Keepers: The Greatest Films of a Moviegoing Lifetime

by Richard Schickel

  His career would extend for three more decades and would include some fine films—or should we say some fine scenes? Somehow, sound pictures seemed to puzzle him. He had so much to say, but much of the time he was awkward with words. “He has created more great moments and fewer great films than any director of his rank,” Andrew Sarris wrote—correctly, I think. I fully like his delirious late melodramas, The Fountainhead and Beyond the Forest, in which Bette Davis utters her famous “What a dump!” line and Vidor surrenders to his own hysteria. More typically, his sound films stumble rather earnestly along, until suddenly a great, essentially silent sequence spectacularly intrudes on them—the bringing of the water to the parched landscape of Our Daily Bread, the gathering of the hands to stop the railroad from intruding on their ranch in Duel in the Sun, the great battle sequence in Solomon and Sheba. And, for a few moments, Vidor is returned to the greatness of the late silent era. It is one of the strangest careers in the history of the movies.

  Yet no stranger than the career of Josef von Sternberg, who was born in the same year (1894). If Vidor was a man of sometimes vague ideas, von Sternberg was a creature of shadows and fog, of a romanticism that was dour, sentimental and lyrical. He was also probably the most arrogant son of a bitch who ever directed a movie. You could not speak on his sets, or snack, or argue with the auteur, of course.

  From roughly 1927 to 1935, he was an important force in American film, breaking in by making moody lowlife films like Underworld and The Docks of New York, then discovering Marlene Dietrich in Berlin for The Blue Angel (all legs and pout) as she brings ruin to the hapless Emil Jannings. For the next five years, von Sternberg’s career and Dietrich’s were inextricably intertwined. They made six more pictures together and were, of course, famous as lovers. There is no doubt that she was totally smitten, and perhaps he was, too. In his biography of von Sternberg, John Baxter prints a note Dietrich slipped into her lover’s pocket after the first screening of Morocco: “You—Only you—the Master—the Giver—Reason for my existence—The Teacher—the Love my heart and brain must follow.”

  Wow!

  Susan Sontag, in her “Notes on ‘Camp,’ ” offers, among many definitions of the term: “Camp is the outrageous aestheticism of Sternberg’s six American movies with Dietrich, all six, but especially the last, The Devil Is a Woman.” That’s pretty much inarguable. But with ironies attached. There’s no question that whatever fame still attaches to von Sternberg rests on these movies. They are vivid in their way, and increasingly absurd, with the offscreen story of the great von Sternberg-Dietrich romance resonating somewhat with that dwindling band of people who care about ancient movie history. And there is this: Once the pair broke up, von Sternberg’s career was essentially over, though he had thirty-five years of a leftover, increasingly irrelevant life to live. Dietrich, of course, continued on, almost until her death at ninety-one—never a wildly popular star yet always a purring force to be reckoned with, if largely, in the end, as a nightclub attraction.

  But von Sternberg is sold short by this more or less exclusive concentration on the Dietrich films. They grew more and more exotic as the years wore on and achieved a sort of wacked-out perfection in Shanghai Express (1932). That’s the one in which Dietrich murmurs, “It took more than one man to change my name to Shanghai Lily,” and you don’t know whether to laugh, cry or flip off the DVD. It’s more or less about her turning to high-class whoring after some unexplained disaster in a love affair she has been conducting with the immaculately stiff Clive Brook, and then reencountering him on a bandit-beset train where their love is rekindled. Not that anyone gives much of a damn about that. The point is to let von Sternberg’s camera caress (or ogle) his star until a happy ending is achieved.

  People at the time took it as a mindless adventure story with lots of careless subplots. But in the whole history of the movies, no film has ever been as avid (to the point of unconscious comedy) in its adoration of a star—and her hats, though that’s another story. We need simply say that we are made, at last, simply to surrender to the story, giggle and snort though we may at the transformation of Dietrich into a perfectly obscure object of desire. We talk sometimes of directors making “personal statements” in their films, but few, if any, make erotic personal statements as slavish as this one. The camera, manned by Lee Garmes, who won an Oscar for the film, is arrogant in the stillness of its gaze.

