The scene is a highway, at night. A girl, naked under her raincoat, is trying to stop a passing car. In despair, she finally throws herself in front of an oncoming Jaguar, which goes into a skid to avoid hitting her. “Get in!” Then, in the road in front of the car, the opening credits roll in reverse, the most original opening in years, punctuated by the girl’s heavy breathing.
It is pointless to try to sum up the plot of Kiss Me Deadly. You have to see it a few times before you realize it is very solidly constructed, and that it tells an ultimately quite logical story.
The pretty young hitchhiker is murdered. Mike Hammer, the private detective who owns the Jaguar, investigates the murder. About three-quarters of the way through the film, he is shot dead and then three minutes later he revives. If Kiss Me Deadly is the most original American film since Orson Welles’ The Lady from Shanghai, it still does not possess the latter’s multiple resonances, and it scarcely merits our attention on the level of intrigue.
The Mickey Spillane novel on which the film is based is apparently also mediocre. Ten people kill each other over several million dollars that are locked away in a white iron box. The film’s authors were shrewd enough to use all the book’s conventionally precise details to show off the abstract, almost fairy-tale aspect of the story. Thus, in the film, the box contains not bank notes, but a kind of fireball that gives off radiation and burns anyone who comes into contact with it. When the hero, opening the box, finds his wrist burned like the skin of a Hiroshima survivor, a policeman, looking at it, makes a remark that turns the whole story suddenly very serious: “Listen to me, Mike, mark my words. I’m going to say a few neutral words…but try to figure out what they mean: Manhattan Project…Los Alamos…Trinity.” This is Aldrich’s subterfuge to avoid using the word “atomic” even once during a film which will end in a cataclysm: The Pandora’s box is opened by an overanxious, too-curious girl, the “sun” burns everything around it. As the hero and his mistress take refuge under the sea, “The End” appears on the screen.
To appreciate Kiss Me Deadly, you have to love movies passionately and to have a vivid memory of those evenings when you saw Scarface, Under Capricorn, Le Sang d’un poète (Blood of a Poet), Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne, and The Lady from Shanghai. We have loved films that had only one idea, or twenty, or even fifty. In Aldrich’s films, it is not unusual to encounter a new idea with each shot. In this movie the inventiveness is so rich that we don’t know what to look at—the images are almost too full, too fertile. Watching a film like this is such an intense experience that we want it to last for hours. It is easy to picture its author as a man overflowing with vitality, as much at ease behind a camera as Henry Miller facing a blank page. This is the film of a young director who is not yet worrying about restraint. He works with a freedom and gaiety that remind us of Jean Renoir at the same age, shooting Tire au flanc in the forest of Fontainebleau.
There can be no doubt that the revelation of Robert Aldrich will be the cinema event of 1955. When the year began, we didn’t even know his name. Then came World for Ransom, a witty little film shot under conditions that resemble those of home movies; Bronco Apache, poetic and delicate; Vera Cruz, a violent farce; The Big Knife, which has just set off a strong reaction at the Venice festival; and finally Kiss Me Deadly, which despite its adapted screenplay, combines all the qualities of his earlier works.
You must see Kiss Me Deadly. If you know the conditions under which films are made today, you can only admire the extraordinary freedom of this movie, which, surprisingly enough, may be compared in some ways to Jean Cocteau’s Le Sang d’un poète, a favorite classic of the ciné-clubs.
—1955
Vera Cruz is above all a dazzling lesson in story construction. I shall try to sum up the screenplay in the clearest possible way.
I have deliberately stripped the screenplay to its bare bones to bring out its ingenuity. I’ve even left out some important points. But what is clear is that each scene would justify a film all by itself; each has its own dramatic structure and is turned inside out, as Sartre would say, like a glove.
Vera Cruz is built on the repetition of themes: two encirclements by the Juaristas; two thefts of the same loot; Cooper saves Lancaster’s life and Lancaster Cooper’s. I have left out the role of Nina, which is perfect: a) she is caught by a bandit’s lasso; b) Cooper frees her by catching the fool with his lasso; c) Nina thanks Cooper with a kiss on the mouth d) during which she steals his wallet; e) as he starts to leave, she offers him an apple; f) he starts to reach for his wallet to pay for it, and g) she tells him “Don’t bother; it’s free”; h) later, they meet and Cooper scolds her for stealing his wallet. “Have you looked carefully for it?” He finds it in his pocket. It’s Nina who brings Cooper to the Juaristas. In the next-to-last scene we see them walking toward each other. We don’t see them in the last scene.
But this Borden Chase story, adapted by Roland Kibbee and James R. Webb and directed by Robert Aldrich, is more than a painstakingly constructed mechanism of weights and balances like a Swiss watch-works. One example: At the end of the first part, Lancaster tells the story of his life to Cooper. His father had been killed in a card game by Ace Hannah, who afterward adopted the orphaned child. This single moment of weakness, the only one he had ever given in to in his lifetime, turned out to be his downfall. Lancaster, grown up, killed him in turn. Ace Hannah had been a philosopher: “Never do anything unless you get something out of it.” And Lancaster’s whole behavior pattern reflects this brand of morality. He admires Cooper only because Cooper also follows it sometimes, although unwittingly. Their conversations are full of: “Ace Hannah would have liked that,” or “If Ace Hannah were here, he’d be proud of us.” And when they are angry at each other Lancaster says, “Ace Hannah would never have been a friend of yours,” and Cooper replies, “Who says I’d want him for a friend?” Lancaster believes he, not Cooper, is the spiritual heir of Ace Hannah. Hannah, however, is probably a combination of Lancaster’s trickiness and Cooper’s intelligence. All the characters in Vera Cruz, from the Countess to the Emperor, are defined in Hannah’s terms, even when they couldn’t know he had ever existed. Everybody betrays everybody else; everybody lies, and all know how to read the truth in others’ faces. The Countess introduces Lancaster to a ship’s captain, who then walks out leaving them alone. Lancaster slaps her hard across the face: “That guy looked at me the way you look at someone who’s going to die; are you trying to get rid of me?”
