'Have You Seen...?'

by David Thomson

  That prompts a fascinating question: How in this postwar Vienna, where the strudel is short, is Orson so ecstatically well-fed? Is a private supply sufficient explanation, or do we need to conjure up the feasts of self-love to explain it? So yes, maybe Cary Grant (a very silly Holly, perhaps) and the knife mouth of Noël Coward as Lime would have been more chilling—or more Greene-ish. But when you put Joseph Cotten and Welles together, just those few years after Kane, it was impossible for the picture not to be a continuation of the Leland-Kane debate.

  I think Carol Reed took that extra in his stride, and knew he had to give Orson some side dish—so he let him do the Switzerland vs. the Renaissance dialogue on the Ferris wheel, reckoning to get “free of income tax, old man” into the bargain. The result is one of those piercing studies in a certain kind of soft English friendship, where one old chum has been taking the other for a ride for decades. And, come to think of it, it’s a picture about modern evil—which, I’m sure, is what Reed and Greene and even Alex Korda had in mind. That’s the very thing that worried the other producer (the second third man?), David O. Selznick, into thinking these boys might be buggers.

  So they might, and so their fondness, their betrayals, and their executioner’s kindness is at the heart of it all. Alida Valli’s somber Anna walks out on the film at the end not because she’s learned she can’t trust men, but because she sees how much of a stooge she was, someone to touch up the zither strings with, someone to be the “love interest.” Whereas, of course, The Third Man is only interested in the preoccupation of rats—how to survive, how to wien.

  I meant to say “win,” but mistyping came to my aid—for surely this film is very Vienna and would have to be included in the great season of Vienna and the Movies. I had my wife take my picture in Lime’s doorway once. I backed in. The door opened and an old woman inside took it all in at a glance. “Ah, that Harry Lime!” she sneered. But she loved the memory.

  The 39 Steps (1935)

  In all the merry briskness of The 39 Steps there’s hardly time to notice that our hero, Richard Hannay (Robert Donat), is about the best original of James Bond you’ll ever find. Except that I prefer Hannay, because he’s not quite the rapist with drop-dead one-liners that Bond would become. As played by Donat, he’s got the right Scots tinge, a hairline mustache, and a saucy twinkle when he gets handcuffed to Madeleine Carroll.

  John Buchan published The 39 Steps in 1915 as a quick story of espionage on the run, with Hannay being pursued by goodies and baddies alike. Charles Bennett did the screenplay with a free spirit, and Bennett himself—very sporting and fond of poor puns—might have been the best Bond of them all. It was a Gaumont-British film, and it has the air of having been shot in half an hour. Not that Hitchcock misses a trick. At the end, as the dying Mr. Memory (Wylie Watson) is pouring out the secret formula he has learned, with a lot of r squared, the screen is filled with heads gathered around him, but there’s still a chorus line of flapping legs as the girls fill the stage behind. There was always that surrealist in Hitch, waiting for an opening.

  It would be folly to say this means anything more than innocent entertainment, but if Hitch had a killing to do, he knew how. Out of nowhere, Lucie Mannheim staggers into the room, pitches forward, and there’s a dagger in her back. And she has fallen, so that the light hits the handle a treat. Most of the time, the film is nocturnal and very noir (photography by Bernard Knowles), with lovely little stone-bridge sets and clumps of heather (art direction by Oscar Werndorff) when they get up into the Highlands.

  Godfrey Tearle makes a good heavy, and there are delicious cameos from John Laurie and Peggy Ashcroft as a crofter and his wife. (Donat notices her, too—for the 1930s, he had a very alert gaze, and it was clearly a tragedy when illness took off his edge.) Above all, he fits the sweet, nasty geometry of Hitchcock’s traps and closing-ins, and he’s insouciant, droll, and brave without being smug. As for Madeleine Carroll, this is one of those few films where you suddenly see that she was sexy. She doesn’t have a lot to do except take her stockings off while handcuffed, but for 1935 that was inflaming. And her character, Pamela, was never even in the book. She and the handcuffs were supplied by Hitchcock.

