'Have You Seen...?'

by David Thomson

  Nichols let it play—what else was he to do with that text and that cast? There’s no point in opening it up, though Lehman had decided that their child really had existed and killed himself. So it’s a solid, talky picture, and a relic of those days when America still honored the theater as a place for intelligent, demanding plays. As a work, I fear it has dated badly, though it captures the drunken acrimony of faculty life all too well.

  The picture had rentals of $14.5 million, a sign of gravity in the audience (as well as stamina), and of our modern taste for domestic diatribe. It was nominated all over the place and Taylor won her second Oscar. Burton did not win, but he never did. Other winners included Sandy Dennis, Wexler for photography that seems to me rather routine, Sylbert for the sets, the shabbiness, and the cigarette burns, and Irene Sharaff for the cardigans and other costumes.

  What does it mean? Despite the aging down of the play, it really is about middle age and its seemingly endless trap. That is a discomfort that by today has been nearly exiled from American movies, so the sight and sound of these couples chatting away through their long night is reminiscent of things like long-playing records, canasta parties, and Norman Mailer.

  The Wild Bunch (1969)

  Made in the same year as Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch manages to imitate its ending and demolish it. Butch and Sundance are badly shot up somewhere in Bolivia (their plan is: next stop Australia) with federales and soldiers surrounding their cramped courtyard. So, wisecracking to the end, they jump out into the light and space (the way they jumped off the cliff once) and only a freeze-frame saves them from annihilation. A freeze-frame! You can hear Peckinpah’s sneer. He might slow down the fatal frames, but that is only so we can see every bullet bursting in flesh and blood. You can call that history’s grim task, or self-destruction’s last orgy. But nothing is spared.

  In time, Deke Thornton (Robert Ryan) will come by to survey the corpses, and we remember his comment to the trash that make up his posse—“They’re men, and I wish to God I was riding with them.” The time is 1916 on the Mexican-American border, when automobiles and machine guns are making their appearance, when a bank robbery can get you no more than heavy casualties and several sacks of steel washers. Times are passing by, and the bunch are doomed men. They know it, and they have one nostalgia—to go with honor, if honor ever existed.

  It had seemed possible ever since Ride the High Country, in 1962, that Peckinpah was going to make a great film if he could find the right scorched epic and keep nobility and despair in balance. Mindful of some Kurosawa films, Walon Green and Roy Sickner came up with it: the last days of a gang that lives on the border, robbing, whoring, riding, getting shot at and shot until someone takes them out. The bunch loses half its men in a first disastrous bank job, when Thornton and his trash are ambushing them. The survivors are Pike (William Holden), Dutch (Ernest Borgnine), the Gorch brothers, Tector and Lyle (Ben Johnson and Warren Oates), and Angel (Jaime Sanchez) the Mexican, their vulnerability and their way to honor when it is too late. And there is Sykes (Edmond O’Brien), the old-timer they leave behind, the man whose Hustonian laughter presides over the film.

  But this is tougher and bloodier than John Huston, and it is a film in agonies over whether there is really honor in this bunch, or just a stupid, archaic code. They abuse women. They kid themselves. They’d rather get drunk than look at the great land. They are friends, yet they betray each other—Thornton was in the bunch once. And while he knows that his followers (Strother Martin, L. Q. Jones—hilarious but reptiles) are garbage, are they worse than the men following Pike?

  The great desert light (by Lucien Ballard) is going out. Civilization is coming, and here is a pained cry of desire and lament from the America that never wanted any such thing. Peckinpah will always be restricted by his limitations, but when he was good you could taste the blood, the hooch, and the regret, and this and Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid are his great films.

  The Wild Cat (1921)

  It’s a marvel (and a mistake) that in an age familiar with Marlene Dietrich and Louise Brooks, the world has rather lost track of Pola Negri. By all accounts, but chiefly her own, Negri was born Barbara Appolonia Chalupiec, in Poland—was one parent a fallen nobleman, the other a Gypsy violinist? Look at her, her eyes lemurlike in their kohl surrounds, and it’s easy to believe all that and more. What’s much nearer the point is that in coming to Berlin to join Max Reinhardt for the play Sumurun in 1917, she made herself available for the burgeoning career of Ernst Lubitsch. Apparently he found her something of a bore in person—or did he? Onscreen, he seems captivated by her. Perhaps he just went home and complained to his other ladies—“Another day with that awful Negri!”

