'Have You Seen...?'

by David Thomson

  Not that Ophüls is so lacking in tenderness, or that the renewal of romantic urgings had not always been a part of his philosophy. The figures in La Ronde are toys, or horses on a fairground carousel, if you prefer. And their presence as figures in a pattern or actors in a play are stressed by the key role of the meneur de jeu, the ringmaster or the director, embodied by Anton Walbrook: “Je suis l’incarnation de votre désir de tout connaître.” Of course, he is a forerunner of the Peter Ustinov figure in Lola Montès, but he is also Ophüls himself stepping out of the dark. He is the director announcing, These people, these comedians, are mine. The first casting in the role was Louis Jouvet. And surely he would have been fine. What do we get with Walbrook? Something gentler and wiser, something Viennese and someone who might easily step off the carousel for a moment and be a king in the story.

  So this is the perfect Ophüls film in a sense that leaves Lola Montès—damaged, abbreviated, maybe not ideally cast—as something more complex. Which do you prefer? It may be a matter of closeness to death. In Lola Montès, the show is nearly over. In La Ronde, it can run for years yet.

  Apart from Walbrook, this is the cast: Simone Signoret (as the hooker); Serge Reggiani (as the soldier); Simone Simon (as the chambermaid); Jean Clarieux (as the brigadier); Daniel Gélin (as the young man); Robert Vattier (as the professor); Danielle Darrieux (as the married woman); Fernand Gravey (as her husband); Odette Joyeux (as the grisette); Jean-Louis Barrault (as the poet); Isa Miranda (as the actress—it was to have been Marlene Dietrich); and Gérard Philipe (as the count).

  Room at the Top (1959)

  What does a producer do in life? Often it is a matter of obtrusive mistakes or unobtrusive flights of genius. In the case of Room at the Top—which was a sensation in Britain when it opened such as would be hard to understand today—it was a matter of Peter Glenville and James and John Woolf offering the part of Alice Aisgill to Simone Signoret (and Glenville isn’t even credited on the film, but he knew Signoret and helped it along). In John Braine’s rather crude but best-selling novel, Alice Aisgill was as she sounds: Yorkshire through and through, albeit modern in her sexual thinking. So it was a risk as well as a coup to say, Forget the people who could play Alice as fortyish and Yorkshire (the part was apparently offered to Vivien Leigh): suppose she is French. And suppose she is Simone Signoret.

  Of course, that’s not the whole story. Braine’s book had done well because it was a tough fable of social climbing and opportunism—of people who were deadly serious about getting to the top. So Joe Lampton betrays his mistress, Alice, in order to marry the boss’s daughter (Heather Sears). He gets to the top, or Bradford’s version of it, and he is reckoned to be doomed. That was the old-fashioned side of Braine’s book. The new Britain coming, like the one Henry James had observed, was one where getting to the top did not necessarily carry any fatal moral consequence. But Joe (and Braine) were softies, really, and rather un-English—they couldn’t stick the boot in without remorse.

  Neil Paterson did the script, and Signoret for one believed that it was better than the novel (Mordecai Richler seems to have done some doctoring). Freddie Francis shot it, and Jack Clayton was the director. It was his feature debut and the start of a purple patch. They did location shooting in Bradford as well as studio stuff, and there are some rather old-fashioned supporting bits from Hermione Baddeley, Donald Wolfit, Donald Houston, Raymond Huntley, Allan Cuthbertson (as Alice’s cad husband), and Ambrosine Phillpotts.

  The strength of the project was Signoret, thirty-eight when the film was shot, but ravishing and very sexy for a British picture. Yet the core of the film was Laurence Harvey as Joe, and his casting was as clever, for Harvey was never quite likeable, and never too much in love with himself. That harshness works very well with Signoret’s carnal abandon. You can see Joe longing to be as immersed in the love affair as she is. Signoret won the Oscar for Best Actress. Paterson won for the script. There were nods for Clayton, Harvey, and Best Picture.

  The film made a lot of money and promoted everyone involved with it. There was talk of a British New Wave and certainly the North Country had an increasing voice in pictures being made. Signoret became an international star, but then her looks deserted her. Harvey was launched on his strange career, and Clayton was a fixture—until The Great Gatsby. But it takes a wise producer to know not to do as good a novel as that.

