The picture had rentals of $2 million and there were Oscar nominations for Stanwvck and Anne Shirley. Today, the 1937 Stella Dallas cannot escape charges of camp, but only because the issue of class is now exposed as the throbbing heart of the film, and as a burning issue in an allegedly egalitarian country. It spoke from Goldwyn’s heart, to be sure, but it is also a record of every awkward journey the self-made American has to suffer if he wants to appear classy. It follows that nearly every “women’s picture” is knocking at this door.
The Sting (1973)
What a mystery this phenomenon is over thirty years later. I suppose on the one hand The Sting was the “sequel” to Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid—as such, it won Best Picture, Best Director for George Roy Hill (he was competing with Bergman for Cries and Whispers, Bertolucci for Last Tango in Paris, Friedkin for The Exorcist, and Lucas for American Graffiti—he could have been grateful for finishing fifth); and the Oscar for Adapted Screenplay went to David S. Ward. Robert Redford was nominated as Best Actor. You might like to pause over that fact and think about it for a few days.
I should add that the picture also made a ton of money: its domestic rentals were around $80 million. Yet I wonder how many people look at it today, or recall it. And if you are caught with it, you will marvel at the strange, abstract world it inhabits—it’s as if the Dick Tracy sets had been built years too early and this flimsy film had thought to take advantage of them.
The title tells you what the movie is, or does. A sting is a kind of confidence trick, one that offers a sham apparatus. And so Paul Newman and Robert Redford propose an immense double-layered fraud that will free gangster Doyle Lonnegan (Robert Shaw) of much of his money. Even more so than with some of those movies where David Mamet films an elaborate trick, this is mere conjuring in which we are lucky enough to be invested on the winning side. There are no characters, no context, no time or place, and not the least gesture toward any other meaning. It leaves one thinking that Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid might have been written by Saul Bellow.
Is it relevant that this film won so many hearts and minds and dollars in the year Watergate broke open? Does it at least help explain the courage of some films from the early seventies that there was this weird “mainstream” in being, too—a mindless entertainment enough to captivate or console troubled citizens (and yet ones who knew they could no longer trust anything or anyone)? As a rule, Best Picture winners, whatever the quality, do have a bearing on their moment. But The Sting is almost a celebration of being unconnected and uninvolved.
This doesn’t mean it isn’t clever and pretty, though George Roy Hill, in my opinion, was a little troubled by plasticity and beauty. The use of the Scott Joplin rags (adapted by Marvin Hamlisch) undoubtedly had something to do with its novelty. And there are some decent supporting players—with a cartoonish comic menace seething out of Shaw. As for Newman and Redford, this halcyon period of their careers looks very odd now. Was there meant to be a gay subtext in the film, or is it helplessly there—like mice on sound stages? I see no sign that Hill got it, and I suspect the actors would have been horrified at the suggestion. But film is a spectacle that begs to be explained—and if you’re awake, what else are you meant to wonder about?
The Story of the Late Chrysanthemums (1939)
Just because it comes from 1939, The Story of the Late Chrysanthemums makes me think of Hollywood. Didn’t America own that heady year? But imagine this Japanese story done there: It’s not hard, it’s a show business success story. An actor of uncertain ability hears the truth about himself only from a humble maidservant. And so he forsakes the grand company where he worked. He goes on the road and she follows him. And in the end it will work out—except that she is not merely “adorable”; she is plaintive, a touch grating, enough to foster the tyrant in him. And he has ugly scenes—full of unfair recrimination, self-pity, selfishness—the things any actor can do without rehearsal. In other words, the human ambiguities of Kenji Mizoguchi’s film are staggering, just as the camera style is already more confident and more beautiful than that of Renoir. I am trying to catch your attention, just like an actor: I want you to see and inhabit the depths of The Story of the Late Chrysanthemums.
