Which brings us to Chinatown (1974), and something close to perfection in my estimation. You know the story. It is ostensibly about water—about bringing it in plenitude to California. But it is most significantly about incest—not the first movie on that topic. There was Scarface, in 1932, which everybody said right up front was about the forbidden topic. Chinatown has John Huston—so evil, so funny—in a crucial role; Jack Nicholson, so slippery, yet in his way so curiously honorable; and Faye Dunaway, utterly tragic when she finally cracks (“My daughter! My sister!”).
The film is a writer’s film—Robert Towne’s, to be specific—though the script contributions of the director, Roman Polanski, are significant and absolutely first-rate; it was he who insisted on the shattering ending, for example. But it was Towne’s story—not exactly an autobiography, but something that captured the fragrance of the Southern California in which he grew up. You can almost smell the sweetness of the land—or is it corruption?—within the film’s frames.
It was always an ambitious project—dreamed of as part of a trilogy, tracing, besides water, land and air as avatars of the unique ambience of Los Angeles. It wound up being carried out in two movies—though the less said about the second one, the better. Sequels, we know, are usually not very good. It is reasonably safe to say that never has a movie as good as Chinatown been so ill served by its successor.
People chip away at Chinatown. They say its pace is draggy, that the orange filters suggesting nostalgia are ludicrous. This and that gnaws at both critics and ordinary viewers. I didn’t much like it on its initial release. Then one night I watched it in a motel room and I fell for it: the intricacy of it, its odd blend of wit and tragedy and, yes, Nicholson’s nose job. (A hinge was used, though sometimes the filmmakers lied about it and said they did it for real.) Anyway, it dawned on me that it was a great movie of a kind, mostly because of its attitude, which holds, as Huston puts it, that we are capable—sometime, somewhere—of doing anything, no matter how vile.
I like it that we live in a world that has at least one movie that holds this truth as self-evident. Whenever I watch it, I am hypnotized by its cruel ambivalences. “He was some kind of man,” Marlene Dietrich murmurs of Orson Welles in Touch of Evil. We may say something similar of Chinatown. It is some kind of movie.
31
Clint
I have written books and innumerable articles about Clint Eastwood and made several films about him, too. I have no similar relationship with anyone else in the movie industry. We have been friends more or less since we met in 1976. We have dined together, laughed together. And I cannot recall the exchange of any cross words. I have no objectivity about his work. I think he is a major American film artist.
I will say, however, that I was not immediately smitten by his work. I drifted into a screening of one of the Fistful of Dollars pictures in the mid-sixties and drifted more or less immediately out of it. I like the Leone pictures very much nowadays. Back then they were too harsh for me, too anti-traditional, and maybe too sardonic. It was the same way with Dirty Harry, in 1971. I wanted more gallantry from Clint. I missed entirely any sadness or loneliness. Jay Cocks, my reviewing colleague at Time, did not. His wife, the actress Verna Bloom, had worked with Clint; they became friends, and one night the three of us had dinner together. I was astonished to find Clint easy and quiet, a listener rather than a talker. I liked the man before I began to appreciate the actor. We took to calling one another when he was in New York or I was in Los Angeles, and that went nicely. Though he was more politically conservative than I was, he was on social issues as liberal as any of my other friends.
He made some okay movies in the early seventies—nothing astonishing, but solid and interesting. I thought The Outlaw Josey Wales (1976) was a wonderfully spacious movie, recounting Josey’s return from bitterness to a new appreciation of community. Clint took over direction of the movie after a few unhappy weeks—he said it was the hardest professional decision he ever made—and the picture had grace and ease (without sacrificing a certain harshness). It marked a turning point for him. Some years later, he casually remarked to me that he thought Josey was every bit as good as Unforgiven, the picture that, of course, marked his annunciation to a more knowing audience. It was just, he said, that people like his bête noire, Pauline Kael, were not expecting it—indeed, didn’t think he had so thoughtful a film in him.
