'Have You Seen...?'

by David Thomson

  So the film wanders through time, and the Faye Dunaway section is a great deal less compelling than the rest—Penn needed to feel that actress as a sexpot about to boil over; Berger saw her as a comic slut. The two don’t mix and so the film wallows. Harry Stradling, Jr., did the vivid photography, and the cast includes Martin Balsam, Jeff Corey (as Wild Bill Hickok), Aimée Eccles, and Richard Mulligan (as Custer).

  The Little Foxes (1941)

  Lillian Hellman’s play The Little Foxes (the title comes from the little foxes that spoil the vines in the Bible), a melodrama about family and money, opened in 1939 and had great success, with Tallulah Bankhead playing the central role of Regina Giddens, who outwits her brothers and husband and gains control of the family cotton mill. As such, it is part of the widespread literary legend that the great families of the South are corrupt, greedy, and deserving of each other. The family history actually came from Hellman’s own memories.

  As the play fared well, so Sam Goldwyn decided to buy the rights. He was warned by an adviser that the play was very caustic, whereupon Goldwyn is supposed to have said, “I don’t care what it costs.” Still, as he hired Hellman to do a screenplay, she was encouraged to build some point of sympathy for the audience. So Hellman created a boyfriend for the Teresa Wright character. Then others thought this was a foolish distraction from the play’s point. Meanwhile William Wyler was hired to direct, and Bette Davis was cast as Regina (for $385,000). At the same time, she was ordered to see the stage production, no matter that she said she wanted to be uninfluenced by the Bankhead performance.

  Hellman said she was burned out on the script, and there was a period when Arthur Kober, Alan Campbell, and Dorothy Parker came on board to do a rewrite. It hardly mattered. Wyler and Davis would fight seriously because Wyler had some notion of Bette being different from Tallulah. But Bette insisted that there was no other way of playing the part. She’s right: Regina is an exultant bitch and any attempt to make her more reasonable or appealing is loaded with mistaken estimates of the play. In the end, on the screen, Davis won out—though she never enjoyed the film.

  The most interesting thing about it all in hindsight is Gregg Toland’s photography. Wyler wanted the realism to control the melodrama, so he stressed the spatial continuities of the household. You can see depth and furnished distance. You can feel the way people may be spying and eavesdropping. And in one great moment from melodrama, the deep focus holds in place Horace (Herbert Marshall) having a heart attack, his pills—out of reach—and a disdainful Regina walking away upstairs. The photography works beautifully, but in a dryly mechanical way that only reveals the extra content in the imagery of Citizen Kane. On that film, depth is an offered reality already being undermined by madness. In The Little Foxes it is just the four corners of a plot of ground where a cutthroat game is being played.

  Apart from Davis, many players from the stage version were kept: Charles Dingle, Carl Benton Reid, Dan Duryea, and Patricia Collinge. Teresa Wright is the daughter, and Richard Carlson plays the boyfriend. Nominated for nine Oscars (including Best Picture and Director, and for Davis, Collinge, and Wright), the film won nothing.

  Little Women (1933)

  In the first years of sound, the American movie studios went through the classics library like the shark clearing the shore in Jaws. And if the latter increased everyone’s respect for sharks, then Hollywood in the 1930s laid down an attitude to literature that lasted until Masterpiece Theatre (and which faded into it without a bump). So it’s fascinating that George Cukor—uncommonly literate among movie directors in 1933—had never actually read Little Women, and was happy to find it so good! And as the newcomer, Cukor had both David Selznick and Katharine Hepburn telling him what a nice surprise he had.

  Louisa May Alcott’s New England family novel was published in 1868–69, and it was clear that in the years of the Depression, the binding role and prestige of the mother had not altered one bit. I say that because, if you come forward to the 1950s and early ’60s, it’s equally clear that the mother has come under cultural suspicion—think of East of Eden, Imitation of Life, Psycho, The Manchurian Candidate. By contrast, there’s so much vigor (as opposed to feminist conviction) in the role of mother and daughters. Cukor has admitted that Hepburn’s Jo imported wholesale the atmosphere, the optimism, and the decency of her own New England family.