The story is set in the late 1890s, and it is drawn from the career of a celebrated Kabuki actor, Kikugoru, a man Mizoguchi knew personally. In the film, he is named Kikonusuke, and he is a student actor with a splendid company. But a young woman, Otoku, has such love for him that she tells him he is still limited as an actor. He believes her—and all this is accomplished on a nocturnal walk, a long following shot, where we see the arrogant man altered by such calm kindness, and its gamble. He goes off on his own, and in time Otoku joins him and becomes his wife. She cares for him. She handles the money, and she steadily advises him on his career; he ignores her often, but her instincts are right. She does not seem unduly prescient, but she understands theater just as she accepts her own subservient role in the drama. He becomes everything they ever wanted—and we see and feel the progress in a picture that has several extended scenes of theater at work—but she is exhausted. The sacrifice has been made.
Compared with the late, period films, this is Mizoguchi intent on modern life, and this is the film in which he perfected his extended sequence shots that are withdrawn from the action, in order to open up the full context of the story. And just as in late Renoir, there is a superb poignant irony that hovers over the riddle of where theater ends and life begins. It is so moving that in film history, directors pursuing the same style should almost unwittingly discover the same. Of course, it is the balance between film and life.
The script is by Yoshikata Yoda and Matsutaro Kawaguchi (and the dialogue is unusually sharp). The photography is by Minoru Miki and the design by Hiroshi Mizutani. Kikunosuke is played by Shotaro Hanayagi and Otoku by Kakuko Mori—actors this great director used only the once, as if he had emptied them, or filled them.
La Strada (1954)
If only because of his association with Roberto Rossellini, it was assumed early on that Federico Fellini was a realist. The success of I Vitelloni had done little to dispute that, even if the film displayed very little interest in improving the social condition it faced—the apathy of young men. But in his next film, La Strada, Fellini either lurched away toward disloyalty, or began to reveal his true colors. You have to take your choice. He created a modern fable in which the background—the road, poverty in Italy—was a given, a source of the picturesque, and beyond reproach—and he hired in American actors in an effort to secure an international audience.
Of course, that tendency was apparent in Italian cinema with Rossellini himself, and careful historians should take note that the great director fell upon Ingrid Bergman not just with love, et cetera, but in an earnest endeavor to get his films to play in America. Thus, the imaginative trajectories of the two parties in that great romance moved in opposite directions. It looked like a tragic love story at the time, but it had all the ferment of comedy.
La Strada means “The Road,” and that is where this odd double act pursues the meaning of life—the strong man and the waif, Zampanò and Gelsomina, in the persons of Fellini’s wife, Giulietta Masina (they had been married since 1943), and Anthony Quinn (who had just won his first Supporting Actor Oscar in Viva Zapata!). I have to admit that there are several other roads I would take to avoid spending time with two such shameless hams. Even at the time, in Italy, leftist critics complained that this stagy allegory had wiped away any prospect of social commentary. But that’s not really the grave or ugly question: What is it that remains? What sort of meaning is there in the very coy dance of these two life forces?
There is a third party to the action—Richard Basehart as more of a trickster figure—and I find him the only interesting person around. Fellini kept his team intact: Otello Martelli doing the camerawork, and Nino Rota writing the music. You might guess this, but the idea of the film is that the brutal strong man dominates and bullies the swe
et, good girl but never conquers her spirit. Some find the question more pressing as to why she doesn’t murder him—or why we remain loyal to the dark and this lurid fairy story. It’s my hunch that not many people could endure La Strada today without some numbing potion. But you have to hand it to Fellini—he won the Academy Award for the Best Foreign Film, and he sank his teeth deeper and deeper in the soft American market.
These fables became more popular as the fifties advanced—The Seventh Seal was still to come. But in Bergman’s world no one has to be lovable, and keeping up a plucky grin despite your tears isn’t called for. I mean this as intelligent critical comment, but I always wonder whether Anthony Quinn might not have directed the movie.
