'Have You Seen...?'

by David Thomson

  When it was all over, the people in the film congratulated themselves for having made a class entertainment—the picture did very well, even if it missed out on most awards (Lange did win the Oscar for Supporting Actress). What’s wrong with Tootsie is the idea that gender shock (or ruse) is just a game, as opposed to a constant subtext in show business (and life). Indeed, Some Like It Hot, more than twenty years earlier, is a great deal more suggestive of the way an unstable person may be swayed sexually—and so what, because nobody’s perfect. Tootsie feels strained and tense, for all the fun, and Hollywood still turns the other cheek most of the time when gay questions arise. Also with Bill Murray, Dabney Coleman, Geena Davis, and Sydney Pollack (as an agent).

  Top Hat (1935)

  Everyone loved Top Hat—or so it seemed. It is the film from the Astaire-Rogers series that most people think of first, not because they really know it, but because the title embodies the affluence of the films as a whole and because there is that abiding image of Astaire dancing solo, in tails and top hat, flinging his cane down and catching it on the rebound. It was the most successful: On a budget of just over $600,000, it grossed $1.7 million at home and $1.4 million overseas. That meant a profit of $1.5 million.

  On the other hand, there is a fascinating memo from Astaire to RKO producer Pandro Berman, responding to the script: Though it had been written for Astaire, he worries that he has no character and nothing to do but dance-dance-dance; he was a straight juvenile again, but “cocky and arrogant”; there’s no real story; it’s too close to The Gay Divorcee; I have too little comedy; I am “forever pawing the girl or she is rushing into my arms.”

  We all know the legend of Astaire the absorbed dancer, hardly knowing if his partner’s feet were bleeding, and dedicating himself to the perfection of routines. So it’s refreshing to see him unhappy over those questions that dog the theorist of the musicals—essentially, do musicals have to be “about” something? Moreover, although Astaire was entrusted with the dance routines in his films, and sometimes the songs came along because of his friendships with songwriters, he seems to have felt helpless in choosing and shaping material.

  More or less, the Astaire-Rogers musicals have the personality of his stage shows, coupled with the odd myth that Fred was a high-society figure. Yes, his sister, Adele, was married into the British aristocracy and Fred was socially minded. But there were raw materials that pointed in other directions: he was Midwest, not rich and not handsome. Remember the early feeling at M-G-M that his charm was too slight to surpass big ears. Fred is odd-looking—and Ginger (she was all-American pretty) seems to know it. People still say he gave her class and she gave him sex. But since when has that been a regular American transaction? In the movies, sex was class—that’s what made Gable a king. Whereas Fred was odd. I think he knew it and worried over it—which is not the same as knowing he was gay. He surely knew that that part of him would never get expressed. Yet knowledge seldom kills desire.

  And so Top Hat—the one with “No Strings,” “Isn’t This a Lovely Day” (which is prompted by weather—something that feels like raw poverty in this world), “Top Hat,” “Cheek to Cheek,” and “The Piccolino,” which is a Ginger song. They’re all by Irving Berlin. Mark Sandrich directed. It is the classic (if not the best), and it’s all about a mistaken-identity plot so much more ludcrous and less intriguing than the one that puts Fred in big pictures and says, Look, he’s one of us. As Graham Greene said, he’s about the nearest to a “human Mickey Mouse” we’ll ever get.

  Touch of Evil (1958)

  Orson Welles had been away, in Europe, and the legend had spread that he had become lazy or inept after his early extravagance and monomania. He was brought back, apparently, because Charlton Heston, cast as the lead, observed that Welles (suggested for the villain) was a possible director, too. So Welles, enlarging his own size for the role of corrupt border-town sheriff Hank Quinlan, came back as the cleverest, most adroit director anyone had ever seen. Touch of Evil is made with sheer brilliance, from the single-take bomb-plant and explosion scene that went under the old credits to the pursuit and confession scene shot amid the trashy canals of Venice, California, standing in for the rancid Mexican-American border.