  Of course, although he left RKO before Little Women opened, David Selznick was the driving force on the project—his own Since You Went Away, ten years later, was a Little Women for the war. The script was by Sarah Y. Mason and Victor Heerman (they won an Oscar for it), and it honors the episodic structure of the novel. Hobe Erwin did great work on researching the look of New England interiors, and Walter Plunkett dressed them according to the economy of a family where sisters were likely to share clothes. It’s as if the stress on real talk that came with sound gave extra impetus to the value of research on the look of a time. Henry Gerrard did the photography.

  Hepburn is the dominating figure as Jo, and Spring Byington is too conventional or soft for Alcott’s mother, but the rest of the cast is outstanding—Frances Dee as Meg, Joan Bennett as Amy, and Jean Parker as Beth, and with Edna May Oliver, Douglass Montgomery, Paul Lukas, and Henry Stephenson.

  There have been two remakes—in 1949, with June Allyson, Elizabeth Taylor, Janet Leigh, and Margaret O’Brien as Mary Astor’s daughters; and in 1994, directed by Gillian Armstrong, with Susan Sarandon as the mother, and Winona Ryder, Claire Danes, Samantha Mathis, Trini Alvarado, and Kirsten Dunst. That last version is very good and faithful, but I think the Cukor version was clearly the one that has been vital in our history. As with all remakes, you have to consider the cultural necessity (and what happens to it) as times change. What Cukor knew was that the period right after the Civil War was as insecure and anxious as the early 1930s.

  The Lives of Others (2006)

  The Stasi got up and quit their desks in 1989, when the Berlin Wall came down, but The Lives of Others resurrects an approach to film that goes a good deal farther back. This is an intricate plot, about cross and double cross, where the viewer has to listen as hard as Wiesler (Ulrich Mühe), a Stasi surveillance man and the gradually emerging protagonist of this subtle story. He is part of a system that records the activities of all likely subversive elements in East Germany. He has a frozen face. We know he is a skilled, if not cruel, interrogator. He seems to be an unquestioning member of the state, a part of the atmosphere of dread that hangs over the country, unsmiling but complicit in the rampant confusion at higher levels.

  I know this crisis in history is over, but that doesn’t mean its threat is gone. Indeed, it may be the countries on the winning side in 1989 that are now most likely to bug the phones of possible enemies, or just those who disagree with the party line. So, this is a movie about integrity and courage, viable in the age of Casablanca, but so much more complex and true to life than that great entertainment.

  And this is a debut feature, written and directed by Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck. Wiesler seems dedicated to listening. For eight-hour shifts, he listens to the recorded conversations of suspects, making his written reports. He is a prized and trusted operative. A chief target is the writer Dreyman (Sebastian Koch), a playwright who gets drawn into writing an essay for Der Spiegel on the exceptional and unreported number of suicides in East Berlin. Another target is Christa (Martina Gedeck), Dreyman’s lover and one of the best actresses in East Germany. As the story unfolds, we see human weakness and betrayal, and then a stunning, poker-faced coup by which the just go free. Building its tension gradually, The Lives of Others (not the best title, I admit) becomes increasingly gripping. And it is so clever a film that as soon as it’s over you want to see it again. There is an exceptional score—romantic but sinister—supplied by Gabriel Yared and Stéphane Moucha, and the central performances are outstanding.

  Above all, I think, The Lives of Others reaffirms not just the idea of liberty but the affinity between espion
age and the methods of film. Surveillance and bugging are processes that fascinate us—in part because they come close to imitating our closeness to the events in film. But surveillance is addictive, and it can result in a bleak, pitiless, and destructive use of a great medium. There are surveillance experts who would intrude on—and destroy—every intimacy. What is so striking about Donnersmarck’s film is the firmness with which he insists on a moral compass sitting in watch over surveillance’s constant theft. The malice and the pity exposed in this story are general, and the power of allegedly free states is as effortlessly enriched by surveillance technology as those of the restrictive and the mean-spirited.

