Street Scene opened in 1929 and ran through the year of the Crash. It is, in a way, a play about its set: a stretch of urban street and lower-middle-class tenement housing; the collection of lives and ethnic groups (a cross-section is arranged—though without anyone of color), brought into focus by a murder that is committed. An Irish American discovers that his wife is having an affair with the milkman, and kills them both.
Goldwyn bought the rights and asked King Vidor if he would direct. So Vidor went to see the play and he puzzled over it. Then he saw a fly on a man’s face, and he watched the fly move. That’s how he would film Street Scene: “… we would never repeat a camera set-up twice. If the setting couldn’t change, the camera could. We would shoot down, up, across, from high, from low, from a boom, from a perambulator, and we would move back and include not only the sidewalk but the street as well.”
It took a superb set by Richard Day and the camerawork of George Barnes. To which was added the score by Alfred Newman, written by the composer after he had attended the shooting and meant to be one more sound effect, linking up the lines of talk. For here is one of the great early sound films, where the buzz of life accounts for the immediacy of the shooting.
For Vidor, as for Rice, it is also an experiment in community and the adaptation to poverty, with the young characters going through so many stages of the desire to leave, to get away, to be even more American than this cross-section. And just as in Magnolia, the abiding ties of kinship and association—of resemblance—are the poetry of it all. Vidor was one of those directors who thought hard about America, without being self-consciously political, and this is a sequel in many ways to The Crowd, where the liveliness of sound is a source of optimism.
Terribly neglected now, it is a classic, with a great cast and excellent natural acting: Sylvia Sidney, William Collier, Jr., Max Montor, David Landau, Estelle Taylor, Russell Hopton, Louis Natheaux, Greta Granstedt, Beulah Bondi, T. H. Manning, Matt McHugh, Adele Watson, and John Qualen.
Strike (1925)
There are versions of Strike available now which, in an earnest effort to be helpful, pile on the music (from Shostakovich to Duke Ellington—both subtly wrong in period) and horses’ hooves when the tsar’s troops attack the striking workers and their families. Avoid all such contributions if you can, and turn the sound down. There are some people who will tell you that Strike (based on an incident from 1912) is part of the Soviet revolution’s rewriting of Russian history, a testament in the annals of communist solidarity. Maybe. I think you can argue that the workers, the factory owners, the troops, and the spies are all so clichéd that you can hardly trust a thing. There are history books that furnish the anguish and the real evidence.
But if you watch the film silent, you cannot fail to respond to the dynamic of the visuals and the thought that someone behind them is a graphic genius, and that the medium bearing them—film—is white hot and dangerous. It hardly matters what happened in the strike: you could drive the world mad with anger with this kind of movie. No one interested in the interaction of film and politics (much less the history of filmic expression) should fail to see Strike. But brood on what it means.
Sergei Eisenstein was twenty-six in 1924. He had studied civil engineering, and he had pursued all forms of graphic art, from painting to cartoon. He had had a crucial experience designing sets for Meyerhold at the Proletkult Theater, and he then led a splinter group of the theater, developing dynamic theatrical performance. It was in search of rapidly changing compositions that he fell upon film, and found himself ordered to make Strike. It was meant as part of a series. But Eisenstein went off on a personal track—it was his career-long failing in Soviet circles, of course, but it was his genius.
And so, with actors from the Proletkult, with Vasili Rakhals doing décor, and with Eduard Tisse as his cameraman, Eisenstein made a six-part chronicle of the strike. Leave aside the matter of justification or circumstances. The narrative is utterly one-sided, but the visuals are intensely ambitious. Eisenstein used close-ups like arias and geometric compositions as if his eyes and mind were overflowing. The giddiness, the hysteria almost, is as potent as the forms—the swirl of hose-pipe water playing on the strikers; the cavalry invading the apartment buildings—everywhere you look. There is hardly a calm or a plain shot. Nearly anyone can see Strike and say, Great God! Composition can do anything.