  “Had von Sternberg made only Shanghai Express his position in the pantheon of filmmakers would be secure,” Baxter writes, and that’s possibly (if too enthusiastically) true, though for reasons Baxter doesn’t quite get—he doesn’t acknowledge the (mostly) buttoned-down hysteria of this enterprise. But there was another film, The Last Command, made four years earlier, that is the most important signpost on the road not taken by von Sternberg. The film has only a minor erotic element and is all sober fluff in its plotting. Yet it is, I think, a great film.

  It stars Emil Jannings as Sergius, a Russian general, brought low as a result of the revolution and, somewhat inexplicably, working in Hollywood as an extra. Working there as well is William Powell, a former revolutionist now prospering as a director on an epic scale. He observes Sergius and hires him, in effect, to play himself—a tragedy-stricken Russian general, who dies in the film. Not enough is made of Powell’s motives, but the actor’s disdain for von Sternberg is manifest throughout the film. We don’t know if Powell was simply trying to humiliate his former enemy or if something more complex is at work in his character. But Jannings, who seems to have been a rather childlike figure, was, at the time, everybody’s idea of a great actor. (He was soon reduced by his inability to master English and, after retreating to Germany, a rather too comfortable relationship with the Nazis.) We can stipulate, however, that in this picture he did attain something like greatness in a performance, a blend of pride and pathos that earned him the very first Academy Award for acting.

  The film itself had its fair share of steam and smoke—there were trains crashing about in it. But it had an openness that was rare in von Sternberg’s films. Its epic qualities dictated that, and Jannings’s performance dictated a certain spaciousness as well, and audiences responded to it. Preston Sturges thought it was the most perfect movie he had ever seen, though one wonders how long he clung to that opinion. In any case, as I said, this was a signpost on a road not taken by von Sternberg, who reverted to more closeted and atmospheric films, many of which were written by that expert, cranky screenwriter Jules Furthman, who was as difficult a character as the director himself. By 1929 von Sternberg was in Germany for his fatal encounter with Dietrich, whose narrow gifts in those days required films of an equally narrow range. It is not too much to say that, in one way or another, he was trapped in his obsession with her for the next five years. Every one of their films together traced one aspect or another of his fixation on her. After that, it is mostly loose ends and minor or abandoned projects.

  We are all, like it or not, auteurists now. It is, if nothing else, the most convenient path through the tangled and ambiguous history of the movies. Even Pauline Kael, though she never admitted it, was an auteurist. But aside from congruities of style—admittedly a huge exception—isn’t it likely that the authorship of movies by their directors is finally a record of their obsessions? If that’s even partially true, then von Sternberg is exhibit number one. We don’t doubt his minor place in this peculiar pantheon, but his claim rests almost entirely on the seven movies he made with Dietrich. The face, the voice—never forget its hypnotic qualities—her form, slinking sometimes, direct at others, was everything to him. With her he was something; without her he was almost nothing. In the whole history of the movies, no director’s reputation has been so thoroughly staked on one performer’s image. It is something to contend with when, as sometimes happens in the circles I travel in, we get to debating the validity of auteurism.

  6

  Men with Movie Cameras

  Here I want to reiterate the premise of this book.
It’s about pleasure. It’s about the movies I would have you download tonight and watch with delight, and no sense of dutifulness. This does not mean that I am unaware of the huge number of omitted movies, or that I lack respect for them. Fritz Lang is a case in point. I think both Metropolis and M are overrated, movies that are running now on their reputations rather than on reengagement with their merits. Lang made a lot of routine outings when he settled into his long run as a busy director of genre films. The exception that tests this opinion is Spione (1928), that giddy, half-mad espionage drama that defies description and is impossible to turn away from. He is loose and free here as he only rarely is in his other pictures.

