'Have You Seen...?'

by David Thomson

  They Made Me a Fugitive (1947)

  This is one of the best, but least known, noir films that came out of Britain in the years after the end of the war—and it is the one that has the most direct comments on the war. Morgan (Trevor Howard) was an air force pilot and a prisoner of the Germans—a good, brave man. But he gets lost in the flux of peace and finds himself caught up in the black-market operations led by Narcy (Griffith Jones). He is framed for the killing of a policeman and sent to Dart-moor. His life and his hopes seem to be over. His girlfriend easily switches her affections to Narcy.

  The narrative setup is not just intriguing, but part of a real postwar mood in which war service and sacrifice seemed to have been passed over by those who had taken advantage of wartime shortages that sometimes became more acute in the peace. Narcy is a rare English villain in that he seems to come from evil itself. His name refers to Narcissus, of course, but you can’t help hearing “Nazi” in it, too. The script was written by Noel Langley, and Alberto Cavalcanti was the director.

  The thing about Cavalcanti was always his ability to present reality and his lurking urge to get inside—at something crazy or distorted. And so in They Made Me a Fugitive, the world seen by Morgan as he gets out of prison is filled with malign eccentricity. The photography (by Otto Heller, who would do The Queen of Spades) was real, but the mood was nightmarish—as witness a woman who tries to get Morgan to kill her husband, and then does the job herself. The lighting is noir without the clear, stylized manner of, say, films by John Alton or Woody Bredell. But America and California are sunny places. Noir in some English films has as much to do with the country’s habitual fogs, and the smoke in Dickens comes from something more sinister than mere industry.

  The story works out well enough but without any effort to whitewash the world where very little is reliable or trustworthy. Indeed, there’s a true feeling here of the disquiet in the novels of Graham Greene or Patrick Hamilton—it reminds us that the villain’s name is also “Nasty” and that nothing is going to be nice again.

  Trevor Howard is vital to this concept and its ambiguity. He makes us believe in Morgan as a decent man gone wrong, as well as someone raised to be very tough and quick in a crisis. Britain had its lighter heroes—Stewart Granger, Dirk Bogarde, John Mills—but Howard is from a darker league, less hopeful, more rueful, that includes James Mason and Stanley Baker. But Howard was a fit rival for Spencer Tracy; he believed in his own ordinariness and knew that the world was nothing to be taken for granted. He is one of the most grown-up figures in British film, even if that experience helped drive him to drink. Sally Gray is unusually good as the woman who helps Morgan.

  They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? (1969)

  There was a lot of talk at the time that this movie had betrayed Horace McCoy’s stringent pulp novel of the thirties in which the collapsing America is displayed in about 150 pages and a marathon dance contest. There is a story about how the James Poe screenplay was subtly undermined or softened that is told in Richard Corliss’s Talking Pictures. Poe was set to direct with a cast of unknowns. Then everything went “known” and expensive. But anyone seeking out the picture now will be amazed that so bleak and desperate a picture was attempted, let alone released. It comes as a further surprise to see that a young Sydney Pollack directed it, and the discovery leaves one wondering what he would make of it now in the long shadow of his diminution.

  It’s not just that Pollack handles the frantic rhythm of surging activity and haunted rest with such authority. It is rather more that he seems perfectly at ease with the metaphor of the dance contest as America’s unique survival test. Nor is it that the particular stories are tidily fashioned to make up the larger quilt. There are also two performances—Gig Young as the MC and Jane Fonda as the leading figure—that are beyond dispute the darkest voice of the thirties and its despair. Gig Young died some ten years after the film—for which he won the Supporting Actor Oscar—but it’s a marvel that someone didn’t recognize this performance and lead him away to some place of rest or oblivion. As for Jane Fonda, for all the enthusiasm for the way she has survived as a “pretty” woman of her age, you have to see her unflinching nihilism in this film to know what was survived.

  There are some weak spots: Michael Sarrazin is too sentimental—or there is a pathetic need in the film to make him likeable. The mercy killing is overdrawn. Indeed, we hardly need it as a motif: Living on in this film is a greater curse than death. Susannah York is very good in her mad scenes, but they are a touch too stagey for the speed of this narrative, and again York looks like a feeble attempt to make the film more palatable, or even sexy.