  The Wild Cat (sometimes The Mountain Cat) is their sixth and last film together, and it shows evident faith in her as a comedienne. In wild hair and leopard skins, Negri is the daughter of bandits who rule the snowy Alps and who capture a young lieutenant. It’s true that Lubitsch and his photographer (Theodor Sparkuhl) did go on location to the snowy places, but don’t look for too much realism in The Wild Cat. It is a satire upon military states, bandits, and femmes fatales, and it is glorious cover for every type of joke Lubitsch can float. It’s worth remembering that this very playful picture was made in Berlin in the worst aftermath of the war. Yet it insists on ridicule from the moment when the young prince is leaving a town and a small army of children appear to cheer him on with “Daddy! Daddy!” There’s not a hint of class commentary in the confrontation of bandit and aristocracy. Everyone’s idiotic. The bandits live in a cave behind a curtain, and the aristos inhabit a kind of gingerbread palace. The décor is dreamlike, fussy, and cheap-scape, and in the end the Alps seem as phony. In addition, Lubitsch invents masks for the screen itself. Nearly every image or sequence comes frilled or restricted by some apparatus. It’s overdone, and a touch giddy, but it surely bespeaks Lubitsch’s urge to satirize the whole show. But the visual is not as funny in the script (by Lubitsch and Hans Kräly) as the ironic dialogue would be ten years later. The reason is simple: we long to hear this mountain girl sounding like a wit and a sophisticate. Lubitsch was aching for sound and inclined to run visual riot in sets and costumes (by Ernst Stern and Emil Hasler). In any medium—like film or theater literature—where there are human figures, the comedy takes a more interesting turn if they can speak. Still, The Wild Cat would be reason enough for bringing Lubitsch to America. Negri came, too, in time, though not as part of the Lubitsch package despite the versatility that had also done Carmen, Ann Boleyn, and Madame Du Barry for him.

  Wild Oranges (1924)

  Wild oranges seem bitter at first, but then you get a taste for them. So says John Woolfolk (Frank Mayo), as he steps ashore on the wild Georgian coastline on a blue-tinted night. He has had a philosophical turn of mind ever since the day—a few years before—when he was out in a carriage with his young wife. A fluttering piece of paper spooked the horses. They were off. The carriage made a violent turn and the wife was thrown out as if propelled by a comic ejector seat. Dead as a doornail. Thus John’s moodiness and his habit of sailing the seas with just his pipe and a pal, Paul Halvard (Ford Sterling).

  The time is said to be not long after the Civil War, yet Joseph Hergesheimer’s novel, Wild Oranges, was published in 1919 and has that air of disquiet that followed the Great War. At any event, the Georgia shore is a strange place. There is a wreck of a mansion visible beyond the wild orange groves and three people live there: Lichfield Stope (Nigel de Brulier), the gaunt, haunted figure of a veteran, a man afraid of everything; his daughter Millie (Virginia Valli), stricken with the same fear, yet somehow the beneficiary of a daily makeup artist; and Iscah Nicholas (Charles A. Post), a homicidal giant with a yen for Millie.

  It is sort of sub-Faulkner—until you remember that in 1924 Faulkner was at the start of his career, and Faulkner’s work is better and stranger than Wild Oranges, a Goldwyn film, directed by King Vidor, and plainly shot on l
ocation. And yet there is something as odd as the wild oranges themselves. There is a huge subtext, and we feel that it interests Vidor more than the heavy melodrama. John has sunk into depression or inertia. Yes, his ship sails on, but he is a passive creature. And Millie is afraid of everything—Ms. Valli rather overdoes this; she has a way of starting violently at every fluttering leaf that is fatiguing—for us. But the conventional romantic meeting of these two is actually made erotic by the sense of two lost souls who may cure themselves in becoming lovers. No, the subtext is not there; it’s not delivered, as it might be in a novel. But you feel it, and—if you are of a mind—you may recall from the future a similar tendency in Howard and Dominique in The Fountainhead.

  I don’t mean to overpraise Wild Oranges, but its novelty is distinct and intriguing. It is not well played by Virginia Valli, though Mayo seems more aware of it. But something is happening in the American movie that seems ready to go beneath the routine level of melodrama.

