Keepers: The Greatest Films of a Moviegoing Lifetime

by Richard Schickel

  One wonders if, later in life, when he had sunk back to anonymity, Vertov regretted his total surrender to the city, buying into its seductions too much. I think not. The pall of Stalinism has not yet settled on this place that is not a place. It is fresh and new and, above all, hopeful. Seeing it today, we are hopeful, too—for a moment. How wonderful the spirit of modernism was in its youth—the old, the staid, the tragic washed away, the greater horrors to come not yet imagined. Released when Vertov was just thirty-three—still time for idealism and for the thought that anything is possible—maybe this is a film of youth. We don’t know. And maybe we don’t want to know.

  In his consideration of the film, Thomson writes that all its tricks “are candid and innocent as someone warning you that he’s going to cheat you.” But he goes further: “It is the only silent film that needs no qualification or apology. It is perfect. It is new still. And it makes you love the world.”

  This is an important point. In our consideration of silent films—of all films, in fact—I am entirely aware that they contain conventions of editing, camerawork and, above all, acting that require of us, watching now, the suspension of disbelief. That’s the way they did things in that foreign country that is, as the cliché goes, the past. We brush past these awkwardnesses, our eyes intent on the higher, more lasting values of the movie in question. This movie—with its quick cutting, its ironic (yet loving) portrait of its demonic cameraman, its frankness about what it is up to—obviates all that. I don’t think you could make something like it today—the city no longer is the avatar of our poetic hopes for modernism. The ambiguities of Sunrise have already, as of 1929, intruded on that pretty, energetic fantasy. So Man with a Movie Camera, like most of the movies in this book, is, finally, in large measure, a lucky accident. There was a man with a theory of his art who had the wit and energy to make a film that demonstrated brilliantly what he was thinking about. He never repeated his triumph, which is a tragedy of sorts, but not one unique in the history of the movies. Just ask Orson Welles.

  Maybe I’m just being self-consciously eccentric when I name this film as the one the entire silent era was aiming at. As I’ve said, it was something of a dead end, in that it was released so late in the silent era and because, of course, it is hard to imagine its techniques being used in the comedies and melodramas that ruled in the other realms of movie production. We know from the experience of our own eyes that the revolution made by the soundtrack was total, sudden and complete. Sound, so bulky and balky, cut off the slender stalks of innovation that had just begun to take root in the last years of the silent era. George Lucas once argued to me that the movies never really recovered from this abandonment of their pure visual element, and I don’t have any serious disagreement with this view. It was trouble enough mastering sound. It consumed everyone’s energies. But we did lose something. And the spirit, the promise, of Man with a Movie Camera is one of the several things that we lost and never found again.

  7

  A Studio’s Way

  One day, probably in 1928, Bill Wellman was making what was apparently a routine movie called Beggars of Life, a part talkie, when he grew impatient with the immobility of the microphone. William A. (for Augustus) Wellman was not a notably patient man. He had been an aviator in the Lafayette Flying Corps in World War I and had parlayed a friendship with Douglas Fairbanks Sr. into work as a movie director, which was fun and kind of adventurous in its way.

  In those days, the camera was enclosed in a booth (to prevent its whirrings from being picked up by the microphone), which could only be somewhat painfully and briefly moved, a drag on the camera’s former mobility. The microphone, inextricably linked to the camera, was the problem—that is why, in many very early talkies, actors are seen sitting around tables, talking into flowerpots in which the microphone is hidden. Briefly, the sound recordist became king of the set, infringing on the director’s dominance of the moviemaking process.

  So Bill Wellman, whose legendary “Wild Bill” demeanor belied the sweetness, even sentimentality, of his nature (I know because he was my good friend in his late years, when I made a documentary about him), decided to do something about this problem. He grabbed a broomstick, hung a microphone on it and had one of the grips hold it out of the shot over the heads of the actors. Thus the boom was born, and it had a vital impact in restoring movement to the movies.