  But more than that, granted that Welles had only a short time to rework the Paul Monash script, just look at the toughness of the Mexican-American attitudes—still years ahead of mainstream American film. Then reflect on the amazingly intricate camera movements in the motel sequence where evidence is “found,” and consider the ambiguous examination of law and justice that goes with it. Think of the scary mood established at the other motel where Janet Leigh goes to “rest,” and judge the audacity behind the performances of Dennis Weaver and Mercedes McCambridge.

  The lurid photography, by Russell Metty, is as atmospheric as that in the Ambersons’ house. The melodrama is played for full value, and yet it leaves room still for a mordant commentary on Welles himself—the incriminating “cane,” the observations dropped like acid on candy-soft metal by the Marlene Dietrich character. It all makes for a fantastic mix—a tour de force filled with a terrible regret about expression itself that infects movie, life, and being. Here is a studio noir picture that stands up equally well as a private “diary” film.

  As had happened before, Welles quit the editing and the film got itself into a studio version that has since been restored. The rebuilding of the sound track, by Walter Murch, is a more dubious achievement. Personally, I prefer the swagger of the old opening with the ticking and the Mancini score to the carefully compiled sounds of a real border town. This isn’t an everyday place—it’s pulp-town. It’s a nightmare in a world that has vanquished all of Welles’s old optimism. It’s as if eloquence has lost the urge to talk any longer—and Quinlan’s nihilism is not far from Welles’s own dismay.

  But try looking away for a second. The emotional impact is so much less than that of Kane or Ambersons, but what do we call this if it is not great film. Welles is hideous as Quinlan, and pathetic. Heston does a great job as the Mexican cop. And Janet Leigh is brave, sexy, and clever enough to conceal the plaster on her broken arm. Also with Joseph Calleia (wonderful), Akim Tamiroff, Valentin de Vargas, Mort Mills, Victor Milian, Joanna Moore, and Ray Collins.

  Track of the Cat (1954)

  This is one of those films that squeezes in because of its oddity, or perversity. After all, director William Wellman—a pillar of the Hollywood community—said he wished he had never made it. But the common sense and practical business-like acumen of Hollywood won’t get you round the corner. “Being business-like” was certainly part of the Hollywood style, but it was so seldom observable in fact. The movie kingdom was a panorama of whims and irresistible impulses—look at the people they married, look at the films they made. Track of the Cat is strange, and the audience didn’t get it. But when Joe Gillis tells the story, dead, from the swimming pool in Sunset Blvd., the audience says, “Cool.”

  The crazy dream factor on Track of the Cat was Wellman’s deep-seated urge to make a color film so that it looked like black-and-white. How do you do that? You make a Western in the winter in the snow country. He found a novel by the Reno author Walter Van Tilburg Clark (he had written The Ox-Bow Incident) about a family that is spooked by a black panther roaming in the woods. They shot exteriors up in the Sierra and interiors at Warners, and Wellman and his photographer, William Clothier, kept the secret to themselves. And no one remarked on it! Not even the labs where they could find so little color to print! Maybe the lab had sat down and reasoned that with Wellman directing it and Robert Mitchum starring it must be OK. Regular guys like that would never get themselves involved in anything so arty, would they?

  Mitchum is in his nasty vein, and he’s good, but maybe it needed a different actor—like Clifton Webb. I like the film a lot, especially its gloomy family mood, with a house full of Mitchum, Teresa Wright, Tab Hunter, Diana Lynn, and Beulah Bondi. As for the panther, you think you can see him anywhere.


  Who even saw it? I saw it, and Wellman and Clothier saw it: “And when it was all over, we both cried. You know, you would have thought we were a couple of crying drunks—really, truly. It was so beautiful and so unusual. Warner saw it—the whole gang. They never noticed it. It went out. It was released. Nobody saw it. No one paid any attention to it. It was just a dream that went up like a bubble had burst. Really and truly. It just broke my heart. I said, ‘For seven years I’ve been looking for a thing like this, Bill.’ And Bill did a great job on it—got no mention as a photographer. Nothing. And it’s absolutely beautiful.”

  And so it is. But the lesson is clear: Don’t go arty for seven years and expect anyone to see it. You see, it’s a closed club and everyone is being kind. If you were a rapist child-molester they wouldn’t turn you in, either. So the only decent way for an American to see a film like this is by accident.

