'Have You Seen...?'

by David Thomson

  But since the comic invention was in no way moderated, this is surely the most frantic and headlong of all Sturges pictures, where laughter and distress over the folly of our fellows combine to produce a physical relief when the film ends. One measure of that is William Demarest being promoted to a leading part—a father fit to be tied. Another is the entire concept of Diana Lynn as his other, caustic daughter commenting on the action. And, for anyone who had thrilled to the stylishness of Fonda and Stanwyck, McCrea and Colbert, then the idea of Betty Hutton and Eddie Bracken bespeaks populist shock in Sturges.

  John Seitz did the photography, Hans Dreier was the art director, Edith Head did the costumes. The Breen Office (censorship) was horrified at the idea of military men fathering six—though it seems to me hysterically patriotic. Sturges was even told to cut a scene where car brakes screeched because there was a need to save rubber. The cast also included Porter Hall, Emory Parnell, Al Bridge, Julius Tannen, Vic Potel, and many others.

  As for the holdup—was there fear of respectable opinion? Even so, in 1943, here is a film that could have struck terror in the dead heart of Adolf Hitler. How do you defeat such idiocy?

  The Miracle Worker (1962)

  The cinema is a place that easily cheapens emotion. One of the most distressing experiences we ever find in its dark is to be in tears of sympathetic response to a situation which we know is trash. If we had time, or the sense, we would write books about that phenomenon, for it is remarkable and damaging, the way we have permitted our finest response to be exposed and manipulated. So it’s important to cling to the memory of those works where the tears have been earned—by the plight of victims; by the magnitude of the human triumph; and by the notion that this is not just a story, but history, or her story.

  Helen Keller was born in the South (she was alive when The Miracle Worker was made), and we still know her as a writer and a worker on behalf of the handicapped. She is a kind of modern saint and a beacon. That is not the subject of this film, or the William Gibson play that inspired it. This is the story of a savage child, a little girl who has made her disabilities into an armor, and of the teacher, Annie Sullivan, who rescues her. Indeed, as the title indicates, the focus of the film is on the teacher, and those most likely to be moved by it are those who have ever felt the marvel in teaching as a chance to change or uplift other lives. In that sense, it is a story brimming with hope, even if Penn makes it a story of lost wildness as much as achieved civility.

  Penn had directed the play on Broadway in 1959, with Anne Bancroft and Patty Duke. It ran 719 performances, and in many ways the movie, produced by Fred Coe, was simply an attempt to film the production and the performances. But something happened. Penn seems to have fallen in love with film as he worked so that no one would ever accuse this picture of being stagy or think that the performances were set in aspic or classic reverence.

  Penn creates the house, the yard, and the family who witnessed the miracle. He sees that the moving camera is essential to animate the fights between Annie and Helen—their great scene over folding a napkin may be the most violent scene in Penn’s work. I know the film shot by shot, and I still marvel at its freshness and the danger.

  Something else strange happened. Bancroft and Duke won the two acting Oscars. Penn was nominated as Best Director. But for reasons that are hard to see, the film was not nominated for Best Picture. This was the year Lawrence of Arabia won, and one can understand that impact. But among the nominated pictures were The Longest Day, The Music Man, and Mutiny on the Bounty—yes, the one with Marlon Brando. I doubt that anyone now sees those three, whereas I know people who re-view The Miracle Worker every year.

  The Misfits (1961)

  The Misfits is more famous as a cultural landmark than as a film. Yet it’s worth remembering that it follows one of director John Huston’s favorite subjects: horses. In turn, the best stuff in the picture involves the actors trying to rope and tame wild horses on silvery flats outside Reno, Nevada. Huston, at least, could look at a horse and see just the wild four-footed miracle. Yet somehow this aching movie is driven to see the horses as symbols of lost purity in America.

  It’s the sort of film that, maybe, a great writer and a famous actress might make on the upside of their relationship, when the poetry could be fed daily by the passion. Alas, Arthur Miller and Marilyn Monroe were over before this film was shot, yet Miller was doing his earnest best to find a role for his wife that might show how good she could be. And so a woman waiting for a Reno divorce gets herself associated with a gang—the last gang—of cowboys. It was a tough order and one that exposed Miller as a limited writer with a subject that needed at least a Willa Cather. But for Miller’s name on the script, one wonders whether a pragmatist like Huston would ever have gone ahead, let alone honored the kind of dialogue that seemed more than pretentious in the rough open air.

