That rationing brutalized the fond flashback structure Pressburger had devised, and thus the film on first release lost a great deal of its subtlety and warmth on two big gaps: that between Germanic and Anglo-Saxon; and that between the young and the old—you could just as easily throw in the ocean between the sexes in Powell’s films, and the yearning scrutiny of every horizon, waiting for a redhead.
What emerges is a period piece, showing the losses of the first forty years of the twentieth century—not just the casualties, but the decline in manners and class loyalty. It is a tale of friendship between Clive Candy (Roger Livesey—it was to have been Olivier, but he could never have been warm enough) and Theo Kretschmar-Schuldorff (Anton Walbrook—a Viennese Jew as one of Powell’s favorite, modest fascists).
As a drama, it is the most intricate the Archers ever tried: It really needs its length, just as it depends on two refugees—Georges Périnal and Alfred Junge—for its look. Its proper length is 163 minutes, and there it stands like a gentle rebuke to the carelessness that can allow war, or forget the deep bonds in friendship or the necessary adjustment in tolerance as we grow older.
The film has been restored and reminds me of another statement in this book: that in any war we hope to be on the side that made To Be or Not To Be—or Blimp. The friendship compares with the bond between Stroheim and Pierre Fresnay in La Grande Illusion. The French film, finally, is stronger because it knows one man may have to kill the other. But you could do only good by playing the two films together. Deborah Kerr plays several female roles, and you can feel the effect she had on Powell. Also with Roland Culver, James McKechnie, Albert Lieven, Ursula Jeans, and John Laurie.
Life and Nothing But (1990)
Sometimes actors who work from habit with the same directors pick up a way of speaking from their auteurs. It is nothing as direct as imitation or flattery. Rather, it is the simple equation of being. As the actor puzzles over his nature and direction, how can he mistake or be betrayed by the voice of his director? And so, now that Philippe Noiret is dead, it is easier to hear the eccentricity and the moral earnestness of Bertrand Tavernier in the actor’s onscreen voice. Actors are like flowers, helpless beneficiaries of the rain and the rhythm that falls on their soil.
It is 1920, on one of the old battlefields. It is all a farmer can do plowing a field not to kill himself on a buried mine. There is a commission of graves and inquiry, and a major (Noiret) is its leading clerk—tracking as best he can the 350,000 missing soldiers, assessing corpses against photographs. Meanwhile, the official France is looking for the ideal corpse (for a ceremony at the Arch of Triumph) to be the “unknown soldier”—just make sure he’s not German, British, or American. The dead have so many embraces in their informal burial.
Somehow it is characteristic of Tavernier that he should approach the history of the Great War—and he is, so often, a historian—from the perspective of the aftermath. The war goes on, though. Gas pellets are released. There are explosions. The relatives come in droves searching for any signs of confirmation. And the major becomes involved with two women: the ex-schoolteacher in the village (Pascale Vignal), searching for a lover, and an aristocratic woman who is looking for the remains of her husband (Sabine Azéma). He begins to wonder if the two women aren’t searching for the same man.
Life and Nothing But has echoes of other Great War films—of Paths of Glory, especially, in a final singsong sequence where Tavernier feels far more hope than Kubrick heard. And it is true to Tavernier’s misanthropic romanticism that a strange affection blooms between the major and the aristocratic woman. Moreover, the skill with which such things are seen in terms of the impromptu hotel arrangements and the starkly verdant fields is what makes the body of the film.
Noiret is an officer in his own army, too severe, too moral to belong to the official army. He is wonderfully expressive as a man who is both shy and romantic—and surely that’s where Tavernier’s own voice comes from. Noiret did so many roles for Tavernier, and for French film as a whole. He is a Spencer Tracy figure, and the major here is one of those roles that led him toward his own outsider nature. In the end, too, I think Tavernier is right. Battle scenes are so often misleading—heroic, tragic, but momentary. The slow, patient, and very awkward business of digging up the bodies can tell us so much more. Especially when a director sees how a gentle sidelight of love story is creeping into the scene.