  The Travelling Players (1975)

  We know after half an hour, that, as non-native watchers, we are always going to be cut off from the roots of this extraordinary ritual become a film. Equally, we know that we are very far from the touristic world of Zorba the Greek. We sense that something innovative and beautiful is being done with the long take and the moving camera—it is said there are just eighty shots in a four-hour film, but who can keep count while being so physically caught up in these movements? Take the information on trust, and are we best advised to see these traveling shots as a version of Renoir, or Mizoguchi or Ophüls, or would we get more out of them if we knew more about the choral processions at the heart of Greek drama? For Theo Angelopoulos, the director, is not just an epic chronicler of Greece, he is someone who seems intent on finding a “musical” in Greek drama.

  The Travelling Players, made when Angelopoulos was forty, was clearly the breakthrough film that marked his lavish and far-reaching style. In a nutshell, the film follows a traveling theatrical troupe in Greece in the years between 1939 and 1952 in its efforts to mount a production of a naïve play called Golfo the Shepherdess. These years are a time of war, first with Italy and then with Germany. That is followed by a fierce war of resistance, encouraged by Britain and America (not always with much understanding), to be followed by civil war because of the spread of Communist influence. In fact, the film begins in 1952, on the eve of the election of Papagos, and it then breaks into flashbacks that track the way the years of turmoil affected the company’s plans. It is likely, in fact, that Angelopoulos used this very parochial format to avoid larger charges of breaking censorship, or commenting too directly on embattled issues.

  A quick survey of Greece in those years will help any viewer, but then you are open to the beauty of the film itself, and the uncanny ways in which movement serves as a metaphor for history. There is not a director who moves so easily through space only for us to discover that a temporal journey has been made. But again, the traveling shot that fixes on a group is not just a record of a family troupe—it is an observation of a society in transit. The period can alter during the course of a single shot. So what we are seeing is pageantlike and theatrical (in the abiding sense of Greece being the founder of modern theater).

  Of course, the panoramic effect cries out for a big screen, but Greek pictures of four hours are far more likely to be confined to the small screen these days. Still, Angelopoulos is a master, and this and several of the films to come are almost unbearably moving if you have caught the rhythm early enough. The color photography is in the hands of Giorgos Arvinitis, and the music here is by Loukianos Kilaidonis.

  Treasure Island (1934)

  The Robert Louis Stevenson novel, published in 1883, has been filmed so many times. There were, apparently, four silent versions, the most notable by Maurice Tourneur, with Lon Chaney as Long John Silver. It was inevitable, therefore, with sound that a new version—the most spectacular yet—be made in the great enthusiasm for literary adaptations. It was a book loved by Louis B. Mayer himself (the friendship of child and adult was always a theme that moved him). Hunt Stromberg took on the production, and John Howard Lawson and Leonard Praskins worked separately on an adaptation, before John Lee Mahin did the screenplay. Not that there was so much work to be done: Stevenson wrote with an uncanny sense of dramatization waiting at hand. His action sequences are carefully worked out. The reader can see the story.

  The key step in the production was to cast Wallace Beery as Silver. This is good casting, respectful of the book, for Beery was close to fifty, commanding if homely, athletic and humorous. There’s no evidence that others were thought of, but it’s interesting to think of Tracy as Silver. As Jim Hawkins, the film cast the thirteen-year-old Jackie Cooper, who had already teamed with Beery in The Champ and The Bowery. But Cooper was tough and very American, and there’s no doubt that the Englishness of the novel suffers in this version.

  Victor Fleming directed, and, as so often, he judged nicely the balance of action and character that the work requires. One of the reasons why it is so hard to measure Fleming’s own character is because, so often, he served his material closely. The photography was shared by Clyde DeVinna (the seascapes), Ray June, and Harold Rosson. Cedric Gibbons did the art direction, and Herbert Stothart wrote the score.

