'Have You Seen...?'

by David Thomson

  Several hands worked on this script, and I suspect that the film only really materialized as Garry Marshall brought it to life. Gere is perfect—hardly there, without odor or disease. Hector Elizondo makes the film as the spirit of the hotel. Jason Alexander sucks up every bit of loathing. Laura San Giacomo has the hapless task of indicating what a real whore is like. And Julia Roberts is about as enchanting and magical and cloud-cuckoo-land as anyone has ever been in American film. She was Oscar-nominated. And in Hollywood’s Golden Age she would have won by acclamation. But for 1990 the Oscar went to Kathy Bates in Misery. And—so I am told—millions of Americans all over the world dream every night of being that fierce defender of literature (who probably is still a virgin).

  Prince of the City (1981)

  Robert Daley’s Prince of the City was a nonfiction book, published in 1975, about Detective Robert Leuci, a narcotics officer in the NYPD’s Special Investigating Unit who becomes drawn into underground investigation and informing. At first the book was bought for the movies by David Rabe and Brian De Palma, and one can only be afraid of the theatrics they might have imposed on it. Another writer, Jay Presson Allen, saw the book—far more shrewdly—as a police procedural ideal for Sidney Lumet. Eventually, that’s how it worked out, with Allen producing and writing a script after Lumet had done a treatment. They reckoned it would make a three-hour movie and it’s close to that at 167 minutes, yet it had great understanding from studio boss John Calley.

  Lumet’s sense of reality and police behavior are at the root of the film, yet it does break through into that fascinating territory familiar from espionage films and the best modern police stories, of a hall of mirrors where no one is quite sure who can be trusted. Once upon a time, informers and audiences alike had a certain battered faith in turning up the truth, cleansing the system and reforming it. The great power of Prince of the City lies in the mounting awareness that no such hopes are justified, that the bureaucratic system is always likely to defend itself. It’s the more striking in that Prince of the City was made before the great age of Internet and cell-phone hookups made ordinary human pursuit nearly impossible.

  This may seem a dry subject, but it’s clear already, I think, that the computer screen and the cell-phone closeup now dominate this kind of story—and inadvertently dramatize the isolation of the characters. We have somehow sold out our human rights in a deal whereby the toys—the machines—are meant to be solace enough in a world where we have less and less chance of uncovering the layers of corruption. So it’s fair to say of even Prince of the City that in following a weak hero it was surely true to life, yet dispiriting, too. Internal Affairs, nearly a decade later, may be a more compelling film just because it clings to that cliché—a flamboyant villain (the Richard Gere role) as opposed to the new truth, that nearly everyone is shadowed by corruption.

  Prince of the City is still very effective, beautifully shot by Andrzej Bartkowiak, with good production design by Tony Walton and costumes by Anna Hill Johnstone. Treat Williams played the lead role (and it’s telling that he has never established himself as an iconic figure—he is an ordinary cop) and there is outstanding support from Jerry Orbach (who served more time in the NYPD than some cops), Richard Foronjy, Don Billett, Kenny Marino, Carmine Caridi, Tony Page, Norman Parker, Paul Roebling, Bob Balaban, James Tolkan, Steve Inwood, Lindsay Crouse, Lee Richardson, and many others.

  Prince of the City is neither uplifting nor encouraging, and it helplessly suggests that citizens get used to the fix being in. At the same time, its insistence on reality as compared with the unfailing integrity of the leads in series like Law and Order is a last commitment to candor.

  The Prisoner of Zenda (1937)

  It’s true that this adventure movie was conceived and carried out by David O. Selznick in the troubled time of the love affair between Mrs. Simpson and Edward VIII. Selznick, you see, was sufficiently Anglophile and enough of a monarchist to care about the threat to noblesse oblige—and he was still so good a showman as to see that The Prisoner of Zenda was a terrific trick for getting romantic audiences inside a court’s inner circle and into the love affairs that can leave crowns and coronets at a tipsy angle. In other words, he took the nonsense seriously—and the history of movies attests to the virtue of that principle.

