Give Hecht his due: Once he had the image, of Lombard keeping a straight face as big-city hype went crazy over her sad story, the picture fell into place. Whitney had wanted Technicolor, when truly black-and-white would suit it better. But what’s wrong with Lombard in color (photographed by Howard Greene)? Fredric March plays the reporter, and Walter Connolly is very good value as his editor, a windbag who can change his story line on a dime, and justify it—a man named Oliver Stone. Oscar Levant wrote some nice music. Lyle Wheeler did the sets. Travis Banton and Walter Plunkett did the costumes. And the ending was concocted by Ring Lardner, Jr., and Budd Schulberg. So Nothing Sacred is like a quick nap snatched during the years-long laboring over Gone With the Wind. And we all know that Gone With the Wind was more important, yet Nothing Sacred is such a relief in its assumption that movies might just as well be quick, throwaway, cynical, and funny as monuments to something or other. I don’t mean to say Nothing Sacred is perfect—it’s not as searching or as magical as Godfrey or Bringing Up Baby. But it’s a true reflection of the “cockeyed” wisdom—that the world was a ridiculous place and it would be a good thing if a few smart young people saw that and said so in a way that makes you laugh. If you want to get the best, bravest insouciance in Hollywood of the thirties, you’re better off going to comedies like this than the sagas. So Jock Whitney was not just rich, handsome, and a charmer—he was right.
Notorious (1946)
There are crucial hints—in Rebecca, in Suspicion, and in Shadow of a Doubt—of one character being taken over by another, or of some dark, neurotic reservation dragging on what might be a positive relationship, that show Alfred Hitchcock’s development in his first years in America. So a case can be made for Notorious as his first deeply personal and fully achieved picture. I do not include Spellbound (1945) in this process. Despite its reputation, Spellbound is a grotesque mess, half-baked in its view of psychoanalysis, and the worst example of producer David Selznick’s interference with his director.
Notorious was done through RKO under the Selznick banner, but while the producer was hopelessly tied up with the problems of Duel in the Sun. So the many excesses of that epic Western, onscreen and off-, helped shape and liberate this dark love story.
As the war ends, a Professor Huberman goes to prison for espionage. His daughter, Alicia (Ingrid Bergman), is left at liberty. She is depressive, alcoholic, promiscuous. Then she meets Devlin (Cary Grant), a cold, watchful intelligence agent. He recruits her, they go to Rio. She falls for him; he, more slowly, for her. They meet Sebastian (Claude Rains), a colleague of her father’s. Sebastian wants to marry Alicia. She wants Devlin to stop it. But he wants the marriage—for reasons of espionage. So the recently saved woman agrees to destroy herself again.
Devlin is now running Alicia as an agent in an effort to uncover Nazi plots still active in South America, and soon enough Sebastian finds out. So he starts to poison the woman he loves. Only then does Devlin make an attempt to rescue the woman he loves and has nearly allowed to be murdered.
The espionage is a front: uranium ore in wine bottles, a silly MacGuffin that chanced to be close to a real secret. But Ben Hecht’s very good script uses the front as a way into the deeply sadomasochistic love relationship between Devlin and Alicia. In turn, this exploits the tendency in Bergman to be victimized and an unyielding dark drive in Grant that only Hitch and Hawks recognized.
So the plot suspense and the romantic uncertainty are hinged and oiled to perfection. For the first time, Hitch had found the two levels at which he wanted films to work. Ted Tetzlaff did the outstanding photography—there are great love scenes and a fine staircase climax. Edith Head did the clothes, and the art direction is by Albert D’Agostino. And Hitch’s direction reaches a new swiftness: Nothing gets in the way—the complete vision has come into its own.
You can say that Bergman and Grant are exactly cast, but they give a great deal beyond that. One should also stress the delicacy of Claude Rains—this is a story of two men led to a need to damage the woman they love. And there are good, showy supporting performances from Louis Calhern, Leopoldine Konstantin, and Reinhold Schünzel.
