'Have You Seen...?'

by David Thomson

  Mr. Deeds Goes to Town (1936)

  Mr. Deeds seems a character from the 1930s, until you think of George Soros, Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, or even Ross Perot. In other words, the rich American, the self-made man, who takes a fancy to help his less fortunate brothers, is a fixture in American public theater. And, as with a fictional version of the type—C. F. Kane—it is not always easy to know whether you’re dealing with a communist or a capitalist, with altruism or manipulation. It’s in such uncertainties that the word “American” comes in most handy. Without a birth certificate, Arnold Schwarzenegger eschews the “American” thing, but every time his uncontrollable Austrian accent assaults the word “Kalifornia” I think of him as a Capra creation.

  The film came from a story, “Opera Hat,” by Clarence Budington Kelland. Frank Capra and Robert Riskin got to work on it as a screen property, and it’s fair to say that, from the outset, Capra, that awkward American success (in that he understood how badly many Americans were still doing in 1936), saw it as an examination of his own good fortune, or what Joseph McBride has identified as “the catastrophe of success.” In other words, can you think of yourself as small-town American when you’re as rich as the guys mentioned above? Or do you lose your credentials?

  Longfellow Deeds is folksy. He plays the tuba, he is shy with women. He lives in Mandrake Falls, Vermont, and he writes verses for greeting cards. He is Gary Cooper—not so much the Westerner as the Northeasterner, and Vermont in 1936 was a good deal more isolated than most parts of the West. He inherits $20 million (a mythical sum) and reckons to give it to the poor. He comes to town with this mission and meets a smart newspaper reporter (Jean Arthur) who has a great time writing him up as a buffoon while he falls for her. In the end, an ingrate nation reckons he’s insane and like most Capra chumps with good intentions he thinks of killing himself.

  Graham Greene made a clever comparison with Fury, shown in the same year. They have the same attitude to the crowd—deep suspicion—but one film is made by an optimist and the other by a pessimist. I think that’s true, and it’s certainly clear that Capra could now make a film so that it hummed. But Deeds doesn’t bear looking into. His wisdom is rural or cracker-barrel, and it barely keeps him from suicide. Just like Mr. Smith to come, Deeds wants hearts worn on sleeves. He will have nothing to do with compromise. Yet bargaining together is the means by which society can be reformed.

  Deeds was shot by Joseph Walker on a budget of over $800,000—Capra was expanding. There is fine character work from George Bancroft, Lionel Stander, Douglass Dumbrille, Mayo Methot, Walter Catlett, Raymond Walburn, and H. B. Warner. It made a healthy profit and Capra won his second Best Director Oscar. But don’t mistake the allegiance in the film’s thinking to an old, rural, and Republican America, one mercifully free from government. In real life, FDR was having to be so much more practical than Longfellow Deeds.

  Mr. Klein (1976)

  Paris, 1942, under the German occupation. Robert Klein (Alain Delon) is an art dealer. We see him purchase a Dutch master from a Jew for a knockdown price. It is a chilly transaction. But then he goes home to find a Jewish newspaper addressed to him. It must be a mistake, another Robert Klein. He searches for this other man, to sort the matter out, but he cannot be found. He meets a lover of the other Klein, Florence (Jeanne Moreau), but he cannot locate the man himself. He believes he should take steps to protect his own name from any suggestion of Jewishness. He asks his lawyer, Pierre (Michel Lonsdale), to locate grandparental birth certificates. With his own mistress, Jeanine (Juliet Berto), he visits a cabaret where an anti-Semitic routine plays. The net of paranoia closes in. The police need to question him. Jeanine leaves him. Pierre offers to buy his business—at a knockdown price. Robert is taken to the Velodrome d’Hiver stadium where Jews are rounded up. Perhaps he will find the other Klein there. But Jews are being taken off in trainloads.

  In a movie, it is enough for certain gestures of the surface to appear for an underwater current to be generated. Suggestiveness is everything, especially when you are looking at the beautiful, blank face of Alain Delon—yet again, the inspiration of a major film. Joseph Losey was at a loose end. The Proust film had fallen through, when he was sent the Franco Solinas script for Mr. Klein. He responded to it immediately, and he called Delon; the actor said he would do it if Losey would. And he guessed immediately that the mystery in Delon was perfectly suited to the enigma—Who is Klein? Is he Jewish? Or is he a fighter in the Resistance trying to cover his tracks? Who is out to get him?

