'Have You Seen...?'

by David Thomson

  Hawks asked Jules Furthman to do a screenplay, and apparently let William Faulkner doodle a few scenes. It would all put Papa in his place. And then one day, Slim Hawks passed a fashion magazine over to Hawks, and there she was, Betty Perske, in a pretty hat, standing outside a Red Cross office, like a vampire. She was eighteen or so, and her voice was deep already. Hawks got Betty to wear “Slimmish” clothes. He took her voice lower. And he told Bogart that it would be a kind of love story if the girl kept topping him with insolent lines.

  Bogart said that sounded fine, but he was overoccupied with his raucous wife, Mayo Methot, and Hawks had every reason to think that “Lauren Bacall” would be not just his contract property, but a new Slim, a bit slimmer and nineteen. Alas for lecherous dreams (and don’t knock them as a major inspiration for good movies). Bacall had a soft heart—Howard always assumed that all the girls he discovered were as cool as he was. She fell in love with the actor, the drunk, and the toupee!

  Meanwhile, it’s a screwball classic posing as a war movie, with a little bit of musical as Hoagy Carmichael teaches Bacall to sing. Sid Hickox got the sultry Caribbean look. Charles Novi did the shabby sets. Max Steiner scored it, and Carmichael and Johnny Mercer did the songs. Effortless, serene, grown-up and childish at the same time. Is there a more “Hollywood” movie? Also with Dolores Moran, Sheldon Leonard, Walter Molnar, Walter Sande, and Dan Seymour. You kept the title? said Hemingway, perplexed. Sure, said Hawks—I had this girl and then I didn’t have her. War is hell, Papa should murmur. But nothing’s perfect.

  To Kill a Mockingbird (1962)

  These days you can’t say “Boo!” to Boo Radley, and you’d better be careful about delivering a cross word on Harper Lee, Gregory Peck, or To Kill a Mockingbird. The novel and the film have passed easily into the pantheon of fictions that speak well and warmly of America, even if Atticus Finch does lose the crucial case, trying to defend Brock Peters against rape charges in a Southern town. I should add “wrongful” to those charges. This is not a Preminger-like film where we are left to make up our own minds.

  The novel came out in 1960 and won a Pulitzer and was bought for the screen by that eminently sane and sensitive team, Robert Mulligan and Alan Pakula. In turn, they asked Horton Foote to do the screenplay, which retained the point of view of Scout, Atticus’s young daughter, who is telling the story as a grown woman (her voice-over on the film is that of Kim Stanley). There’s no doubt that, coming when it did, To Kill a Mockingbird was hugely welcome to and much glorified by liberal America. How far it hurried social improvement is another matter. Indeed, how extensive or real the social improvement is remains an embarrassing question. But there is a piety in the child’s voice and a simple decency in Finch that have helped bestow the mantle of Lincoln on the character. Not that Gregory Peck was ever averse to that kind of ennoblement.

  Peck does not seem entirely Southern—and I’m sure that was felt in the South above all. For this Atticus is not just enlightened; he is a little like a wise stranger. Of course, that is not to challenge or compete with the dignity, the sincerity, or the judiciousness that Peck brought to the role—all genuine, yet all labeled, too, whereas the character in the book, I think, was less solemnly conscious of the dangerous ground he was breaking.

  The other great appeal of the film is owed to Mary Badham, who gives one of the finest performances by a child in American cinema. Robert Duvall made his debut as Boo Radley and is very good. The music was by Elmer Bernstein.

  To Kill a Mockingbird was nominated for the Best Picture Oscar (it lost to Lawrence of Arabia). Mulligan was nominated for directing; Peck won his Oscar, overcoming Peter O’Toole, Burt Lancaster in Birdman of Alcatraz, Jack Lemmon in Days of Wine and Roses, and Marcello Mastroianni in Divorce—Italian Style. Mary Badham was nominated and lost to Patty Duke (age sixteen) in The Miracle Worker. Horton Foote won for his screenplay.