And it can. The actors make the owners brutes and the workers saints. But the imagery makes us excited about both of them. You want to be a striker and you want to be a cavalryman. Above all, you just want to be a filmmaker. You can still feel the way young artists must have swarmed around Eisenstein. At a bird-brained level, the film says, “Poor strikers.” But it says, “Sweet policemen,” too! It suggests something that has little to do with Communism: that film can harness energy, any energy. It’s what Leni Riefenstahl knew. So watch out. And encourage written history and the preservation of documents.
Stromboli (1949)
So Ingrid Bergman wrote a letter to Roberto Rossellini: “I saw your films Open City and Paisan, and enjoyed them very much. If you need a Swedish actress who speaks English very well, who has not forgotten her German, who is not very understandable in French, and who, in Italian knows only ‘ti amo’ I am ready to come and make a film with you.” She wanted reality, truth, beauty, art—or so she thought. He went wild at the letter because he wanted a name actress, money, fame. He wrote back at length and told her about a Latvian woman he had met in a refugee camp: “In her clear eyes, one could read a mute intense despair. I put my hand through the barbed wires and she seized my arm, just like a ship-wrecked person would clutch at a floating board.”
Be careful what you wish for. Not very long thereafter, Bergman was Karin, a Lithuanian refugee, who agrees to marry Antonio (Mario Vitale), a young fisherman from the island of Stromboli. The island proves a far greater ordeal than the camp. The living conditions are harsh. Her husband beats her for speaking to another man. She hates the massacre of the tunny fish. And then the volcano erupts. She spends a night alone on the slopes of the volcano and cries out to God.
In real life, Ingrid and her director were lovers already on the island, but she cried out in another kind of despair at “these realistic pictures.” “To hell with them!” said Bergman. “These people don’t even know what dialogue is, they don’t know where to stand; they don’t even care what they’re doing. I can’t bear to work another day with you.”
It’s easy to read what happened in terms of the films they made together (a series of ordeals), but there is a comic side to it. And, truth to tell, even on the real Stromboli Ingrid never quite looks like the most deprived Lithuanian. In fact, Stromboli was a coproduction of Rossellini’s company and RKO, with an American screenwriter, Art Cohn, helping out with Sergio Amidei and other Italian writers.
Yes, they went on location, and yes, the ground shakes beneath the cameras often enough as the volcano plays its part. In many ways, this is the most immediate and dramatic of the films Ingrid and Roberto made together just because the island speaks for itself and because Ingrid is so much more than a peasant or an amateur. The ordeal is like a penalty, but the film really rises to a climax. We do feel that a god or some spirit has touched Karin. The photography is by Otello Martelli, and the music—somehow—is a combination of Renzo Rossellini and Constantin Bakaleinikoff (from RKO).
There are different versions (and lengths), largely because RKO sought to minimize the ordeal and the damage. They apparently put $600,000 into the production (and there’s no doubt but that impressed Rossellini), but they took only a fraction home afterward.
The Stunt Man (1980)
It was inevitable perhaps, after a full ten years of the auteur theory in America, that someone was going to identify the begging subject of the monster director, the egomaniac who might easily kill people or destroy cultures to get the right shot on screen. And so, somewhere between Apocalypse Now and Twilight Zone: The Movie came Richard Rush’s Th
e Stunt Man, in which the director’s power over reality had been glorified by the subculture of picture making. In this case the director was called Eli Cross, and the name evoked “Noah Cross” (John Huston’s character in Chinatown), just as Peter O’Toole’s insouciant swagger left one wondering about his own memories of David Lean in Arabia.
The story is told through the startled eyes of Cameron (Steve Railsback), a fugitive from justice and an unhappy Vietnam veteran who takes cover from pursuit by taking the job of stunt man in Cross’s World War I movie. He is enthralled and horrified by Cross’s act—somewhere between Von Stroheim, Von Karajan, and “Vonderful, darlink!” (in other words, the satire wanders and is often betrayed by its own camp aspirations).
O’Toole’s performance, I fear, is mistakenly overdone. It’s as if he had been made giddy, or encouraged in giddiness, by the script. Whereas to be accurate and damning, this director needs to be as gregarious as Welles, as humble as Capra, as funny as Preston Sturges, and as religious as Scorsese (even if the Church is just Him). In other words, a director is a wondrous bag of tricks who can lose track of his own deviousness because he means to be all things to all men (and women).
