The film was 181 minutes as it opened and then it was cut to 154. The Haver restoration (using stills for lost scenes) is 170 minutes and a work of terrific scholarship and even greater love of the project—but still it’s a mess. The “Born in a Trunk” number is garish and chaotic. On the other hand, the routine for “The Man That Got Away” (music and lyrics by Harold Arlen and Ira Gershwin) is among the finest musical numbers ever filmed. If it were all we had left of the whole venture, it would be enough. In the age of video we are at liberty to watch the scene over and over again, to exult in the smashing precision to Judy’s emotionalism and to behold the ravished delight in Mason at getting to see such a thing.
The Stars Look Down (1939)
Those who regard John Ford’s How Green Was My Valley (1941) so highly have probably never seen Carol Reed’s The Stars Look Down. As a matter of fact, John Ford had seen Reed’s film, and he apparently bought up a lot of its stock footage to use it in back projections and so forth. He should have tried to acquire much more.
Reviewing the film when it came out, Graham Greene thought it compared favorably with Pabst’s Kameradschaft, and he felt that The Stars Look Down might be the best film Britain had made yet. It was taken from A. J. Cronin’s novel, set in the Welsh mines where Cronin had been a medical inspector, published in 1935, which was an earnest plea for the nationalization of the mining industry (something accomplished only by the Labour government of 1945).
The rights for the film were bought by a new company, Grand National, with some money put up by holiday-camp pioneer Billy Butlin, and Carol Reed would be loaned out from Gainsborough. A budget of £100,000 was agreed on. The script for the film was done by J. B. Williams.
Michael Redgrave had been cast in the central role of Davey Fenwick, a man from a mining family who seeks education and a life above ground, but who returns from university to support his father’s strike. Redgrave and a crew went off to Workington in Cumberland to film at a mine and in the miners’ village. Redgrave went down into the pit and worked a drill, and designer Jim Carter took elaborate notes with a view to reconstructing the miners’ village at Twickenham (the biggest set yet made for a British film). They also imported tons of coal and coal dust and a team of pit ponies. The photography was by Mutz Greenbaum and Henry Harris.
Margaret Lockwood was uncertain at first about playing Jenny, the girlfriend who decides to get herself a rich husband, but Carol Reed was close enough to the actress to persuade her to sign on. You can argue that the attempt at realism was partial, and it’s true that Reed liked actors enough to want faces that stood out from the crowd. But that gap aside, his picture has nothing like the sentimentality of the Ford movie, and it is founded in a far tougher approach to the necessary development of mining. Also, the tragedy at the mine in The Stars Look Down is more natural, more right historically, and far less maudlin. The British were once a little ashamed of their cut-price social realism, and its documentary quality, but if you look at The Stars Look Down and How Green Was My Valley, it’s often a matter of preferring overcast to the sunniest days the Welsh mountains ever knew.
The film was just finished as war broke out, and there was a feeling at first that it would be too depressing. But the wartime audience was ready to grow up, and the film was very well received. The rest of the cast includes Emlyn Williams, Edward Rigby, Cecil Parker, Nancy Price, Linden Travers, Allan Jeayes, and Milton Rosmer.
Star Wars (1977)
In 1979, when some innocence could still be excused, Michael Pye and Lynda Myles wrote, “Star Wars has been taken with ominous seriousness. It should not be. The single strongest impression it leaves is of another great American tradition that involves lights, bells, obstacles, menace, action, technology, and thrills. It is pinball on a cosmic scale.” For me, it is also the line in the sand, the disastrous event, never mind its high, good, boyish intentions.
George Lucas had ample reason to be wary of Hollywood. THX-1138 (still his most personal movie) had been a disaster. The success of American Graffiti had come despite gloomy predictions and stupidity from studio executives. Lucas was close to broke and determined to get his own back.
Lucas wrote a treatment for Star Wars in 1973. It was turned down by Universal and United Artists, but Fox bought it (for $10,000 down). A budget was agreed of $10 million ($3.9 million of which was to cover special effects). A sum of $750,000 covered the contributions of Lucas, his producer, Gary Kurtz, and all the leading players (though Sir Alec Guinness had 2.25 percent of the profits). In his best moments, Lucas reckoned the film could earn domestic rentals of up to $25 million. He had a trump card: In the negotiations with Fox, he had retained the major power of merchandising connected with the film, and the similar power over sequels. An empire was being formed in his mind, and this contract with Fox is among the seminal documents in film history.
