The ballet within the film was a novelty, but it inspired An American in Paris, just as The Red Shoes has a pioneering place in that special history of movies that are not simply musicals but stories with music—a tradition that includes Powell, Minnelli, and Kelly as well as Demy and Baz Luhrmann. The atmosphere of collaboration has never been done better. But neither has any film been so clear about the polar loneliness of a genius like Lermontov. And, please remember, that Victoria Page does die, her red feet severed from the rest of her—the red matched by the blood. This is from Hans Christian Andersen, and it has never been for soft hearts,
But The Red Shoes is never tired.
The Remains of the Day (1993)
How do we assess the nationality of films these days? Or, if I think I detect an echo of call and countercall in the formal exchanges between butler and housekeeper at Darlington Hall, is that my urge to feel a kind of Japaneseness (in that this film comes from a novel by Kazuo Ishiguro), or is it the real thing, a culture that treasures the way it has invented rituals that contain emotionalism? In which case, is this not also deserving of a high place in that English tradition that regrets the inhibition on feeling, but thanks God for it, too? In short, The Remains of the Day deserves to be watched very closely.
The watching is repaid, as it usually is with Merchant-Ivory films—meticulous is as meticulous does. Moreover, in this case, the project has not just the usual team (with Ruth Prawer Jhabvala adapting the novel for the screen), but a pair of producers of the utmost distinction—Mike Nichols and John Calley (one of the few Hollywood executives to sustain a reputation for being smart, likeable, and loaded with taste).
The setting is an English country estate in the 1930s. James Fox is lord of the manor and manners, well-intentioned, apparently amiable, but dangerous. His house is apparently run by Stevens (Anthony Hopkins), the butler, a man whose own life has been subsumed in the need to make order in the household. Two things threaten his calm: the fact that his elderly father (Peter Vaughan) is too old for service, and must either be retired or put down; and a new housekeeper, Miss Kenton (Emma Thompson), every bit as expert as Stevens, but more wayward in that she knows she could have an emotional life of her own.
These servants sustain appearances in a household where Lord Darlington is trying to avoid the Second World War. To that end, he has “conferences” to discuss the world, attended by French, German, and American figures, as well as a plain version of Oswald Mosley. And when the housekeeper takes on two European girls—very clean—as maids, it is the tranquil Darlington who says, Sorry, but they have to go, they’re Jewish.
So there is a pleasing, meticulous balance, between plot and subplot, from which one might conclude that servitude is servitude and should end. In the main plot, this will be spelled out in Stevens’s eventual inability to admit that he loves Miss Kenton. The acting of these scenes is as good as acting gets. When Stevens hides the book he is reading, the scene is great. With only one fatal disqualification: that Hopkins is so profoundly intelligent an actor he cannot quite become as stupid as Stevens is in reality. Acting stupid is a rare test, for which a refined intelligence can be an ultimate handicap.
So there’s a flaw, and it matches Merchant-Ivory’s reverence for the polished décor that is armor to the world they disapprove of. So there’s a terrible tension all through the film over whether outright rebellion might not simply seem vulgar and lower class. The servants have taken the sweet poison of the system. And the “perfection” of so many scenes is somehow clammy, precious, and embalmed. But it’s a fascinating dilemma and as good as the Ivory-Merchant business ever got. With Christopher Reeve, Tim Pigott-Smith, Hugh Grant, Michael Lonsdale.
Repulsion (1965)
Marnie (from 1964) and Repulsion would make a fairly intense double bill on morbid female psychology, except that I think the Hitchcock film would now look so dated as to be effete. Whereas the Polanski film is still startling—it deserves to be shown in London, at the old Paris Pullman, in one of those heatwaves that always take London by surprise. It is at least in the class of Psycho for its creative confusion over the genres of horror, suspense, and love—yes, I think it’s love, the need for which aches in Deneuve’s eyes. This is the film, above all, that suggested how hard it was going to be to make a dull film with Catherine Deneuve. And it indicated that Roman Polanski knew a good deal more about the workings of the mind than Hitchcock. But Hitch was always hopeful that if he knew how cinema worked, that would cover shortcomings in the other area.
