I did not always think that. Robert Penn Warren’s book seemed to me, when I first read it in the late 1940s, a major American novel, a work of high ambition and considerable achievement. (The last time I encountered the book, it seemed to me wildly overwritten.) What Rossen did in adapting it was quite radical. He stripped it down to its plot, in effect clearing it of the underbrush of fancy writing and stressing its highly melodramatic story. He simply tells the tale of a man rising from humble beginnings to command a backwater southern state, and Rossen made a rollicking movie out of it. Its author graciously endorsed the movie, for good and sufficient reason, I think.
The film was shot with Northern California standing in for the South, and it featured some bold casting, notably of Broderick Crawford as Willie Stark, the fast-rising, hard-falling southern governor. He was a crude actor, though the son of performers, up out of undistinguished westerns, comedies and suchlike. But he had a noisy power, and he was perfectly typecast in the role, as were Mercedes McCambridge as his secretary and John Ireland as a cynical journalist. Crawford did a rather good—if again loud—impersonation of studio head Harry Cohn in Born Yesterday but then declined to inconsequence in genre pictures and television (Highway Patrol most prominently). He was a hard-drinking man, and young actors, working the show as they were breaking in, observed him pasting his lines around the set—open a drawer, read a few lines, shut the drawer, glance in another direction and read a few more until the scene was finished. All along, he kept nipping at his bottle. By afternoon, such acting as he was capable of was finished.
We come now to Marlon Brando, about whom it seems I’ve been writing all my life—including, yes, a book. He once called me on the phone to protest the use of some clips in an Academy Award tribute to Elia Kazan that I was producing (it turned out okay). He had it in him to be a great actor, and occasionally he was. He was also a lazy and self-indulgent slob, whining often and tiresomely about the actor’s fate in general and his own in particular. He made weird and unpredictable choices as an actor. He could be both dainty and crude, often within virtually the same moment on film. He had an almost surreal way with words in his interviews. But to get to the essence of it all, he simply changed the face of acting in America, indelibly.
One imagines that his family despaired of him as a kid—military school and all that restlessness—so they shipped him off to New York, where his sister, Jocelyn, was studying acting. He took a surprising interest in the subject. He quite soon came under the influence of Stella Adler, who was for some, Brando notably, a passionate teacher. She was something of a Stanislavskian apostate, but she gave Brando a discipline he had previously lacked. It is perhaps not too much to say that what he learned of acting technique he learned from her. When he began to get roles in the commercial theater, he did well. People could see that he had something they couldn’t quite describe, but he was arresting. They could imagine a career for him on Broadway. And so could he. From 1944 to 1947, he was pretty steadily working there, culminating with Streetcar. People thought he was going to be a star in something like the usual way. And so did he.
He was an eccentric, of course—the pet raccoon and all—and a man whose moods affected his performances, night in and night out. He was a challenge to act with, no question about that. But he was good in ways that people had not seen before. And the run of films leading up to On the Waterfront, in 1954, was near to unprecedented. There were complaints, of course—mumbling, self-indulgence—increasingly from Brando himself. Acting was such a childish activity, especially for him, since it was relatively simple for him to do. He seemed to think, for a time, that politics was a more serious activity than acting. He made a number of unworthy movies, in most of which he managed at least moments that only he could create. He made some films that were better than his critics would admit (Mutiny on the Bounty, One-Eyed Jacks), but he basically put it about that doing anything worthwhile was but “a chilly hope.” Then of course there were his masterly returns to form in The Godfather and Last Tango in Paris.
We are left with a mystery. My generation had such hopes tied up in him, and I guess we are obliged to say he failed them. But consider Streetcar, which some have suggested is the best movie adaptation of a play ever made. They will get no argument from me. The brutality and tenderness of Stanley Kowalski is an ever-renewing miracle, with his co-stars not far behind. And what about On the Waterfront? And to think that he affected not to give a shit. This least professional of players (and his colleagues) made of acting a profession, of all things.
There were good movies being made then—though it was scarcely a golden age—but so much of the talk was about the actors. Brando, Clift, even James Dean preoccupied us more than their vehicles. Stars were fewer now than they had been, but they had about them a mystery that was larger, I think, than it had been earlier.
