'Have You Seen...?'

by David Thomson

  Enormous sets were built, and a budget of $1 million was surpassed. There were thousands of extras all perfectly costumed. The photography was fought over by Billy Bitzer and Hendrik Sartov, who were by now fierce rivals, and that surely led to delays. But the picture is a wonder to look at, especially in the tinted prints that Griffith intended. And in the early twenties, American film was desperate for ever more exotic locales and settings for the same old melodramas: DeMille would rebuild ancient Egypt; M-G-M experimented with real Rome and Culver City Rome on Ben-Hur. So Griffith’s dream of re-creating the Paris of the 1780s was not crazy. And the emotional pull of The Two Orphans was plain—it was remounted as a Broadway play in 1926. In addition, this is the Gish sisters film in which Dorothy really excels. Her blind gamine has great opportunities for pathos. To which, of course, Lillian turns a very sympathetic ear.

  What troubles the modern viewer is the disproportion between accumulated verisimilitude and humbug, and the attitude to the revolution. There is actually a “helpful” title as the revolution gets under way: “The French Revolution RIGHTLY overthrew a BAD government. But we in America should be careful lest we with a GOOD government mistake fanatics for leaders and exchange our decent law and order for Anarchy and Bolshevism.”

  Such emphatic clarity only underlines the dilemma of a nation mad for story but bereft of history or a way of measuring consequences. Griffith was never able to invest his history with rounded human beings who spoke and thought as real people do.

  Orphée (1950)

  All Jean Cocteau did was take the legend of Orpheus and set it down in a deliberately plain, prosaic France of the postwar years where the paranoia left from the Resistance experience was likely to linger. And when we remember that Cocteau’s official debut in film was Le Sang d’un Poète (1930), a very determined, arty movie, then the naturalness of Orphée and its readiness to be a film noir is all the more striking and impressive. There could be a rather ostentatious, swishy magician in Cocteau, not so much a showoff as a show-on. But within the cloak-carrying eccentric there was a very hardworking craftsman, always open to the new, always ready to learn. I don’t think it’s going too far to say that the restrained magic of Orphée, its fascinatingly humdrum exquisite moments, are lessons learned from such things as Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne and Les Enfants Terribles, projects on which Cocteau was simply the writer, or assistant, to more comprehensive film artists.

  So, there’s something to Orphée of the postwar Paris—shabby clothes, boxy cars, dusty roads, and the rhetoric of existential tirades, along with that inner feeling for vengeful, reactionary forces that had been left by occupation. Ask what that experience was like on film, and Cocteau’s Orphée may be enlisted as evidence. So Jean Marais is the poet, a statue with a floppy forelock attached, a man of stone and flesh at the same time, but a man who has been a lion recently and has a new authority because of it. François Périer is a rather clerical Heurtebise, Marie Déa is Eurydice, like a girl from one of Jacques Becker’s romances. Edouard Dermithe is Cégeste. The men wear slacks and open-necked shirts. Only death is dressed up—she is María Casares, with that enigmatic smile learned in Les Dames. Death’s agents are black-leather motorcyclists. The poetry may be coming in on a car radio. Throughout the picture, the mundane parts of life are aglow with extra meaning, like umbrellas radiant with lightning.

  Nicolas Hayer did the photography. Jean D’Eaubonne did the design, from models made by Christian Bérard—the film is dedicated to Bérard, a Cocteau regular who died in 1949. The costumes are by Marcel Escoffier, and the music is by Georges Auric. The cast also includes Juliette Gréco, Pierre Bertin, Henri Crémieux, Roger Blin, and Jean-Pierre Melville. The voice—and why not? for he had a magisterial voice for so slight a man—is Cocteau’s.

  And so Jean Cocteau—writer, poet, man of the theater, designer, artist, entrepreneur, provocateur: call him what you will—also found time to be a man of the movies, not just a filmmaker and a source of films, but an eminence at film festivals, a patron to the young. Simply to outline Cocteau’s role in French culture of the twentieth century is to see America beset by internal frontiers and no-go areas. That a Cocteau could flourish speaks to the ease and assurance of French film.

