'Have You Seen...?'

by David Thomson

  Raise the Red Lantern (1991)

  Songlian is rebellious from the outset. When she is hired on to be the fourth wife, or concubine, of a rich man, she does not wait for the sedan-chair service that will pick her up. She packs her suitcase and walks, however far it is, in an attempt to show that she is her own fierce self, a young woman who has had enough of a university education to know that such practices as being married off in 1920 are archaic and absurd. Yet it happens to her, and the prison only draws in more tightly as the story unfolds. You can see this as one of the uncompromising social studies that began emerging from China—or you can see it as a Joan Crawford-like picture, with money from Hong Kong and Taiwan as well as China. After all, Songlian is also Gong Li, one of the great new actresses at the end of the twentieth century.

  The house of Chen seems to exist in the provinces, yet we see no more of those exteriors than Songlian. There is an abiding master shot from a high angle, looking down on the courtyard that is the common space for the four houses of the four wives. The servants of the household are there to make their life easier—to massage their feet, to get their clothes, to arrange for a doctor to call—but they are guards, too, ensuring that the women do not escape. When Songlian arrives, she is the youngest and the freshest—the most sexual. Yet she is the least resigned or understanding. But she is smart enough to see that the four wives are in an eternal and futile competition to win the master’s favor. So she plots to gain more power.

  That is the delusion of the young. At first, she thinks she will be pregnant. She makes the claim, and Chen—hungry for an heir—comes to her regularly, with solicitude. Songlian thought that then, sooner or later, she would be pregnant. But an abused servant informs on her, and she is punished. The red lanterns that mark her house as a place of special privilege are taken down.

  The film comes from a novel by Su Tong and a screenplay by Ni Zhen. Zhang Yimou is the director, and this was one of his breakthrough films—but notice that the Taiwan master Hou Hsiao-hsien was an executive producer, and Gong Li is in every sense a star. Her look—beautiful in Western eyes—and her acting (very fresh and forthright) are vital to the accessibility of this film. You’d also have to weigh the ravishing color photography of Zhao Fei and Yang Lun. Even untrained audiences notice that the new Chinese films had an expressive use of color that had nearly been given up in Western cinema.

  It was Oscar-nominated for Best Foreign Language Film, and it played with great success on the international art-house circuit. But in its portrait of Songlian, it knew that old lesson Crawford had learned in the thirties and the forties—that the wronged woman should not expect mercy.

  Rancho Notorious (1952)

  In its first planning, Rancho Notorious was intended to marry Fritz Lang’s fondness for Western iconography and his interest in gambling. Silvia Richards (with whom he was romantically involved, and who scripted Secret Beyond the Door) had done a treatment, “Chuck-a-Luck,” featuring the kind ofvertical roulette game of chance that figures in the story. But the treatment was shelved, and it was only when Daniel Taradash came on board as a new writer that it took off. It was Taradash who proposed a balladlike structure to the film, “The Legend of Chuck-a-Luck,” written by Ken Darby.

  Although Lang spent time researching exterior locations, this is the most set-bound of his Westerns—and the best. The two things are surely related. Whatever he might say about touring in the Southwest, Lang the artist preferred the control of studio shooting, and he never seemed dismayed by the “atmosphere” of cardboard rocks and painted vistas. So there were a few shots done at the Republic ranch, but most of it was filmed at the General Services studio, with Wiard Ihnen doing great work on the “mountain retreat” of Rancho Notorious, a kind of Berchtesgarden for wanted men, ruled by Altar Keane (Marlene Dietrich).

  As photographed by Hal Mohr (in color) it looks very good—indeed, the cowboys have a slightly piratical air. The story is very simple: Vern Haskell (Arthur Kennedy) sets out to avenge the rape and murder of his sweetheart. The journey takes him to Rancho Notorious and is another study of vengeance as a warping force. Far less successful is his love affair with Altar and the romantic rivalry of Frenchy Fairmont (Mel Ferrer), a character somewhat mocked by his own name.

  Indeed, Western enthusiasts only notice the artificiality of Rancho Notorious—but that is because Lang takes that for granted and makes this world a cockpit for moral energy that risks going mad. In that light, this film is very close to The Big Heat, even if the urban, black-and-white mood is kinder to the real subject. There are astonishing fights in this “Western,” and they are like the fights that always thrilled Lang—less trials of strength than extreme geometric compositions (parallelograms of forces) in which humanity seems to be in the balance.

