In turn, this led to amazing images of an edge to the world—of the world beyond the dome of the show—that were as beautiful as the idea of Columbus so close to the edge he might fall off. So this is a great film—by far the best thing done by two awkward talents, Jim Carrey and Peter Weir. There is outstanding supporting work from Laura Linney, Noah Emmerich, Natascha McElhone, Holland Taylor, Paul Giamatti, and Harry Shearer.
12 Angry Men (1957)
At the outset of his movie career, you can almost hear Sidney Lumet saying to himself, Yes, I know this is far-fetched (that one sane voice sways the rest of a jury in 95 minutes), and I realize that that amounts to a whitewash of the jury system as a whole (so much more complacent than, say, Anatomy of a Murder, made two years later, where we are the jury, and can’t quite decide). Still, within the limits of TV-into-movie, Reginald Rose had written a very deft script, with delineated characters. Lumet knew that he had an excellent cast, as well as Boris Kaufman ready to film it. So he tells himself, Don’t fuck up. Don’t get in the way.
If I say that I think that’s what Lumet tried not to do on projects that range from Long Day’s Journey into Night to Q & A or from Network to Dog Day Afternoon, it can sound mealy-mouthed. Not getting in the way is a high skill and a kind of modesty that is always looked upon kindly by writers and by those who have suspected that the auteur theory was a crock.
The original 12 Angry Men still works very well. Indeed, the only thing that really mars it (apart from its excessive tidiness, and its willingness to settle for that) is Lee J. Cobb’s overwrought performance and the assumption behind it that his character is a bigot. Somehow you feel that Otto Preminger would have made the man so much more charming, and then cast Henry Fonda in the part. Of course, that’s already taking our analysis over the edge of simple enjoyment and into an appreciation of role-playing that Lumet never encourages.
Preminger knows that his courtroom is an arena where a great game is played; he takes it for granted, therefore, that he has actors playing actors. Whereas Lumet’s reticence and self-effacement tell the actors they are playing real guys or types. And Cobb’s being overcooked is very well demonstrated by the modulated ordinariness of people like Robert Webber, Martin Balsam, and Jack Warden. The less these jurors have to do, or stand up for, the more intriguing they are, and the more kindly Lumet looks upon them.
But where does that leave the Henry Fonda character? For me, then and now, he was always too much the teacher or the saint come down from heaven, or head office, to be among ordinary, sweaty men. Fonda is very relaxed, but it’s hard for him not to be Lincolnesque or educational, and his white suit is an unnecessary clue, just as his classless eloquence is the giveaway to the kind of enlightenment he is meant to represent. He is not a common man, and anyone who has ever done jury service can guess that the attorneys would have rejected him early on. So his instrumentality shows like a halo. It’s the fault of the play and the whole concept, for Fonda never gets angry. He just does his best to steer the result while keeping out of the way, and does it so well that Sidney Lumet never seems to notice that he suffers from the same crushing superiority.
Twelve O’Clock High (1949)
There are academic situation where Henry King’s Twelve O’Clock High is employed in business schools or psychology classes for its lessons in man management and the maintenance of morale. That’s fine, but I hope the business majors don’t lose sight of the harsh beauty of a tense Gregory Peck, his hair and eyes as black as his leather jacket, or the rakish lines of the Air Force caps. For the iconography here goes way past acceptable managerial attitudes.
The framework of the film has Dean Jagger (he got a supporting Oscar), in civvies on a bike, coming back to the airfield in England where he was adjutant once. The tarmac is desolate, but then the roar of bomber engines comes in. There was a demoralized American unit there, enough to feel doomed or unlucky. Then Peck was the commander sent in to make sure they’d straighten up and fly right. He managed, but at the cost of his own crack-up. You see, bosses are not to become so fond of their men that they can’t send them to their death.
So Peck drives himself crazy as he cuts out excuses, indiscipline, and friendship. Maybe that’s like life, but I would advise keeping Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 in mind. Twelve O’Clock High is made from the point of view of obedience to authority and unquestioned acceptance of command. Yet there must have been a view that felt the war was insane, and gung-ho hysterical commanders exactly the leaders to avoid. Catch-22 is a work of art, while this movie knows no reason to doubt the system.
