It turns out that Laurents was dropped from the film for a while. His dear friends Pollack and producer Ray Stark explained that “he” (Redford) was anti-Laurents—not because of the view of Hubbell, just because Hubbell’s part was smaller or less chewy than Katie’s. Later, Laurents came back, after several other writers had tried to steer the picture out of its mess. Now it looks and feels inevitable: the mismatched close-ups of Redford and Streisand are not regarded as satirical, and the Hamlisch music bridges all troubled waters. It’s just that the picture is shitty—it’s one that Hubbell must have written. And so the abiding fact of difference, and the possibility of politics, began to burn off in the light of the southern California sun. With Bradford Dillman, Lois Chiles, Patrick O’Neal, and Viveca Lindfors. Margaret Booth was the supervising editor at seventy-five—she could have cut it in her sleep, for this rhythm of evasion and lies was ancient and in her blood.
Went the Day Well? (1942)
In her BFI book on Went the Day Well?, Penelope Houston argues with characteristic shrewdness that the real threat the film plays with—of German invasion—had passed by the time it was made. Without a crushing victory in 1940 in the Battle of Britain, the German command were unable to launch a full invasion. There may have been other reasons—some weird superstition in Hitler, or even a residual sympathy for the country. (It was not that he didn’t know there were Nazi sympathizers in Britain.) At any event, setting itself up in 1942, this Ealing film was confident enough to be more than a chiller—what if they had come with their Teutonic efficiency and fascist severity? It is also a reaffirmation of that typically Ealing sense of “little England” that could say to itself, “Well, of course, they wouldn’t come, they may be nasty but they’re not stupid.” So the really telling contrast between Went the Day Well? and, say, Jean-Pierre Melville’s Army of Shadows is just what would have happened in a Britain under occupation.
But don’t forget that this very English film was made by the Brazilian Alberto Cavalcanti, a man whose contribution to British film cannot be underestimated. Ms. Houston also stresses that this film was prompted by a story by Graham Greene (though she believes Greene never saw the film). The story was “The Lieutenant Died Last.” It describes a village called Potter, which was renamed for the film as Bramley End—and very pretty, too. The scripting was in the hands of John Dighton, Diana Morgan, and Angus MacPhail, with Michael Balcon as official producer. Cavalcanti had been working in British documentary, above all, but he had credentials that went back to silent and experimental days and he was well regarded by Balcon even if the two men sparred over Cavalcanti’s dreams of surrealism. It was a good appointment, for Cavalcanti was likely to eliminate jolliness and parochialism. And as it turns out, Went the Day Well? is blunt about German sympathizers and the kind of violence required in a war like this. The film stops short of cruelty, and you can say it is ignorant of Nazi terror still, but you can’t see it without the occasional shudder—this could have happened and been awful.
Wilkie Cooper did the photography (with Douglas Slocombe as an assistant). William Walton wrote the music. Sidney Cole was the editor, Tom Morahan the art director (with Michael Relph as his assistant). The excellent cast includes Leslie Banks, Valerie Taylor, Marie Lohr, Harry Fowler, Frank Lawton, Elizabeth Allan, Thora Hird, Muriel George, Patricia Hayes, Mervyn Johns, Basil Sydney, David Farrar, John Slater, and James Donald.
Of course, Britain had a real war, and Ealing dealt with it, from The Foreman Went to France and The Next of Kin to The Cruel Sea and Dunkirk. But to test the virtues of Cavalcanti’s film, just look at the airy adventure of The Eagle Has Landed (1977), by John Sturges, no less, with its secret longing for the Germans to win in their ingenious raid—especially with Michael Caine as their officer.
Werckmeister Harmonies (2000)
The longer we look at a very plain image, the more susceptible it becomes to dreamscape, madness, or terror. Look long enough at some scruffy Hungarian town on days when the sun never pierces the overcast, and you can believe it is the end of the world that is awaited. Track closely with two men walking in silence and you can hardly tell whether they expect to see doom or glory. Did you ever, as a child, take one word and just keep repeating it over and over again until the repeated sound had lost all notion of meaning, but utterance was your song?