  As for Wellman, he made Wings and won accolades for making a real movie as Hollywood then understood the term—thrilling, sentimental, romantic and pure fun. Dissatisfied with a stuntman’s attempt at a crash landing, Wellman hauled himself into the cockpit, executed an expertly managed crash, walked away and never flew a plane again.

  Wellman is usually seen as not much more than a colorful footnote in the early history of the movies, an amusing, inventive guy, capable of making good, solid movies in virtually every genre, which he continued to do until his retirement in 1957. But I’m going to make a larger claim for him. By 1931, he was under contract at Warner Bros., and for the next four years he did more, I think, to establish the tone and style of that studio than any single individual, making it—to my taste anyway—tough, brash, funny in its brawling way, and willing, as no other studio was, to look life in the eye, before applying a little saving sentiment to the picture in its last minute (though sometimes it didn’t even bother with that).

  It’s been noted that Warner pictures were—literally—dark, and people guessed that was because Jack Warner was saving on sets and the electricity bill, which might have been true. Its stars—Cagney, Edward G. Robinson, Bette Davis, Joan Blondell—were an odd-looking lot who probably would not have been stars elsewhere, and they were constantly aroil with rebellion, which was a matter of indifference to Wellman. The thing was, if you missed the logo, you still knew the picture was from Warner less than half a minute into its often brief running time. Maybe MGM had that kind of character, too, except, more often than not, your heart sank when you realized what you were in for, which was slickness without sharpness, sentiment without authentic tragedy (though, of course, MGM was far more successful financially than Warner).

  One day, as Wellman strolled to the commissary for lunch, he was approached by two young writers, Kubec Glasmon and John Bright, who pressed upon him their treatment for a project called “Beer and Blood,” assuring him that it was based in part on their own experiences hanging around the Chicago underworld. That appealed to him—he loved realism (or his own particular brand of it), and after reading the piece in his office that afternoon, he immediately took it to Darryl Zanuck, then the head of production at Warner Bros. Zanuck at first demurred to the project, thinking he had made too many gangster pictures lately. Why should he do another one? he inquired. “Because,” snarled Wellman, “I’ll make it the toughest one of all.” “You got it,” said Zanuck.

  And, indeed, it was tough—but not until Cagney, originally cast as a best friend, replaced Edward Woods as the lead in the picture. “Eddie wasn’t tough at all; small-town boy,” Cagney later said. It made all the difference to Cagney’s career and to the fate of the picture.

  It’s not just a matter of one of the most famous scenes in movie history—the grapefruit in Mae Clarke’s face. It is, largely, the demonic energy Cagney brings to his role as the gangster, Tom Powers—that mixture of psychopathy and wild humor and, yes, charm that marks his rise and fall in the underworld. It seems to me, to this day, that the screen had never before seen anything like this performance—if only because it required a soundtrack to convey the full snarling nuttiness that Cagney unleashed and Wellman was smart enough to let unfurl in all its glory. It remains, to my taste, the greatest gangster picture of the genre’s first era, all anarchy and wildness.

  Wellman did not make many more gangster pictures over the course of his long career. He didn’t have to. But yet, The Public Enemy (1931) was a kind of model for the pictures that would immediately follow it. This was not a matter of plots or stars. It was a question of spit-in
-your-eye attitude, leavened by rough comedy sometimes, and rough sentiment, too.

  “In any Bill Wellman operation,” wrote the late, great Manny Farber, “there are at least four directors—a sentimentalist, deep thinker, hooey vaudevillian and an expedient short-cut artist whose special love is for mulish toughs expressing themselves in drop-kicking heads and somber standing around.” It’s irresistible not to quote from Faber; his writing is so colorful and jazzy, and records an impression that is accurate in its way. Alas, it’s wrongheaded in its own way, too, though that is not Farber’s fault. He was writing when Wellman’s Warner Bros. pictures were not generally available and he had to focus on the longer, more striving films that were all right and sometimes better than that (see The Story of G.I. Joe, for example) but do not, in my estimation, match the power, and the plainness, of his best work at Warner Bros.

