'Have You Seen...?'

by David Thomson

  Then in 1985 came the finale, Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome, in which Max comes to the city of Bartertown and finds Tina Turner waiting. It was a pretty good match. Again, Miller directed, and the ingenuity with homemade vehicles, rocking sound, and unconsidered violence was taken in whole—this was also the age of Rambo and the Terminator, and it was a great joke for Australians that maybe the wildest of these silly franchises was not even American.

  Of course, there was another lesson, not lost on Mel Gibson, who has seldom lacked for confidence. It was that in the matter of violence, far-fetched plotting, and anything and everything in the name of home, family, fatherland, and so on, he could probably get away with whatever he elected to do. The sweet liberal spurs of outrage whenever he goes over the top with a car or a drink are so minor compared with the complete fantasization of liberty, vehicular motion, and bull’s blood in the Mad Max films. He knows what we want. He proved it three times in a row. Alas, the odd talent of George Miller seems to have been left by the roadside. But a pattern for Australian confidence was laid down, and Mel Gibson had our number.

  The Magnificent Ambersons (1942)

  There is only one way to start—by saying that this might have been the greatest of American pictures, the clear and present expression of the tragedy that occurred in the land when such things as the motorcar, personal obsession, and “development” eclipsed the late-eighteenth-century republic. Just as Orson Welles sometimes spoke with reverence and nostalgia (as if he had been there) about the “olde England” behind Chimes at Midnight, so this is his bow to “olde America,” and the surest sign of how much the very modern man loved the past.

  I am speaking as if the movie we have—and are likely to have for the rest of time—is not our great tragedy. But it is, in two ways: as the masterwork on the screen, and as the story of its own ruin—a story that becomes George Orson Welles just as fully as the onscreen disaster is fit for George Amberson Minafer.

  It was the second film of his RKO contract, made in the dismay that followed Kane, the exuberance with which Orson would depart for Rio de Janeiro and his South American adventure, and the more certain onset of war. It was from the novel by Booth Tarkington, published in 1918, and it developed from a radio version in which Orson had played George. For the film, Welles gave that part to Tim Holt, and chose to use himself as narrator. Thus we have the gravest twenty-seven-year-old reading the decline of the Ambersons into the national record. Stanley Cortez did the photography, and he was slower than Toland, apparently. But he had his own genius, and he was well suited to the deep continuities of space and time required by the old house and the placid naturalism of life there. The tragic spirit is in Cortez’s light, whereas Toland’s in Kane is often—appropriately—a light show. That is why people say Ambersons is more deeply felt.

  This may be the greatest ensemble acting in American film: Holt—bumptious yet dull; Joseph Cotten, so ready to yield as Eugene; Anne Baxter in bud, then bloom, as Lucy; Dolores Costello, like old lace as Isabel; Ray Collins as Jack—so chipper, so brave; Richard Bennett, heartbreaking, as Major Amberson. And Agnes Moorehead as Fanny, coming unglued as her nephew stuffs himself with strawberry shortcake.

  So, the film was shot by the end of 1941. Early in 1942 after throwing a rough cut together, Welles went away to Rio, leaving Robert Wise to edit the film and his manager, Jack Moss, to guard it. They tried. They cabled Welles, who was shooting miles of film and getting to know the ladies of Carnival. He stayed away. It was his momentous decision. And in his absence RKO previewed the film and shrank from raucous laughter in a crowd of kids. They intervened. It seems likely that Welles’s version would have been 132 minutes. RKO released the picture at 88. Much of the closing material was gone. A studio ending was tacked on. Years later, the cut footage—the last hope of rescue—was apparently dumped in the ocean. The full film was lost—but its full meaning was vindicated.

  Magnolia (1999)

  I have already seen Magnolia several times since it opened, and it gets better and more complex on every viewing. I can see the frank structural debt to Robert Altman’s Short Cuts, in its notion of several stories from one part of town that may slightly overlap but which reflect on each other and become more fascinating as the picture builds. But Short Cuts came out of the considerable experience, in life and art, of Raymond Carver and Robert Altman, and Magnolia, in blunt fact, is a young man’s film where one has to give credit to the way thinking has made up for a sheer lack of life so far.

