'Have You Seen...?'

by David Thomson

  In many ways, this is the picture closest to the blithe heart of Preston Sturges. He had been an inventor, and he believed in being inventive. He did admire women for their cinematic presence, their look, and their way with clothes. So, Gerry hops off to Palm Beach and on the train she meets John D. Hackensacker III (Rudy Vallee), who takes a shine to her and invites her yachting. Meanwhile, the Wienie King has also given Tom money to fly south. That is where he meets John D.’s sister Maude (Mary Astor), who thinks he’s terrific.

  Of course, the more she sees of John D., the more Gerry gets her old yen for Tom. The two Hackensackers are very long-suffering about it all, but as they are jilted they do wonder whether Tom and Gerry don’t have available siblings. They do, and so the screwball’s roll ends in a double marriage and the title comes up: “And They Lived Happily Ever After… Or Did They?”

  This is a very funny film. The dialogue sparkles, and the total devotion to a life of appearance is rich in irony. Moreover, the train journey south is an opportunity for Sturges to introduce the Ale and Quail Club, the best-ever excuse for his team of supporting players. But the screwball needs oil all the time if we are to avoid the squeak of pain or real emotional hurt. When the Breen Office saw the script, they thought they heard a kind of rapturous surrender to infidelity and sex—and they feared that might offend an American public at war. So Sturges kept carnality at a distance. Still, the fragility of marriage is all too evident, just as the kind of personality Sturges adored is seen as being truly dangerous. After all, the unquenchable lust in people—the desire for more appearance—is answered only by a flagrant trick (the doubling up of McCrea and Colbert), as if to say only movie’s fraud can keep the ending happy. You could still take The Palm Beach Story and make a bitter lamentation out of it and the way the people screw up (in the sexual and the mechanical sense).

  Whereas in The Lady Eve we see two contradictory people who are attached by love, in The Palm Beach Story lovers who are like brother and sister seem highly fickle and uncertain. You can begin to get hints of how the dream of being Preston Sturges faded. Still, the four leads are delights, and the froth of eccentricity elsewhere helps keep us from seeing that the fun is close to madness: Robert Warwick, Arthur Stuart Hull, Torben Meyer, Franklin Pangborn, Snowflake, William Demarest, Jack Norton, Robert Greig, Roscoe Ates, Chester Conklin, Jimmy Conlin, and Vic Potel.

  Pandora’s Box (1929)

  It is one of the turning points in cinema: February 1929, the opening of Pandora’s Box in Berlin. Yet the film is still silent, no matter that sound is conquering all. In the next few months, Dietrich will do her Lola-Lola at the Blue Angel, groaning out that “Falling in Love Again” chant in her lazy way. And for a moment Dietrich will rule the world of femmes fatales. Deservedly so. But here, a few months earlier, is the real turning point, as Lulu (Louise Brooks) waits for the embrace of a sexual maniac, and Jack the Ripper, her guy, is entranced by the knife, shining in the German Limehouse light. Her hand goes still, and we feel sure we heard something—the stretch of silk as a blade pierced it, her last sigh, her first scream?

  Today, Pandora’s Box plays at silent-screen festivals, or at any event where people are eager for the best films ever made. It is not the last silent film, but it may be the first modern movie, the first time someone has said, Let’s do the orgy, the whole thing, let’s make it about the way sensuality destroys itself. And let them—the ones in the dark—watch. Because the point of the film is, Really, are you going to stay in the dark all your life, or will you come up here into the German Limehouse light?

  Pandora’s Box is a reworking of material in plays by Frank Wedekind—Erdgeist and Die Büchse der Pandora. The script is by Ladislaus Vajda. The director of photography is Günther Krampf. The art director is Andrei Andreiev. And the costumes are by Gottlieb Hesch—in that last scene, Pabst told Hesch to take Miss Brooks’s favorite outfit, rip it and soil it with grease, and tell her to wear that. Her own clothes. The cast was top-rank German people, some of whom hardly spoke to Miss Brooks, the Kansas dancing girl, imported for the film, the girl who wasn’t a star. Dietrich’s grave perplexity hung over it all: “Why should Pabst choose her when he could have me?”

