I think this is the paradox Pauline Kael was getting at—and I know I count myself in the band of people at the movies who say, Please, if you’re going to take me to a concentration camp don’t do it too well. Because your skill is not quite the point. I am troubled throughout The Pawnbroker, though I do not doubt the sincerity of those who made it. The script by David Friedkin and Morton Fine is from a novel by Edward Lewis Wallant. Quincy Jones did a heartfelt score that I find excruciating. And Rod Steiger is Sol. For me, Steiger became a nearly unwatchable actor as he grew older, and I fear that The Pawnbroker was the decisive step on that journey. He was inventive, ingenious, and egotistical as an actor—and I suspect that in such a man, Primo Levi–like, the ego has been burned away.
Peeping Tom (1960)
In the late fifties, all over the world, a shudder passed through filmmaking, the passing tread of a ghost or a warning. It took away the old innocence, and stopped some filmmakers dead in their tracks. From others, it drew a confessional outburst that might be vindicating or self-incriminating. Around 1960 there is a cluster of revealing films which seem to know the game is up—the magic is over. And they admit it, uncertain whether to be proud or ashamed, exultant or horrified: Rio Bravo, Vertigo, Touch of Evil, Some Like It Hot, L’Avventura, Hiroshima Mon Amour, Psycho, Through a Glass Darkly, The Exterminating Angel, Lola, Peeping Tom. As I say, the moods are various (Peeping Tom and Lola), some films are ends and some beginnings. But some secret law of film’s displacement of reality has been felt.
So Michael Powell makes Peeping Tom, and has every reason to be taken aback by its vitriolic reception, but none at all—unless he intuits that loss of magic—for giving up, for going away to Gloucestershire. After all, to a man like Powell, vitriol was syrup on his pancakes!
There is still not enough known about Powell in the late fifties. But let’s offer these things: His great days (the wave upon wave of the late forties) were over. A drab surge of realism was coming to British film (it was exemplified in the Woodfall films) and it was the smack of documentary that Powell loathed. His partnership with Emeric Pressburger had ended, and it’s clear how far Emeric guarded Micky against his worst arrogance. Without Pressburger, Powell was vulnerable. And the recent films had done poorly; they seemed out-of-date.
And so Powell makes an alliance with Leo Marks (a former cryptographer), and Marks pours out this story of a young man in film—a focus puller—obsessed with the relationship between film and fear. He likes to photograph women in the moment of their murder. It would be a color film (photography by Otto Heller), but it made London feel like the city where Peter Lorre’s M is hunted, a place where every passageway is psychological and anxious.
Powell gulped down the script (and Marks offered it as a shooting script) and then added his own things: the legion of redheaded women; himself and his own son in the home-movie footage of Mark Lewis’s tortured upbringing; and Carl Boehm (instead of Laurence Harvey) as Mark—surely Boehm could be Lorre’s brother.
The result is a masterpiece full of dread, raw with the vulgarity Powell allowed himself even as he imitated the aesthete. It is cold, nasty, and alienated and it knows how far those things are akin to the reptile machinery of film itself. It is a film in which you cannot tell disgust from exhilaration, because it is gripped by the real sadism of a serial killer. It’s no wonder critics were shocked. The film was so far ahead of the game. It was as if a hero had proved a torture master. And something in Powell (only fifty-five) felt compelled to admit not just to what he had seen, but to how far the stress on seeing—on being a camera—might be a moral disaster.
Penny Serenade (1941)
During this prolonged tearjerker, there is a birthday party where Applejack (Edgar Buchanan), the family friend, presents Irene Dunne with a box of handkerchiefs. “You can never have too many,” he mutters shyly, or like someone who has read the whole script. Some movies are padded out with “laughter pauses”; this one gets to 118 minutes because of crying spells.
At first, everything seems promising. How could one resist the prospect of people as smart and eloquent as Irene Dunne and Cary Grant being married? But wait, Grant is a bit of a big shot here, yet with an air of unreliability beneath it all. You wonder if it’s going to be one of his great performances. Well, they lose a child and decide to adopt—they squeak through the process, even if his income is uncertain. They want a little boy, but they settle for a girl named Trina.