Take a girl in whom there is a violent clash between her look and her inner being: She looks like a sexual dream, but she has feelings of nightmare over the body. There is no need for explanation—no need for a rough sailor in the house, a convenient poker, and so on. Take the neurosis as fact. This girl is left alone in her sister’s apartment in South Kensington. The heat builds. The food rots. And every other organism flowers.
The script was by Polanski and Gérard Brach, and the superb photography—using very wide angles to get the emotional warping—was by Gil Taylor. But Polanski gave special credit to Deneuve, her commitment and understanding, even if she was driven close to crazy at the end of it all. Of course, an actress knows very often when a film belongs to her, and Repulsion offers neither cure nor rebuke for Deneuve’s mania. She takes over. She becomes the pulse that is making the world and the film—and the only shocking thing about this was that just a moment ago, Deneuve had been the same engine in Jacques Demy’s Umbrellas of Cherbourg.
Another thing to be said for Repulsion is Polanski’s rapid identification of a kind of English supporting actor not in the mainstream, but edgy and odd with some unresolved anger or violence. Repulsion is full of them: Ian Hendry, John Fraser, Patrick Wymark, Yvonne Furneaux, and, not least, James Villiers (an actor much admired by Joe Losey, too).
Repulsion apparently cost £95,000, which was a lot of money in a silly way, and ridiculously cheap in another. It made black-and-white seem normal. It had a score by K. T. Komeda, the Polish jazz musician. It got an X certificate in Britain (properly), but it cleaned up and it was the first clear evidence of a rare balance in Polanski: He had a vision to delight the surrealists—but he had box office in his blood, too. It was likely that England was just a stepping-stone for him.
Ride with the Devil (1999)
We know Ang Lee nowadays as a major director based in America if not quite American. He has moved from Taiwan to Jane Austen to Annie Proulx without losing his balance, or his interest in the ground. He had the extraordinary success of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, a brimming entertainment, a tender estimate of female heroes, and a very artful marriage of Western and Eastern traditions. It may seem like a natural Ang Lee picture for inclusion in this book. Still, I prefer the far less well known Ride with the Devil.
Derived from a novel, Woe to Live On, by Daniel Woodrell, Ride with the Devil is a history of the American Civil War as seen through the experience of the border states, Kansas and Missouri, and through the eyes of several characters who are more and less than simply American. What is uncanny about the picture is not just the casual handling of extreme violence—including the raid on Lawrence, Kansas, by Quantrill’s Raiders, an event scarcely known in America generally—but the larger re-creation of period, both in terms of objects, artifacts, and clothes and in the way people speak. This is a period film where you suddenly appreciate how little adjustment there is in talk in such movies. But the script (by James Schamus), Lee’s direction, and the playing by a fine cast leads us directly to a different kind of sensibility. As ages pass, so thought changes and language is the record it leaves. Read letters from the Civil War period—the ones in the Ken Burns documentary—and you are living with elevated education and a blunt specificity that make this sentimental age seem soft and foolish. Yet here is a Taiwanese director getting into that level of discourse.
Frederick Elmes did the photography—brilliant in all respects, but in love with the dappled countrys
ide and the simple architecture. Mark Friedberg did the production design, and Marit Allen did the costumes—all first-class work. Mychael Danna wrote the music. It’s common enough by now in the Lee-Schamus films (often produced by Ted Hope) to see a kind of integrated craftwork that is uncommon in most films—and not always noticed. Ride with the Devil was not widely praised, and not seen as a film way out of the ordinary. But now, just a few years later, it has a tough texture and a kind of human practicality that leaves a work like Cold Mountain looking inflated and remote.
Tobey Maguire has never delivered so complete and sturdy a performance, or one with less need to be liked. Jeffrey Wright is outstanding. The singer Jewel is very touching and natural in the female lead, and there is outstanding work from Skeet Ulrich, Simon Baker, Jonathan Rhys Meyers (very scary as a psychopath), James Caviezel, and Tom Wilkinson.
Now, I understand that I may be troubling some readers in preferring this to Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. But this is the superior film, truer to life and a very problematic situation.