The film was made, and it went one million dollars over budget. Fox was bemused by the picture, but by December 1980, it had a worldwide gross of $510 million. Half of that went to exhibitors. Fox took about $160 million. Lucas, Kurtz, and a few others shared $55 million. Guinness had $3.3 million. And the profits from the toys, the merchandising, the souvenirs, went largely to Lucas.
Of course, those numbers have built steadily in the twenty-five years since with video, television, DVD, boxed sets, and so on. And with a remorselessness that seemed to pain George as much as it did his followers, the original plan was enforced. It speaks weirdly to his narrative sense, perhaps, but the first film was really part 4 of a six-part series. And so the sequels came: The Empire Strikes Back (1980, Irvin Kershner), which introduced Yoda (the most appealing figure in the series), and Return of the Jedi (1983, Richard Marquand).
That trio had all done very well—The Empire Strikes Back had a world gross of $538 million and Return of the Jedi took $475 million. Nearly a decade passed. Lucas invested more in Industrial Light and Magic, the company he had set up for special effects work, and surely in time these special effects became less special than the staple diet of film. In that process, photography itself was eclipsed by digitally generated imagery.
The narrative, cinematic value of the three films so far was slight. Yoda was cute. Harrison Ford and Carrie Fisher had their moments, and it was like Saturday morning movies and pinball—but so is pinball like pinball. But then Lucas rallied himself and personally delivered the three films as promised: The Phantom Menace (1999), Attack of the Clones (2002), and Revenge of the Sith (2005).
The return of Lucas as director promised authorship, but audiences recoiled from the coldness of the later films and the waste of good actors. Even the fun was gone. The numbers were not the same: Clones cost $120 million and grossed $310 million; Sith cost $113 million and grossed $380 million. The films were desertlike in that time and space made a common nullity, a place where no light falls.
Stavisky (1974)
When Stavisky opened in Paris, there were attempts made by Stavisky’s heirs to block the movie. The tribunal that examined the matter said there was no malice or damage in the film—rather, it was a “rehabilitation.” I think that’s the way any viewer ignorant of the case (which is to say, nearly everyone outside France) will view it. Stavisky is an adventurer, and he is Jean-Paul Belmondo, still attractive, raffish, but obsessed with ruin. As Alain Resnais put it, “What did interest us was the man’s personality: on one hand, an enormous generosity, a theatricality, a strong life impulse; and on the other, an almost inexorable thrust toward death. I have always been interested in the functioning of the human brain. Especially when there seem to be two very contradictory impulses warring within the same mind, as in the case of Serge Alexandre.”
Serge Stavisky (1886–1934) was a Russian, born in Slobodka, who came to France when he was thirteen. He turned into an impresario and a speculator and a con man, and in the end there was an immense scandal in France at his fall and at the sums of money that were lost. Finally, he shot himself. Or is it possible that others killed him?
For the scandal had affected many powerful people. Stavisky did poor business in France, perhaps because so many were still owed money by his firms.
Jorge Semprún had been asked to write a screenplay before Resnais was considered as a director. But the two men had worked together before, and they fell into a fruitful collaboration in which Stavisky would be seen both through his own eyes and as he appeared to others. So he shifts in the film from romantic to drab, from adventurous to irresponsible. It’s a strong story line (and Resnais and Semprún kept to the facts as best they could), but it is a story with an overall attempt to show a whole era ending. Indeed, grant a few years’ license, and it’s easy to imagine Stavisky as a guest at the house party in La Règle du Jeu, taking a fateful phone call, but carrying on regardless.
