'Have You Seen...?'

by David Thomson

  Que Viva Mexico (1931–32)

  You can propose that Sergei Eisenstein’s Que Viva Mexico is not a fictional film in any accepted sense of the term. But Eisenstein believed it was a collection of stories (more than a documentary). Above all, the story of its fortunes—tragic, comic, essentially cinematic—is irresistible and it helps furnish the definition of what the French have called film maudit—more or less, a film ruined or spoiled by something, usually “them.” But remember: Every time the word them is employed, it’s “us” using it.

  In the spring of 1930, in Paris, Jesse Lasky of Paramount met Eisenstein and offered him and his associates, Tisse and Alexandrov, a modest contract if they would come to Hollywood ($900 a week to cover the three men). They arrived. They set up house, and they wrote scripts that struck Paramount as too expensive, impossible, or far too grim. (Others have disappointed Paramount for far larger sums.) The last of these was a version of Dreiser’s An American Tragedy. So the trio were stranded when Paramount terminated the deal. It was then that Eisenstein thought of Mexico.

  It’s fairly clear that he had no wish to return to the USSR, and who can blame him? The painter Diego Rivera encouraged him to see Mexico and film it. They went to Chaplin for help (loaded with money) and he sent them to Upton Sinclair (well-off, but not loaded). It’s a measure of Sinclair’s curiosity and geniality that he and his wife advanced $25,000 for the trip, on a deal that would give the Russians 10 percent profit once costs were covered. So they set off.

  The idea was for a four-month trip. It turned into fifteen months. Tisse went crazy for the faces, the pyramids, the decoration, and the light. Eisenstein loved the liberty (there was an element of homosexual holiday in it). They sent footage back to Sinclair for processing. He was more than impressed—but how did it all add up? It went on and on, with Eisenstein’s concept enlarging as he learned more about Mexico. Then Stalin cabled Sinclair to say he didn’t approve of Eisenstein. The footage was ravishing but unworkable. The money ran out. Eisenstein and his fellows went back to Russia (to harder times), and Sinclair kept the footage.

  It was decades later before this material went back to Moscow. By then (1979) Alexandrov was the only one of the three left. He gave it the best shape he could, which is close to nil. He put a solemn commentary on it (read by Sergei Bondarchuk) and a dreadful musical score. It explains nothing about Mexico, but it is worth seeing for its intense, intermittent beauty and because of the atmospheric insinuations of how Eisenstein and the others were having the time of their life.

  So, no, it’s not a feature—but it cries out for one. And in a macabre way, changing names and numbers, the same story could be told of Orson Welles’s It’s All True, about ten years later and based in Rio. The best of the Welles footage is as lovely and as open-ended as the Tisse footage. It shows that Truth is a flimsy justification when you’re dealing with film and money, and people are expecting a story. But the fascination of the great films maudits never dies. Is there even a secret urge in all great film artists to be maudit?

  The Quiet Man (1952)

  As John Ford’s daughter, Barbara, surveyed the footage of The Quiet Man, she enthused in a letter to her father that it made Ireland look like “a fairy land.” In time, Winton Hoch and Archie Stout shared an Oscar for making it look so enchanted and emerald, despite much adverse weather. And so far we’re nowhere near the story itself.

  Ford saw Ireland for the first time in 1921 (just after the birth of his son Patrick), and I think that to understand his conception of America it is important to see how he regarded Ireland. What follows from that is his helpless yielding to wishful thinking, and his celebration in The Quiet Man of a folksy, prettified Ireland. That twilight was finally set aside with the country’s accession to the European Economic Community. The Quiet Man was a popular success in parts of the world accustomed to send money for guns to the IRA. It brought no comfort to those Irishmen who hoped to free their country from unreason, poverty, the tyranny of the Catholic Church, and the addled mixture of coziness, self-pity, boozy charm, and brutality known as “Irishness.” The Quiet Man is the cheerful imprisonment of a real country in the confines of folklore and picture postcard. (It is the stifling of the voices of Joyce, Shaw, and Wilde, all of whom loathed the sentimentalization of Ireland.) Rather than see the real thing—the facts—Ford settled for the legend. He said as much about America, and it is time for this dangerous pipe dream to be exposed.