  There was the novel by Anthony Hope (published in 1894), and done twice already as a silent film. This version is credited as follows: script by John Balderston from an adaptation by Wells Root of a play by Edward Rose; directed by John Cromwell. And no one wishes to allege that those gentlemen were not in attendance. But we know that Sidney Howard and George Cukor were asked for suggestions, and everyone dreaded Selznick’s own brainwaves. If ever there was a picture put together by the system of taking classics and getting a movie at the other end, this is it. Yes, it worked out fine, but why? Is it the story? The look of the thing? The cast? Or is it just that in 1937 most people were happy to see this kind of story? One telling point: By the 1952 remake (often shot-for-shot identical), Zenda was clearly a kids’ entertainment. But in 1937 it was a flick for adults, too.

  In hindsight, the color of the 1952 version seems automatic and drab, whereas James Wong Howe’s rich black and white in 1937 is far more atmospheric and romantic, and far better at getting the forests, lakes, and castles of Zenda (just past Pasadena). The direction is as swift and tidy as a movie that is itching to arrive at swordplay. And the pacing is without fault.

  Still, it’s the efficiency and glamour of the playing (or the casting) that really carries the picture. No, you can’t tell Ronald Colman’s Rudolf Rassendyll from his king—so at least you understand the dilemma of all the other noble idiots in the picture. In fact, Colman serves as a ball boy to some more favored players: Madeleine Carroll, who is so lovely as Flavia that it’s easy to believe that Selznick’s partner, Jock Whitney, fell for her; Mary Astor, who is allowed for once to be naughty as Antoinette; C. Aubrey Smith as Colonel Zapt; David Niven as Fritz; Raymond Massey as Michael—or Black Michael, as the cast has it, in case you’ve missed the hints in Massey’s acting. I have left the best to last, because Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., was usually such a junior and so wet. But really his Rupert of Hentzau is delicious, and one of the most appealing villains in screen history. I suspect Rupert was grandfather to a man named Bond.

  The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes (1970)

  This is a famous tragedy, so where should we begin? Well, in the first instance, Billy Wilder’s preferred cut was a 200-minute film, but the picture as eventually released was 125 minutes (and it frequently feels painfully slow). It cost $10 million, with enormous sets—one, an ocean liner, turned out so big, they couldn’t film in the studio pool and had to go to sea! It earned $1 million. And Wilder himself consented to the massive cuts, including a couple of self-contained Holmes “cases.” But what are self-contained cases doing in a film of this length?

  Wilder had been thinking about Holmes since his days in Berlin. He felt drawn to the cool brain of the man, the misogyny, the boredom, the disbelief in all sentiment. As early as the 1950s, Wilder had had talks with Alan Jay Lerner, Frederick Loewe, and Moss Hart about a musical, with Rex Harrison as the detective. That passed, but then Wilder and I. A. L. Diamond started working on a script (it would be a ten-year venture) with dreams of Peter O’Toole and Peter Sellers in the two roles.

  It’s clear that Wilder planned something fresh on Holmes—a new but searching character study; an explanation of his problem with women, and his flirtation with homosexuality. Wilder had fought censorship through the forties and fifties, slipping his sex, nastiness, and double meanings in between tablets of stone. Then censorship gave up and said, virtually, Do what you like. A case can be made that such opponents of censorship as Hitchcock, Preminger, and Wilder were suddenly lost. They had specialized in being naughty—now they could be frank. And I suspect that Wilder was not ready to make an open film about gayness. The sexual material was left naked by the new fashions, but Wilder was not t
he man to be so open. So the heart of the film is muffled.

  Then something strange happened: O’Toole dropped out and Wilder replaced him with Robert Stephens after a very brief meeting, without ever seeing Stephens on stage or screen. He simply told Stephens to be perfect and then nagged him endlessly about fine nuances until Stephens was lost. It is said the actor even attempted suicide in the crisis that developed. So I think it has to be admitted that the casting was wrong—Stephens is not right for what Wilder intends. Nor is Colin Blakely much help as Watson.