There was another way of looking at this—Laurence Olivier’s. If Brando acted too little, Lord Olivier probably acted too much. He liked to say he did it in order to leave behind a decent estate for his family, but there was more to it than that. Acting fascinated and defined him. Try to imagine Brando in such a role. Possibly in the dark night of his soul, an unadmitted idealism may have fitfully stirred, to be tamped down with a contemptuous comment. He could unquestionably have done more, but he could have done less.
The quintessential movie of the 1950s was, I think, From Here to Eternity (1953). It is, as I said earlier, probably the best movie ever made by Fred Zinnemann, that cautious, whiny, occasionally mean-spirited craftsman. The film is a quite accurate adaptation of the James Jones novel, mainly by Daniel Taradash. It’s very well acted by Deborah Kerr and Burt Lancaster, among others, and features the comeback performance by Frank Sinatra that established him as a star forever and a day. The roll in the surf by Kerr and Lancaster is without a doubt an iconic moment in the modern history of the movies.
Eternity is typical of the films that received the most sober critical attention at the time—mainly adaptations of middlebrow novels, made with sometimes fussy care and now held at somewhat of a discount by critics and the knowing public. I still like it, though. There is a craftsmanship, a professionalism—call it a sheen—to it that is admirable. And an under-the-surface passion in its players that grips the viewer harder than he may expect.
The genres, though, were not entirely neglected in these days. In sci-fi, there was The Day the Earth Stood Still (1952) and Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956). In the former, Michael Rennie, not a particularly well-known actor at the time, plays an alien who pilots a spacecraft to Earth in order to issue a warning: Give up your warlike ways or face obliteration. His ship is crewed by a giant robot named Gort (actually the doorman at a Los Angeles hotel), sewn into a seemingly seamless metallic costume, who can be deterred from defending his ship violently if one utters the phrase “Klaatu barada nikto,” which it falls to Patricia Neal to utter. Rennie proposes a demonstration of his powers; he will—why yes!—make the Earth stand still. He does so while incidentally solving an equation that has been puzzling an Einstein-like scientist (Sam Jaffe). There is a nice ease to Rennie’s performance—indeed, to Robert Wise’s entire picture. It is graceful. It does not breathe hard. The film is charming, likable. It makes its unexceptionable point without undo preachment, ere it draws out of sight with the usual “We’ll be watching” warning. Too bad Neal and Rennie can’t act on their obvious liking for one another, but you can’t have everything.
Don Siegel’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers is a more intense film. Starring two minor but agreeable actors, Kevin McCarthy and Dana Wynter, it tells the story of the citizens of a small town who are being replaced by “pods,” look-alike creatures that are essentially blander versions of the real folks. They take over when the citizens fall asleep, so what we have here is basically a townful of insomniacs—and an allegory that, depending on your taste, is either anti-Communist or anti-McCarthyite. It is, like many of Siegel’s films, trim, efficient and smoothly scary
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Somewhat later, I kept company with Dana Wynter for a couple of delightful years, and she had a tendency to pooh-pooh the thing. She was a very beautiful woman (also a charming one). She was loaned out for this B picture and was a good sport about it. She was a completely professional actress, but not one who took the work all that seriously. She was a devoted mother and had a wonderful, throaty chuckle that continues to resound happily in my ears. It seemed to me her attitude toward Body Snatchers was rather larkish. She had made at her home studio (Twentieth Century Fox) more “important” movies, which had been more ponderous than popular. This was the only picture that people paid attention to, and its eventual cult status amused her, as it should have. She was, like a lot of performers of those years, trapped in the conventions of the times—so many heavy-handed adaptations of “literary” works. I never heard her name one of those that she thought was any better, so she settled for Body Snatchers. It was what she had in the way of immortality, which is, after all, more than most people have.
26
Don’t Unfasten Those Seat Belts Yet
If you were serious about the movies in this period—and God knows I was—your attention often shifted abroad. Foreign films were, well, just different—in their styles, their themes, maybe simply in their appeal to those of us in the younger audience who wished to transcend genres. We were taken with a new thought: that the movies were an art form just as valid as any other, which we wanted to help define. There had always been adults who believed that, but for us it was a generational thing. It was one of the things that helped set us apart from an older crowd, for whom, on the whole, movies were nothing more than an evening’s entertainment.