Is Vera Cruz an intellectual Western? Yes, in a way, though it is far removed from the others—the facetious High Noon, and the outright phoniness of Shane or Treasure of the Sierra Madre. Vera Cruz made me realize that you cannot criticize John Huston’s movies on principle. They fail because of a lack of style and weak direction. Vera Cruz is precisely a “Huston” movie that succeeds.
Aldrich’s direction is a little showy and full of effects. Some are excellent and others superfluous, but they all serve the story.
It is a shame that many of my colleagues have completely missed the point about Vera Cruz. Some of them, understanding nothing at all about it, denounced it as pompous and childish. It was Victor Hugo who asked, “Who are all these children, not one of whom knows how to laugh?”
—1955
The Big Knife is adapted from a play by Clifford Odets which had some success on Broadway, and which Jean Renoir plans to bring to the Paris stage.
The action is set in contemporary Hollywood, in the home of a star, Charlie Castle (Jack Palance), whose wife (Ida Lupino) is about to leave him. A few months earlier, Charlie’s studio had rescued him from scandal. Driving with a starlet, Charlie had run over a child and fled the scene. The studio’s publicity director had done a few months in jail in Charlie’s place, and the starlet’s salary had gone up tenfold.
A suspicious gossip columnist wants to expose the affair, and she could raise a considerable ruckus.
In addition, it seems Charlie could win his wife back if he’d give up everything and leave with her. But the studio head has no intention of allowing that to happen. If his star doesn’t renew his contract for another seven years, the very people who had hushed up the scandal will turn on him.
At the moment when everything seems settled and the reconciled couple are getting ready to leave Hollywood, Charlie kills himself to escape a world whose laws he can no longer live with, and to escape his own ignominy.
We may well wonder if it is interesting to make films out of plays, especially, as in this case, if the director doesn’t allow himself to adapt them freely. I believe it’s natural for a filmmaker, fascinated by the technique of his own art as well as possessing experience in the theater, to be tempted to stamp and embellish a play with a certain literary quality, shaping it by using the endless possibilities of cinematic editing.
Robert Aldrich has not merely filmed a play; he has indeed directed a theater production cinematically; he has “edited” and filmed an arch-theatrical production. All the pounding on tables, the arms raised to heaven, the about-faces with the whole body clearly come from the stage. But Aldrich imposes his rhythm on them, a tempo that is all his own. Even his least accomplished movies are fascinating.
With his lyricism, his modernity, his contempt for the slightest vulgarity, his desire to universalize and stylize the subjects he treats, Aldrich’s effects remind us constantly of Jean Cocteau and Orson Welles, whose films he cannot have missed seeing.
The action of The Big Knife is moved forward not by the interplay of emotions or of actions, but only—and this is both rarer and more beautiful—through exploration of the moral construction of the characters. As the film progresses, the producer becomes more and more the producer, the starlet more and more the starlet, until the moment of shock and explosion at the end.
Films of this kind need exceptional acting, and in this case we are more than satisfied by Jack Palance, Ida Lupino, Shelley Winters, and especially Rod Steiger, who plays the producer magnificently. He is a patriot, a democrat, both fierce and sentimental, completely mad.
Aside from presenting a very exact picture of Hollywood, The Big Knife is the most refined and intelligent American film we have seen for a number of months.
—1955
An open letter to Mr. Chan, Chinese detective, Beverly Hills, California:
DEAR MR. CHAN:
Please begin an investigation, with the assistance of honorable number one son and honorable number two son, into the reasons why the Charlie Chan series keeps getting worse. Warner Oland much talent, Sidney Toler little talent, Roland Winters no talent at all. Norman Foster honorable director, William Beaudine not honorable; work always bungled. On tablet of jade is written: “Folly is the sister of genius,” but Charlie Chan series of films less folly every day than day before. Send explanation immediately. Payment in Chinese dollars. May Confucius be with you.
—1953
Leon Pool (Wendell Corey) is a weekend gangster, an amateur. He gets involved in a holdup at the bank where he works as a teller. As the police close in, he barricades himself in his house with his pretty wife, who knows nothing about his activities. Police lieutenant Joseph Cotten aims carelessly and kills the timid gangster’s wife. The widower is sentenced to ten years at hard labor, but because he is so well behaved, he is kept under light security. He shoots a guard on the prison farm where he works, and he escapes. He returns to the city where the holdup happened with only one idea: to kill the wife of the cop who killed his wife. Just as he is about to succeed, he is caught. Disguised as a woman to throw the police off his trail, he is betrayed, a few seconds before he can fire, by his carelessly rolled-up trousers which fall down from under his skirt.
