'Have You Seen...?'

by David Thomson

  And as if made under the sign of Renoir, The Last Picture Show is an ensemble piece: Timothy and Sam Bottoms are very good as the central brothers, the older one cursed by having to look after the kid; Jeff Bridges gives one of his key performances as Duane, the adventurous boy; Cloris Leachman is heartbreaking as the woman who grabs at a last chance of love, and feels better for once in the madness of it; Eileen Brennan is a delight; Ellen Burstyn delivers just the kind of extra class a bit of money allows in this world. Ben Johnson is immense as Sam the Lion, and the scene by the pond is among the great moments in American film. Then there is Cybill Shepherd as the daughter of the rich family—pretty, spoiled, and trouble.

  It was nominated for Best Picture and Best Director, Johnson and Leachman won Supporting Actor Oscars. All earned. There was a sequel, Texasville, that was decent but minor. This is a great film, and its sadness has only mounted as Bogdanovich seems further away from matching it.

  Last Tango in Paris (1972)

  On a movie screen, vacant real estate can tip some people over the edge—especially if it’s photographed by Vittorio Storaro and designed by Ferdinando Scarfiotti. And so, in 1972, one of the worst-dressed couples in modern film find themselves in the same empty space in Passy and they fuck. Except that since they do not actually discard those awful clothes, and since they go through the movie motions of sex, I’m not quite sure what is accomplished—or what the film as a whole is going to mean.

  I feel I can start in this way because you all seem to know Last Tango in Paris, no matter that it predates Star Wars by a full five years. It was a sensation—which now gives it the burden of an ex-sensation. Some critics even proposed that it was the line in the sand dividing the saved from the unsaved. It is often presented as the Marlon Brando film that shows you what Brando longed to do if not just expected to be Marlon Brando all the time. Some people—even those who’ve seen it—still believe that it’s the film in which two people really did it. To which one has to smile sadly and say, Oh no, people have worn clothes that bad and said silly things onscreen before. Indeed, there may be a mathematical bond between the two.

  The real history of the picture is something one longs to know, and I suspect it begins in the special mixture of opportunism and real creative daring that is Bernardo Bertolucci. Coming off The Conformist (which is a great film, and deeply concerned with sexuality), he had some kind of notion for a man and woman who meet and exist for a few days as just a sexual couple. He wanted Jean-Louis Trintignant and Dominique Sanda, the couple from The Conformist, and people who seemed to register an unusual attraction and loathing onscreen. It was promising, though even in outline it seemed more important that they talked wonderfully than that they made us think people in a film had done it.

  You see, people in a film are never going to convince us of that, even if the screen records pulse rates, nervous excitation, and sensory stimuli (all those wiggle lines beneath the writhing bodies). We think they are acting because we are watching—and we’re right. But in talk, we can believe in people. The trouble with Marlon Brando and the long-suffering Maria Schneider (who is so much more interesting in The Passenger) is that we can’t believe in a flicker of exchanged interest. Their whole thing is an assignment, and then you realize not only that Brando’s sniff of interest changed the whole film, but that this may be the picture where he is really being Marlon Brando, hunching up in stupid self-pity and behaving like a jerk.

  I am tough on the film because misunderstanding has championed it for far too long. There are great things—the décor, the framing, the occasional look of broken nobility in Brando, and the idea of strangers fucking. But it is hard to have two people onscreen for two hours and keep them as strangers. Great music by Gato Barbieri. Rather wishful use of Francis Bacon in the credits. Suggested retitle (pace O. J. Simpson): If They Had Done It.

  Last Year at Marienbad (1961)

  It was impossible to view Hiroshima Mon Amour without feeling the crisis of the world—not just the dread of world war, but the possibility of nuclear holocaust. That made for an earnestness, a respectability, a respect for the real, that was as gripping as the extreme formalism of the picture. So it came as a shock to many with L’Année Dernière à Marienbad that Alain Resnais was also fascinated by the rococo flourishes of a great eighteenth-century hotel, by the lavish costumes that Delphine Seyrig wore from one moment to the next, and even by the curl of her eyelashes that resembled the arc of the question mark in her every statement. Could Alain Resnais be this decorative?