  Russell Metty’s black-and-white photography captures the dry air of Nevada very well, and it makes the starry cast look pretty good. It’s just that Miller can’t deliver these people as real and ordinary—while Huston can’t see that if they’re not “grand” or “epic” then he’d be better off not filming them. Of course, the cowboys are a big trio—Eli Wallach (the most natural), Montgomery Clift (who is like his character from Red River after two stints at a Betty Ford Clinic), and Clark Gable, who was fifty-nine as if fifty-nine was the old man and the sea. It was shortly after the film finished that Gable died of a heart attack—some said it came from the exertions of the horsebreaking sequence; some pointed to the delays caused by Marilyn; others just noted that at fifty-nine Gable was like eighty. He’s tough and tender with Marilyn, but she can’t match him, line for line, smile for smile, in the way he worked. Her uncertainty seems like vagueness to him. And vagueness can give a guy a heart attack, too.

  The best performance in the film comes from Thelma Ritter—but of how many films is that not true?

  One might have wondered if Huston would fade away with the film. But he was probably the person least weighed down by the film’s failure. He was a vagrant and a creature of chance. There would be worse films to come, but there would be Fat City, The Man Who Would Be King, and Wise Blood. Huston was like many gamblers: He never took too much credit for winning or losing.

  Miss Julie (1950)

  August Strindberg’s Miss Julie was written in 1888, and despite its being a somewhat awkward length for conventional theatrical productions, it has been in the international repertoire ever since. Why not? It is a brilliantly tense tragedy about sex and class in which the aristocratic daughter of a great house flirts with the footman. The whole thing takes place on one hot summer’s night, and it is a play that is difficult to produce without some impact. So it is all the stranger that the movie repertoire includes a phenomenal film of the play that is hardly seen.

  Alf Sjöberg was born in Stockholm in 1903—in other words, fifteen years ahead of Ingmar Bergman. And Sjöberg was the master of the dramatic arts in that small country as Bergman came of age. Sjöberg was head of the Royal Dramatic Theatre, while on screen he did The Road to Heaven, Frenzy (which gave Bergman his first credit as screenwriter), Iris and the Lieutenant, Barabbas, and Karin Mansdotter. But Miss Julie was once the best known of his films—it shared the Grand Prix at Cannes in 1951 with Vittorio De Sica’s Miracle in Milan.

  The novelty to Sjöberg’s Miss Julie is that the drama is extended by the use of flashbacks that play in the same frame and on the same sets as the night in question. This may sound awkward or contrived, but it works with silky ease and such strange, dreamlike resonance that it is remarkable that more films have not pursued the same strategy. For why should the one frame not contain different times? Why do flashbacks have to be so self-contained when in truth memory floods into every present moment?

  The black-and-white cinematography is by Goran Strindberg, who was actually a distant relative of the playwright. The drama is centered on Anita Björk as Miss Julie and Ulf Palme as Jean the footman. For
those who reckon that Ingmar Bergman must have used (and known) all the great Swedish actresses of the postwar era, Anita Björk comes as a welcome surprise (they worked together only once). A blonde, she was sexy, sad, intelligent, very quick in her reactions, and so compelling that she quickly got promoted to Hollywood. That move didn’t take, but her Julie is utterly worthy of the part—there is no higher compliment. As for Palme, he accepts second place in the drama, but only because of a kind of bitter deference that marks the resentful servant class.

  Very well reviewed at the time, Miss Julie ought to have found a place in the international repertory. If Bergman had made the same film in 1951, his widespread recognition would not have waited on The Seventh Seal. But Sjöberg and Björk are two first-rate figures who have been passed over in the film culture that allegedly now knows and gets to see everything. It is true that the play’s concentration is dispelled, and I think it is true that Miss Julie works best with flesh, heat, and fragrance only a few feet away on a stage. But the elastic frame of Sjöberg’s film could yet be a gold mine in filmmaking.

