'Have You Seen...?'

by David Thomson

  Shanghai Express (1932)

  Facts are facts: This film was made at Paramount in the middle of industrial Los Angeles, and not just in a Paris loft apartment with a few gestures toward scenery and an absolute determination to make a small, private movie that was a mockery of Hollywood conventions and a tribute to absolute love—as if that were an archaic religion once claimed by the Persians. Yes, there is a shot of a locomotive leaving a depot, but it is so sublimely shot from above that it might be just a series of floats drawn beneath a camera. As for being in China, that expensive, time-consuming chore is regarded with perplexity—as if anyone with the least imagination ever “needed” to be anywhere else.

  How did Josef von Sternberg get away with the masquerade? Well, because Marlene Dietrich was a phenomenon still, especially when treated with her lover’s hopeless, sultry languor. Just like the film shot in the loft on strips of film that the girl has stolen during 5 p.m. love nests with a Big Producer, this is a man and his girl shooting scenes during their own romance, and trusting that the scenes may somehow extend the natural history of the sexual act. They surely do: Not enough attention has been paid to Sternberg’s close-ups as orgasmic moments of the sort experienced with other people in the room so that you have to keep your quiet as intense as the dark. The exquisite shot of Dietrich in prayer (to save Clive Brook’s life) is such a one—so poised, so composed, so still, so hushed, like a bomb on the edge of going off.

  And don’t rule out the possibility that Sternberg was tickled to see whether Paramount or the public would tumble to the fact that he was asking them both to see and take seriously films about his and Marlene’s coming. The great trick of the films, of course, is to say they are about true love—thus, we are meant to suppose that Lily and Donald have waited desperately to meet again and now will be married (I want to see the film where Lily goes back to be lady of the house in Shropshire) instead of just sexes passing in the night, coming and going. To that extent, all of Sternberg is a withering satire on the alleged function and entertaining purpose of these things called movies.

  But it was done at Paramount. Jules Furthman wrote a script. Lee Garmes did the photography. And you can see Anna May Wong, Warner Oland, Eugene Pallette, Lawrence Grant, Louise Closser Hale, Gustav von Seyffertitz, and Emile Chautard as other drugged guests at the party, sauntering in and out of the light in a world where the light and the dark are like being in bed or not. It is ridiculous and lovely, just like an orgy for people who know nothing lasts. Yet the film is seventy-six years old as I write and still a monument of erotic art. Moreover, it is one of the few great surrealist experiments ever paid for by a studio and people raised to the tough rules of the rag trade.

  The Shawshank Redemption (1994)

  Polls of the general public have discovered a very high opinion of The Shawshank Redemption, and I’m prepared to take that as a sign of the innate longing in most of us for feeling good and getting a bit of salvation. At the same time, I am not yet persuaded that Frank Darabont has enough muscle in his head to resist a weakness for adult fairy tales. Anyone with that malady should recall how severe the best fairy stories are, and how unforgiving the bent of children is. I still find The Shawshank Redemption a veiled testimony to the idea that being in prison is not so bad. Whereas I think in our world and time that being in prison is not just bad, not just an effective way of organizing and extending crime, but one of those things over which we should be most ashamed.

  It comes from a novella by Stephen King broadly dedicated to the notion that good nature will come through in the end, yet this is a principle that seldom operates in Mr. King’s customary horror works. Tim Robbins plays a man wrongly imprisoned on murder charges, a man whose natural decency will subtly alter the nature of prison life and ensure that he and his pal (Morgan Freeman) get their just deserts at the end of a very long (142 minutes) and rather slow film in which “parable” creeps in as realism beats a retreat.

  There is another interpretation of prison: that it is the sweeping place for all the worst defects of poverty and inequality in society, and a way in which the better-off parts of that same society can overlook the disparities and any kind of guilt that may result from it. That would be called politics, and that is something the American movie is very fearful of getting into. It means that the question of chance sending one to prison (or making one a genius in Las Vegas) is very fertile as a way of getting at the hypocrisies of America. But Darabont’s film spends so much time establishing the Gothic nature and look of the prison, and so little on its ambiguous moral light.