  Arthur Kennedy is very good, and his Vern fits in easily with the Westerners he was playing at the same time for Anthony Mann and Edgar Ulmer. The supporting cast has a number of vivid cameos—William Frawley, Jack Elam, Dan Seymour, Frank Ferguson. Lang said that he and Dietrich were romantically involved during the film. Maybe, but it doesn’t show. Dietrich here was fifty, and her makeup begins to look heavy. She lacks songs (apart from “Get Away, Young Man”), and she misses Sternberg. Without him, she was not the easiest person to put in a movie story. After Rancho Notorious, she did nothing until Witness for the Prosecution.

  Rashomon (1950)

  Even if you haven’t seen Rashomon, you’ve likely heard of it. You vaguely know the way in which “Rashomon-like” applies to a story in which you get several points of view that amount to a total contradiction and a revelation of the lies we tell. I wonder how far Akira Kurosawa guessed at the time that the new art-house film circuits of Europe and America were bursting for this kind of agnosticism? Was his whole American career worked out as carefully as Addison DeWitt (same year) sculpted the rise of Eve Harrington in All About Eve? It won the Grand Prix at Venice and went on to the Academy Award for Best Foreign Picture. And it was the start of Kurosawa as an international figure.

  It’s not that Kurosawa didn’t deserve some success. He’s a terrific, vigorous, single-minded director. And in such varied things as Seven Samurai and Ikiru he’s well worth-while, even if you can predict those films in detail from about fifteen minutes in. He’s also close to an amateur when it comes to taking us back to early Japan and having us feel the lawlessness and the threat to culture in those times. So Rashomon leaves us like smarty-pants who don’t trust truth. But Sansho the Bailiff (just a few years later) leaves a feeling of fear and miracle in the world. To be brief, I don’t mind Rashomon being celebrated—it’s good clean fun, spectacular, and absorbing. But when its fans don’t know Mizoguchi I get upset.

  So, in Rashomon, three characters meet in the woods: a nobleman, his wife, and a bandit. And they are observed by a fourth, a woodcutter. At the end, the nobleman is dead and the woman appears to have been raped. But what really happens? As in most expert thrillers, the secret to that last question is that it doesn’t matter—for grave issues of character, action, and society are not being called into being. A game is being played in which ninth-century Kyoto is an excuse for costume, swords, and a way of filming the woods that might occur more naturally to a Japanese artist. The fundamental issues of freedom and slavery in Sansho, or of hope and loyalty in Ugetsu, are never broached. Instead, it’s a shorthand for getting from “You never knew” to the assumption of wisdom that actually eliminates all responsibility or consequence. Because you don’t know what happened, nothing happened.

  On the plus side, the film was quick and vivid, and in many ways (i.e., the fighting) it catered to Western curiosity. The rapid tracking movements were full of fun and energy—if empty of meaning. Toshiro Mifune introduced his bristling wild guys. Machiko Kyo played the woman as if determined to have no future claim of rape trusted. Masayuki Mori is the nobleman, and Takashi Shimura plays the woodcutter. Of course, the film is a drama. It’s only later on that one reflects how far the
Rashomon method is more interesting if applied to comedy, and in a situation where everyone is sure they are telling the truth.

  Yes, there was a direct remake, The Outrage (1964), shifted to Mexico, with Paul Newman, Claire Bloom, Laurence Harvey, and Edward G. Robinson. It is a tranquilizer.

  Raw Deal (1948)

  This book has to include at least one of the luminous noirs made in the late forties by Anthony Mann and photographer John Alton. But can it find room for more than one? Mann had been Emil Anton Bundsmann (born near San Diego in 1906). The child of philosophy teachers, he tried acting first, and then joined the Selznick company to direct screen tests. He started directing low-budget films in 1942, and he became established, and respectable, around 1950 with the James Stewart Westerns. John Alton was five years older, born in Hungary. He roamed the world working as a cameraman, and studying the infant art, and he ended up in Hollywood in 1940. He did five films for Mann, all black-and-white—they are T-Men, Raw Deal, Reign of Terror, Border Incident, and Devil’s Doorway. Alton also shot He Walked by Night, credited to Alfred L. Werker, but also worked on by Mann (and the most abstract of them all). From these beginnings, Alton went on to win an Oscar for the entirely different color photography on An American in Paris. That was for M-G-M, where Alton became a celebrated but conventional artistic cameraman.

