'Have You Seen...?'

by David Thomson

  It’s true that Tully Marshall plays a foot fetishist, and that may have upset Ms. Murray. But then look at the rapturous treatment of the key waltz—with its streamlined moving camera. That’s something an actress might die for, an unrestrained romanticism. Also with Roy D’Arcy and Josephine Crowell.

  The Merry Widow (1934)

  You had to be there, maybe, for here is a subgenre that has faded away. Instead of this lightly veiled cherishing of aristocracy, with a developing cult of ballroom dancing, we get The Queen. So it’s worth tracing the history of The Merry Widow, which premiered in Vienna in 1905, and then triumphed in New York in 1907. The book of the operetta was by Victor Léon and Leo Stein, and the music was by Franz Lehár. Although the story line does presuppose a European prince’s need for money, it also takes for granted that every widow in sight (and most other women, too) are going to go wild for a prince who can sing and provide a palace. I suppose Rainier and Grace Kelly is the last time that trick really worked.

  Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer owned the rights from the silent version (by Stroheim). That film had cost half a million and change and made a profit of over $750,000—without the songs. As such, it was the biggest hit Stroheim ever had. So a remake with Lubitsch in charge and Maurice Chevalier as Count Danilo was not to be argued over. It was their fifth film together and originally Grace Moore was to have played Sonia. But the studio insisted on Chevalier having top billing and Moore’s dignity was too offended. Whereupon, the “natural” casting of Jeanette MacDonald went into effect. And she was able to deliver “Vilia.”

  Samson Raphaelson wrote the script for the movie with Ernest Vajda, and Lorenz Hart and Gus Kahn wrote some fresh lyrics to go on the Lehár songs. In order to give no direct offense to anyone in an anxious Europe, the original setting of Montenegro was changed to Illyria (where Twelfth Night takes place). Oliver Marsh did the photography (and he had shot the Stroheim version). The sets were by Cedric Gibbons, Gabriel Scognamillo, Fredric Hope, and Edwin White. Albertina Rasch did the choreography, and Ali Hubert and Adrian designed the costumes. The cast also included Edward Everett Horton, Una Merkel, George Barbier, Ruth Channing, Sterling Holloway, Donald Meek, Herman Bing, Minna Gombell, Akim Tamiroff, and Shirley Ross.

  Thalberg was in charge of the production, and there seems to have been no hint that Lubitsch, Chevalier, and MacDonald were tired of each other yet. But there is something askew. It’s as if in 1934 the intuitive Lubitsch can’t quite see the reality of the Prince of Wales and Mrs. Simpson creeping up. Royalty was on the slide, and the gorgeous self-infatuated aplomb of Chevalier was beginning to date. It’s hard to believe, but Lubitsch does the story without an ironic undertone. He does it straight.

  So they shot for eighty-eight days. It cost $1.6 million and it lost money. No one quite knew it at the time, but this was the end of Lubitsch and Chevalier, though they nursed a dream of doing Papa, in which a father plots to end his son’s love affair—and the girl falls in love with him.

  Metropolis (1927)

  Metropolis is everywhere now—you see it in “abridged” form with pop music accompaniment; it plays on the walls at fashion openings; would you be amazed to see it in a supermarket, the gloomy trudge of slave workers imitating the checkout lines? Have the Teletubbies done it yet? More or less, it has come to stand for cinema’s attempt to be the macabre soothsayer of modern times—a role made all the easier in that no one ever seems to remember what Metropolis wants to mean. Perhaps there has always been a gulf between the proclamation of the last titles and the relentless respect for urban enclosure and trap in the imagery.

  Once upon a time, film history had it that Fritz Lang and his wife, Thea von Harbou, were inspired to do the film by their visit to the United States, and New York, in 1924. In fact, that trip was to examine studio facilities. Lang and Harbou already had a script in hand as they made the journey. They had seen the future before they saw New York, but they were eager to report the latest tricks in set construction and epic-scale shooting to Ufa. For Metropolis was set in advance as the biggest film ever made in Europe.