  Don’t forget that Michael Balcon was the producer on this, with Ivor Montagu as his assistant. Alma Hitchcock and Ian Hay touched up the dialogue, but Bennett’s script seems perfect. It was all done at Lime Grove Studios (later a stronghold of BBC TV) with the deft expertise required of episodic television. But it was a big hit, and it’s still one of the best straight thrillers of the thirties.

  The Thomas Crown Affair (1968)

  Take one modern mastermind, a businessman turned by boredom toward thieving. Add a beautiful insurance investigator determined to capture him, but just as resolved to go to bed with him. It’s fairly plain that The Thomas Crown Affair is a glorified fantasy festival—and it’s a little less clear that Crown is another version of James Bond in that he is handsome, tailored, educated, class to his buffed fingertips—yet an outlaw at heart. And the woman is every Miss Perfect who wants to know what Bond keeps in his 00.

  Coming off In the Heat of the Night, Norman Jewison was to produce and direct The Thomas Crown Affair, with a screenplay by Alan Trustman. He was taking his time contemplating which actor to cast as Crown when Steve McQueen started on a series of badgering calls. It’s not for you, Steve, Jewison told him. You’d have to wear a tie. You’ve never been to college. McQueen grinned, and said less and less. He just went into his sardonic and superior act. Until Jewison saw that, yes, Steve McQueen could play Thomas Crown. It’s that old principle in fantasy that goes back to Bulldog Drummond or Hawkeye: Make sure the gentleman can run through the forest or the bedroom barefoot.

  Of course, putting The Thomas Crown Affair to any test of character risks solemnity. But you can see, in hindsight, how the larger hippie invasion of movies had left millions of people craving glamour, stylish clothes, and an Ivy League education (the asserted assets of Mr. Crown). And the story can turn sexy. For my money, Pierce Brosnan and Rene Russo in the remake are having sex while McQueen and Faye Dunaway are giving off signals. Still, they have their adherents. Norman Jewison meanwhile revealed himself as a mod by breaking up the frame in as many pretty shapes as he could think of. This was tiresome in 1968, and it’s inane and incredible now. You realize that the Michel Legrand score, with “Windmills of My Mind,” was doing a lot to hold the film in place; with lyrics by Alan and Marilyn Bergman, it won the Oscar for Best Song.

  Alas, the one great asset of the rich in films of the thirties—their ability to say funny things—is missing here. But McQueen takes a supercilious pleasure in keeping his tie on, and Dunaway probably has a few wicked ideas about what she might do with it. They needed Buñuel. But it was asking too much of the system to realize that. Haskell Wexler did the photography, and he probably disapproved so much of the entire venture that he started doing things like waiting for the right light. As if the light mattered in a work so artificial. Also with Paul Burke, Jack Weston, Yaphet Kotto, Todd Martin, Sam Melville, and Addison Powell.

  Thomas Graal’s Best Film (1917)

  Mauritz Stiller had an eye and a feeling for the great Scandinavian outdoors; thus, Sir Arne’s Treasure (1919) is a revenge epic about Scottish mercenaries marooned on the Swedish shore because of the ice. It shudders with the cold and the prospect of slaughter, and it has many exciting moments. But put Stiller indoors, where frivolous but good-natured people can wear less clothing and show some awareness of a modern world, and that’s when he comes to life. It’s not just that he was so good a director—he was a natural director of smart comedies (and history teaches us that that is the hardest genre).

  So Thomas Graal’s Best Film is nothing less than an inside pictures story—not necessarily the first, but certainly the first in showing how far the need to conjure up film stories was changing the way people regarded the thing called life. So man-about-town Graal (Victor Sjöström) is a film scriptwriter and a
ladies’ man. But he can’t think of a subject to do next! It’s only when he hires a very lively Scots girl, Bessie (Karin Molander), as secretary that he sees how far her fantasies may give him material. Of course, the two of them fall in love, but it’s part of Stiller’s droll irony that they can never be quite sure whether they’re in love with each other or the idea of the movie they are making.

