Yentl (1983)
Any venture including Barbra Streisand that asks for her not to be noticed or recognized—in other words, where attention is not being paid—is a stretch. It is not just that we may be skeptical about Barbra passing as a man, or a boy. It’s the failure to register a superstar, or a very large ego, that is most far-fetched. And exactly that dislocation is evident in the film between the alleged hiddenness of her character and the vast, sweeping songs that seem eager to take on the sky and space itself—as well as the largest movie theater you can dream of. Isaac Bashevis Singer’s Yentl—the girl who puts on men’s clothes to get herself a male education—requires a concealed, shy yearning. And shy is not quite Barbra—as witness the nearly total way in which this picture was hers. In short, there are people who think Yentl is impossible.
But there it is—very well made, at certain points directed with flair and precision, and with one of the great scores in film history. I know, in the process it has become so large that it is a recipe for all kinds of feminism, and when Yentl sings “Papa, Can You Hear Me?,” a beautiful, keening song, we were left in no doubt about the therapy rinse Barbra was giving to her own relationship with a father.
But Streisand also had the vision and the taste to know that Michel Legrand was the man to write this score. And then Legrand recognized the range of Streisand’s unprecedented voice and delivered lines and musical moments that were a feast for her. The lyrics to these songs—by Alan and Marilyn Bergman—are a lot more uncertain. There’s a feeling that this Yentl is going to end up in Las Vegas—and in truth an entire casino called “Barbra” would not be inconsistent with her talent.
Yes, the real charm of The Umbrellas of Cherbourg is that we never forget that Cherbourg is a small, provincial town without emotional underlining, and without the massive orchestration of this film. Yentl could have been done much smaller—by which I mean to say as quiet, Jewish songs sung a capella or to a single instrument. They become production numbers, and so Yentl needs to fly to get away from ordinary groundling feelings.
Never mind, the actual storytelling—with Mandy Patinkin, Nehemiah Persoff, and Amy Irving—is very well done. The songs are great and there is a way in which every uncertain Jewish beauty deserves a Yentl now and then the way inarticulate Italian gigolos want a Rocky. Both films are species of modern opera—in which case Yentl worked better because it has the score. So Barbra directed a film. The Academy turned their back on her (there was an Oscar to Legrand and the Bergmans), but stars of her size must adapt to that kind of ignorance in the world. And pass on, driven by song and forgiveness.
You Can’t Take It with You (1938)
The “it” in American movie titles is often supposed to be sex, but Capra knew it was money. The film came from a hit play by Moss Hart and George S. Kaufman, that had opened on Broadway in 1936. It was a farce set in the Vanderhof household in New York City where everyone pursues his or her passion without much success until a granddaughter invites her fiance’s rich parents to the house and there are several lessons about money, America, and how we’re all poor when we’re dead. It is a well-made play about eccentricity, a cozy reassurance about being poor, and a blithe hope that in troubled times Americans can stay “wacky.” In short, it’s screwball made under the shadow of a war that would wipe away most of those lazy attitudes. And as a reminder, the House Committee on Un-American Activities was formed in 1938, the year Capra’s film of the play appeared, in which a charge is made that the Vanderhofs are “un-American.”
Capra was in trouble after the financial failure of Lost Horizon—and anyone who could swallow that Utopianism in 1937 needed bed rest. He was about to plunge into a venture on Chopin and George Sand (with Charles Boyer and Marlene Dietrich), when the Hart-Kaufman play came into view, with a script by Robert Riskin. That recipe did the trick. You Can’t Take It with You would win Best Picture. It did very nicely as a business venture, and it kept contact with the myth that Frank Capra had seriously radical ideas.
Joseph Walker shot it in fifty-six days with an all-star cast. The picture cost $1.64 million, and it would earn rentals of $2.13 million in its first year. Yet it has lasted less well than Mr. Deeds or Mr. Smith, precisely because it is enclosed, rather smug, and happy to be funny, while the two earlier films at least raise many problems and leave us with that queasy feeling that is still the most interesting thing about Capra. Deeds and Smith threaten many orthodoxies. The Vanderhofs are amiable nuts who rarely go out-of-doors. They are already confined.