It’s an amusing plot. Fritz Lang would have refused to direct it unless he could have reversed the end to show the vengeance of the just man, his favorite theme. But in this case, the enterprise limps from the very beginning, precisely because the plot is so offbeat. In a slick film every touch of boldness is a pleasant surprise, but in a daring film even the slightest compromise is exasperating.
The killer, created by John and Kard Hawkins in a short story, and by Harold Medford, who wrote the screenplay, is likable from the start. He is fearful and timid; he suffers from an inferiority complex which his admiring wife, the only one who never makes fun of him, is gradually curing. During the war in the Pacific, Leon Pool hardly killed any “Japs” because he was too gentle a soldier, timorous and clumsy. His buddies nicknamed him “fog.” His teller’s salary is inadequate and he gets involved in the holdup to raise his standard of living. When Joseph Cotten kills his wife, Pool’s one idea is to kill Cotten, a notion that would occur to a simple, uncomplicated man, unburdened by logic and the constrictions of traditional morality. Unfortunately, the screenwriters begin to make concessions at this point. Pool has to kill the prison guard so the audience will turn against him and his desire for revenge will appear unjustified. The logic of the character falls apart; the good guy becomes a killer, the corpses pile up to no purpose, and the film loses interest except for a few moments of madness when slightly ridiculous but beautiful ideas surface, as when Pool, with the innocent air of a frightened duck, appears in the street disguised as a woman.
But Boetticher is a likable filmmaker, whose earlier work for Universal we must now forget, since his contract there forced him to spend from 1948 to 1955 making inane (if sometimes very handsome) Westerns.
—1956
Cinema was born with well-defined genres: Westerns, thrillers, sophisticated comedies. It was born American and remains so. I am just as certain that each genre is heroic. For all that its sanctity amuses us, the so-called American comedy has adopted sanctity as one of its favorite themes: Capra’s Mr. Deeds and Irene Girard in Europe 51 climb similar calvaries. The greatest filmmakers of the world have always worked in all genres and still do. And they also know the art of moving and amusing within the same scene (True Heart Susie, Sergeant York). The greatest actors—those who emerge triumphant without direction—are also capable of this art: Grant, Cooper, Stewart, Fonda, Bogart.
Capra, a controversial genius but a genius all the same, improvised the essentials: echoes (Deeds); a tuba, the walls of Jericho, hitchhiking (It Happened One Night). You couldn’t fail to shed tears watching Stewart weep in the telephone booth in It’s a Wonderful Life, biting his lips, tearing his handkerchief, pulling it around his neck, twisting the telephone wire. Another comedy with sanctity as its subject was Good Sam by the great Leo McCarey.
Some of Hawks’s venerable films, like I Was a Male War Bride, or A Song Is Born pushed comedy forward; but Cukor still gives us movies like the earlier ones, and we shall not reproach him with it, because he is who he is and everything he does is fine. I’m aware that these observations may seem disjointed, but what am I to do? “You like Cukor, you like It Should Happen to You; write a review.” I said, “OK.” But the trouble is that Cukor isn’t the kind of director you write about; he’s someone to talk about with friends on the street or sitting in a café.
Garson Kanin, who has talent to burn (but who is no fool and is saving it for winter) has dreamed up the idea that a young woman named Gladys Glover (not an opportunist by any means, she simply wants to be known, for no particular reason) spends her last penny to rent a gigantic billboard on which she has her name inscribed in giant letters. This is not the place to explain how the billboard proliferates; the point is that Gladys becomes a celebrity, absurdly enough, for no reason. It is as gratuitous as the crimes that fascinated André Gide. But, if gratuitous crime doesn’t pay, that is by no means true of unjustified celebrity. In the eyes of her mother, America, Gladys becomes the symbol of the average American girl, a kind of Miss Person of 1953.
The theme of It Should Happen to You is marvelous. It is much more than a tasteful diversion. If you look carefully you see the whole mechanism of celebrity against a background of the absurd. The moral of the story is that it is easier to find glory than to justify it, and that such glory has little meaning since it is acquired within a society that is unconscious of its absurdity.
Cukor, the director, and Garson Kanin, the writer, have invented a curious, eccentric, even absurd, character for the actress. If we laugh at her countless blunders, she inspires enough sympathy to keep us going during the “dead” times that are necessary to set up Kanin’s gags.
Comedy is a noble genre and, since all Hollywood genres are heroic, its comedy is heroic too. Everyone knows it’s harder to make people laugh than to make them cry—everyone knows it but no one believes it. You explain to someone that it was more difficult, and more authentic, to make It Should Happen to You than some particular war film. They get their backs up, they accuse you of having gotten your values backward. To understand, it suffices to imagine two typewriters. Sitting at one, a fellow is writing a mighty epic of Pearl Harbor; at the other, someone is writing It Should Happen to You. The first fellow is putting in a few hours’ work; in the second case, there has to be genius. In the first case, you can get by with a well-tried formula: war is monstrous but exalting. In the second there must be: a) an idea from which to start; b) an idea to arrive at; c) gags; d) recoveries. Some comedies have only two characters, but if you give the couple one or two children as you go along, it’ll take another two weeks or a month of work to create the children, to find ideas for them, to compose their dialogue. This is why we can say in all seriousness that It Should Happen to You is a masterpiece. To keep up the rhythm for ninety minutes with no letup, to keep the smiles constant even between laughs, to direct people that way…that takes a master.