All of this is in a screenplay by Morrie Ryskind, from a Martha Cheavens story, that uses the awkward framing device of Dunne listening to old records accumulated during a marriage but on the point of divorce—it’s the only way the title works. They handle the baby. There is even a droll scene where as the adoptive parents pass the hot potato back and forth, so Applejack steps in and gives the baby a bath. The time comes when probationary adoption has to be approved and Grant has lost his income. The film never says why, and never explores his aversion to work or discipline. But he goes before the adoption official (Beulah Bondi) and a judge and works his way toward tears. Then, after her first Christmas play, the daughter suddenly dies—off camera—from an unexplained illness. The couple crack up, and they are on the point of splitting forever when Beulah Bondi calls again with news of a little boy just like the one they asked for in the first place.
It was a Columbia film, directed by George Stevens, and Cary Grant was actually nominated for an Oscar. It’s an excruciating experience, not only because the intelligence of the central players is strangled in the parent trap—they never talk about anything else—but because the step progression is relentlessly determined to get the tears out of us. George Stevens is not that much in evidence, though the monotonous household interiors are filmed (by Joseph Walker) with as much variety as possible.
Made on the eve of war, Penny Serenade was a big success, presumably because of every fear of loss it touched on. Not its least problem is that the children are so obvious and uninteresting. So American? Thank God, in real life, they manage to be so much more varied than the ones found for Hollywood pictures. The infant at the adoption hearing, a two-year-old, is used shamelessly for reaction cutaways, and her somewhat older sister is a bore—is it a malady of boredom that sweeps her away? But children will lose interest if their parents talk about nothing but the children. Here’s a PhD thesis: that hardly anyone in Hollywood had ever experienced a normal family life, and so hysterical dysfunction mounts.
People on Sunday (1929)
The conventional history of German cinema in the twenties and thirties still functions in a poisoned nutshell, it’s from Caligari to Hitler, the story of expressionism, formalism, and vigorous design eventually crushing life and real light in the medium. It’s halfway true and half-baked, and nothing gives the game away so quickly as People on Sunday—or Menschen am Sonntag, that delicious urban trifle, put together by as cocksure a group of kids as ever collaborated on a new sort of movie. So, on the one hand, People on Sunday is like a launching pad for so many young talents. On the other, it leads to a simple question: How was this made in Germany in 1929? And the how is no small matter: It’s as if the eye of G. W. Pabst (the closest Germany came to a naturalist or a humanist) had been joined with that of the French New Wave. It’s as if the iconic fatalism of Louise Brooks suddenly succumbed to the sun and shadow and the flirty spontaneity of Anna Karina.
That comparison is not remote: for this is, quite simply, one of those weekend pictures where guys photograph their girlfriends—almost as a way of getting them into bed. Forget and forgive the brooding cityscapes of M and The Testament of Dr. Mabuse, this is about girl watching and inviting pickups off to the park for a picnic, a beer, a swim, and who knows where it will lead? This is a film about boredom and the craze for tanned skin. There were boys and girls in Germany—not just driven archetypes who never saw the sun! Just as its title suggests, it’s not about the archetypal humiliated doorman, or Lulu and Jack the Ripper, it’s about “people” on Sunday, ordi
nary people. Indeed, it is one of the few films that shows how between 1919 and 1939 you could be German and ordinary.
I hope there is no need to stress so large a political message, quite apart from its artistic or cinematic meaning.
How did it happen? Well, the oldest of the gang, and very likely the one with the camera was Eugen Schüfftan. He was a very technical photographer and soon he would work for Duvivier and Carné, but in the German context I suspect it was Schüfftan who loved the real light that fell in summer, a quality that comes back in Leni Riefenstahl’s Olympiad and even in some of the burnished views of Nuremberg in Triumph of the Will. Billy Wilder supposedly did the script from an outline by Curt Siodmak—and it’s tart, saucy, sexy. The direction was shared by Robert Siodmak and Edgar G. Ulmer. And Fred Zinnemann helped load the cameras at first.
But the eye-opening seductive force has to do with Berlin, the real light, the feeling of summer stupor and the mutual sensuality of a cast with names nobody knew—Brigitte Borchert, Christl Ehlers, Annie Schreyer, Wolfgang von Waltershausen, and Erwin Splettstösser.
