It’s the story of a German woman who kills a black American soldier (Günther Kaufmann) during the war. Her husband (Klaus Löwitsch) takes the blame for her, and Maria gradually rises and becomes wealthy and powerful in the West German “miracle.” The screenplay came from Peter Märthesheimer and Pea Fröhlich, but the idea was Fassbinder’s and he was changing the script as they went along, turning Maria Braun—beautiful but coarse, a survivor but greedy—into the model of postwar Germany, and using Schygulla’s vibrant sexuality as a way to the box office. The truly remarkable thing was that the film should never have been made, that Fassbinder forced it upon everyone and behaved monstrously—as if he expected and wanted someone to come forward and kill him—and yet it is a superb, comic-book satire on German success (it culminates in Germany’s winning the World Cup, and the voices of most of the modern chancellors). And these things preside over Maria Braun’s carnal puddle, stretching out to claim more and more.
Michael Ballhaus did the photography, and Helga Ballhaus did the design. The cast also included Ivan Desny, Gottfried John, Günter Lamprecht, Elisabeth Trissenaar, and Hark Bohm. But there’s no doubt that Schygulla carried the film—in performance and as a poster image. Fassbinder’s sexual tastes were clear, and there’s more than an edge of contempt expressed for Maria. Still, those movies that have a female central character seem more coherent and expressive. It’s as if his social satire was prompted or encouraged by having to work with actresses.
The Marriage of Maria Braun won the Silver Bear at Berlin and it then proved to be his greatest box-office success all over the world. At Cannes, a few months later, he was being pursued by distributors—even those from Hollywood—with gifts, bribes, and honors. The picture that begged not to be made. Such savage ironies were as vital as cocaine.
La Marseillaise (1938)
The height of Jean Renoir’s emotional participation with the French Popular Front was 1936. That’s when he supervised the making of La Vie Est à Nous with the support (if not more) of the Communist Party. He also launched a public appeal for funds (a franc each from a citizen guaranteeing a ticket to see the film) for a movie to mark the anniversary of the French Revolution. Alas, the ticket money raised was insufficient and so La Marseillaise did not appear for two more years, funded by CGT (the congress of French trade unions). But the film is fabulous and badly neglected. It traces the events from July 1789 (the storming of the Bastille) to 1792 and the defeat of the Prussian army.
No one would be tempted to call La Marseillaise an epic—and Renoir was afraid of it being labeled a “history film.” Instead, he wanted to make a panorama of France in the moment of the revolution. So the key to his approach is to fix on the citizen army from Marseilles, to follow it on its untidy march north and to trace the composition of the song that every Frenchman knows. The film is deliberately casual, fragmentary, charming, and amusing—the capital-letter grandeur of history is shrugged away at every opportunity. As they are in all of his movies, Renoir’s people here are too busy living to observe and caption their own significance.
Renoir worked on the script himself with Carl Koch, and Martel and Jean-Paul Dreyfus. André Zwoboda was the production manager. The photography was shared by Jean-Serge Bourgoin, Alain Douarinou, Jean-Marie Maillols, Jean-Paul Alphen, and Jean Louis. The production design—from palaces to common homes—was by Léon Barsacq, Georges Wakhévitch, and Jean Perrier. The editing was by Marguerite Renoir.
By the time Renoir made La Marseillaise, the Popular Front was breaking up and Renoir’s interest in individualism was having to face the sad evidence that people could persuade themselves to love one another only for so long. So his revolution is full of wry observations of petty selfishness, of self-interest masquerading as team spirit, and of humble kindnesses in the people marked down for posterity as royalists and aristocracy. The great achievement of La Grande Illusion—his previous film—is the way men of different standing can still march side-by-side, in community and compromise. In other words, “revolution” is a big word for the small changes that Renoir sees. What’s more important are the real spatial connections—the way people on the march mingle and chat, and the suddenness with which palace guards desert their defunct cause.
