'Have You Seen...?'

by David Thomson

  It’s over fifty years old now, and I daresay that Vincent Van Gogh scholarship has moved way beyond the level of Irving Stone’s melodramatic novel about the unhappy painter. The message of the title and the fixed bourgeois notion that ecstatic art should expect no fitting reward in this world are trite as well as erroneous. But Lust for Life is still Vincente meets Vincent, a delicate, very sophisticated Italian-American sensibility honoring the raw power of an uncouth Flemish genius. Minnelli lived to old age in Beverly Hills; Van Gogh shot himself in a cornfield at thirty-seven. The gulf does not matter. The movie is flooded with respect, and there are few moments as glorious as when Minnelli lets the CinemaScope frame become a wall of Van Goghs.

  John Houseman was the producer, Norman Corwin wrote the script, Russell Harlan and Freddie Young did the photography, Miklós Rózsa wrote the music—and all of that work is the epitome of craftsmanship. Still, it was Houseman and Minnelli who set such stock in going to the real places of Van Gogh’s life, from Holland, to Paris, and then gradually farther south in France. Without any didactic heavy-handedness, there is still the notion that the actual light and the real places are essential—because a painter is the creature of his world as well as its creator. That’s why it is so telling that in Lust for Life there is never any concession to the old Hollywood notion that perhaps this driven artist might have been happy, too, and socially acceptable, with a little better luck, a few sales, and the right woman. Vincent is doomed from the outset, and that certainty animates Kirk Douglas’s performance, in which finally the outward resemblance between the two men seems incidental to the inner affinity.

  The largest gesture toward “entertainment” in the picture is Anthony Quinn’s Gauguin, and, of course, Quinn won the Supporting Actor Oscar—Douglas lost to Yul Brynner in The King and I! Quinn is all very well, but his biggest lesson for Van Gogh would appear to be, Take your crises and turn them into grandiloquent ham.

  Far, far better are the other supporting parts, nearly all of which are completely subservient to the film—Everett Sloane as the doctor, Pamela Brown as one of his women, and James Donald as the long-suffering brother, Theo. In the choice to root the film in the letters between Theo and Vincent the film made perhaps its soundest decision.

  One other issue needs to be faced: Metrocolor is handled with great care and tact by the two cameramen, but still one can’t help but long for Technicolor as the system that applied to Van Gogh best. The colors need to throb like wounds. We should come away from the film searching for dark glasses. Whereas Metrocolor, finally, is just a touch too tasteful. Still, as the years have passed we have had other movie Vincents—by Altman, Paul Cox, and rivetingly by Maurice Pialat. But it is justice, I think, that the Minnelli survives and stands at the heart of the group.

  The Lusty Men (1952)

  Rodeo riders have their season and their eight seconds on a bull. They take their prize money while they can, and soon they are arthritic from their fractures, hobbling round the circuit, picking up beer money. Producer Jerry Wald had read this sad outline in a magazine story by Claude Stanush, and he put Stanush with David Dortort to furnish a movie treatment. What the fellows hit upon was one cowboy in decline, Jeff McCloud, teaching another on the way up, Wes Merritt. Dortort did a lot of research, and for a moment Robert Parrish was going to direct it at RKO. Then he fell away and Nick Ray was the director for hire, reveling in the research material and the chance to film the back roads of the West, country he had explored in his time as a folk-music researcher. Horace McCoy turned it into a shooting script, and Robert Mitchum and Arthur Kennedy were cast as Jeff and Wes.

  It was then that Howard Hughes, interested in Susan Hayward, looked for a way to get her on his lot. Wes has a wife, he surmised—Susan Hayward—and she is drawn to Jeff. McCoy and Dortort did hasty revisions to accommodate this new angle, and Ray managed to get Lee Garmes to bring mood to the tatty, nomadic world of rodeo.

  It all sounds like a routine project, yet a bond formed between Ray and Mitchum, no matter that the actor was bewildered by Ray’s introspective silences and his search for “motivation.” And Mitchum found himself as a loser, a man who has wasted too much time and broken too many bones and promises to himself. But in a funny way it’s the bourgeois drive of Susan Hayward’s wife, Louise, that is most interesting, struggling to make a stable world out of the gypsy life when Jeff prefers to believe that nothing is going to last. And the harder Wes tries to be a star, the more surely Jeff and Louise are drawn together in their rueful, common understanding.

