It comes from a novel, Il Contesto, by Leonardo Sciascia, with a screenplay by Rosi, Tonino Guerra, and Lino Iannuzzi. The setting is Italy, but without the usual points of identification preferred by Rosi. Instead, this is set in a Lang-like city, granted that it has the architectural elements of antiquity. But the photography—by Rosi’s regular, Pasqualino De Santis—has a quite different approach: The real is now primed to be the décor of theater.
When a public prosecutor is shot dead, Inspector Rogas (Lino Ventura) is engaged to find the answers. But Rogas quickly guesses that the murder—and then the murders—involve a more thorough attempt against law and order. Rogas is being pressured by, and growing suspicious of, everyone—a judge (Alain Cuny), a chief magistrate (Max von Sydow), and a minister of justice (Fernando Rey). The casting indicated in this hierarchy speaks less to realism than the discreet charm of authority, and as always with Rosi there is straight-faced humor that is held back only by the sequence of crimes.
Indeed, there are moments when Illustrious Corpses is reminiscent of both Luis Buñuel and Jean-Pierre Melville, and one feels the hardened realist in Rosi yielding more and more to style and feeling less certain of his old political allegiances. Moreover, as style builds, so paranoia becomes harder to defy or forget. The more accomplished the filmmaking, the easier it is to feel afraid of the grand design of conspiracy. And the ending to this film seems to indicate something close to despair in Rosi—it is him listening to the Italian version of “It’s Chinatown.” In other words, it’s nothing that an honest man can alter or deter.
This undermining atmosphere works especially well on the potent, earthy, and plainly strong Lino Ventura as the chief investigator. He is iconic, a man as used to violence as to thinking for himself. And Ventura brings with him the air of much experience in difficult noir situations. Yet his strength will be dissolved and his likeability left for little. Equally, the prosecutor killed at the outset is none other than Charles Vanel, eighty, and very near the end of an illustrious career. Gradually, Rosi had worked himself away from figures of rugged probity to the brittle, none-too-full charmers such as Gian Maria Volonte who played in several of his films. It is as if we no longer deserve the star system.
Imitation of Life (1934)
There was a time in the study of film when most people had seen Douglas Sirk’s Imitation of Life (1959) before they caught up with the original version, by John M. Stahl. Indeed, it seems to be the case that Sirk himself put the Stahl aside until he had done his work. With good reason: for what was clearly a story filled with social criticism in 1959 was a blithely racist film in 1934 in which the silliness of the romantic plot was washed up on the shore of American opinion, without any treasure of satire glinting in it. Not that the ignorance or indifference in the original is without interest.
It comes from a Fannie Hurst novel, published in 1933, with writing for the screen that involved a credited William Hurlbut and a host of uncredited people, including Preston Sturges. Bea Pullman (Claudette Colbert) is a widow with a daughter, Jessie. She has a hard time coping. A black woman, Delilah Johnson (Louise Beavers), comes to the house, looking for work. Delilah has a daughter, too—Peola. Bea asks her to move in as housekeeper. It all clicks, and Delilah makes the best pancakes anyone ever had. They start to sell the mix locally.
Time passes: The girls have grown up (they are Rochelle Hudson and Fredi Washington now). But Peola is passing for white at school. A newcomer, Elmer Smith (Ned Sparks), suggests the pancake mix is good enough for mass marketing. A company is formed, but Delilah refuses the 20 percent offered to her because she just wouldn’t know what to do with it. So quietly Bea puts some money aside for her. Don’t ask how much—charity is a private act, and Colbert trusts her own taste in such matters. Bea meets another man (Warren William). The man goes for Jessie. Delilah dies. Big funeral. Peola owns up.
It sounds a lot like an idea James M. Cain might be trying out, and one can suppose that he studied the original novel carefully. What is startling about the 1934 version is Bea’s sublime but relaxed air of superiority, which includes the idea that 20 percent is an equitable payoff for the mix, that a vague bank account will suffice instead, and that Peola is really being pretty “uppity” trying to horn in on white lifestyle. Truth to tell, Colbert’s self-regard fits this rather ugly superiority in ways that keep the picture working.
