'Have You Seen...?'

by David Thomson

  Then there is the second half—same people, same cameraman (Rudolph Maté), but a different style and an essentially cockeyed situation in which self-pity and sympathy have replaced desire and intelligence. (Is this the decline of America?)

  In 1939, the audience slipped over from one track to another without being derailed. It was a big success—with Maria Ouspenskaya, Lee Bowman, and Astrid Allwyn. In 1957, McCarey remade it himself, with Cary Grant and Deborah Kerr, as An Affair to Remember. Eighty-seven minutes became 115 (no small thing) and Grant—according to McCarey—played the whole thing for comedy: In other words, he couldn’t swallow part 2.

  Alas, in 1994, they tried yet again: Warren Beatty and Annette Bening in Love Affair (directed by Glenn Gordon Caron), and with Katharine Hepburn. Now neither part worked.

  Love in the Afternoon (1972)

  “Since my marriage,” says Frédéric, “I have found all women beautiful.” It is a line worthy of Lubitsch from the last of Eric Rohmer’s six moral tales. And if Rohmer’s tone is more modern and anguished than that of Lubitsch, still, the link between the two is touching to anyone who likes to see traditions in cinema. Although Rohmer and the moral tales seem to have gone out of fashion, this was and remains the climax to one of the great series in filmmaking. It is not simply a perfect, perilous film; it is also the vindication of the series of six.

  Frédéric (Bernard Verley) is in a private business he enjoys. But he has gone beyond the hesitation that affected every other hero in the moral tales. He is married, happily, to Hélène (Françoise Verley). They have one child and another on the way. He is handsome, complacent, and just a little overweight from the bounty of marriage and tender cooking. He has a habit after lunch of falling into reveries. Early on, we participate in these extraordinary voyeuristic inspections of passing women. It is a male thing, perhaps; but it is the imprint of movies, too—for Frédéric watches all the girls go by and accepts a simple embrace from them in his dreams. (Note: The women he meets on the street are the women from the earlier moral tales—Françoise Fabian, Aurora Cornu, Marie-Christine Barrault, Haydée Politoff, Laurence de Monaghan, Béatrice Romand.)

  Frédéric judges that this dream is safe—and no one seems to take anything too seriously. But then he meets Chloé (Zouzou), and we know straightaway that she is real: She is not perfectly groomed or composed, she feels raw and dangerous. And at first Chloé is simply someone to assist—the male has fond illusions of friendship that can be inhabited with some women (though he does not mention it to his wife). And before long, Chloé has become a needy, begging threat to his order and complacency. Love in the afternoon is the kind that usually seeks out the weakness in happily married men.

  As with the rest of the series, Rohmer has his team: producers Barbet Schroeder and Pierre Cottrell; Néstor Almendros doing the photography; and this time there is music (fantasy requires wings) by Arié Dzierlatka. And, if I may say so, Eric Rohmer himself. There is a quality, a calm, in many Rohmer films that amounts to an abdication, almost, of the directorial function. We seem to be the privileged observers at so many special encounters. But the calm is agitated here, or striving, and it’s hard to miss Rohmer’s feeling that this film was special. You feel compelled to see the moral tales again. You are admitted to dark secrets about happiness—like the need for secrecy and dishonesty—that take us to the root of romantic comedy and its avid neighbor, tragedy. What did Rohmer mean by “moral tales”? The question was often asked. People wondered if they were being got at, preached to, educated? No, nothing so blunt. But you are shown an experiment, and yourself in it—and then the comedy exerts its toughest grip. You are in danger.

  Love Me Tonight (1932)

  When Rouben Mamoulian did Porgy onstage, in 1927, he had often confused his cast but dazzled onlookers with his sense of an overall rhythm—involving speech, music, sound effects, and movement. When the curtain rose on Catfish Row, he had tried to bring that scene to life with native, or Gullah, calls, no matter that his New York black actors had no idea what that language meant. And when he came to Love Me Tonight, five years later, he took all his earlier experiments and put them together in the sensational opening: “Isn’t It Romantic?” beginning with Maurice Chevalier in the tailors shop, going out onto the street, a train, and the gypsy camp before Jeanette MacDonald finishes it from the balcony. There had never been a musical item so fluid, so regardless of settings, and so much a guiding force of rhythm. And it was made possible because Mamoulian saw that you could record a number and then film it to a playback. Their energy was liberated.