  The Lusty Men is not the best title it could have had, for the machoism in these guys is short-lived. Wald wanted a happier ending, where Mitchum goes off with an old girlfriend (Maria Hart), but Ray could taste the tragedy he had on his hands and he held to the scripted ending where Jeff gets a fatal injury trying to recapture his past.

  After the studio shooting (with excellent art direction by Albert D’Agostino to show the trailer homes), they went traveling with the rodeo circuit. That’s when Ray and Garmes did some great scenes—the one where Mitchum goes back to his old family home (used in Wim Wenders’s Lightning over Water) and the melancholy shots of the rodeo ring at twilight with the wind stirring up dust and hot-dog wrappers. And that’s the secret to the film: for its conventional triangle story is brought to life by an eye like Walker Evans’s and the actors’ respect for the inner delusions of pipe dream. Insist on the full 113-minute version—shorter versions were released.

  M (1931)

  If you look at Fritz Lang’s work as a whole then it is fascinating to see the hinge and the transformation represented by M—as his urban thrillers took on character and foreboding, as they moved from frenzies of pure (or genre-driven) action to the crooked path pursued by warped figures. Thus, it is as if the city itself takes on more tragic character once Hans Beckert is the subject of a film. It is not simply that he is a villain, or a dysfunctional hero. But he is a trapped figure for whom his own nature (hidden beneath that drab, draped overcoat) is just another version of the city where law and outlawry alike will join in the hunt for him. As if they cared! For surely, the plaintiveness in Beckert—and in Peter Lorre’s bulging eyes—is that he has become a victim so that the vicious routine of the others’ urban game (call it the system, or corruption) can go on as before.

  The film was evidently based on Peter Kürten, the Dusseldorf killer, who was at large in 1930—though Kürten killed adults as well as children, and often burned the corpses. Lang saw Peter Lorre onstage (in Wedekind’s Spring Awakening) and made his famous bargain: If Lorre would stay off the screen, Lang would give him a starring part one day. What part? asked the actor. To which Lang said he didn’t know yet. I think it’s plain that Lorre inspired Lang’s killer far more than Kürten—thus M begins with the stricken childishness in Lorre, the high voice and the masochist eyes. In seeing Lorre, Lang had discovered a character vital to his work: the man terrified of himself.

  Thea von Harbou took credit for the screenplay, though Lang and even a few others had significant input. Even so, the greatest power of the film lies in the way Beckert is seen, and heard. It is as if he is there, in the city, or at our shoulder, before we notice him. So the beautiful device by which a criminal who recognizes the “Peer Gynt” whistling plants a white chalk “M” on Beckert’s shoulder is akin to this presence, and it is like that clammy sense of Beckert being close to us in the dark.

  But then notice the exquisite views of this fabricated city—the high-angled shots of insect groupings, the web of framing devices, and the implacable architecture of the frame. The light is bright often, harsh and scathing, but it never has a hint of daylight or fresh air. Does that mean theatrical? Or cinematic? It’s more than stage light, it’s the consistent fog of city life where breathing itself draws the light through our lungs, with so little nourishment or solace. Photographed by Fritz Arno Wagner, and with art direction by Karl Vollbrecht and Emil Hasler, M is a masterpiece of prison’s mood in everyday li
fe.

  Of course, it is Lorre’s film (just as it became his curse), but notice the fine work by Ellen Widmann, Inge Landgut, Gustaf Gründgens, Fritz Odemar, Paul Kemp, Theo Lingen, Ernst Stahl-Nachbaur, Franz Stein, Otto Wernicke, Georg John, Rosa Valetti, and so many others. The sound is off and on, and that variation is oddly effective—again, it is as if the sound comes in with a heartbeat or breathing. (And they say Lang himself did the whistling.) What’s the most disconcerting thing about M? Neither its killer, nor the cold paranoia. It is the beauty.

  M (1951)

  Joseph Losey made M at almost precisely the worst time: he was on the verge of being run out of America by the blacklist, and it was not likely that any new approach to the Fritz Lang material would be viewed sympathetically. Moreover, Lang himself was by then a Hollywood resident, as well as a deeply competitive soul. He got into a shouting match with Seymour Nebenzal (producer of both the original and the remake), and he volunteered his opinion that the whole thing was theft. That led to accusations that Losey had in some places copied the mise-en-scène of Lang’s classic. That is simply not true. Nor is the subject of the two films the same.