  Lionel Barrymore plays Billy Bones, Otto Kruger is Dr. Livesey, Lewis Stone is Captain Smollett, and Nigel Bruce plays Squire Trelawney. Charles Sale is Ben Gunn, William V. Mong is blind Pew, and Douglass Dumbrille has the key role of Israel Hands (Jim’s opponent in the best action scene).

  There’s nothing to fault here beyond the Americanness. Beery is droll and wicked—he is never quite the loner that seems waiting to be discovered in the novel. Tracy and, say, Freddie Bartholomew do, immediately, give promise of a different atmosphere, one in which we recognize Jim’s need for a father figure.

  The story does not rest. Byron Haskin directed a version for Disney in 1950, with Bobby Driscoll as Jim and Robert Newton as Silver. Newton commandeered the part and spawned a host of impersonations (notably by Tony Hancock), but Newton was drunk and Silver is not. Orson Welles was Silver in 1972, and really not very good. There is a TV version in 1990, with Charlton Heston as Silver and Christian Bale as Jim (it was directed by Fraser Heston). In truth, it is the best version of the novel. There is also a version by Raul Ruiz, postmodernist, ironic, playful, and a real treasure.

  The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948)

  John Huston had made efforts to secure the rights to Treasure of the Sierra Madre before he went off to the war. After all, the book had been published originally in 1927. But Warners had trouble locating its author, B. Traven, or verifying his identity. So the project dragged on and was revived after the war. Jack Warner was not happy: Huston wanted to do the whole thing in Mexico; some of the talk would be in Spanish; and there were no dames. In the end, it cost close to $3 million and it didn’t do very well, probably because by then Bogart had a real romantic image and too many people were dismayed to see just how nasty and crazy his Fred Dobbs became. Still, when Jack Warner saw it, he reckoned it was one of the greatest pictures the studio had ever made.

  Huston did the script, and Traven himself thought it was brilliant (he had only a few suggestions, which Huston followed). So they all went off to Mexico, with Ted McCord doing the black-and-white photography—I think it’s a blessing that McCord delivered a rough look, whereas a Gabriel Figueroa might have lit the hell out of it (but there are too many camp sequences on painful sets where voices bounce off the wooden floor).

  But the strength of the film is the unsentimental approach to the three treasure seekers, played by the director’s father, Walter, Tim Holt, and Bogart. We have no illusions about any of them, even if Holt’s Curtin comes dangerously close to being a regular fellow. But the old-timer was always crazy and the onset of Dobbs’s paranoia is very well done. And it follows from that that, while the idea of “treasure” is sublime and all-powerful, Huston knows it for a trickster, too. It is the search that grips these men more than the finding. And the old man’s mi
rth at the way the gold dust is scattered in the wind is an ancestor to the mad laughter that ends The Wild Bunch, and even the attitude to all the lost loot in Kubrick’s The Killing. It’s in Huston’s nature, as much as the old-timer’s, that treasure will give you a purpose in life—so long as you never get hold of it. Then you’re done for. And this is actually very close to the notion within The Man Who Would Be King, that project that held Huston for decades.

  And there are so many other things to enjoy: Bobby Blake as the Mexican kid at the start; John Huston himself in a white suit; Alfonso Bedoya, quite delicious as the bandit, though probably setting the general image of Mexico in American eyes back a hundred years. It was nominated for the Best Picture Oscar, and it got rave reviews despite the disappointing numbers—within a few years it was an accepted classic. Huston won as Best Director (beating Olivier for Hamlet). But what pleased him most was when his fattier got the Supporting Actor prize—just two years before his death.

  The Tree of Wooden Clogs (1978)

  Long before there were appealing stories of some movie-genic loner getting over a bad romance by buying a villa in (name the province of Italy where you intend to spend the rest of your days), the Italians themselves had worked out a simple kind of inducement, based loosely (or not) on the lives of the peasantry from another age. Ermanno Olmi was born in Bergamo in 1931, the child of peasants—and The Tree of Wooden Clogs is based upon the peasant life in a farmhouse community there at the very end of the nineteenth century. So, plainly, Olmi was delving into his own past in the age when Italy was struggling to be one nation, despite the unifying forces of the Church, the campagna, and the position of the peasantry.