  In truth, because Louise Brooks was rather more the real thing than an actress. No, I don’t mean she was Lulu, though there are episodes in her life still to come where she is an outcast and a reject. But Dietrich long before The Blue Angel was cute with knowingness—she could hardly move without tossing you that complicit grin. And Brooks was knowledge still looking like innocence. She is the natural being, a knife herself, a blade called beauty and desirability, thrust into the soft bourgeois flesh. Everyone wants her and she wants only to utter that scream that says “sound.” “Let me talk” plays on her extraordinary mouth. Let me tell you how much I know. That is why the men in the film want to consume her, to stop her mouth with kisses.

  This is the box where so many films are kept. Start here. With Fritz Kortner as Schön, Franz Lederer as Alwa, Carl Goetz as Schigolch, Alice Roberts as Anna Geschwitz, Krafft-Raschig as Rodrigo Quast, and Gustav Diessl as Jack the Ripper.

  Paper Moon (1973)

  In gorgeous black and white (by Lázsló Kovács) that seems to come from Hungary as much as the Midwest, and with period costumes and décor by Polly Platt, Paper Moon is the best-looking of Peter Bogdanovich’s three hits in a row from the early 1970s. Every house and parlor repays scrutiny; any cap may have dollars in it. And in this deft story about looking sharply, one has to work to get every ounce of pleasure. You can say it’s a Fordian throwback, but Bogdanovich has a tougher, sadder view of human nature than Ford and Capra. Then there’s the degree to which a very sharp child has to educate her slow-witted father.

  It comes from a novel by Joe David Brown, Addie Pray, which was turned into a screenplay by Alvin Sargent. The latter admitted that he got too bored to read the ending of the novel, so almost inevitably he changed it. In the book, Addie goes to live with a grandmother. But the movie is cute enough to know that it has actually discovered a love between Addie and her father, Mose. So the two go off together. A sequel would not come amiss, but it is Hollywood’s principle to leave the really interesting films open-ended.

  The coup of the film would seem to be casting Ryan O’Neal as Mose and Tatum, his real daughter, as Addie. She was ten when she won the Supporting Actress Oscar, and she has done nothing else to remind one of this flawless performance. Was it being with her dad that did it? Was it that Bogdanovich at that time had an assured way with actors? Or is it so good a role that any adult could play it? Whatever answer you prefer, I think this is among the toughest views of children in the unduly sentimental range of the American film. The real movie star of the years in which Paper Moon was set was Shirley Temple, whose goodness was as true as her dimples. Whereas Addie is born old and wise—and thus this is a film that every ambitious child loves.

  Another point of view is to say that Tatum O’Neal is far more than a supporting actress in Paper Moon. Her role dominates the film. She is its mind, its conscience, its humor and fears. So if Tatum had got Best Actress (that went to Glenda Jackson in A Touch of Class), then a further justice could have been done—giving the Supporting Actress Oscar to Madeline Kahn for her superb Trixie Delight. There is much else, including John Hillerman in two parts, Randy Quaid, P. J. Johnson, and Burton Gilliam.

  Bogdanovich’s next film was Daisy Miller, starring Cybill Shepherd, but the first film done without Polly Platt. I cannot place later Bogdanovich films in this book, and I cannot entirely fathom his decline. But I feel the need, again, to pay tribute to these three in a row, the work of a man who deserves and deserved to be known in the pantheon of American moviemakers.

  The Parallax View (1974)

  There’s no way for an audience to inhabit The Parallax View—this alone would account for the film’s failure, without any testing of whether such steady play upon paranoia is ever going to be fun for anyone. But the very thing that seems
to have drawn Warren Beatty to the project serves to keep an audience from identifying with him. For it’s as if Beatty had entered his own Parallax test to see just how far he could go in being unlikeable in playing the lead role in a big picture. Why he should do that is another question, larger than this essay can take on, but it is close to what makes that intelligent man tick.

  The greatest men of our time have been going down—we know that feeling if we survived the sixties and the seventies—and reporter Joe Frady reckons there is a conspiracy, with a large corporation, Parallax, that hires and trains assassins for all purposes. He will get himself hired on. That promises a scoop, perhaps, but it also threatens a full examination of Frady’s personality. For he is not exactly Woodward and Bernstein. He is a user of people, a liar, a problem, someone who has not made peace with life. Is that why Parallax thinks he might be their kind of guy?