  What’s true of Lang is true, I think, of Russian silent movies as well. Their importance to a group of directors cannot be overestimated. Elia Kazan can speak for all of them: “God, that’s it…. That’s adventure…. Not just some friends of yours on the stage yelling at each other.” He said that his flirtation with communism was based less on politics than on the films he saw from the USSR.

  That was true of the next generation as well: We were taught to revere the Russian cinema, and justifiably so. There was, at least in the films exported to the United States, an epic quality—and a technical skill—that was largely unmatched in our native cinema. Yet I don’t particularly want to see those movies again. My best critical academic friend, Jeanine Basinger, recently said to me, “I’m done with them.” By which she means that they were vitally important when we were young and soaking up the knowledge that was vital to our becoming film historians, but less so now. We will, naturally, respond favorably to their great sequences (the Odessa Steps sequence, for example) when we encounter them in an anthology film. But, guilt-ridden as I am to say it, they are a slog when I sit down to watch them in their entirety. I hasten to add, however, that they will never be less than “historically important,” and no one seriously interested in movies can afford to miss them.

  That brings me to that huge stumbling block of the late silent era, The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928), Carl Theodor Dreyer’s great film about the trial and martyrdom of the Maid of Orleans. Unlike most of the other movies in this book, I have seen it only once, and I doubt that I will return to it in the years remaining to me. In part that’s because it is so vivid in my memory, and in part it’s because it sets out a “story” that is so familiar.

  It is a film that seems to be told mainly in close-ups, though that is mostly an impression. There are sequences of what I suppose might be called “action,” though that’s a peculiarly weighted word in this context, as we shall see. Mostly, Joan sits on a stool while a panel of judges questions her claims to sainthood. They are by and large grotesques, wearing a weird collection of funny hats, and they sometimes seem obsessed with the fact that she chooses to dress in male clothing, which must seem to us the least of her “sins.” Dreyer covers them in a series of close-ups—some individual, some linked by tracking shots—which pause to study each face closely and then move on. Joan answers their questions softly and simply but remains convinced of her righteousness.

  She quite correctly fears the flames of the auto-da-fé, so much so that the first time she is taken out to the stake she confesses that her claims of being in touch with God—that she is acting on His instructions—are false. By this time, the film has lost its static quality. The judges decide to torture her into confession and conduct her to that chamber of unspeakable pain. There is no doubt that they are lasciviously looking forward to seeing this girl naked and in pain—and here Dreyer abandons his stately manner. It is a sequence as quick-cut and horrific as anything in the history of cinema. Something similar may be said of the two outdoor sequences where Joan confronts the stake. They are not especially quickly cut, but they have a roominess and an attention to detail in the handling of crowds, for instance, that is exemplary. As viewers we are—perversely—somewhat relieved to be out in the open at last, freed of the claustrophobia of the courtroom. Joan’s death in the flames is handled powerfully and simply, and the movie concludes not with her death but with the riots that ensue as the populace realizes that a terrible mistake has been made.

  In a certain sense this is a perfect movie; there is nothing in it that strikes one as careless or miscalculated or excessive. A master is in control of its every shot. And that says nothing about Maria Falconetti’s performance as Joan. She was “discovered” by Dreyer working in a boulevard comedy in Paris—pretty but not glamorous, a young woman of no particular piety but exuding a kind of common sense. And, I guess, patience: Dreyer said later that her performance was created shot by shot—look up, look down, turn here to the right, there to the left. It could easily have looked manipulated, but it does not. She has an ease before the camera that is transcendent. She worked without makeup and there is a scrubbed clarity about her that is heartbreaking in its seeming lack of calculation. There is near-universal consent among critics and historians that her ability to transcend Dreyer’s finicky direction, to ease it back to simplicity and naturalism, constitutes one of the great performances in film history. They will find no disagreement from me.

  Yet she never made another movie. She returned to the theater, as an actress and producer, and died during World War II as a refugee in Buenos Aires. One has the instinctive sense that she knew she had nothing more to prove.