  In the thirties, and even as late as Birdman of Alcatraz (1962), there was a notion in our films that dedication, hard work, and rehabilitation were possible. So it’s interesting to note the widespread feeling now that prison is a form of gaming—you win or you lose, you’re in or you’re out. Surely this makes it far easier for the lucky to disregard any ideas of social consequence and responsibility. And so we have other prisons where the unnamed and the uncharged are also tortured.

  It goes without saying that Tim Robbins is very good in the film, while Morgan Freeman is immaculate. But such things do not guarantee intelligence. Both actors, I think, are worldly enough to know the white lies being trafficked here. The cast also includes Bob Gunton, William Sadler, Clancy Brown, Gil Bellows, and James Whitmore.

  The Sheltering Sky (1990)

  Don’t try telling the picture business, or the audience, that The Sheltering Sky was just another version of The Sheik, with a white woman (Debra Winger) swept off her feet, her camel, and her existential worldview by a glorious Arab, Belqassim (Eric Vu-An). The picture cost at least $25 million, and it grossed just over $2 million in the American market. That is doom, and I daresay the failure helped to hurry Winger into premature retirement just as it led the business to see that whatever John Malkovich had, it had little to do with charm and being a romantic lead.

  Not that The Sheltering Sky can be a romance. It is the Paul Bowles novel of 1947, and there is the ancient Bowles sitting in a café, like a wise lizard, watching over his characters and offering a sparse, unsentimental narration. Kit and Port Moresby (Winger and Malkovich) come from America to North Africa with Tunner (Campbell Scott), who would like to get into bed with Kit. But Tunner is not quite attuned to the fatalism that attends the Moresbys. They are, in turn, a version of Paul and Jane Bowles, whose sexual agenda was not fixed but who had half a mind to disappear into the desert as a response to the thankless life exposed by the recent events in Europe.

  I don’t claim the film as a total success, let alone on a par with the novel, though I would say that Bernardo Bertolucci and Vittorio Storaro make the desert seem both enthralling and sinister. Nor is the adventure of Kit and Belqassim revealed as fully as it needs to be—but if you read the book, it would be a challenge. What does work is the affectless hostility of Malkovich and the girlish gloom of Winger—they really give very good performances, above all in touching the affection that has lost the habit of trusting itself. Then there is the exquisite extra of a raddled Jill Bennett and a toady Timothy Spall as the Lyles. Their role is small, but they are never off target.

  With music by Ryuichi Sakamoto (as well as Lionel Hampton doing “Midnight Sun” over the credits), production design by Ferdinando Scarfiotti, and a clever script by Mark Peploe, The Sheltering Sky really does bring us to the lip of horror and a terrible Western dismay at the confrontation with emptiness and alienation. The novel is bleak and austere enough for the end of the world, and in a way that’s its true subject. The film runs the risk of seeming like just a bad trip (though it might be really shocking with more hints of Kit going native, or feeling the gravitational pull of her escape from European culture). Of course, in the years since The Sheltering Sky was made, our experience has turned away from any exploratory relationships with Islam. And it’s possible that Bertolucci was timid about that before he began. But I think the picture will emerge with more distinction as a portrait of two literat
e and brave Americans lost in the desert.

  Sherlock Jr. (1924)

  And so it was that Buster Keaton’s fondness for mechanics turned to the projector itself. Sherlock Jr. is not much more than 40 minutes long, as if Keaton thought to himself, This joke can only go so far, don’t let’s grind it into the dust. Still, it was a proper Joseph M. Schenck production, like the others, and in the largeness of its surreal vision it is not just as important as the longer features: It is a breakthrough. It is as if a filmmaker had at last learned the point of the whole thing.

  Buster plays a dreamy movie projectionist, an aspiring soul who sits beside his apparatus, beholding the wonders of the screen, and content for the moment to imagine himself there—as one of the famous screen characters, “Sherlock Jr.,” ace detective. But then the time comes when Buster is drawn like a bubble to the surface. He goes up to the screen, studies it for a moment, as if it were a Magritte canvas entitled This Is Not a Place, and enters. He steps into the action, and the first joke is that the image in which he has found himself starts cutting violently so that he goes through the slapstick of readjustment. This is hilarious, and it does embody the ultimate world of Buster—where a machine can make a chump of him by ringing its very simple changes.