  Alexandre Trauner did the sets and spared nothing, but the sets are inert, not fun, and not often explored by the action. Miklós Rózsa gave a treasured violin concerto—and it’s not memorable. Christopher Challis did the color photography, but it’s hard to recollect the imagery. Toward the very end, there are excellent scenes between Holmes and the woman (Genevieve Page—Wilder turned down Jeanne Moreau) that are good enough to show a way to reconstruct the film with Holmes truly uncertain over his own sexual nature. The long version plays sometimes. But it’s no help: In so many ways, this great attempt was wrong. Also with Christopher Lee, Irene Handl, Clive Revill, Tamara Toumanova, Stanley Holloway.

  The Producers (1968)

  Everybody now has seen The Producers onstage, or they have their stories about how they just missed a ticket. Long ago, the daring of the show and its concept have collapsed under the weight of the money it has earned. And yet, as its success threatens to surmount so many records in show business, when Springtime for Hitler opens in the show within the show, some members of the “audience” walk out until it is perceived as a satire on Hitler. And all of this began nearly forty years ago—it says something odd about Mel Brooks, and us, that the story hasn’t grown along the way. It just sits there, the supposed comic tribute to a Jewish way with show business and making money that has become money itself. How can or should Brooks keep the aghast tone of self-congratulation out of his voice?

  The strength of the film, it seems to me, is still the rare charm in bringing Zero Mostel and Gene Wilder together as Max Bialystock and Leo Bloom. Thank God they don’t have to do numbers together—but that’s because they are so intent on the other numbers, the ones that could make a success out of a disaster. They will put on a flop show and take the money from investors. The worst play they can find is Springtime for Hitler, a happier reprise of that story, written by Franz Liebkind (Kenneth Mars). But when the first light of “satire” dawns on the audience, Springtime becomes a hit and the guys have to blow up the theater to stop it all. So they end in jail with plans for a new show, Prisoners of Love.

  Mostel and Brooks shone with fondness for each other. It was as if they knew that they were being so scurrilous and inventively funny about Jewishness that their game together was a riposte to Nazism—instead of a deeply plausible response. It was as if they had elected to believe that show business was truly the Jewish religion. Non-Jews could see other things in Jewry, but the Jews themselves realized that show business and storytelling were the secret. And these two dainty, filthy guys together gave the first film a touching relationship that held together in the spasms of schtick that took over. For me, succeeding partnerships—especially Lane and Broderick—never came near this furtive pleasure. Never even seemed Jewish.

  Like most things touched by Mel Brooks, it has all gone too far, and yet the first film—coming in those smugly disapproving sixties—was truly out-of-its-mind and in-our-face. It was a small outrage, but that was its métier. As a huge success, it suddenly raises so many other, larger worries—like would these two guys really do this? Or like raising the hope for a far more dangerous work, one in which a couple of schmucks run coach trips to Auschwitz and Dachau, with a sideline in selling Nazi memorabilia and souvenirs.

  Providence (1977)

  You could take a long time to tell the story of Providence, but you can tell it very quickly, too. Clive Langham (John Gielgud) is a famous writer, a novelist. He lives in a large house on an estate, and he is dying in some pain. He is writing a book, or trying to, and he is reliving the events of his life, yet trying not to. That double flex is the energy of the film, for his novel is peopled by versions of the figures in his life: his son, the lawyer, Claude (Dirk Bogarde); his illegitimate son, Kevin Woodford (David Warner); Claude’s wife, Sonia (Ellen Burstyn); and his own wife, Molly, and his mistress, Helen (both figures filled by Elaine Stritch).

  The script is by David Mercer (who is referred to with fond exasperation in the story). The astonishingly atmospheric camerawork is by Ricardo Aronovich. The art direction—in houses inhabited and houses that are like stage sets (and meant to be)—is by Jacques Saulnier. The costumes are by Claude Serre, John Bates, and Yves Saint-Laurent. The music is a deliciously old-fashioned score by Miklós Rózsa.