  There’s a rich movie tradition of the Southern trial: It includes Judge Priest and Inherit the Wind as well as movies like Ghosts of Mississippi or Mississippi Burning or Intruder in the Dust. All the movies whisper to us that, with human nature, it can’t really be that bad. While the warmth of the South says, Yes, yes it is, because human nature has its habits. So if you’re up in court in certain places, don’t rely on the Finch Amendment.

  Tokyo Story (1953)

  Critics refer you to the Ozu style, but they are not generous in wondering what it means. So as I watch Tokyo Story again, I notice how often, after the “action” has ended, Yasujiro Ozu keeps the camera running on the space where it occurred. But are “action” and “space” the right words? The question is unnerving. Whether we rejoice in the cinema of “action” films, or simply remember the signal “action” that orders the camera to start rolling, we are pledged to believe in activity or incident. Yet, in candor, as you look at Ozu scenes, “activity” is not the best word. And that emptied or surrendered space after the “activity” may be meant as a direction to us—some guidance in how to look. After all, these cramped houses are empty sometimes: when the people who live there are “out”; when they have moved “off-camera”; or when they are dead.

  These are not idle wonderings. Take the “story” that is Tokyo Story. An elderly couple who live in another city decide to visit their married children in Tokyo. It is a big journey. Everyone acts as if it is important. But, in reality, the family living in Tokyo hardly has room or time for the visitors. There is a problem of space in these houses, which leaves a question mark over the possession of inner space and how far the people can regard that as a right. So the parents are put up in a spa. And they go away from Tokyo disappointed. The mother falls ill on the way back. The relatives now hurry to get their last meeting with her. But they are too late. The mother dies. The widowed daughter-in-law—altogether the kindest person in the film—makes funeral arrangements. The father tells this daughter-in-law she should marry again—he is too impressed by loneliness to see another way. She doubts she will.

  Some writers talk of Chekhov, and of the ordinary unkindness in families. The film itself admits to the implacability of life: It goes on, there are spaces left empty after people have gone, and there are ideals or “stories” of kinship and kindness that may be betrayed. Ozu’s fondness for actors is immense, and his low-level, very still camera is gracious to acting: It lets it soak in; it permits time; and Tokyo Story is longer than Ozu usually allows himself. But I am not sure it is enough to say, simply, that Ozu sighs with regret and takes up a Chekhovian resignation. I am not sure it’s enough to say this of Chekhov. For deep down—looking at people and their spaces—Ozu seems to know the profound outer loneliness in which people do not always play the role of son or father, or play it well. And there is no moral edge to his gaze. It is not that Ozu disapproves of his more abrupt characters any more than he sees Tokyo Story as a commentary on housing problems in the city and the nation. Though that point needs addressing, too, for Ozu seems to wonder always whether Japanese institutions are not prisons, too, confining human nature and taming it. Ozu is a master, but I think the message is more disturbing than just that of dismayed humanism.

  Tol’able David (1921)

  The silent cinema, it seems to me, was often by nature more interested in the nineteenth century, and America as a rural society, than it was in progress and urbanization. Of course, the cities meant larger audiences and bigger theaters. But still there were pictures so nostalgic for tamed space that they resemble the Western reestablished in glorious Eastern parks. That is where Tol’able David fits, and still works. Among other things, it is one of the most spectacular and heartfelt identifications with countryside ever managed onscreen. But it is the countryside as an expression of virtue and order. Don’t forget that Hemingway’s “Big Two-Hearted River” was written only a few years later. It bespeaks a modern sense of country, as a place of escape from civilization’s plight.

  This is the story of David Kinemon (as handsome, true, and thoughtful as Richard Barthelmess).
In the first movement he harmonizes with his country life—his dog, his parents, his home and friends. All he misses is the chance to drive the U.S. mail. He is not man enough yet. But then Iscah Hatburn arrives with his two sons. They have escaped from prison and they terrorize the area. They kill David’s dog and paralyze his brother. The Kinemons move, and David wonders if he has been a coward. One day, he gets to drive the mail, and as the Hatburns try to steal it so the chance for the great fight arises. He is a man.