  Living (1952)

  If I tell you that the first shot of Living (or Ikiru) is an X-ray of stomach cancer, advanced, you will say you know this film already. And you do. Television has made countless movies of the week about some kind of ordinary person who discovers that he or she is dying—it is cancer, or a tumor, or a bad heart. That is tough enough, but there’s an extra degree of pain to it all in that the people believe their lives have been empty, or wasted. What have they done for fifty or sixty years except go to the movies and live with their unhappiness? And if I tell you that Mr. Watanabe, the subject of the X-ray, is going to rally his spirits enough to make a small park for city children, you’ll say, That’s right, I’ve seen that one! And you have, many times over fifty years, for this story line has become a chestnut of diagnosis and treatment. The person will die, but they will have done something.

  I cannot and will not even try to tell you that the story had not been tried before Akira Kurosawa’s Living. But Living is the modern basis of this small genre. And I need, above all, to persuade you of its freshness when it was made. Very little real reflection had been started anywhere on the difference between life and movie life. Living grew directly out of the neo-realist moment, the postwar feeling that films need not be reserved for heroes, for sergeants who went up the beach at Iwo Jima. You could make a film about an ordinary person. He could lack charisma, starriness, courage, good luck—all the things that all of us lack. He could be struck down by fate or misfortune or illness. And he might rally. As if his story had never happened, or been seen, before.

  What I’m trying to suggest is that the history of the movies is the chronicle of changing taste and new ideas. There are films—like Bicycle Thieves, like 12 Angry Men, like Living—rooted in a sense of ordinariness that quickly become a new orthodoxy. At that point, they can be drastically reinterpreted as simpleminded, sentimental, obvious, and flattering to all of us. It’s like seeing a great new ad: It works for two days, say, and then it becomes the postmodern version of that ad, peeled away by familiarity and contempt.

  But you can’t see Living as it was made in 1952—not anymore. So do the best you can. Go to a movie theater where Living is playing, and just sit there and resist it if you can. It is for later to argue how or whether it “fits in” with Kurosawa’s career, or whether it simply enlarges his opportunism. Just resist it if you can.

  Takashi Shimura plays Watanabe—he would be the leader of the Seven Samurai in two years’ time, a bold, assured, physical champion, and a wise, amiable leader. Watanabe is none of those things—and Shimura gives one of the great performances in film history. But if you feel the actor, honor this principle—that he has made the famous story new for you. Now it is 1952, and you are a wreck.

  Lola (1961)

  Black-and-white CinemaScope, the full frame, into which sails a white Cadillac convertible. The ocean. A man gets out of the car, a blond dressed in white with a white cowboy hat. Beethoven on the sound track, the Seventh Symphony. With the motto, “Pleure qui peut, rit qui veut (Chinese proverb)” and then the dedication—À Max Ophüls. It is one of the magical openings in film history: Lola by Jacques Demy. What are we to make of the dedication? In part that this Lola in Nantes is cousin to Lola Montès, the subject of Ophüls’s last film, made only a few years before. That the style of the film may develop the poetics of the moving camera and passing time. That woman as helpless, chronic performer will be the subject. Yet nothing prepares one for Demy adapting the glorious studio style of Ophüls to the casual, home-movie manner of the New Wave.

  Lola (Anouk Aimée) is a cabaret singer in Nantes. She lives with her little boy. The father went away a long time ago, to go to the South Seas or Hollywood, to be on some big screen. And just as Lola has won the love of another provincial boy, Roland (Marc Michel), so her man will come back from Pago Pago or Bird of Paradise. Which frees Roland to go at least as far as Cherbourg.

  There was something in Demy that probably aspired to having his every film be attached to all the others (remember we shall see Lola in Los Angeles in Model Shop), and characters reappear along with phrases in the Michel Legrand scores—to say nothing of their lamenting optimism. So the other female characters here that Roland knows—the mother and the daughter (Elina Labourdette and Annie Duperoux) are just as elegant and nervy as Lola. In Demy’s films, or on his carousel, mistakes are subject for guilt or gloom only so long as the people don’t notice the momentum that carries them forward. Feelings change. Moods shift. Luck comes and goes—gambling’s call was there before we had even heard of Baie des Anges. Lola has never given up on her old bet, never deserted the table. In a way, the gamble is what keeps her young, romantic, and silly—and Anouk (not always the supplest of actresses or the one to step away from solemnity) is so giddy and impetuous you love her too.