  Rope (1948)

  Rope was a play by Patrick Hamilton (his first, written when he was only twenty-five) produced in London in 1929 to great success. (Brian Aherne played one of the killers, and Ernest Milton was the detective-like Rupert Cadell.) It is the story of two young Englishmen who murder a friend (in their Mayfair flat) simply to prove that they can do it. It was assumed widely that Hamilton had been influenced by the Leopold-Loeb case in Chicago of 1924 (the basis for Compulsion, too). But he always denied that, and said he had thought of the idea in 1922. He also added that he was not especially interested in the Nietzschean ideas behind the murder: “I have gone all out to write a horror play and make your flesh creep.” Thus, at the start of the play the murder is heard but not seen on a darkened stage.

  Alfred Hitchcock was five years older than Patrick Hamilton, and it is certain that he saw the play in London—it is as easy to conclude that he would have been fascinated by its sense of murder as an exercise and by the gradual discovery of the crime by the Rupert Cadell character. The mystery is how no one sought to make a movie of it in the next two decades. Perhaps there really was an issue of dangerous taste involved.

  Hitchcock was clearly drawn to Rope as a play: it is even said that he thought of doing it on stage: “I undertook Rope as a stunt… The stage drama was played out in the actual time of the story; the action is continuous from the moment the curtain goes up until it comes down again. I asked myself whether it was technically possible to film it in the same way. The only way to achieve that, I found, would be to handle the shooting in the same continuous action… And I got this crazy idea to do it in a single shot.”

  Not so much crazy as predetermined, academic, and laborious. Hamilton himself was hired as a first scenarist, and replaced with the young Arthur Laurents. Then Hume Cronyn did some dialogue revision. But Hamilton noted the difficulty of writing a script when the one-shot camera style (the ten-minute take, as it would be called) was a given.

  There are eleven shots, and the result is… terrible. This is a ponderous picture founded on a dire theoretical mistake, the most disastrous proof of Hitch’s urge to have a movie all in his head before he began. There may be some curiosity value in waiting for the “clever” invisible cuts. But only if you care to forget what is being said and done. That is possible because the creepiness of the Hamilton has been turned into a lecture—where James Stewart is badly miscast as Cadell.

  It is said that Hitch wanted Cary Grant and Montgomery Clift as the killers, and one can see that being hilarious and unprecedented, a screwball comedy more than a gay subtext. Not surprisingly, the two actors backed off and so we are left with John Dall and Farley Granger, both of whom remind us of string, not rope.

  Rosemary’s Baby (1968)

  When you consider that Roman Polanski went from The Fearless Vampire Killers to Rosemary’s Baby, you get an idea of his nerve and his ability to handle whatever commercial situation came along. There’s also little doubt left about his brilliance at that time, and his enthusiastic proclivity for nastiness. Some horror pictures date badly (The Exorcist, for one), but Rosemary’s Baby is very disturbing still. In a way, the most alarming thing of all is Polanski’s apologia. He read the Ira Levin novel, loved it, and thought great parts of it ready for film. But “being an agnostic… I no more believed in Satan as evil incarnate than I believed in a personal god; the whole idea conflicted with my rational view of the world. For credibility’s sake, I decided that there would have to be a loophole: the possibility that Rosemary’s supernatural experiences were figments of her imagination.”

  Now, if you as a
viewer feel that “loophole,” get through it fast. I always know I’m trapped with Satan in the film.

  The rights to the novel had been bought by the horror movie veteran William Castle, and he had wanted to direct it himself. But Paramount and Robert Evans told him, No chance, and the project was offered to Polanski, who accepted fast and wrote the script himself. His plan was to film the New York apartment building, the Dakota, all in Los Angeles, and he has given great credit to Richard Sylbert (production designer) and Anthea Sylbert (costumes) for the suffocating look and feel of the film.

  The lead parts presented problems, and Polanski had to be persuaded to see Mia Farrow in the role. But once she was cast, her anorexic, cropped-hair look became seminal. I think there’s no question but that her physical, biological suffering is rendered throughout with extraordinary intensity. For the husband, Polanski thought of Redford and Beatty, but they were far too canny and image-protective to take on that forbidding role. So, finally, it went to John Cassavetes, which only suggests that the Devil is in casting when it suits him.

  But Polanski was just as interested in the old-timers, the coven, that would surround Rosemary. Ruth Gordon was inspired casting, of course, but don’t miss Sidney Blackmer, Maurice Evans, Ralph Bellamy, Elisha Cook, Jr., and Patsy Kelly.

