'Have You Seen...?'

by David Thomson

  Odds Against Tomorrow (1959)

  Odds Against Tomorrow was a coming together of unexpected forces: the director Robert Wise; the blacklisted writer Abraham Polonsky; and the Harbel Company, which was Harry Belafonte, at that time a popular success as a singer and because of his performance in Carmen Jones, so that he was able to provide significant funding for this adventurous film noir. The source material was a novel by William P. McGivern, and Polonsky did the script, which was credited to John O. Killens and Nelson Gidding. (Polonsky had not had a credit since I Can Get It for You Wholesale in 1951.)

  It’s a story set in the Hudson Valley, to the north of New York City, and it concerns an attempted bank robbery. The leader of the robbery is Johnny Ingram (Belafonte), very much a new kind of black—smart, tough, not humble, not ingratiating, but a talented musician who is hung up on gambling. Polonsky’s intent was to show a rounded character not remarked on, self-pitying or vengeful because of the way he has been wronged. In fact, Earle Slater (Robert Ryan), a white racist, has many of the characteristics of the alienated black man. And then there is Burke (Ed Begley), a veteran ex-cop embittered against the system.

  The film was beautifully shot by Joseph Brun. Anna Hill Johnstone did the unromantic costumes. Leo Kerz was the art director. Dede Allen edited, and the music came from John Lewis, leader of the Modern Jazz Quartet (with Milt Jackson playing for Belafonte’s character). With this level of craft work, and the high quality of acting, Odds Against Tomorrow amounts to probably the best picture of race relations in an American film until that time. It did not labor under a Stanley Kramer–like message. It did not encourage stereotype casting. And the only real reference to its theme is the ultimate state of Ingram and Slater: burnt to the point of being unrecognizable.

  Belafonte was not the greatest of actors (certainly not as a young man), and he was somewhat impeded by his high voice. But Ryan is outstanding, and there is a trio of very good female performances—by Shelley Winters, Gloria Grahame, and Kim Hamilton. There is also a very good performance from the young Richard Bright as a homosexual.

  Wise’s direction is rather muted—this is not nearly as forceful a picture as Polonsky’s Force of Evil. And compromises are evident along the way. But here was a film of real courage, sold by United Artists. It did not do well, but today it looks like a movie while the far more celebrated The Defiant Ones seems like a labored lecture. Belafonte was deeply disappointed; he did not act in films for another ten years. Equally, he never found a way of bridging the happy image of calypso singer and the man who held so many adult political opinions.

  Of Human Bondage (1934)

  Of Human Bondage, W. Somerset Maugham’s autobiographical novel, was published in 1915, and its span of early life included the way in which Philip Carey, a medical student, became obsessed with a Cockney waitress and remorseless user of others, Mildred Rogers. Philip is crippled (he has a club foot), and it’s a matter of profound mystery as to why he is drawn to Mildred—unless it is because she is his worst possible enemy, the abrasive edge on which he can file away his male surface or veneer. She is one of the most hateful of “heroines,” yet you feel a self-scourging pleasure in how she is written.

  Pandro Berman wanted to make the film at RKO. He had a script, by Lester Cohen, with some dialogue work by Ann Coleman. Leslie Howard had agreed to take the part of Philip. But director-to-be John Cromwell could only think of Bette Davis for Mildred. However, her employer, Warner Brothers, believed it would be the worst thing possible for her, and a sure way of killing her following. So the actress campaigned. She went in and asked every day for six months, until they gave in out of fatigue.

  The script concentrated on the Mildred story—and even Davis admitted that she couldn’t really conceive how Howard or Philip thought he was in love with her. She determined to pull no punches. Davis hired an English cleaning woman so she could study the accent, and she fiercely ignored the English cliquishness on the set. (Howard was allegedly surprised that an English actress had not been cast.)

  Davis asked Cromwell if she could do her own makeup in the scenes of Mildred’s decline. “I made it very clear that Mildred was not going to die of a dread disease looking as if a deb had missed her noon nap. The last stages of consumption, poverty and neglect are not pretty and I intended to be convincing-looking. We pulled no punches and Mildred emerged as a reality—as immediate as a newsreel and as starkly real as a pestilence.” That was part of it—the rest was Mildred’s gloating cruelty, her deliberate needling of Philip’s good little boy, and Bette’s radiant ugliness.