He had a point. He also had the habit of inconsistency in those days. He followed Josey with The Gauntlet, for heaven’s sake. He thereafter did some movies that were decently ambitious—promising—but not quite, I think, what he hoped for them to be. He was a self-taught director, learning by instinct. An indicator of that: His worst picture, The Rookie, preceded his best (to date), Unforgiven, then a lot of so-so work before he began the very good run of films that started with Mystic River, in 2003.
Since then, not all of his films—we’ll come to some of them later—have been hits, but all of them have been aspiring. Mortality dogs his heels, as it does all of us who are in our eighties. It pretty much takes a year to make a movie, and how many years are there—even if you are the fittest man on the planet? He made Jersey Boys simply because he wanted to have a musical in his résumé. The challenge, you know.
Clint is a dedicated worker. There have been years in which he made two movies. He does not “develop” films. He secures them in the open market, and there are times, he says, when there is not much around and he takes what he can find there, for better or worse—though in recent years he has been more careful in his choices. He has a somewhat belated sense of his own importance as a filmmaker—not that that veers toward self-importance. Sometimes you wonder what he sees in this or that project, but they tend to come out pretty well. There is an ease about him, a lack of pretense, that is one of his most attractive characteristics.
32
Belle de Jour
Catherine Deneuve is naked to the waist, her perfect breasts threatened with flogging while she awaits her punishment without affect—or so it seems. She shows no fear. No writhing. It has been argued that she may be a virgin. I rather doubt it; I think it more likely that she is at this early moment in Belle de Jour (1967) merely frigid. In any case, she was instructed by the director, Luis Buñuel, not to act in any way in the movie, and she did not—brilliantly. Later she is recruited to be the title character of the film, working only in the afternoons and returning at night to her safe, sane and, one suspects, not very interesting home and husband.
Belle de Jour is one of the most beautiful and mysterious movies ever made—elegant, handsome, enigmatic, in some sense inexplicable. As the film moves along (in great beauty, let it be said), it does not unravel itself (not fully, at least). It is ostensibly clear and ultimately opaque. It is—yes—surreal.
The film makes clear that Buñuel is one of the great directors. His filmography, which includes The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie and That Obscure Object of Desire among so many other great films, is a major one. And no one else has had the wit to make a movie in which the guests at a dinner party refuse to leave.
33
The Apu Trilogy
These films were made in the 1950s by the Indian filmmaker Satyajit Ray. They have about them great simplicity and a greater power than we first noticed, as they trace the rise of the boy Apu from childhood to (fairly) young manhood. There are deaths in them and a degree of other misery, though in the end things come out all right, relatively speaking.
They also contain the danger that “humanistic” cinema is always freighted with. There is a certain predictability: birth, death, big topics oversimplified and sometimes rather tiresome. In the early 1990s, a friend of mine named Gilbert Cates was producing the Academy Awards telecasts, and for several years I produced the little tributes to the winners of the honorary Oscars, including one in 1991 for Ray. There were no air-worthy prints of his work in India or the United States; they were located in Great Britain, where—one should have known—they had
the year before had a Ray season complete with gorgeous prints, in prime time, incidentally. There is something to be said for having a movie culture—that is, a capacity to pay heed to minority tastes.
Coming upon the Apu Trilogy anew, I was struck by the lasting power of its strong, simple imagery and by the cumulative power of the three films (Panther Panchali, in 1955; Aparajito, 1956; and Apur Sansar, 1959). You really have to see them back-to-back-to-back, which is difficult to do. They truly constitute an epic, ranging as they do over two decades and through both city and village life in modern India. They reflect as well the most basic and tender emotions in a patient way. Most important, all three films speak indirectly to a single theme: the ineffectuality of the male in a colonial and postcolonial society.