  The film came from a Saturday Evening Post story of 1933, by Maurice Walsh, in which an Irish boxer goes home to Kerry, falls in love with a local girl, but finds himself at odds with the girl’s brother over the dowry. There was a plan to do the film with Alex Korda just after the war, but that fell through. A few years later, for Argosy and Republic, it was revived. Richard Llewellyn did a first script, and then Frank Nugent turned it into a shooting script.

  The boxer was made a bigger man; he became Sean Thornton, and John Wayne had the part. Rather more important to the lovelorn Ford was getting Maureen O’Hara into the role of Mary Kate Danaher. And for her brother, he cast Victor McLaglen, who had been a boxer—he fought Jack Johnson (no matter that McLaglen was thirty-four years older than O’Hara).

  The concept of the film needs the three epic figures, with a gallery of “little” people gossiping about them. But whereas there is an authentic passion between Wayne and O’Hara (the actor thought the director was calling for love scenes to imagine himself with O’Hara), the prolonged fisticuffs with McLaglen is brutal and ponderous, as well as a travesty of how family really works in Ireland.

  The gallery includes quite a bit of fun and sparkle with Barry Fitzgerald, Arthur Shields, Mildred Natwick, Ward Bond, Ken Curtis, Mae Marsh, Francis Ford, and—a standout—the young Jack MacGowran, not just really Irish but truly an actor.

  It cost about $1.5 million and earned nearly $6 million. McLaglen got an Oscar nomination for Supporting Actor, and the film had a Best Picture nomination. Ford won his fourth Oscar as director.

  Radio Days (1987)

  Or suppose it all works through the ear? “It originated from an idea that I wanted to pick out a group of songs that were meaningful to me, and each one of those songs suggested a memory. Then the idea started to evolve: how important radio was to me when I was growing up and how important or glamorous it seemed to everyone.”

  Expect Woody Allen to tell a story and he gets tense with the fear that he will forget or fumble it. So he puts himself onscreen, as if that may help him keep control. But since he is so disastrous an actor, and so crippled by the demands of his ego, he spreads uncertainty in other actors. Pretending itself seizes up. But then sometimes Allen finds another way to go—he makes a picture that is an essay or a set of variations on a theme. And if he can persuade himself to get offscreen then something wonderful is in prospect. Like Radio Days, an event that all of a sudden makes it clear the guy was born to make movies, even if so much of the time he lets fear and pretension get in his own way.

  So Radio Days takes a household living out by the shore—not simply autobiographical, but a way of organizing the memories: There’s the kid, Joe (Seth Green), very natural, very relaxed and funny, and nobody’s neurotic; there’s Tess (Julie Kavner), the mother; Martin (Michael Tucker), the father; there’s Aunt Bea (Dianne Wiest), dreaming of handsome guys; and Uncle Abe (Josh Mostel), feasting on fish. This is one of the most humble, robust, and lifelike families in American film, and without the matter ever being addressed in a narrative way (thank God), we get a sense of amazing warmth and solidarity, as well as a kind of chorus always ready to hum and dance to the songs on the radio.

  It’s a time of disaster hoaxes and real wars, with subs off Long Island looking like great fish, with local beauties dancing nude in their parlors like women waiting for Edward Hopper to paint them. It’s the greater New York of seascapes and desolate streets that slope down to the water, as well as Radio City Music Hall and ratty nightclubs. And the film slips like wet fish on a
marble slab—it’s so alive. Carlo Di Palma shot it, and Santo Loquasto did the art direction, so the middle-class look is actually very richly provided.

  Woody is the narrator—sad, wistful, excited, aroused—and he’s perfect. He has a great enough radio voice that he isn’t driven to sing. The songs keep coming like your favorite radio station, and you get a feeling of how movies and radio were once the bloodstream of a great nation. This is one of those quiet films that cuts America open to the eye, and leaves you longing for those old days ( like Ambersons). It’s a masterpiece, a one of a kind—with Mia Farrow as Sally, Danny Aiello, Jeff Daniels as Biff Baxter, Tony Roberts, Wallace Shawn, David Warrilow and Julie Kurnitz as Roger and Irene, and Diane Keaton singing “You’d Be So Nice to Come Home To.” And like the sea, the fish, and sound itself, running through it all, the aching lament of “September Song,” which can shift the mood in any direction you want.