  And the director is Alain Resnais, the maker of Night and Fog and Hiroshima, Mon Amour (which is to say, grave works that lead us to the brink of our modern abysses). But Resnais is also the director of Last Year at Marienbad, which is constructed on the idea of play or gamesmanship. And Providence is one of those rare masterpieces able to stand back from the process of creation—in this case the making of a novel—and see what a serious game it is.

  There is no doubt in my mind that the very opening—in which a camera tracks through the large, deserted house, to find a man who drops something on the floor, is a reference to the opening of Citizen Kane. In turn, that is a way of saying that some of the wisest and greatest works in our art are reflections on the very process of making film.

  The film is very funny, not just in terms of its incidents, but in the way a crazy rhyming holds reality and the novel together. There is a sublime surprise here that amounts to the most basic openness to what happens in life. And it’s part of that that the performances are exquisite: the archetypal lecherous cantankerousness, the thirst for wit in Elaine Stritch; the elegance and the profundity of Ellen Burstyn; the intelligence and the gay loneliness of Dirk Bogarde—this is not just one of his best performances, but a confession from the man; and the divine mixture of the spirit and the smart, witty flesh in John Gielgud.

  As for Resnais, let us just note the effortless and eloquent English here from a director who has no superior at his use of the French language. This is literature written for and on the screen. The cast also includes Samson Fainsilber, Tanya Lopert, Cyril Luckham, Milo Sperber, Peter Arne, and Kathryn Leigh Scott.

  The Prowler (1951)

  Nothing could be tidier. A married woman (Evelyn Keyes) reports a prowler. Van Heflin is the cop who comes to investigate. They become attached. They kill her husband. It all ends in the desert, with the police pursuing Heflin up a manmade mountain of earth. The possibility lingers that Heflin himself was the prowler at the beginning.

  This was Joe Losey’s third film, after The Boy with Green Hair and The Lawless. He was asked to do it by a strange Austrian producer going under the name of S. P. Eagle. The budget was low, the schedule was nineteen days, but Eagle had acquired Arthur Miller to do the camerawork. With a veteran like that on hold, Losey elected to save time by going for long takes. The result is his first deeply personal and unmistakable film, a bleak parable on the restless urge in postwar America to get ahead.

  There was a screenplay of sorts, but Losey was able to get Dalton Trumbo and Hugo Butler to do a substantial rewrite in which their terse nihilism would match the unsentimental (and makeup-deprived) performances of the two leads. Keyes and Heflin are brilliant, and a demonstration of how many small stars lived in the hope of getting this kind of B picture. The overall regard for the characters—as helpless figures driven past morality by ambition—may have helped foster the suspicion that Losey (and others) were Communist. It’s far more the fusion of film noir with an adult intelligence. And that may be why The Prowler seldom rates in the self-pitying annals of film noirs we love to see over and over again. The violence and the human weakness are not neurotic here. Nor are they gloated over. They are the heartbeat of the
nation.

  Losey would survive. He moved on and did more great work. Robert Aldrich, his assistant director on The Prowler, had a few good years to come. But Heflin and Keyes are the real casualties, two very smart players who hardly knew that this very modest picture was probably going to be their greatest moment.

  One other aspect needs treatment. As he came to make The Prowler, Losey had lunch with John Huston (an unofficial assistant to Eagle, or Sam Spiegel). Losey was genuinely asking for an education, and Huston said, “Remember, the screen is three-dimensional.” What he meant, Losey gathered, was that the illusion of depth and space was vital. It was in that spirit that he used John Hubley unofficially as a design consultant—the actual sets were credited to Boris Leven. And so The Prowler is the first Losey film in which we feel a keynote of his vision: the interaction of place and character, and the way in which the camera can move through space with the human figures. Example: The brilliant shot of Heflin in his bare lodging, endlessly throwing paper basketballs at the lamp bowl. Physical obsession can be established in a great movie in five seconds (if you see the ceiling shot).