Joseph McBride has raised the point that You Can’t Take It with You was made as Capra was realizing that he was a millionaire and taking steps to guard his “it.” So you can think of this as a picture where Capra got his confidence back, and in which he made a lightweight defense of eccentricity, and a first happy meeting with Jimmy Stewart. Graham Greene put his finger on it: “The director emerges as a rather muddled and sentimental idealist who feels—vaguely—that something is wrong with the social system.” But don’t ask what, and don’t think too hard about solutions. The contrast with La Règle du Jeu is striking: two enclosed groups, both riddled with maverick tendencies. But for Capra “romance” was so simple a step, and for Renoir it is the disease that is making a plague.
Capra also won his third Best Director Oscar, a tribute to his unabating instinct for physical comedy and a crowded frame. The cast also included Jean Arthur (the most appealing person in view, sane and calm, but defending the nuts), Lionel Barrymore, Mischa Auer, Ann Miller, Spring Byington (nominated), Eddie Anderson, Donald Meek, Halliwell Hobbes, Harry Davenport, and Ward Bond.
Young Mr. Lincoln (1939)
The matter of legend and history hangs over the American cinema. Even those of us who believe that in certain key ways the medium once belonged to America (or was fashioned to express it), cannot dismiss the charge that those same movies have ruined a nation’s sense of history. And when America becomes in so many respects not just the most powerful nation on earth but also the one that is most hungry to be admired, it has to be allowed that ruined history may be a prelude to an infinitely larger damage in the world. In other words, this issue would not be as important as it is if America had not insisted on being the world’s star.
So consider Abraham Lincoln. What does he mean? More or less, people say that he was the greatest president the country has had. To be blunt, was that because he “won” the Civil War? Was it because he took the country into that war? Or was it because he quietly insisted on what that war was about—which is to say, a prolonged struggle between principle and practice which would not be solved in his lifetime? Was he a figure of more than human insight and understanding, or was he a man who could see beyond local interests and partisanship to recognize that the black Americans must be empowered, and all Americans remain citizens?
Why did John Ford think to make Young Mr. Lincoln in 1939? In all the immense commentary on the film that Cahiers du Cinema published, and in all the praise of Ford by American writers, this question goes unanswered. And the decision to make the film was personal. Stagecoach was by far Ford’s “major” film of 1939: it was nominated for Best Picture and for director—Young Mr. Lincoln got neither nod and it did only modestly. There was no anniversary. But there was the sense of a coming crisis and the uncertainty as to whether Roosevelt should run again after his two terms in 1940. I think the urge to look at Lincoln came out of that questioning.
You can call that patriotic, or a sign of Ford’s deep wish for some men to be like gods. Yet in the study of history, men are not gods, no matter how pious or benign they may seek to be. You cannot attempt good in the world without arousing those who charge you with harm. For every positive thing Lincoln did, you can point to the damage. The best explanation of how a man could look so weary, so sad, so accepting as he does in his last photographs is the nature of that burden. (The face of Lincoln is that of a man who has read the Faulkner novels not yet written.) Which is entirely human and historical. And
in the same way there is no way of treating Lincoln except through the facts.
Yet Young Mr. Lincoln is a film about collective mood, about the national reference that has so many streets called Lincoln and which accepts the myth that this difficult, dangerous man (because he would not stop thinking) can be tidily put under glass and labeled “hero,” or some such. The film—which imagines Lincoln’s youth in Illinois in the most enchantingly casual, naturalistic, and matter-of-fact way—is religious. But Lincoln was not subject to religion.
So the film is a sublime dream, most artfully rendered, richly entertaining, with Henry Fonda in a kind of trance of worship, and Ford indulging every treasured feeling for a past he would have loved to inhabit. To the degree that Lincoln is a legend and film a dream, this is nearly perfect. But because Lincoln was real, actual, and made out of difficult thought, this film is a travesty and deeply antidemocratic. For it wants to believe that democracy does not rely on the steady application of human effort and compromise.
