'Have You Seen...?'

by David Thomson

  Journey to Italy (1953)

  This was probably the film that began the end of the stormy relationship between Ingrid Bergman and Roberto Rossellini. But that may only be a way of saying that it was made at their crisis. Did it really end things, or did it instruct the couple in moving forward? It’s not certain that there ever was a “script”—George Sanders told stories of being given scraps and fragments on bits of paper—but Rossellini had a story, from close to home. Alex and Katherine Joyce are English. They have been married long enough for it to go stale. They come to Italy. Headed for Naples. Meaning to see a piece of property they own. As they travel, their marriage suffers further. Until, finally, they are separated during a religious procession. They pause—they will try again.

  Nothing Rossellini and Bergman had done had prospered, and so by this time the director was compelled to get a big actor as a guarantee for the film. George Sanders may have been the best or the worst choice. An actor of neglected depth, he had become used to playing suave villains. He despised himself and his much-married life. He was depressed, lonely, and fastidious. He was quickly driven mad by Rossellini’s improvisations. He collapsed with Ingrid (they had played together in Hollywood): “I can’t go on. I can’t do this commedia dell’arte and invent and get the lines at the last minute.”

  Ingrid was far more familiar with her husband’s methods, and more innately drawn to improvisation, but she was just as sure that the method was fruitless. And so, in many ways, Rossellini was filming the real alienation of his players and trying to harness it to the story of a man disillusioned and a woman desperate in her search for something new. But does he deserve credit for that? At its best, Rossellini’s style develops long takes and fluent camera movements to formulate context and when the wife sees the ruins at Pompeii and sees the lasting embrace of old feelings, there is something profound or yearning in the movie.

  It is said, for instance, that the name “Joyce” had been used out of homage and with a view to making a great love story. Journey to Italy is not that, and it is the very dry remains of what had been a great scandal. Yet Cahiers du Cinema would vote it one of the greatest films ever made, and for people like Bertolucci it became an emblem of personal cinema. I think the ordeal of director and actress is historic and instructive, and I can see a hope or an attempt in the picture that is not to be denied, but it is very hard nowadays to watch it in the spirit Cahiers and its best writers found. I think it’s much easier to be embarrassed on behalf of Bergman and Sanders, and to hear the forlorn jokes they exchanged. But as a story, this is probably the least of the films she and Rossellini made together—less powerful than Stromboli, less alarming than Europa ’51, and less delivered than La Paura. Those European years were so full of hope for so many, and so disastrous commercially. It is a great subject for a movie.

  Le Jour Se Lève (1939)

  Here is a film that as late as the 1950s was regarded as an impeccable French classic, and which could have been employed in the argument that the French invented film noir on the screen, and not just on the page. Referring to it as a key film in history, in 1955, Roger Manvell spoke of the ideal blend in “Prévert’s feeling for spiritual defeat and Carné’s hard sense of locality and character.” Isn’t that a tidy definition of noir, as well as a good account of French apprehension on the eve of war?

  But then something happened. In part it was the necessary rediscovery of Jean Renoir, something much encouraged by the New Wave and its allegiance to Renoir, and in part because of the story that Marcel Carné (despite Les Enfants du Paradis) might have been something of a collaborator. The facts of that case are dubious, but even if there was more to the suspicion I can see no reason for forgetting the bruised radiance of Le Jour Se Lève, and other Carné films of that pregnant period. La Règle du Jeu is the greater film, but we have room for both, and Marcel Carné today has slipped to the status of forgotten master.

  The story, by Jacques Prévert and Jacques Viot, is simple and mundane: Jean Gabin is working class, rough but decent; he falls in love with a florist (Jacqueline Laurent); but the girl is entranced by a wicked small-time showman (Jules Berry); so Gabin takes some comfort with the world-weary woman (Arletty) who is assistant to the showman. Gabin kills Berry, not really to win his girl but in a vain effort to cleanse the world. And so he is holed up in a house under police siege. As the dawn rises, he will be killed himself, but as the night passes he flashes back over the events that have brought him to this situation.

