Bennett is sexy, spiteful, unreliable—just the kind of girl that Lang the misogynist liked to dream of. She seems more relaxed than ever before. Whenever she went ladylike, she stiffened up. And, of course, Dan Duryea (in a series of clashing stripes), his forelock dripping off his lean head, his nasal voice arcing over that of Lazy Legs—he is a treat. The setting is said to be Greenwich Village, but it seems to be just a dark block away from The Shop Around the Corner.
Schindler’s List (1993)
So many of the major enterprises of American film in the 1990s were trying to rediscover the place, or even the value, of big movies. Are they more than the spring that releases big money? And so in the same year, there was Steven Spielberg making Jurassic Park, because he knew he could, because he had the technology to keep the dinosaurs loping across the meadow, snapping at your heels, because film had reached that point of being able to re-create the distant past—as if it had been filmed yesterday. And at the very same time, he made Schindler’s List, which in finding the Thomas Keneally novel had discovered a way of dealing with the concentration camps while keeping the movie big, and an uplifting event. Further, Spielberg must have realized—Oscars to Oskar—that he was at last in an impregnable position to have Hollywood give him proper respect. Their restraint toward his youth had lasted long enough. And just to show them, he’d make the two films at the same time, as if to prove that he was past being merely human.
It’s hard not to see Spielberg’s point about Hollywood’s attitude to him. It is hard to resist his satisfaction that as that part of him covered by the past required some acknowledgment of his Jewishness, so the example of Oskar Schindler, manufacturer of enamelware—and the savior of over a thousand lives—was a decent way of telling the dire story with a positive attitude. Beyond that, with the help of Steven Zaillian’s scrupulous and tender screenplay, Schindler’s List is an uncanny version of the camps, the Krakow ghetto, the thing called the Holocaust, done with such steady application to all the crafts accessible to modern film, and with such an appalled sense of human nature that any kid coming to it fresh and suspicious might be sure the Holocaust happened.
But then, alas, some clerical fussiness flags that little girl’s coat in red, so we will not miss it. That small touch exposed the uncrushable chutzpah of the most accomplished and “mature” filmmaker in America in 1992. With that one arty nudge Spielberg assigned his sense of his own past to the collected memories of all the films he had seen. All of a sudden, the drab Krakow vista became a set, with assistant directors urging the extras into line.
Schindler’s List was a brimming example of Hollywood craft, and of maybe the most industrious and benevolent producer the system had ever known, but Schindler’s List was also a disgrace to expressive power and our inescapable ties to the thing in our lives that used to be called “content.” It was an organization of art and craft designed to re-create a terrible reality done nearly to perfection. But in that one small tarting up (not nearly enough to deter Oscars, of course), there lay exposed the comprehensive vulgarity of the venture.
Everyone was good, not just Liam Neeson, Ben Kingsley, Ralph Fiennes, and Embeth Davidtz, but all the children and the beautiful women who did not know whether the washrooms would give them water or gas.
The Searchers (1956)
Tell me the story again, Father—if you are my father. How Ethan Edwards comes back from the war late, with gold and his old Confederate coat. He comes back to the homestead of his brother, the wife and the children, in a place where no homesteading is really possible. Monument Valley looks like the beginning of time, or the end of it, but you can’t farm there, and it is supposed to be Comanche territory. All of which shows how fast and loose John Ford would play with fact.
But the meaning or the purpose are elsewhere here, just as we feel Ethan has come back to see the brother’s wife. Not a word is said, but there is a feeling of a love that passed there once, like a stream. Then Ethan is drawn away on a senseless posse mission and the Indian called Scar comes in the night, kills everyone, but is cruel enough to take Debbie, the youngest, until she can become Natalie Wood. And so the years and miles of searching begin as Ethan and Martin Pawley (Jeffrey Hunter), not a purebred anything, go after the scar and the wound and Martin realizes that he is there, just to be there, in case Ethan finds Debbie and makes certain of purity in the frontier way.