Rififi (1955)
Jules Dassin had been blacklisted after Night and the City (1950). He was hanging out in Italy and France when suddenly a producer told him to read Auguste Le Breton’s novel Du Rififi Chez les Hommes over the weekend. It was all in crooks’ slang and Dassin’s French was not up to the task. So he got a friend to read it to him aloud. He still didn’t like the book very much, but when he went in to the Monday meeting he heard himself say yes. It was a magical decision.
Sitting there in our dark, quietly engaged in our own surreptitious tasks—like unwrapping a stick of chewing gum without making noise, or kissing the person beside you without being arrested—we are natural accomplices in furtive enterprise. How else does anyone explain the rapt attention and emotional support that the audience will bring to a scene of sustained robbery? So long as the criminals stay short of nasty violence, we are ready to watch them robbing our bank, our jewelry store, our house even. Rififi is the classic case of such participation, with a nontalking sequence of close to thirty minutes as the guys pull the job. If you want other examples of the same concentration try Thief, The Killing, Heat, the Mission Impossible films, or Criss Cross. Of course, Hitchcock took the voyeurist attraction several stages further when the crime became murder. But, to this day, Rififi is a morale booster for small crooks everywhere.
Dassin and René Wheeler turned the novel into a script, and Dassin knew that he could stretch the achievement or the prowess of the bad boys because in the end he would chart their downfall. The highest trick, like that in Vertigo, is to let the killer get off scot-free.
Philippe Agostini did the photography. Georges Auric wrote the music. Roger Dwyre edited the picture, and the production design was by Auguste Capelier and Alexandre Trauner. The cast is tough but quirky (just the way we like our criminals): Jean Servais, Carl Möhner, Robert Manuel, Janine Darcey, Pierre Grasset, Robert Hossein, Marcel Lupovici, Dominique Maurin, Magali Noël, and Dassin himself (under the name Perlo Vita).
Now shift your point of view. You come home to find your home violated—the clever job becomes an outrage. Anthony Minghella’s film Breaking and Entering is a measure of the sexual undertones when real robbery fills us with horror and a sense of invasion. The contrast leaves one dreaming of Buñuel doing a two-hour film in which a man enters a sleeping woman’s bedroom and deprives her of everything. She wakes up and calls the police, of course, but the investigating officer cannot quite understand why she is so elated. In life, of course, the feeling is the opposite. All of which only helps indicate what a very strange and transforming place the movie house is.
Rififi was at Cannes, and Dassin won a prize—much to the consternation of American authorities who still harbored that old anti-Red grudge. But Dassin was buoyant—for it was at that same festival that he met a dazzling Greek actress, his future wife, Melina Mercouri.
The Right Stuff (1983)
Terms of Endearment, in which Jack Nicholson plays a retired astronaut, won the Oscar for Best Picture for 1983. Philip Kaufman’s The Right Stuff was a nominee, but it was also a serious box-office disappointment and a film that seemed overshadowed by the concurrent real-life political uncertainty of John Glenn. Maybe the Ladd Company did a poor job distributing the film. Maybe there was a remaining feeling that agreed with the original screenwriter, William Goldman, and the writer of the best-selling book, Tom Wolfe, that Kaufman had erred in subjecting his heroic chumps to a more ironic treatment. But, in hindsight, I think it was all a sad reflection on the way the film business and the audience was retreating from being grown-up in the 1980s. The Right Stuff—tongue in cheek (how else can you say that title?)—is one of the great American movies, and its failure spelled our decline and our decades of dismay yet to come.
It’s not that Kaufman ever doubted the heroism of Chuck Yeager or felt less than love for flight. Sam Shepard in a faded brown leather jacket looking for chewing gum is Gary Cooper, but a fond detachment from Cooper, too—and don’t forget that the real Yeager (a demon of self-promotion still in 1983) is a grinning face in the background in the desert cantina scenes. As for the next generation, they are spam in a can, very human but the creation of PR spin, and whirling on their own daft axes. Above all, the humor brought to those Cold War years is so warm and tender—just look at the cartoon characters of LBJ and the German rocket experts. Just feel the larger, liberal air of merry silliness that kept the Cold War busy, the “space race” and every armaments contest. It’s as if the wry voice of A. J. Liebling (a great journalist of the period) has been used to deflate the silly balloon of tension.