Pépé le Moko (1937)
It is one of the great ideas in film: A Parisian gangster, a jewel thief and a bank robber, has to take shelter from the increasing police scrutiny; so he hides in the Casbah in Algiers—the Arab part of town, a no-go area for the police; but then along comes a beautiful socialite, a Parisienne, who catches his eye—he is a romantic; and in time he gives up the Casbah to be with her—and he is taken.
It came from a novel by Henri La Barthe, and it was produced by the Hakim brothers—Robert, Raymond, and André. They were Egyptian, but Pépé le Moko was their launch, and it led to an extraordinary and diverse career as producers (it included La Bête Humaine, The Southerner, Plein Soleil, L’Eclisse, Eva, and many others). They got Julien Duvivier to direct the picture and Henri Jeanson to do dialogue for it. They also elected to shoot some location footage in Algeria, while making a superb Casbah set in a Paris studio—with production design by Jacques Krauss. The photography was by Marc Fossard and Jules Kruger, and the music was a clever mixture of French romantic and North African.
Still, in history it rates as a Jean Gabin film. Gabin was thirty-three, not far from beautiful, but tough-looking, too, and while he became known as an actor who worked with Carné and Renoir, he owed a lot at first to Julien Duvivier who had cast him in Maria Chapdelaine, La Bandera, and La Belle Équipe, before making him the gift of Pépé le Moko, Parisian and North African, famous yet anonymous, very realistic yet self-destructively in love with love and with Mireille Balin, a beautiful former fashion model who would also have a great success with Gabin in Jean Gremillon’s Gueule d’Amour (1937). In two-shots, she was elegant and he was raffish, but there was an erotic charge in their friction that was unmistakable. It’s a bit of a mystery why Mlle. Balin did not last—she may have been set back by the way American interests sought to kill every print of Pépé le Moko once its remake, Algiers (1938), was set up.
That was a Walter Wanger production, directed by John Cromwell, in some places on a shot-for-shot basis lifted from Duvivier. Charles Boyer now was Pépé (not nearly tough enough) and Hedy Lamarr was Gaby (let me say it: not as beautiful as Mireille Balin). The American version also starred Sigrid Gurie, Joseph Calleia, Alan Hale, Gene Lockhart, and Johnny Downs. The French film had included Line Noro, Lucas Gridoux (as the sleazy cop, Inspector Slimane), Gabriel Gabrio, Fernand Charpin, Marcel Dalio, and Gaston Modot.
Of course, that kind of imperial suppression of competing films was common, and nearly always stupid. In recent years, however, Duvivier’s Pépé le Moko—shot and created with skills worthy of Michael Curtiz—has reappeared in very good prints, and now the odd vulnerability of Gabin is reestablished. He was a great star, and one of the world’s most natural screen actors.
Performance (1970)
Performance is a mirror: You look in it, and it shows you a kind of self you fear or dream of. If you were alive in London in the 1960s, the experience is certainly touched by nostalgia, though it leaves you knowing that you never quite had it that bad or that good. If you’re on the artistic side, then the story teaches you that you can be a hard man. But if you’re from the underworld, then it gives you heart—you might be an artist, too. It’s part of the chronic English addiction to noir. It’s a fairy story, poised between the godheads of Aleister Crowley and Jorge Luis Borges. It has moments that belong to the history of the musical. It has passages worthy of an anthology of the most pretentious films ever made. It takes itself so seriously that it can be very funny. And it has useful hints on how several people can inhabit one bath.
Clearly, it’s romantic in its notion that the outlaw and the artist are alike, or twin figures. That comes from Donald Cammell, a remarkable fringe figure in film history, never satisfied or resolved, a suicide finally, but an emblematic hero in the rushing progress of change in Britain in the sixties. He wrote the script—he was the source of the ideas in the film. Then Nicolas Roeg came on board as his codirector and as the film’s cameraman, perhaps because Cammell needed technical help, but also as a way of helping Roeg into a directing career.