There are things in The Searchers that are cockeyed—notably the false eyelashes that Natalie Wood will wear as a Comanche bride. The subplot with Vera Miles and Ken Curtis becomes a bit more grinding every time you see the film. But then you are seeing the film again and again, because of its mystery. And every time, I find, I’m not quite sure how it’s going to end, because I suspect Ford himself was in terrible doubt. But the simple confession in the ending of family and kin being reasserted is then magically defied when Ethan is not fit or ready to enter the house again. That last image of him in the breeze in the doorway, contemplating civilization and fury, and the door closing, is the greatest thing Ford ever does, and it is a tremendous moment in American film. But be careful deciding what it means.
Merian Cooper produced. Frank Nugent wrote the script. Winton Hoch did the beautiful photography. Max Steiner wrote the music—and the great, rolling theme. John Wayne’s harshness, learned from Red River, came home. Jeffrey Hunter is fine, Natalie is adorable, and the rest of the cast is Vera Miles, Ward Bond, John Qualen, Olive Carey, Ken Curtis, Harry Carey, Jr., Hank Worden, and Henry Brandon as Scar. Someday in all this some new movie should tell Scar’s story and of how Debbie loved him, and we should always recall that this comes from a story by Alan Le May and is the obverse of the story he wrote for Huston’s The Unforgiven, where Audrey Hepburn is a Kiowa girl who has been taken by the whites.
Senso (1954)
The opening of Senso could hardly be more interesting. It is 1861, and we are at a performance of Il Trovatore at the Fenice opera house in Venice. We see the stage and then the packed house. In the upper gallery, leaflets and flowers are passed to the front for a demonstration against the occupation of Venice by the Austrian army—they are the officers in white sitting in the best seats. The excitement of two forms of theater, the Verdi and the political, is wonderfully done. And this is the old Fenice, so tragically burned in 1997 (and providing John Berendt for the occasion of his book The City of Falling Angels). There are moments when even feature film contributes to our historical record.
An emotional supporter of the demonstration is the Countess Livia Serpieri (Alida Valli). But in the aftermath, a close friend of hers and a leading activist (Massimo Girotti) goes so far as to challenge one Austrian officer—the insolently handsome Mahler—to a duel. In her efforts to have that dangerous silliness set aside, the countess attempts to meet Mahler (Farley Granger). He is in her box for the next delayed act of Il Trovatore. We see the singers in the background. “Can you see?” she asks. “Quite well,” he answers, attending to the slope of her bosom. Some Austrians take culture where they can find it.
It is the start of a fatal love affair, in which the countess will be humiliated and Mahler will end up shot, all played out against superb battle scenes and a tense nocturnal moment when the countess’s household, dogs included, is aroused as Mahler enters her bedroom, and Valli goes into such flights of desperation that she seems to grow older before our eyes. She died recently, and I wrote something to the effect that she seldom showed us a smile. As Anna, in The Third Man, there is not much to smile about, but there ought to be moments here in Senso when she loves Granger’s wastrel. Perhaps, instead, she knows that he is unreliable—indeed, he is the one who smiles at the thought of her predicament. Just as he knows he is worth no one’s love, so she falls to her ruin.
This mournful romance has not dated, and for many it is one of Luchino Visconti’s cleanest and most satisfying films, in which the steady respect for décor is accompanied by a bleak lizard’s stare for the human wrecks. Visconti had arranged to have I
ngrid Bergman and Brando as the lovers. That seems like a huge loss. But Valli and Granger are more awkward and human; they are not icons of romance, but an unlovable beauty and a dishonest paragon. Their passion is never less than painful, and so a streak of realism looms up amid the lush visual treatment. The photography is by G. R. Aldo and Robert Krasker. Some of the music is Bruckner. An abbreviated, dubbed version, The Wanton Countess, had dialogue by Tennessee Williams and Paul Bowles! But the Italian script was by Visconti and Suso Cecchi d’Amico.
The Servant (1963)
Several years before the notorious house on Powis Square in Performance, Joseph Losey knew how to set an infernal mold in the structure and ambiance of a suitably upper-class residence. The house was by Richard MacDonald, of course, that hugely skilled designer so vital to Losey’s rediscovery of himself and movie in England. I remember seeing the separate rooms all on one Shepperton sound stage, and realizing the way in which the webbing of camera movements could hold them in place. There, as the film was shot, you had a prescient feeling of a certain addled England stretched out in a morgue.
