'Have You Seen...?'

by David Thomson

  The next big point is here was a throwback: The Sopranos belongs to David Chase and HBO, but no one ever felt that it was “directed” except very tidily, thank you. There was a team of directors, and a team of writers: some were bigger names than others, but I really doubt that the greatest auteurists in the land could have identified uncredited episodes as coming from this person or that, Steve Buscemi or Tim van Patten. So the series honored the roots of television and factory filmmaking: it was the team that did it, and the team was the directors, the writers, and the cast of supporting actors. Week by week, integrity and eccentricity (consistency and originality) were as easily conveyed by the impulse of Tony Sirico or Edie Falco, or any of the others. Except that all those actors lived under a tyranny: Let me stay alive, Lord, from week to week and for the next season. And as befitted such a pressure, the skill and the cunning and the art of The Sopranos would be gripping from week to week.

  The larger picture is another story. Some said The Sopranos was a great novel on TV—you should read those novels again. Frankly, I don’t believe David Chase’s assurance that it was all—just about—under control. If he thought that, he should have been fired. Eighty-six hours is a lot of story, but far too often the shapeliness of a great novel’s design was gone. One day, I hope, we may get the inside story of the show, how Chase and HBO pondered the question of whether dramatic closure or syndication rights mattered most.

  There was no closure in The Sopranos—though there had been in The Godfather: Part II, and that’s why Coppola’s six hours is a greater work of art. David Chase never quite made up his own mind about Tony Soprano’s “I’m a good guy really,” whereas Coppola knew the evil in Michael’s heart. The Godfather: Part III is another, sadder story, not as bad as we thought at first, but too silly finally, and too nervous to grasp the only logical conclusion—Michael should go to Washington, not Rome, and we should see the resemblance of organized crime and our way of government.

  But there’s another problem: Great art, finally, concerns people of true nobility who nurse a flaw—the old models of tragedy are not just a myth. Story needs them. Long before the end, I fear, both Tony and James Gandolfini were bores—characters of an innately supporting nature who do not know or feel or aspire to enough to match their America. Michael Corleone is a great character in that we see his flaw grow from momentary impulse to obliterating disease. In the last analysis, The Sopranos occupied eighty-six hours; it did not turn them into great theater. The Godfather plays every year. The Sopranos in reruns will bore you.

  The Sound of Music (1965)

  For years, in the summertime, when newspapers had nothing to write about, they might cobble up stories about how many times a serial killer in Duluth had seen The Sound of Music. No, I’m kidding you, it was never a serial killer, though here and now I would like to propose a movie—it could be called My Favorite Things—in which some provincial woman has just two things in her life: seeing The Sound of Music, and killing off elderly patients in the nursing home where she works. I see it as a vehicle for Reese Witherspoon (the wonderful shocker from Freeway, but still capable of going blonde and pink when she’s comforting the frail before she kills them). She is, of course, a mistress of trivia on the great show and film, and she has a way of singing “Climb Ev’ry Mountain” under her breath as she smothers her patients.

  Yes, you’re right: I am a very sick, vicious old man, but writing a thousand of these little recommendations can drive you crazy, especially when I come to a picture that I loathe but which—unquestionably—has to be in the book, if only because millions of the stupid and aggrieved will write in to the publisher, “Where was The Sound of Music?” if it is not. It is here.

  I can believe that coach parties of out-of-towners kept The Sound of Music going for 1,443 performances after its Broadway opening in 1959—that, and its very pretty view of the Second World War as just a young nun, some sweet children, and the coming of the Nazis. It was Rodgers and Hammerstein, their last work together, with a book by Howard Lindsay and Russel Crouse derived from a work named The Story of the Trapp Family Singers. Some names fit.

  Onstage, Mary Martin had played Maria at the age of forty-five—which rather shows how close the delight in musicals is to spiritual or irrational experience. The movie was the second collaboration of producer-director Robert Wise and screenwriter Ernest Lehman—they had killed West Side Story a few years earlier, which was a more serious crime than making The Sound of Music, because the latter had always been brain-dead.