  It is a musical, of course, not just for the cabaret scenes and Lola’s song there (words by Agnès Varda) or even because of the Beethoven, but because Demy had already identified Legrand as his dramatic composer. Demy knew already that every line of dialogue was waiting to be sung—and perhaps that was the best direction he ever gave his actors.

  Raoul Coutard did the camera work, and the movements are lush and streamlined. Bernard Evein did the décor—and in time Demy would be fascinated by design. But in 1961, you could see that Demy had something of Ophüls and something of Minnelli. The real wonder was in seeing how much Demy there was, too.

  Lola (1982)

  Yes, you can imagine that when Rainer Werner Fassbinder, only a year away from his early death, determined to make a film called Lola he was harking back to The Blue Angel (1930) and to what had happened to Germany in the intervening fifty years. So it’s wise to begin with a comparison. In The Blue Angel, Professor Rath is destroyed, and Lola-Lola (we may surmise) is headed for somewhere like Hollywood. The sexual imperative accounts for her rise and his fall. Thus, the loss of integrity equals destruction of self. Well, that’s nice and tidy, isn’t it?

  But Fassbinder the maker of violent, modern theater, the survivalist (and the relentless consumer of cocaine), sees things very differently. Von Bohm (Armin Mueller-Stahl) comes to the small city where the action takes place as the new building commissioner. Note, straightaway, that Fassbinder wastes no time on illustrious teachers as models for society—the man in the vortex and the feeding trough of the new Germany is the building commissioner. Schukert (Mario Adorf) is wary—he is the corrupt city gangster, the boss and the lever, and the owner of Lola (Barbara Sukowa), star singer and prize whore at his club, the Villa Fink. Schukert seeks to delay and spoil Von Bohm’s reformist energies by having the man meet Lola. They become lovers. They are eventually married. But Schukert gives Lola the Villa Fink as a wedding present, and then continues his affair with her. Von Bohm is still the building commissioner. In Fassbinder’s world, you do not get off so lightly as having a “fall” allows. You stay in office and you make your reports.

  One of the most interesting things about Lola is that, despite Fassbinder’s personal disintegration, this is one of the most fluent and stylish of his films. Indeed, just as with Buñuel, it’s remarkable to see how the early radical was falling in love with the medium of film itself. Whereas with Buñuel that process took decades, Fassbinder had so little time it was accomplished in a few years. But in color scheme and in it
s very articulated camera movements, this is a film with a relish for the rotting spaces in a corrupt system. The continuity in time and space in Petra von Kant was an ordeal, but here it’s a process—the coming to a decision. The savage compressions of the early films have been abandoned. Some thought this amounted to decadence in Fassbinder, but you only have to live with this reworking of The Blue Angel to get the bitter satire and the inability to sustain heroes. Indeed, as the stylishness mounted, Fassbinder’s feeling for people and conventional eroticism was becoming more implacable.

  The script for Lola was done by Fassbinder himself, Peter Märthesheimer, and Pea Fröhlich. Xaver Schwarzenberger did the very accomplished photography. Helmut Gassner did the production design—and more effort and money was going in that direction. The cast includes Matthias Fuchs, Helga Feddersen, Karin Baal, Ivan Desny, Elisabeth Volkmann, Hark Bohm, Karl-Heinz von Hassel, Rosel Zech, and Christine Kaufmann.

  Lola Montès (1955)

  Made two years before Max Ophüls’s death, Lola Montès invokes the idea of some butterfly that discovers the most demanding and balletic movements in the air just before it expires. A tired man might have had reason for settling, but Ophüls’s camera here is moving to stay alive, and in the circus scenes it has a circling motion—circles round a still thing, or reverse circles around another ronde—that is beautiful and heartbreaking at the same time. You have the feeling of a destructive performing energy having been summoned.