  At a cost of just under $2 million, the movie had rentals of $15 million, and it played a major part in the return of horror, with scenes where even a hardened viewer had trouble watching. It’s easy to laugh at the idea—of health-food nuts who are really Satan’s crew—but not during the film. It got very few Oscar nominations, but Ruth Gordon won for Best Supporting Actress and ensured her comeback. As for Polanski, he was established in his American reputation. But in the year after the picture came out, on Cielo Drive, in Los Angeles, his wife, Sharon Tate, was murdered when very close to full term in her pregnancy. It was an age when the Devil found every loophole.

  ’Round Midnight (1986)

  Dexter Gordon died in 1990, uncommonly lucky among jazz musicians that someone had found the kindness, the ingenuity, and the money to make a proper celebration of him before that death. And if you are inclined, unhappily, to the suspicion that his generation is unlikely to be repeated in our musical history, then ’Round Midnight is not just a grace note to Dexter but an eloquent memorial to a great art and its ruinous background. By which I mean the wretched life that black Americans lived to play as they liked.

  It’s not that anyone interested in the history of jazz can turn to Hollywood for help or illustration: In feature films, there is Nat King Cole as W. C. Handy; there are Louis and the boys on the bus out to Newport in High Society; and there are small wonders, like Marie Bryant singing for a moment in They Live by Night. There is Ellington at the road house in Anatomy of a Murder. There is Miles playing to Jeanne Moreau’s face in Lift to the Scaffold. But the neglect is nearly complete, and it speaks to something horrible when you realize—naturally enough—that plenty of Hollywood people loved jazz. So the self-portrait in ‘Round Midnight is an item of treasure—and we owe it to a Frenchman, Bertrand Tavernier.

  Tavernier had known François Paudras, the ordinary Parisian jazz fan who had done so much to help Bud Powell in his worst times—and Powell was very likely deranged as often as he was brilliant. Tavernier had also seen Gordon, whose European exile had been long because of his association with drink and drugs. Moreover, those things had left the handsome, tall man an unsteady wreck, as well as someone whose speech was hard to understand. Yet Tavernier had this idea that Dexter could act in a fiction movie, playing a version of himself, “Dale Turner.”

  Irwin Winkler offered to produce the picture, and I believe that one Clint Eastwood did a lot to persuade Warner Brothers to distribute the film in America. Then Tavernier and David Rayfiel wrote a script about Dale’s friendship with a Frenchman, played by François Cluzet. The “story” is slight, but Dale wants to return to New York to see a daughter. It’s enough, and it allows Gordon to improvise on the theme to startling richness. The nomination of Gordon for an Academy Award was a sentimental gesture, but not crazy or ridiculous. Gordon helps show us the profound links between modern jazz and the Actors Studio—which arrived in New York at much the same time. And if he is technically weak, that doesn’t deny him sauce, wit, and a lovely creole mannerliness.

  Beyond that, there are magnificent studio sessions, enormously enhanced by the art design of Alexandre Trauner. Some of the camerawork at these jam sessions is classic. The cast includes Sandra Reaves-Phillips, Lonette McKee, and Christine Pascal, and the musicians make a roll of honor: Herbie Hancock (who did get an Oscar for his score), Bobby Hutcherson, Billy Higgins, John McLaughlin, Pierre Michelot, Wayne Shorter, Ron Carter, Cedar Walton, Freddie Hubbard, Tony Williams.

  The Round-up (1965)

  We are on a sun-drenched plain of dust and blond grass; maneuvers are taking place. There are horses, a military band, and firing squads—it is all like toy soldiers in the long days. It is said to be the puszta of Hungary some time after 1848. The Austrian army, in cloaks, boots, and full uniform, have rounded up prisoners, some of whom may be remnants of the rebel army. There is a feeling of decades of antagonism between the administration in Vienna and the cowboy life on the puszta.

  The career of Miklós Jancsó began only six years after the Budapest uprising. The Round-up, which caused a great stir at Cannes in 1965, was plainly both a historical study and a textbook demonstration on how prisoners might be interrogated, intimidated, and broken down. At the same time, it is a very formal film, made up of the regular outlines of compounds, stockades, and cells, surrounded by the infinite space and glare of the summer.