This is what happens, and though it is irrational, this thing that happens, we have the sense that it happens all the time (this is surely the miracle of film imprinting the whole medium—the explosive innovation that becomes as plain as habit). There is a young man (Lars Rudolph), with long wild hair and sunken eyes. Every night, at closing time in the pub, he conducts the strange dance of the solar system—it is a measure of his longing for knowledge. He has an uncle (Peter Fitz), an intellectual who speculates on the intervals between musical notes. But some dread hangs over the town where they live—and its harbinger is the arrival of a great truck that carries the stinking figure of a stuffed whale and the smaller marvel, the Prince.
The nephew looks at the whale and he doesn’t know what to make of it. The feeling in the town becomes more ominous. Then Auntie Tünde (Hanna Schygulla—magnificent) asks the nephew to give the uncle a message, an offer—it is inscrutable but threatening. And violence breaks out in the town. The mob storms a hospital, beating inmates and mocking them. Tünde seems to be part of the military operation. Then calm returns but the nephew is a wreck, sitting on the side of his bed.
Where does this turn into meaning? As you watch it over and over again, possibly correcting errors I have introduced, it could be a metaphor for Balkan terror or for all of Hungary in 1956. You can propose that the film is an essentially Eastern European anticipation of trouble—made in the tradition of Miklós Jancsó, or Kafka. I don’t know, and I suspect that the director Bela Tarr is far more interested in getting the universal application of this haunting parable.
In filmic terms, all is lucid and precise, even if the context is infinite in time and space. Werckmeister Harmonies demands steady attention, but then it becomes like a symphony of dread enough to make most horror pictures seem fussy. The script is by Tarr and László Krasznahorkai, and it comes from The Melancholy of Resistance, a book written by the latter. Tarr makes immense films with prolonged shots—as such he is a nephew to Ophüls and Tarkovsky. But in his insights, he has something of Lang. He can hardly see a doorway without knowing things can get worse. Unique, very hard to describe, the kind of work that merits the simple praise—“cinematic.”
West Side Story (1961)
West Side Story is sometimes hailed as a movie landmark. It had rentals of $20 million on its first run. It got eleven nominations and ten Oscars. And, as much as anything, it began to overcome that earlier feeling of vulnerability in the American musical—that as story, literature, or content, it was so insubstantial. After all, this was Romeo and Juliet updated to 1950s New York. It was hip and cool. So be it. Millions will tell you they have had a good time at the movie, but I am here to say that the experience is a bit like sailing on a massive modern container ship whereas to see the stage show was like flying across the Indian Ocean on the Cutty Sark.
Onstage, it was the coming together of four big talents not always known for team spirit—Arthur Laurents wrote the book; Leonard Bernstein did the music; Stephen Sondheim was allowed to do the lyrics; and Jerome Robbins did the choreography. Of course there was a fifth man: Hal Prince, who was a codirector. It opened in September 1957, and it was a sensation—because of the artistic athleticism of the corps dancing as an expression of gang spirit (the Sharks and the Jets); and because of the elevation of the songs as something a good deal smarter and tougher than the abiding regime of Rodgers and Hammerstein offered. Above all, it was theater. Being there in the same space with those dancing gangs was the point of it. Their energy carried over the footlights. It was like a great prizefight. And, together, the anticipation in “America” and “Something’s Coming” required the sixties.
Onstage, we had seen the city streets as sets, but in the movie there was a misguided attempt to use the real streets without softening Robbins’s balletic dances. It did not mesh. Whether or not it could have done if Donen or Minnelli had been in charge, we’ll never know. As it was, Robert Wise was coproducer and codirector (with Robbins). Wise has an honorable record in film, but not for energy, magic, or changing the rules. The partnership with Robbins was not fruitful. The movie broke down into gang scenes and love scenes. And then the real gloom set in, for three of the four leads could not, or did not, sing their songs. So the big close-ups Wise favored (as equaling love and sincerity) were made more unreal by listless dubbing.