  No one ever did this kind of stealthy thriller better than Alan J. Pakula; and Pakula was a man acquainted with depression and searching analysis. He ticks off the levels of the plot like a doctor assessing symptoms, so Paula Prentiss and Hume Cronyn are erased as friends or helps to Frady, and he explores an increasing solitude that rather becomes Beatty’s uneasiness.

  There’s always the question of where this kind of intrigue can go. In Klute, Donald Sutherland did offer something like rescue to Jane Fonda. And in All the President’s Men, there was the available opening in which some could believe that Redford and Hoffman had saved the Constitution. But Joe Frady has no ties, and Pakula is disinclined to trust him with victory. Thus, there is a greater, much darker film waiting in the wings in which—while telling himself he is still on the job—Frady does become an assassin. And a good one. Beatty always had the chilly smile to get away with that sort of efficiency. And there is a provocateur in him: just look at the way he elects to be a girl when crowded by the belligerent redneck in the bar.

  So The Parallax View isn’t right, and its fateful climax is altogether too glib and tidy. But the scene on the aircraft is brilliant, and it shows Frady beginning to lose his mind. It’s one of those films in which two odd minds (Beatty and Pakula), no matter that they were at war (for Beatty tended to oppose everyone in those days), were on to something. The goal within reach, I think, was that Beatty might have recognized his killer’s face in a last shot. Just before he pulls a trigger.

  Paris Nous Appartient (1961)

  None of the first New Wave films took as long to make as Jacques Rivette’s Paris Nous Appartient. In the late fifties and early sixties, it became a legend of penurious dedication and steadfast anxiety. For, despite the optimism of its title, this was a film about unease, paranoia, and not belonging. Truffaut (who became one of its producers along the way) spoke of it as “the most directed” of New Wave films. He might have added that it was the most intellectually thorough, the most pensive and pessimistic, the film most alarmed by the world.

  Rivette had a loan from Cahiers du Cinema. The camera and the processing were on credit, and Rivette was given ends of film from other productions. Actors were hired as participants in the production—a way of saying they worked for nothing. And yet, the event that serves as the focus of the film’s story is an amateur production of Shakespeare’s Pericles, an undertaking done for its own sake and as a gesture of defiance to all the forces of materialism and mistrust that beset the city.

  Gerard (Giani Esposito) is putting on Pericles, but he is devastated by the death of Juan, who was composing music for the play. Juan’s death is a mystery—some say suicide, but there are hints of murder. Gerard starts seeing Terry (Françoise Prévost), Gerard’s girlfriend and a rather sinister fatale figure. She is also close to Philip (Daniel Crohem), an American who has fled McCarthyism and who believes that there is a hostile conspiracy in the city, out to get him and to stifle life and liberty.

  It’s part of Rivette’s great talent that he makes this threat feel immediate and modern, yet a relic of the cities dominated by Dr. Mabuse. One of the most resonant moments in the film is a private screening of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (Rivette had been a great admirer of Lang). Rivette’s camera style is objective, quite distant and classical—he is in the Renoir line, though without Renoir’s exuberance. But the editing is conspiratorial, always leading us to suspect that there is more to a situation than we grasped at first.

  Paris Nous Appartient was written by Rivette and Jean Gruault, though it’s clear that the script took on a life of its own over the years as the actors were encouraged to improvise. Charles Bitsch did the photography, and Philippe Arthuys wrote the music. Betty Schneider plays the young girl who is an inquirer after mystery and obscurity.

  The film did not do well, though many good judges regarded it as the most rich and thoughtful of the first New Wave films. In Breathless and Les 400 Coups there had been an affection for Paris that deserved Rivette’s title. But Rivette’s film was far more political than anything Godard had done yet. It spoke to a mood that would be made manifest as the sixties went on and assassinations defined our peril.