  Raging Bull (1980)

  Between October 1942 and February 1951, Ray Robinson and Jake La Motta fought six times. Of those six fights, La Motta won only the second. Not that they were anything other than close fights, fought to the full limit of rounds, with Robinson winning on points in all except the last fight, a knockout. Robinson was the greatest boxer-fighter of his age. He was Sugar, an eloquent, smart black man who conducted himself like a prince. He was Ali in advance, as well as a sight to behold in the ring. So let’s make a film about La Motta?

  It really is the far-fetched decision, except that La Motta was white, Italian, and one of the neighborhood gang. He was known as the Bronx Bull, and he made a cult of stupid defiance. More than that, Marty Scorsese could identify with him as some kind of lonely hero who longs to be one of the boys. (But art can resist type: Nick Tosches wrote a great book about Sonny Liston.)

  And so we trace the rise and fall of La Motta (Robert De Niro) through two marriages—first to an Italian girl (Theresa Saldana) and then to a white icon, the Lana Turner of the neighborhood swimming pool(Cathy Moriarty). Jake is sexy, but he knows he must apply ice water to his horn to keep it strong for the fights. So he pets with Moriarty and flirts with the boys. There is a very lively gay subtext here—hardly perceived by Scorsese—in which Jake is drawn into the ghastly macho circle of the fight crowd who secretly want to fuck each other.

  Put that next to the immense, studied beauty of the film—the umbilical ring ropes in black and white but dripping red blood—and this is a very fancy film indeed. Nothing suggests anything but fear and loathing on Scorsese’s part for the homosexual tendency, but there it is, in a film that plainly knows so little about boxing (and cares less) that it’s happy to shoot it as somewhere between the bullfight and the ballet. It’s pretentious and yearning, but reluctant to think its own feelings through. De Niro won the Oscar, not for insight so much as for the huge ordeal by which he made himself gross after looking like a brutal saint.

  The result is fascinating, but truly confused. And it’s the start of those films in which Scorsese can’t close his eyes and ears to the foul patter of Italian guys, and it’s the start of Joe Pesci (perhaps the great virus in Scorsese’s work—the demon he cannot deny himself yet the force of destruction he fears to take on) taking the world over.

  Paul Schrader and Mardik Martin wrote it, but not together—and their two voices may be at the heart of the turmoil. Michael Chapman did maybe the last great job in black and white—it’s like Weegee in olive oil. Thelma Schoonmaker’s editing is brilliant, even if it introduces a facility that helps Scorsese dodge his unsolved narrative. The great cast includes Nicholas Colasanto, Frank Vincent, and John Turturro. De Niro won his Oscar, and Pesci was nominated in support. Raging Bull has problems, but when Ordinary People beat it for Best Picture it was the moment for the Academy to retire into the night.

  Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981)

  At the time, everyone involved was making too much money to really explore first thoughts, let alone second, but in hindsight, Raiders of the Lost Ark looks like a very strange party game. Yes, it was the “natural” alliance of the two boy giants of the picture business, George Lucas and Steven Spielberg, and surely in their first great bounty they could be forgiven if they felt the urge to be kids again and to go back to the thrills of Saturday morning pictures. Don’t you get it—Raiders and Indiana Jones are a fond throwback to a lost world? Well, yes, I think everyone got it after about three minutes. And it’s not that Raiders wasn’t fun. But did we need three of them?

  The idea was hatched by George Lucas and Phil Kaufman, and I have heard rumors that Kaufman had expected to direct this first film—certainly there’s a brotherhood of a kind between the leather-jacketed Indiana Jones (Harrison Ford) and the idealized version of Chuck Yeager (Sam Shepard) in Kaufman’s far more interesting The Right Stuff. But the script was given to Lawrence Kasdan, and then Spielberg decided that he might as well direct, with Lucas serving as producer.