Natalie Wood was Maria and she was beautiful, but she stank of film star instead of city girl. Richard Beymer was Tony and he was a lump. Rita Moreno was great in the dancing—“America”—but she did not sing either.
The result is 155 minutes of a pedestrian, epic musical. I just wonder what Minnelli could have done in 100 minutes on very stylized sets, with wild kids. The production design in the movie is by Boris Leven, and it’s not bad, but the film never delivers the feeling of place. Ernest Lehman wrote the script—and if you think of going from North by Northwest to West Side Story in two years you have living demonstration of how deadly success can be.
Wetherby (1985)
Wetherby, in Yorkshire, is the site of a branch of the British Library—and one of the characters in the film actually works at the Library, telling an awkward, ardent young man that no, it’s a reference library, you can’t check the books out. It’s in the way playwright-director David Hare works that the place therefore stands for two broad intellectual elements: the attempt to gather and organize life and experience; and the need to control and license it. It’s the perfect corollary for a story about the difficulties in absorbing pain, loss, and tragedy into life. And it’s a sign of the considerable potential in Britain—through theater and television—for complex ideas taking shape as movies.
It seems to be a settled world. There is a dinner party in the house of Jean Travers (Vanessa Redgrave), an old farmhouse. There is food and wine and talk: it is a kind of ideal of civilization. But one person is still and silent at the table—John Morgan (Tim Mclnnerny). He comes back the next day to talk to Jean. Without explanation or warning, he has a gun and blows his brains out. A policeman comes to investigate (Stuart Wilson) and he wonders why Morgan did it there, in the farmhouse, in front of Jean. He talks to Jean and she says, “Doesn’t matter how well locked up you are, at times you’re always going to have to let people in.”
There it is, the heart of the matter—closure and entrance, self-sufficiency and conversation. The structure of Hare’s film tells us that Morgan’s shot has already broken the enclosure Jean has created—it has let her past bleed forward into her present life, and we know there was a love affair in those days that ended badly and which left Jean with the fear of someone coming in again. It may sound didactic, cut-and-dried, but Hare’s talent is to root the larger implications in the small things or remarks of everyday life. And film’s ability to juxtapose the now and the then enables him to treat Jean’s life as almost an experiment in sensibility and sympathy.
Wetherby opened theatrically, but it’s the kind of film that has sustained British television for decades—first with the BBC and ITV, then through Channel 4 and HBO: small subjects; very good writing; exact acting. Simon Relph served as producer, Stuart Harris did the photography, Jane Greenwood and Lindy Hemming did the costumes, and Hayden Griffin was the designer. The budget was plainly very small, and no one ever intended the picture as being for a mainstream audience. But then consider the quality of the cast: Vanessa Redgrave giving an astonishing performance in which emotionalism starts to break through the control; her own daughter, Joely Richardson, playing Jean as a young woman; with Judi Dench, Ian Holm, Suzanna Hamilton, Tom Wilkinson, Marjorie Yates, and many others. And this comes in a period when Hare seemed especially intrigued by film—enough to make Wetherby, Paris by Night, and Strapless all within the space of four years. They are all small stories, fabulously played, and situations that grow in recollection.
What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? (1962)
Joan Crawford had worked with Robert Aldrich in Autumn Leaves (1956), and she had asked him repeatedly for another picture. Then Aldrich heard about a novel, by Henry Farrell, about the Hudson sisters, movie stars from the old days but wrecks now and still living together. Aldrich heard that Bette Davis had read the book, too, and was interested. He found no studio ready to take it on, so he bought the rights himself and then worked out a deal with Kenneth Hyman at Seven Arts. Crawford would do it for $40,000 and 10 percent of the producer’s profit; Davis agreed for $60,000 and 5 percent of the profits. Warners would release the film, and a paternal Jack Warner held a press conference with his two great stars from the past. They promised to behave.