  The screenplay was written by Gustaf Molander (who would also write Erotikon), and it’s clear that he was as much of a support to Stiller as Victor Sjöström. The actor-director (who would lead the way to Hollywood) was an earnest and humorless presence in his own films, and a grave figure in life, yet Stiller somehow freed a sense of comedy in him—or was it that the presence of the delightful and bubbly Karin Molander playing the Scots girl reminded Sjöström of fun? American movies were strong on girlish charm at this time (think of Mary Pickford), but Karin Molander was unsurpassed for naturalness, invention, and sheer charm. Everyone loved her, apparently, and several fellows ended up marrying her.

  Thomas Graal’s Best Film is photographed by Henrik Jaenzon, and naturally enough he plays a photographer in the film. The production design was by Axel Esbensen. The picture that survives is barely an hour long—and it was probably longer once. No matter, this is a cheeky film, full of insights into the ways of romance and romanticizing—and thus one of the first movies with a real comic understanding of the intricacies of picture making.

  It proved such a commercial success in Sweden that Stiller decided to marry his two leading characters, and so in Thomas Graal’s Best Child (1918) they collaborate on their biggest production yet—a child, but one that will be a credit to both of them. And we all know what a vexed thing collaboration can be in the picture business.

  The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada (2005)

  Technically, this is a French and American picture, directed by Tommy Lee Jones and produced by Michael Fitzgerald, but largely financed from France by Luc Besson. Yet in most significant ways, it is a Mexican, or a Mexican-American, picture, written by Guillermo Arriaga, the author of Amores Perros and 21 Grams, and the chronicle of a strange story of amity and loyalty worked out along the Mexican-American border. It is, legitimately, a Western, to the extent that it insists on an honest, humane look at some types of life now evident in the American West and along the border. From time to time, it summons up the iconography of Peckinpah and Huston, yet it is its own film, a rough but wry comedy in the end and a picture that takes for granted the shared, harsh times of most Mexicans and Americans.

  Pete Perkins (Tommy Lee Jones) is a rancher in the town of Van Horn. He hires an illegal Mexican immigrant, Melquiades Estrada (Julio César Cedillo), and the two men become friends. Together, they date Rachel (Melissa Leo), a married waitress, and Lou Ann Norton (January Jones), the neglected wife of a border guard, Mike Norton (Barry Pepper)—the Nortons are from Cincinnati. Norton shoots and kills Estrada; it is an accident, but also the consequence of Mike’s arrogance and his overreliance on his weapons and the echo of an early shot where a fox is mistaken for a coyote. So Perkins, who has learned the truth, kidnaps Norton and compels him to help carry Estrada back to Mexico for a proper burial.

  The film becomes a lugubrious journey, with Estrada’s body suffering badly in the heat and being subjected to some comic but grisly preservation techniques. The journey opens up the real nature of Mexico, as a place of amiable, decent people who muddle along as best they can in the blind shadow of American energy and purpose. In the end, the mood is probably closer to Faulkner than to any set movie examples. The penetrating survey of a real border and its ambiguities was offset by the serious neglect that the picture received on its American opening. The case remains that it is one of the best American films in recent years, and the fine elucidation of an intriguing actor as a considerable director.

  As photographed by Chris Menges in ways that leave no doubt about the heat and the marginality of life, this is a picture that does what cinema has always been supposed to do: It sees through terrain to the heart of a treacherous social system. Tommy Lee Jones has been a brusque actor often, nearly brutal in his mercenary choices (the Men in Black films), but this movie is an uncovering of philosophy and tenderness and a beautiful proof of the independent spirit that may bring American movies back to life. Barry Pepper is outstanding as an unlikeable character. January Jones is excellent as a doll trying to be a woman. There are good supporting performances from Dwight Yoakam and Levon Helm (as a blind man who asks any passerby to kill him). Melissa Leo serves coffee and makes the world tick, but isn’t going to get overly attached to any one man.

  Three Comrades (1938)

  We know much more than we might about Three Comrades because it was the picture on which F. Scott Fitzgerald was most heavily involved as a screenwriter (and the only one where he got a credit). This is the picture about which Fitzgerald implored producer Joseph L. Mankiewicz, “Can’t a producer ever be wrong?” And this is the Fitzgerald who, a couple of years later, in the unfinished The Last Tycoon, would write an incisive portrait of how a studio like Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer worked. So it’s useful to know—by way of Mankiewicz—that the chief objection to Fitzgerald’s dialogue came not from the producer, but from Margaret Sullavan, who said, “These lines are unsayable!”