  There are many other fine supporting performances—Bonnie Bedelia (so close to stardom in films, but never quite, and seeming to guess it here); Bruce Dern—another near star very shrewdly cast; Red Buttons, so much better than in Sayonara, where he did win a Supporting Actor Oscar. But all the good work amounts to a superb, fatalistic ensemble in which Young and Fonda are the tireless sources of infection or disbelief.

  They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? didn’t do well, and it has not survived as well as others of its time—notably Midnight Cowboy. But this is more lucid, more painful, and more American. It is unquestioned proof of a knowledge (in 1969) of how far show business itself was a corrupting energy that had driven the dream mad.

  They Were Expendable (1945)

  John Ford was in the Navy and in the Pacific during the war. He had his own movie group under the OSS, and his pictures included December 7th and The Battle of Midway. They Were Expendable was a nonfiction book, by William White, published in 1942, an account of the PT–boat campaign after the Japanese seizure of the Philippines and the retreat by General MacArthur. M-G-M had purchased the film rights, and they wondered if Ford might be available to do a feature film based on it. But his availability depended on prior commitments to the Navy and to Fox, and a realization that, once you’ve begun to film such things for real, it’s harder to story them up again. In 1944, Ford would write about feeling abashed that “a great warrior like me should be in mockie-land while the good people are fighting.”

  Yet it worked out. Secretary of the Navy James Forrestal put in a word and Darryl Zanuck at Fox turned a blind eye to Ford’s opinion that he had been wounded. They Were Expendable began filming at Key Biscayne, in Florida, in February 1945, with a script by Frank Wead and others. Joseph August did the photography, and he worked wonders in giving the bright look of Florida a duskier Pacific sheen. It’s a film to conjure with—especially in comparison with the more roughly shot war documentaries—in games of “authenticity.” They Were Expendable is “mockie-land,” yet it feels as if we are there.

  It’s an episodic film, based on a series of strategic withdrawals. It is made out of intense, idealistic respect for the men of the Navy—people Ford had known and seen die—and it’s worth stressing that Ford was at his best in the cohesion brought on by defeat. For me, Ford misconstrued the military and resolved to see it as a central “family” (whereas society is the American family). But still he was at his most heartfelt in seeing this family proved by defeat. What is most interesting, and left unanswered, is how far the fictional strength of the men in They Were Expendable sat beside his real experience of breakdown and worse under combat. It was a just war, and courage is a natural human resource, but so is fear. And there is no doubt, finally, that Ford was dedicated to the ideal and myth of the military—whether the war was just or not.

  Long, and leisurely (135 minutes), They Were Expendable is a quiet epic, with Robert Montgomery as the lead and John Wayne as his second. They make a good contrast: The starchy Montgomery had served, whereas the Duke’s terrific credibility had escaped service. Donna Reed is brave and lovely as a nurse. And the cast is fine all the way down in a film mercifully free from comic interludes, drinking scenes, and heavy sentimentality: Jack Holt, Ward Bond, Louis Jean Heydt, Marshall Thompson, Leon Ames, Cameron Mitchell, Russell Simpson.

  Note: The
film did not open until December 1945. Thus, in hindsight, its account of an initial defeat becomes all the more triumphant. And it is a film that shows officers airlifted out while ordinary men are left behind. Real soldiers and sailors may have been more caustic on such matters. Ford had mixed feelings about it, in part because M-G-M cut it without him.