  Ossessione (1942)

  The story of how Ossessione came to be is as interesting as the picture itself. In the late thirties, Luchino Visconti, an aristocrat, had gone to France to assist Jean Renoir. When Renoir came to Italy in 1940, for La Tosca, it was again Visconti who helped out when Renoir left for America. But they had talked about the kind of film Visconti might make as a debut: not a fascist film, of course, and not a white telephone romance—but a new kind of realism. Renoir mentioned the James M. Cain novel The Postman Always Rings Twice. Visconti made a script of it with Mario Alicata, Antonio Pietrangeli, Gianni Puccini, and Giuseppe De Santis. To their surprise, the Fascist authorities agreed that it could be made. But no one had bothered to seek rights to the book.

  It was set in the Po valley in conditions of poverty never alleviated or romanticized by the film. Yet this poverty was paid for in great part by Visconti’s private money. A drifter stops at an inn run by a couple. He and the wife start an affair. They are about to leave, but the wife decides to stay and the man moves on. Then there is a reunion, and now murder is plotted. The new couple take over the inn, but the man thinks the woman has only used him for the money. He starts another affair. The wife is killed.

  In many ways, this is the toughest adaptation of the Cain novel, and one that shows a very different Visconti from the later stylist. He was in love with reality; he was not apparently an admirer of people, but he carried the difficult project past Fascist interference. He had Aldo Tonti and Domenico Scala as his cameramen and the imagery is hot before it becomes overheated, with a bleak indifference toward the meanness of place and action. Clara Calamai was the wife—and very good and sexy; Massimo Girotti was the drifter—lean, virile, and nasty; Juan de Landa the husband.

  The authorities were amazed. They had never seen an Italian film so brutal or sordid, yet so human. Still, it was hard for the Fascists to see how it offended technically—except that anything that new might be dangerous. So the censor banned the film, and, apparently, young critics put pressure on Mussolini’s son to get it released. By then, however, Italy was in such chaos that there were different cuts of the film, and few places where it could be shown. After the war, the illegal use of the Cain novel was revealed and the picture did not play in America until 1975.

  As for Visconti, he seems to have taken time to digest the whole experience. He did not make another film for five years, and that interim was filled with the movies that are called neo-realist. Ossessione is sometimes still presented as their source. But that’s hardly true. Ossessione had no overtly political sensibility and little liking for people or society. It is a Renoir film, if you like, but made by a cold misanthrope. And it is still very powerful.

  Othello (1952)

  It was with Othello that Orson Welles pioneered the itinerant or much delayed kind of production that would loom large in his later years—though the aborted It’s All True, in various parts of South America, was the first sign of this method. The approach can be romanticized: thus it is said that Welles slogged through many minor things as an actor from 1949 to 1952, saving money and stealing costumes from Hollywood films for Othello. No one can deny the quixotic courage to persist, or the readiness to improvise. Still, movies are predicated on the most economical package of time for good reason, and on the determination (called the script) of what is to be filmed. Welles’s method is both a hostage to money and an open excuse for the changed mind. Thus a work in progress in film may be never finished, or fixed in the mind. It might be anything, a potential, that often prevents it from being a satisfactory something.

  Othello opened at Cannes in 1952. It did not premiere in the United States until 1955. And it was only in 1992 that a “restored” version appeared, with rerecorded music and
a clearer sound track. I’m not sure that the clarified versions are truer to intent than the earlier renderings. Indeed, the condition in some of these Welles films where nearly every voice sounds ill-recorded, but faintly like Orson, may be more expressive of the approach than anything else. This is not a coherent production of Othello so much as variations on the Shakespeare—or an ongoing conversation about the play in Welles’s head (the film it resembles is Al Pacino’s musings over Richard III), and the company it needs is the 1979 Filming Othello, where Welles sits at the editing table yarning about the original.