  So it was the more intriguing that there was a buried resemblance between these two opposite films. Just as in Hiroshima, a man and a woman haunted each other’s steps, the one asking the other to remember that this had happened before, so in Marienbad, in the glassy hotel, the man suggests to the woman that they were there before, last year. It was as if the mood of Hiroshima Mon Amour had been extracted and served up again in a Douglas Sirk picture. But I think many viewers were disconcerted in 1961, and even led to doubt the gravity of Hiroshima. As a consequence, Marienbad has gone from being a sensation and a cult event to a film that is very little seen today. Alas.

  The film was a collaboration between Resnais and Alain Robbe-Grillet, a notable novelist and soon to be a director in his own right. Robbe-Grillet’s screenplay is very readable and ornate, but it is founded in his knowledge that the writer can only stimulate the cinematic process that “realizes” what the writer has suggested, “For instance, the author describes a conversation between two characters, providing the words they speak and a few details about the setting. If he is more precise, he specifies their gestures or facial expressions, but it is always the director who subsequently decides how the episode will be photographed, if the characters will be seen from a distance or if their faces will fill the whole screen, what movements the camera will make, how the scene will be cut etc.”

  So Resnais flowered where Robbe-Grillet was the ground, and he made a series of superbly cinematic renderings of the endless male questions to the woman. By contrast, Marguerite Duras (in Hiroshima) was far more drastic in defining action. Robbe-Grillet is a writer who objectifies all action in his intense, surface description of it. It was a beautiful match.

  Sacha Vierny did the black-and-white Scope photography. Jacques Saulnier did the production design. Henri Colpi edited the film, and Francis Seyrig wrote the music. It was shot at the chateau of Nymphenburg, in Munich. Seyrig commands the picture as a swan does a still pond. The men are Giorgio Albertazzi and Sacha Pitoëff.

  As an abstract film it is entrancing. But what is greater still is the subtle evocation of film as a process that exists in eternity—in other words, see the film more than once and its prior existence (last year) immediately becomes more meaningful.

  Late Spring (1949)

  It would be possible to write a book on the roles that actress Setsuko Hara played for Yasujiro Ozu. It is so much quicker, and more searching, to see the films. And that is a way of saying that these deceptively simple movies are prodigious in their complexity. Indeed, to watch Late Spring (the first they made together) is to enter into something like a novelistic process. In turn, novelists might answer that they would need more “action” or material than Ozu and his regular scenarist, Kogo Noda, provide. Not very much happens in Late Spring apart from the essentials. But as soon as you try to write down that outline, you realize the infinite range of the brief cutaways and the extraordinary power of cinema when Ozu is handling it.

  Noriko (Hara), the daughter, lives with her widower father (Chishu Ryu). He is in his early fifties, she is in her midtwenties. She is attractive—but so is he, even if he has a little bit of the absentminded professor about him. They live in a house which we know from other Ozu films—a set of flat rectangular enclosures: It has the comfort of home, yet it is cramped and resembles a prison. Straightaway, we are asked to look at the house and its living drama—family life—and ask ourselves whether family is, simply, a fine thing, or an ambiguou
s institution.

  Noriko does not seem interested in marrying, though she is friendly and fun with men. She is attached to her father—is this healthy, or not? An aunt (a frequent figure in Ozu, and blunter than his central characters) urges marriage and hints that the father has already started looking elsewhere. There is another woman in the father’s life. They all attend a dramatic performance, and Noriko is plainly disturbed to see the interest between the other two. Is the father being selfish? Does he simply want to get the daughter out of the way? Is the daughter being immature and possessive, or is her realization of her love for her father unusually mature?

  The daughter is edged into marriage, though she makes it clear that it is not what she prefers. We see it as a compromise, and we hope it will work out. And then we gather that the father has feigned interest in the other woman. He does not want to marry again. And after his daughter’s marriage, he returns to the home, alone. He sits there and peels an apple and we feel that a great grief has come over him.