  As so often with Carné, this is a world—morbid in its soul, yet lifelike in detail—that is built on sets: The designer was Alexander Trauner, then at the start of his career, but already expert at balancing the physical and the metaphysical aspects of claustrophobia. Trauner’s work is harnessed to the immaculately somber black-and-white photography of Curt Courant (who had done Woman in the Moon for Fritz Lang and La Bête Humaine for Renoir). The music is by Maurice Jaubert, who was Vigo’s composer, and that makes clear how richly the different streams of French film run into one river.

  Rightly so, people remark on the glittering malice of Jules Berry’s performance and its rare, disconcerting mixture of cruelty and charm. Yet Arletty’s may be the voice of the picture—so casual, so accepting, so candid, and so fatalistic: This is the voice of France in 1939. But Gabin is the active heart of the film and Le Jour Se Lève made him a great star. In the American remake, The Long Night (1947), by Anatole Litvak, Henry Fonda is the hero and Vincent Price the murdered man. But that picture was heavy and depressing, whereas Le Jour Se Lève has a tormenting strain of hope—the final French irony.

  The Joyless Street (1925)

  After The Saga of Gösta Berling, Mauritz Stiller brought Garbo to Berlin. He was in a very agitated state, receiving contract offers from many quarters (including America already) and apparently accepting them all. Yet he was broke, and living at the Esplanade in Berlin on credit. It’s hard to think that he had any other destination in mind except Hollywood, and he assured Garbo that she would go with him. But while they hesitated, in Berlin, they got an offer from G. W. Pabst to have Garbo in his new film. It would be called The Joyless Street, a bleak portrait of how, in Vienna, decent girls could easily slip into prostitution because of the pressures of inflation.

  Pabst’s advisers warned him that Garbo was just a beauty, no more. But he looked at her closely, and his genius “lay in getting to the heart of a person, banishing fear, and releasing the clear impact of personality which jolts an audience to life.” Who said that? Louise Brooks, much later in life. But Brooks had by then learned that Pabst looked at the eyes and was ready for everything else to be still.

  The Joyless Street is pretty raw melodrama, but couched in terms of the urban misery of Europe in the 1920s. Garbo is Greta Rumfort, a woman who nearly succumbs, only to be rescued by an American lieutenant. There are two plots, the Greta story and the Maria Lechner story—Maria is a famous courtesan and she was to be played by Asta Nielsen, the preeminent seductress in European cinema and at least twenty years older than Garbo. The script was by Pabst and Willy Haas, and Guido Seeber was the cameraman. But Stiller drove a hard bargain: Garbo and Einar Hanson (a Swedish actor as the lieutenant) got $4,000 each, the same as Nielsen.

  Stiller wanted to be on the set, and Pabst entertained him at first. Seeber had to admit that Garbo looked less impressive in the first footage than she had done in Gösta Berling. It was Stiller then who said, Use Kodak film instead of Agfa—the German style of using faces was harsher than that in Sweden, and Stiller began to teach Pabst a more romantic look. Indeed, he urged Pabst to use a slightly slower motion in the close-ups—it masked a nervous tic Garbo had, and it gave a lingering, extended sense to the feelings. It made the eyes slower and more momentous.

  Having learned all that, Pabst asked Stiller to leave the set, and he then showed Garbo what directing could be. Stiller had been bold, authoritative, brilliant. Pabst preferred to whisper to his actress privately. She listened. Her
eyes enlarged. She said she learned the world from Pabst. And The Joyless Street is a powerful melodrama, lit up with psychological naturalism. It was a major event in Europe, alerting governments to the social misery on the street. And it was a secret turning point in film history. Pabst asked Garbo to stay in Germany. But Louis B. Mayer arrived in Berlin, and the deal with Stiller and Garbo was done. People asked Mayer had he seen Gösta Berling—but had he seen The Joyless Street was the bigger question.

  Judge Priest (1934)

  The marriage between Will Rogers’s homespun philosophizing and John Ford’s reactionary assurance is sweet indeed, and Judge Priest remains so entertaining one might sign on for the restoration of the Confederacy, Jefferson Davis, and D. W. Griffith, too. The setting is rural Kentucky in 1890, a benign, summery place where Rogers is the widower Judge Priest, a man with loose grammar and extensive kindness. So he has Hattie McDaniel as his housekeeper, and there is a lovely moment when they sing together, in call and response, and the pleasure of two expert players wraps up most awkward questions about race and condescension.