  It is true that Nebenzal sought to do a remake for Columbia. Further, when the project was offered to the censor, his response was that the only justification for doing the film was as a repeat of an historic masterpiece. So the Lang script had to be followed. But Losey saw the material differently: “The attitude of the film-makers and of society then [1931] was that a sex maniac or anyone guilty of sexual acts towards children was a monster to be hounded down even by the criminal underworld—who were in fact his peers—because he was worse than they were. This is obviously a pretty unenlightened and even old-fashioned view, and very few people would subscribe to it now. Most people realize that this sort of thing is a terrifying illness.”

  The shooting lasted twenty days and led to a film with long, intricate takes that should be 88 minutes—there are cut versions around which do damage to the sense as well as corrupting David Wayne’s heartfelt performance as Martin Harrow.

  The script was by Norman Reilly Raine and Leo Katcher, and there was additional dialogue by Waldo Salt. Don Weis was script supervisor and Robert Aldrich assistant director. John Hubley was the design consultant, and Ernest Laszlo did the black-and-white photography. The picture is set in Los Angeles (especially the old downtown) and there are some beautiful shots of steep streets, and of the Bradbury Building.

  And then there is Wayne, an actor too often confined to comedy and a rather waspish manner. It was Wayne who made Losey eager to do the film, and it is Wayne’s performance finally that answers all the carping. Stripped down by his confession, and feeling himself among alien beings, he is for Losey a model of the shattered soul—it might be anyone—who can now be found on city streets, ready to make an ordinary enterprise of a monstrous crime. If it is true that people no longer quite attend to the Lang version, because it is a classic, then Losey’s film sets the real terror free again like a wild animal.

  Along with the reconstruction of L.A. to match Lang’s schematic view, Losey assembled a great cast of small-part actors: Howard da Silva, Luther Adler, Martin Gabel, Steve Brodie, Raymond Burr, Glenn Anders, Karen Morley, Norman Lloyd, John Miljan, and Jim Backus, many of whom were about to become victims of the blacklist.

  Maclovia (1948)

  In what a narrator describes as the most beautiful and tranquil part of Mexico, there is a lake and an island in the lake, called Janitzio. There lives Maclovia, a girl, an Indian, a virgin, the daughter of Don Macario, a modest landowner. Maclovia is María Félix, who was thirty-two at the time, stunningly beautiful, if a little past her virginity. It doesn’t matter: sometimes virginity is a state of mind. Maclovia is an epic melodrama and love story, made by Emilio Fernández, “El Indio” (he was of mixed Spanish and Indian descent). Fernández is known as a broad actor in Peckinpah films—he is Mapache in Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch. He is also the great director of Mexico’s golden age. Maclovia is a characteristic work, easily treated lightly, but still burning with romantic intensity.

  Maclovia falls in love with José María (Pedro Armendáriz), and he is too old for the story, too. But for Fernández and his cameraman, Gabriel Figueroa, the pathos is over the top but utterly sincere. Forbidden to look at Maclovia, José María wants to write her a letter. So he goes to the village school and begs to be admitted. Gradually, he learns to write—cut, and there is Maclovia, at the same school, asking to be taught to read. Of course, this storytelling tradition works in part because of an uneducated audience and a very basic way of life. At the same time, these peasants wear white suits that seem washed every day, Félix’s Maclovia wears false eyelashes and benefits from the beauty parlor. Why not? Once upon a time North American films worked at the same code—and Félix resembles the divas of the Joan Crawford era.

  There is a loathsome army sergeant, the military power in Janitzio, and he wants Maclovia, too. José María attacks him and gets twenty-four years’ imprisonment (Fernández himself got twenty years once for a shooting). We tremble to discover whether Maclovia will give herself to the sergeant to free José Maria. You’ll have to find out, though I’ll say that I think the very ending of the film should have been more violent, more tragic, more operatic, more everything.