  As the story of a tailor (Chevalier) who falls in love with a princess (MacDonald), it owes more than its casting to Lubitsch. At the same time, this is the Mamoulian film in which even his scolds agree that the inventiveness worked as a whole instead of just a series of coups. It came from a play by Paul Armont and Léopold Marshand, and it was converted to the screen by Samuel Hoffenstein, Waldemar Young, and George Marion, Jr. But it’s the wit of Mamoulian, the swinging hipness of the Rodgers and Hart score, and the sauciness of Chevalier and MacDonald that make it work. Of course, stage musicals would always require that performers sing and dance at the same time. But the speed and the streamlining of the movie musical were accelerated by Love Me Tonight and they became like spirits or arrows of desire.

  Victor Milner did the photography, and Hans Dreier designed the sets. MacDonald does a great version of “Lover,” and Chevalier does “Poor Apache” and “Mimi.” Above all, the quality of fantasy and reality fused in a musical—it might be possible to have a fellow on a real street in the rain, doing a very complicated song-and-dance number, and looking as if he were in paradise. One of the loveliest things about sound was that the music, at last, came from the air—and not from that orchestra beavering away in the lamplight.

  The cast includes Charles Ruggles, Charles Butterworth, Myrna Loy, C. Aubrey Smith, Elizabeth Patterson, Ethel Griffies, Blanche Frederici, Joseph Cawthorne, Robert Greig, Marion Byron, Cecile Cunningham, Tyler Brook, Edgar Norton, Rita Owen, Rolf Sedan, Gabby Hayes, George Humbert, and Bert Roach.

  There seem to be prints in circulation of various lengths, so it’s worth stressing that it was originally released at 104 minutes. It is still exhilarating to see Love Me Tonight, and when one recognizes that Mamoulian is also responsible for the stage debut of Oklahoma! and the movie of Silk Stockings, then surely he has to be acknowledged as a facilitator of one of our sweetest fantasies.

  The Love Parade (1929)

  As soon as The Love Parade begins, Ernst Lubitsch pulls the carpet from under sound’s insecure feet: There’s a conversation heard behind a closed door and then Maurice Chevalier appears and immediately talks to the camera. The technological battery is dumbfounded; Lubitsch is in charge again. And so The Love Parade is reckoned to be the first musical with a story—so long as you see that Lubitsch is tongue in cheek. Jeanette MacDonald is Queen of Sylvania and horny as hell—and MacDonald, despite being a “songbird,” did a very hungry look, thank you. She wants a husband and then Chevalier arrives. He’s a Count and she makes him a Prince so they can be married. But happy days and happier nights are intruded on by his status as “prince consort.” A man needs a job, and so finally she has the sense and the sensuality to make him King.

  Sylvania is from the studio that invented foreign kingdoms for Duck Soup, and royalty here is very much a way of measuring sexual passion. In other words, Jeanette’s Queen is a Queen Bee, and every conversation she gets into is filled with sexual innuendo. It’s uncanny to think that this is just two years after the moral system of silent cinema. It is as if the audience had been transformed, that they are suddenly expected to keep up with the innuendo of The Love Parade—which reaches some delicious, lewd places. Yes, it’s Lubitsch in charge, but he was not alone—and this is a film that teases Chevalier about his French accent and generally takes a smartness in the audience for granted. Think of Farrell and Gaynor in Sunrise, say, and going to see this movie i
n a country movie house!

  Supposedly the film came from a play, The Prince Consort, by Leon Xanrof and Jules Chancel, with a script by Ernest Vajda and Guy Bolton. Yet in truth it’s so flimsy that Lubitsch might have dreamed it up in an afternoon. Hans Dreier did the sets and Victor Milner the photography. The songs are by Victor Schertzinger, with lyrics by Clifford Grey. They are not distinguished, but Lubitsch likes to shoot them in single takes when he can, and Chevalier and MacDonald seem perfectly relaxed under the primitive recording conditions.