  Always open to melodrama, Welles made one key shift in the play. He begins with Othello’s funeral, observed by lago (Micheál MacLiammóir) from a cage hoist up on the battlements. And so the meaning of this Othello is more or less the affection and loathing that ties the two men together and which is unavoidably homosexual in feeling. Of course, that same tension runs through Welles’s work, and the confusions of the shooting are held in place by the Iago figure—the one character who seems in charge of what is happening.

  No one can deny the beauty, the spectacle, the heat and flourish of this film, but those things were second nature to Welles. It uses settings in Morocco and Italy with great aplomb and cuts them together in defiance of “continuity errors.” Yet the single-stage-set Macbeth is more concentrated and powerful a film. This one spills out in every direction, and surely we are eager to know about the chaos of its making. But we have only the illusion of recovered unity and purpose. The rest is like a holiday in the sun—the best thing to account for Orson’s deep tan and deeper voice. Suzanne Cloutier’s Desdemona is not adequate, but there is loyal support from Robert Coote, Hylton Edwards, Fay Compton, Nicholas Bruce, Doris Dowling, and Michael Laurence.

  Our Daily Bread (1934)

  There’s something so revealing about the creative naïveté of King Vidor that he could take his own hope for granted: that M-G-M would make Our Daily Bread just as they had been enthusiastic for his The Crowd. Vidor wanted to take the young couple from the silent film, John and Mary, broke, out of work, and behind with the rent in their city. But then an uncle gives them a plot of rural land. They go there. They try to live. But John realizes that he is ignorant as a farmer and so he approaches another unemployed farmer and suggests a cooperative venture. Within days, it seems, his bit of land is a parking lot for no-hopers: there’s a carpenter, a stonemason, an undertaker, and even a violinist. John takes them all—he’s making a story as well as a farm.

  Vidor wrote the script with his new wife, Elizabeth Hill, and took it to Irving Thalberg. Time passed, and then Irving admitted he didn’t think it was quite right for the studio. The studio system was not exactly part of the New Deal; indeed, the studios were very afraid of unionism, let alone cooperatives. Still, Vidor seemed not to notice or appreciate his own film with its stress on an all-for-one community and its wary attitude to banks and their decision to withhold funding. He fancied that other studios would jump at the opportunity. Or did he? He described it that way in 1953, but was he so innocent of business politics and life in America that he thought a small communist epic might help break the credit squeeze at banks?

  In the end, he had to go to his pal Chaplin at United Artists for a guaranteed release, and he ended up hocking his own property to raise about $150,000. Still, the picture was only 71 minutes, shot largely on a disused golf course close to Hollywood (even that city was suffering!) and culminating in the exhilarating sequence where the community bands together to bring the water down to the land. They dig a ditch. They divert the water, chivvying and guiding, with what amounts to a human chain. And finally, they are a tribe reveling in their water and their communal efforts. Vidor shot that footage with a metronome and a bass drumbeat (adding Alfred Newman’s music later), so there’s a surging, Soviet-like rhythmn in the montage.

  To say that Vidor was not suspicious of how this material would be welcomed is to deprive him of the kind of political sense that surely lies within The Crowd, Street Scene, and Our Daily Bread. He was fascinated by how American dreamers sustained their hopes when there was very little left to put on the table. But far more than Our Daily Bread, The Crowd touches on the real despair that can come with failure. What strikes one now in Our Daily Bread is the fun and spirit of a very odd camping expedition and the innocence that believes that if things work, then people will fall in line.

  Joseph Mankiewicz actually wrote the dialogue (not his wittiest), and Robert Planck did the sunny imagery. Tom Keene is John (very cheery) and Karen Morley is really lovely as Mary—somehow in the hard years she keeps her sweeping false eyelashes. John Qualen is very good as one of the gang. How it fits with Vidor’s The Fountainhead is another matter.

  Outcast of the Islands (1950)

  There is a view of Carol Reed that this was his last interesting film; there is a less friendly take that says this was the first dud, or the first picture where Reed seemed to have forgotten to care. All of which raises fascinating questions about how one quality lasts in a career, or how easily other factors betray the quality. I think it’s true that Reed had three great films in a row—Odd Man Out, The Fallen Idol, The Third Man—and I fear it’s the case that nothing after Outcast is as good. (Though The Key, 1957, is the one possible exception to that.)

