. Meanwhile Richard Day was building a Welsh mining village on the ranch at Malibu. But the budget was too high, and Wyler was thought to be extravagant, so at the last moment John Ford was brought in to direct—he had the reputation not just of being very good, but of filming economically.
The film that resulted is not just esteemed. It won Best Picture in the year of Citizen Kane, and it collected several other Oscars. I have to say that no one who knows Wales has ever had this respect for the film. Day’s large set was pretty to its tiptoes, idyllic and breathing with the proper nostalgia (it won an Oscar). But in no way did it resemble a Welsh mining community, places where the weather, the overcast, and the poverty have done so much to take away prettiness.
But the inner prettiness—the sentimentality—of the family story is every bit as big a problem. This is a weepie with coal dust in your eyes, as well as an uplifting but distant view of mining that is not willing to examine the economics closely for fear of giving offense. Yes, the family life was strong, but the truth in many places (and it’s a truth written on headstones since 1941) is that the nation exploited coal and its workers heartlessly and left a place of poverty and eyesore. To the prettiness of the film’s village, I would just respond “Aberfan”—a place of disaster unknown in most American minds.
So it’s coherent and touching, but shot through with a fatal wrongness—the fact that the almost all cast are from everywhere but Wales is part of this. Roddy McDowall is excellent as the child, and he was bold casting for the time. The cast also includes Walter Pidgeon (Canadian), Maureen O’Hara (Irish), Donald Crisp (Scottish), Anna Lee (English), Sara Allgood (Irish), Barry Fitzgerald (Irish), and Rhys Williams (Welsh!). It’s said that the film cost $1.25 million and it had first-run domestic rentals of $2.8 million. So it worked—but, of course, next to Kane, it looks like Victorian homily.
Humoresque (1946)
Joan Crawford had just done Mildred Pierce, and her reward was a big new contract at Warners. So she surprised her producer, Jerry Wald, by saying that she’d heard of Humoresque and wanted to do it. Wald explained that the story really centered on the young violin player from the slums, Paul Boray. Her part, the woman who becomes his lover and patroness, the one who drowns herself finally, was secondary. “But it’s delicious!” said Joan, and she was right. She was playing her age in a sensible way. She guessed the film would end up hers, and she saw that she and John Garfield together could be like La Motta and Robinson.
It’s probably a good thing that neither star knew exactly how the film came into being. A couple of years earlier, Clifford Odets had been hired to work on the George Gershwin biopic, Rhapsody in Blue. He had written miles of script that couldn’t be used, so the studio reckoned to marry it off to the outline of a 1920 Humoresque, taken from a Fannie Hurst short story. Barney Glazer was doing this marrying, and he had one big query for the studio: Should the fiddle player’s background be Italian or Jewish? In the end they settled on Italian, which meant they used Paganini instead of a Hebrew lament.
Of course, Garfield was at a disadvantage: He had to act while he was playing the violin. He worked hard at it, but in the end they came to an arrangement where the nimble digits of Isaac Stern came up out of the darkness to do the fingering on a violin attached to Garfield’s chin. This ensures a very noir look in the music scenes, and leaves one hungering for the dialogue between Stern and Garfield.
For her part, Joan had the clothes designed by Adrian and the dead-on notion that when she looked at Garfield playing the violin she was imagining his hands elsewhere. It works. The love story is clichéd and sultry in just the right mix, and director Jean Negulesco seems to know exactly the kind of high-tone trash he is dealing with. In essence, this is a fancy equation in which the gutter-urchin genius and the Park Avenue hostess can each get their rocks off through a little noisy art. Without this exchange, who knows whether New York—let alone the movies—would ever have survived?
The film is greatly enlivened by the supporting cast, notably Oscar Levant as Garfield’s piano player and as the film’s comic relief. He has many droll lines, most of which it’s easy to imagine he wrote himself—like “It isn’t what you are, it’s who you don’t become that hurts,” which could have been Levant doing his own epitaph. One day, looking at Garfield with his arms pinned, at Stern reaching up to finger the strings and himself on piano, Levant suggested they all go on the road. The rest of the cast includes J. Carroll Naish, Joan Chandler, Tom D’Andrea, Peggy Knudsen, Ruth Nelson, Craig Stevens, and little Bobby Blake as the child Garfield.
The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1923)
Victor Hugo’s novel Notre-Dame de Paris is a root of cinema, made five times already before what we like to think of as the classic Lon Chaney version. But what does the old story mean? You can easily draw a parallel between the Hugo and King Kong, with the monstrous, hallucinatory “beast” being revealed as a tender soul filled with love for our heroine. But Kong hiding out on Skull Island is far removed from Quasimodo reign
ing in the upper reaches of the stronghold of the French Catholic Church or—as Hugo put it—the heart of Paris itself. How does Quasimodo fit with the Church—as its terrible bastard son, or as a warped Christ figure? Is his mere existence in the great cathedral enough to start us thinking that the Church is a corruption and a failure? Does Quasimodo die to save Esmeralda, or to protect all of us under the roof of the Church? In the considerable gaze of the handicapped—hardly focused when Victor Hugo wrote—what does it imply that Quasimodo should die? Don’t we, rather, wait on the day when the hunchback comes down from the roof and reveals himself as a wise man?
This Universal version, directed by Wallace Worsley, was a colossal undertaking. Notre Dame was a copy of the original on a 6,000-square-foot lot that was meant to show eight blocks of surrounding housing. Edward T. Lowe, Jr., did a script that was faithful to the outline of the book, and nothing was spared on the costumes. Still, the reason for doing the film was the imagination of Lon Chaney, for whom Quasimodo was an obvious part. Chaney is said to have needed three and a half hours a day just to put on the makeup: the great glaring eye, the mouth full of broken teeth, the idiot tongue poking through the mouth, and the hump itself—allegedly forty pounds of rubber. It is one of his great triumphs, yet Quasimodo remains surprisingly upright, noble, and masculine. Everyone always remarked on Chaney’s prowess with his makeup kit, yet there are roles—and this is one—where the actor is always recognizable and where the pained experience of Chaney shows. He was the man of a thousand faces, but he had a great face and it is that of someone who has seen and survived horrors. In much of Chaney’s great work, we long for him to speak, to tell us about that world he has known.
'Have You Seen...?' Page 62