  This is its story: A future city-state is ruled by John Fredersen (Alfred Abel), who lives with his son, Freder (Gustav Fröhlich), in moderne penthouse splendor. But there is an evil genius, Rotwang (Rudolf Klein-Rogge), who advises Fredersen, and he lives in a warped house such as Hansel and Gretel might have found in the dark woods. Freder intuits that something is wrong: He has a vision of the slave labor being turned into virtual machines. And there is such a protest movement forming in the bowels of the city, led by Maria (Brigitte Helm). Freder takes her side, but Rotwang makes a robotic Maria who will preach depravity and destruction to the mob. The city is nearly destroyed—but finally there is a reconciliation: The heart and the head will work together. How this will work, or what happens to the economy of the metropolis, no one knows.

  What matters is the dynamic geometry of the sets and the blocks of people, the way the foreboding message is carried in the imagery, and then the way in which the devilish version of Maria is so seductive. Karl Freund and Günther Rittau did the photography, with Eugen Schüfftan supplying some special effects. Otto Hunte, Erich Kettelhut, and Karl Vollbrecht were in charge of the design and Aenne Willkomm did the costumes. The movie shot for 310 days and 60 nights. And it cost 5 million marks (about $1 million). It was said that 30,000 extras were employed, and as you look at Metropolis today don’t forget that the computer had hardly been thought of yet. This is a vast vision translated in theatrical terms. The story it tells can be lifted off, like a helmet from a skull, but the skull—the oppressiveness of the city, its labyrinth, and its suitability as a trapping place, are the message of the film. And when one Brigitte Helm becomes another, the essential virus in doubling had been let loose.

  M. Hulot’s Holiday (1953)

  Such a pretty little beach—and apparently, it was at Saint-Marc-sur-Mer, near Saint Nazaire, in Brittany. You know the kind of place, with bijou boardinghouses looking out over the beaches and puppy rollers unwinding in the bright sun. With bathing huts and beach umbrellas like cupcakes. You feel, after the movie, that someone should put a polished glass dome over the place so that its light, its freshness, and its kindly humor may be preserved forever. It is where Hulot goes in the summer, though Hulot is clearly the kind of man who takes uneasily to the idea of holiday. He can never quite get it right.

  Four years after his incarnation as the country postman in Jour de Fête, Jacques Tati was back in pants too short and a perky Robin Hood hat too small. He was an arc in the wind, his potbelly thrust forward, his head leaning back to have longer to look at things. He is a bachelor, plain to see, a good soul, but not naturally gregarious—not when he is so accident-prone. And as Tati observed the French, or the world, in the years after the war (with the last mines being swept from the beaches), he saw the innocent pleasure of seaside holidays and he made a film in which Hulot is never quite happily aligned with the other cartoon life in sight. But does Hulot complain? Not at all: he is tolerant, forgiving, and open-minded, and he is patient. He will come another year.

  Meanwhile, any possible sense of lingering grievance or injury at bad luck is taken away by the serene sound track: not just the plaintive theme by Alain Romans (and the blonde in the boardinghouse, the pretty one, with hair done up as in a Dutch portrait of the seventeenth century plays it all the time on her record player); the seashell remoteness of natural sound effects; and then the muffled quality of every spoken word. It is as if Hulot is sinking into a summery swoon of deafness. But no one ever said anything worthwhile to him, so what’s to worry over or regret?

  The photography is by Jacques Mercanton and Jean Mousselle, and the open-air stuff is thoroughly enchanting—you can smell the salt, the sunblock, and the ice cream. The credits say that Tati wrote the film and needed three colleagues, Pierre Aubert, Henri Marquet, and Jacques Lagrange. Perhaps. I can just as easily believe that Tati sketched the whole thing out one afternoon, and touched it up a
s summer passed.

  Of course, it was a comedy understood everywhere, and it was a breakthrough success for Tati. Today…? Well, it is so benign, so clean, so airy in line and content. I don’t think there is a drop of malice in the whole picture and so I have to wonder whether it could ever have been made. It is a last touch in the line of cinema that began with René Clair, and Hulot is one of the rare comic protagonists from the bourgeoisie. I suspect that Hulot has a small shop on the Left Bank, eccentric and distinguished, that sells stuffed creatures. That—or he is a secret agent.