It was a trashy novel (by Robin Maugham), ostensibly uplifted by Harold Pinter’s script. In fact, this was exactly the kind of trash—all rooted in intimidation, sadism, and shame—that Pinter understood. It was Losey, who was by then like a ferret pursuing the fat rabbit of English class, who knew what it could be. It was Losey who knew that Dirk Bogarde (that most secretive of English actors) could not fail to flower in the shit-beds of the hothouse. It was he who saw and nearly provoked a sexy affair between James Fox and Sarah Miles so that it would spill over on film, masking their limits as actors.
Yes, there is a decided lack of humor in the whole thing (or the decision to settle for Barrett’s smarmy smile as comment). And there is finally a feeling of degradation and moral downfall for Fox’s Tony that is way beyond his intellectual or spiritual capacities. (Invoking those things is the best joke in the film.) Still, this portrait of a helpless master and a cunning servant is icy, deliberate, and filled with loathing. And note that this vision came several years before that thing called the sixties really started to happen in Britain. So it’s still relevant and useful to see The Servant as the climax to the unsettling films Losey made in the fifties in England.
But in all of those films, he faced problems of budget, script, and casting—to say nothing of his own uncertainty. The thing that strikes home in The Servant is the wintry assurance, the reptilian stealth of the takeover, and the final bleakness as England slips into the hands of its Barretts. Bogarde was a great strength during the filming: He helped the younger players, and I fancy that by his mere consent he gave courage to Losey. For Bogarde knew the swine he was becoming, and one part of his horrible smile is for all the aunts in England who would be mortified by it.
This is one of the great English films, and I don’t think it could have been made in any other country without such surgical malice, or such American disinterest. Indeed, it leaves Performance looking not just imitative, but pretentious and romantic (Donald Cammell believed too much of his own guff). Losey knows that the Tonys will go on, dead inside, just as the Barretts would dream up their Blair. But those consequences are only there if you feel inclined to do the autopsy. First observe the death.
Se7en (1995)
In a city where it rains, a serial killer is on the loose. The police call him “John Doe” in advance of finding him, and the chief responsibility for that falls on Detective William Somerset (Morgan Freeman), who has seven days to go until his retirement, and a much younger cop, David Mills (Brad Pitt). Rookie and veteran, the two men make friction first, and then friends. Mills has Somerset home to dinner to meet his pregnant wife, Tracy (Gwyneth Paltrow). At dinner, their apartment shakes as the subway train goes past. Nowhere in this city is still, dry, or comfortable. But the dinner party is nearly sacramental in David Fincher’s misanthropic film—it is a small haven of amity and understanding. It will not deter Somerset from retiring. But perhaps it restores his faith in the human race. More fool him.
No one I have ever met seeks to deny the aggressive talent in David Fincher, the director of Se7en, nor even the suggestion that he may be the closest rival to Michael Mann at putting eloquent imagery on a screen. But is that enough?
The city in Se7en is not named; it is “metropolis” again—which is fair enough and quite beautiful in the way Darius Khondji has made its shit-wash radiant. And the deliberate squalor that comprises gray slums and trashy luxury is equally well handled in the production design of Arthur Max and Gary Wissner’s art direction. This is an odious place, and the hatefulness—we feel—has arisen naturally out of the malice, the disgust, and the unbridled evil in the world. (It comes from the computers, too.) Alas, the cops are no longer vigilantes or protectors. They are not people who can save the world. They are sacrificial victims—they are the idiots whose dogged pursuit pays tribute to the intelligence of the killer. More fool them. More brilliant him.
The killings in Se7en are modeled on the seven deadly sins, and they are hysterically brilliant in their presentation and the way in which the film offers them to the detectives and to us as puzzles to be solved. This bleak intellectual command—it’s deadpan Meet John Doe—comes to reside in Kevin Spacey, in his revealing performance (Spacey, I think, was born to be hateful—grant him that, and he comes alive). And the killer wins: He assures his own death (always part of his plan), and he completes his mission, which includes striking horror in Somerset and Mills, and in us. More than the director knows, or gives himself a chance to notice, the film identifies with and embodies the cruel intellectual superiority of the killer. To that extent, Se7en—quite beautiful and piercing—is one of the most truly sadistic works the cinema has produced. Its very achievement is disgusting.