La Notte (1960)
In which a couple visit a dying friend in the hospital in Milan, where a deranged, nymphomaniac young woman throws herself at the man, and the first sign of moral helplessness or lassitude appears in his halfhearted denial. He is tempted to experiment with the happening. On the couple’s life together—he is a writer, she is the wife of a writer. On how she wanders in the city and sees unfamiliar sights, how men in a fight believe she is watching them with intent. On an absurd striptease they witness at a nightclub where engineering and athletics have eclipsed intimacy. And then an all-night party where he becomes attracted to a lonely woman, a younger version of his own wife. And the dawn comes up after the party and the couple are together, caught in an attempt to make love.
Because they are married, and because they are Marcello Mastroianni and Jeanne Moreau—above all, because she is Moreau—La Notte is the gravest movement in Antonion’s trilogy, the one with L’Avventura and L’Eclisse as its wings. In L’Avventura one love relationship breaks up because the woman vanishes, and then another woman takes over and is led to the point of wishing to disappear. In L’Eclisse, two strangers and unlikely friends meet, have an affair, and then silently turn away, leaving their rendezvous unoccupied. These are attempts at love that fail.
But a marriage is rather more than an attempt. Giovanni and Lidia are embedded in life: not just their apartment and his work (for which she is the first reader), but their dying friend (Bernhard Wicki). They have no children, but they have a life, and when Lidia strolls in parts of Milan where, perhaps, she has never been before we are close to that open sensibility in modern art, the one that measures the world—like Mrs. Dalloway seeing and feeling London, like Anna Karina probing at the texture of reality for Godard. And Moreau is not just stronger than Mastroianni as a screen presence. He lets the light slip over him; she inhales it, sniffs its fragrance. We might believe that she would make a better writer than Giovanni. And she is more potent, more vulnerable than even Monica Vitti (the girl met at the party). Moreau is a root vegetable, Vitti a flower. And in these years Moreau could take over the films of powerful artists and men in her defiant glance.
As time goes by, La Notte is the central structure in the trilogy, and the most moving part. Yet it is also the part most weighed down by conventional ideas of guilt and responsibility. And it is in L’Avventura and L’Eclisse that the air lightens so much with the possibility of chance. Lovers may forget each other—married people never. And Moreau’s abandoned face is one of the great images of twentieth-century disaster.
La Notte was written by Antonioni, Ennio Flaiano, and Tonino Guerra from a story by Antonioni. It was photographed by Gianni Di Venanzo, and I think the grays are among the greatest ever filmed. Piero Zuffi did the sets, and the music is by Giorgio Gaslini. The trilogy is unique and precious (albeit foreboding in most respects), but La Notte is the central passage, in which minutes pass like the stones of a hard road.
Le Notti di Cabiria (1957)
Fellini followed La Strada with Il Bi-done, in which Broderick Crawford and Richard Basehart played swindlers who masquerade as priests. The film was such a disaster that Fellini had great difficulty raising the money for his next film. In the end, he needed twin producers, Carlo Ponti and Dino De Laurentiis, for this to work. And it was always as a vehicle for Giulietta Masina that Fellini began to research the lives of prostitutes in Rome. Once more, he was looking for anecdotage and incident rather than social understanding. He actually employed the young poet Pier Paolo Pasolini to sharpen the hookers’ talk, but he used none of the Marxist interpretation that was available with Pasolini.
The central character was named, portentously, after the heroine from early Italian cinema, but everything else about the role was Masina—the lack of prettiness or coarseness, the squashed gamine spirit, the plucky resilience
, the tart with a heart. With Piero Gherardi, Fellini gave the rather nocturnal movie a raffish look, but again the gesture toward realism was more atmospheric than political. Aldo Tonti did most of the photography, though Otello Martelli took over at the end. The music was once more in the hands of Nino Rota, and music was as important as ever in protecting this winsome concept from the brutal realities of her job. We should not forget that in time Le Notti di Cabiria would inspire a musical, the 1966 Sweet Charity, by Neil Simon, Cy Coleman, and Dorothy Fields. That show imitated the film in its view of Cabiria as endlessly brave, despite the relentless way in which every man declined to fall in love with her. May we, just for the sake of adult entertainment and grown-up attitudes, observe that Belle de Jour came to exist in much the same time period?
