In time, Gal handles Don rather well, and life in the Costa del Sol resumes its even tone. This happens because Winstone’s Gal is as clever as he seems lazy. He goes back to London and is involved in the mob scene there, a setup that includes such archetypal figures as James Fox and Ian McShane (both of whom bring considerable baggage to a film like this).
So Sexy Beast rests somewhere between a gangster film and a game in which the elements of gangsterism are pieces on the board. It was written by Louis Mellis and David Scinto (with uncredited help from Andrew Michael Jolley), and we know early on that it’s a screenplay that relishes chat and verbal structures. Don’s way of speaking is often insane, and sometimes wildly theatrical. But the interaction is very compelling. Ivan Bird did the photography, and he makes Spain seem like a daft never-never land. The production design is by Jan Houllevigue, and the music is by Roque Baños. There are dream sequences and nightmares, and there are some reasons for thinking that pretension risks going out of control. But Sexy Beast, and Birth, have ravishingly effective scenes and an overall air of mystery that is enchanting.
Shadow of a Doubt (1943)
Over the years, Alfred Hitchcock would often say that Shadow of a Doubt was his favorite picture. It’s an intriguing pick, and I think it points toward areas of creative liberty that Hitch felt opened up on that picture, as well as the crucial cross-identification of the two Charlies which is so important to his evolution. Still, in larger retrospect, I think there are several better pictures than Shadow—and several reasons for seeing it as a transition from certain English modes or habits to the more extensive pessimism of his American work.
It was the second picture made on his Universal deal (following Saboteur), with Jack Skirball as an amiable producer who left Hitch alone to do his thing. And though the film comes from a story by Gordon McDonell, it’s much closer to an original worked up for the screen by Thornton Wilder, Sally Benson, Hitch, and his wife, Alma. Hitch had wanted Wilder because of Our Town and his wish to be true to small-town life. Yet, I wonder if that artfully worked up background atmosphere doesn’t get out of hand—indeed, doesn’t even become a pressure that could explain murder. If only the young Charlie were more eager to get away from the stifling world.
You see, the thrust of the action is more that of a mathematical theorem than a story. Charlie Oakley (Joseph Cotten) is seemingly trapped in a harsh urban world (New York). He is a killer, too, increasingly pursued by police. So he thinks to make an escape, all the way across the continent, to Santa Rosa, in California. That’s where his married sister (Patricia Collinge) lives with her daughter and Charlie’s niece, “Charlie” Newton (Teresa Wright). But as the journey works out, the young, adoring Charlie will realize the older one’s dark truth and will prompt his demise.
The bond between uncle and niece is fascinating, and it points to the subtle bonds between characters in later Hitchcock (Melanie and Lydia in The Birds, say). But it needs some help that might come if the niece had a little more danger or violence in her, just a touch more of the uncle. As it is, they are so different, the bonding seems imposed and threatened by the dense undergrowth of Santa Rosa life—Collinge, Henry Travers, Hume Cronyn—much of which has dated badly and become a heavy-handed commentary on law-abiding interest in the grisly aspect of murder.
So the film lurches in and out of its own smooth poison, and the repeated use of the “Merry Widow” dance device becomes intolerable. But Cotten and Wright act beautifully, and seem to feel more and more strands of DNA becoming tangled as the picture goes on. So the greatest interest is to see Hitch feeling his way into that tangle where good nature and a darker opposite become mutually dependent. He is getting toward the way in which “good” characters feel a stronger impulse toward “bad” than they ever reckoned on, and that is the real turning point in Hitchcock’s cinema.
Shadows (1960)
When Shadows opened in London, at the National Film Theatre, in 1959, it was part of a season entitled “Beat, Square and Cool” that looked back to the experimental films of the 1950s, or even earlier. But the film had an end-credit boast, “The film you have just seen was an improvisation,” that seemed to hark forward and that caught some of the mood of the Actors Studio, which seemed to be the core of the new American acting. It had given us Brando, Clift, and Dean, but still to come were Nicholson, Pacino, Beatty, and De Niro. In many ways, the actor John Cassavetes, who made Shadows, seemed to fall in line with those names. After years of failure in the early fifties, he had had a breakthrough in Martin Ritt’s Edge of the City (1957), in which he had seemed torn between a rebel intransigence and the self-pity that was helping Method actors become stars.