  For the charm of Rogers and Ford is not in doubt. The film is so relaxed it takes your breath away. There are long shots where folks just amble around and wait to think of something to say. Then there are fade-outs where Priest’s wise sayings drift on for several seconds over the darkness. As for Rogers, he is nicely made into a real part, not just his radio voice being photographed—though he does sometimes chat straight to camera.

  Still missing his wife after a couple of decades, still mixing a little fishing with the law, Priest is just what the name says—a surrogate for that idealized Catholic father figure to a community that exists largely on summer heat, booze, dreams of the old South, and thinking about nothing. That’s how Stepin Fetchit just about gets away with his show of comic imbecility. How some film commentators can behold without a shudder this demented paradise built on racial prejudice is another matter.

  Action does not matter too much in this leisurely life (though the script has the names of Dudley Nichols and Lamar Trotti on it). But there is a case and a trial that makes up the second half of the movie. It is a set piece that allows Francis Ford’s spitting in the spittoon act—ping!—as a deflating joke on Berton Churchill’s windy rhetoric. There is also an awkward flashback to the war as Henry B. Walthall (no less) gives character testimony on behalf of the dour, laconic Gillis (David Landau).

  Justice and history are alike here in that very rosy spectacles are required for all forms of looking. The general hope that such court proceedings celebrate common sense sits very oddly beside the ongoing statistics of lynching in the South—even in dear old Kentucky. But Priest here is a clear god for Ford and an antecedent of Lincoln and every other unschooled lawman in the Ford canon. Did Ford believe this was in some way “true” to the Kentucky of 1934? Was he merely wallowing in nostalgia? Or is this a kind of Brigadoon where all realities have been suspended?

  As you may guess, the film is outrageous, shockingly racist, and serenely opposed to all forms of progress or argument. At the same time, it feels like a yarn spun on a porch in the late afternoon sun, and it reminds us of how closely and mysteriously allied such storytelling ease can be with the blunt lineaments of fascism. All the problems of Ford are here, in 1934.

  Jules et Jim (1961)

  Here was something new in the New Wave. It was not just the spontaneous decision to film a piece of life as lived in 1960, with time (just about) to find actors and give them something to say, albeit breathlessly. This was a period film in which a careful research was made of newsreels and the corners of Paris that still felt like the eve of 1914. It had costumes, an old-fashioned movie star (Jeanne Moreau goes from Brooks to Garbo), and a novel to be based on. It was a film such as France had made in the thirties, the forties, and the fifties. Except that it was new, so quick, so darting, never settling, seldom letting old-fashioned sentiments have their sway. It was an hysterically modern film, guessing the sexual freedom that was about to dawn in the sixties. And it was not just a New Wave hit (like Breathless and Les 400 Coups), but the kind of film that “everyone” went to see. It broke records, and it allowed for some future deals that were fanciful. But ask anyone alive then to list the films that were the New Wave and they will answer Jules et Jim, and they’ll likely say the names in that peremptory, provocative, gambler’s way that Jeanne Moreau could offer with her enticing smile. Truffaut said women were magic. The film added: beyond understanding.

  It came from a novel by Henri-Pierre Roché, about two friends, one French (Henri Serre), one German (Oskar Werner)—they love the same mercurial woman, the war comes, and the losing side wins Catherine. But the matter is never quite settled. Affairs cross over, beds are swapped—this was the sixties part of it—and in the end Catherine is a dark flame ready to burn herself or anyone else.

  François Truffaut did the script with Jean Gruault, and it is faithful in outline, yet terrifically jazzed up by film. Truffaut was hardly letting a sequence exist or settle. His system was fragmentary, arbitrary, rule-breaking. Shots didn’t “match” or keep a steady beat of promise and delivery. And yet there was a classical voice-over—from Roché—that spoke to Truffaut’s love of literature and order. This battle is the life of the film, and if in doubt Truffaut seemed to imply that Catherine (or Moreau) was question and answer enough. He made a rough medley and then there was a shot of the enigmatic woman surveying it all, and passing it.