  Indiana Jones is an archaeologist, and a rather humorless, deadpan jokester who has difficulties with women—let’s face it, he has difficulties with just about everything. But he’s determined to keep the Ark or the Holy Grail or the residuals of these pictures or whatever it is out of the hands of the Nazis and all other bad guys. The time is the 1930s, and you can easily think of Gunga Din, Beau Geste, and Only Angels Have Wings. Actually, you can easily see those films. And the “boys” might have realized that.

  Experts on the series say that the original is the best, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (1984) the least, and Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (1989) a happy return. You can identify the series by its female stars—Karen Allen, Kate Capshaw, and Alison Doody (which amounts to an admission that they weren’t very interested in women). But Spielberg directed all three, with humor here and there and secondhand panache everywhere. Harrison Ford became a grudging version of the most successful movie star of all time—though Sean Connery outshone him as a brusque Dad in number three.

  It doesn’t really matter, I suppose, except that along the way the photographing of adventure yielded to and helped discover computer-generated imagery in which everything was possible and nothing very interesting. Also, the pictures made amounts of money that altered the economy of Hollywood and made it seem orthodox to keep on making lightweight, silly, fun pictures. Here are the numbers.

  Raiders (writing credits: Kasdan, Lucas, Kaufman)

  budget: $20 million

  worldwide gross: $384 million

  Temple of Doom (writing credits: Lucas, Willard Huyck, and Gloria Katz)

  budget: $28 million

  worldwide gross: $333 million

  Last Crusade (writing credits: Lucas, Kaufman, Menno Meyjes, Jeffrey Boam)

  budget: $48 million

  worldwide gross: $494 million

  Rain Man (1988)

  You can present Rain Man as exactly what Hollywood wanted from itself in the late eighties. It cost about $25 million, and it had a worldwide gross income of $354 million. More than that, it won Best Picture as well as several other Oscars. It is also a fond portrait of a man’s world in which guys learn to blend sensitivity with success, gentleness with winning. Fifteen or so years after its great arrival, it looks curiously artificial and irrelevant. It’s the kind of film that hopes to make contact with life through “stellar acting.” But it’s little more than a commercial for itself, stuffed with self-admiration and gloating coups. I don’t think it goes too far to say that it’s the smug movie of a culture charging down a dead-end street. It isn’t simply that it’s so removed from life. It’s also the horrible comfort and cocksure bossiness it feels in that gulf.

  Charlie Babbitt (and I think we are meant to hear the “everyman” reference in the name), played by Tom Cruise, is a smart, nasty, selfish hustler. He goes back to the Midwest for his father’s funeral and gets a surprise (the last in the film). It turns out the father has left his considerable money to “another” brother: Raymond (Dustin Hoffman). This is Raymond as in Raymond from The Manchurian Candida
te, but worse. Raymond is autistic, a kind of idiot savant. He is a simpleton with a tremendously rapid way of calculating numbers. And these brothers never knew about each other, but now they have to get along. They will try because Charlie feels very fraternal about Raymond’s money. However, don’t be surprised (or a believer) if Raymond gradually turns Charlie into a warm, loving human being—in short, a brother.

  The story is by Barry Morrow, and the script was written by Morrow and Ron Bass. The film is directed by Barry Levinson, who in his time has done some really touching studies in male bonding. Cruise and Hoffman were powerhouses of different construction: Hoffman is a veteran car, cranky, quirky, eccentric; while Cruise is about the most streamlined and efficient wheels on the market. There is even a fatuous way in which you can read this as country and city or nineteenth-century and twentieth-century America. But it’s best to confine yourself to Cruise’s “I sit in awe at the feet of a master” act, along with Hoffman’s “Why do you so admire me, my son?” I’m sure that Hoffman worked very hard at becoming autistic—it’s just that it was a shorter journey than he ever reckoned. Cruise’s acting, I think, is actually more thoughtful and very much quicker. But Hoffman wins on time of possession and hesitation after the catch. It all requires enormous patience and is a 90-minute film stretched to 133 minutes.

  Valeria Golino is the girl. John Seale did the lustrous photography. Ida Random and Linda DeScenna did the art direction. Stu Linder edited the film and Hans Zimmer wrote the music. Other Oscars went to Levinson as director, to the script, and to Dustin Hoffman.