You Only Live Once (1937)
“ET” it says inside the hat—that’s how Eddie Taylor (Henry Fonda) gets sent to prison as a third-time loser in You Only Live Once, which is Fritz Lang’s most magnificent account of malign destiny snuffing out true love and a man’s chance. Of course, the “ET” was somebody else.
It is said that the prospect of the story arose when Walter Wanger and Sylvia Sidney bumped into Theodore Dreiser, who had been writing an article about Bonnie and Clyde. What a subject, the novelist said, and what a part Bonnie Parker could be for Sylvia. Wanger was looking for a new project to release through United Artists and he got Gene Towne to come up with a treatment. In turn, Graham Baker wrote the screenplay. It was only then that Ms. Sidney, impressed by his direction on Fury, suggested that Fritz Lang might direct the picture.
Henry Fonda may have asked her later why she did that—for he found Lang boorish, humorless, and relentless and didn’t like him, either. But Sylvia Sidney was getting an education. On Sabotage, in England, in 1936, she had been bewildered as to what Hitchcock was doing on the key sequences—everything was fragmented. Then she saw the result, and realized that she was great in the picture. Lang worked in much the same way—reaction shots in close-up to fit into the pattern.
Lang was a dictator, but the rewards are there on the screen. He composed everything in advance in detail, and made as much of an enemy of the cameraman Leon Shamroy as he did of Fonda. But then look at the emotional force in the compositions. Feel the growing sense of trap and enclosure, and see the way in which décor and lighting are being used to the same fateful ends. So many American crime films of this era made a pass at pointing to the social background or the man’s violent nature as reasons for his criminal career. In You Only Live Once, it’s as if the condition of being seen or photographed is enough to dramatize the desperate peril in every choice.
What is really remarkable is not just how fully Lang had adapted to American films and talk, as the way in which sound had been added to the visual as if it had always been there. Voices in the fog, gunfire, and the mood of music (Alfred Newman’s) have been effortlessly incorporated. And Eddie becomes an Everyman, a nearly Bressonian character tossing a coin over God or life. Lang made such problems for himself and never really had a hit in America—but this is one of the most beautiful movies ever made.
In hindsight, it doesn’t have much to do with Bonnie and Clyde. As Arthur Penn showed us, those sexy hoodlums just wanted to make a name for themselves and to hold on to their ampersand. They die happy—death is their coming. But Eddie and his girl Joan in Lang’s world are models for the eternally underprivileged and unlucky. And Lang never lost his sympathy for those figures.
You, the Living (2007)
As I drew close to completing my selection of a thousand films for you, I yielded to the natural human hope for surprise. My deadline was December 2007—so I had a dream surprise lined up in my head: that on the brink of finality, I might encounter not just a very appealing film but a great director. And so, in August 2007, knowing my predicament, and taking a properly wicked pleasure in it, Tom Luddy asked me if I’d seen any Roy Andersson. No, I replied, though somehow I knew the name was double “s” from Sweden, and not a plumber’s mate from Bethnal Green.
So a DVD appeared of You, the Living, which had played (to a prolonged ovation) at Cannes in 2007. I was staggered—not just by the exquisite medley of Célinean dismay, Chaplinesque optimism, amazing diagonal compositions, lugubrious color control—the film feels as if it’s on heavy valium and needs more—but by the absolute clarity with which someone has said, “Look, look at me—or look at things a new way.” I was immediately under the worst opposite pressure, for as I was delivering late entries my unique editor, Bob Gottlieb, was despairing at how many “greats” and “masterpieces” the book had already. So I must choose my words carefully—You, the Living is impossible to describe or forget. It helps open up a new and very becoming modern genre—I’d like to call it “film flat,” in that it is founded in the absolutely calm, unexcitable view of the dreadfulness of life. “Film flat” is a noble tradition, easily accommodating Bela Tarr and Ozu, but open to so many others who elect to put a brave face, or a numb mind, on the worst of possible worlds.