Masina won the Best Actress prize at Cannes for her work, and soon enough she would come to be an emblem of a kind of fortitude that we should all honor, if we can. For my shoddy part, I still find her a cloying actress, a presence that makes me uncomfortable and a terrible barrier to deeper involvement. The men in the film include Franco Fabrizi and François Périer, though it was by now quite hard for anyone to play scenes with Masina except by succumbing to her music. Still, the film won a second Best Foreign Picture Oscar for Fellini at a time when American cinema was hardly permitted to touch prostitution as a subject. Though I am reminded of Tina (Marlene Dietrich) in Touch of Evil, only a year or two in the future, so much more economical, more alluring, and so lethally down to earth in her deflation of the male ego.
As you will have gathered, the film was a hit and a restorer of Fellini’s box-office appeal. Still, I doubt that anyone struggling to hold back the laughter in Cabiria could have foreseen the great lunge toward gravity and modishness that was about to occur. Something called La Dolce Vita was brewing in his eager mind. He would tell the world it was depraved and have them lining up for more!
Now, Voyager (1942)
When Warner Brothers bought the Olive Higgins Prouty novel Now, Voyager, they had it in mind for Norma Shearer, Irene Dunne, or Ginger Rogers. Such wishes only bewildered Bette Davis, who believed it was uniquely suited to her—the story of Charlotte Vale, a repressed, shy, private woman who is drawn out by a psychiatrist, Dr. Jaquith (Claude Rains), and who then falls wondrously in love with Jerry Durrance (Paul Henreid). This shift called for a real change in looks (the loss of spectacles, the growth of hair, and so on), and whereas Davis was always eager for such alterations in herself, the other actresses were far more cautious about losing looks. So Davis got the part, and she would say later that she was instrumental in getting Henreid (after the studio had shot a lousy test) and in improving a lot of the dialogue. She can sound arrogant, but melodrama needs confidence as much as any genre.
The novelist had proposed an interesting idea to Warners: as a lover of silent movies, she suggested that the flashbacks be done as silent scenes, with a voice-over narrative. Over the years in film, that has often proved effective, as well as cheap. The idea of a voice studying the past is strangely potent. But Warners stayed literal-minded: The past should sound and feel real. Casey Robinson did the screenplay and wrote everything “straight.” But Ms. Prouty prevailed on one other matter. The studio had been uneasy over the title—what exactly did it mean? But the novelist said it implied a mixture of romantic quest and immediate action. This is no small point. The titles of romance pictures are often the most poetic, and they clearly speak to the viewer. The very scheme of Now, Voyager is to suggest to any awkward, recessive woman that she can come into flower—now!—flowering in the dark.
Irving Rapper was hired as director (he had been a dialogue director), and this was his breakthrough picture. Sol Polito did the photography, and it benefits from one of Max Steiner’s great string scores. For Bette Davis, it was always a favorite picture, itself a sign of her own emotionalism. She made a big fuss about better material, but she was always very good in “women’s” pictures. When she does the big line—about the moon and the stars—it’s clear forever that “big” is all about the magnification factor of her eyes. Rains is excellent as the doctor, and he was by now a subtle foil to Davis. As for Henreid, Davis enjoyed his company and helped him a lot—but he was often uncertain about the kind of hero he was most suited to. Studios saw him as a Charles Boyer and tried to prettify him, but Henreid was more retiring or modest and he seems a touch hidden or unreliable.
The rest of the cast includes Gladys Cooper (as Charlotte’s mother), Bonita Granville, John Loder, Ilka Chase, Lee Patrick, Mary Wickes, and Janis Wilson. Now, Voyager was a solid hit. Davis and Cooper were both nominated for Oscars, and Steiner won one for his score.
The Nutty Professor (1963)
Which Jerry Lewis frightens you the most—the spastic jerk, or the ringmaster you used to be able to see on the muscular dystrophy telethon? Lewis has himself told the story that his wife would not let their children see The Nutty Professor because of the frightening ease with which he had carried off his strange “Hyde” persona in the film—Buddy Love. And it’s not that Lewis was unaware of this. He has said that he had the idea for this film ten years before he made it, but he was frightened by what he might discover in the process. In short, although The Nutty Professor seems like a comic spoof of the Robert Louis Stevenson classic, I’m not sure that this Jekyll and Hyde may not be the clearest tribute to the power of the myth. This is a comedy only in its pretext. It’s also a tense exploration of character, and maybe the first time Jerry Lewis put his popularity at risk.