  There’s a comic subplot, with Lupino Lane as Chevalier’s valet and Lillian Roth as the Queen’s maid. They have the best number, “Let’s Be Common,” and Roth is so pretty and saucy you wish that she could have done more pictures. Still, the movie wouldn’t hold today if Chevalier were not amiable and MacDonald so naughty. The conceit of the story is that in every royal marriage when it gets dark the royal line and future depend on the sex. Chevalier and MacDonald leave no doubt about grasping that. You can argue that their facetious-filthy dialogue goes on just a little too long, but the chief impact is the wonder that Lubitsch should have done a talking picture with such wit and charm. Also with Edgar Norton, Lionel Belmore, and Eugene Pallette.

  Loves of a Blonde (1965)

  The thing that was immediately striking about Milos Forman’s Loves of a Blonde was the way in which the helpless humor of three awkward, pudgy, balding reservist soldiers gazing at three bored, pretty girls at a tea room/dance hall turned into a quite ravishing sexual scene as the dark-eyed blonde, Andula (Hana Brejchová), has a heady romantic afternoon with Milda (Vladimir Pucholt), the kid who is playing tentative jazz piano at the dance hall. The same gray light, from cameraman Mirolav Ondrícek, washed over the soldiers’ flat faces and Andula’s body. And one day Ondrícek would photograph Amadeus and Valmont.

  The Czech New Wave came quickly: It had only four years really before the slap-down in Prague, and after that so many of the naughty boys were off to Paris or New York. One of the scenarists on Loves of a Blonde was Ivan Passer. You could see the influence of the French New Wave, to be sure, but it was in the forlorn view of the middle-aged soldiers that Forman exhibited a sad, middle-European irony, something nearly Chekhovian. See the film again, today, and you want to know more about those very tin soldiers and how their world has betrayed them.

  The story of Andula and Milda is very slight, and you can argue that throughout his work Forman sees the love affair as a very fleeting thing, and as a test of adaptability for all parties. But it’s the freshness of real behavior here, and the fondness for unglamorous faces, that distinguishes Forman. Not much lasts here, whether under a Communist regime or something more open. The factory is the ultimate prison. People have to get along the best they can, chained as much by shyness and natural reticence as by the reports of secret police.

  But Forman is a realist, and he recognizes that if you’re going to dump a barracks of soldiers in a small town, then they’ve got to have some girls—otherwise, the humbug of soldiering will curdle in their veins. Forman does not have a lot of time for idealists: They make trouble—for themselves and for others. Even Mozart is beyond idealism. He is a bullet, propelled through stagnant space, giggling at his own momentum, and altogether too unusual to have any social lesson to be passed on.

  Still, you can sniff the air of insurrection in a film like Loves of a Blonde and guess what a short future Prague communism has. The film is very simply made, with telephoto shots that encourage untrained actors to be natural. It follows that Forman and Ondrícek have a greedy eye for the giveaway glance—the pity and the self-pity alike. Of course, Forman became a New Yorker—whereas in odd ways Roman Polanski stayed a European. It’s a fascinating comparison, for both men had grown up in tough places where they learned to measure freedom. Yet neither has made so big an issue about it. And for both men, there are invisible barriers in life—and in self—that may prove every bit as daunting as police barriers.

  Lucky Luciano (1973)

  Charles “Lucky” Luciano has been portrayed several times on the American screen—Bill Graham in Bugsy, Andy Garcia in Hoodlum, Angelo Infanti in The Valachi Papers, and so on—so that he begins to be one of those heroes of infamy, like Billy the Kid: No matter what fresh crime is added to his record, no matter how sketchy the proof, his luster increases. In the last scene of Francesco Rosi’s superb Lucky Luciano, our guy goes to meet a screenwriter, and somehow the collision of fact and fiction brings on a fatal heart attack.

  Rosi’s film came just a year after The Godfather, and was assuredly made easier to deliver because of that success. Indeed, there was a version twenty minutes shorter for the U.S. market that cut out a lot of the Italian stuff. In addition, this was a picture for which former blacklisted writer Jerome Chodorov did the subtitles on the English version. Beyond that, the film was cast with a number of American actors—Rod Steiger as Gene Giannini, Vincent Gardenia as a military man, and Charles Cioffi (the villain in Klute) as Vito Genovese.