The trilogy begins with a portrait of Apu, an adorably curious and eager boy in an agricultural village, undaunted by the tragedies that surround him, which include the death of his young sister and the passing of his father when they move to the city. Apu acquires a teacher-mentor and eventually goes to college, though a certain languidness overtakes him—there are so few opportunities for young men, and the possibilities for corruption abound. He finds happiness in an arranged marriage (of all things), but his wife dies and he surrenders to bitterness, in the process abandoning his son (and the novel on which he is working). He eventually recovers, though the conclusion of this work is ambiguous. One thinks Apu, chastened by the bitter experiences he has undergone, is now settling for a rather bland domesticity, for making a living like the rest of us, instead of the life that was occasionally promised by the trilogy.
It is not a tragedy. Neither is it a study in more than a muted and occasional bliss. It is, well, just “life,” I guess. And I can’t think why the trilogy haunts me as it does. I suppose it’s because there are so few movies like it—the flow of life in its ordinariness (and occasional alarms). It is everything as we experience it, not melodramatized.
I have to say that it is an odd work for me to care so greatly about. I am, I suppose, Eurocentric in my taste for movies from abroad (as this book probably proves). There are simply more cultural congruities between Americans and Europeans than there are between us and, for instance, the Indians. You have to work harder, on the whole, to appreciate their nuances. That said, there is a great clarity to the Apu Trilogy, a simplifying force, if you will, that grants it an uncommon grace. Ray could sometimes dither (he made some thirty films, not all of them masterpieces), but his is a great body of work.
34
Fellini
Pirandello is evoked. Existentialism is mentioned. And, naturally, “the silence of God.” Check, check and check again, when it comes to Fellini.
But what about show business, of all humble things? Or perhaps we should call it “low business”—the realm of clowns and magicians, chorus girls and lecherous impresarios, working the provinces, the less salubrious big-city music halls, on rare occasions, from childhood on lured, tempted and occasionally dismayed the great director. They were the subject of his first film (Variety Lights, co-directed with Alberto Lattuada), and they are a crucial element in the last of his films to be released in the United States, Intervista. Whether he touches upon it only briefly or muses upon it at length, low business has never been absent for very long from the thoughts of Federico Fellini. It is the topic of his masterpiece, 8 ½ (1963).
It is an oddity of Fellini’s filmography that he so often makes pictures about this or that aspect of show business and that the critical commentary about it so infrequently alludes directly to it. The critics are always chasing various forms of big think in his work. But consider: His first great success, La Dolce Vita (1960), was about the Roman demimonde and its relationship to, among other things, low-level journalism. (It also contributed an immortal word to the language—paparazzo—the name of a character engaged in scuzzy journalism, the plural of which is paparazzi.) There are others, of course, beginning with his very first film and including the delightful I Viteloni (1953), which is about the fumetti, photographic comic strips, not to mention La Strada (1954). And let us not forget And the Ship Sails On and the late-in-life Ginger and Fred, which has Mastroianni and Giulietta Masina as a retired dance team brought back for one of those god-awful nostalgia TV shows (she wants to do it, he doesn’t), which is, I think (I’m in the minority here), sad and funny and curiously moving in its minor way.
There are those who are not susceptible to Fellini’s charms. They think he’s the avatar of cheesy sentiment. They are being too stern with him. 8 ½, for example, is a film in which fantasy and reality get into an interesting muddle. Mastroianni is Guido, a blocked director, committed to a film’s start date and flat out of ideas for it. The set is built, the cast is ready, but the problem, he thinks, is that the medium cannot contain his vast vision and Guido will not again compromise that vision, put on just another “show,” crowd-pleasing though it will probably be. He cancels the shoot.
And then, out of the shadows of the set, a magician appears, ready to work, and the clowns parade out. Guido tentatively starts sorting them all out. Others whom we have met during Guido’s dreams and reveries amble into view as well, to be shaped into some semblance of art. Among the voice-over lines we hear: “Life is a holiday; let us live it together.”