But John Cassavetes was something else. Shadows had been improvised in only a few places. Cassavetes also claimed that it had been shot in six weeks. But we know now that the process was much more extended and conventional. Shadows was a project that Cassavetes introduced at his Drama Workshop in 1957. The situation: that of a light-skinned black family, some of whom sometimes passed for white. The roles were assigned and then improvisation was used to discover the right dialogue and structure—this is close to the method Mike Leigh would employ in England. Long before the shooting started, Robert Alan Aurthur (cowriter on Edge of the City) came in to help on the script. The movie started shooting in 1957 and went on over a period of two years. It was shot, on 16 mm, by Erich Kollmar; it was edited by Maurice McEndree and Cassavetes; and it acqured a musical score that featured Shafi Hadi and Charles Mingus. It is said to have cost $40,000.
More or less, it looked like the New Wave films coming out of Paris yet it had an American subject: interracial love relationships, with striking performances from Ben Carruthers, Lelia Goldoni, Hugh Hurd, and Anthony Ray (Nick’s son). It was the awkwardness, I think, that led to thoughts of improvisation, but it was the faces of these actors—totally committed—that carried the energy of the film and seemed to characterize a fresh realism.
Considering the impact of the film, it’s remarkable that none of the actors really “took” in a career sense. Because they seemed very good at first. So Cassavetes (and by implication his wife, Gena Rowlands) fell into a lifelong “bargain.” They might do industry films occasionally, but they were pledged to their group and its ability to dig out important inner subjects in a form of acting that was far more group-related than given to new social or political ideas. Seen now, Shadows looks like an intriguing but isolated experiment. For years, Cassavetes regarded it as a new model. Today, it looks like a warning that actors are seldom smart enough to know what to say on their own.
Shakespeare in Love (1998)
If you were ever moved by the depiction of the Globe at the start of Olivier’s Henry V, then Shakespeare in Love comes as a very belated sequel and one of those few modern films that takes possession of the audience. Quite simply, it is a clever idea, to go back to the life and times of Shakespeare, to trace the show business intrigues of Elizabethan theater, and to tell a fresh, vivid love story that surely helps anyone feel Romeo and Juliet on the pulse. More than that, the whole thing is done in great good humor, with a few knowing winks to the audience of 1998, as if to say, Well, of course, no one knows for sure what Will Shakespeare was like—but isn’t this plausible?
The project had been in waiting a long time, and Marc Norman’s place on the screenplay credits points to long research and probably many drafts. And Tom Stoppard? He comes in late in the day, with a touch of Will about him, and smartens up the whole enterprise so that the wit works on many levels and the whole thing suddenly coheres. The battle between theatrical companies (Burbage and Henslowe), the attempts by the chamberlain, Tilney, to keep women off the stage, the love affair between Will and Viola De Lesseps, and the bringing into being of Romeo and Juliet—all these things are beautifully integrated, with Elizabeth herself keeping a stern but fond eye on the proceedings. The result is funny, sexy, a serious tribute to the writing and to theater, and a film that ought to help any stu
dent grappling with Shakespeare.
John Madden directs, and I don’t say he does more than keep the many balls in the air—but that is no small achievement. Richard Greatrex did the photography. The production design is by Martin Childs—using clever sets and real buildings. The music is by Stephen Warbeck, and the really glowing costumes are by Sandy Powell. Ingenuity fizzes like champagne, and I don’t think it’s going too far to remark on a true affinity between the raptures of storytelling skill in the film with the spirit of Shakespeare himself.