The Life of Emile Zola (1937)
As Warner Brothers took it upon themselves to save French history from obscurity, they had the unfortunate experience of discovering that members of the Dreyfus family were still alive. And when they saw the script for this film, they had in all conscience to admit that Lucie Dreyfus’s (Gale Sondergaard) stirring speech to Zola (Paul Muni) to take up the case never actually happened. Warners were not perturbed or made any the wiser. They knew that it should have occurred, and thus scenario triumphed over history; the screenwriters won Oscars, and Best Picture was awarded to this enjoyable but bogus affair.
How do we now reconcile ourselves to what happened, or to this, from the Warner Brothers files (it comes from the story editor): “Now, while it is true that our picture is exceptionally true to the spirit, the background, the meaning of Zola’s character, life and times, it is also true that—but, only after learning the facts—we took great liberties in other respects…. Briefly, the picture of Zola has little in common with accurate chronology or factual history…” On the one hand, you can smile at the willful deceit and the hubris that saw “spirit” as meaning more than “facts.” You can say it was only a movie. Though then you must at least understand that The Life of Emile Zola was a very prestigious set of lies—that’s what Best Picture does for you. And then you have to admit, seventy years later, the helpless ignorance in educated Americans about history and the damage that can do to current events.
The studio liked the idea of Emile Zola because it was High Art, Paul Muni, and Relevant for Today. And Warner Brothers was probably the only studio in 1937 that would have been willing to charge anti-Semitism in the Dreyfus case. They also loved to do the art direction for the past, and they were always searching for such parts for Muni—The Story of Louis Pasteur had been a hit the year before.
So Henry Blanke (a good man) was the producer and William Dieterle was the director. The studio bought Matthew Josephson’s book, Zola and His Time, and they entrusted the script to Norman Reilly Raine, Heinz Herald, and Geza Herczeg. The script is elementary and clichéd both as history and drama, and it bears out in every detail Hal Wallis’s instruction to the makeup department: Make sure Muni still looks like Muni, despite the three-hour makeup session he has every day.
And we see Zola making his name with Nana (actually he had been famous years earlier) and meeting a real Nana; getting through the Franco-Prussian war; having visits from Cézanne (Vladimir Sokoloff); and finally doing the Dreyfus case. Anton Grot designed it. Tony Gaudio shot it. Max Steiner did the music. Joseph Schildkraut won a supporting Oscar as Dreyfus, and the cast also includes Gloria Holden (as Zola’s wife), Morris Carnovsky as Anatole France, Louis Calhern as Major Dort, and Grant Mitchell as Clemenceau.
The Life of Oharu (1952)
It is a symbol, perhaps, or a measure of artistic nature. But quite early on in this film, Oharu, the young daughter of a samurai, meets a young page, Katsunosuke. The two make love, but are seen and stopped. Theirs is a fatal crime against caste: Katsunosuke is beheaded and Oharu is sent into exile. The time is 1686, in Kyoto. But the film is 1952, and Katsunosuke is Toshiro Mifune, the sensation of Akira Kurosawa’s recent Rashomon, winner of a prize at Venice in 1951. Older and nettled, Kenji Mizoguchi now set out to make a film that would surpass Rashomon, and to that end he chose Kurosawa’s star actor for a big love scene and early departure. It was a gesture toward Kurosawa, to be sure, but far more it was Mizoguchi’s indication that he was more interested in making a film about women. Not only were such stories sadder; they had a far greater capacity for r
evealing the terrible travail of Japan.
In fact, the film opens twenty years or so later than this incident. Oharu is fifty and a prostitute—her fate is settled. It is in seeing imagery in a temple that she sets off on the several flashbacks that make up the film. A fascinating comparison can be made with the form of Ophüls’s Lola Montès (just a few years later). Spelling out the incidents of Oharu’s life makes her tragedy clear—but it shows how far, like Lola, she has become an actress or a self-performer.
She is hired to provide Matsudaira with a son—and then she is banished again for having tired the lord.