And yet, it is a picture about the friendship between a white woman and a black—and clearly they are intended to be seen suffering from the same problems with “pushy” kids who overshadow the mothers’ lives. But Hurst and Stahl alike seem to see the title and the idea of “imitation” or mirroring as ironic or comic—not as a first attempt at social criticism. Sirk in 1959 dropped the pancake mix to boost the melodrama. So his Delilah (renamed Annie) is simply a servant. And there irony strikes at last: for equality of the races is so much assisted if the Delilahs have a respectable bank account. Still, the 1934 Imitation was nominated for an Oscar as Best Picture. That was before supporting acting was recognized, but if it had been, then Louise Beavers might have got the first “black” nomination.
Imitation of Life (1959)
In 1958, Lana Turner’s fourteen-year-old daughter, Cheryl Crane, stabbed her mother’s lover, Johnny Stompanato, and killed him. She went free because it was said that she was defending her mother against attack. Turner was not much short of forty, and Universal sprang to her rescue by putting her in a remake of their 1930s hit, Imitation of Life, a story of mothers and daughters, one couple in the theater, the other their servants. Douglas Sirk was the natural director at Universal for such material.
It all turned out a great success, and Turner’s career was prolonged by the box office. The real oddity is that Sirk, only fifty-nine when it opened, made it his last American picture. In fact, he fell ill, and that got in the way of later, more independent ventures. His producer on the film, Ross Hunter, would carry on, but never again with Sirk’s critical intelligence.
Some have surmised that Sirk was preparing to leave America and that he added hints of summing up to what he guessed would be a smash hit. For himself, he was most interested in the racial contrast and in the long friendship between Lana Turner’s actress character and her housekeeper, played by Juanita Moore. But the strength of the film is elsewhere, in Susan Kohner’s great performance as Moore’s daughter, a girl who can pass for white and who elects to lead that duplicitous life. And so Sirk took the old Fannie Hurst melodrama and turned it into a critique of racial identity in America, with Kohner giving one of the most desperate performances in his work.
He had his reliable team of craftsmen: Russell Metty on camera, art direction by Alexander Golitzen, and costumes by Bill Thomas. The color scheme is fiercely controlled, and, as usual with Sirk, the fine aesthetic control of so many hysterical scenes is the heart of the picture. John Gavin is Turner’s romantic interest, and he is a quieter version of Rock Hudson (if that is possible). Sandra Dee is a dead spot as Turner’s daughter—and that’s a big omission when the contemporary audience was sniffing scandal.
But I can’t help feeling that illness or the decision to move on has damaged Imitation of Life. It’s as if Sirk leaves the mechanism to look after itself, instead of building the mood of romantic madness in the detail. So the old lesson emerges: that trash—or material that is so defined—is just as demanding of artistic control as much loftier stories.
Of course, this genre—the women’s picture or the weepie—did not have far to go in movies. Television would soak up that audience, especially in daytime serials. And so Sirk can look increasingly camp as time passes. It’s a regrettable trend: So many of the lies in our way of living are accessible through the women’s picture—as witness the startling force and rather academic beauty of Far from Heaven. But it was not clear whether that was a remake, a parody, or the rehabilitation of a genre. Sirk’s best work stays fresh, and it can still stimulate ideas.
The Immortal Story (1968)
&
nbsp; “It is very hard on people who want things so badly that they can’t do without them. If they can’t get these things, it’s hard. And when they get them, surely it is very hard.” These are the words uttered by Levinsky (Roger Coggio) after his master, Mr. Clay (Orson Welles), has died. They lived together once in Macao, where Clay was a rich and powerful merchant installed in a mansion. But Clay is troubled by the thing others call “story.” He is a man of dry accounts, money, and ledgers. He can look up the facts of his life. Story disconcerts him because it is not factual or reliable. So Clay decides to put a story to a test.
This is Orson Welles, shooting in 1966, for a first showing on French television. The project is the 58-minute “Immortal Story” by Isak Dinesen. Working for ORTF, on a limited budget, Welles does the screenplay and assembles the barest hints of art direction to convey Macao and the period. The story that troubles Clay concerns a young sailor and a rich man’s wife. So Clay uses Levinsky to hire actors: Jeanne Moreau is Virginie Ducrot—she will serve as the wife; and Norman Eshley is Paul, a young, blond sailor.