  There is that opening shot, with the camera hurtling in toward the outspread arms of Julie Andrews. But instead of a messy collision, her young plum voice breaks out in “The hills are alive.” It goes on for 174 minutes, photography by Ted McCord, art direction by Boris Leven. Though dubbed (in “Edelweiss”), Christopher Plummer is caught between heavy boredom and the apparently serious urge to start kicking some of the children. He is having a terrible time, but somehow or other he must have signed a contract.

  It won Best Picture, a second directing Oscar for Wise, and five Oscars altogether for ten nominations. In its initial rentals, it earned $72 million and took over the position of the most successful film of all time. The Godfather surpassed it in 1972—which reminds me of the proximity of this sort of rubbish and a murderous response.

  Sparrows (1926)

  Sparrows is still a picture that could frighten young children and anyone thinking of going to the South for a holiday. Deep in the swamps, old Grimes (Gustav von Seyffertitz) runs a baby farm—he takes in kidnapped children and then reckons to sell them off to fresh, unknowing parents. The setup is Dickensian, with Mama Molly (Mary Pickford) looking after seven children in a hovel surrounded by quicksand and crocodile swamps. And Molly is something to behold: In 1926, Mary was thirty-three, yet she looks less than five feet tall and in long shots you’d guess she was fifteen. In close-ups, she’s older, but you wonder less about that than about how she has found not just a makeup salon in the swamp but a place where they can braid her pigtails every morning.

  These inconsistencies don’t matter. Written by C. Gardner Sullivan and directed by William Beaudine, this is a robust melodrama that leaves Griffith looking a little genteel. Mary looks great because she’s the star and the heroine and because being so pretty is the sign that she hasn’t given in yet—her glamour is hope, darn it. (That’s why Warren Beatty is so cute in Bonnie and Clyde. He’s good-looking because he’s looking forward to things!) And Molly’s dazzle would be more easily mocked or attacked if the film’s situation weren’t so authentically scary and nasty. Make no mistake, this view of the South is a breeding ground for all those Texas Chainsaw pictures and the films where pretty white girls get put in a Southern jail and—please don’t ask!

  In other words, give great credit to Beaudine, and to Mary the showwoman, for she was the driving force on these films, and she made sure they worked. Like hiring Charles Rosher, Karl Struss, and Hal Mohr to make the swamp look nasty and her look good. Moreover, when Mary and the little ones escape from the Grimes place and make a perilous journey through the swamp to civilization, you are left in no doubt at all that Charles Laughton saw Sparrows as he prepared Night of the Hunter.

  And in 1926, this kind of stuff was believed. There were reports of such baby farms in the metropolitan press. There is even a scene with a ladder at a window where my wife and I burst out in unison with “Lindbergh!” As for Mary, she acts hard—a bit too hard maybe. She has a notion here of a country girl and she has an antic way of moving and dancing. Of course, she’s endearing—and of course, she could still play a child in 1926 (like Pollyanna). But all you have to remember is that she was probably the richest woman in town already. Don’t forget, too, that her father died when she was five so that Gladys Smith was left to help her mother raise a handful of children. The “sparrows” are the children, of course, and nothing is spared when it comes to their prettiness or their tears. But that was Mary’s style—why spare a thing?r />
  Spartacus (1960)

  From the outset, Spartacus was a Kirk Douglas picture. At an early script reading, Laurence Olivier appeared in a three-piece suit, Peter Ustinov wore a summer suit. Charles Laughton came in a bathrobe. Whereupon Kirk appeared in sandals and a short leather skirt, brandishing a gladiator’s sword. The British contingent started giggling, and Kirk knew what it was to be a revolting slave who still owned the picture.

  There were other ironies in the name of freedom along the way. Owning the rights to Howard Fast’s novel about the slave rebellion, Kirk heard that Anthony Quinn and Yul Brynner had a gladiator project under way, too. So Kirk pushed his budget so high that the other production got scared. They offered to amalgamate. Kirk demanded, and got, unconditional surrender. He also gave the screenplay assignment to Dalton Trumbo (with credit), thus helping to break the blacklist. Anthony Mann was the director (hired by Universal), and he did a couple of weeks (the gladiator school—with characteristic precision) before Kirk lost his temper at Mann’s suggestions that Kirk was overacting. Instead, he hired in Stanley Kubrick, who was eager to satisfy his contractual commitment to Kirk after doing Paths of Glory. In addition, Kubrick, like Trumbo, came fairly cheap, and on a $12 million budget, Kirk was said to be looking for fat to trim.