—1954
Bom…bom…bom…bomm. Bom…bom…bom…bomm. To the strains of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, four or five American soldiers liberate a German village with nothing but hand weapons. Ludwig von Fuller, who doesn’t fool around when he’s making movies, gives us the illusion that we’re watching the entire American army. A wounded GI is cared for by a young German girl, Helga—an idyllic touch, love, Wagner takes over for Beethoven. Samuel Fuller, who handles his camera with great style, takes his forbidden lovers on a honeymoon on the Rhine that is straight out of Guillaume Apollinaire.
But Helga has a younger brother fascinated by Hitler, whose corpse is still smoking. To make him understand the horrible truth of Nazism, Helga takes him to the Nuremberg trials.
In the courtroom we see closeup shots of Helga and the brother watching…watching what? Reverse shots from newsreels: Nazi torturers attempting to justify themselves before the tribunal. It’s a mark of Fuller’s cleverness that from this point on, one out of every two shots was filmed by him (shot) and the other (a reverse shot) is from the archives. But Fuller, who keeps his eye on the ball and has more than one trick in his bag, goes one step further with his effective ruses: he brings a 16 mm. projector into the courtroom which will show those who are attending the trial (and, of course, the audience of Verboten) those atrocious images that were filmed when the camps were liberated and which have become famous—all that dark material to which Resnais gave definitive form in Nuit et Brouillard.
The Paris press has generally looked down on Verboten and made fun of it, and I have just described it in a similar tone, but now I’d like to say why I liked it and why I admire Samuel Fuller.
To make a completely successful film means imbuing it with qualities that are varied and almost contradictory, a difficult and rare achievement. It’s often said that a film is “cinema” or “not cinema” without saying precisely why. For me, a filmmaker must know how to make or show something better than the others do. That chap, for example, is not a good storyteller but he directs actors better than someone else; another one spoils scenes, but every shot is perfect; a third piles up three hundred prosaic shots that add up to a powerful movie; a fourth has wonderful camera work; a fifth allows things to get confused but he knows how to create real characters, etcetera, etcetera. In short, no film is a total success, and it’s awfully easy to criticize what it’s not. It’s our job to try to discover what it is.
As I watched Verboten, I realized all that I still have to learn to dominate a film perfectly, to give it rhythm and style, to bring out the beauty in each scene without taking refuge in extrinsic effects, to bring out the poetry as simply as possible without ever forcing it.
Samuel Fuller is not a beginner, he is a primitive; his mind is not rudimentary, it is rude; his films are not simplistic, they are simple, and it is this simplicity that I most admire. We can’t learn anything from an Eisenstein or an Orson Welles, because their genius makes them inimitable, and we only make ourselves ridiculous when we try to imitate them by placing the camera on the floor or on the ceiling. On the other hand, we have everything to learn from those talented American directors like Samuel Fuller who place their cameras at “the height of the human eye” (Howard Hawks), who “don’t look, they find” (Picasso). It’s impossible to say to yourself, faced with a Samuel Fuller film, “It should have been done differently, faster, this way or that.” Things are what they are, they are filmed as they must be; this is direct cinema, uncriticizable, irreproachable, “given” cinema, rather than assimilated, digested, or reflected upon. Fuller doesn’t take time to think; it is clear that he is in his glory when he is shooting.
That a committed filmmaker, overwhelmed by the strength and power of the documents from the Nuremburg trials on the horrors of Nazism and the camps, should have imagined a fictitious story around them so as to insert them into life, to remove them from cruel objectivity in order to draw a moral lesson, is a powerful and beautiful idea for cinema. Especially so when you think that the American distributors never wanted to buy the rights to Nuit et Brouillard. That this filmmaker’s work manages to match the strength, crudity, and truth of those famous documents, as did Balzac’s the Civil War, is what I find fabulous about Verboten.
I shall go to see this film again because I always come away from Samuel Fuller films both admiring and jealous. I like to take lessons in filmmaking.
—1960
There are a number of ways to tell the story of Baby Doll, but I think the plot, as imagined by Tennessee Williams and filmed by Elia Kazan, was only a pretext for the former to delineate a woman’s portrait, and the latter to direct an actress.
Nonetheless there is something quite new on the screen here, which harmonizes well with the sort of experimentation that is being pursued by some directors who have interested us this year. Carroll Baker, the heroine of Baby Doll, takes her place in the sun beside Marilyn Monroe in Bus Stop, Brigitte Bardot in Et Dieu créa la Femme, and Ingrid Bergman in Eléna et les Hommes.
What is new here, and fairly daring, is that sex is the only focus of attention. The feelings that are portrayed, basically Karl Malden’s jealousy, are merely the occasion of deliberate and fierce derision.
The love-doll, almost twenty, married already but still a virgin as may still be possible only along the banks of the Mississippi, is a baby-woman, a thumb-sucker, but clearheaded and without illusions to the point of cynicism. She is the maiden wife of a baker who kneads bread as his only fantasy. Now arrives on the scene another baker, a Sicilian, a maker of bastards, an injured flier whose hangar has been burned down by an arsonist. He has headed home to find the culprit and get revenge.
The authors (worse luck for them) don’t want the audience to know whether the Sicilian wants only to avenge himself on the old husband (the arsonist and cuckold-to-be) or whether, in the middle of his quest for vengeance, his attention will be utterly distracted by the possibility of ravishing an available maidenhead. Right in the midst of their love duet, between the seduction scene and when they go to sleep in the nursery, the camera wanders away for five minutes searching for Malden. It finds him.