  Mickey One (1964)

  Those were the days: just consider the assembly of talents—director Arthur Penn, just off The Miracle Worker; Warren Beatty in his most beautiful and ambiguous period; photography in black and white by Ghislain Cloquet (between jobs for Malle and Bresson); music by Eddie Sauter, but featuring the melancholy improvs of Stan Getz; a supporting cast that gathers Alexandra Stewart, Hurd Hatfield, Franchot Tone, and Jeff Corey; and a script by the brilliant, pretentious, paranoid Alan Surgal—the kind of script a kid does on spec, and which got taken up by some of the best people in town.

  To call the film pretentious is hardly amiss, or less than flattering: this is the kind of daring experiment that a great industry should be able to make. It is also, let us note, the mood of Alan Pakula’s more famous and successful paranoid movies, ten years earlier and far more jittery than velvetlike. Truth to tell, Mickey One is amazing and a huge tribute to the influence of the French New Wave on a mind as fertile and ambitious as Penn’s.

  The story is not meant to be clear, but Mickey is a comic and/or piano player, a nightclub stand-up, who now longs to hide because he believes the Mob or every They he can think of are after him because of a mysterious offense he has given. To say the least, this troubled soul relies on the very confused moodiness of Warren Beatty in the 1960s and his urge toward narcissism and reclusiveness at the same time. It is uncanny casting (since he was producer, too!), and no small tribute to the movie is the way Beatty dislikes it and has sought to distance himself from it. Yet he would never be more himself, both appealing and insufferable.

  But as a fusion of noir and modernism Mickey One is hard to credit, even as you watch it. There are lurches toward symbolism and the ponderous dragging up of “meaning,” but for much of the time the picture has a sinister, inane momentum all its own and quite stunning. George Jenkins did a great job on the seedy settings—this is a film made in “metropolis”—and for most of the time Penn trusts the weird serenity of the script and just lets it play. No doubt, his discussions with Beatty—in search of the core—were agonizing, but in fact Beatty’s inconsistency as a player only feeds into Mickey’s incipient breakdown. Alexandra Stewart’s modest talent also serves to make the romantic setup more inexplicable.

  It’s beside the point to say that there are things “wrong” with Mickey One. The whole concept is outrageous, and the style-for-style’s-sake is mannerism to an extreme. At the same time, I think it’s relevant to say that only Arthur Penn would have tried it, but that Penn also is so generous and so curious that he refrained from imposing a starker line of control. So it’s unique, wayward, and a film to see whenever you get depressed about the withering of the American imagination.

  Midnight (1939)

  Take your pick of these stories: Billy Wilder and Charles Brackett delivered a script for Midnight and it was “perfect.” But producer Arthur Hornblow, Jr., felt the need to assert his own power so he called for a rewrite—from Ken Englund. The said Englund did his best, but Hornblow read it and agreed it was not as good as the original. “Who do we know,” he asked, “who writes like Wilder and Brackett?”

  “Brackett and Wilder?” said Englund.

  “Excellent!” determined the producer. He passed the script back to the first two writers, and they retyped their original so that it would look different.

  Or, the script came in and director Mitchell Leisen loved it but thought it was a touch too cynical. So he sat down with Brackett and Wilder and just made a few suggestions—at which Wilder hit the roof. All his life, he hated people who changed scripts. But he hated Leisen too, and that is more mysterious: Leisen was ahead of Wilder as a director; Leisen was gay, and he was a one-time designer. Whatever, Wilder put the word around that Leisen relied on good scripts (from Wilder and Brackett and Preston Sturges) and then tried to “improve” them.

  It doesn’t work out: There were good Leisen films written by other people—and Wilder did have a nasty edge. Midnight only adds to the dilemma, for here is one of the great screwball comedies, with Eve Peabody (Claudette Colbert) at its center, a smart mercenary on the make, far from likeable, yet acceptable within the general whirl of wit and competition that distinguishes the film. She meets a Hungarian cab driver, Tibor Czerny (Don Ameche) and is getting on well, but crashes a big party where she fastens on Georges Flammarion (John Barrymore), who starts flirting with her in order to pull his wife (Mary Astor) away from her lover (Francis Lederer).