  This was a short story by Joseph Hergesheimer that Griffith planned to make with Barthelmess. But when the actor and director Henry King formed Inspiration Pictures together, Griffith traded them the story. The script was actually written by King and Edmund Goulding together, and King took great pleasure in researching locations in the Virginia countryside, in the area where he had been raised himself. Henry Cronjager opened the lens to that dappled light and delivered countless views of country life as a version of heaven.

  I’m not sure I want to hear these people speak. Their initial comfort could be too stuffed to be endurable. And, really, the characters are so one-sided that they have little need for speech or thought. King’s method is to find reveries and hold them rather too long. Barthelmess was probably the ideal actor for this. He had an interesting face, never without traces of doubt and anxiety (think of Heroes for Sale and Only Angels Have Wings). It was a face that was more interesting than many of his predicaments—and Tol’able David is tolerable in great part because of his modesty and his gradual emergence as a man of action.

  The fight is grand, prolonged, and not one to bet on. But here in 1921 someone has suspected that great truth, that the movie fight is its trial at arms and its reason for suspense. It should be added that the setup in Tol’able David goes on: You can see it in High Noon, in Straw Dogs even, and in just about every film where revenge has rectitude (like King’s The Bravados, even, where the fighting response is very confused).

  The cast also includes Gladys Hulette, Walter P. Lewis, Ernest Torrence, Ralph Yearsley, Forrest Robinson, Edmund Gurney, and Marion Abbott.

  Tom Jones (1963)

  In his memoir, The Long-Distance Runner, Tony Richardson admits to feeling that Tom Jones was “incomplete and botched,” despite its success, despite its winning the Oscar for Best Picture. The modesty is well-founded. The picture is a mess, sometimes called a romp, and a tribute as much as anything to the sudden new appetite for things English. Richardson talks in his memoir about how the film coincided with the first emergence of “swinging” London. I’m not sure that history would sustain that thought, but it is the case that Tom Jones caught the theatrical wave of the Royal Court and of Woodfall, the new film company that had made films of Look Back in Anger, The Entertainer, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, A Taste of Honey, and The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner. It also harked back to the model of history with sex and indignity founded in The Private Life of Henry VIII.

  It was Richardson who felt the urge to escape contemporary realism and who thought of Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones. He asked John Osborne to do a screenplay from a treatment of the novel he made himself. No one was ever satisfied with Osborne’s script (and he refused to do much rewriting). But with the sheer amount of story detail, costumes, and sets it was impossible to get the budget under £500,000. Columbia was to have backed it, but then David Picker arrived and United Artists took over.

  Jocelyn Herbert was hired as designer, and after talks with Ossie Morris broke down, Richardson got Walter Lassally as his cameraman. They had locations all over the countryside—houses here, lanes there—and that sense of a rural society is the best thing about the picture. It’s something Richardson summed up. He said it was an unhappy production (because of the script), “but there were many wonderful compensations—the English countryside in summer, heavy with the scents of grass seeds, dog roses and cow parsley, a green richness that seems to last longer than anywhere else. There were the great houses we used: one with a lake gorged with water lilies and yellow flags; another (Cranborne) majestic and elegant with a labyrinth of garden succeeding garden, glimmering with white and yellow roses.”

  The young Albert Finney tried to hold it together, but, as he knew, Tom is a passive part. Everyone else has more fun: Susannah York as Sophie, Hugh Griffith as Western, Edith Evans, Joan Greenwood, Diane Cilento, George Devine, Joyce Redman, Rachel Kempson, Wilfrid Lawson—and the narrator, Micheál MacLiammóir.

  It made a fortune and won Best Picture. Richardson won for directing, Finney was nominated for acting—and three Supporting Actress nods went to Edith Evans, Diane Cilento, and Joyce Redman (they were beaten by Margaret Rutherford!). John Osborne got the Oscar for screenplay. Lawrence of Arabia had won Best Picture the year before and it was technically British. But Tom Jones was the breakthrough—the English were coming.

  Toni (1934)

  Based at Les Martigues, using the resources of the Marcel Pagnol Company, Jean Renoir intended Toni as a new commitment to realism. Everything was shot in real exteriors or in the kind of rough interiors where the action occurred. Inside and outside were as connected as they are in rural life. All sound was recorded live, on location, despite some imperfections. And the cast was an assembly of amateurs or of actors close in personal history to the parts they were playing. As for the story, it was picked up from a newspaper report, about an Italian immigrant worker in a tragic love affair.