  The one participant who gives his all is Figueroa, a great cameraman to be sure and a master at bringing subtle shadows to the harsh light of Mexico—you can see here how he uses fishing nets to diffuse the light. And Figueroa took pictures the way María Félix strikes attitudes: they were a perfect match. You may find the knockout compositions overpowering after a while. Some American directors who used Figueroa, like Ford and Huston, came to that opinion. But, again, if you grasp what Maclovia is doing, then Figueroa is a vital source of its power. Félix could be funny and explosive (see her work in French Cancan). Here she is beautiful, in love and suffering. When she hears José María’s letter to her, the film runs riot: there are at least ten different close-ups of her response.

  Madame de… (1953)

  If I told you the story of Madame de…, I could easily make light of it. It could be a silly woman who fancied she could do as she pleased. Then her husband gives her a pair of earrings. Now, you must understand, she is “comfortably” married. She and her husband look good together. But they almost certainly both have their secret affairs where they look good—or is it happy?—in their own eyes. I could be ironic about the story. The woman was reckless. She was spending too much. Some people in love are like that. So she pawned the earrings. It’s all so trivial to start with, yet it turns into a tragedy that overwhelms Madame. It’s just like a good horse and carriage: one minute you’re making your handsome way to lunch or the opera, and the next you’re in the gutter, broken. You believed you were immortal, when you were no better than an expensive watch.

  La Ronde is the story of an entire society. Lola Montès is about the most famous courtesan of her moment. And Madame de… is about earrings. Yet, clearly, as the jewels change hands they are just the hard token of the soft hopes passed around in La Ronde. With Max Ophüls, as much as with any director, it is the pursuit or the circling, the impulse, that puts the camera in the air as if it were a butterfly in its short life between soaring and exhaustion. And maybe just because this is the smallest story that Ophüls did, it is the quintessential film, the one that knows the suddenness or the brevity of both happiness and disaster. After all, it’s a tragedy to Madame de…, and a bit of gossip to you or me.

  The film comes from a novel by Louise de Vilmorin. It was adapted for the screen by Ophüls himself with Marcel Achard and Annette Wademant. Fickleness was perhaps the Ophüls subject, but time and again, in different countries and diverse studios, he hired the same people. So Christian Matras was the photographer. Jean d’Eaubonne did the design. Georges Annenkov and Rosine Delamare designed the costumes. The music was by Georges Van Parys.

  Danielle Darrieux is Madame de…. Charles Bo
yer is her husband. And Vittorio De Sica is her lover. The rest of the cast includes Mireille Perrey, Jean Debucourt, Serge Lecointe, Jean Galland, Hubert Noël, Madeleine Barbulée, Jean Degrave, and Léon Walther.

  The film exists at 102 minutes, and seems perfect. Yet there’s a story of a longer version, as much as 180 minutes, lost. We lost other Ophüls projects, too, like La Duchesse de Langeais, with Garbo and James Mason, and the story of Modigliani. Jacques Becker made that, with Gérard Philipe as the painter, and the film is dedicated to the memory of Max Ophüls, like Jacques Demy’s Lola, like so many films. People ask what killed Stanley Kubrick. Don’t rule out the horror of making Eyes Wide Shut and realizing that he was not Max.

  Mad Max (1979)

  Very few people guessed what Mad Max was going to be when the first film in the series opened. It looked like a biker movie, set in a future world, vaguely after the apocalypse, with Mel Gibson as its figurehead. The film was very badly released (with dubbing so you could hear what the Aussies were saying!) with very little promotion. But the audience loved the strange mix of biker action, futurism, and (shall we say?) Australia-rules fascism.

  The first film was written by James McCausland and George Miller (who directed, too) and the photography was by David Eggby. Gibson played Max Rockatansky, a policeman (albeit one with an overriding urge to become freelance). It’s when the nasty gangs on outback roads get his wife and son that Max turns Mad.

  The second film, Mad Max 2 (1981), known as The Road Warrior in the U.S., is a Kennedy Miller Entertainment production. George Miller is still making the film, but the script has been turned over to Terry Hayes (one of the best writers in Australia then), Miller, and Brian Hannant, and American Dean Semler has been brought in to do some photography. It’s clear in The Road Warrior that the Third World War has come and gone and fuel oil is now the gold that runs the world. The setting and the talk were far more blatantly Australian. Mel Gibson had become a dress-up doll. And this was probably the liveliest film in the series, with a cast list that included the following comic-book characters: Feral Kid, Humungus, Curmudgeon, Quiet Man, Lusty Girl, and so on. Join the dots and you had a story. This time, there was no mistake about the financial cleanup operation.