Lukas Heller wrote the script, under Aldrich’s guidance, and that’s where the crucial tone was laid down. Even if the two actresses were grateful for a comeback opportunity and prepared to bury old differences, the picture would show them as warring gargoyles, sisters who had always been rivals. But what was special to this venture was the grisly black comedy of the approach and the closeness to real horror. It was not going to be a picture in which either sister won much audience sympathy. They were two grotesques, the opposite arrows in a classic sado-masochistic relationship. The picture would ask us to laugh at them. And to match the harsh tone, it would be shot in a rather hostile black and white. Bette especially was asked to wear exaggerated makeup—as if put on by a clumsy child—while Joan was a bedridden cripple, served rat for dinner. It’s hard to miss, or forgive, the cruelty. On the other hand, Aldrich (without a hit of his own in several years) had been given a tough deal by Seven Arts—do the whole thing for under a million dollars.
It worked. Coming just a couple of years after Psycho, it moved black-comic horror into the mainstream and, even more than Sunset Blvd., it treated old Hollywood as a deranged waxworks show. Crawford would make another five pictures and they were all exercises in horror. Davis had to take her share, too. Increasingly in life she let her makeup be influenced by that of Baby Jane Hudson.
The picture was a huge success: it covered its production cost in just eleven days of release. It’s hard to take—it always was—though Davis especially is touching in the final beach scene. I think it shows a failure in Aldrich to handle extremes without exaggeration. But its influence commercially was enormous. Bette Davis was nominated for Best Actress. Had she won, it would have been her third success—a record. Joan was not nominated; neither was the picture nor Aldrich himself. (Anne Bancroft won in The Miracle Worker.) But Victor Buono got a supporting actor nod, and he caught the film’s reckless catering to the gay regard for old Hollywood.
What Price Glory? (1926)
After The Big Parade (1925), everyone wanted a First World War picture that seemed fresh, and American. What Price Glory? was a play by Maxwell Anderson and Laurence Stallings that opened on Broadway in 1924 and ran for 433 performances. It centered on the amiable rivalry between Captain Flagg (Louis Wolheim) and Sergeant Quirt (William Boyd), and it employed a kind of language far closer to that spoken by soldiers than anything heard in a theater before.
Fox assigned the play to Raoul Walsh and he recast it with Victor McLaglen as Flagg and Edmund Lowe as Quirt. He also cast Dolores del Rio as the French girl, Char-maine, that they both fancy. Walsh hired in a hundred Marines and they did the battle scenes at night where Century City now stands. Apparently the police came to stop them several times and arrested a different assistant director every time. There were many complaints from neighbors about the bombardment, but in those days filmmakers did whatever they could get away with. Walsh reckoned that Fox had had to pay something like $70,000 in damages to be free of complaint.
In hindsight, the remarkable thing is that a play famous for its talk still held up as a silent fil
m. The soldiers spoke in pretty rough ways during the filming and it became quite a craze for lip-reading audiences to write to the papers to report what was really being said in What Price Glory? But Walsh understood that the play depended on two guys artificially separated by being an officer and a sergeant. They were natural antagonists who lived by needling and teasing each other. And so the scheme (and entire genre) of wisecracking military buddies was born—whether or not it was something observable in war. Fighting men under stress in American films are licensed to be comics. Further, the repartee began to erase distinctions of ordinary soldier and officer—and so in From Here to Eternity there is very little respect for officers. It was something Walsh was ideally suited to—the rough friendship of different types in a war situation, the egalitarianism of the Army, and it’s a topic he never really tired of.
Walsh’s teaming of McLaglen and Lowe continued (with diminishing success) in The Cockeyed World (1929) and Women of All Nations (1931), where they continued playing Flagg and Quirt, and in Under Pressure (1935)—this after What Price Glory? had earned close to $2 million on a production cost of $350,000. But Walsh picked up the idea of a sparring twosome to great effect for Me and My Gal, The Bowery, and They Drive by Night.
John Ford had helped Walsh on the battle scenes for What Price Glory? And in 1952 Ford returned to the old chestnut, teaming Jimmy Cagney and Dan Dailey. Nobody could see why—and Walsh himself was by then planning Battle Cry, a celebration of the military group, featuring Aldo Ray as a very Walshian common grunt (a figure exploited further in The Naked and the Dead and in Anthony Mann’s Men in War).
'Have You Seen...?' Page 153