If we consider that a lot of French and American directors never manage to illustrate their text, we must take off our hats to Kazan who throughout Baby Doll succeeds intentionally in filming action that bears no relation at all to the dialogue. The characters think one thing, say another, and convey yet a third.
Kazan is no storyteller; his talent is for description rather than narrative. He never succeeds in making a unified film, just a certain number of scenes. His cinematic unit is neither the shot nor the film itself, but the scene. If Baby Doll, from one viewpoint, is stronger than East of Eden (if not more successful, at least more daring), it is because essentially it consists of two great scenes, one of which is as long, detailed, and powerful as the second third of Queen Kelly. (The comparison between these two films seems foolish only at first sight.)
Baby Doll is almost two hours long. The first thirty minutes are exposition. Precisely at the thirtieth minute, Karl Malden introduces Eli Wallach, the Sicilian, to his young wife and leaves. The first scene between these two perfectly matched partners lasts exactly a half-hour; their conversation begins on the front steps, continues behind the house, then in the old car, again in front of the house, and finally on the swing.
There, after Wallach’s sly questioning, really a cross-examination, he becomes certain that Malden is the arsonist; the camera draws closer and closer to their faces, which move gradually toward each other; the scene ends with this suggestion of inevitable contact.
At the sixtieth minute, Carroll Baker breaks away abruptly and, followed by a grinning Wallach, rejoins Malden as the loving wife. Malden, coarser than ever, slaps her. (How many cuckolds owe their misfortune to an undeserved slap?)
The second hour of the film is also made up of two long, even scenes: the first takes place between Wallach and Carroll Baker outdoors and then in the house; the second shows us the household à trois in confrontation. The third half-hour of the film: They return to the house, Baker describes her marriage, there is a promise of lemonade for two, a great number by Wallach concerning evil geniuses, Baby Doll’s fears, diabolism, a paper denouncing Malden signed by the girl, laughs, intimacy in the nursery, and cut to…
Malden is coming back like an idiot from the town. Final halfhour scene; Malden’s jealousy, his horrible suspicions, the transformation of Baby Doll (a woman now), a tense dinner, a tragicomic afterdinner drink, and a fantastic chase in the night, ending with Wallach’s takeoff in a fishtail. Will he, the most interesting character in the film, return tomorrow?
The handsome Sicilian belongs to an ancient race; he wears a little flat cap at a rakish angle, a black shirt with thin white stripes open at the chest; he carries a stick in his fist and uses it to emphasize his sarcastic remarks. With his barrel chest and opera singer’s carriage, his is an impressive presence. Above all, there is his clear, animal glance which gleams out of two small eyes that are filled with insatiable lust, and not least, there is the fox’s body ready to slip between the sheets to eat his neighbor’s chicken, in this case, Baby Doll. All this is a constant ingredient of this film which is held together by the desirability of a woman.
All great filmmakers aspire to be free from the constraints of drama; they dream of making a film without progression, without psychology, in which the spectators’ interest would be aroused by means other than changes of place and time, the cleverness of the dialogue, or the characters’ comings and goings. Un Condamné à Mort s’est échappé (A Man Escaped), Lola Montès, Woman on the Beach, and Rear Window all achieve a considerable amount in this tricky game, each one in its own way.
In Baby Doll, Kazan has succeeded almost completely, by means of a style of direction that is unique, in making this sort of film, while simultaneously mocking the emotions that are portrayed and analyzed in conventional films.
What bothers Kazan, what he cannot seem to manage, are the transition scenes involving several characters. In Baby Doll he succeeds in dodging them except at the beginning of the film, and from the moment the Sicilian starts to court the woman-child, we are watching a film in which each gesture and glance is made to count, so perfect is its precision. It is a film masterfully dominated by one man.
Kazan’s talent, which is essentially of a decorative nature, is more effective with subjects of this type (those that come from Broadway, we could say quite simply) than those laborious social theses which are necessarily dishonest.
We know now that Elia Kazan has nothing more to say to us than what his screenplay writers have written for him, and at the same time that he is the man who knows best of all how to reveal actors to themselves.
The second time we see Baby Doll, we discover a second film which is still richer. Whether it is a work of genius or mere talent, whether decadent or generous, profound or brilliant, Baby Doll is fascinating.
—1957
A Face in the Crowd, which I believe to be a great and beautiful work whose importance transcends the dimensions of a cinema review, was a vivid disappointment to the American public and to the French public as well—almost surely because it is the exact opposite of On the Waterfront and because one must attack today whomever one flattered yesterday.
Does that mean that Budd Schulberg and Elia Kazan have changed their colors? No. But On the Waterfront, a screenplay that passed from hand to hand for five years, was so emasculated by the end that all that remained of its anti-fascist intentions was an unconsciously but nonetheless basically demagogic movie.
This time out, Schulberg and Kazan were their own producers, and thus have been able to bring us a film that conforms entirely to their initial intentions. The result is sensational.
Demagoguery, because it contains a certain euphoria, a good-guy aspect, is pre-eminently American. It is slowly but surely gaining a foothold in France in journalism, radio, and television by dint of the fact that the media are more and more inspired by American methods every day.
In the film it all begins when a pretty girl, the niece of the owner of a small radio station, has an idea for a program to be called “A Face in the Crowd.” The program will let the man in the street speak or sing into a mike.