The script is by Lawrence B. Marcus, from a novel by Paul Brodeur, and it’s very much of that age that preferred its directors to be amiable boys instead of dangerous men. What’s fascinating is the presence of Richard Rush in charge of it all. Rush (b. 1930) was a leading independent director in the 1960s, associated with drugs and bikers—he did Hell’s Angels on Wheels, Psych-Out, and Freebie and the Bean, and seemed to have been promoted with The Stunt Man. Moreover, that picture did well in the United States, and it earned Oscar nominations for script, direction, and O’Toole. It seemed like a threshold for a career, yet Rush has directed just once since then: Color of Night, a disastrous attempt to make Bruce Willis erotic.
The Stunt Man doesn’t wear too well: It manages to seem both obvious and pretentious now, and one longs for O’Toole to moderate his performance. But the idea of a demented fantasy in which a film director begins to resemble God or the other guy is funny and promising and true to life. The Stunt Man seemed to believe it was going to be a Great American Film. It isn’t, but that’s no reason for Rush to retire.
It was photographed by Mario Tosi, and Dominic Frontiere did the score (which also includes Dusty Springfield singing “Bits and Pieces”). It involves Barbara Hershey (as the actress in the film), Sharon Farrell, John Garwood, Alex Rocco, and Allen Goorwitz.
Suddenly (1954)
Don’t tell me: The list of films omitted so that Lewis Allen’s Suddenly should make the thoughtful thousand is enough to make a pantheon or an introduction to film course. It doesn’t matter. We have to have this 77-minute killer, written by Richard Sale, about an assassin who takes over an ordinary suburban home because it has a great view of the railway depot in this town called Suddenly. How it got that name is just one of the things that could be answered in a remake. One thing it shows is America’s readiness for “Action!”
You see, the president is coming through town on a train—can you imagine presidents traveling by rail?—and the hit man has a high-powered rifle which he will set up in the suburban home. And crack. Actually, it’s stretching a point to argue that this assassin needs a rifle and bullets to do the job. Because the killer is Frank Sinatra, from whom mere glances could kill—just ask the cocktail waitresses, croupiers, and floor managers of Las Vegas.
The year of release is 1954—in other words, Frank has likely just won his Oscar; he may be on the point of losing Ava Gardner; but his voice is back on Capitol on things called long-playing records. Frank the hoodlum has been redeemed—so let’s knock off a president. And make no mistake about it, the actor who could make a woeful Maggio in From Here to Eternity had it in him to be as nasty, creepy, and vicious as anyone on the American screen. The arrogance and sarcasm are like his toupee and his thin lips: forces for breaking backs. The cruelty and the malice are the fantasy acting-out of the shriveled runt, and they suggest an amendment to Ava’s famous remark—that if Frankie only weighed 110 pounds, then 100 of that was vengeance.
There’s a very good supporting cast that includes Sterling Hayden, James Gleason, and Nancy Gates, and you have the feeling that if the film had allowed itself more time and budget then Frankie’s character (named John Baron) had schemes of torture lined up for all of them.
Why did Sinatra do it? He was making his way back in respectable films and pleasing musicals—From Here to Eternity, Young at Heart (though that shows his dark, fatalistic side, too), Not as a Stranger, The Tender Trap, Guys and Dolls. Surely nothing but deep psychic need prompted it—a chance for the little man to smack the world in the face. In which case, it turned out badly. In less than ten years, there were many people wondering whether Lee Harvey Oswald had seen Suddenly, and been encouraged. And after the shooting of John Kennedy, Sinatra took steps to have the film withdrawn, just as he was reluctant to let The Manchurian Candidate play very widely.
Did Oswald take the hint? Was Oswald the striker? There’s still so little we know that the pitiless self-hatred of Sinatra’s face is all the more alarming. He is not just a killer; he’s a disappointed prophet in a world longing for religious incident.