  It’s hardly original to say that the two guys had a great time on their five films—the cinematic excitement jumps out at you from every shot, and surely these films had a huge impact on certain French critics (often reliant on the subtitles) in finding beauty at the lowest level of American moviemaking. Equally, the label “every shot like a painting” is a mixed blessing that often goes too near the dream of saving trash with artiness—that shining white lie and pathetic fallacy is painfully evident in Reign of Terror, the most spectacular of the films, largely because it is a re-creation of revolutionary France. Every shot is breathtaking, but lack of breathing is not helpful to feeling oneself taken up in the atmosphere of a movie. Reign of Terror is frantic, show-off time—nothing is natural about it, and it is a tough act to inhabit.

  That’s why I opt for Raw Deal, a brutal vengeance story in which Dennis O’Keefe escapes from prison resolved to nail the people who put him there. The savage compositions of light and shadow fit this hard-boiled and luridly unfair world. There are superb cameos in villainy, by Raymond Burr and John Ireland, while O’Keefe and Claire Trevor are perfectly suited to the bittersweet, sadomasochistic “romance.” One can breathe while watching the film, and one can feel that the noir story is adjusted to the bravura styling. In Reign of Terror, there is a grotesque gap between Robert Cummings’s sunny hero and Richard Basehart’s Robespierre. Cummings is making an entertainment while Basehart suspects he may be in a work of art.

  The most interesting question is what this partnership did in educating Mann. Surely his eye was assisted and provoked—yet Mann has one of the great cinematic eyes (arguably a lot more interesting than Alton’s). So maybe it was Mann who helped Alton. Mann was working his way toward a kind of calm distancing from people that is emphatically at odds with Alton’s graphic underlining of everything.

  Rear Window (1954)

  There are great films and great entertainments. Sometimes one film is both—take Rear Window. L. B. Jefferies (James Stewart) is in his Lower Manhattan apartment with a broken leg. There it is, in white plaster, as long and hard as a telephoto lens. He is a photographer and a sensationalist. He specializes in taking pictures of dangerous events. This time he got too close—thus the broken leg. So the wanderer and adventurer is a trapped spectator, seated in front of the lives in the courtyard where he lives, trapped by the offers of marriage from his perfect girlfriend, Lisa Fremont (Grace Kelly). He can only watch—remind you of anyone?

  There are windows in the courtyard, windows and lives: the honeymoon couple; the composer; the lonely romantic woman; a young dancer; an elderly couple with a dog; and the Thorwalds—Lars and his wife. They argue a lot: the wife is bedridden; she nags Lars. He seems bitter. So many of the windows are playing love or marriage movies—as if Lisa had programmed them. Then one night when L.B. is only half awake, he thinks… did he see a part of a murder? Where is Mrs. Thorwald?

  His masseuse, Stella (Thelma Ritter), tells him voyeurism is an unhealthy habit. His friend the cop, Doyle (Wendell Corey), tells him he’s crazy. But Lisa begins to think they might both be right. They will play detectives together.

  This comes from a novelette by Cornell Woolrich and a script by John Michael Hayes that is among the most perfect ever written. For as the intrigue grows, as the crazy notion picks up dark detail, and credibility, so our love story deepens. Lisa will go across the way to the Thorwalds’ apartment while he is out and she’ll look for the wedding ring. If Mrs. Thorwald took a vacation, as Doyle says, she’d hardly leave that behind. So over she goes, with Jefferies and us watching, and Oh, my God, here’s Thorwald coming home. He gets her, but Jeff calls the police and they come just in time. Then cock-a-hoop Lisa is wiggling her hand at Jeff because she’s wearing the wedding ring. And Lars Thorwald follows the line of her signal and looks straight at us.

  Robert Burks did the photography. Hal Pereira led the art direction team. Edith Head did Lisa’s great clothes. Franz Waxman wrote the music. The windows use players like Judith Evelyn, Ross Bagdasarian, Georgine Darcy, Irene Winston, and Lars Thorwald is Raymond Burr in white hair—he looks like… David O. Selznick, that bête noire in Hitchcock’s life.

  It’s 112 minutes. It’s funny, tart, tender, thoughtful, desperate, and as neat and tidy a moral parable about looking at things and getting involved as you’re ever going to find. I suppose I’ve watched it forty times or so, and I’m still waiting for it to taste like less than a Meyer lemon fresh from the tree. But as time passes, the suspense falls away, and the bones of greater comedy emerge.