  What interests Rosi most of all is the way, long before the movies, the Americans had seen Luciano as a mixed blessing. And so it is that the movie follows history in showing the release of Luciano from an American jail so that he may assist the Allied landings in Sicily during the war. The film leaves little doubt but that the very Americans who had prosecuted Luciano saw fit to rehabilitate him in the building of an antifascist resistance movement in Sicily. In turn, that led to the revitalization of the Mafia and its development of the drug trade in the years after the war. The weapons of mass destruction are something an agile democracy must know how to find when it suits them.

  With a script by Rosi, Lino Iannuzzi, and Tonino Guerra, the wartime intrigue is handled with sardonic relish—in so many ways, the flourishing of the Mafia has been presented in the movies as one of those imperfect but amusing forces: Someone has to do it, someone has to let the luck fall on him, no matter that the real Luciano spent a good deal of his life in prison, or being hounded toward that destination.

  As befits the maker of Salvatore Giuliano (1961), Rosi is of the opinion that no one knows the truth or the facts about a figure like Luciano, yet everyone walks in his sun or shade. These people exist to define our nature, our capacity for entertaining violence, and our dreams of conspiracy. And just as with The Mattei Affair, Rosi’s view of the “gangster” is hooked upon the lovely, flashy, but shallow performance by Gian Maria Volonte and the implicit assumption that a man like Luciano was always so intent on impressing or intimidating people that he was akin to an actor.

  That’s where Rosi’s characteristic fondness for documentary and epic hand-in-hand works so well—for theatricality is the document-level with a man like Luciano. The beautiful photography is by Pasqualino De Santis, and the rich cast also includes Edmond O’Brien and Charles Siracusa, the real Narcotics Bureau agent who devoted his life to curtailing Luciano’s.

  Lumière d’Été (1943)

  The state of war universal in 1943 is not mentioned in Jean Grémillon’s Lumière d’Été. Yet a malaise hangs over the strange, half-empty hotel in the desolate mountain area of Provence (it was filmed in Alpes Maritimes and at the Victorine Studio in Nice). It is a place that feels like the dead end of the world. The only activity going on there is mining, and the occasional distant blasts are the signal of some enormous panning operation that is sorting through the rocks and the stones for unnamed minerals. It is a house where Agatha Christie might have set a murder mystery—or Jean-Paul Sartre could have trapped hell. Not the least virtue of the production design is that the house seems to be starting to come apart—because of the remorseless explosions. That design work was done by André Barsacq and Max Douy, with the aid of Alexander Trauner (who was Jewish).

  The script and the dialogue are by Pierre Laroche and Jacques Prévert—though it would be no surprise to hear of a stage play behind the film. A young woman, Michèle (Madeleine Robinson), comes to the house to make a rendezvous. She will attract three men: a
pathetic failed painter, a maker of scenes rather than pictures (Pierre Brasseur); an engineer in a leather jacket who works at the nearby mine (Georges Marchal); and the indolent, vicious fellow who has been courting the hotel owner, a man who likes to do a little target practice with his rifle (Paul Bernard). The owner of the hotel is played by Madeleine Renaud.

  There is something like a curse on these people, and I’m sure in original prints of the film, Grémillon and photographer Louis Page intended that the harsh light would stand for it. Alas, I have never seen a print that captures that severity. But the spitefulness and the boredom of the hotel people is mordant, Prévertian, and a contrast with the vigor and naturalness of the working-class people.

  Grémillon deserves his following among French filmmakers, above all in that he was a documentarian who turned to fiction and knew how to find the “facts” of the world of his characters. So the mining operation here gets a good deal of attention, and it is like a kind of surgery that could be applied to the people. And yet, attempts to compare Lumière d’Été with Renoir’s La Règle du Jeu seem ridiculous and damaging to the Grémillon picture. I can believe that Grémillon had Renoir in mind, and I can easily imagine that he intended the audience’s sense of the war to explain the becalmed self-loathing of these people. But the dramatic activity is so much less than in the Renoir film, and the class perspective is thinner.

  When Lumière d’Été has its big fancy-dress party it’s a mistake. The atmosphere of the film has depended on so few people in so large a space. So where do all these extras come from? Where do they live? Our sense of the picture has been undermined.

  Lust for Life (1956)