Case in point: The Earrings of Madame de…(1953). My resistance to superlatives remains steadfast, and yet I cannot help but think—sometimes—that this Max Ophüls film is one of the greatest films.
It is always mentioned in those books that list and discuss the masterpieces of world cinema, though an entirely coherent account of its plot is rarely given. The decor, the costumes, the breathtaking camera movements are described with proper awe, but the story line is not always clearly defined. It is in some sense quite simple: Madame de…(Danielle Darrieux) is in debt and must sell something to lift that burden. She settles upon some earrings, a gift from her husband, the surpassingly suave Charles Boyer. In due course, they reappear in her life when she takes as a lover the elegant Vittorio De Sica. They fall into real love, which becomes something like a tragedy.
In a very rough outline like this, Madame de sounds, I suppose, like a fairly routine romance. But that reckons without the elegance of Ophüls’s realization. The swirl and sweep of his camera—often in tight spaces, at that—has few comparisons. And the playing of his principals—restrained, yes, but with passion throbbing just beneath the surface—is similarly intense. When Darrieux and De Sica in effect dance out the entire story of their passion, as the musicians one by one withdraw from the ballroom and the lights are gradually extinguished, it is, to my way of thinking, one of the grandest romantic moments in all of cinema.
Ophüls made other romances equally as potent—Letter from an Unknown Woman is an excellent instance—but Madame de is the one I like best. I love the air of sadness that haunts it without overpowering it, the curious calmness with which it confronts the storms of the heart. You wonder how Darrieux can go about her days—eat her lunch, choose her frock, get her hair done—gripped as she is by relentless passion. Possibly this is the great, almost unnoticed miracle of this film: It does not entirely surrender to its grand passion; it leaves a little room for the quotidian, for the flow of ordinary life, which goes on despite our breaking hearts.
There’s no particular rhyme or reason to the films of the 1950s. There was a nice little line of women’s pictures (mostly Jane Wyman, weeping her eyes out). I’m leaving out High Noon and Shane because I don’t think they were as good as people thought they were at the time. In retrospect, they seem too stiffened with the desire to rise above their station. There was, though, the musical, which, in this decade, is the history of the collaboration between Stanley Donen and Gene Kelly. This sublime pair rescued this genre from its reliance on backstage stories. The history of Hollywood would be poorer by far without the exuberance of On the Town, Singin’ in the Rain and Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, among others. Their unique blend of effervescence and joyous romanticism is without parallel in film history.
In particular, Kelly brought to these enterprises something that was quite new to the movie musical. Vincente Minnelli defined it as a kind of earthiness that had been missing from male dancers before his arrival. (Astaire was great, but he was more ethereal.) In a sense, Kelly’s athleticism made it all right for little boys to like dancing. He had, to be sure, ambitions (some might call them pretensions) for musicals—those ballets that became his staple—and though one stirred restlessly as they rolled on and on, who could deny the sheer joy of something like the staging of Singin’s title song (among other immortal moments)? For the most part, Donen’s best work was based on original material or on minor sources that could easily be “adapted” for the screen with no one “knowing” that was happening. Decline, to a degree, set in when members of the “Arthur Freed Unit” began making versions of hit Broadway musicals at MGM, though even then there were lovely moments (for instance, the great “Steam Heat” number from The Pajama Game).
If I had to choose a musical for my peculiar pantheon, it would have to be Singin’, for the perfection of its development at a fairly early stage in the musical revival of the fifties. But I’m going to pick another one, too, also written by Betty Comden and Adolph Green, though directed by Vincente Minnelli: The Band Wagon (1953). It has a shimmering score by Arthur Schwartz and Howard Dietz, some gorgeous dancing by Astaire and Cyd Charisse, and a superb comic performance by Jack Buchanan, as a producer-director-star who must be cured of his own pretentiousness. This is what sets the movie apart. It sends up the musical’s new desire to, you know, “make a statement.” It is a rare thing for a movie musical—a movie anything—to satirize its own premises. But The Band Wagon does it with high spirits and good cheer. It deserves a higher place in memory than it has—it’s a lovely, merry movie.