  I have outlined the “action.” Yet I’m not sure I have given away the story, for every viewer of this magical, very finely balanced film will take a different explanation of what has happened—and what we should think about it. Further, the synopsis is to be read in the full film against shots of the sea, of the trees, the trains—cutaways that place the action, along with the wistful music (by Senji Ito). Add in some of the great perfomances in film history, and Late Spring is the threshold of late Ozu, one of the most complex portraits of life we have to look at. But in Ozu the reciprocity of seeing and feeling was fraternal. The calm of the art should never mask the great inner turmoil.

  Laura (1944)

  Having had an uneasy patron-son relationship with Darryl F. Zanuck at Fox, Otto Preminger was given Laura to produce, with Rouben Mamoulian as his director—he even had Mrs. Mamoulian doing the famed portrait of Laura Hunt. Well, as shooting developed, Zanuck had complaints and somehow Otto managed to unload them at Mamoulian’s door. “OK,” said Zanuck to Otto, “you direct!” So he did, firing Mrs. Mamoulian’s portrait along the way. If this all sounds like a little bit of Waldo Lydecker in the night, you are at least prepared for the high intelligence of Laura the movie and the way in which Clifton Webb makes Waldo Preminger’s first tragic hero, nailed up on the cross of his own intelligence.

  But in turn, that asks the question, What kind of movie is Laura? Well, it’s a murder mystery, not just in terms of who did it, but even of who is the victim. The setup makes you think it’s Laura Hunt. Dana Andrews is there from the start as the uncouth, depressive detective, a very important Preminger character and proof of his instinct for Andrews’s rare moral lassitude. He’s been fed so many stories about Laura that he’s half in love with her before the magnificent set piece where he “lives” in her apartment at night, examining her underclothes, her perfume, and her letters, and finally lapsing into dream beneath that portrait (all of this to the David Raksin score—though Preminger had wanted Duke Ellington’s “Sophisticated Lady”).

  And that’s when the film really becomes a treat and very Preminger, for the detective now begins to hate his dream girl because she’s so ordinary—the prediction of and comparison with Vertigo is uncanny and by no means in Hitchcock’s favor. For Laura’s noir look covers a comedy (the dialogue is brilliant) and a profound, nearly surreal romance in which desire is seen as more potent than any realization. And that’s how and why Waldo—a connoisseur to the ferrule on the end of his cane—is really the center of the film, its sour heart as well as its best brain.

  Moreover, as Andrews turns on Gene Tierney—because, in truth, she is a rather ordinary woman—he becomes a lot uglier. There’s even a hint of a longing for torture in the grilling he gives her. The film ends up by wrapping them in love, but only with Waldo’s flinching disdain. The critic Eugene Archer understood their real doom: “One can visualize their future—the tormented detective brooding into his liquor before the omnipresent portrait, while poor, unwitting Laura, the merest shell of his erotic fantasy, ponders her unhappy lot while washing his socks in the kitchen sink.”

  This is a masterpiece, so assured in its tricky style and its handling of Waldo (ramrod, but swish) that you wonder what brought Preminger to life just as you realize how complex his best films will be. The casting is as acute as the constant reframing of the camera in its resolve to keep as many people in frame as possible, including the vibrating spaces between them.

  The Lavender Hill Mob (1952)

  The starting point of The Lavender Hill Mob is when a man who wears a bowler hat meets a fellow given to bow ties. Already, in 1952, this spoke volumes about class and pretension, and it was a meeting of opposites enough to justify the word mob in the title, quite apart from any tongue-in-cheek allusions to American crime films in which breaking the law was like sex. In most British films, crime is just a Sunday outing.

  Apparently Michael Balcon had asked T. E. B. Clarke to do a serious film about gold thieves. But Clarke was a man unto himself, born in 1907, Charterhouse and Cambridge, and dodging the rest of that career to become a Daily Sketch journalist and then a screenwriter. He did the fascinating Champagne Charlie for Cavalcanti; he then did Hue and Cry, Passport to Pimlico, and The Blue Lamp before The Lavender Hill Mob. Later on, when Ealing’s little England movies had become more studied, he did The Titfield Thunderbolt. But he won an Oscar for original story and script on The Lavender Hill Mob, and he gave south London something to cheer about—its salubrious neighborhoods are not often celebrated in pictures (Julia Roberts did Notting Hill, not Tooting Broadway).