Henry King was already an old-timer raised on the nobility of silent films and Richard Barthelmess as the Boy. Yet King and Peck were an interesting team, prepared to show the flaws in Peck’s statue—The Gunfighter is somber and depressive; David and Bathsheba tries to be guilt-stricken; and The Bravados gives Peck a rare lease of wrath and disorder.
The air combat scenes (with some war footage and some very steady cockpit shots) suggest that man management can handle a dogfight—there’s no room for panic, blind luck, or fuck-up, and little sense of the insanity of going up in a rattling steel box to lob bombs down Hitler’s chimneys. Or was the target Dresden?
So this is a film that the Pentagon would have loved (and surely assisted), and it is guarded in history by Peck’s ravaged sincerity and our larger feeling that that war was just (and fair?). Still, I hope military managers don’t put too much reliance on its simpleminded homilies. And I must point out that Peck’s crack-up is as brief and tidy as oversleeping. He sits still, oblivious and balefully intent, like a constipated Lincoln—and then, snap, he’s all right again. So much for the real killer of combat stress. So, yes, this film needs the voice of Heller’s Yossarian and at least the possibility that the command structure includes as much spite, folly, and madness as were permitted to show a few years later in From Here to Eternity.
Twentieth Century (1934)
Alas, we cannot rely on the movie archive to let us see how serious an actor John Barrymore was. But as to his command of comedy, there is no problem at all. Twentieth Century is one of the supreme screwball extravaganzas, confined to a moving train as if to demonstrate what tour de force means. It is also such a piercing dismissal (and celebration) of “acting” as fraud, self-service, and maneuvering for advantage that perhaps the first question—applied to Barrymore, or anyone else—is effectively out of order. Nothing is as hard or grave, or even as close to the grave, as comedy.
It all began as a play, The Napoleon of Broadway, by Charles B. Milholland. The director-producer Jed Harris looked at it and said it wasn’t very good, so it should be passed on to Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur. Milholland protested and said it was based on the impresario Morris Gest. Why not base it on me? said Jed Harris. Hecht and MacArthur duly turned it into Twentieth Century, which opened on Broadway in 1932, with Moffatt Johnston playing Oscar Jaffe and Eugenie Leontovich as Lily Garland.
The story? Jaffe is a theatrical producer in dire need of a success. He gets on the great train of the title hoping to sign up Lily, a big star, who is also traveling on the rails. He knew her first as the humble ingenue he discovered, Mildred Plotka. His star, his lover—doesn’t she owe him one? She feels she owes him as many as there are pellets in a shotgun cartridge. There is a madman on the train (correction: it caters only to that breed), posing as a millionaire, and he gives a check for Jaffe’s production of The Passion Play—Lily as Mary Magdalene.
Hawks worked on the play. Gregory Ratoff (who had played Jaffe in Los Angeles) urged him to make Lily as sharp and devious as Oscar. To convince Barrymore, Hawks had only to call the actor “the greatest ham on earth.” For Lily, he went to his own second cousin, Carole Lombard. He told her that the movie would be total attack from the first scene. They should play it like a couple married and divorced many times—like Grant and Russell in His Girl Friday, “protected” by the legend of being eternal enemies. He broke through Lombard’s reserve to the real
woman—impetuous, foul-mouthed, and punch (or kick) first. It worked. It’s hard to think that anyone had seen chemistry before Twentieth Century. We want this couple—as parents!
Joseph August shot it. Etienne Girardot repeated his stage success as the “millionaire.” And for the rest, there are Walter Connolly, Roscoe Karns, Ralph Forbes, Charles Levison, Dale Fuller, Edgar Kennedy, Billie Seward, Snowflake, and so on. It may be a matter of taste as to whether you are more vulnerable to the comedy of mime or that of words and behavior—it seems to me inescapable, however, that Twentieth Century revels in the fraud of acting while so much silent film is laboring to believe in its artifice. Sophistication. Riot. Let the train go on forever. The comedy of confined actors is one of man’s merciful triumphs.