Joseph Fiennes is Shakespeare, and he’s so dynamic you wonder what happened to his career afterward. Gwyneth Paltrow is lovely and eager as Viola De Lesseps, and she got her Oscar for it. Simon Callow blusters and cringes at the drop of a hat as Tilney. Colin Firth is a villainous Wessex. Ben Affleck is Ned Alleyn. Geoffrey Rush is Henslowe, and Martin Clunes is Burbage. Tom Wilkinson is superb as Fennyman, and still the cast includes Antony Sher, Jim Carter, Mark Williams, Imelda Staunton, and Rupert Everett (uncredited) as Marlowe.
The picture cost $25 million (a miracle, for it feels lavish) and the U.S. gross was over $100 million. Its seven Oscars included Best Picture and Script, to Ms. Paltrow (Best Actress) and to Ms. Dench (Best Supporting Actress) for her queen of the revels. A genuine delight—and where is the sequel as Viola is shipwrecked on an American shore?
American friends are shocked that I rate this so highly. Is it that the English long to love their Will?
Shame (1967)
We know that Ingmar Bergman had lived on an island off the Swedish coast for the last years of his life, and Shame is a work that helps explain this retreat. For all anyone knows, or ever knew—with blueberries, wild strawberries, fish in the sea, and a little wheat to make your bread—such an island may have been a survivalist ideal. Shame opens on just such a becalmed rural setting, the place where Jan (Max von Sydow) and Eva (Liv Ullmann) have gone to. But something is wrong, and gradually we become aware of some indistinct state of civil war, without prospects or better escapes. It is not a modern war, but one that might have been fought by Godard’s Les Carabiniers. It is a kind of makeshift war into which every sophisticated dread—fallout, torture, the loss of standards—can be accommodated. I’m not sure if the “shame” talked about is the regret that sees such loss of standards, or guilt over the notion that anyone can or should escape such a dilemma.
Coming very soon after Persona, Shame has an air that seems to say: Intellectual discussions of identity are all very well, but the bleak stories of survival are all that are left. It shows also how thorough Bergman’s own pessimism was, and how completely it could take away his humor; after all, the paradox of a silenced actress in Persona is comic, so long as no one laughs. And it’s not that the fear of civil war and the breakdown of civic and civil standards has gone away—the wind called Katrina brought it home, even if we have grown accustomed to forgetting reports of famine and civil war in Third World countries where such things are common.
Beautifully shot by Sven Nykvist in somber black and white, Shame is The Seventh Seal acted out in modern times, without any benefit or allusion to the holy family that can survive. Jan and Eva were artists once, musicians, but they are childless and their indignity now is only underlined by that very impractical career. Time passes during the film, and life is degraded step by step. The last survivors end in a boat, uncertain whether to drink poisoned water or not.
There are times, and Shame is an example, when Bergman’s despair began to threaten his stamina as an artist—or so I feel. I wonder whether true despair can be so fertile and articulate. Shouldn’t it have the grace to shut up? And in this mood, Bergman becomes sometimes monotonous and foreboding. It’s easy enough to imagine the end of the world, happening down the street, and to guess how badly neighbors (and we ourselves) may behave. But there may be humor, too, and kindness and a remembrance of better things. So it was a great encouragement to see Bergman rallying after the grim sixties. Not always in sunshine and frolic—Cries and Whispers is not cheerful. But it is robust and full of life. And in the decades since, Bergman emerged into a kind of shocked, half-broken kindness, a mood of optimism even.
Shampoo (1975)
Somehow or other, over the years, the newspapers have found the nerve or the gullibility to ask themselves the question “Is Warren Beatty running?”—as in, Is he running for elective office? Among many other things, Shampoo is the definitive answer to that question, and his way of suggesting that there are always going to be other people (individuals) that divert him from working for people (the mass). These days, the people beckoning him are his children and his wife, for Warren has changed. But no one could change enough to dissuade the voters from what was once a favorite American dream—that he was catnip.
In Shampoo (a title that could have a sexual connotation, I suppose), he plays George Roundy, one of the genius hairdressers in Los Angeles and a man who is thinking of opening his own salon—that is the extent of his political ambition. The ladies like him—and not just because of what he can do with their hair. And George surely likes the ladies. In the brief period in which we see him, he is “going with” Goldie Hawn, and he is very vulnerable to an old flame, Julie Christie, the mistress of Jack Warden, whose wife, Lee Grant, is also determined to have George’s dryer on her hair. And then there is Lee’s teenage daughter, Carrie Fisher, in her first film part.