  Buster then takes the part of the detective and manages not just to find a string of pearls but to shoot some devilish pool without having the “13” ball blow up in his face. But then he comes back to the real world and meets his sweet girl again—this time it’s Kathryn McGuire—and when it comes to kissing her, why, he looks through the projection window (directly at us) and takes lessons in technique from the couple on the screen. All of a sudden, someone has observed, with humor, that the picture show is there as an enchanting if uncertain teaching tool for how we do the little things.

  Keaton directed this himself, and in the scenes where he is in the screen—in straw hat and late-nineteenth-century costume—there are some classic images of him in the desert like the spirit of Americana. So often, in period setting and costumes, Keaton harked back in time, but without the heavy sentimentality of Griffith. He is a pioneer figure, a smart little man on the prairie and the range, not intimidated by the scale of it all, but deeply impressed. That is why he is gazing. And that is one reason why he is so alert to the new mechanics of the age. So Sherlock Jr. is not really a comedy—it’s not one of Keaton’s funniest—but it is a tender, wistful reflection on the new laws of physics, of being there and falling in the water when the shot changes. Indeed, Keaton sees it as a new species of wild beast—not one he thinks he can get along with. The only question is, Will he one day disappear into that screen world where the shocks are instant and pain-free?

  She Wore a Yellow Ribbon (1949)

  There’s a memo that John Ford wrote to potential scenarist James Warner Bellah about She Wore a Yellow Ribbon that is deeply instructive on Ford the artist: “Jim, I think we can make a Remington canvas… broad shoulders… wide hats… narrow hips… yellow strips down the pants leg… war bonnets and eagle feathers trailing in the dust… the brassy sound of bugles in the morning… the long reaches of the prairie… the buttes and mesas in the distances and the buffalo…”

  Is there a better demonstration of heroic impressionism, or of Ford’s natural inclination to paint a fond picture of an idealized life—as opposed to telling the accurate history of what happened in the West? All I ask Fordians to notice here is how far the director’s entire approach was imbued with the wishful thinking of legend making. The other thing to say is that Ford seems a lot more comfortable in She Wore a Yellow Ribbon than he did in Fort Apache, the first film in the cavalry trilogy and the one that addresses history the most.

  “Custer is dead,” She Wore a Yellow Ribbon begins, but only as a marker. It is clear that the cavalry is on its way to avenging that defeat, even if Ford makes nothing of the politics behind that need. But this is really a day in the life of the cavalry as measured through the person of Captain Nathan Brittles (John Wayne), who has mere days left in the service but time to make a small advance in the campaign against the Indians. Filmed in color, Yellow Ribbon is fond, uncritical, nostalgic, and drunk on the Army.

  The younger people at the fort—the bustling good humor and daredevil riding skills of Ben Johnson, John Agar, and Harry Carey, Jr., and the prairie glamour of Joanne Dru (she wears the yellow ribbon) blend in with the veteran stock company that is Victor McLaglen, George O’Brien, Mildred Natwick, and Francis Ford. There’s precious little story and Wayne is duly older, creaky, amiable, benign, a pussycat and a model for others. Ford had seen him in Red River and been impressed by his acting, but as yet he had not realized how far that ability depended on Wayne exposing an uglier side of himself.

  In fact, the script was done by Frank Nugent and Laurence Stallings, and it is free from contentious issues. The photography by Winton Hoch is legendary—not just in what it renders, but in the famous thunderstorm sequence where Hoch got the forks of lightning tarting Monument Valley up a bit. Of course, Brittles is a widower—he talks to his wife’s grave in the amber light. But she doesn’t talk back, alas. It’s possible that women ended up a little more bored and less self-satisfied than the Brittles of the regiment. But women don’t really figure in the scope and texture of the Ford legend: They may be seized by a chief named Scar, but they aren’t allowed a relationship with him.