  So it would not be surprising if Magnolia were a little schematic, and I suppose that the plague of frogs at the film’s end could be read as an arbitrary intervention, and a way of drawing the proceedings to a close. Instead, I think the frogs are not just sublime and casual, but a very poetic, absurdist way of enlisting the universal. A wiser, less hopeful man would not have used the frogs. They come out of nothing but Paul Thomas Anderson’s desperate belief in life.

  There are five areas of focus: Jason Robards is dying, despite the care of Philip Seymour Hoffman and the terrible mixed feelings of his young wife, Julianne Moore. Robards’s estranged son, Tom Cruise, is the commanding figure in a strident men’s movement, but he is on the point of being reduced to zero by the patient inquiries of a young woman journalist. Melora Walters is a drug addict and a piece of refuse who finds a cop, John C. Reilly, falling for her. Philip Baker Hall is a TV game show host at the end of his tether, in part because of the guilt he feels toward his daughter, Melora Walters. And William H. Macy is a wreck in life, a former kid quiz-show champion.

  It’s easy enough to extract from that information the kinds of guilt or shame that hang over these people and which amount to a deep loneliness, no matter how crowded their frames are with other people. But that level of awareness is minor compared with the howling anguish of Julianne Moore at her own infidelities or the helpless vacancy left in Tom Cruise once he is brought back to the core of truth that all his life has been constructed to deny.

  So it’s obvious enough that the film relies on very good writing and astonishing acting. But then you’d have to allow for the mournful persistence of the Aimee Mann music and the steadfast adherence to context in Anderson’s way of shooting. In the end, nothing so sustains this film as the sense of neighborhood, or the mathematical possibility of contingent lives and the way in which pain and grief and failure are shared things, like air, no matter that the economy may be lonely and capitalist. There’s the real point of Magnolia, I think, the way in which Anderson shows us a common or shared place, and the undeniable achievement of contingency as a kind of politics.

  Major Dundee (1965)

  When Major Dundee opened it was under a cloud. Its director, Sam Peckinpah, disowned it, because of interference from the producer, Jerry Bresler. It was shorter than Peckinpah wanted, and there was a good deal of confusion apparent on the screen. But Andrew Sarris felt that “the suspicion persists that Dundee was a disaster on the directorial level long before the front office stepped in.” Well, years later, a fuller version emerged, allegedly closer to Peckinpah’s intentions, and Sarris seemed prescient. Not that Dundee isn’t a fascinating picture and as much of a promise of what was to come as an indication that Peckinpah wore storm clouds instead of hats.

  Bresler had approached Peckinpah (a second best to the already engaged John Ford) with a treatment by Harry Julian Fink. It was a Civil War story; it was a rogue Apache story; it was a Mexican story; and it was a prisoner-of-war story. Dundee was a Union officer who would free and enlist a bunch of Confederate prisoners to go after a rogue Apache warrior. This would lead them over the border and into Mexico, where they would end up fighting the French who were trying to suppress a Mexican revolution.

  Charlton Heston was attached as Dundee. Peckinpah sat down with Fink, who then produced 163 pages of script on a third of the story! So Fink was fired and Oscar Saul came in. Peckinpah went location scouting in Mexico, and the more remote the place the better he liked it. Then, just as shooti
ng was to begin, there was a power shift at Columbia (the studio paying for it) and the $4.5 million budget was cut back to $3 million. Out of reach, Peckinpah shot what he wanted and spent… $4.5 million. And so the clash was inevitable.

  More than that, Peckinpah had gone for the violence. He took it into his head to rip away the golden legend of the cavalry as set down by Ford. To that end, he stressed confusions of leadership and the terrible violence of battle. There would be no heroes. The war was a storm that took on a life of its own—and Peckinpah was certainly reaching out for a metaphor for Vietnam. His cut came in at 160 minutes; the film was released at 124.