Spacey controls the film: After all, he knows the script (by Andrew Kevin Walker); he has designed the mise-en-scène. Freeman and Pitt are valiant, Paltrow is sweet and woeful. There are good supporting performances from R. Lee Ermey and Richard Roundtree.
Seven Brides for Seven Brothers (1954)
Who’s to argue with the president at the time, Dwight D. Eisenhower, who said, “If you haven’t seen it, you should”? Still, it seems to me that Seven Brides for Seven Brothers—deemed innovative, groundbreaking, and sensational in its day—has fallen out of fashion. It was a big hit in 1954, and it was actually nominated for Best Picture. Is it possible that the rise of feminism has taken away a lot of an innocent age’s enthusiasm?
It was a Jack Cummings production, driven forward by Stanley Donen, who was working on his own and obviously had a lot to prove in delivering a musical (without any stage original) where the story was carried in song and dance. Indeed, the most daring thing about this film is the breakup of the old musical tradition in which illustrative numbers halt and summarize the small talk. Donen deserves high credit for a musical where the music hardly stopped. This wish to be new showed up in strained relationships with the first screenwriters, Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett. They had worked from the Stephen Vincent Benet story “The Sobbin’ Women.” But Donen was unhappy. So they backed off and Dorothy Kingsley came on board. It was she who worked out that the female lead (Jane Powell) should be far more instrumental in the plot maneuvering.
So, here are these seven brothers out in the backwoods when one of them, Howard Keel, feels the need for a wife—whereupon his brothers all get the same itch. More or less, the model for the story is the Rape of the Sabine Women, though it’s doubtful that that was noticed in the Eisenhower age. High spirits and animal energy overwhelm sexiness—that’s what the dancing is all about.
The songs were written by Gene de Paul and Johnny Mercer, and they include “Bless Your Beautiful Hide,” “When You’re in Love,” “Lonesome Polecat,” and “It’s Spring, Spring, Spring” (is it just three springs?). But it’s the choreography of Michael Kidd that is the driving force (granted that Donen was himself a dancer and choreographer) filling the
CinemaScope frame with dynamism, especially in the barn-raising ballet.
Keel and Jane Powell were not dominating actors or star personalities, but they did not need to be. This really is an ensemble musical, with Marc Platt, Jeff Richards, Matt Mattox, Russ Tamblyn, Tommy Rall, and Jacques d’Amboise among the men. The other brides are Virginia Gibson, Julie Newmeyer (later Julie Newmar), Nancy Kilgas, Ruta Kilmonis (Ruta Lee), Betty Carr, and Norma Doggett.
As so often, looking at this classic again only underlines the timidity of the business and the art in not moving further ahead with integrated musicals. The energy of Seven Brides, the exuberance, is still astonishing and exhilarating. And the chorus line of bursting talent tells its own story. Giving up on the musical, though, goes hand in hand with the decline of popular song and jazz. How did the music go out of America?
Seven Chances (1925)
If ever the comedian was born to reflect on the meeting place of—or the abyss between—“true love” and life’s chronic tendency toward gambling, it was Buster Keaton. In Seven Chances, Buster is a man, Jimmy Shannon, with a “true love”—Mary Jones (Ruth Dwyer)—and he will end with her, which is nice if you believe in nice. But Buster plainly is a man inclined toward a belief in nothing but mathematics and absurdity. Thus, he does not laughingly reject his predicament—to be married by 7 p.m. on his twenty-seventh birthday—but he obediently falls in with it, like a number that has always been searching for the right equation. Look at his face—as beautiful but as inhuman as a butterfly—and you see that utter failure to identify sentiment, as opposed to identification. Buster is a Monopoly player who, told that his emblem is the boot, never thinks to ask, Is the boot me? He says, “I am the boot. The boot is like me. I like a boot. Give me a boot.” And life obliges. Why seven?
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