As she develops the program, she unearths a bearded brute in a prison in a scene that is the most important moment of the film. It is the trigger that will catapult this man, Rhodes, out from the underbelly of society. She asks his name, and he answers, “Rhodes.” “Rhodes what?…I see, just Rhodes.” She takes the microphone and says, “His name is Rhodes but his last name is Lonesome.” The spirit of the film is contained in that sentence. A small journalistic trick starts the whole machinery. The girl is honest and sensitive; nevertheless, all the fraudulence of the journalistic world is fully expressed in that little trick: “His last name is Lonesome.” We await his reaction. He may become angry and stalk off. What happens is that he looks at the girl (Patricia Neal), is silent for a moment, hesitates, and then breaks into laughter. From this point on, whatever may happen, whatever his crimes and however innocent she may be, we are unable to pity the good girl; she represents corruption, he is the corrupted. It’s he who has a right to complain right up to the end.
How will Rhodes act in front of a mike? He stutters, but he doesn’t let it throw him. He offers improvised, offbeat little songs and familiar chatter, which his female listeners eat up; he talks to them about his mother, about laundry soaps that roughen their hands, about the dishes that have to be done again and again; he seduces, astonishes, wheedles, and little by little he has America safely in his pocket.
He moves from radio to television, his destiny lifts him higher and higher each day, though his natural spontaneity doesn’t follow suit. He is frank; he puts his foot in his mouth; he invites a black woman on camera; he puts down the brand of mattress that is advertised on the show. In America, politics always overlaps show business, as show business overlaps advertising. As a result, Lonesome soon finds his support solicited by candidates for the presidency. The scene in which he educates an old politician-general is absolutely great; he tries to teach him how to be popular: Don’t keep your lips closed, learn how to make fun of yourself, come on camera with a pet—a dog or cat—in your arms.
And, on every landing of this staircase to glory, there is a carnival atmosphere, valets, unmade beds, empty and hysterical frenzy. Girls sleep beneath his photograph. The more he is loved by the public, the more he is detested behind the scenes by all those who are living off his powerful personality. Neal, who is clearly his mistress, though deceived several times a day, hangs onto him with all her strength, and each time she manages to get him alone for five minutes, he becomes once again her fragile baby.
The end, which is of necessity somewhat contrived, as Rhodes is publicly unmasked, comes through as truly and authentically as the rest because it is verifiable that these inflated human sausages explode in short order, as the capricious career of Senator Joseph McCarthy (whom the authors had in mind) proves.
That A Face in the Crowd was directed by Elia Kazan says in itself that it is a film acted to perfection. Andy Griffith’s interpretation is indeed a performance—but it belongs to Kazan; never has an actor been so completely carried by a director.
There’s no denying that the film lacks consistency, but to hell with consistency! What’s important is not its structure but its unassailable spirit, its power, and what I dare call its necessity. The usual fault with “honest” films is their softness, timidity and anesthetic neutrality. This film is passionate, exalted, fierce, as inexorable as a “Mythology” of Roland Barthes—and, like it, a pleasure for the mind.
—1957
I have just seen Paths of Glory, an independently produced American film that was shot in Belgium after the French authorities refused to allow it to be made in France. The filmmakers, I believe, have no intention of even submitting their work to the censorship commission.
Paths of Glory is adapted from a novel of the same title which is based on a true event—an event that, because the truth has been kept fairly quiet, mars the usual heroic history of World War I.
As the film opens, we are present at a conversation between two French generals portrayed by George Macready, with his scarred face, and the Hollywood actor of French descent, Adolphe Menjou (not his first role as turncoat, since it appears that, despite “public opinion,” * he denounced his old friend Charlie Chaplin to the House Committee on Un-American Activities). Menjou, speaking for general headquarters, asks Macready to capture a trench network considered impregnable, whatever the cost. The real purpose is to quiet down the criticisms of the press. At first Macready refuses to sacrifice his men to no purpose, but then gives in when Menjou promises him personal advancement. As a result, the general deliberately sends an entire company of brave men to their death, led gallantly by their colonel, Kirk Douglas.
The trenches are, in truth, impregnable, and the attack scene becomes a frightful, bloody slaughterhouse. This desperate advance is the best segment of the film. At the height of his madness, the general orders an artillery barrage on his own troops as they are pinned down by the enemy; the artillery officers refuse to carry out the order. When the few survivors return, the general orders three of them, chosen by lot, to be shot as examples of cowardice. The film ends with the scene of the execution; one of the three, mortally wounded in a prison fight in which he had attacked the chaplain, is tied down to a stretcher. Kirk Douglas, in a rage, decides to get the general; he muses aloud on the remark of Samuel Johnson: “Patriotism is the last refuge of scoundrels.”
This film, which was withdrawn from a Brussels movie house at the demand of Belgian veterans, will never be released in France, not as long as there are soldiers around, in any case. It’s a shame, because it is very beautiful from a number of points of view. It is admirably directed, even better than The Killing, with many very fluid long shots. The splendid camera work captures the plastic style of that epoch—we think of the war as it was pictured in the photographs of L’Illustration.
The film’s weakness—what keeps it from being an irrefutable indictment—is a certain lack of psychological credibility in the “villains’” behavior. There were, certainly, during World War I, a number of similar “war crimes,” barrages aimed at our own troops out of error and ignorance and confusion rather than from personal ambition. Cowardice is one thing, cynicism another. This general, who is both cowardly and cynical, is not very believable. The screenplay would have been strengthened if one officer, a coward, had panicked and ordered a barrage on his own troops, and another officer had had the three survivors shot as an example.