  Not that Vidor omits the blood and thunder (after all, he kept the rock drill in The Fountainhead). Before we are through there is a wild dog, a house burning down, and one of the greatest fistfights ever managed on the screen. It goes on and on in patient long shot—and it is clear that Mayo and Post had to carry a lot of it themselves. Mayo looks as if he has been through a couple of grinding millstones, and Post is an authentic monster.

  Wild River (1960)

  There are several films by Elia Kazan that are far better known—in part because of the sensational literary credentials, and because of high-powered central performances. There is no reason to nag at those films too much. They are what they are. Still, Wild River remains one of my favorites in his work, in large part because the subdued acting is perfectly in key with the historical subject and the unusually ambiguous approach. In so many Kazan films, there is little doubt about the characters we are meant to like and approve of—and the unrestrained acting is often a concession to their threatened righteousness. But Wild River begins and ends with an issue on which only fools take sides quickly.

  The time is the 1930s. The place is Tennessee. The government has a plan to “improve” life for the people. Chuck Glover (Montgomery Clift) is a TVA agent who comes to spread the good news. It should be said at the outset that while Clift is a star and an intense romantic, this is Clift after his accident—not as beautiful, not as sure, but a muddler, a well-meaning mess, and a city guy out of his depth in this strange backcountry. It is the shabby ordinariness of Glover that is so important and instructive in how to watch the picture.

  A dam will be built, so some small holdings must be cleared or sacrificed. This policy usually works well enough. But Glover confronts a matriarch, Ella Garth (Jo Van Fleet), who will not sell her land or quit it—no matter the benefits. She will have to be removed. Glover tries reason and blunt requirement; he even falls in love with Ella’s granddaughter, Carol (Lee Remick). He finds himself hated by the local community, harassed, and beaten up. In the end, of course, the government “wins.” Ella is taken away to a tidy new place she hates. We guess the change will kill her. But the dam will help Tennessee and Chuck will marry Carol and take her away.

  Remember that in the 1930s Kazan made a short, People of the Cumberland—about another benign attempt to help poor people. Wild River came from two novels, Mud on the Stars, by William Bradford Huie, and Dunbar’s Cove by Borden Deal. The screenplay was entrusted to Paul Osborn and his authentic regard for inarticulate people.

  Time and again, the film works through restraint. This begins in Ellsworth Frederick’s mournful, sodden landscape photography—in Scope and winter colors. It is there in Kenyon Hopkins’s quiet music. And it is there in the strict objectivity of the script. Chuck is a decent guy, but he does damage. He may kill Ella and he troubles the society that finds him unfit for Carol. Nor does the film even suppose that Carol will be a glowing beneficiary. They make an awkward but touching couple—and just as Clift is prepared to let that show, Lee Remick is quite brilliant as someone of plainly lower intelligence than her own. What can you say about Jo Van Fleet—except that in life she was a whole five years older than Clift?

  Wild Strawberries (1957)

  In the “delivery” of Ingmar Bergman to the world, Wild Strawberries was the second shot, the clincher. The Seventh Seal had shared the Special Jury Prize at Cannes with Wajda’s Kanal. The following year Wild Strawberries won the Golden Bear at Berlin, and it was a more accessible film, less dubious about man’s future, but anchored to the presence of Victor Sjöström as the old professor, Isak Borg, whose journey to receive an honorary degree becomes a judgment of his whole life. Bergman over the years had often been tougher on his characters than his audiences liked. This tendency would reappear later and it was taken as part of his intimidating gloom and gravity. But Bergman revered Sjöström and came to love him. That showed, and it helped.

  Borg is a professor of bacteriology at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, He lives alone, save for a housekeeper (Jullan Kindahl). He is seventy-eight, Sjöström’s age when the project began. He is intending to fly to Lund for the honorary degree, but he has a dream—with handless clocks. A coffin falls from a hearse. A hand reaches out from within it to him. So he decides to go by road. The symbolism of this dream could be less oppressive. On the other hand, in opening up the casket of dream, the film is reaching into very fertile ground.