Of course, Resnais’s Stavisky is very beautiful, and very aware of iconography. The rich color photography is by Sacha Vierny, the set design is by Jacques Saulnier, and the costumes are by Jacqueline Moreau and Yves Saint-Laurent (he dressed Arlette, Stavisky’s wife). So, it’s rather as if the gorgeous décor and clothes of Marienbad had been given a shot of adrenaline with this compelling story. The music, by Stephen Sondheim, came from Resnais’s sense of the way, in Follies, Sondheim could move from champagne to acid so quickly. You wonder if Stavisky could sing sometimes, like Chevalier, tempting destiny.
Belmondo personifies the film: He dresses well, with a love of clothes; he acts in a broad, very manly way, seductive yet shy, too; and we can credit that lurking pressure, the death wish. Anny Duperey is ideally elegant as Arlette. Charles Boyer is very fine as Baron Raoul—Resnais longed to work with him—and the cast also includes François Périer, Michael Lonsdale, Claude Rich, and Gigi Ballista.
Steamboat Round the Bend (1935)
At the end of John Ford’s Steamboat Round the Bend, we are waiting to see which of two Mississippi paddle steamers appears first. The audience is in no doubt, for the Claremore Queen—under the benign, chatty, slow-cracking Dr. John Pearly (Will Rogers)—has been able to take the lead by adding its supply of hooch whiskey to the boat’s furnaces. And then, as if the Queen were Stepin Fetchit (Jonah, Pearly’s second in command and first in comradeship) it pops, creaks, stretches its joints, and starts to spout fire from its curlicued funnel. It was Ford’s idea that, in victory, the Claremore Queen should explode altogether. That comedy was denied by the new boss at Twentieth Century Fox (the amalgamation had just occurred) and so a modicum of narrative realism prevailed at the end.
But what we have here is a dream or a farce, a piece of knockabout theater that smells of the studio in Los Angeles, and in which the studio shots sit awkwardly beside pretty footage of boats on the river. In other words, this is no more the Mississippi in the 1890s than Ford’s Monument Valley is a reliable part of the West. And the dream in Steamboat is like the one in Ford’s Judge Priest (a more interesting film), the offering of a South where Pearly and Jonah might be chums, and where the unyielding strains of history, race, and madness (the South of Faulkner) are buried in a minstrel show where everything is going to be all right, and where the injustice and the hanging of Duke (John McGuire) will be averted by a magic Ford is too bored to spell out—at least in Judge Priest the reversal of bad law is given due attention.
The film hangs upon the double act of Rogers and Fetchit, and they are sweet and cordial together even if today it is difficult to expect a black audience to swallow the simpleton in Fetchit. Joseph McBride quotes V. S. Naipaul on how adored Fetchit was in Trinidad in the forties, and how Fetchit and Rogers together “was like a dream of a happier world.” That’s valuable, but it hardly catches the problem of Fetchit for modern American audiences.
So there are lovely ironies, like the way Pearly’s waxwork figures can become switched for convenience—Grant becomes Lee and two biblical prophets are turned into Frank and Jesse James. Most of this benevolence comes from the persona of Rogers, and one can argue that he is one of Ford’s most intriguing heroes—an improviser, a “natural,” yet pickled in limelight, a wise man yet as much a social outcast as Ethan Edwards. It should be added that Rogers was killed in a plane crash in Alaska before this film was released. He was fifty-five and he might have made many more films for Ford. But for good or ill?
As you might imagine, the film includes a great deal of broad playing: Irvin S. Cobb as the rival skipper, Eugene Pallette as a sheriff, Francis Ford as a drunk, Berton Churchill as a bombastic religious voice, and Anne Shirley as the girl who loves Duke.
Stella (1955)
If only someone had had the sense to cast Melina Mercouri in The Barefoot Contessa—that stately bore of a film might have suddenly sparked. In 1955, Mercouri was twenty-two, harsh, gauche, nervous, sexual, and rough—she went barefoot, bare-shouldered, and bare brazen. She was dark blonde, and she sang a bit and danced hardly at all—her arm movements were silly and repetitive, and she needed someone like Astaire to teach her how to dip her chin into her shoulders. It may seem strange to stress this detail, but look at Stella and you’ll agree: She had great shoulders.
Stella was her first film, in which she is a café singer who just collects men—until one of them takes her out. The style is flat-out melodrama, and there’s more than a little tourist trade in the movie with the suggestion that this is what Athens and Greece were like. Subtlety wasn’t her thing. She did presence, with eyebrows like the fins on great fifties cars and a feeling that her eyes were always about to catch fire.