  The supporting cast included Frances Dee, Kay Johnson, Reginald Denny, Alan Hale, and Reginald Owen. Henry Gerrard did the photography. The art direction was by Carroll Clark and Van Nest Polglase, and Max Steiner did a shocked score.

  It worked. The picture was not popular, but no one could deny Bette’s bitchiness. Warners was as horrified as they said they would be. She was a write-in candidate for an Oscar, but Bette believed that Warners ordered its members to vote against her (Claudette Colbert won for It Happened One Night). Davis was simply confirmed in her estimate that the studio was craven (she won next year for the flimsy Dangerous). A clash was inevitable. Years later, Bette looks brave and poisonous, but the question remains as to whether Of Human Bondage is a writer’s justification for misogyny. It was remade, in 1946, with Eleanor Parker and Paul Henreid, and in 1964, with Kim Novak and Laurence Harvey. And it has never worked.

  Oliver Twist (1948)

  There is competition—even a musical version, Oliver!, which won Best Picture in 1968—but at the movies there is only the David Lean version, which stands not just as a warning to all followers, but as a model for the kind of serialization of classic novels developed by the BBC and famous in America under the rubric of Masterpiece Theatre (originally with Alistair Cooke as its urbane host). You could argue that Lean’s film prospers to the extent that Oliver Twist (1837–39) is one of Dickens’s more superficial, or surface-strong novels. Oliver Twist is a mystery story with fierce ordeals which turns out very nicely. It paints a vivid, frightening picture of the London underworld, but its message is not much more than “watch out”—every foundling may be a nobleman. Arguably, Oliver Twist today, taken from scratch, would be much more intriguing if Oliver became the leader of the gang, the cool head that surpasses Fagin and Bill Sikes and brings a little Corleone rationalism to it all. And then proves to be of noble birth. But easily steps over into politics with all his alarming prowess. Watch out for foundlings, indeed.

  Lean and his producer, Ronald Neame, had undoubtedly been influenced by the Cruikshank illustrations. Still, designer John Bryan and photographer Guy Green found a nearly operatic noir style that is a beautiful partner to Dickens’s visual descriptions. There was a very good score by Arnold Bax, and a kind of squalid energy in the textures of walls, streets, and clothes (call it dirt) that left M-G-M costume films of the same kind looking very laundered. Even David Copperfield suffers in comparison. And the great tradition of English clothes and props in such films begins with Oliver Twist.

  Granted his approach (and admitting that it was Dickens, too), John Howard Davies was a fine Oliver, and again it’s worth noting that he had many attributes of the real child—shyness, awkwardness, numbness—compared with the excessive, voluble articulation of the generation that included Freddie Bartholomew and Dickie Moore. I adore those two, but they were a little like miniaturized grown-ups (the thing Graham Greene observed in Shirley Temple). John Howard Davies seemed like a frightened boy.

  As for Fagin, there were a few mild complaints in 1948 that it might be overdone, and even a little unfriendly to Jewishness. I don’t agree. Fagin on the page is over the top because he playacts all the time for an audience of children. Alec Guinness got close to the illustrations, and he believed he was playing an inky villain without compromise or reflection upon Jewishness. We can take it. Otherwise, we would have to conclude that Robert Newton’s Bill Sikes is very un
fair to Brutes (don’t Brutes have a heart and a union?) because he is so frightening. In other words, this kind of correctness is anathema to Dickens.

  And then Lean showed how well he understood the necessary detail in smaller parts: Francis L. Sullivan as Bumble; Kay Walsh (Lean’s wife then) as Nancy; Anthony Newley as the Artful Dodger; Diana Dors as Charlotte; and so on. Not a dud in the crowd. Even Bill Sikes’s dog is one you flinch from.