  Wellman was not a director much interested in subtexts. What you saw was what you got, as in Heroes for Sale. Such “deep thinking” as the film contains centers on Richard Barthelmess and his confrontation with the Great Depression, at its depths in 1933. He gets out of the army after World War I a drug addict, cures himself, prospers with a laundry, loses his wife and business in the downturn, joins the army of the unemployed and is last seen living under a bridge with the anonymous victims of economic disaster. (No one could say the studio was afraid of unhappy endings.) The story was swift—the running time is a mere seventy-three minutes—but it leaves out nothing and is one of the comparatively few movies that directly address the effects of the Depression. Particularly fine is a riot of the unemployed, which is powerful, efficient and scary. I have no idea what Wellman’s politics were at the time, but the movie drips with compassion—and outrage—about the victims of national tragedy. And it does so without particularly sentimentalizing them. They are mute as they are hammered by a fate from which there is no escape. Our sympathy for Barthelmess and the rest of the victims is enlisted because no special plea is made for them. I can’t go on; I must go on is the tone.

  Wild Boys of the Road, which immediately followed, is a shade more sentimental, but somehow very powerful as well. Zanuck, who was gone from the studio before it was released, liked “ripped from the headlines” stories, and he saw a touching one here: kids riding the rails, looking for work, food, a place to rest their heads for a night, in the depth of the Depression. Wellman’s film simply follows a group of them on their travels. There are no big stars (his new and beloved wife, Dorothy Coonan, was one of the gang), and much melodrama ensues, including one of the most potent sequences of the era: a boy losing his leg to an onrushing train as the kids run from railroad bulls. This leads finally to a hopeful ending, wherein a Roosevelt look-alike promises better times ahead. But the main thing about the movie—eighty-eight minutes long—is its mad rush. There is nothing “mulish” about it, no “somber standing around” in it. Wellman was a director of surfaces in these days—bright, hard, depthless. So it happens that this was the first Warner Bros. picture that I saw of his, and I responded to its pell-mell pace and rough sentiments.

  This, I thought, was a man to reckon with. He told the unvarnished truth, as he did in an inconsequential movie that same year called Central Airport. A man and a woman enter a hotel room, undress, and simply proceed to go to bed—no questions asked. I loved that about the guy—the lack of dither in those pre-Code days, simple behavioral truths offered without apologies or simpering. He went on to grander enterprises (he made the first and probably the best of the endless Star Is Born pictures), but I still think there was a match of man and material in the Warner years that deserves serious study—not that that will ever happen these days, when movie history is all haste and half-knowledge.

  We are not yet finished with Warner Bros., nor with several good directors bustling about on their lot. It is not too much to say that by the mid-1930s Warner was, of all things, an auteurist studio. Wellman was in and out of the place, of course, and Raoul Walsh had come over from Fox in the late thirties, and Howard Hawks was more there than anywhere else during this period. Hawks was a dry, rather affectless man, who spoke in a monotone, placed his cameras in spots that seemed in retrospect inevitable and, above all, dreaded “fuss.” He was also a congenital liar, a dandy and a powerfully secretive man. I came to know him rather well in his late years and came to like him a lot, though I knew I was never going to solve the mystery of the man.

  Of the directors who shuttled on and off the Warner lot in the thirties and forties, Hawks had by far the greatest range. Comedies, melodramas, westerns, even musicals—everything seemed to be his dish of tea. He had a spectacular relationships with Cary Grant and Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall and, of course, John Wayne—among the many actors and actresses he worked with so effortlessly. He claimed he found his style in 1932 with Scarface. It was, he liked to say, everything but the kitchen sink, up angles and down angles until (to borrow his phrase) it “reeled the mind.” (And he hated cutting it all together.) From then on his camera would be eye level, his cutting severe, his emotions understated. Above all, his manner worked for virtually every topic. We can name a few, together with their genres: Twentieth Century (romantic farce), Bringing Up Baby (ditto), Only Angels Have Wings (comedy-adventure), To Have and Have Not and The Big Sleep (romantic mysteries) and a slew of westerns starting with Red River and proceeding from there.