The Strange Affair of Uncle Harry (1945)
We are in a town called Corinth in New Hampshire. Harry Quincey is called “uncle” by half the town. In fact, he lives with his two sisters, Lettie and Hester, not one of them married. It’s a grand house, stuffed with old-fashioned furniture, but the family fell with the Depression. So Harry works as a pattern designer at the mill, while Lettie exists as a strange invalid, “like Robinson Crusoe on her chaise longue.” In truth, Lettie loves Harry and can’t think of letting him go. But then one day, modernity walks into these archaic lives in the form of Deborah, a new person at the mill from the Boston office. She’s up-to-date in clothes and look. She’s chic and smart. She’s Ella Raines. And she and Harry fall in love. This is not one hundred percent credible, but the thought of it stirs Harry—and Harry all this while is George Sanders. This is one of the very few films in which that interesting, sad man was called upon to be a real actor. And the result is what makes the film touching and unusual.
Lettie meanwhile is Geraldine Fitzgerald, an actress as wasted as George Sanders was in the history of Hollywood. She looks a little like Ella Raines (which is good), and she plainly nurses a desire for Harry that the script hasn’t the nerve to spell out. Still, this is a very unusual portrait of real familial obsession, and for about an hour it’s a compelling picture.
The script was by Stephen Longstreet, with an intervening adaptation by Keith Winter, from a stage play by Thomas Job. But the producer on the film is Joan Harrison, Hitchcock’s former assistant, and the woman who had put director Robert Siodmak on Phantom Lady. Siodmak is not interested in suspense or violence here. This is not a noir. But it’s a picture of stifled emotion, and the art direction, by John Goodman and Eugène Lourié, is very telling about dead lives muffled by “stuff.”
Harry loses Deborah. Apparently she has gone off to marry another man after Lettie has effectively squashed Harry’s urge to be married. This is what drives Harry to thoughts of murder, and some rather fussy business with poison and cups of cocoa. So it’s Hester (Moyna MacGill) who dies, and Lettie who gets the blame. None of this feels exactly right, and the ending of the film is a farrago of censorship and creative nervousness dragging a picture away from its own promising material. There’s a title at the end of the film begging patrons not to divulge the ending. Instead, we should be attacking Universal for ever taking it on. But the message is clear: There was a fascinating family story to be told here, one descending into madness. The film is only 80 minutes long, and it’s easy to see a lot of ways an extra fifteen minutes could have helped.
It may be that the heartfelt anguish on Sanders’s face is his response to the way his best chance (for many years at least) was going to be spoiled. But there are many American films that cry out for braver hands and audiences who seek the end of controls.
Strangers on a Train (1951)
It’s worth recalling that at this point in his career Hitchcock had just made three uncertain films, and three relative flops in a row: Rope, Under Capricorn, and Stage Fright. The misguided ten-minute-take period was over, and he was looking to recover himself. As is so often the case with Hitch, he found what amounts to a human diagram—criss-cross (a movie title from 1949): You do my murder, and I’ll do yours.
The idea came from Patricia Highsmith, and that dark lady once told me that this was the movie from her work that she most enjoyed. She didn’t mention Farley Granger. Which goes to suggest what this film owes to the remarkable late insolence of Robert Walker, an actor who had been cripplingly ingratiating, archetypally nice and decent, and forlornly appealing. Suppose that there was some much darker, less normal fellow inside Walker, and suppose that he had been wounded by the loss of his wife, Jennifer Jones—then this is an inspired piece of casting. It’s true that this Walker is a little older and heavier—there seems to have been an illness or a setback of unusual proportion. Nevertheless, he drives the entire movie and may have taken Hitch to new prospects.
Guy Haines (Granger) is a tennis champion, about to be engaged to the daughter of a senator (Ruth Roman), but still married to a cunning small-town slut (Laura Elliott—very sharp), one of the more murderable figures in film. Bruno (Walker) knows all this; indeed, he is like an author, his own author—and Hitchcock’s masterful style always favors those who know the most in his films. So Bruno offers what is truly a pretty idea, and he cannot comprehend that Guy doesn’t pick up on its wit and wisdom. That Guy doesn’t act on it is the least Highsmith part of the film. That he is so halfhearted in his refusal is a concession to censorship.