Twenty Thousand Streets Under the Sky (2006)
The interaction of Patrick Hamilton (1904–62) and the movies becomes more fruitful as time goes by. He is not just the spirit of noir writing in Britain; he is a major novelist, who can stand comparison with Graham Greene, and with Harold Pinter—on whom he was a big influence. Hamilton plays—Gaslight and Rope—have their film interpretations, and Hangover Square is the origin of a famously lurid movie. But the enormous virtue of Simon Curtis’s television filming of Twenty Thousand Streets Under the Sky was the tribute to Hamilton’s writing and the rescue of one of the lesser-known books. In one stride it laid claim to being the best Hamilton on film, and the most instructive. Above all, in close-ups Curtis had found a style that addressed the wounding, terse conversation of Hamilton’s books.
What Curtis and his screenwriter, Kevin Elyot, did was to make a three-part television series that exactly reflected Hamilton’s plan: three short novels that worked together to make a portrait of life in a shabby public house on the Euston Road in the 1930s—the original novels, The Midnight Bell, The Siege of Pleasure, and The Plains of Cement, were published as a trilogy in 1935. The three central characters are a young barman (Bryan Dick), brash, likeable, romantic, and soaring in his ambitions; a pretty prostitute (Zoe Tapper), torn between the barman and the call of her trade, but hopelessly pushed into the position of betrayer; and another barmaid (Sally Hawkins), plain, quiet, watchful, and hopelessly in love with the barman.
The photography is very close to black and white, with a bruised coloring creeping in gradually as emotions rise higher—this is a fabulous recreation of the mood of the 1930s, and a photographic technique that has great potential. But the look of the film depends just as much on the openness and the disappointment in the faces and the outstanding level of movie acting by a little-known cast. I should add that the specially composed score, by John Lunn, was as potent and distinguished as some of the moodiest French movie music from the 1930s. In addition, Curtis used sets and real locations to build a stunning impression of London before the war.
It will be fascinating to see what a talent like Simon Curtis can or will do in feature films. But for the moment, here was one more testament to the natural place of television production in the history of British film. The material here is of the highest order, but the writer has always meant so much more in British television than in British film production. Of course, for Hamilton enthusiasts, a last great work remains to be filmed: The Slaves of Solitude, his masterpiece on boardinghouse life, published in 1947 (that key year in the history of noir)—if noir fans could only see that the mood and the movement is so much more extensive than a group of B pictures.
Two-Faced Woman (1941)
Two-Faced Woman opened just three weeks after Pearl Harbor, when no one felt compelled by so flimsy a romantic comedy—Garbo was to play Karin, a rather chilly ski instructress who becomes her own sexy twin sister to retrieve her husband, Larry Blake (Melvyn Douglas). But as war arrived, so the title seemed awkward. It carried intimations of espionage and dishonesty. Many other titles had been considered, everything from Her Wicked Sister to Naughty Today and Nice Tomorrow.
The film came from a Viennese play, The Twin Sister, by Ludwig Fulda, set in the fifteenth century! It was shifted to modern America by screenwriters S. N. Behrman, Salka Viertel, and George Oppenheimer, but without any sign of promise. Not that you have to blame other people. Garbo herself chose this script over A Woman’s Face, the Donald Ogden Stewart reworking of the old Swedish picture about plastic surgery, the one that gave Joan Crawford a hit. Perhaps Garbo was afraid of that association with cosmetology.
She had a friendly team around her: George Cukor directed, Gottfried Reinhardt produced, Joseph Ruttenberg did the photography and Adrian the costumes, but the fact is that she was given an unkind haircut and some ugly clothes. (Adrian quit over the picture.) She doesn’t look great—so you might look at the close-ups and start guessing how old she must be.