  The film is very cool, very frightening, and beautifully controlled. Yes, it played off Losey’s acquired paranoia from the McCarthy days, but it drew upon his knowledge of Paris, too—this is one of the cruel Paris films. Alexandre Trauner did superb sets, full of a decaying bourgeois splendor. Gerry Fisher handled the photography. And the startling cabaret scene was done with Frantz Sakieri and a very unexpected use of Mahler.

  I’m still not quite sure how far the French accept this as a French film—it has insidious things to say about the bonhomie of collaboration. But the journey of Losey, from The Prowler through The Servant to this Paris, is quite remarkable. And Delon’s Klein, numb but deeply intelligent, cut off from society by some masquerade but then through the discovery of alienation itself, is extraordinary. The very skilled cast also includes Suzanne Flon, Francine Bergé, Jean Bouise, Louis Seigner, Michel Aumont, Massimo Girotti, Francine Racette, Roland Bertin, and many others. It is a film of frozen, listless faces, the perfect currency of occupation. And it’s worth stressing that Alain Delon was himself one of the venture’s producers.

  Mr. Skeffington (1944)

  By a nice touch of error, Bette Davis refers to this film in her memoir, The Lonely Life (1962), as Mrs. Skeffington. Of course, mistakes creep into the best of books. Still, it is charming to think of her costar, Claude Rains, attempting to persuade her that the film is actually called Mr. Skeffington (his part) only to be crushed by her withering eloquence. If Bette is in the film, how on earth should it not be treated as Mrs. Skeffington? Of course, this invented byplay could so easily be a scene from the film itself.

  It’s a saga about marriage, charm, and beauty—yet it’s also one of the few American films that takes on the subject of Jewishness. It was a project close to the heart of the Epstein brothers, Philip and Julius. Not only did they write it, they produced it, too. As such, they undoubtedly let their feelings run riot. The final film ran 146 minutes, and Jack Warner was personally angry with it for being overwritten, with sequences so tied to previous sequences that it was hard to dislodge them. In truth, the story does not stand up to the length it was given. But assuredly the Epsteins could have said they were keeping faith with the outline of the novel it was based on.

  Fanny is New York society, very beautiful and very brilliant, even if she thinks so herself. But when it comes to marriage, she has a problem. Her younger brother has behaved badly in the market. His debts need to be repaid and the only one of Fanny’s suitors who will do that is Job Skeffington (Claude Rains), Jewish, and more brilliant even than Fanny. He mouths a lot of cynical wisdom about Wall Street, and there were those at Warners who objected to the project because it might be seen as an endorsement of all those fascist views on the Jews and their callous manipulation of the economy.

  They marry, and Fanny resents her “dull” husband. A divorce is procured and still Fanny frets that their daughter is so plain. Job Skeffington is interned in a concentration camp. Which means that he comes back blind. Why? Well, Fanny has been seriously ill in the meantime and lost her looks (Davis plays these scenes with a sort of savage anticipation and dread)—but Job cannot see her to know the difference. He is the ideal husband, for he has always adored Fanny despite her paid-up status as bitch, snob, and hypocrite.

  Vincent Sherman directed the film and did a fine job. Forty minutes shorter and it might have been a sensation. Some other actresses marveled that Bette went so far in depicting Fanny’s ravaged looks, but Dav
is was as brave as she was vain. Meanwhile Claude Rains quietly delivers one of the most endearing and sophisticated performances in the history of the women’s picture. If only courage had prevailed—think of the dry, comic Shylock he could have made.

  Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939)

  The junior senator of an unnamed Western state dies at an awkward moment. (In Lewis Foster’s prompting story it was “The Gentleman from Montana.”) For the Senate is about to hear a bill on a dam project in that state, a matter of considerable organized graft that involves the state’s machine boss, Jim Taylor (Edward Arnold), and its senior senator, Joseph Paine (Claude Rains). In the hurried nomination of a new senator, the choice falls on Jefferson Smith (James Stewart), an organizer of boy rangers, the recent hero in a forest fire, and a handsome fellow who has been over every inch of his state, including the part where the grass bows under the wind, et cetera. He goes to Washington.