In other words, forget the mighty personal statement. Settle for putting on a show, albeit one that looks as though it will have a big finish after all—brassy, sentimental, full of good feelings. I can see why this looks like a compromise to some people. Sure. Possibly. Then again, an awful lot of more aspiring movies have come to a lot less. I like the message of 8 ½. A lot of the time, less is more; and a lot of the time, more is just terrible. There is a lot of posturing in this film, a lot of silliness too, but it keeps delighting. I want masterpieces as much as the next guy, but they are rare—as rare as first-rate entertainments.
35
Strange Loves
Any movie that is set in large measure at Burpelson Air Force Base, where Sterling Hayden is defending his vital bodily fluids, cannot be ignored. Indeed, Dr. Strangelove is the 1964 comic masterpiece from Stanley Kubrick, in which the world comes to a screeching halt as Peter Sellers, playing three roles, patiently explains to his Russian commander-in-chief counterpart that one of the nut jobs under his command “went and did a silly thing,” consisting of setting off a nuclear strike that cannot be called back. Strangelove himself (another Sellers role), his wartime activities grand now that he has switched sides, cannot prevent his arm from flying up in the Nazi salute. This is one of the rare American comedies that is about something more than moon, June and romance.
George C. Scott as General Buck Turgidson explains that we will get our hair mussed in an atomic exchange, but with casualties in the acceptable twenty-million range. If you think that’s funny, then this is the movie for you. I do. Its last image is of a lone airplane flying into oblivion while a song plays “We’ll meet again, don’t know where, don’t know when.”
What I like best about Dr. Strangelove is the way it stays relevant. As I write, it is precisely fifty years old, and more than most movies—especially movies with a “topical” bent—it has not aged. The events depicted could still happen pretty much as they do on the screen. It is still wildly funny and wildly terrifying. It’s as Howard Hawks once said, “The great trouble is people trying to be funny. If they don’t try to be funny, then they are funny.” To which, “Amen.” These people are completely sober. There is not a moment when they signal they are just kidding. This is probably because Kubrick, though one of the most intelligent men I’ve ever met, never in my hearing cracked a joke. He was all intensity—ferociously so. No one on a Kubrick movie was ever allowed to fool around. People around the movie game were sometimes dubious about him. Those who actually made movies were awed by him; those who reviewed them or otherwise theorized about them often had their doubts. He seemed not to have any idea how funny he was.
The Monty Python troupe was definit
ely trying to be funny as it set forth in pursuit of Monty Python and the Holy Grail in 1975. And they were. The film was produced on an absurdly low budget, which is why they clopped along with coconut shells imitating the sound of horses’ hooves. There was no budget for actual horses, and no time for, shall we say, the nuances of plotting. (At the press screening in New York, they gave out the shells as souvenirs, which my children and I proudly bore away with us at the end of the show.) They were an extremely merry group and totally without pretense, which was the best thing about them. They just sort of banged along their loose plot line, advising us to “look on the bright side of life” (as they did in the very good sequel Life of Brian, which ends with the boys crucified, but game as ever. That was the thing about the lads: They just didn’t give a damn. I got into modest trouble with William F. Buckley on that one. I saw no reason why religion was not fair game for satire. He begged to differ. Snarled to differ, actually. A nice little dustup).
But maybe we need to make a serious point here. This is actually one of the bravest films I write about in this book. If you cannot make a movie sending up religion, you don’t really have a free screen. Everything has to be fair game in the movies—as it is in all the other arts. This film—which is not as flat-out funny as Grail—claims that right (pomposity coming here) for the screen. It is, to my knowledge, the only movie to do so. We obviously live in a secularizing age, which proceeds apace. I haven’t seen Grail since it was released. I don’t know if I’d still think it was funny or challenging or whatever. But that’s not the point. The point is that it got made, a small miracle.
Keepers: The Greatest Films of a Moviegoing Lifetime Page 22