Yet Andersson has not filmed Dachau, Darfur, or Dresden in its fire—no, I’ve heard Swedes say, “Oh, that’s just Sweden,” which sometimes volunteers for the status of utopia. And You, the Living is a variety of single-shot views or panoramas of the bored and boring dystopia.
If that sounds depressing, you have not encountered the extraordinary, ravishing humor of Andersson—thus a man going to the electric chair is told to think of something else. The clichés of stupidity ring through the film like the forlorn yet plucky brass-band instruments that he cherishes.
It will dawn on you that these random views of ordinariness are far from documentary: Andersson builds sets and keeps a tight body of players who take many parts. Then you begin to appreciate the courage and the beauty of this vision. Andersson knows how bad the world is, and he knows the fraud that distorts it for commercials (that is his main occupation). But this and the earlier Songs from the Second Floor (2000) are his conscience. And they are vital parts of the best of modern cinema. You must see it!
Z (1969)
Ζ was a political thriller attended by such controversy that it left you believing there was a real issue within the film. It is based on the murder of George Lambrakis, a Greek deputy, in 1963. The killing was the work of right-wingers, allegedly with the support of the police. It became a burning scandal and a self-sufficient incident in Greece—where “Z” can mean “he is alive still”—and by the time the film opened, all reference to the matter was banned in a Greece led by the colonels’ junta. As a result, the film was made as a French production (shot largely in Algeria), though Mikis Theodorakis’s score was apparently smuggled out of Greece, where he was living under house arrest. Almost as a concession to that courage and novelty, Z got a Best Picture nomination, and it has plenty of power even if it looks rather Warner Brothers from the 1940s next to The Battle of Algiers.
The movie was based on a novel derived from the real case by Vassili Vassilikos, and it was scripted by Jorge Semprún. At first, we see the Lambrakis figure (all names are changed and the country goes unnamed), played by Yves Montand, before he is killed. Then Jean-Louis Trintignant is the magistrate whose suspicions are enough to call it murder. Costa-Gavras directed in a very robust way, aided by some fine color photography by Raoul Coutard. The picture was made a good deal more impressive—and less likely to be ignored—by a starry supporting cast that included Irene Papas, Charles Denner, Georges Géret, Jacques Perrin, François Périer, Marcel Bozzuffi, Renato Salvatori, and Pierre Dux.
The tone is austere and I don’t doubt the commitment of most of the filmmakers. But the trouble is that this kind of shadowy political intrigue had been common (and sometimes brilliant) in feature films for a long time. So it’s very
difficult for re-creations like Z to be better than, say, Casablanca or The Third Man, or to convey the authentic detail of a complex situation to a large audience. It is very difficult for the movies to do such cases as this and not leave the viewer uncertain about their veracity. The dead end of the whole process may be JFK and Nixon, overburdened with research, skill, and care in the acting but finally helpless confusions of history and legend. Television—drier, smaller, and quicker—has a far better record at bringing us the truth about these cases while we still feel angry.
One plain conclusion is that movie is not always a very helpful medium journalistically. Movies so easily yield to their own atmosphere and make the intrigue as dark as noir plotting. It’s in that sense that The Battle of Algiers stays stirring and credible. Still, it’s intriguing to see Trintignant’s watchful face as the magistrate—and to compare it, next year, with his assassin in The Conformist. But no one had doubts over which was the better film, even if Z won the Oscar for Best Foreign Picture.
Zabriskie Point (1970)
Just as Easy Rider is a warning example of changing times in 1969, so is Michelangelo Antonioni’s Zabriskie Point, where on the box-office strength of Blow-Up the utterly determined and unsharing artist was offered the U.S.A., a budget of $7 million, and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer to make… just about whatever he wanted, or emerged with, from a strange period of rumination and improvisation. The result is something I love, no matter that it grossed about $800,000, and is altogether rather like Monica Vitti’s faltering English trying to come to terms with the dry lucidity of Joan Didion.
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