  The Thief of Bagdad (1924)

  The sharpest eye cast on Doug Fairbanks was that of Alistair Cooke—it was the golfer studying the acrobat. And Cooke, who was a very good observer of movies and the movie scene, saw the first signs of limit in The Thief of Bagdad, made when Doug was forty—a dangerous age, of course. The story was out that Bagdad had cost $2 million (a prodigious sum), and it was Cooke’s opinion that for that kind of money the audience deserved and expected nothing but absolute effortlessness in the leaps, the huge swinging movements, and the landings. It’s a shrewd point. At the circus, say, after someone has done a triple somersault or some such marvel, we can forgive a stumbled landing—somehow it speaks to the actual difficulty. But on film, we entertain a fuller sense of perfection—something spiritual, expressive of a deep inner health and vitality, enough to overcome the roguishness of Doug’s role in Bagdad. And in this film, he has a few moments of being out of breath or unsteady on his feet. All of a sudden people looked for sweat and the beginnings of a belly—and in The Thief of Bagdad, he had costumes that did show that part of the anatomy.

  The story goes that it was Doug’s first hope to have Maxfield Parrish design the film. That fell through (though Parrish did do a fine poster), and costumer Mitchell Leisen recommended William Cameron Menzies (it would be his first movie). There were palaces and grottoes by the mile, 3,000 extras a day as well as a real flying carpet. You can see where the money went.

  This is not a casual reference to production values; rather it is a crazed urge to make Doug’s gymnasium overpoweringly real or atmospheric—when truly his art was as abstract as gymnastics. But the dressing-up got out of hand. The décor began to smother the wonder of it all. Every Olympiad, the world is set alight again by the poetry of bodies moving through space. It is part of the essential dance in films, and Doug, like his friend Chaplin, was a study in motion. The sadness is that he never saw how far the simplicity was the secret.

  The script was the work of Doug himself (under the name Elton Thomas), Lotta Woods, James T. O’Donohoe, and a certain Achmed Abdullah. Arthur Edeson did the photography, and William Nolan was the editor. There was a special score written for the picture, and it did well. The only question is whether it managed to get its money back. The supporting cast included Snitz Edwards, Charles Belcher, Julanne Johnston, Sojin, and Anna May Wong.

  One last point: This is one of the films in this book (written during the direst years of the Iraq War) where the title refers to the country that was just a few years old in 1924. So let it be said that Doug’s good humor and sweeping ignorance make assumptions about Baghdad and its people that are outrageous and so total that no one could really assume there would be no retribution. It is still fair to speak of Doug’s vitality and innocence. But time has passed, and we know that neither quality is safe out of the house.

  The Thief of Bagdad (1940)

  Release dates don’t often mean a lot, but this glorious adventure fantasy was opened at Christmas 1940, and there’s no better way to think of it than as a sack full of wonders and presents when the world had little to look forward to. It was the brainchild of Alexander Korda, and the meeting ground for all the talents he could pull together. The marvel is that its style is so consistent when it almost certainly had six directors: Alex and Zoltan Korda and the designer William Cameron Menzies, not to mention the three credited directors—Ludwig Berger, Tim Whelan, and Michael Powell.

  It’s the sublime confrontation of two very different figures: Jaffar (Conrad Veidt), the great wizard, dressed usually in black, and Abu (Sabu), a native boy. Veidt was a recent refugee from Germany, one of the most handsome of men, but an actor with mime in his soul—he had been Cesare the sleepwalker in The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. As for Sabu, he was fifteen, a boy from India, who had already done Elephant Boy and The Drum. He was pretty, quick, and agile, but it was his mischief, his merriment, and his sweet nature that made him a star. With Veidt, he had a cheeky chemistry that has not aged—it still seems as fresh and moist as the film’s Technicolor.

  That exquisite look was owed to many skills: to art director Vincent Korda, who doggedly followed every order from Alex or Powell to make the colors more intense or the designs less historically plausible; to a design crew that included Menzies, Percy Day, Ferdinand Bellan, and Frederick Pusey; to Oliver Messel, who did the costumes—themselves an act of defiance against wartime austerity; and of course to Technicolor, including its resident adviser, Natalie Kalmus, and the two cinematographers, Osmond Borradaile and Georges Périnal.