Was there studio sabotage at work? It doesn’t seem so, so long as you discount the way several friendly forces allowed this disaster to happen. In addition, Garbo had to dance—the chica-choca, a kind of rumba, which she does with dance director Robert Alton, without grace or enthusiasm. Then throw in the fact that the picture is stolen away by two other women: Constance Bennett and Ruth Gordon. Then the Catholic Church picked on the movie: She was sleeping with another man, they said. It’s her husband! answered Metro. He doesn’t know it, said Cardinal Spellman. Thus the moral perils facing comedies of remarriage.
The reviews were bad and they stung Garbo. Another project came up, The Girl from Leningrad (she would have played a resistance heroine), but it passed over. So Garbo went to the studio and agreed that for $250,000 she would let them out of their contract with her. So began the list and the age of the films Garbo might have made. It’s clear that she retained some dream of a comeback through most of the 1940s. In 1948, Walter Wanger tried to set up La Duchesse de Langeais. Max Ophüls was to direct. She had vaguely approved James Mason as costar, and she had done screen tests with William Daniels and James Wong Howe (they look better than Two-Faced Woman). Mason was to get $75,000—and Garbo $50,000. The budget was at $500,000. But it all collapsed: The money melted away, and Garbo was difficult. Ophüls went on to do La Ronde.
2 or 3 Things I Know About Her (1967)
Who or what is she? Jean-Luc Godard gives his answer over the credits, and it is the description of his future. Cinema is over. Social studies have begun. So “she” is “la cruauté du neo-capitalisme”; prostitution; “la région parisienne”; “la salle de bains que n’ont pas 70% des Français”; “la terrible loi des grands ensembles”; “la physique de l’amour”; life today; the war in Vietnam; the modern call girl; the death of modern beauty; “la circulation des idées”; “la gestapo des structures.” And very soon, we see our central character, Juliette Jeanson (Marina Vlady), on a summer evening on the balcony of her apartment, on a high floor, above the city and in the air, saying, “Oui, parler comme des citations de verité… C’est le père Brecht qui disait ça… Que les acteurs doivent citer.” That the actors ought to quote.
In fact, one can argue that Godard’s transition from remade movies to the films of quotation lasted a few years, but 2 or 3 Things… is the essential work, shot in a month of the summer of 1966, with an actress he had not worked with before, in Techniscope and color yet with an intimation of the endless videotape that might be required to watch the working out of solar systems where bubbles and liquid meet the air on tops of cups of coffee.
Already characters are slipping away to become archetypes, and already the charms of Paris are moving into the stricken conditions of Alphaville. The heroine represents Paris and vice versa—the symbiosis of fiction and sociology is a machine that has been turned on. Henceforward, Godard’s films are to be theorems or tests of how a society can and cannot work. The film is shot by Raoul Coutard, and in its wide screen it has intense, liquid moments of urban beauty, but already a kind of recorded neutrality is setting in. What will there be to make its harsh record subtler, except the ways time may deform and fade the electronic record (old Xeroxes have become faint footprints)? Thus, the poetic just
ice we wait for is the machine’s great sigh and the collective forgetting of electronic data. The moment when digitalization fades away and data lose their taste.
But here is the question: In the forty years since 2 or 3 Things… have the collected works of Godard improved upon the anthology of the years 1959–67, or has he only demonstrated the fear, or the regret, or the lack of energy to make those films again? Of course, l’école video-sociologie is content. Its annales expand by geometric progression. But as she looks off at the air and as her hair moves through space and time, Marina Vlady cannot help but evoke nostalgia for those ghosts who were playing tennis in Paris in Pierrot le Fou, or Belmondo and Karina trying to start up a musical on the pine-tree shores of the Mediterranean.
Look back at the definitions of her, and the one that seems doubly ominous forty years later is “le gestapo des structures.” One of those structures, I think, comes when actors quote instead of clinging to their wildness.
2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)
Between 1953 and 1964, Stanley Kubrick had made seven films. It was then that extended contemplation set in. It would be four years before he delivered 2001. This was the era of man in space, from Yuri Gagarin to men walking on the moon. So it’s not that people weren’t interested in the topic, or wondering about whether there were other creatures in space.
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