  The trouble is plain to see: it’s Richard Harris and the Confederates offering a view of chivalry and a war within the army. Whereas it might have been a film about a lost patrol, hacking away and killing, despite the loss of function. Harris is mocking the film. Heston is stalwart. And there are very good supporting performances from James Coburn, Warren Oates, Ben Johnson, L. Q. Jones, R. G. Armstrong, and Slim Pickens—a stock company taking shape. Peckinpah said it was one of the most painful things that had happened in his life—but it was early still. The photography, by Sam Leavitt, is violently antiromantic. The jittery music is by Daniele Amfitheatrof. Everything involving Senta Berger should have been cut.

  Make Way for Tomorrow (1937)

  Make Way for Tomorrow seems like one of those knockout fortune-cookie titles from the 1930s (tough but optimistic), like Little Man, What Now?, You Can’t Take It with You, or Gone With the Wind. It sounds like the description of a bracing future, a challenge but surely good for us all. And there are characters in the film—the younger characters, the children—who might utter it in that way, albeit wistfully. Like “Time Marches On” as a warning to a lame horse. In truth, Make Way for Tomorrow is an extraordinary film for America—which may account for why you haven’t seen it. The Awful Truth (the other film Leo McCarey made in 1937) is the one you know, the one that got Academy attention. It’s a great film, daring, challenging, funny enough to make playboys and playgirls think twice. But Make Way for Tomorrow is so tough you can’t believe it’s going to do what it does.

  Barkley and Lucy Cooper (Victor Moore and Beulah Bondi) have been married fifty years. The bank is taking back their house. They have four children, and they tell them the news: Cora (Elizabeth Risdon), Nellie (Minna Gombell), Robert (Ray Mayer), and George (Thomas Mitchell). In 1937 Beulah Bondi was two months older than Mitchell. One way of addressing that is to say that Beulah Bondi was an actress who frequently looked older than her actual years; she also wears aging makeup in the film. But the other is that in using Thomas Mitchell, McCarey was deliberately employing a “veteran” and favorite actor because George is a son who will do a wretched thing.

  It is plain that Barkley and Lucy are deeply fond of each other—you could say “in love” if you are not shocked too much at the thought of that bounty being available for old people. And their children agree to their being separated. A time will come when George has to advise his mother that he has a rest home in mind for her. Watch that scene and remind yourself that McCarey is known for “comedy,” for this is one of the unkindest and yet most understandable scenes in American film. McCarey films it as such yet he makes it ordinary and natural, too, and he lets the mother recover the son’s shattered dignity. It is one of the great moments in American film, and it is dazzling and confounding to know that Mitchell won the Supporting Actor Oscar in Stagecoach, and was not nominated for his George Cooper. Why not? Because some acting is too truthful to be endured.

  Did Ozu know this film?

  Viña Delmar wrote the script from a novel called The Years Are So Long by Josephine Lawrence. William C. Mellor did the photography. Hans Dreier and Bernard Herzbrun did the sets. George Antheil and Victor Young wrote the music. I think it is the best American film about family betrayal, yet it is so good that it does not content itself with blaming the young. It is about life, and if it is seldom seen it is because we are not strong enough.

  Malcolm X (1992)

  Spike Lee’s Malcolm X is 202 minutes long. It cost about $30 million and earned rentals of $19.4 million. Those are disappointing figures. But we live by the ethic of the marketplace, and in the history of film there have been more drastic disasters. I recall that Lee had great difficulties getting Malcolm X completed, so I don’t think there’s much room for charges of extravagance on the production. On the other hand, Michael Mann’s Ali somehow cost $107 million—and grossed only $58 million. That’s a gross figure as opposed to rentals: in other words, Ali lost far more money on first run, yet somehow or other raised a budget three times as high.

  Was that because Ali was reckoned to be more likeable than Malcolm—especially to a white audience? Or was it because Michael Mann was white? We are on very tricky ground here, and Spike Lee, for one, would opine that we are being idiots if we don’t recognize that a black director has a harder road to follow in “Hollywood.”