She has to work as a courtesan to give her father money—but she is fired for being too proud.
She marries and she is happy, but her husband is killed by thieves.
Living in a convent, she seduces a man in return for dress material.
She becomes a prostitute and is mocked for her age and ugliness.
She is sick. She learns that her father has died. But that long-ago son has become the lord—perhaps she can live with him. But then she is told she is the shame of the clan. She can see her son once, from a safe distance, and then she must go away again.
As acted by Kinuyo Tanaka, Oharu is an emblem of the abused state of woman in Japan. But this is more than long-suffering and endurance. Mizoguchi has made his heroine desirous and desirable. She always wants to fall in love. She never accepts the rules that condemn her, or hides her nature. She is a figure ready to give and receive love. Taken from a much more ironic novel, by Ihara Saikaku, this is one of the great Mizoguchi films, in which every situation is described in terms of deep focus, camera movement, and a world made by décor. It is a series of acts building to tragedy, but Oharu is not beaten or subdued. At the end, she is still in motion, a degree or so more resilient than Lola Montès even.
Lilith (1964)
If The Hustler was sharpened by Robert Rossen’s illness, did Lilith flower with his dying? Not that the film has too many defenders—is it still the case that not many have seen it? Warren Beatty is known for disliking it, and even as good a critic as Andrew Sarris reckons it is as pretentious as profound. Alas—suppose Ingmar Bergman had made it, or François Truffaut, by which I mean one of those directors famous for his mad women, and not afraid of the asylum.
Beatty must have known what he was being lined up for. Although the novel (by J. R. Salamanca) begins with his character, Vincent, coming to a mental hospital as a new nurse, the title of the project made it clear that the number one female patient, Lilith Arthur, was the film’s subject, as immediate as Jean Seberg yet as legendary as the name.
The screenplay was done by Rossen and Robert Alan Aurthur. For the second time, Eugen Shüfftan was in charge of the photography, and the design was credited to Richard Sylbert and Gene Callahan. These talents are vital, for the film has to make the asylum into a credible reality as large as the world.
Beatty’s grievance may have come from the bond Rossen had to build with Seberg. How do you take on this subject without making a kind of rapture with your actress? This is Jean Seberg with long hair, never lovelier and never acting better. And there are complex dialogue scenes between Lilith and Vincent in which Seberg takes just about every point, reducing Beatty to his collected gestures of uncertainty and hesitation as a feeble response.
Seen today, the film is remarkable for the prescience of its casting: It’s not just the excellent, vigilant Kim Hunter as Vincent’s wary employer; or Peter Fonda as a disturbed patient; it’s also a desperately tense Gene Hackman as one of Vincent’s friends; Jessica Walter, James Patterson, Anne Meacham, and Rene Auberjonois in an overall cast that could be an Actors Studio party.
Of course, Lilith is a femme fatale, woman the devourer, a feminist godhead at a time when many men in film were fiercely addicted to the defense of manhood. I do not rule this out as a reason for the box-office failure of the film and its general critical neglect. So let me end, and urge you to see the film, with this from Jean Seberg:
“Lilith was for me at first the chance to try, in America, something in which I believed deeply with someone whom I esteemed very much; this film allowed me at last to leave my usual character, to do something other than what people usually proposed to me. That is to say in what degree the financial failure of the film affected us, Robert Rossen, who was already very ill, as well as me. We had truly given the best of ourselves, and that, for an empty theater. So Lilith was for me at once the most exciting of my experiences as an actress, and something rather sad.”
Limelight (1952)
By the time he reached Limelight, Chaplin was in an autobiographical, and self-pitying, mode. And so this very strange story of an aging comedian who fears he has lost his touch contains long, intemperate discussions on the fickleness of the audience, without seeming to realize that a teary movie has stretched out to 143 minutes of old-fashioned melodrama.