It’s a surprise that this era of the musical was so brief: We can identify its beginning in 1952, with Singin’ in the Rain, and declare it over with Damn Yankees, in 1958. Musicals, of course, continued to be made in later years, but rarely, and they were largely versions of Broadway hits. They seemed to me more dutiful than inspired. There were no replacements for directors like Donen (who mostly made comedies in his later years) or stars like Kelly, Astaire and Charisse, who did straight roles with mixed results. I wish that were not the case. Movies occasionally need to sing and dance and be sort of giddy. I miss those qualities and I want them to make a comeback. I doubt they ever will. The skills they require are lost to Hollywood now.
27
Mixed Baggage
In 1955—or maybe it was 1956; sources differ—a man named Jean-Pierre Grumbach, operating under the pseudonym Jean-Pierre Melville (the name, of course, borrowed from American literature), made a movie called Bob le Flambeur (Bob, the Gambler). I did not see it at the time (few Americans did), but it was re-released some years later, and it was welcomed warmly in the United States—a trim crime story about an assault on a casino in Deauville. It was the kind of thing we liked to think the American cinema held a patent on, though it had more or less lost the knack for the genre by this time.
Melville’s crime dramas, efficient and engaging, are valuable ornaments, none more so than Bob le Flambeur. It is that it is so unfussy, which is true of all Melville’s movies. There are, it seems to me, no more clean-cut narratives in our recent movie history. As important, they are brisk and hypnotic. He was heard to murmur that he did not really know what his movies meant until he saw the finished print—by which time it was, naturally, too late to make changes. It sounds slapdash, but the
films don’t play that way. There is nothing careless about them.
Take Bob. It moves right along, but it is actually a very patient movie, laying out its plot carefully, making sure we always know its ins and outs. Melville’s films always make perfect sense. They are also fatalistic and romantic in an offhand sort of way. And very tough-minded. I have never seen a bad one, or, to be honest, a truly lovable one, either—unless what you love is impeccable craftsmanship in aid of criminal enterprises beautifully laid out.
The Searchers also appeared in 1956. There is little need to describe this very straightforward movie by John Ford—hasn’t everyone seen it by now? A girl who will grow up to be Natalie Wood is abducted in an Indian raid on her home, and John Wayne, as Ethan Edwards, abetted by Jeffrey Hunter as Martin Pawley, go looking for her. Many miles and many years later, they find her. She is, of course, “spoiled” by her relationship with Scar, the savage who perpetrated this deed, and there is little doubt that she has come to love him. So when Ethan and Martin at last find her, will the former kill her or forgive her? There is a subplot in which Hunter’s wedding to Vera Miles is endlessly delayed by the obsessive search.
There are things wrong with the movie: sentimental songs, for example, and a rather feckless story about an Indian woman who is in love with Martin and is also—curiously—crucial to the development of the plot. It didn’t win any prizes and did no more than respectable business. I was mildly dubious about it; it seemed to me not quite routine, but also not all it might have been. I had not, however, reckoned with the enormous power of John Wayne’s performance. In its rage, in its implacability, in its sheer command of the screen, its complexity, it is towering. He comes home belatedly from the Civil War, still in love with Dorothy Jordan but not daring to speak of it, since she is married to another. He is scarcely settled before Debbie is abducted and the near-endless search begins. Eventually Wayne is required to hold two contradictory thoughts in mind simultaneously: that his niece must die for loving Scar, and that she must be forgiven for a fate that she can do nothing to evade, save committing suicide. It is possibly the central glory of this performance that we never know which way he is leaning. We know only from the odd outburst that he is in agony. Mostly, he is enraged by the cruelty of the position in which he finds himself. When at last he corners Debbie, we expect him to kill her—in some sense the higher logic of the story demands it. But he cannot. The logic of movie heroism—this is, after all, a John Wayne picture—argues otherwise. He lifts the terrified girl skyward and quietly says, “Let’s go home, Debbie.” And we would not have it any other way.
Keepers: The Greatest Films of a Moviegoing Lifetime Page 19