Clay is warned that to meddle with the story is very dangerous. And so it comes to pass: The sailor couples with the wife of the merchant. Clay dies—though the character does not die in the story. The sailor leaves a large seashell and Levinsky puts it to his ear. He thinks he has heard the sound before. But where?
The Immortal Story is very restricted as a film, perhaps because ORTF said it had to be, but perhaps because this Mr. Clay is already enormous and chair-bound. He cannot go out into the world. Reports of it come to him. Willy Kurant did the photography, in Eastman Color—so it is Welles’s debut in color. André Piltant was the art director. The music consists of haunting pear-shaped pieces by Erik Satie, played by Aldo Ciccolini and Jean-Joël Barbier. In color and framing it stays simple, but deeply eloquent.
What is stirring and suggestive is all the ways in which it seems to be self-referential. Clay is Kane-like, enthroned but unable to move finally, with life coming before him as a play or a movie. Moreover, it is a ritual that he thinks he can control or direct. And the seashell is made to resemble the glass ball in Citizen Kane, just as we are surely set up to think of a story’s ungraspability tormenting a man who wants to be master of the form.
Welles was only a little over fifty, yet The Immortal Story has a grandeur or finality in which no kind of irony is allowed to enter. I used to love this film, because I felt it was a superb, ominous prediction of its maker’s own passing. But as I have passed that age myself, so I am less happy with its finality and pomp. I think it is a picture that shows the fatal lack of humor in Welles, and the surfeit of vanity. Still, it is rare and you should see it.
In a Lonely Place (1950)
From the same year that offered Sunset Blvd., a really scary movie about that paranoid place. There are some remarkable violent men in American pictures. Let’s just note the ones in great romances: There’s George O’Brien in Sunrise; there’s the hero in Carousel, Billy Bigelow; there’s Montgomery Clift in A Place in the Sun; and there’s Dixon Steele (Humphrey Bogart) in In a Lonely Place.
Steele is a screenwriter—a bitter, depressed man, a bit of a drinker, a failure with women though still attractive, and inclined to lash out under pressure. Why is he like that? The film never really offers an answer, though we are left to conclude that his place has something to do with it, for he is a creative man in a town where creative people are asked to take poison to be part of the club. Then, two things happen to him: He meets a woman, Laurel Gray (Gloria Grahame), who might save him; and he becomes a suspect in a murder case. No, he didn’t commit the murder, but in the course of their uneasy affair Laurel realizes that he has a terrible murderousness inside him and she wonders if she can really share that lonely place with him.
It comes from an excellent novel by Dorothy B. Hughes and a screenplay by Andrew Solt and an adaptation by Edmund H. North. And it is both thriller and love story, one genre cracking into another like eggs breaking. It was directed by Nicholas Ray, and the depth and self-hatred of his personal thrust is made clear in the casting of Gloria Grahame, who had been his wife but from whom he was splitting as the picture came to be made. Grant, too, that Bogart and Bacall were in an uneasy foursome sometimes with Ray and Grahame and you can feel how much of Bogart’s nasty manner here comes from firsthand observation.
In Billy Wilder’s Hollywood picture of 1950, all the madness is borne by the slender frame of Norma Desmond. You could say Joe Gillis is crazy, or broken, too, but Wilder lets him tell the story in his hard-boiled way. Whereas in In a Lonely Place, everyone has some of the damage taken in, and no one gets away unscarred. Of course, McCarthyism isn’t mentioned in the film, so we’re left at liberty to read that into the malevolent climate, too.
Robert Lord produced, Burnett Guffey shot it in black and white, and you feel acid in the air—not a hint of glamour. Robert Peterson did the art direction, and there’s a good song, “I Hadn’t Anyone till You,” sung by Hadda Brooks. But it’s Ray who brings menace and mistrust to nearly every composition. This is probably the best work Bogart ever did. Grahame stands up to the withering scrutiny. And there are fine supporting performances from Frank Lovejoy (as the cop), Carl Benton Reid, Art Smith, Jeff Donnell, Martha Stewart, Robert Warwick, and Morris Ankrum.