Similarly, Robert Aldrich in Attack, irritates us with psychological error when he has the frightened captain push over with his foot the revolver that had fallen to the ground, the gun the lieutenant whom he had betrayed was going to use to kill him. It’s easier to forgive Kubrick a technical error, which is nevertheless obvious; Colonel Kirk Douglas several times salutes his superiors bareheaded!
I would have thought that Stanley Kubrick, who from the start had decided not to try to distribute his film in France, could have found better examples of military abuses in more recent wars. They abound: pillaging by French officers; the Indochina war with all the scandals we know so well; the Algerian war, with which, after Henri Alleg’s experience, the director could have posed his “question” more effectively.
In any case, despite its psychological oversimplification and its theatricality, Paths of Glory is an important film that establishes the talent and energy of a new American director, Stanley Kubrick.
—1958
There are two things about The Night of the Hunter that make it an important event: it’s the first time the American actor Charles Laughton (whose performances in Mutiny on the Bounty, The Private Life of Henry VIII, and The Paradine Case are quite rightly famous) has directed a film; and it marks the return to the screen of Lillian Gish, the greatest actress from the silent movies.
The subject matter disconcerts: a father is paid ten thousand dollars to commit a murder; he hides the money away in a rag doll, and makes his two small children swear to keep it absolutely secret until they are grown up and can use the money. Soon after, he is arrested, sentenced to death, and executed.
His former cellmate (Robert Mitchum), a preacher who is in jail for theft, is now released. To achieve his life’s ambition to build a chapel, he determines to get hold of the ten thousand dollars. He only knows of its existence, not where it is hidden. He marries his cellmate’s widow (Shelley Winters), refuses to sleep with her, and then kills her when she discovers him grilling her children to find out where the money is. The children, a boy and girl, terrified of their stepfather, flee with the doll in their arms. An old lady (Lillian Gish) takes them in and turns in Mitchum. The boy, reliving his father’s arrest, rips the doll open and offers the money to the unlucky preacher-murderer right under the eyes of the police.
I should hasten to add that the preacher has “love” tattooed on the fingers of his right hand, and “hate” on the left, so you’ll know that this is no ordinary film. The Night of the Hunter is a bizarre adventure; it must be regarded as cruel farce, or better still as a parable about the relativity of good and evil. All the characters are good, even the apparently evil preacher.
Screenplays such as this are not the way to launch your career as a Hollywood director. The film runs counter to the rules of commercialism; it will probably be Laughton’s single experience as a director. It’s a pity, for despite failures of style, The Night of the Hunter is immensely inventive. It’s like a horrifying news item retold by small children. In spite of Stanley Cortez’s gorgeous photography—Cortez is the man who shot The Magnificent Ambersons in such exquisite light—the production flounders between the Scandinavian and the German styles, touching expressionism but forgetting to keep on Griffith’s track. Still, Laughton isn’t afraid to knock over a few red lights and some traffic cops in his unusual film. It makes us fall in love again with an experimental cinema that truly experiments, and a cinema of discovery that, in fact, discovers.
—1956
The original source of this film is a novel by William March on which Maxwell Anderson based a play. John Lee Mahin’s screenplay is taken, I believe, from the play rather than the novel. Mervyn LeRoy directed the film. Why has there been so much working over of a single property? Probably because there’s a pretty successful idea here: an eight-year-old girl who skips happily through life to the tune of Au clair de la lune is actually a precocious criminal, the murderer of an old woman, a little boy, another old woman, and finally a derelict named, like the director, LeRoy.
If censorship were ever justified, it would be by prohibiting films like this where exhibitionism competes with vulgarity. This is an overblown and empty vehicle, a natural to make a lot of money for a handful of backers who rack their brains year in and year out to find a “good story,” as if the heart of the seventh lively art were the lucky discovery or the clever idea, whereas the most beautiful and fascinating film of the year is the one with the fewest events, Un Condamné à Mort s’est échappé.
The Bad Seed is a useless movie, like many others, all the more scandalous because it hides its futility behind a situation of extreme seriousness, and childhood is made to pay the price. Despite its baseness, it’s perfectly designed to please the snobs: “Go see The Bad Seed, darling, it’s terrific.”
To launch the film, the press was invited to a luncheon on the occasion of Mervyn LeRoy’s arrival in Paris. I recall that I ate very well, but that’s hardly the issue. I’d prefer never to have met Mervyn LeRoy, since now I have no desire to see anything he’ll ever make again.
LeRoy is a pioneer, an artisan who came to films at a time when directing was manual labor, a physical performance. He is one of those filmmakers who are always available. Having no preferences, no themes, no obsessions, no style and very little temperament, they never know what films to make. They make comedies, war films, Westerns, melodramas, musical comedies, and occasionally direct a screenplay that pretends to insight, like The Bad Seed, which will attract the critics’ attention.
The Bad Seed is clumsily directed but well enough acted. The actors had played their roles during a long theater run and had grown into them. The little girl is quite good. But the movie is to be avoided, all the more so since the adaptation is careless. The ending, which follows neither the novel nor the play, is quite simply ridiculous.
—1957
As devoted as they are to liberty, equality and fraternity, the French are also devoted to ceremony. The coronation of a Queen of England increases the sale of television sets ten times. I’ll never forget the sighs of pleasure that ran through the five thousand spectators in the Gaumont-Palace movie theater one day in 1948 when, in an American film directed by Otto Preminger, Charles II says to Linda Darnell: “Amber, you don’t love me and you never have.”