  The Missouri Breaks (1976)

  It was a famous failure in its day, part of the legend that Marlon Brando was so spoiled and so expensive and so hell-bent on destroying “sensible” film projects. It was also taken as a warning that the Western really was dead and that only idiots would be prepared to put two eccentrics like Brando and Jack Nicholson together and hope for coherence. There is also the notion that this was the start of Arthur Penn’s decline, leading him astray from tightly controlled scripts and remorseless encounters with psychic ordeal.

  In which case, how is The Missouri Breaks so amiable, beguiling, and seductive—as sweet as prairie grass—and how does it sustain such a foolish air of being a pointless ramble around the West, its clichés and marvels, and a band of actors who might have been born with their boots on (albeit the wrong way round)? It always seemed to me (I admit I am biased) that the nod early on in the film to Laurence Sterne and Tristram Shandy was the clue (the mad rancher Braxton asks his daughter to hand him down the book when he is vexed from having to hang rustlers).

  This is the Western as picaresque, as shaggy-dog story, and—in a very Hawksian way—as a kind of on-set interview and improv with the various people assembled for the film (play it with Beat the Devil). There is actually a perfectly respectable theme to it all, if you need to have a theme: rich ranchers and landowners trying to keep away that indolent spirit, the wandering lout and his gang, inclined to steal a few cattle here and there, try growing cabbage, and steal your randy daughter. In fact, I trust screenwriter Thomas McGuane enough to guess that this is what the Breaks country was like in the late nineteenth century—or would have been like if enough people had read Tristram Shandy.

  The gang is priceless, and the deaths worked out for them are as inventive as they are degrading—John Ryan, Frederic Forrest, Randy Quaid, and the superb Harry Dean Stanton, who has a lugubrious campfire chat with Nicholson that deserves to go straight to the anthology of great scenes. And I like Nicholson with Kathleen Lloyd, too, though she is a little Greenwich Village, I suppose.

  But, really, it is Brando’s film, and everyone knows this, Nicholson included (there are times when he seems content to watch—the rivalry does not show). As for Marlon, he is a wagonload of costumes, accents, personae, and tics. He is the regulator, yet utterly irregular. He is a great actor making sport in the long grass—he is a Boudu. And for me the film could go on forever. No wonder its dull reception crushed him. And remember that, despite every digression and divergence from strict order, he manages to make Robert Lee Clayton lethal and as scary as hell. So he talks to his horse! Conversation is too important to be entrusted to cowpokes alone. This is a sublime comedy and an uncommonly relaxed film, full of a feeling for nature and whimsy, caprice and cutthroats.

  Moby Dick (1956)

  Just seven years after Twelve O’Clock High, Gregory Peck is our commander again, but this time man management succumbs to destiny and the soaring metaphors of Herman Melville. In An Open Book, his autobiography (which was a little less than fully open), John Huston said, “Moby Dick was the most difficult picture I ever made. I lost so many battles during it that I began to suspect that my assistant director was plotting against me. Then I realized that it was only God.”

  That’s a good joke, nicely Hustonian, and a fair measure of the level of this bold, romantic adaptation. I’m sure Huston had a large respect for the novel. Still, he was wise to make a boys’ seafaring classic out of it. And it works, and would work again at the high school level. I can think of no better stimulus to a reasonable class to read and inhabit Melville than to see this film. Of course, there are tons of prose and barrels of sperm oil omitted, and there is no attempt to render Melville’s deeper spiritual concerns. On the other hand, I don’t think anyone seeing this film would walk away believing that it was just a story of a man’s mad pursuit of a whale. Huston knew his great books (from B. Traven to R. Kipling to J. Joyce), and he never did an adaptation without knowing his limits and respecting the grandeur of the page.

  So he got Ray Bradbury to make him a barebones script, and then he urged designer Stephen Grimes and cameraman Ossie Morris to find the right blanched look of eyes nearly blinded by the light and of paintings exposed to weather and time. Some said it was arty, yet in the Hustonian manner the art was practical and effective, too. You know from the start that there is a visual concept—that this material is being scanned by the blank eye of the whale and the equally uncertain gaze of God.