  It was shot in black-and-white CinemaScope by Raoul Coutard with the newsreel pieces stretched like dreams. That violence worked beautifully, and it was all deeply if not lyrically expressive of a life too full and turbulent to be measured—and again that appealed to 1961 as much as the sleeping arrangements. All the while Georges Delerue’s net of music, fragile but hopeful, tries to hold it together.

  Today? It looks brittle, nervy, too rapid to face its own doubts, too hurried to let deep feelings emerge. But the exhilaration has not turned sour or stupid because the lethal intimacy of Moreau insists on command—so that she can blow the whole game up. I think she inspired the film—and she knew it. Without Moreau, the New Wave is a paddling pool.

  Julius Caesar (1952)

  What’s not to like? A strong story, a good script, a fair cast, and a valuable moral. I’m only half tongue-in-cheek, because in truth the virtues of this Shakespearean translation begin in the idea of making a small, workmanlike story about men and power. You only have to imagine the extra resonance of the Mercury Theatre version of 1938, clearly aimed at modern fascist dictatorships, to see how M-G-M’s Rome is a safe removal at a time when Hollywood was unusually beset by political anxieties. But there’s not a hint of Quo Vadis—only a year earlier at the same studio—and, thank God, this is a toga story in which God takes a snooze and the power drives of plausible men are studied instead.

  The black-and-white photography is by no less than Joseph Ruttenberg, the sets are by Cedric Gibbons and Edward Carfagno, but the picture is resolutely un-good-looking. Of course, Joseph Mankiewicz lends his notorious blind eye to that, seeming quite content to make a picture full of talking heads. And the whole thing is just two hours long, which leaves it the perfect aid for kids who are studying the play at school.

  Marlon Brando’s Antony has always been the star attraction, if only because at the time his shift from mumbling to full-scale Elizabethan verse came as a surprise. But this Antony looks good and doesn’t overdo the Machiavellian streak. It’s a fine performance, even if—to these eyes—it has to bow before the real movie acting of James Mason (as Brutus) and John Gielgud (as Cassius). They are both very good (until they put on helmets)—good enough to let us feel the shade of “Good night, and good luck” creeping in. (If only these Romans smoked.) Louis Calhern is terrific as Caesar, and Edmond O’Brien is Casca. Yes, you can believe your eyes—that’s Deborah Kerr as Portia (last seen tied to the stake in Rome in Quo Vadis) and Greer Garson as Calpurnia.

  The film is decently plot-dri
ven, and you have to wonder whether—a mere ten years later—Mankiewicz didn’t hunger for some of this merciful momentum as he was laboring with Cleopatra. The smothering element in that epic, of course, is the banality of the dialogue. The great lesson of Shakespeare is that—given their best wishes—everyone would speak in sixteenth-century English.

  It’s hard to imagine Shakespeare being done with less imagination—and let’s not forget that the Welles versions of Macbeth and Othello are streets ahead of this as pieces of cinematic reimagination. But John Houseman (the producer in 1938 and 1952) had worked with Welles, and he had seen the benefits in a very plain way of doing things. Brando could have learned so many lessons. He could have accepted Gielgud’s invitation to go to London and do theater—Hamlet included. Instead he claimed a prior engagement: scuba diving. And this is a Julius Caesar in which you can imagine that Marc Antony is dreaming of a perfect wave.

  Jurassic Park (1993)

  In the 1980s, already, the cult of the dinosaur had begun. Science and natural history museums had life-size models of T. rex, et cetera, skeletons or fully clothed in reptilian hide, where movement overtook the beasts. Come up on T. from behind and the system went into effect: he whirled around, a growl came from the machine, and his dead eye fixed on you. It was a lot of fun, and the rather naïve mimicry of museum technology was soon surpassed by triceratops in your lap. The key movie in the process came from Steven Spielberg and DreamWorks, though before that it was a best-selling novel by Michael Crichton in which—if I remember correctly just a little DNA preserved by chance could bring back the imaginary thrill of The Lost World.