  Los Olvidados (1950)

  There is no doubt about Los Olvidados being a turning point in Luis Buñuel’s career. In the late 1930s, and in the age of war, he had led a wandering life, trying to be useful or to stay employed, but never dreaming of the kind of world in which he could make his art without hindrance. His impact in the late 1920s had been moderate at best, and restricted to avant-garde circles. In America, he had had jobs with the Museum of Modern Art and Warner Brothers, but without finding roots, let alone the chance to do what he wanted. There must have been times when he wondered if he would make another film—or what the world called a real film.

  After the war, Buñuel moved to Mexico and began to make feature films there: Gran Casino (1947) and El Gran Calavera (1949). Los Olvidados was his next film, and it was plainly directed at an international audience. Its voice-over narration begins, “Concealed behind the imposing structures of our great modern cities are pits of misery, hiding unwanted, hungry, dirty and uneducated children… a fertile breeding ground for future delinquents. Although modern society attempts to correct these evils, the success of its efforts is still very limited…”

  Worthy and reliable sentiments such as prompted many films in the 1950s—and hardly left the essential problem much better. In other words, despite the dream passages in Los Olvidados, despite its sense of a universal cruelty, this is a social problem picture as made by an earnest left-wing sensibility. André Bazin went so far as to say that Los Olvidados had a humanity that Buñuel’s earlier documentary, Las Hurdes, had lacked. I take a different view: Los Olvidados seems to me a conventional protest, as if made in the assurance that the world can be improved. Whereas the true surrealist impulse finds no reason to credit or think of improvement.

  So Los Olvidados is a surreal imagination firmly tempered by the attitudes embedded in Italian neo-realism, and as delivered by the sumptuous photography of Gabriel Figueroa, a man far more drawn to the picturesque than was Buñuel. The result was clear and useful: The movie won the prize for directing and the critics’ prize at Cannes in 1951. It played all over the world (sometimes as The Young and the Damned). It made money, and it assuredly promoted Buñuel in Mexico and began to build his art-house audience.

  The film is still worth seeing for historical reasons, and for the uninhibited yearning shown in the young people. But the treatment of characters is so different from the approach that really distinguishes Buñuel. This is, in the best sense, an upsetting film. Coming away from it, you want to help. Whereas the great Buñuel is a gentle, amused guide to the absurd dance we have been making all our lives. The film features hunger—real hunger, which is not to be disparaged. But the hunger that grows in The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie is entirely neurotic.

  Once Upon a Time in the West (1968)

  Perhaps it was a warning sign, but nobody was sure how long it had been going on. In the mid-1960s, three men began meeting to talk about the Western and what it meant to them: Sergio Leone, Bernardo Bertolucci, and Dario Argento. Leone had had the go-ahead from Paramount to make a new, more personal Western, nothing as fixed and familiar as the Dollars pictures that Leone had just made with Clint Eastwood, Lee Van Cleef, and Eli Wallach. Those films were pastiches, parody, satire—but this new one would be “real.” The three men started spinning off “ideas” for Westerns, which meant really the things they recalled from their own beloved films. As Bertolucci put it, Leone “had understood that cinema was changing, and that there was a need for people who wouldn’t tell you the same old stories in the same old ways: in our treatment we put visual images and sensations rather than a lot of dialogue.”

  This was several years after the drastic redefinition of genre as managed by Jean-Luc Godard. And by that standard, the several months of Westernizing by those three men was an unmitigated disaster, a terrible sign of self-indulgence among film buffs cuddling their memories instead of carrying the medium forward into a new age.

  The script was written by Leone and Sergio Donati, and you can annotate its references to classic Westerns if you like. But don’t let that “intellectual” framework delude you into seeing Once Upon a Time as a reappraisal of the West. Instead, it is a druggy attempt by these Italian boys to make their own Western. So it’s a grotesque mishmash of Monument Valley and such epic settings, a weird mix of Hollywood stars and Italian support, dialogue done in mistranslated riddles, with every situation dragged out like slow-motion sweat, and all beneath cobwebs of the mock symphonic music of Ennio Morricone. It is beautiful as photographed by Tonino Delli Colli, but this is beauty on novocaine.