  He travels in a 1937 Packard, driven by his daughter-in-law (Ingrid Thulin—in her Bergman debut). Along the way, in dream or reality, Borg will encounter the landmarks of his life—his son (Gunnar Björnstrand), his mother (Naima Wifstrand), his wife, now dead (Gunnel Broström). And they pick up a young hitchhiker, Sara (Bibi Andersson). The photography, by Gunnar Fischer, is unusually contrasty for Bergman—very black, very white—as if to convey an elderly impression of life.

  Sjöström had been friend and example to Bergman. He was old, difficult, and not well (he died in 1960). As they made the film, Bergman had to abbreviate his hours and make sure Sjöström was done for the day with a whiskey by 4:30. He seemed distant—but Bergman saw that it was insecurity, the actor’s fear. Then he saw Sjöström warm up in chatter with Thulin and Andersson. This is Bergman on the last scene:

  Isak Borg’s great love of his youth takes him to a sunny hillside. Far away, he can see his parents beckoning to him. At five in the afternoon, the sunlight shone low over the grass and made the forest dark. Victor was angry and spiteful. He reminded me of my promise—on the dot of half-past four, home, his whisky. I appealed to him. Nothing helped. Victor stumped off. Quarter of an hour later, he was back. Aren’t we going to take those damned scenes?

  … As he walked through the sunlit grass with Bibi in a long shot, he was grumbling and rejecting all friendly approaches. The close-up was rigged up and he went to one side and sat with his head sunk between his shoulders, dismissing scornfully the offer of a whisky on the spot. When everything was ready, he came staggering over, supported by a production assistant, exhausted by his bad temper. The camera ran and the clapper clacked. Suddenly his face opened, the features softening, and he became quiet and gentle, a moment of grace.

  Winchester ’73 (1950)

  It’s a dazzling idea that as a rifle, the Winchester ’73 one-in-one-thousand (the one made best), changes hands, so the range and variety of the Western genre is defined, and all in 86 minutes in etchinglike black-and-white photography from William Daniels, so often a master of romantic lighting. There are other innovations: this was the first occasion on which Anthony Mann worked with Jimmy Stewart—there would be seven more films—and it was a landmark in that Universal, in hard times, worked out with Lew Wasserman a deal where Stewart got 50 percent of the profits, and likely made $1 million on this picture alone.

  So there’s a shooting contest in Dodge City, presided over by Wyatt Earp (Will Geer). There are brothers locked in hatred, Lin McAdam and Dutch Henry (Stewart and Stephen McNally). There’s a saturnine Indian trader dressed in blac
k (the admirable John McIntire), a raw soldier (Tony Curtis), a very broad-chested Indian chief, Young Bull (Rock Hudson), a coward and his girl (Charles Drake and Shelley Winters), Jay C.Flippen as an old-timer cavalry sergeant, Millard Mitchell as High Spade, Lin’s lugubrious companion, and then, at the end, the wonderful drawl and leer of Dan Duryea’s Waco Johnny.

  Needless to say, this is a telescopic Western, in which Mann’s eagle eye surveys great distances and the variation of terrain. You feel the space of the Western fable and you feel how close courage and resolve in the hero have come to harshness. Borden Chase, the writer, has said that Stewart did not seem ideal casting until people remembered the bomber missions he’d flown in the war. And truly this is a tougher, edgier Stewart, never too far from cracking up or turning cold. Mann was made into a more interesting dramatist by meeting Stewart.

  Apart from that, one marvels at the speed of a story that circles so prettily without seeming contrived. The greater part of the action is out-of-doors, and the black and white adds to the sense of period. But this was a time when actors wore old leather and carried guns with aplomb. It’s a delight to see the way Duryea moves, just as it is to contemplate Stewart’s hat. The Indians are obediently savage and unfathomable, and the wild landscape is a place where only determination and shrewdness will triumph. Of course, there is also the gun—a beautiful object and a rare piece of engineering, and in 1950 still regarded without irony or shame as an instrument of progress and order.

  There’s no way America fifty-five years later could reinhabit those clothes and attitudes with confidence. That’s one reason why the Western has gone. But Mann in the 1950s made a precious group of films, with a hero who was struggling between violence and decency, but a figure who expected to prove his virtue and purpose in a trial of arms. Stewart’s experience in World War II made him a more challenging actor and it allowed Winchester ’73 to seem not just a genre film but a modern story—as up-to-date as its remarkable profits deal, another of the things that killed the honorable company of all the supporting players who put a hand and a fond glance on the esteemed rifle.