  There follows a lull-like passage in the movie in which Jimmy Stewart does Washington and proves what a sweet clumsy innocent he is. There are adorable moments when the tough secretary Saunders (Jean Arthur), listening to him, begins to be altered by him. Then battle is drawn as Smith’s plan for a boys’ camp—wouldn’t you know it?—requires just the same bit of land the machine has bought up for the dam.

  I’m not complaining. Part of the pleasure—and there is much—of watching Mr. Smith is to admire the delicate craft of Sidney Buchman’s script in which everything fits together. But there are warning signs: When Jeff says farewell to his loyal boys, there are tears in his eyes, and Jefferson Smith will cry a lot, just as he breaks down to a croak in the twenty-three-hour filibuster which is the set piece of the movie, and might be tense if Capra did not editorialize so much with approving smiles from Harry Carey as the president of the Senate (Carey and Claude Rains got Supporting Actor nods).

  Jeff’s grievance is that Washington has become a place of compromise. Well, let’s think about it: Dams may have vested interests behind them, but dams, like Hoover Dam, changed the West and made life better for millions. And, yes, as someone says, there are a lot of other creeks where boys’ camps could be sited. Washington is about the deals, the compromises, and the bargaining over such things—and it is American because practical democracy believes in compromise staying fair to the ideals. It does not hold by the shrill, teary idealism that makes Smith not just naïve, but a step toward fascism.

  So the “boldness” of this film in 1939 is specious and a measure of how far sentimentality prevailed in Hollywood—of beautiful numbskulls like Jeff taking the high ground over Taylor (who acts like LBJ) and Paine (who looks like Harry Truman and sounds like the blessed Claude Rains). Has Jeff adored Lincoln all his life and not bothered to read about the practical politician who carried reform in his small change as well as his checkbook? So this is Capra-corn, brilliantly made, yet special pleading of a reactionary and dangerous kind. (Capra’s radicalism is Goldwaterism written in invisible ink—and that is pretty much how Capra turned out politically.) I prefer to be governed by people like Paine (until the narrative catastrophe of the film’s ending, which Buchman loathed and resisted—that kind of suicide attempt is so close to the spirit of assassination). Sentimentality leads to fascism quicker than compromise.

  There is a superb Senate set (by Lionel Banks). The photography is by Joseph Walker and often quite noir—there’s actually very little comedy in the picture, and Taylor’s stripping down of Paine—“the silver knight,” he sneers—is very frightening. Also with Thomas Mitchell, Eugene Pallette, Guy Kibbee, Jack Carson, and Beulah Bondi. It cost nearly $2 million, but earned twice that.

  Mulholland Dr. (2001)

  There’s no sense in looking for a thorough explanation to Mulholland Dr., and only madness would require a reading of it in which every last detail has been made to fit together. That has never been David Lynch’s method, and this, plainly, is his scary valedictory to a kind of Hollywood and a movie atmosphere in which he feels he grew up. Moreover, to the extent that Lynch has a purpose in what he does, it is surely that we surrender as fully as possible to the helpless fluidity of the arbitrary and the ill-fitting. That’s why the “Dr.” in the title is a reference to dream rather more than to the moment-by-moment mapped-out coherence of either Mulholland Drive (a real place in L.A.) or the process of driving (arguably a unique state of introspection and public performance in that city).

  But we are idiots in the dark, and even Lynch is quite fond of that status, so it is not unreasonable to ask for a thread. In which case, accept that this is a prophecy and a retelling of the legend in which the pretty blonde—this one from Deep River, in Canada—comes to L.A. to become an actress, a star, or a phenomenon. Yes, the film is full of other versions of this “Betty,” including Ann Miller’s landlady at the apartment complex where Betty finds a resting place and a casting couch. All the women are versions of this hopeless hope (and that is to describe the special look of Naomi Watts, who is so vulnerable as Betty). And all the men are variant figures on the set of dumb guardians that “movie” presents to the young woman trying to get in.