Cammell’s script was enriched a good deal by the input of David Litvinoff, someone on the edges of the art world and the underworld. Sandy Lieberson was a key figure as the producer. When Warner Brothers hated it, Frank Mazzola helped edit the final version. Christopher Gibbs was a design consultant.
It’s the story of Chas, a gangster on the run, and Turner, a rock singer in exile from the world. Cammell had wanted Marlon Brando and Mick Jagger in the parts. He ended up with James Fox and Jagger. They are both good enough to hold the film in place, though the most powerful figure onscreen is Anita Pallenberg as Pherber, the seductive impresario.
Performance has to be seen—it is very visual. But it is very heady, too—and that element requires patience. The film may not have worn well. Cammell made other films, but never the masterpiece he required. Roeg became a very interesting director, and then a terribly vague figure, deeply affected by Cammell-like urgings. The film is not anywhere near as good as the stories that surround it. But if you ever doubt the tempest of repressed sensuality and pretension in the English soul, then Performance is a film to grapple with. By now there is enough written about it to nearly bury the film. So hold on to moments, like Jagger singing “Memo from Turner.” Also with Michèle Breton, Stanley Meadows, Johnny Shannon, and Allan Cuthbertson.
Persona (1965)
It could not be simpler. A great actress, Elisabeth Vogler (Liv Ullmann), was playing in the last performance of a production of Electra. In the second act, she stopped. She would not take a prompt or a cue. It lasted a minute. Then she went on again, as if nothing had happened. She laughed afterward—she said she had this terrible fit of laughter in her. She had supper as usual with her husband. But next morning she was speechless. “This state has now lasted for three months.” Tests reveal nothing in the way of a health problem or a hysterical reaction. These are the notes given to Nurse Alma (Bibi Andersson) as she prepares to meet Elisabeth Vogler. This is the start of Ingmar Bergman’s Persona.
The nurse is amiable, decent, professional—I daresay she takes some pride in having common sense, a practical nature, a basic belief in people being healed. I mean, a nurse has got to believe that, just as an actress has got to hope that there are people out there who will be reached by the messages she believes she is sending. Anyway, the nurse cannot stand the silence. So she begins to talk and the film settles into a rhythm that we know—from being at the movies: one person talks and the other listens—and the listener becomes more powerful, for the more the talking person talks, the more surely plea and desperation creep in. And Alma the sensible is a mess—why do you think nurses wear starched white clothes, with a watch clipped to their lapel, if they aren’t in terror of disorder?
But Alma has become an actress, too. It may be that in her jumbled life she has never talked so much to anyone, never performed,
and never had the chance to find that level of self-expression. And thus Alma comes to the discovery that actresses know, and which sometimes tempts them into silence: that they are being used by the listeners, that they have become fantasy creatures, imaginary figures, personalities to play with. It could not be simpler: It is black-and-white, a little over 80 minutes, a film that might have been made over a long holiday weekend for next to nothing. And it is about vampirism and the power of one personality over another; it is about acting and being; it is about performance and silence. And it is what we had for films once upon a time. It is beside the point to say that Ullmann and Andersson are good in the picture. Rather, they are an event of primary importance: No one should be allowed to act professionally without seeing Persona. Of course, in life one cannot impose those rules. All I know is that with students—not just of film, but of every subject—I have shown Persona and had the conversation that followed go on and on until natural darkness overtook us. It could not be more complicated, or less lucid. It is as if Elisabeth Vogler fell silent in Electra because of her own memory of the film. We are in performance: It is a religious condition.
Peter Ibbetson (1935)
Gogo and Mimsey are childhood sweethearts living in Paris. But when Gogo’s mother dies, an uncle ships him off to London. He grows up to be Peter Ibbetson, an architect, but not a happy man, in the nineteenth century. In Paris, on a visit, he meets a girl, Agnes, and remembers Mimsey. A job sends him to Yorkshire to restore stables belonging to the Duke of Towers. He meets Mary, the Duchess of Towers, and feels he knows her. Why not? She is Mimsey from his past. When Peter tries to run away with Mary, the duke intervenes and is killed in an accident. Peter is given the blame and life imprisonment. His back is broken. But he can still find Mary in his mind.
'Have You Seen...?' Page 105