  And we are far from done, regretting the absence from our list of such films as His Girl Friday and Ball of Fire. I might as well say it—with a gulp—that it is probably the best filmography in the history of American cinema. Even the semi-duds—Hatari! among them—have more spunk than a lot of directors’ presumed masterpieces. Or to put it another way, there is scarcely a Hawks film that I would not happily pop into the DVD tonight and watch. Indeed, there is this interesting thing about most of his work: It doesn’t date. The dialogue in some cases may be seventy-five or more years old, but it remains crisp and funny, and the situations that occasion it are plausibly farcical. You don’t have to make many allowances for it.

  Unlike his competitors, Hawks was famous for two themes that he worked endlessly. One was the functioning male group bickering as they bonded in pursuit of whatever adventurous goal they were jointly pursuing. They were funny guys most of the time, but they were also haunted by death, which was usually greeted if not with a laugh, then with a shrug. The temptation toward the lugubrious was sternly resisted. (See the passing of Thomas Mitchell in Only Angels Have Wings for the perfect example of gallantry under the ultimate pressure.) And then, perhaps more famously, there was the Hawksian woman. Putting it very simply, she was always one of the guys, bantering on an equal footing with men. (She always had wise-guy lines that matched in their insouciance what the boys were saying.) Hawks used to say that they were the kind of women he found most attractive, and we have no reason to doubt that.

  There were plenty of funny ladies in the movies of this era, but it seems to me the radical simplicity of the Hawks style served these women as the works of no other director did; their ease, their directness, their appraising manner are really beyond compare. And you have to think that his radically simplified style was the perfect servant of his subject matter. I have no idea how self-conscious it was, but I think it represented that stream of modernism that aims at stripping down subject matter to its bare-bones essence—just enough and no more.

  I’m not saying that Hawks is the greatest of all directors—I’m not saying that about anybody—but the body of work is superlative. The continuing freshness of his films cannot be denied, nor the sheer fun and tension of them.

  And still we are not quite done with Warner Bros. Not when Baby Face has been ignored, and, for that matter, I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang.

  Baby Face (1933) was directed by Alfred E. Green, who began directing in 1919 and didn’t quit until sometime in the 1950s. He was a typically prolific studio director, making his share of all-right and not-so-hot movies, with his biggest hit, The J
olson Story, coming late in his career, in 1946. Baby Face, to which Zanuck made some story contributions, is quite brutal. Barbara Stanwyck plays a woman from a coal town, raped by her father and rendered frigid as a result. She makes her way to the big city, where she works her way to the top—actually frigidly fucking her way to the president’s office—where, at the end, George Brent is rescued from ruin by her. (Among the men she uses in her rise is John Wayne.) It is, to say the least, a very cold film, and it is all of seventy minutes long. It attracted little attention when it was released, was re-edited when the Production Code was given teeth, and was then restored in recent years.

  It is, I think, a near-to-great film—for its speed, its bluntness, its complete lack of hypocrisy. It says people, some of them, are like this—more of them, perhaps, than the studios liked to contemplate. And also that the studio system, when it just didn’t give a damn about particularly pleasing the public with saving, sentimental gestures, was capable of really brutal truth-telling. And that says nothing about Stanwyck, who is simply great in her hardness and heedlessness. The fact that her best friend is a black woman, beautifully played by Theresa Harris—and that her race is never overtly commented upon—is one of the many felicities of this film. At this time, Stanwyck was the finest of screen actresses, working often with directors like Wellman and Frank Capra, who responded to the directness of her address, how she failed to sue audiences for their sympathy yet somehow attained it. She was often, or so it seemed to me, radically alone in her pictures, yet she never gave in to that quality. She later made more famous films (Meet John Doe, Double Indemnity), but her essence is here in this increasingly well-regarded little movie. The film also had an unintended consequence: It caused some sort of row between Harry Warner and Darryl Zanuck, which caused the latter to leave Warner and become head of his own company, which quickly became Twentieth Century Fox in 1935. But the important thing is this: When a place like Warner Bros. wasn’t trying too hard, when it was just banging them out, it was capable of casual greatness, generally unrecognized at the time.