The Incredible Shrinking Man (1957)
It’s a simple split screen—today we hardly think of such things as special effects. But it is one of the most stirring movie images I have ever seen. The full figure of a man is struggling to close a door, except that he is pushing with all his might against maybe the bottom six inches of the door. And in the open gap we see a cat—maybe only a kitten—five or six times bigger than the man, its paw reaching in to hold the door open, its claws like hooks the size of the man’s head. This is The Incredible Shrinking Man, written by Richard Matheson, directed by Jack Arnold, and it is one of the things movie was made for.
Richard Matheson was just thirty when he wrote the novel The Shrinking Man. It’s about a middle American sunbathing in his garden as some unlucky cloud of nuclear radiation passes over. He starts to lose size, an inch a week. The crisis is so stunning and so comic, there’s no real attempt at psychological realism. His wife is troubled, tender but then bewildered. How many husbands can lose an inch a week and keep their dignity? He has to hide from the cat and from spiders. He lives in a doll’s house and a matchbox. And so on.
The novel becomes wonderfully detached and philosophical—you know Matheson had read his Kafka. You realize that true love, a happy family, and a purpose in life really do lose their point if you can’t see your husband or hear him crying for help. It was a project at Universal, produced by Albert Zugsmith, scripted by Matheson, and directed by Arnold in an utterly straight, humorless manner. That may have been Arnold’s natural style, but it amounts to genius. This story needs no tragic music or underlining. It is just one of those processes in life that change everything. And yet suddenly, and despite economic art direction (by Alexander Golitzen), the house becomes a Himalaya range to the man. And as befits this great fable, there is no rescue, and no end. Universal did put a bizarre title at the end about how God loves even zero. But the gods we know at the movies have to see something first.
The cast is unimportant, though Grant Williams as the man is perfectly OK—the story needs a dull everyman figure. He also catches the inadvertent courage of the man. But the greatness of the film belies the studio’s addition of the word “Incredible.” Not only is it credible. This is a film that might persuade you to keep a small easy-use ruler in your pocket just in case. Of course, in the real America most of us grow larger—and that has its own set of tragic or absurd consequences—but the beauty of Richard Matheson’s story is to make us afraid the other way, and to let us see how, in the right light, the plain circumstances of our own homes may be as horrific as Kurtz up the river.
The Informer (1935)
The Informer was once taken for granted not jus
t as a masterpiece, but as a landmark. In The Film and the Public, published in 1955, Roger Manvell spoke of “the near perfect unison of theme and structure.” He liked the way the fateful action occupied a single night in a fixed place—the one in which Gypo Nolan sells an IRA companion to the British authorities for £20. How he boozes away the money and comes to contrition. Manvell admired the creation of a nocturnal city through just a few lamps and pieces of wall. He liked Victor McLaglen. In the end, surely, that is what it comes to. It is his response to McLaglen that lets Manvell compare the impact of The Informer with M or Odd Man Out.
It is my impression these days that not even the most steadfast Ford fans really want to see The Informer again. So it needs to be stressed—as a warning to us now, with our intemperate passions—that The Informer won John Ford his first Best Director Oscar (this in the year of David Copperfield!) as well as Best Actor for McLaglen. Max Steiner won for his music, Dudley Nichols for his screenplay. With trepidation, I went back to Sight & Sound for winter 1961–62, to find the new top ten films. The Informer was not there. Not even Manvell had voted for it. Ford was not among the top twelve directors. The only ones of his films to get a vote were The Grapes of Wrath, Wagon Master, and The Quiet Man. Is it possible that enough people had had the chance to compare The Informer with what history said about it?
It comes from a play by Liam O’Flaherty, and the supposed unities of time and space praised by Manvell seem to me an obtrusive staginess founded on the idea that this night we will witness a soul in the process of self-flagellation. The sets are by Van Nest Polglase, and the photography is by Joseph August. It may be that we lack prints good enough to show the quality of their work, but I have never seen The Informer as anything other than maudlin self-pity trapped on a stage.
'Have You Seen...?' Page 64