  The unit settled in Youghal, Ireland, with a grand boat and they had merry hell with the weather—which shows. It was very hard to send expensive actors out in open boats in those conditions, and harder still to photograph the danger and the awesome battle with the whale. So awkward back projection obtrudes. Perhaps Orson Welles knew best in his stage play (done a year earlier in London), where actors simply swayed in unison to convey the pull of the sea. (Welles is here, too, of course, as a delightful Father Mapple.)

  At the time Peck’s Ahab was challenged as being, inwardly at least, too handsome, or too accustomed to his own nobility. Robert Ryan might have been more fearsome—as he was in Billy Budd. Better still, maybe Huston was his own ideal Ahab, though that could have stretched his rope past breaking. In An Open Book, the director maintains that time will recover Peck’s qualities in the film—and I think that has happened. In the end, it holds up, enjoyable and very likely to send you to your proper place: the book.

  The Moderns (1988)

  We’ll always have Paris? The hero’s name is Nick Hart, said director Alan Rudolph—“Say it in French—‘art.’ ” That may sound unpromising, a touch coy even, but do not be deceived. The Moderns is a wonderfully beguiling diagnosis of those afflicted by “art,” and it is one of the great films about that other roasted chestnut, “Paris.” Cue for the gloriously inane figure of Ernest Hemingway (Kevin J. O’Connor) to stride up to some innocent passerby with some turgid aphorism about the nature of Paris.

  But go back to Hart (Keith Carradine) and his sketchbook, which entirely resembles the film he’s in in his louche, absentminded way. He does cartoons for the papers and for money, but art’s curse still hangs over him. And he is pretty good, some say as good as Cézanne, Matisse, or Modigliani. There he is in Paris, hanging out and drawing, when along comes an old flame, Rachel (Linda Fiorentino), who is now married to Bertram Stone (John Lone), a millionaire in condoms and looking to expand into art.

  The rivalry between the two men will lead to an exquisite triumph of fake paintings (by Hart of course, a droll copier) that end up in New York’s Museum of Modern Art while the vicious Stone destroys the real things, over which he thinks he’s been duped. Rudolph wrote it, with Jon Bradshaw, and you could argue that in a world of any justice their script would be hanging on exemplary walls now. Alas, no, but we suffer a better fate: We get the movie in which love (the real thing and the fake) jostles with levels of authentici
ty in art and devotion to Paris.

  The picture is a panorama of fakes in which really only Hart, the forger, stays honest. The delight of the screenplay is to keep this philosophical issue bubbling while bringing so many stray cats home for the night or a moment. The Paris was all made in Montreal, apart from a few dazzling montages of the old place. So we get passing eccentrics—Geraldine Chaplin, Wallace Shawn, Genevieve Bujold—on sound stages that are utterly acceptable as “Paris” because Rudolph and Bradshaw realize what an old whore the city is.

  You can say the film is Altmanesque with its shifting circus of supporting players. But there’s a more authoritative wit behind it all than Altman dared, and I suspect it comes from Bradshaw. This is a picture made out of infinite love for art, Paris, and love, but in a full awareness of how much all three have sold out to advertising in the modern age.

  Just look at the sustained final sequence in which Hart and Oiseau (Wallace Shawn) quit Paris by train and come to New York, where Rachel will be magically discovered. The movement of people and of the camera in that sequence—with Bradshaw playing a small role as an idiotically confident MOMA guide—is a beautiful passage of film built around the score (by Mark Isham). If you take art seriously, let alone love, you have to see this film. And once seen it is with you forever, like Paris or short sight.

  Modern Times (1936)

  In 1935, a Soviet official, Boris Shumisatsky, visited Hollywood, and took time at Charlie Chaplin’s studio to watch a work-in-progress, originally entitled The Masses but now set to be Modern Times. Later, in Pravda, Shumisatsky took it upon himself to say that Charlie had followed many of his suggestions on what to do with the film. And, of course, this story got back to the New York Times and was a formative influence on the notion that Chaplin had turned Red. Whereas anyone who worked with Charlie would have agreed that getting him to take any advice was the hardest thing on earth. Hadn’t he even determined to keep Modern Times silent (or without talk) after the studio he built had been soundproofed?