  So what do we conclude? That Reed reached a peak that was short-lived? That he was stimulated by the postwar state of the world? That a friendship with Graham Greene was an encouragement? And that, later on, Reed found his way of making films was terribly hampered by his status and by the greater amounts of money? Nicholas Wapshott’s biography tells an interesting story of Outcast: how Reed, on his own, shot background footage on a research trip, only to discover that the camera union forbade its use because he’d shot it on his own. That was bureaucracy killing impulse, and it may have been symptomatic of things that depressed Reed.

  Outcast of the Islands was based on Joseph Conrad’s novel, published in 1896 as a prequel to Almayer’s Folly. This was an Alexander Korda project, though the novel could easily have been Greene’s recommendation—it is that side of Conrad that seems close to Greene, about a man, Peter Willems (Trevor Howard), who becomes obsessed with a native girl and who then loses confidence, luck, and design in his life.

  Reed went off to what was then Ceylon to research the film and find locations, and along the way he made his famous discovery of Kerima to be the girl Aissa. There was a good deal of filming around Ceylon, and then interiors were done in England on sets designed by Vincent Korda. William Fairchild wrote the screenplay. Ted Scaife and John Wilcox did the photography. Bert Bates was the editor. The music was by Brian Easdale.

  The film did not do well, but Pauline Kael would call it “one of the most underrated and unattended of modern films.” I share that opinion, and I like the way she identifies the life force in Willems despite his every mistake. The story is not heavy on action. It is a mood piece, and I think Reed was making a very successful adaptation to a new way of regarding film—as a way of showing character and atmosphere. That no one else responded to it may have added to his dismay. Yet I cannot altogether rule out the chance of some kind of curse attached to Conrad with film, or stemming from the ennui in the central character. The cast includes Ralph Richardson, Robert Morley, Wendy Hiller, George Coulouris, Wilfrid Hyde-White, and Frederick Valk.

  The Outlaw (1946)

  The Outlaw is not a good film, but it does exist and it does come at a time when American movies may have been at their peak and when a man quietly going mad reckoned to himself, Well, if he could afford it, why not do it? These days we tend to romanticize every kid who can steal, beg, or borrow enough credit card debt to get a first film made. So why disparage a man who was able to take years if he wished, shooting by night, not necessarily because he was busy in the day—though he was, producing aircraft to save the free world—but because he really lived by night and had the best chance of designing a brave new brassiere then. You see, The Outlaw isn’
t just Howard Hughes, or even Pat Garrett meets Doc Holliday and Billy the Kid. It’s Jane Russell.

  We know this much. It was always a Howard Hughes production, but Howard Hawks was to direct from a treatment by Hawks and Ben Hecht and a script by Jules Furthman. Furthermore, it was Hawks who supervised the casting process. He got Thomas Mitchell as Pat Garrett and Walter Huston as Doc Holliday (which makes Huston the only actor who played Holliday and Wyatt Earp). And he did many tests of young unknowns before he cast Jack Beutel as Billy the Kid and Jane Russell as the girl, Rio. There’s no doubt that Hughes had at least a voice of approval in this, and his lanky figure was sometimes seen in the distance. But it was Hawks who chose everyone and who shot for two weeks with Lucien Ballard on the camera. He shot some smart scenes, especially with the Kid and Garrett—though I think it was always apparent that Beutel was too languid (despite stories that Hawks had thought of him for the Montgomery Clift role in Red River).

  So Hawks went away. The Arizona locations (near Flagstaff) were abandoned, and shooting resumed in Los Angeles, with Hughes himself directing, and Gregg Toland now doing the photography. That took about six months and deteriorated into endless sessions in which Hughes tried to get Jane’s breasts to be themselves while standing up erect. Of course, the lady was big-bosomed and without support she was helpless. So Howard’s aeronautical engineering came into play as he schemed over a brassiere that would not show.