Then count the glories: the dazzling feeling of being in the air, buffeted by devils and clouds; the loving employment of the desert. Southwest (largely filmed around Edwards Air Force Base); and the chorus that is the press corps—feverish and frantic, and the best measure of the film’s American awareness. The result is a mix of beauty and satire, comedy and pathos, character and reputation, that is endearing and challenging. It is hardly possible to watch The Right Stuff without growing into a critique of America—and there, I guess, you have a key reason for its failure.
It follows in such a panorama that many actors do fine work: Dennis Quaid is as bouncy as a new ball; Scott Glenn is a mockery of laconic toughness; Ed Harris is so much more appealing than the real Glenn; Shepard is just fine—and kindly untested as an actor; Barbara Hershey is a ripe peach; Jeff Goldblum, Levon Helm, Pamela Reed, Fred Ward, bring them all on, all the way down to Royal Dano’s stark preacher. It’s a delight still, and I’d guess that its current rentals on DVD are five times those of Terms of Endearment.
Rio Bravo (1959)
Long before the measured fade-in that introduces the languid self-delight of Dean Martin and the jailhouse singsong, Rio Bravo had shrugged off the tight harness of a regular Western. Yes, we are holed up in a little town on the edge of the desert, with an ornery prisoner and a perverse posse from hell waiting for a false move, but… Let’s be candid, could this ordeal go on forever? This is not exactly the West, but Illyria, or paradise. Time is there for the Dude to make his slow recovery from booze, for Colorado to act cool, for Feathers to talk John T. Chance into the ground (is he so bad-tempered because he ended up with a name like “Chance”?), and so that Stumpy can grow old. As for the Burdettes, the villains, let’s allow that they are a minor order of angels, snarling and shooting from time to time, but as solid as the wall in squash, ensuring that the ball bounces back.
So, it is 1959 and that dazzling moment when you can see Hollywood breaking up like old concrete, with beautiful new flowers creeping through the cracks. And this is Howard Hawks’s last great film, which is not to disparage several nice small ones still to come. But just as Vertigo, say, is one man’s testament on film, and not comforting, so Rio Bravo is an old-timer’s reverie, and it is the proof of what we have seen all along: that it might be fun to do a movie.
Of course, Hawks’s trick is to make it loo
k easy, too. Is there a film from the fifties so free from strain, or one in which the drift of song is there all the time—I refer not just to the cutthroat song or Dimitri Tiomkin’s dainty music, but the notion (a few years ahead of Demy) that really every line could be sung. And whereas it is easy enough to romanticize a final Western grouping like The Wild Bunch (and I really like The Wild Bunch), isn’t this grouping more civilized, more sexy, more chatty, and more safely lodged in what I will call culture? This little town could be in Arden.
The screenplay is by Jules Furthman and Leigh Brackett. Russell Harlan took the pictures. It’s 140 minutes, and I wonder if even at 14 hours Hawks would have succumbed to boredom. The routines are not all brand-new, though Feathers is without doubt the most Coltraneish voice in American film, going on and on and getting better all the time. What is it about? Is it about courage and character and conversation? Yes, but it’s about rolling a cigarette, black tights, and waiting for a flowerpot to come through the window. It’s about teasing Ward Bond rotten for Wagon Train. It’s about blood drops in a glass of beer.
Ricky Nelson did well enough. Dean Martin altered the way the world thought of him. John Wayne watched over everyone like a football coach with rookies. And Angie Dickinson took her moment the way Bob Beamon jumped in Mexico City in 1968. With fond thanks to John Russell and Claude Akins as the Burdette brothers, to Pedro Gonzalez and Estelita Rodriguez (I think they’re meant to be Mexicans), and to everyone else.
The River (1951)
So a Frenchman went to India to make an English film. It’s an encouraging sign of how, after 1945, film nationalism started to leak. Films made by travelers became increasingly common, whether documentary or feature. But for Jean Renoir, the emergence of The River was also a way of healing the past. He had not made a picture since The Woman on the Beach (1947). He was not sure where he belonged, or how to proceed. Then he was approached by a former florist, Kenneth McEldowney, who had heard of Renoir’s interest in Rumer Godden’s novel The River. McEldowney bought the book (Renoir had an option already) and arranged $500,000 for the picture.
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