Sullivan’s Travels (1942)
John S. Sullivan (Joel McCrea) is a director of successful comedies—he has done Hey, Hey in the Hayloft, Ants in Your Pants of 1939, and So Long, Sarong. But he’s getting just a little tired of his own success and a certain disrespect that goes with it—like no Oscar nominations (Sullivan’s Travels would receive zero nominations). He lusts for dignity (a pose always likely to spell doom in the world of Preston Sturges). He wants to suffer a little, to see real, tough life. He wants to make a picture called O Brother, Where Art Thou? And thus Sturges launches his great Hollywood satire—all the better in that Sturges himself was torn in just the way of Sully.
There are very funny scenes in which the director’s entourage tries to discourage him from this headstrong gambling. Again, it’s typical of Sturges that those in the entourage are not craven, greedy idiots. They are the wise, sad men that Sturges kept as his stock company. They understand Sully—their man—it’s just that he’s going too far. But even in 1942, if a director got an idea in his head he could persuade himself he was at heaven’s gate. Still, these scenes—with Robert Warwick and Porter Hall as studio men, with William Demarest as Jonesy, Franklin Pangborn as Casalsis, and Eric Blore as his valet—are among the best Sturges ever did, with a level of wit that is close to Oscar Wilde.
Sully is a chump. He goes. On a first forlorn effort he meets a girl (Veronica Lake)—there’s always a girl in the picture—before ending up back in Los Angeles. Then he really goes for broke, and this time he makes it—does he ever! A real bum steals his possessions—that bum is then killed so that the death of Sully is reported. And Sully ends up on a chain gang in the South. That ordeal is rather tactfully presented. Still, it’s a kind of hell, until one Sunday the convicts are led to a black church where they are shown a movie—it’s Playful Pluto, a Disney picture from 1934. When the wretched guys laugh at it, Sully gets the message: There is something to be said for silly movies that make you laugh. So he engineers his escape (Sturges knew that this part of the film was feeble), and he goes back home, collects the girl, and resumes life as an Oscar-less favorite.
It’s not that Sully is “right.” It’s rather more that the dilemma of whether to be Nicholas Ray or Preston Sturges goes on. Never fear—the system will get you whichever you choose. Yes, the film is far less morbid than Sunset Blvd. (eight years later at the same studio, Paramount—and John Seitz shot them both), but its ideas are trickier to resolve.
McCrea (a Sturges choice) is sublime: handsome, a bit thick, but decent. Veronica Lake was a discovery and difficult. She wanted McCrea to go to bed with her, and her being pregnant compelled Edith Head to put her in baggy clothes. The romance is fatuous, yet very Hollywood. The true love exists be
tween Sully and his entourage—a group given screen life for the first time.
Sunday, Bloody Sunday (1971)
The most interesting thing about John Schlesinger’s Sunday, Bloody Sunday is that in the central triangle of relationships, not one of them feels right or plausible. At first, you reckon that’s an obvious failing in the film. But then as the story goes along something else comes into view—not very movielike, you have to admit—that suggests, well, maybe none of the relationships in life are exactly right. Is it, perhaps, that only the fantasy bonds from fiction are entirely gripping? Is it the case that in real life we all muddle along and make do as best we can?
Now, that is not the way Penelope Gilliatt’s screenplay was presented when the film opened. Instead, it was the story of Bob (Murray Head), a young designer, who is having relationships with two people—Alex (Glenda Jackson), a divorced consultant in business; and Daniel (Peter Finch), a doctor—and Finch at that moment was fifty-five. Yes, you’re correct. Bob and Daniel are both male, which means we have a homosexual relationship in a British mainstream movie, one in which the two actors kissed. We all saw it happen, and carried on muttering to ourselves about Peter Finch never having seemed gay. But that’s part of the other problem I talked about.
John Schlesinger was gay, and I suspect there was a naughty streak in him itching to get that onscreen. And the picture was duly hailed for its gender pioneering. But Gilliatt’s script (and she was a film critic in her day) is something else: It’s a portrait of a professional Britain, not quite where jobs really matter, but peopled by characters who have rather put feelings on the shelf. Being with someone is a saving grace—or, at least, it avoids the disgrace of solitude. But it doesn’t really fool anyone. And living together is one of those weird misnomers. Cohabiting is colder and more accurate, maybe. But people don’t really live together, anymore than they sleep “with” each other. They sleep side by side, like prisoners in a row.
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