  The Passion of Joan of Arc is a film beloved by critics. That’s partly because it gives those secularists an opportunity to prove they are not impervious to the religious impulse when it is presented soberly, without spectacle, as it so rarely is in the movies. More important, it is a great act of modernism. It tells, obviously, a very traditional story, which could have been a fusty bore, as all the other pictures about Joan of Arc are. But it is rich in shots and sequences that belie that intent in an unself-conscious way.

  Passion does not seem like a great act of modernism, its stylistic innovations are so quiet, its narrative so traditional. It hides its hand very well. But there is a curious thing about modernism in the movies: They do not in their earliest years boast of a figure like Picasso in painting, Diaghilev in dance, Joyce in the novel or Stravinsky in music. Maybe that’s because the movies were such a young art that no one thought to look for innovation in them. Maybe it is because many people could not see that it was an art form at all, so deep were its roots in popular nineteenth-century theatrical forms, as were its greatest artists (Griffith, Chaplin, et al.). There were gestures toward modernity, some of which I have alluded to here. But setting aside such oddities as Buñuel’s Un Chien Andalou (which I adore, but it is not quite a movie as we understand the word), there is only one film that, from first frame to last, throws down a full-throated challenge to the movies’ traditional understanding of what a film might (and might not) be.

  When David Thomson was planning Have You Seen…?, his book of a thousand short essays about movies that he loves and loathes, all important milestones in the history of film, he quite sensibly decided to include only fictional film. But then a friend asked, “What are you going to do with Dziga Vertov and Man with a Movie Camera?” Thomson reports wincing, writhing and worrying before finally including it in his book.

  He made the right call. The film is not really a documentary. It is, perhaps, a poem. It is, assuredly, one of the few great modernist gestures in the history of the movies. And it is today as fresh, as stirring, as it was the day it was released in 1929. There was, in the late silent era, a little vogue for “portraits” of great cities—Berlin: Symphony of a Great City (1927), People on Sunday (1930)—and I suppose it fits in that cycle. But not really. For Vertov creates, without telling us so, a “city” composed out of parts of Kiev, Kharkiv, and Odessa—in other words, a fictional city. This city awakens in the morning, goes through its workday, indulges in its nighttime play and then goes back to sleep. What holds the film together is a cameraman (played by Vertov’s brother, Mikhail Kaufman) clambering high, slouching low, as he seems to record “life caught unaware”—the
events of a day, from the birth of a baby to visits to a beauty shop. The film also records the work of an editor—Vertov’s wife, Elizaveta Svilova—fully accessing all the known movie tricks of the day to enliven a film that doesn’t need enlivening, but profits from it. It is not the first film to take in the process of filmmaking—people were interested in how movies were made almost from their beginning—but this was the first to self-consciously explore the tricks of the trade in some detail.

  Vertov had more in mind than just making a “city symphony.” In a foreword, he says, “This experimental work aims at creating a truly international absolute language of cinema, based on its total separation from the language of theatre and literature”—which, of course, it does not do. The movies remain today, as they were then, a storytelling medium. Movies like Man with a Movie Camera are something of a dead end. Even a city wasn’t rich enough to sustain a feature-length film—witness Vertov’s need to resort to three cities to create one semifictional one.

  Yet the film is a marvel. Our cameraman (whose activities were recorded by Vertov himself) is a heroic figure, a Stakhanovite of imagery, faintly comical in his tirelessness. Vertov even makes entertaining a sequence of people reporting for instruction to Stalinist seminars. And in his little way he is not unaware of sexuality—there are those shots of women dressing to go to work. There is not a moment in the film that is not exhilarating, alive to all the possibilities.

  The movie is very quick. It does not linger long on any of its many subtopics. Yet it never feels rushed. It is always loyal to its pace, which can probably best be described as that of the observer wandering the streets, pausing to enter some shop or institution and then moving on, glimpsing, but not really studying, what he sees. Vertov wants to create an impression of something that is new in the world, and not in all its aspects benign, though Vertov takes no moral position on that. How it will work out in the long run is not his concern. It is an implacably jazzy, attractive place we want to be in. We want to do what Vertov does: find a way to respond to its rhythms with rhythms appropriate to it.