  “For the first time in my life,” Renoir would write, “it seemed to me that I had written a script in which the elements completed one another, not so much through the plot as by a sort of natural equilibrium.

  “Toni was to speed up my separation from the notion of the predominance of the individual. I could no longer be satisfied with a world which was nothing but the dwelling-place of personae having no link between them.”

  And thus, Renoir—the son of a portraitist—learned to set aside the close-up for the group shot (of course, his father was a master of complex social gatherings, too). In Toni, we can see Renoir feeling out physical context and the way personal relationships are defined by intervening space and the glance, or the regard. It looks a lot less dramatic, or melodramatic, than the films before the early 1930s—after all, the silent film often tried to bury itself inside anguished or ecstatic faces caught between massive plot forces. But now Renoir comes to see that intensity as a failure to honor the tangled contexts in which we live with others.

  Toni has a new harshness in its photography (for the first time, Renoir had his nephew Claude Renoir doing the camerawork). But that is a response to the sunlight and the rocky terrain of the Midi. Despite that texture in the imagery, the compositions, the moving camera that exhausts so many passing compositions in one sweep, and the editing that is founded in the movement speak to a tenderness or kinship in peoples who must also respect the scheme that they are aliens to each other. The attitudes and the attention of actor Charles Blavette are exemplary in this process. (He is as influential as Dalio in Rules of the Game.)

  Renoir noted that Toni was taken as a predecessor of Italian neo-realism, but he was suspicious of the bond—because he disliked the Italian habit of adding sound later, and because he noted the Italian custom of melodrama. In Toni, fateful instincts are played down by a kind of fatalism that knows everyone has his or her version of what happened. The purpose of the cinema, Renoir seems to say, or its opportunity, is to reconcile the brief outbursts of happiness or tragedy with the stoicism, or the duration, that sees all things happening and changing. That sensibility begins and ends in the style of the film, the way of seeing, and the human ability to imitate film itself by being burned but not destroyed.

  Tootsie (1982)

  I’m imagining how the headline, or something close to it, must have run: Gandhi beats Tootsie—and it gives ominous warning of Hollywood in the 1980s. I’d far rather see Tootsie, because it’s a more interesting take on what wearing a robe can do to a man. But is it interesting, or dangerous, enough?

/>   Tootsie is a show business story, one that is spurred on by a common problem: an actor who can’t get work. Michael Dorsey is “difficult.” That’s why he isn’t going to get a longed-for role in The Iceman Cometh. He has recently coached Sandy (Teri Garr) about being more assertive/butch as she tries for the part of hospital administrator in Southwest General, a successful TV soap opera. So, as a game and to show how un-difficult he can be, Michael dresses up as “Dorothy Michaels” and gets the part himself/herself. Once he’s in, it was certainly possible for the many scriptwriters to have a lot of fun. But, please note, it’s all a game and a demonstration of Dustin Hoffman’s “versatility” that he can get away with it. Don’t let’s encourage any thought that Michael or Dustin are other than straight guys.

  And so, on the one hand Tootsie is a bit of fun from the world of show business, no matter that that business has a higher incidence of homosexual behavior (in or out of the closet) than any other profession in America. In the same way, the audience for Tootsie was expected to discover anew how “brilliant” Dustin Hoffman was and is, without entertaining any doubts about him. A lot of actors—maybe the best equipped to play the part—would have ducked it.

  The credits on Tootsie are story by Don McGuire and Larry Gelbart, screenplay by Gelbart and Murray Schisgal (enough to suggest that Gelbart really is a player). But stories were current about other writers—not least Elaine May—and the overall feeling that the people in charge (including director Sydney Pollack) had had a lot of trouble working out this story so that it remained good, “clean” fun. Once it gets going, that falls into place. For instance, Michael falls for Julie (Jessica Lange), an actress in the show, no matter that she wonders if Dorothy may be a little lesbian. And then Julie’s father (Charles Durning) comes on to Dorothy, too.