  Rebecca (1940)

  When Joan Fontaine came on the set of Rebecca (having overcome Vivien Leigh, Margaret Sullavan, Loretta Young, and Anne Baxter in the casting contest), she was taken aback that both Laurence Olivier and Alfred Hitchcock treated her with a coolness close to disdain. But why not? Fontaine was playing an interloper in a settled household, a real girl daring to challenge the power of a ghost, and she didn’t have a name to call her own. Hitchcock knew a lot about intimidation, and Olivier was so crazy about Vivien then that he thought he would have preferred her on the set.

  But that was by no means the biggest battle on Rebecca. Producer David O. Selznick had tempted Hitch to come to America, and then he offered him the Daphne Du Maurier novel that had been recommended to the Selznick organization by Kay Brown (the same way they had got Gone With the Wind). So Selznick the book man was certain the adaptation should be faithful. There was the start of trouble with Hitch, who had often made big departures on books he was filming—tossing in a girl in The 39 Steps.

  So there was dispute on the script with Selznick bitter and bewildered at Hitch’s casual departures. In the end, Selznick won that battle on a script that was credited to Robert E. Sherwood and Hitch’s assistant, Joan Harrison. Moreover, in nearly every detail of that squabble, Selznick was right: he knew what a strange bird Rebecca was—a mixture of romance, mystery, obsession, and even horror. To this day, it is striking for the way it overlaps genres and allows hints of perversity—especially in the role of Mrs. Danvers.

  But the real struggle came in the shooting and the amazed reaction to rushes. Selznick was used to ample coverage (if in doubt, shoot another angle), and he fancied himself as an editing-room master of ceremonies. Whereas Hitchcock liked to envisage every aspect of a sequence in his head, then shoot it, so that the pieces of film only needed assembly. He left no fun to the editing—and no power. Selznick roared in distress.

  Forever afterward, Hitchcock complained at Selznick’s interference—and nobody could deny that habit in the producer. But Hitch’s way of shooting was not just very difficult to interfere with. It was immaculate,
and it worked. Rebecca is often a suspense film, and Selznick had never managed that as well as Hitch could. So both sides could claim victory, if only because the movie won the Best Picture Oscar and was a box-office success. The battle between producer and director would be settled another day.

  Who won? We won, for this is a very sophisticated entertainment, one of the best films Selznick would ever make, but deeper and tauter than anything Hitch had done so far. Fontaine is superb (this is her real Oscar performance). Olivier is very interesting and repressed. George Sanders is a treat. But over the years Judith Anderson becomes uncanny as Mrs. Danvers—she was defeated for Supporting Actress by Jane Darwell in The Grapes of Wrath (a travesty).

  Rebel Without a Cause (1955)

  This is a key moment in American film, poised on the brink of rock ‘n’ roll and the kingdom of the American teenager, yet bringing to a close the era of the brooding existential hero, the tradition that had gone from John Garfield to Brando and Clift, and which had suddenly risen up in the untidy life of Nicholas Ray as that ghost-in-waiting, James Dean. And for a moment, two nervous wrecks—the actor and the director—were looking in time’s mirror and the result was a film that survives as emotional melodrama, as a portrait of high school and of the impossible remaking of family in America. There are moments of pretension, of stilted lines and unfulfilled striving. (Why not? It’s about being a teenager.) On the other hand, it’s as perfect an expression of the moment as a great song.

  The possibility of the film had been around for several years. It might have been a Marlon Brando picture. But it came together at Warner Brothers, produced by David Weisbart and written by Stewart Stern, apparently from an idea by Ray, with some further work by Irving Shulman. Still, much of the mood was derived from study of actual Los Angeles gangs—albeit white, white, and white. Thus, it is also a history of a city that is no more. Jim Stark (Dean) comes to town, and finds himself confronted with the gang led by Buzz (Corey Allen), with Judy (Natalie Wood) as the princess, and Plato (Sal Mineo) as the only other outsider. The film never asks why Plato is beyond the group, but his parents are nowhere, he has a black nanny, and he wants to be looked after in the profoundest way. Of all the gang—and it includes Dennis Hopper, Frank Mazzola, and Nick Adams—only Judy is played by a teenager (so Ray had an affair with her as a salute, and as an attempt to feel the young pulse).