  The script was by Lajos Biró, with dialogue by Miles Malleson. André De Toth was a production assistant. Who did what? I don’t think anyone cared or remembers now. Powell, we know, did a lot of stuff with the ship, including putting an eye on it and then tracking into the eye. You have to give credit finally to the producer, to Alexander Korda, one of the most inspired men in his awkward craft—full of generosity, wit, panache, and taste, and always with a spare Hungarian up his sleeve and the conviction that the look of the Arabian Nights could be cut together with shots from the southern Californian desert and the Cornish coast. It’s very hard to look at Korda’s small empire during the war years without being touched. And this was maybe the wildest thing they ever did. If you have children, show them this film—and stay with it if they totter away, drunk on color.

  The cast also included June Duprez (yes, Korda had an eye for women), John Justin, Rex Ingram (as the djinni), Miles Malleson (as the sultan), Morton Selten, Mary Morris (such a rare actress), Bruce Winston, Hay Petrie, Allan Jeayes, and Adelaide Hall. Oscars went to Vincent Korda, to Georges Périnal, and to Lawrence Butler and Jack Whitney for special effects.

  The Thin Man (1934)

  Don’t worry about a thing: we know you take Dashiell Hammett very seriously (we all do), and yes, the thin man in Hammett’s novel is a murder victim who can fit into a very narrow space, whereas in the films the thin man is evidently William Powell, and he’s thin because thin is cool and suave and because he doesn’t eat anything. And if you really owe allegiance to literature, you can tell yourself that Nick and Nora Charles are an allusion to the “glamour” of Dash and Lily (Hammett and Lillian Hellman). But in the end, it doesn’t matter because really they are William Powell and Myrna Loy. Hammett and Hellman were just lucky to be involved.

  In fact, the screenwriters on the first film, Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett (married, too), encouraged the notion that the Charles couple were based on them. They did a script in three weeks for producer Hunt Stromberg after M-G-M had bought the book for $ 14,000. Stromberg hired Woody Van Dyke to direct (the key move), and Van Dyke hit on Powell and Loy for the leads (he had just directed them in Manhattan Melodrama). The studio was happy with Powell, but Louis B. Mayer objected to Loy. He thought she was too much of a lady. But Van Dyke fought for her and Mayer said, OK, if she’s available in three weeks for another picture. And that is why he and James Wong Howe shot The Thin Man in sixteen days (with two days for retakes).

  We are talking about chemistry here, as well as alcohol, and the fact that Powell and Loy would do fourteen pictures together. Loy accounts for it as well as anyone: “I played differently with Bill. He was so naturally witty and outrageous that I stayed somewhat detached, always a little incredulous. From that very first scene, a curious thing passed between us, a feeling of rhythm, complete understanding, an instinct for how one could bring out the best in the other.”

  They were sophisticates. When Nora joins Nick in a bar, she asks the barman how many he’s had. Seven, says the husband, and she orders seven for herself to catch up. It’s one of the most uxorious gestures in American film, a sweet r
aspberry to the memory of Prohibition (ended just the year before) and a sign of something very important about this married couple. As Loy said, doing married is hard—it’s usually what happens when the film ends. But these two like each other. They drink in harmony. And if that damn dog lets them, they cuddle. There it is, a rarity in the system: a married couple who are still doing it.

  They also shared the same bored amusement with the “explanation” scenes—who did it, how and why. They guessed that the audience wasn’t listening. They were just reclining in Powell’n’Loy (a smooth cocktail). Don’t bother to distinguish the plots in all the sequels. Just thank Van Dyke. The original also included Maureen O’Sullivan, Nat Pendleton, Minna Gombell, Cesar Romero, Natalie Moorhead, Edward Ellis, and Porter Hall.

  The Third Man (1949)

  How easily the great works of film become anthologies of their own highlights. How seldom we actually watch a picture like The Third Man again from start to finish—because how are we to muster the proper surprise when we know it inside out? But there is a writhing tension deep down inside, between the calm evil perpetrated by Mr. Harry Lime (we do not see the children destroyed by dud penicillin, but we see the harrowed face of Trevor Howard watching them—and with Trevor Howard’s face in those days it was hard to make a flat movie) and the eloquent, sardonic, charm-for-sale effulgence of Mr. Orson Welles. Even the cat knew to perch on his shiny shoes, and surely Carol Reed knew how to get that knowing glance as the awoken light from the window above falls on his chubby smile.