He plays Julius Kelp, a chemistry professor at Mathews College. He is Jerry in horn-rimmed spectacles and wild hair. He has buckteeth and a silly grin. He is helplessly vulnerable to the fact that he is secretly in love with one of his own students, Stella Purdy (played by Stella Stevens, who has moments that are Monroe-esque).
So Julius takes a swig of some chemical elixir—to lose his shaming self, to be “bigger than life” (it is the same theme). He turns into Buddy Love, a monster of arrogance, armor-plated “cool,” a hideously sophisticated cocktail lounge singer and insulter, a womanizer. Some people have always felt that Love was a version of the Dean Martin persona, the handsome guy that may have intimidated Jerry in all the years of their partnership. I’m not so sure. Jerry knew Dean was generous, harmless, and sweet-natured. But did Jerry really think that of himself? I lean to the theory—first proposed by Danny Peary, I think—that Love is the demon inside Jerry Lewis: the all-night vampire of money and sentimentality in the telethon; the total manipulator of all he sees in his film directing. The cruel perfectionist—the man who needs always to be right.
You can work it out for yourself in this extraordinary film, and test the evidence that Lewis is a self-conscious artist torn between the one-reel knockabout farce and a sermonizing film. Yes, it’s an awkward mix, and one Chaplin had pioneered. The Nutty Professor was written by Lewis and Bill Richmond, but Lewis directed and coproduced, and as is clear from any study of his work, he conceived and controlled every item. There are a lot of good sight jokes along the way, but in the end it is the conflict of personalities that is most alarming. It’s like one of those desperate moments in the telethon where Jerry sings to a sick kid. We feel as helplessly trapped as the child. But for once, at least, you feel the torment in Lewis himself.
Odd Man Out (1947)
It’s hard to overestimate the importance of Odd Man Out to British cinema. For here was a film about the IRA, set in Belfast and to a great extent filmed there—already, so many awkward realities had been surpassed. It is also a story of twelve hours, tragic and suspenseful, and in its use of Robert Krasker’s very bold black-and-white night photography it surely made a contribution to film noir not far short of that of John Alton. Above all, in presenting James Mason and director Carol Reed, it proved that Britain had the talent to carry very big pictures. To this day, Odd Man Out looks like a determined attempt to say that Britain—or Europe—can handle any modern drama.
It began as a no
vel by F. L. Green, published in 1945 and boosted by its sales as a Penguin paperback. Carol Reed picked Green to do his own screenplay, but he spent several months with him hacking it into existence. And then, R. C. Sherriff had his turn smoothing it out. In justice to the novel, and the increasing fever the hero suffers from his wound, Odd Man Out begins with the perfect realism of a daylight robbery and proceeds through dream and hallucination toward religious expressionism as the leader of the gang, Johnny McQueen (James Mason), goes on the run, pursued by his friends and enemies alike. And much depends on the handsome exhaustion of Mason’s beautiful face.
The film takes no side in the IRA politics, but it has great sympathy for the gang and its loved ones. At the same time, the police are solemn and somber but not malicious or wicked. The one drawback to the film that troubles is the religious air it holds, and the way in which Johnny may be redeemed by his suffering. In terms of what was to come, the neutrality with which Harry Lime is observed may owe something to Reed’s ultimate failure at keeping McQueen free from conventional patterns of guilt and atonement. And so the fabulous shadows Krasker had made for the film cannot help but take on Catholic undertones. In The Third Man, in Vienna, they are mere irony.
Ralph Brinton did the art direction for studio interiors to match the cobbled streets of Belfast—and Shoreditch in east London was used for some night locations. William Alwyn wrote the music. Many of the actors came from the Abbey Theatre in Dublin: the gang is completed by Dan O’Herlihy, Robert Beatty, and Cyril Cusack; Denis O’Dea is very good as the head constable; Kathleen Ryan is Johnny’s girl; and other people in the city include Fay Compton, Beryl Measor, F. J. McCormick as Shell, the betrayer, and Robert Newton, generally thought to be too hammy or too drunk as the painter. Newton sweeps the film into Grand Guignol, and he helps make us see Belfast as a Dickensian city instead of just a place where a man waits for midnight or death.
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