Michael Cacoyannis directed Stella, and it uses Athens locations very well, just as it conveys the slender margin between money and its absence. Indeed, there’s a tinge of neo-realism to the film even if economics have been subsumed by fatal passion. The men in her life are a feeble dandy, a soccer player, and a kid. They’re too close in age (and looks, maybe), and it would be nice to see Stella turning some older sugar daddy inside out. She laughs too much, and her laugh sounds as if it was recorded inside a tin sound box. But she looks fabulous and incendiary. Did I mention the shoulders? She could be the first girl to give you a hot shoulder.
In The Barefoot Contessa, she might have been sexier, more vulnerable and more needy than Ava Gardner—and, truly, in Mercouri you can feel the desperation of a European girl about to be taken up by the big show. Stella played successfully at the Cannes festival, and that’s where she met Jules Dassin, who became her husband and cocreator.
But Cacoyannis was obviously mad for her, and it’s always the person who gets those girls first who gets the truth and suffers the most. The finale in the film—the fatal meeting with a jilted lover—is done in a deserted city square, like a Western shoot-out, and the mock gravity is exactly right. The death blow is sudden and Stella is fulfilled by it. For Greece, at the time, the film was an astonishing breakthrough, and it’s overloaded with bouzouki music, as if the Greek film industry was pushing its main chance as hard as possible. In later years, the tendency in Mercouri to overact was uncontrollable and less appealing than she seemed to think. But Stella is the moment, and you can still feel the heat and the sweat in her nervous armpits. For ninety minutes, at least, she had it.
Stella Dallas (1937)
This was always a Samuel Goldwyn property. He had read the novel, by Olive Higgins Prouty, published in 1923, and he loved it. More, he fancied it was him, no matter that the central character, Stella Martin, marries above her class, to Stephen Dallas. They have a daughter, Laurel. Stephen leaves her and then wants a divorce. He wants to marry again, to a socialite, to his own class. So Stella marries a man she knows, Ed Munn, a man of no quality, and Laurel moves away gradually to enjoy the “better” life her father offers. But Laurel is pained by her vulgar mother. And Stella adds to that crassness, to make the break easier, or out of her own misery. Laurel marries a rich man. Stella is outside the house, in the rain, watching—as if it were a movie.
The story was a hit in 1925, when Frances Marion wrote scripts. Henry King ended up directing. Belle Bennett was cast as Stella, after more famo
us actresses had declined the part. Lois Moran played Laurel. King shot it too slow, and Goldwyn and his editor, Stuart Heisler, had to go through the whole thing recutting before it played. In that work, day after day, Goldwyn was reduced to tears. Stella was him—he knew how it felt!
Twelve years later, Goldwyn wanted to remake it. He was still moved by the material. He had had a divorce and a daughter who suffered from it. In addition, Goldwyn had been Gelbfisz; he was Polish, he was famously ugly—in every Last Supper, someone said, Judas Iscariot looks like Goldwyn; he was treasured and mocked for his linguistic solecisms. He was a figure of fun. And he was the classic nouveau riche who might hope to see a daughter marry “well” in American society. Stella Dallas was Goldwyn—it was his own vision of himself that accounts for one of the all-time classic women’s pictures, a work that cannot be touched without belief—as witness the dreadful modern version with Bette Midler as Stella.
So Vidor made the great version. In his book, A Tree Is a Tree, he says little about it; perhaps he knew it could never be his film. But he had Rudolph Maté shooting it, the man who had photographed Falconetti in Carl Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc. The music would be by Alfred Newman. Richard Day was the art director. Tim Holt was Laurel’s beau; Alan Hale was Ed Munn (brilliant casting); John Boles, limp and effete, was Stephen Dallas; Anne Shirley was Laurel; and Barbara Stanwyck was Stella. Stanwyck does a great job, even if she was a player whose chief ideal, always, was to seem cool and superior. Like so many stars, she had known hard times and humiliation—it all spilled out.
'Have You Seen...?' Page 132