  Suppose you are inclined to judge that a lot of the audience would regard Malcolm X as an “unattractive” or unappealing movie hero. Then compare it with Reds, the John Reed biopic made by Warren Beatty. That film opened in 1981 (at 200 minutes) and it cost about $35 million. In other words, allowing for the time difference, Reds was a good deal more expensive. Yet it had rentals in the U.S. of only $21 million. But Reds was Oscar-nominated for Best Picture (generous, but OK), and it won for director (very generous). Malcolm X was not nominated in either category.

  I am trying to keep this entry as factual as possible—to make a climactic point. But now I want to say that I believe Malcolm X is a better-made, more dramatically coherent film. Vittorio Storaro’s photography of Reds is classical and magnificent, yet I think Ernest Dickerson’s imagery in Malcolm X is more organic and dramatic and stirring. Let me go further: Warren Beatty’s Jack Reed is a narcissistic gesture; Denzel Washington’s Malcolm is from the soul. Reds is a liberal’s nostalgia for days he has no real wish to reinhabit. Malcolm X is a record of the life and lies that formed Lee.

  Malcolm X is important not just in showing the conflicting influences on a young black man in the mid–twentieth century. It also tracks the appeal to such a man of Islam, a subject that still hangs over the world. This is an extraordinary film, an exciting story, and a parable where every meaning is fresh.

  There are outstanding supporting performances from Angela Bassett (as Malcolm’s wife, Betty), Albert Hall, Al Freeman, Jr. (as Elijah Muhammad), Delroy Lindo, Theresa Randle, Kate Vernon, Lonette McKee, Tommy Hollis, Giancarlo Esposito, and Lee himself. The screenplay was by Lee and Arnold Perl, using The Autobiography of Malcolm X.

  Male and Female (1919)

  This is actually The Admirable Crichton, the play by J. M. Barrie which opened in 1903. An English aristocratic family and their butler are shipwrecked on a desert island, whereupon Crichton the butler—the devotee of common sense—becomes head of the family. Let us suppose that a gentle dash of social criticism was intended, still Cecil B. DeMille foresaw other revolutions contingent on the story—for instance, he imagined Gloria Swanson striding out of the surf after the shipwreck so that her tattered silk gown clung to her body. It was only when DeMille volunteered his title to exhibitors that they begged him to make a change. Films about admirals had no track record, apparently. So DeMille reconsidered and decided to call it Male and Female.

  Of course, when you realize that it was made in the same year as True Heart Susie, you can see the divergent paths possible in cinema. An audience existed still for Griffith’s respect for Lillian Gish, but a new force had come into being and it was eager to see as much of Swanson as possible. Jeanie Macpherson wrote the script, though the actors on DeMille pictures rarely saw a script—it was usually C.B. telling them a bit of the story and them acting it out.

  DeMille elected to film the desert island scenes on Santa Cruz, a small island off Santa Barbara, and everybody went out there for a couple of weeks. For those scenes, Swanson was bedr
aggled first and then increasingly exposed as the sun beat down. But DeMille foresaw the charge of exploitation and therefore determined to have his star as near nude as possible as often as possible. So in her secure existence before the shipwreck she takes a ladylike bath where she is apparently nude. And then, just to add balance, after Crichton has read to the family from a book about Babylon, Swanson’s character (Lady Mary) has a dream in which she is a slave girl and Crichton (Thomas Meighan) has become the emperor of Babylon. This required slave-girl costumes. The young Mitchell Leisen was hired to design them, and he used batik and beads, a lot of skin, and big built-up clogs so that the diminutive Swanson might seem taller.

  Yes, it’s shameless, but done with enormous zest and good humor. And suppose that DeMille was correct—suppose that sex was the best American antidote to any threatening signs of class distinction. Consider this account, by Swanson, of what Elinor Glyn told her:

  “The Prince of Wales absolutely adored you in Male and Female…. You children don’t realize what has happened yet, I know. But you will. Motion pictures are going to change everything. They’re the most important thing that’s come along since the printing press. What woman can dream about a prince anymore when she’s seen one up close in a newsreel? She’d much rather dream about Wallace Reid. People don’t care about royalty anymore. They’re much more interested in queens of the screen, like you, dear.”