  Of course, the DNA in this Los Angeles has been taken over by script situations: From the outset, as Rita is nearly shot up on Mulholland, she begs the coming outrage, “Don’t do it. We don’t do it this way.” Life’s accidental energy is always fighting scenario’s tradition. And when Betty and Rita run the lines Betty has for a reading, they make huge fun of the stupid stuff. But then Betty takes the same nonsense and turns it into a terrific, unnerving sex scene, where every witness seems gripped by the melodrama.

  Mulholland Dr. is very sexy—Lynch makes not the least effort to resist a steaming lesbian love scene—and every banal moment feels hinged to inexplicable violence or dread. Yes, the thrust of the picture is childlike and forbidding: this Hollywood is a very bad place—don’t let your Bettys go anywhere near it, and trust in the monster around the corner. But Lynch has always nursed a provincial child who longs for a safe world. It is just that his numb organism is also invaded by an art-school sophisticate who has learned to be very cool with depravity and the disgusting. So Mulholland Dr. is the Hollywood we all treasure—the home of family entertainment with the extra kicker of the odious stag films made in the same place on the weekends.

  Muriel (1963)

  François Truffaut wrote that he had seen Muriel three times so far without liking it completely, and without liking the same things. And no matter that it was Alain Resnais’s first film in color, it came after Hiroshima, Mon Amour and Last Year at Marienbad as a comprehensively “difficult” film, the one over which many people gave up on following Resnais’s career. He became strikingly clearer in the next few films. He remains a great director. But—fittingly enough, in a film about bits of the past that slide away or are destroyed—Muriel became very difficult to see for years. It is therefore the mystery film in Resnais’s own history, the one many people are curious about.

  The central character is Hélène Aughain (Delphine Seyrig), a widow of about forty who lives in Boulogne—the city is very important, as is the experience of Hélène and other characters of having seen an old port city terribly bombed in the war and then largely rebuilt. So there are at least two cities there, the one of, say, 1939, and the one of 1963.

  Hélène is an antiques dealer, though she is a gambler, too, at the casino. Her life has taught her you cannot rely on the past. A man, de Smoke (Claude Sainval), who owns a demolition firm, is her lover, and though he pulls things down we feel he wants to build her up. Then Alphonse (Jean-Pierre Kérien) appears, a failed restaurateur, and Hélène’s first lover. He has a niece, Françoise (Nita Klein). In turn, Hélène has a stepson, Bernard (Jean-Baptiste Thierrée), who is haunted by the memory of an Algerian girl—Muriel—whom he helped torture during the troubles.

  As can be seen, these characters are concerned with both physical salvaging and the emotional reconstruction of memory. The script is by Jean Cayrol (poet and novelist),
and it insists on treating all the figures alike and from the outside. “Every person is a world,” says Cayrol in the script to the film. You must then take into account the extreme editing style of the film: of very rapid cutaways to evoke the memories of a place, generally without the time or trouble taken to identify the places. The result was always a dense and difficult film to follow, and perhaps one in which Resnais made too great a demand on the audience. It is worth stressing that his subsequent relaxation, in narrative and in form, could be read as an admission of undue difficulty.

  But Resnais is a great director, and I recall Muriel as a very demanding but emotional film, shot by Sacha Vierny and with a fine score by Hans Werner Henze. And in Seyrig’s beautiful participation as Héléne we are eager to enter deeper into the film. I think it wants to explore recent memories, and it uses Algeria and Boulogne in the way that Hiroshima and Nevers are used in his first feature film. In hindsight, what is so striking about my memory of the picture is its ambition. Nearly everyone who “knows” Muriel will tell you how many times they saw the picture—and how many more times are still needed.

  The Music Box (1932)

  A simple player piano, tidily enclosed in a purpose-built box, has to be delivered to 1127 Walnut Avenue in Los Angeles. It is the sort of thing that happens every day, the small commercial exchange on which a great metropolis depends. In this case, the piano is a birthday present from a wife to a husband, a surprise, such as makes companionship endure. But in a land of free enterprise, where hope and ambition recklessly outstrip ability, you never know what you are going to get. It could be Mr. Laurel and Mr. Hardy, having gone into business as carriers on their collective funds of $3.80.