  Kubrick handled himself warily on the picture and never dared to encourage the suggestion that it was not Kirk’s baby. But he could see the script was heavy and inert, and he began to give more of his time to the supporting cast (Woody Strode is very good, Tony Curtis is cute, and Olivier is like a snake). He dumped the unknown actress cast as Spartacus’s wife and hired in Jean Simmons, who had refused it earlier and now went through the motions with tongue in cheek—sometimes she seems to smile at the camera as if hoping others are getting the joke.

  Russell Metty did the camerawork and became increasingly bad-tempered with the boy genius director. A lot of it was filmed in America—the gladiator school is in Death Valley and the open-air pool is at San Simeon. But the battles were done in Spain—and they were expensive. Many crosses were required for the crucifixions. You can put a lot of this down to Kirk’s monomania. But Hollywood, California, was never the culture that was going to do the story of a slave revolt and the loss of patrician privilege with relish. Neither the script nor the film comes to terms with this anomaly, or traces the real ambiguities of citizenship and slavery.

  It is 184 minutes, and it had rentals of just over $14 million. Moreover, it came out in the season of John Wayne’s The Alamo, and Kirk and the Duke were each determined they had made the best epic and launched devout Oscar campaigns in which much was made of the freedom of Texas and the freeing of the slaves. Neither film did well (though Peter Ustinov did win the Supporting Actor Oscar for his slave dealer). I suspect that a 45-minute documentary with Olivier, Laughton, and Ustinov telling stories of the film would still be a classic.

  Spellbound (1945)

  Spellbound is one of the most expensive vanity pictures ever made in America. The producer, David O. Selznick, was in a deep depression. There were disputes over why. He had killed his own desire by winning Best Picture twice in a row, with Gone With the Wind and Rebecca; he was in dire confusion over the state of his marriage and whether he really loved his discovery, “Jennifer Jones”; he was a manic-depressive waiting to hit a new low; he was dismayed that he could not help the “war effort.” So he started seeing a practitioner, a woman named May Romm—who ends up with a credit, “psychiatric adviser,” on Spellbound. In turn, she was rebuked by her professional associations for lending her name to such a fraudulent and witless treatment of psychiatry.

  Of course, in the early and mid-1940s, stories with psychological content were hot in Hollywood, and in no small part that was due to the rise of psychiatry in the community—a development aided by the number of qualified people fleeing Austria and Germany. The real part that movement played in these films and in film noir is a fascinating subject.

  Selznick jumped on the bandwagon but never bothered to ask how it functioned. So he got Ben Hecht (also a willing patient and a robust neurotic) to fashion a story from Francis Beeding’s novel, The House of Dr. Edwardes. You won’t believe it, but this is the story: Dr. Constance Petersen (Ingrid Bergman) works at a lunatic asylum. Dr. Murchison (Leo G. Carroll) is retiring as director. His replacement is Dr. Edwardes (Gregory Peck). No one notices anything untoward. Constance falls in love with him, and realizes he is a fake—he is, in fact, a mental patient himself. He thinks he killed Dr. Edwardes. We wonder, too. But Constance treats him according to the best therapy available—a lot of talk and some powerful kissing—and sets him straight. And us. The real villain was…

  It says a lot for the skills of Hecht and Alfred Hitchcock, and for the beauty of Peck and Bergman together, that thousands of viewers did not start screaming and hold out their arms for a straitjacket (like the father in The Conformist). In fact, in 1945, the public seems to have swallowed the gibberish whole. It was nominated for six Oscars (including Best Picture)—it won for Miklós Rózsa’s score (using the wail of a theremin).

  Hitch had the good sense to break it down as a piece of nonsense with great scenes—and so it endures. The doors opening on other doors; the long tracking shot fixed on a razor in Peck’s hands; the motif of lines on a white surface; and—notoriously—the Salvador Dalí dream sequence. Not all of that was allowed in the film (Hitch may have been jealous), and of course it is burdened by explanations. Hitch did dream sequences very well—he called them real life. And that is where Spellbound collapses. It has very little reality. Psychiatry survived, but May Romm never let her name be used on another film.