It’s surely true that one big reason for doing the film for Renoir was the chance to cast his brother Pierre as Louis XVI—awkward, seeming lost, but decent and resigned to his fate. Lise Delamare is Marie Antoinette and Louis Jouvet is very good as Roederer. The rest of the cast includes Andrex, Ardisson, Nadia Sibirskaïa, Jenny Hélia, Léon Larive, Gaston Modot, and Julien Carette.
Mary Poppins (1964)
P. L. Travers, the author of the Mary Poppins books, was Australian, and her name was Pamela Lyndon Travers. Although the books are set in London in about 1910, they began to be published only in 1934, and so it’s clear that from the outset they spoke of a secure and nostalgic time at the height of the Depression. Equally, the movie of Mary Poppins is one of those immense conservative successes that tried to withstand all the tides of change in the 1960s. And so, as kids in America felt the ground moving in ’64 and ’65, there was Mary Poppins and her umbrella as ways to achieve safe flight.
There were several Mary Poppins books, and there was no stage original for the movie. Instead, Disney supported Bill Walsh in his great belief in the books. He was a Disney veteran who had produced and helped write such live-action adventures as Davy Crockett, King of the Wild Frontier and The Absent-Minded Professor. He was associate producer on Mary Poppins and cowriter with Don DaGradi. They hired Robert Stevenson to direct it—and his career went back to King Solomon’s Mines (1938), Tom Brown’s Schooldays (1940), Walk Softly Stranger (1950), and The Absent-Minded Professor (1961). Stevenson was English and he may have been the one to suggest the Poppins books. But the real coup on the picture was the score, by Richard M. and Robert B. Sherman, which worked as modern music while keeping the flavor of the period. The Shermans had done some songs for Disney—on The Absent-Minded Professor and Summer Magic—but nothing really prepared anyone for the hit songs in Mary Poppins, or renewed that level of success later.
Edward Colman photographed the picture. Tony Walton did the sets and costumes; Walton then was married to Julie Andrews, the star. She was a stage success, of course, most notably in My Fair Lady, but 1964 brought her film debut as Mary Poppins, just as she was passed over for “her” role of Eliza in the movie of My Fair Lady. The subsequent lesson was emphatic. Andrews won the Oscar as Mary Poppins, and she exactly caught the balance of open appeal and period assurance—the nice way of being right. She also sang the songs as if she had written them—not just “A Spoonful of Sugar” and “Chim Chim Cheree” but “Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious” (which is the hip, swinging version of “Do-Re-Mi” from The Sound of Music).
Mary Poppins is genuinely pretty, and absolutely clear in its provision of a perfect nanny for everyone. Not that the parents are belittled. Mother is a suffragette, with a song to prove it. Father is a banker. And they are Glynis Johns and David Tomlinson. But the perfect match for Mary is Dick Van Dyke, whose charm did not always work on the big screen. It won the Oscar for music—My Fair Lady won for scoring. And the picture earned $31 million, two and a half times what My Fair Lady earned. Super!
Mary Reilly (1996)
Mary Reilly was a novel, written by Valerie Martin, that invented the character of an Irish housemaid who is employed in the London home of Dr. Henry Jekyll. She is a simple, innocent girl who has had a terrible upbringing—she has been terrorized by her drunken father (Michael Gambon). He has tortured her with rats, her greatest fear. So in a way the Jekyll house is a precious escape for her. But it is more than she has bargained for. Jekyll (John Malkovich) has his own intense work going on, in a laboratory from which the servants are excluded. But he is drawn to Mary—and she to him. And, when he appears in the house, the doctors assistant—Mr. Hyde—has his way with her, too, no matter that she is deeply affronted by his direct approach.<
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A consequence: In due course both Julia Roberts and her director, Stephen Frears, received “Razzie” awards—the raspberry—for the worst work of the year. Less expected, perhaps: This is the best version of the Jekyll and Hyde story ever put on the screen—and it is a wonderful movie.