  The Shining (1980)

  The Overlook Hotel was designed, as the credits attest, by Roy Walker and Les Tomkins, but it looks and feels as if Albert Speer and Leni Riefenstahl might have worked on the night shift. The air is crystal. Sound carries in the thin air. And shining lasts, sometimes for decades. There is a magnificent opening where the hotel manager (Barry Nelson) tells Jack Torrance (Jack Nicholson) how the place needs a caretaker in winter. It’s a case of one bullshitter shitting another, and it’s so cozy it gives you the creeps. And there you are listening to this guff about the magnificent, comprehensively appointed hotel which is useless, alas, in winter. Why? Because it snows! DID NO ONE EVER TELL THEM ABOUT SKIING?

  Anyway, the hotel needs a caretaker, some sort of natural loner with a family that gets under his skin and a great novel to write in the quiet winter. But a guy who will appreciate throwing a ball against the pine-tree walls at the Overlook and imagining he’s in the World Series. Let’s face it, it needs Jack: In a way, the 2001 way, the Overlook is Jack’s special obelisk. “You’ve always been the caretaker, sir,” says Philip Stone’s plaintive Grady (Stone in late Kubrick is a touchstone). After all, Jack can shamble down to the Gold Room ballroom, shut up for the winter. He can sit at its long bar, hide his eyes in hope, and there’s Lloyd, the immaculate barman, only slightly resembling a cadaver, with, “What’ll it be, Mr. Torrance?”

  What indeed? The Overlook is Jack’s palace of desire, his eternal movie house. It plays his slow horror pictures, the ones where all the loathing of his own family will find a home. And, truly, this is a movie about home—and being caught in someone else’s.

  Yes, it’s a novel by Stephen King, and King got very indignant that Kubrick’s film hadn’t been scary enough. Oh, poor Mr. King—who even made a TV version to show what he meant, unaware that it would miss the deep-seated humor and hominess of Kubrick’s version. This is surely Kubrick’s great film, serenely unanchored in any fixed genre, effortlessly invented, inspired alike by the hollow brain of a house and the naughty little germ of a man, Jack. It would not work if Jack were not endearing, hammy, and so stupid—but over the years no actor has done stupid as well as Jack.

  Shelley Duvall as wife is grating—but she’s meant to be. Danny Lloyd is one of the great sinister children of modern film. And there are the supporting players, Barry Nelson and Philip Stone, for sure, but Scatman Crothers and the sublime Joe Turkel as Lloyd. This is not quite horror; it’s more dread which seldom has climaxes but never goes away. The novelist Diane Johnson wrote the script. John Alcott did the lovely shiny photography, and the music comes from Bartók,
Penderecki, Wendy Carlos, Rachel Elkind, and Gyorgy Ligeti. A masterpiece. How wonderful that this straining, chilly, pretentious, antihuman director should have stumbled into it.

  Shoeshine (1946)

  The harsh black and white of Shoeshine’s photography takes us back to that ancient discovery of the medium—that while you may envy the lavish life of the wealthy, still the imagery of poverty is imprinted on the viewer’s soul. There is no need in this film to spell out the intricacies of justice when vagrant kids are charged with stealing. The wolfish faces of the boys tell the whole story. Shoeshine is like Dickens simply reporting the life of the streets and the courts, daring us to look away or forget. Bicycle Thieves is a very moving picture, and Paisan and Open City reflect a growing historical intelligence. But Shoeshine trembles with a bare need to get its message home. Its children are not sentimentalized (and the boy in Bicycle Thieves is). They are tough, spunky, becoming increasingly broken down and demoralized by their life. There are scenes in Sergio Leone’s Once Upon a Time in America (1984), pretty pastel scenes, of the kids who will become the gangsters, and their childhood is romanticized from start to finish. See Shoeshine and you cannot feel that. The children are the natural victims of war.

  In this case, we follow two boys, Giuseppe and Pasquale, who are shoeshine artists—they see the world from the ground up, and they polish the shoes of Romans and American soldiers alike, hoping for a scrap of money. They are already edging into the black market, and they are the easiest of those criminals for the police to catch. So there are trials and sentences, and they are confined in a children’s prison—there is no other word for it—where their criminal training intensifies. De Sica’s film does not preach about such consequences, but there is no escaping them.