  The Spirit of the Beehive (1973)

  In a village called Hoyuelos, near Segovia, in 1940, two young girls, sisters, see James Whale’s film, Frankenstein. They are Ana (Ana Torrent) and Isabel (Isabel Tellería), and people tell you in advance that The Spirit of the Beehive is extraordinary because of Ana Torrent, who was maybe six when the film was shot. And she is extraordinary, but only in the way of the whole film that allows an equal performance from Isabel Tellería as her older sister.

  The country is flat near Hoyuelos, the buildings are sparse and simple. But the wind blows across the bleak fields. There is a well, and no child can know how deep its water goes. Their father keeps a beehive, and he writes out passages from Maeterlinck’s Life of the Bee, as if trying to digest them or use them as a diving-off point into the black well water of a new book on bees. The family lives in a large but quite empty house where everything is like a magic breath on the embers of memory or metaphor. The bees struggle in their mysterious task. The mother, Teresa, writes letters that have no answer. Ana looks at photographs of her parents when they were young. Isabel tells Ana that the monster in Frankenstein is not dead. That sort of death is simply something they do in movies—the way one day Isabel pretends to be dead to frighten Ana. And Ana believes she will see the monster—though it will come as no surprise that when he appears he is gentle and sad. Ana has watched the scene in Whale’s film where the monster and the little girl sit for a moment beside the lake.

  Victor Erice films with a simplicity that matches the land near Hoyuelos, and yet after twenty minutes or so of this beautiful, grave film you know that every image is shot through with—let’s call it “spirit.” When the children set a small bonfire and jump through the flames, they are angels or demons. When Isabel is scratched by the cat, she puts blood on her lips like lipstick, like a femme fatale. When a deserting soldier hides in the barn, he is a harbinger of the monster appearing.

  You could say that Erice has found a way of shooting—severe, yet without bottom—that is like the tremendous appetite of the two children for fantasy or storytelling. Yet one might discover in closer inquiry that this film, made at the end of Franco’s life, and set in 1940, has many buried meanings about a country and its monstrousness. Enough for a burial ground.

  You could argue, I suppose, that this is Spanish, a cultural
attitude where these depths are more accessible if only because amid tyranny the people live on the brink of spirit, too. But you realize, too, how in America “spirit” has become a glib, empty word. We have to go as far as hideous horror to reach it, Erice has only to turn his head to see it. You could place Erice in Buñuel’s line, though Erice seems content to be rural, mysterious, and childlike. Indeed, you feel he is drawn to Ana like a bee to the hive. But I think you could watch this film for years and have its possibilities grow larger all the time.

  Splendor in the Grass (1961)

  William Inge had his season of influence, and it lasted from Come Back, Little Sheba to All Fall Down, with Picnic, Bus Stop, and Splendor in the Grass included. His subject was the emotional and sexual repression in the American heartland. Nobody at this period complained of sexual repression in Warren Beatty, but his very handsome aggrieved look was important to Inge. They were friends. Beatty is the star of All Fall Down and Splendor, and his one stage performance was in Inge’s play A Loss of Roses, which became the movie The Stripper.

  Splendor in the Grass may be the most satisfying movie (as a whole) drawn from Inge, and I think that has to do with the authority and candor of Elia Kazan, and from the way actors could nearly scent the end of censorship in the air. There are “nude” shots of Natalie Wood in this film—they are not quite that, but we feel we have seen her naked—and in 1961 they were urgently required if only to say, Girls like her want sex and this is what it is going to look like. Kazan uses water in the film—and uses it brilliantly—as an old-fashioned metaphor for sex. But it can’t help our craving: Let those two kids get at each other. Kazan and Inge met when Kazan directed Inge’s play The Dark at the Top of the Stairs. In the course of that work, Inge told him the story in Splendor. Inge wrote it as a story. Kazan turned that into a script. And then Inge did some doctoring. Boris Kaufman did the photography (his first film in color). Richard Sylbert did magnificent work on production design—for this is a film about staid, deadening interiors and houses. Anna Hill Johnstone did the costumes: David Amram wrote the music.