  Well, the bowler hat and the bow tie have a naughty plan. The bowler hat belongs to a bank clerk who feels taken for granted. He sees a way to free the banking system of a quantity of bullion. Bow Tie then fancies that the gold can be rechanneled in the form of Eiffel Tower souvenirs. The subject became a comedy, and it sprang to life once Alec Guinness was cast as Bowler Hat and Stanley Holloway as Bow Tie. When I say that their little gang is augmented by Sidney James and Alfie Bass, I am talking perfection. Now four English types were together: the humble, the spiv, the rogue, and the straight. You can work out which is which—and although this film regards the enemy forces of law and order with generous indifference, you could see the same setup working as a resistance story too, resistance to being taken for granted. Years later, on TV, Dad’s Army was a beloved hit show that worked on the same sly dynamic.

  And Ealing could roll out the talent then: Charles Crichton directed and helped secure his reputation for subversive humor; Douglas Slocombe photographed it; and the young Seth Holt was the editor. There is even Audrey Hepburn in a walk–on part.

  The Lavender Hill Mob was one of those films that impressed the world with English spirit as much as its humor. And it stands up very well. In the same year, The Quiet Man took a similarly fanciful view of the charm of the Irish. It stands up less well, and is somewhere between condescending and cloud-cuckoo. But The Lavender Hill Mob trusts Guinness’s ability to bring distinction to a comedy by the simple process of acting as if in a serious film. This is and was the trick to Guinness and to a special kind of Englishness.

  Lawrence of Arabia (1962)

  It’s tempting to argue that more than forty years ago, pitched midway between the Suez “affair” and the Six-Day War, Lawrence of Arabia could be forgiven for being a certain glance at history through English eyes. And so, more or less, the thrust of the movie is, My word! Just see how far one English eccentric could alter the history of the world! That’s us Brits for you. And thus, T. E. Lawrence is presented as a mystery man, mercurial, ungraspable, a show-off yet shy, and almost as much a riddle to Robert Bolt and David Lean as he is to Jack Hawkins’s Allenby at the memorial service early in the film. And in so many ways, Peter O’Toole’s flamboyant, staring-eyed performance is a diversion from asking useful questions about Lawrence. Indeed, it takes refuge in O’Toole’s frequent stance—well, isn’t everyone a bit of a ham if you scratch the sur
face?

  In which case, it’s useful to spend a moment or two studying the real T. E. Lawrence: short, rather plain, stubborn-looking, reflective, but clerical. Alec Guinness is maybe the natural casting, and Guinness did play Lawrence on stage once. But in Lean’s scheme of history he has to make do with being a silky saturnine Arab prince in Lawrence of Arabia, a warning sign of how little interest the film was prepared to show in Arab feelings, let alone the Arab point of view.

  There may be patriotic defenders of Lean already reaching for their scimitars. So let me say that with Robert Bolt’s schoolmasterly script (and Michael Wilson’s help), with Sam Spiegel’s great determination as a producer, and with the inescapable chemistry of desert and camera, Lawrence is spectacular enough to pass for a thinking man’s epic (without the thought). Unfortunately for that argument, Otto Preminger had made Exodus two years earlier, managing to ignore the easy trick of desert “splendor” and grasping (Preminger was Jewish) that that part of the world was politics and then more politics, a place where everyone believes they are right and blessed and where everyone has behaved very badly when the opening occurred.

  Lean and his cameraman, Freddie Young, did some things very well: the match light that gives way to immense desert; the prolonged arrival of the Omar Sharif character, as somewhere between magic and mirage; the raid on trains; the reverse angle attack on Aqaba. And then there is the music (by Maurice Jarre), which I find hackneyed and stately, but which many people think of highly. Certainly it is conducive to the leisurely epic that unfolds.