  Once Upon a Time was a fairy story, made under the guise of a return to reality. And while Leone may have intended an homage, it crushed the Western and was so ludicrously deranged in terms of real history that it cut off any attempt to develop the Western as a means of pursuing American studies. It was a way of saying that film artists need not look at the world, at nature, at life—just the anthology of movie imagery. Alas, it was a work acclaimed by many, with buffs looking for the longest possible version of this distended story (160 minutes is the favorite).

  The cast included Henry Fonda (his black villain was the closest the film came to wit), Charles Bronson (as empty as the film was long), Claudia Cardinale, Jason Robards, Gabriele Ferzetti, Woody Strode, Paola Stoppa, Keenan Wynn, Jack Elam, Lionel Stander, and many others. Leone actually shot a good deal in America, but he was impervious to wherever he might be. His mind was so full of preconceived wide-screen compositions that he was blind to anything new or real. He was traveling on the screen, and he reckoned tracking shots were the only significant form of transportation.

  One-Eyed Jacks (1961)

  Some time in the spring of 1957, Marlon Brando decided that he wanted to make a Western. The word went out and he was offered a script derived from a Charles Neider novel, The Authentic Death of Hendry Jones, written by Sam Peckinpah, with Frank Rosenberg attached as producer. Rosenberg brought it to Brando, who thought he liked it, and in 1958 Brando wondered if Stanley Kubrick would be interested in directing it. But Kubrick hated the script. So Peckinpah was fired and Calder Willingham came on board.

  Those script sessions, with Kubrick usually present but increasingly disaffected (and more and more obsessed with Lolita), might make a great movie. The story line changed, and some felt that it had to take in any fresh scene or character Brando thought of. The money kept going out. The story eventually settled on the friendship of Rio and “Dad” Longworth. They do a bank robbery but only one of them can get away. Rio goes to prison. He emerges years later and hears that Longworth is sheriff of a small town to the north, with a family. Rio goes after him.

  It was when Kubrick heard that Brando had hired Karl Malden to play “Dad” (he had wanted Spencer Tracy) that the young director looked for his exit—and the exit strategy was that really Marlon wanted and needed to direct this film himself. Marlon acted taken aback, yet friends felt sure this had been his plan. And so the dire exercise came to pass. A strange location was found on the Monterey peninsula for much of the action. An unknown, Pina Pellicer, was hired to play “Dad” ’s daughter and Rio’s beloved. Kubrick left his imprint in the supporting cast: Ben Johnson, Timothy Carey, Slim Pickens, and Elisha Cook, Jr. Katy Jurado was hired as “Dad” ’s wife.

  The movie has its admirers. But at 141 minutes, it seems to me overdrawn but very uncertain. There is a vengeance story in there. There is a father-son story, full of recrimination, and Brando was well aware of hating his own father. There is a pathetic love story—though the real story of Brando
and Pellicer is grim, and ends in her suicide. In the end, it seems like an untidy wreck with several lean, short films struggling for survival.

  Alas, it’s easy to conclude that this condition reflects what happened. Brando’s patience wore out as filming went on, and as he found the need to make up his mind (and hold to it) so he felt burdened. Long before the film was finished, he had walked away from his own project and left the editing to others. He would never direct again, and yet he had a mix of self-pity and evasiveness that could blame the failure on film itself and the other people who were supposed to help him. And so our great actor bumped up against his own fatal limits—of being unable to sustain his own interest or be responsible to a larger work and its company. Yes, there are lively scenes in the film, but Brando was always a man fit for the moments more than the hours or the years. Natural actors are not always professional artists.

  One False Move (1992)

  According to IMDb.com, One False Move had a U.S. domestic gross when it was released of just over $1.5 million. Now, for a movie that is not a great deal. Yet I find that nearly everyone “in the know” has heard of this film, and many recommend it. As they might, for it is one of the few original thrillers made in America in the last twenty years. How can these things be reconciled? A gross of that number suggests that, at the most, 400,000 people saw the picture. That is a tiny sum by the standards of the movies—though if I or anyone could count on selling 400,000 copies of my next book, I’d be very happy. In the same way, a million and a half is chump change in any business sense. But for the characters in One False Move, it is real money. I don’t think this is meandering thought about one movie. It’s a way of getting at something profound in our culture: the lack of proportion over numbers, and the dislocation it represents.