  But don’t work too hard on who deserves the credit, because the fun moves too fast. Yes, it’s a great script, but it’s a great script rendered with terrific feeling and panache. Charles Lang photographed it (and it had a budget of over $1 million), Hans Dreier and Robert Usher did the sets, and either Irene did the clothes or Miss Colbert wore her own. So it looks funny and smart at the same time—a Leisen keynote—and only worth recalling when you realize that Wilder’s eye could go blank.

  Most people will settle for the fun of Midnight and the aplomb of the players. Claudette Colbert was never better, and if you feel what a steel blade she was behind the smile, what’s wrong with that? John Barrymore is inspired, naughty, and irrepressible—you realize that he was a great comic actor. Mary Astor was so reliable that people take her for granted, whereas she was beautiful, intelligent, and sexy and all night long—ask George S. Kaufmann. As for Ameche and Lederer, Monty Woolley and Rex O’Malley, these are the supports who make so many fine movies work.

  Midnight Cowboy (1969)

  “Everybody’s talking at me, I don’t hear a word they’re saying. Only the echoes of my mind.” That song and the image of Dustin Hoffman and Jon Voight walking in Manhattan, his limp somehow joined at the hip with the other’s stride, is one of the certain madeleine-in-the-tea memories of the late sixties. So it’s a marvel to find that the Harry Nilsson song was not even nominated. But the song wasn’t written for the film, and in the search they had discarded things by Joni Mitchell, Bob Dylan, and others.

  John Schlesinger had had his success in Britain, most notably with Darling, which was nominated for Best Picture. It was when he came to the U.S. to open Far from the Madding Crowd (a failure) that he took root for the first time and considered making an American picture. A friend had recommended the James Leo Herlihy novel, and Schlesinger was fascinated by the characters of Ratso and Joe Buck. He got Waldo Salt to do a screenplay and Jerome Hellman came on board as a producer so United Artists (this was in the great era of Arthur Krim and Robert Benjamin) gave it the go-ahead and never interfered, no matter that the eventual X rating was predictable.

  Jon Voight was very much Schlesinger’s discovery, but Dustin Hoffman was urged upon him by Hellman. He encouraged Schlesinger to go to New York to spend time with Hoffman, and the actor was waiting in costume and character as Ratso.

  The film is odd stylistically, like a lot of Schlesinger. On the bus ride there’s a real documentary sense of passing life. But in Manhattan, there is too much feeling of the whole thing being very arranged, or Fosseized, that comes from the mannered and rather superior cutting. Nor was it exactly clear in 1969, despite the X, just how gay this subject was. In other words, I think Schlesinger was a little squeamish about New York and his own material. So it can be seen as just a very odd friendship—and since America is so “bizarre,” perhaps that’s all it is.

  That said, it was a breakthrough film in that so many raucous and sordid things were handled so casually. Schle
singer was a little hurt that Hoffman didn’t respond too much when the final film was seen, but I think that came from a fear that Voight’s easygoing manner had stolen the film. Ratso is not really to be believed. It’s a shameless piece of overacting—which is not to say that anyone else could have done it or would have dreamed of doing so.

  So it opened as an X at 113 minutes, and then along came the R at 104. Far more important, it took Best Picture and Best Director and got nominations for Voight, Hoffman, and Sylvia Miles plus a win for Waldo Salt. All of that helped break down censorship, but the film is left in its cul-de-sac—an odd sidebar. Schlesinger remained far more at ease with British material.

  A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1935)

  In a lot of history books you find this famous production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream at Warner Brothers as “long awaited.” I wonder. It seems to me more plausible as an overnight whim—as if Jack Warner and his wife had been to see Max Reinhardt’s Hollywood Bowl version of the Dream and wondered, Why not a movie? Once it was agreed on, Hal Wallis and Henry Blanke jumped on it as producers, a budget of $1.5 million was approved, and the great Max Reinhardt was given William Dieterle as right-hand pro (in case he had any difficulties). The result got a Best Picture nomination, but it was not well received. Hollywood and the press were uneasy. There was no tradition then of gala movies and a lot of people were afraid of making fools of themselves. But this is really the only movie Reinhardt ever made, so we’re left to the conclusion that the great man did anything he could think of to hold attention. It’s not as if there’s a palpable Viennese magic or mood at work.