  Written by Jancsó’s regular colleague, Gyula Hernádi, and photographed by Tamás Somló, The Round-up advances like a theorem as the Austrians isolate possible troublemakers and then trick a couple of rebels into giving away the identity of the old revolutionary guard. This film is in black and white, and it was still only experimenting with long takes and very elaborate camera movements. By the time of Red Psalm (1971), which is astoundingly beautiful, Jancsó had brought the whole film down to twenty-odd shots, elaborate movements of people in different directions and a chorus of delectable young women in nothing but white skirts. Red Psalm won the Director’s Prize at Cannes, but it was taken as a turning point in which this very individual director began to show signs of ostentatious formalism for form’s own sake.

  For his part, Jancsó claimed to be making films about freedom and power and their eternal conflict, but he did not seem to be much hindered or opposed by censorship. And there are great passages in The Round-up in which one feels the mathematics of liberty being steadily squeezed by geometry. It may be that only Hungarians, or people with a detailed knowledge of Hungarian history in the nineteenth century, can respond to these films. But long before the ending of the Iron Curtain, Jancsó felt he was making hymns to a strangled national liberty.

  It is easily forgotten that Jancsó is still alive—and by many standards a master. Moreover, one can make the case for his influence—on Angelopoulos, on Béla Tarr, and even on Sergio Leone. No one had imagined the parade-ground elegance of his films until he made them, and just because Jancsó was so different from the films from, say, Poland or Czechoslovakia should not discredit him. Elegance is a Hungarian attribute—it was there in Alex Korda and Michael Curtiz. Meanwhile Jancsó’s work is nearly as out of fashion as that of Eisenstein, and not much short of being that spectacular.

  Ruggles of Red Gap (1935)

  The Ruggles story goes back, and may well have its origins in more-or-less factual episodes from the picaresque history of the Wild West. Whatever, the notion of a servant (or a wife) won in a game of poker is rich in comic and menacing prospects—imagine Barrett won at a Mayfair card club in The Servant. Anyway, Henry Leon Wilson’s story had been filmed twice as a silent, in 1918 and then in 1923, with James Cruze directing and Edward Everett Horton in the lead role.

  Paramount decid
ed on it as the last film in Charles Laughton’s contract with them. Arthur Hornblow produced it; Leo McCarey directed; and the screenplay was officially by Walter DeLeon, Harlan Thomson, and Humphrey Pearson. However, it seems that Laughton’s private writer, Arthur Macrae, was imported to doctor it to the star’s liking.

  The film has a great reputation still, but I’m bound to side with Laughton’s biographer, Simon Callow, in saying that he gives an awkward, overdone, owlish impersonation of comedy without ever being funny. And Callow is surely right in his diagnosis: Laughton was not humble or self-effacing; he was nobody’s servant. And there is the problem. Edward Everett Horton was a deferential actor, he understood in his true modesty the proper form in being a servant. Laughton was always more like a Barrett (from Wimpole Street), capable of digesting the entire household and becoming its mocking master.

  Still, it’s a nice idea, of Marmaduke Ruggles acquired in a bet by nouveau riche Westerners and then becoming a restaurateur (Laughton, we may recall, had been born into the hotel business, though in snobby Scarborough). The comedy of the film does exist, and it is to be found in the Flouds, Egbert and Effie (Charlie Ruggles and Mary Boland), the nervous-exuberant couple who are fearful of faux pas. The cast is also enriched by ZaSu Pitts, Maude Eburne, Roland Young, and Leila Hyams. McCarey directs the ensemble very well, and the Laughton-Pitts romance is as well observed as the Flouds’ marriage. Yes, this is the film with the set piece where Ruggles confounds the Americans present with a quiet but perfect rendering of Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address. Laughton does it well—but like a great actor. How interesting it would be to hear it coming from a true Jeeves. Of course, this was Laughton’s heyday: He had just done The Private Life of Henry VIII and The Barretts of Wimpole Street—Les Misérables, Mutiny on the Bounty, and Rembrandt were ahead. He was unstoppable until I, Claudius came apart on the terrible gulf between him and Sternberg. But not too much of Laughton stands up well. The mystery is still there. Was he desperate not to emerge as gay, or was he locked in self-loathing? It seems that every picture was a hurdle in that race—a race never resolved. He passed from “greatness” to junk with surprising ease. In Ruggles of Red Gap he seems like the empty square. And Leo McCarey does not quite seem to notice.