  Paris, Texas (1984)

  The movies play with age in a way that tempts us, for it caters to one of our most absurd hopes, the one about staying young, and never dying, perhaps, yet glowing like the sunset with wisdom or something that has been acquired in the process. But Paris, Texas—haunting as it is—is torn apart by this problem. The film opened in 1984, when Harry Dean Stanton was at least fifty-eight. Nastassja Kinski then was twenty-four.

  They are offered to us as Travis and Jane, a couple who have been married and who have a son, Hunter (Hunter Carson), who must be six. That would mean, almost certainly, that the child was conceived when Jane was seventeen. It’s not that such things can’t happen, nor that Travis might not have left the marriage four years ago and gone to live in the American western wilderness, so that Jane sent Hunter to live with Travis’s brother Walt (Dean Stockwell) and his wife, Anne (Aurore Clément). And I can accept the possibility that Travis comes walking out of the wilderness, that he collapses, and that Walt is called up to rescue him. So that the broken family comes back into focus, and Travis must consider how he can save them all.

  May I say that it would have been a different film if Travis had been played by the screenwriter, Sam Shepard, who was forty-one at the time, and handsome and commanding in a scarecrow kind of way. In other words, I can believe that the teenage Kinski could have fallen for him and driven him crazy. But I’m not sure that she would have noticed Harry Dean Stanton. Well, you may say, actors do as they are told, for actors are trying to execute the purpose of the writer and the director. And perhaps it is intended that Travis and Jane were “wrong” for each other from the start so that it is rather a union that Travis has dreamed.

  There is a long sequence, set in a kind of brothel in Houston, where Travis seeks Jane out in the effort to persuade her to resume life with Hunter. Its circumstances are odd: The two characters cannot really see each other; they do not look at each other. It is unbearably emotional and extended, and it is wonderfully played by both actors. And it works: Jane is reunited with Hunter while Travis watches this from an unbridgeable distance. It is nearly as if he is dead.

  Every frame of the film lets us know that its director, Wim Wenders, loves the West, as a real place and as a very theatrical setting. I daresay the same could be said for Sam Shepard. The music, by Ry Cooder, is about as perfect as such music could be, and Robby Müller’s imagery is very moving. But it doesn’t work, or cohere—even though it moves one, and I’m not sure that many films are as moving and as incoherent. It is shot through with a kind of attitudinizing male romanticism that one can easily see coming from Nicholas Ray, a man Wenders knew and loved and filmed at his death in Lightning over Water. And it is as uncomfortable as that film. I used to like it very much. I now see it as a “problem” film. And I wonder if I will live long enough to hate it.

  Une Partie de Campagne (1936)

  It is only forty minutes, and if by chance i
t was the first film you saw you might automatically conclude, Why should any picture ever be longer, or shorter? It is a Guy de Maupassant story, about a Parisian bourgeois family having its Sunday in the country. The young woman, engaged to a dead end, meets a man on holiday at the country inn. They have a brief sexual encounter. Was it love or just a moment’s sunlight on an overcast day? So life goes on, ruined, or whatever. Who knows—perhaps it would all have been worse if the young woman had gone off with her adventurer.

  Jean Renoir took his cast and crew to a place on the river, the Seine, near Marlotte. He hoped for sun, in the mood of the day-trippers, and there are flashes of warm light in the film, but most of the time it rained—and one doubts whether rain or wind ruffling the water have ever been filmed with such feeling. As if he foresaw delays and anxieties, Renoir elected to play the patron at the country inn, Père Poulain, and there he is pattering in and out of the action, doing his best to offer encouragement. You can see now how it is a trial run for La Règle du Jeu, an experiment in being behind and in front of the camera at the same time—in both cases, Renoir is the host at the uneasy party, doing his best to keep the event moving along.

  All this happened in 1936 and was not released until 1946. How easy it must have been then for the film to pick up its coda: “Des années ont passé avec des dimanches tristes comme des lundis…”

  But do not forget the astonishing company: Jacques Becker was an assistant director, Henri Cartier-Bresson was another; Claude Renoir was on the camera; Marguerite Renoir would be the editor. And then, watching and absorbing, there were Claude Heymann, Luchino Visconti, and Yves Allégret. Joseph Kosma would do the great music—can’t you hear the waltz that drifts down the river from Sunday to Thursday?