Ms. Martin has not exploited Robert Louis Stevenson. She has reimagined his book (1885) in ways that are not just proper, but flattering. So here is a version of the Stevenson in which there is a special sexual concentration on the “other” part of an orderly personality. It works not just in terms of the doctor and the brute, but in showing two sides to Mary herself: the good girl, and the woman who is tempted by feelings of romantic and sexual fulfillment. And so this Mary Reilly is both an example of the awed Victorian readership clinging to Stevenson’s novella, and a real participant in the story of which Nabokov observed, “Excluding two or three vague servant maids, a conventional hag and a faceless little girl running for a doctor, the gentle sex has no part in the action.”
Well, that vagueness goes in this film. Mary is as pale as the London fog or a concentration camp victim. She has a sharp fox’s face (I think the idea of the rat is felt in her very look). In turn, that is a measure of Julia Roberts’s commitment to the part. She has no anxiety about how she looks—ill, haggard, deprived, undeveloped, all of which have a sexual as well as a medical connotation. What is remarkable and delicate about her performance are the ways she lets Jekyll gently warm her—her sexual dream, with hushed sighs; her shattered response to a kiss; her tremulous intimation of her own sexuality.
To say that Malkovich’s two men—both strong, one inhibited, one outrageous—are at her bidding is to convey the real creative line of Mary Reilly. Malkovich has so much more to do. But the film makes him Mary’s mirror. The script is by Christopher Hampton and it is a great piece of work, the identification of the major film that awaits. But in turn, that film would not be ours now but for Frears’s intelligence, the brilliant art direction of a team that included Stuart Craig, Michael Lamont, and Jim Morahan, and some of the dankest photography (by Philippe Rousselot) ever seen. I can see how this was less than commercial, but the neglect of the film by real critics is shocking. It cost $47 million and earned $5.6 million in the U.S. Cheap at twice the cost.
M*A*S*H. (1970)
There must be a great book to be written on how M*A*S*H. went through our culture, and one of its topics would be the radical difference between the tone of the movie (a mockery of team spirit) and that of the inspirational television series that followed. It would also be a history of backdoor genius, or as Pat McGilligan puts it in his biography of Altman, “It came to pass because a pushy agent believed in Altman, because an iron-willed producer backed him to the hilt, because it was the best possible script, and because the studio was not entirely cognizant of what was happening.”
It was a novel first (with the initials standing for Mobile Army Surgical Hospital) by Richard Hooker. It was seen by screenwriter Ring Lardner, Jr., who believed it might make a great movie. In turn, he showed it to Ingo Preminger, who came on board as producer, and then Preminger let George Litto—Altman’s agent—read the script Lardner had done.
Despite first thoughts of shifting the action to Vietnam, Lardner stayed with the Korean setting. Many people liked the script, but fifteen directors—Kubrick and Lumet among them—were put off by the episodic nature and the sense of drift or “mash.” That’s how Altman got the job on a Fox film budgeted at $3 million. At first Fox had thought of Lemmon and Matthau as the two leads, but Preminger knew they had to be younger, hipper—Donald Sutherland and Elliott Gould. As it happened, Altman upset both the leads but that was part of his steady cultivation of all the minor players instead. For he wanted a film with no lumps, or stars, in the mash.
The script was filthy, profane, and awash with blood, all things that had to be negotiated. But nothing did that better than the way the two surgeons talked about anything except surgery while they were at work. Irreverence or antiestablishment thinking was the essence—and in fact this is the Korean War as seen through the druggy hopelessness of Vietnam. There’s a fascinating period shift.
What goes with it is a new, slippery camera style—full of zooms, reframing (or bad framing), focus issues, and a sound track that moved in and out, picking up different or unexpected things all the time. The texture of the film was mashed, stoned, and dislocated. And yet it was beautiful, funny, and sometimes crazy. There was an ending with Hawkeye going home. But Altman dropped it and threw in a wild public address credits sequence—as if the film we’ve just seen is the movie of the night at the hospital camp.
Fox never understood it until it did $40 million in rentals. Altman was established not just as maverick, but as a stylist. And a host of new actors got exposure: not just the leads, but Tom Skerritt, Sally Kellerman, Robert Duvall, Jo Ann Pflug, Rene Auberjonois, Gary Burghoff, Michael Murphy, John Schuck, Bud Cort, and so on.