  Three Comrades is from a novel by Erich Maria Remarque, published in 1937. The comrades are Germans who fought in the First World War and who try to make their way in the peace. Against a background of rising fascism, they meet Patricia Hollmann, a magical and inspiring young woman who is dying of consumption. One of the three, Erich, marries her. But in the end she dies by her own volition in the hope that Erich and Otto (the two left) may make their escape from Germany.

  Mankiewicz was the appointed producer at Metro, and he had known Germany as a student in the late 1920s. Frank Borzage was the eventual director, and Edward Paramore was brought in as cowriter when Fitzgerald’s script faced trouble. It also seems that David Hertz and Waldo Salt did some rewriting. There was a clash: Fitzgerald had been hired not just as a master of dialogue but as someone who knew the Europe of the Lost Generation firsthand. By instinct, Fitzgerald would have wanted German actors and a tough view of the changes in German society after 1933. But Metro was eager not to lose its German market (despite real knowledge of Nazi methods) and so it was very reluctant to offend Germany. Giving the project to Borzage—as opposed to, say, Fritz Lang—was a way of building the romance into a fit opponent of war. It made Sullavan more enchanting and more powerful. For Borzage excelled with stories where love could overcome depression, political unrest, or worse.

  The wonder is that the picture ended up as good as it did. Joseph Ruttenberg did the photography, with montages by Slavko Vorkapich. The art direction was by Paul Groesse and Edwin Willis—though it’s a stretch to say that we believe we’re in Germany. We suspect we’re at Metro, and we feel too many realities tugging at the flimsy structure. And though Margaret Sullavan is ethereal and breathless and everything anyone will ever tell you she was, the men are still Robert Taylor, Robert Young, and Franchot Tone. They feel like American guys—without that overcast that affected Europe in the 1930s. The cast also includes Guy Kibbee, Lionel Atwill, Monty Woolley, Henry Hull, George Zucco, and Charley Grapewin. It’s not that Mankiewicz was wrong—rather, the project was at the wrong studio. (It should have been Warners?) You do not see Three Comrades and know that a terrible war is inevitable. You think the world is unfair to lovers.

  The Threepenny Opera (1931)

  Die Dreigroschenoper opened in Berlin in 1928, a musical play by Bertolt Brecht with music by Kurt Weill. In turn, it was a version of John Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera (1728), and Brecht retained the struggle between Peachum and Macheath, while bringing action forward from the eighteenth century to Soho in about 1840. And The Threepenny Opera is more or less world-famous because of the song “Mack the Knife,” which has been through so many versions—no matter that few people have seen the work
onstage, let alone the movie (which was in its day the subject of a fierce legal battle between Nero Films, the production company, and Brecht and Weill).

  Brecht and Weill joined forces in the late 1920s and early 1930s on three shows—Threepenny Opera, Happy End, and Mahagonny—all of which were considered “epic theatre” thanks to the writing of Erwin Piscator. Epic was nonrealistic, an extension of cabaret, agitprop, and those things would be sharpened later by the way in which the works preceded Hitler and the Nazis. But something else needs to be said, and I think it applies to all three plays: that the texts and their drama is so much less than the power of Weill’s music. Time and again, it is the sinister, seductive power of the songs—“Mack the Knife” and “Surabayya, Johnny” are outstanding examples—that holds the shows together. As for the writing, it treats hackneyed situations and clichéd characters. It rejects the poetry of spoken language and seems to disdain evident “big” speeches.

  The film was set up by Nero and Tobis and Warner Brothers. It was an early and odd example of the international coproduction. The rights went for 40,000 marks and the budget was set at 800,000 marks. Seymour Nebenzal was the producer, G. W. Pabst was asked to direct, and immediately there was trouble.

  Though the play had been a success onstage, Brecht and Weill felt that it was being softened for the movie. Nebenzal and Pabst were so much more impressed by naturalism and so much less given to the comic-book fragmentation of the theatrical production, with slogans and placards. The designer on the film was Andrei Andreiev (who had just done Pandora’s Box), and it’s certainly true that the film looks more like an attempt to produce London than the play’s deliberate emphasis on staginess.