His name is Calvero and he lives on film sets, though there is an attempt to place him in the London of Chaplin’s own youth. As if drawn by his own melancholy, he notices that his neighbor, a young dancer named Terry, has tried to kill herself. So he saves her and then nurses her through some weird kind of nervous paralysis. The actress he cast as Terry was Claire Bloom, and everyone in the world noticed the striking resemblance between Bloom and Chaplin’s latest wife, Oona O’Neill. Then as Chaplin talked to Bloom, endlessly, about the backstory of the film, it became all too clear to the actress that she was a stand-in for Chaplin’s mother, Hannah. In real life, she had gone mad, but in Limelight Chaplin was trying to tell himself a story in which he rescued her.
As if to underline the family ties, Chaplin found parts for most of his children, and he blithely incorporated speeches on many of his growingly grumpy attitudes about the modern world. Of course, it is still Chaplin, whose astonishing history commands not just respect, but interest. No one had so represented the movies like Chaplin. On the other hand, the self-pity is suffocating, and far too much of the sentiment now seems funnier than the set pieces of comedy—it’s not for nothing that the film is sometimes called Slimelight.
Bloom observed that Chaplin treated her like a parent with a child, lecturing her on every aspect of life, and then expecting her to deliver complete imitations of his actions. There was so little room for her own talent. And in the famous “reunion” with Buster Keaton in the final benefit show, it is plain that Keaton has no option but to do as he is told. Of course, he was in no other position, whereas Chaplin was still making a movie according to his own whims.
None of this is any excuse for what happened to Limelight. The feelings against Chaplin in America had been growing for several years (thanks to his sex life and his leftist talk) and the Immigration and Naturalization Service was calling him to be questioned. He was reluctant, and so everyone from the American Legion to Loew’s blocked Limelight—it only took in $1 million. Very soon thereafter, Chaplin left America and lived the rest of his life in Switzerland. But he had been there years already in his head.
Technically, therefore, Limelight was not released in America for another twenty years, and so Chaplin and a couple of aides won an Oscar for the score (“I’ll Be Loving You”) in 1973. By then, the Academy and America had forgiven the man. But what is most instructive is the relative ease with which “genius,” or a complete command of the audience, had dwindled to nearly nothing.
Little Big Man (1970)
Everything seemed perfect, even if much of the everything was bound to be a field of blood, ruin, and tragedy. Still, anyone could see in 1970 how Little Big Man was “made” for Arthur Penn. Considering how Penn had so artfully employed the local context of the Barrow gang (Texas in the years of the early Depression) to be eloquent about America in the late 1960s, it was a foregone conclusion that Little Big Man would be a decisive allegory on the Vietnam War. So when that duly happened (for the most part), there was at least a kind of anticlimax and rather more deadly, nothing like the gradual discovery of analogy that daw
ned on us as Bonnie and Clyde shot people to pieces.
Little Big Man was a novel by Thomas Berger, published in 1964, or at a time when literature, at least, was able to contemplate the fate of the Native American without benefit of analogy. It was a brilliant, picaresque novel, written in the voice of Jack Crabb, a 121-year-old Candide of Western history, an idiot-coward who had been there during Custer and the destruction of the Sioux and so many other things.
The novel was very literary (why not?), by which I mean that it did not try to be a movie or even a novel on its way to the screen. It was a book, telling a complicated set of episodic stories. The movies do not like old men. And Arthur Penn had established a need for his central lives to be in the balance. That is what he does well. Crabb’s ancient wisdom suited Thomas Berger very well, but it was not right for a Penn picture. His characters go through great crises. They do not measure them decades later.
So the film cast Dustin Hoffman (a smart choice) and agreed that he had to be himself when young and this amazingly wizened figure, too. Calder Willingham was credited with the script, and that may be where this decision came from. But it made the urge to pass a verdict on America irresistible and obvious. So the terrible bloodletting in the picture—and the best of Penn is very violent—was not awesome, beautiful, or ambiguous, it was bloody depressing. Penn’s depiction of Custer as a grotesque was both obvious and quirky, and it seemed like piling on in the age of McNamara and Westmoreland. None of that is as important as the casting of the witty, humane Chief Dan George as an Indian.
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