The TV show, on CBS, went from 1972 to 1983, with Alan Alda as Hawkeye and Gary Burghoff as the single holdover from the movie. Its success dwarfed that of the film: its final episode, with Hawkeye having a breakdown, is still one of the most watched things on the small screen. Yet the TV show was about a reverence (for the unit) that became more pious and more sweet as the years passed. Whereas the original mash is sour and astringent, and with a kick.
Master of the House (1925)
At first, as you watch Carl Dreyer’s Master of the House—and it seems to be provided nowadays with the crudest kind of overdone piano accompaniment—you feel yourself locked into all the worst traditions of silent melodrama. We are in a Danish home, in fixed long shots, a place where the severe husband (Johannes Meyer) seems like the tyrant in charge. He is waited upon, hand and foot, by his wife (Astrid Holm). There seems to be no limit to his demands or his sense of entitlement.
But wait, a few things seem to be happening that break the Victorian mold: Sometimes this husband is seen with his back to the camera, and the effect is striking—for the film seems to say, What an idiot he is: and rather than grimace with the pain of long suffering, sometimes the very pretty Astrid Holm seems to toss her head as if she knows some other possibility; and then there is something else—Dreyer’s long shots are not just habitual, the way of the medium, they are a gradual opening up of context and the larger frame in which the man’s behavior looks worse and worse. In other words, there is a moral in the space.
Something really unexpected is coming: the man’s aged nanny (Karin Mellemose), who comes back to the household and starts to assess the value of everything the husband demands as a price to be paid to the wife. The setting is plainly nineteenth century, and the whole thing comes from a play by Svend Rindom that he and Dreyer adapted together. But what follows is not just mountingly funny, but a feminist treatise in 1925 that completely outstrips the kind of suffering-wife melodrama that has been indicated. And as the picture progresses, time and again it is the full frame—the spatial suggestiveness of a whole apartment that Dreyer had built for the filming—that works against the husband’s attitudes.
We do not expect a comedy from Dreyer, maybe. But what a revelation it is to see this as the film that preceded La Passion de Jeanne d’Arc, and what an insight into the gravity of that classic. What we have to face, at the outset, is that by the mid-1920s Carl Dreyer was as sophisticated an artist as Shaw—though morally and emotionally he is a great deal more piercing. Yet again, for those sympathetic to Stiller and Sjöström, here is evidence that the highest achievements of silent cinema were often Scandinavian.
Yet as far as can be judged, Master of the House was an enormous export success. For instance, its domestic attitudes and the comic touch had a very big impact in France. It follows from this that, like Stiller, Dreyer was in the process of developing a camera style that was close to that of Renoir and which prefigures the glorious achievement of Gertrud. Dreyer may have been austere and spiritual. What is more impressive is his brea
kthroughs in placing story, context, and meaning in revolutionary ways. Master of the House is a satire in the Lubitsch class and a clear forerunner of Ingmar Bergman.
The Matrix (1999)
We are in the kind of future city where the rain and the drab chic run together like salt in an open wound—it is a pace first established in Blade Runner and Se7en, and it speaks to the confidence and the good humor in today’s young. On the sound track there is the rattle of Marilyn Manson and groups actually called Massive Attack and Lunatic Calm. You could get depressed but for the plain fact that a blithe empty-head like Keanu Reeves is thriving and the Wachowski brothers reckon they are about to make a bundle. There have been a lot of future noir films, and franchises, and at last the role of dutiful film critic is widely recognized as purgatorial. But The Matrix has an unquenchable cheek and chutzpah. When the Wachowski brothers went with the immense video package of the three films, they hired professors of philosophy and film critics and recorded their feelings as they reviewed the films. I was one of the critics. The three of us (add in Todd McCarthy and John Powers) trashed the great pretentious beast. But the brothers ran the track anyway. You have to love them.
'Have You Seen...?' Page 85