But the long sequence in which Bruno does kill the wife is still like a superb gift to the audience—note the way Bruno lowers her strangled body into our laps and our desires as a reward. What follows—Guy’s desperate attempt to be champ and prove his innocence—is not nearly as enticing or as involving as Bruno’s scheme. We want more of Bruno. We want a Guy who does fall in with the plan. For Hitch has grasped in this movie how ready we are to lend our immoral support to murderousness.
So in a way it’s only half a film, with a good deal of padding: Pat Hitchcock, the awful tennis match—not to mention Ruth Roman. But the splendor of Bruno, his deadly flowering, is reward enough for those compromises. And in discovering the charm of villainy Hitchcock is charting out the ambiguity that will mean so much to him in the 1950s. So think of it as Bruno, on a train and making his way to a provincial fairground as dusk falls. It ends, properly, with his demon driving a carousel mad, and with his hand opening to reveal one of Hitchcock’s great burning objects.
A Streetcar Named Desire (1951)
The Tennessee Williams play opened in New York, in December 1947, and it had thirty minutes of applause on the way to 855 performances. But those facts don’t really explain its power or influence, or its standing as maybe the great American play written in the age of movies. It was, from the outset, a directed play. The Williams text, and the play’s dynamics, had been through the maw and the needs of director Elia Kazan. I do not mean that as criticism. Kazan was at his height as a director, and 1947 is also the year of the foundation of the Actors Studio in New York, the focus of his psychological realist intensity and his sheer command of a new generation of actors. But Kazan’s impact was greater still. He needed to identify with the text personally, and thus the story of Blanche DuBois (which is how the play reads) and its parable of homosexual desire was repressed (it’s the only word) by Kazan’s grasp of the Stella-Stanley scenes. He brought them out—to that end, he had an affair with Kim Hunter (Stella) during the production, and he had a bond with Marlon Brando (Stanley) that made Stanley the focal point of the action. Anyone who was there that night in 1947 will tell you it seemed like a play about Stanley. Yet if you read the text he is clearly secondary.
The film was a long time coming, no matter that the play’s producer, Irene Mayer Selznick, was a child of the movies. It was impeded by censorship and the first feeling that so much of the play was simply not negotiable on film. In that process, Lillian Hellman actually wrote a version of it with a happy ending! Then there was the fear that with so tough a venture, the role of Blanche required a star. Many people were considered. Olivia de Havilland could have done it but she felt that Blanche was too sordid. So Vivien Leigh was cast—her second great
Southern belle—and Kazan had to cleanse her of all the ideas she had picked up from the London stage production, where Laurence Olivier had directed her and Bonar Colleano played Stanley without becoming a sensation.
The film is censored in a good many places, and it is without Jessica Tandy, the first Blanche onstage. But it remains our best record of that original production, for Kazan did the film with the rest of the Broadway cast. And in a style and décor taken from the play. The screen distances it, of course—above all in the sex and violence—but it’s still a very powerful piece in which Leigh bravely challenges Brando and fights him off. On film, Brando looks a setup, whereas onstage he must have been a startling surprise.
Harry Stradling photographed it. Richard Day was the art director. Lucinda Ballard did the costumes. Alex North wrote the rather heavy music. Vivien Leigh got her second Oscar (though the role increased her mental instability), and Karl Malden and Kim Hunter won in supporting categories.
Street Scene (1931)
Today, a play like Elmer Rice’s Street Scene might seem naïve or unlikely. Yet in many cases people do live on streets still, and with the chance of community that that involves. In the East, on hot summer nights, the windows are open and people still sit on the steps watching the kids play, counting the passage of neighbors. But some accursed privacy has taken over: it is like the feeling in Rear Window (1954) that no one realizes they are being watched. They count on the solitude of their unit, and it is not just television they are locked up with. We live now with our dreams and fears; we practice our bad habits. So the gesture toward connectedness in Street Scene—like that in, say, Short Cuts or Magnolia—looks portentous or marvelous. Of course, if, as it suggests, there is still a thing called society, available to be seen, then there may still be politics, too.
'Have You Seen...?' Page 133