Shampoo grew out of the friendship between Beatty and his house writer, Robert Towne. They shared the nomination for original screenplay, though it may be that Beatty believed that his being the living model for George deserved a share in the prize. Let’s say Towne wrote the script, while Warren fixed it. It takes place on election day 1968 (the first Nixon victory), and it is not just a portrait of sexual promiscuity and of having one’s life ruled by one’s dryer, but a panorama of L.A. too. In the end, the Beatty character’s chronic womanizing is left like a bull, bristling with banderillas, trapped in a corner—but still horny. Beatty is absolutely brilliant in the part, and it’s hard to believe that he is not improvising some of the speeches—or confessing.
Shampoo was directed by Hal Ashby, and it is full of Ashby’s constant good nature and his love of Los Angeles. Of course, this is the world before AIDS, which helps us see the picture now as a time capsule of the last great era of self-confidence, if not cockiness, in Hollywood. Seen today, it is startling just how free and easy pictures could be with sex then. If movies’ real social purpose was to train us in sex, there must be the beginning of a suspicion that since 1975 we have been letting ourselves lose the habit.
Shampoo is very funny when it is most urgent, as with Julie Christie under the table and Warren trying to keep his aplomb. This may be as close as we have come to a modern screwball classic—we can only marvel that it doesn’t stimulate imitation.
Shane (1953)
It’s hard to realize now that anyone ever lacked for confidence in Shane. But the film was shot in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, in the summer of 1951, and it was ready for the screen long before its release in April 1953, when Paramount proudly announced, “There never was a film like Shane.” Something was amiss somewhere in estimates of this nearly perfect arc of story in which the slender buckskin saint yet gunslinger rides out of one horizon, and then rides out the other, and somehow the warring state of the land he passed through has been settled. No one really thinks the West was like that—everyone wishes that it had been. Shane is a fairy-tale Western, as the critic Robert Warshow knew:
Shane was hardly a man at all but something like the spirit of the West, beautiful in fringed buckskins. He emerges beautifully from the plains, breathing sweetness and a melancholy which is no longer simply the Westerner’s natural response to experience but has taken on spirituality; and when he has accomplished his mission, meeting and destroying in the black figure of Jack Palance a Spirit of Evil just as metaphysical as his own embodiment of virtue. He fades away again into the more distant West, a man whose “day is over,” leaving behind
the wondering little boy who might have imagined the whole story.
Shane was a short novel by Jack Schaefer, published in 1949, and the film (scripted by A. B. Guthrie, Jr.) had the good sense to make a very faithful adaptation. The story is very simple: A man, a gunslinger once, stops awhile in a valley where the farmers and the ranchers are at odds. He settles matters and rides on. George Stevens, just off A Place in the Sun, was at the top of his game and had become a very good handler of landscape to back up human story. And maybe the first thing that strikes us about Shane is its photography (it won an Oscar for Loyal Griggs), which is as tender to deep space as it is to the cramped cabin where the Starretts live.
In many ways, Alan Ladd was not natural casting. Though he had a great, deep voice, he was famously short and slender. The film involves him in a tremendous barroom fight with Ben Johnson, and Johnson told wry stories about how he had to go easy with the lightweight to get beaten up properly. And Ladd in buckskins now is a little too close to gay iconography maybe. There must have been other thoughts along the way. Yet Ladd is astonishing: He seems to know that his rather humdrum life is being ennobled. He acquires grace.
Van Heflin and Jean Arthur—the Starretts—were always very good actors. Brandon De Wilde announced himself with Joey. And then there are supports—Elisha Cook, Jr., John Dierkes, Emile Meyer, Edgar Buchanan, and Walter Jack Palance, the greatest mean ornery arrogant gunfighter there ever was, or will be. There are stories—far rarer in practice than you might guess—that coming home from Wyoming, everyone knew they had made something special. So Paramount made them wait.
'Have You Seen...?' Page 124