Of the fifty-two covers a year on Paris Match, how many do not show a princess, queen, empress, or someone of the sort? But this is 1957, when it is our governments that would cheerfully declare, “The State is us.” Which brings me to Anastasia, a most mediocre film which has for its theme an historical enigma, one of the stupidest and emptiest subjects in a category that never fails to fill the theaters.
Docile slave that he is, Anatole Litvak directed Anastasia with laziness, lack of imagination and bad taste that even his advanced age cannot excuse. He was chosen to direct Ingrid Bergman, recently returned to Hollywood, because Vivien Leigh whom he directed badly in The Deep Blue Sea received an acting award at the Venice Festival (another proof that the jurors are charged with responsibility beyond their competence).
I have seen the best Ingrid Bergman films, those directed by Hitchcock, Rossellini, and Renoir, five and six times each. Those directors knew how to push her to her limit, each of them in a different direction. Elegant and agonized with Hitchcock, nervous and without makeup with Rossellini, a voluptuous Venus descended to earth with Renoir, in this film she is badly photographed and awkwardly costumed. It is the worst role she’s ever had.
Anastasia pretends to draw us into the world of “if you were there.” Don’t go to see this cynical and mediocre film. Anatole Litvak despises you; despise him back.
—1957
On a beautiful day, in the early afternoon, William Holden, a little the worse for wear, but sunburned and carefree, turns up in a small Kansas town. In exchange for a square meal, he agrees to dispose of an old woman’s garbage and she offers to wash his shirt for him. So he is bare-chested when he meets a pretty girl (Kim Novak) and her younger sister (Susan Strasberg). Once the shirt is laundered he goes on his way to see Cliff Robertson, an old college chum, grown prosperous and now engaged to Novak.
The next day the annual day-long town picnic takes place, a genuine country fair. Holden shines. He’s a marvelous dancer and the life of the party. In no time he has to resist the advances of a schoolteacher, Rosalind Russell, who’s had too much to drink. As he begins to give in, she lashes out at him, he’s disgusted with himself and retreats, only to be rescued by Kim Novak, in whose arms he spends the night. Then he gets into a fight with Robertson and the police as well and hops a freight train, begging Kim Novak to meet him in Tulsa. In spite of her mother’s tearful pleas, she gets on a bus and follows him. The last scene—we see it from a helicopter—shows the freight train meeting the bus.
I don’t know whether William Inge’s play Picnic (he also wrote Come Back, Little Sheba and Bus Stop) is a work of genius, but Daniel Taradash’s screenplay, directed by Joshua Logan (who also directed the Broadway production), comes close.
With this slice of life, Logan paints an unmalicious portrait of America almost without sentimentality. The starkness is slightly cruel, a bit like Jean Renoir. But if one has to see Eléna et les hommes a few times to uncover all its beauties, there is nothing in Picnic that is not clear from the first. This may be why Picnic is more seductive than Renoir’s film. To push the comparison further, the films are also alike because they transcend simple stories told in images; they offer a view of love more authentic than we usually get to see on the screen—love that is carnal and, in the end, disenchanted.
Joshua Logan lets us take our pick of emotions in Picnic: you can laugh or cry at his characters’ oddities; each notion carries both heads and tails, pathos and humor. If Logan were younger, Picnic would be a crueler film, but also more open and naïve. As he is forty-eight years old, robust, voluble, and in vigorous health, he wanted to dominate his subject and still treat it from a certain distance. I think it was all to the good.
In Logan we are introduced to a new and very great director. Jacques Rivette called him an “Elia Kazan multiplied by Robert Aldrich.” And it’s true: Picnic makes you think of East of Eden in its delicacy of detail and of Vera Cruz because of its brilliance. After seeing Picnic, which was his first film, and then Bus Stop, I find Logan such a gifted filmmaker (in terms of directing actors, camera work, screenplay amelioration, clarity) that I think the only way he could spoil a film would be on purpose. He is a pure director, a man we know will not be walked on. (He left Hollywood about 1935 when History Is Made Tonight was being shot. It would have been his first director’s job.)
Picnic, which I prefer to Bus Stop, is always inventive; every image is filled with energy. Logan wills us to laugh during a sad scene and, conversely, to feel saddened during a funny one. He leads us by the nose and the audiences that fill the theaters can only marvel at it.
—1955
There’s the screenplay. Let’s talk about it. It’s clever, in the best sense of the word, and we at the Cahiers don’t have much use for movies constructed on good ideas, on astuteness, ingenuity. Still, the script of Twelve Angry Men discourages criticism: 1) we are present at a deliberation with a strict continuity of time, place, and action, and experience intensely the feeling, not of something done, but of something being done. It’s a triumph of the television style; 2) the stereotyping of the jurors is so nuanced that instead of twelve “specimens,” we have only six, each represented twice: two intellectuals, two laborers, two bigots, two smokers, two scrupulous types, two who are absolutely “proper.” Each character trades details with an almost identical counterpart, rather than displaying the broad and somewhat strained strokes that are usual in this sort of “conflict cinema.”
Many films (some of the best) are boring and make you feel as if you might want to leave to get a drink or look for an available woman. This movie makes it increasingly more difficult to leave as the story unfolds; a man’s life is at stake, and only a unanimous verdict can save him from death. One by one the jurors relent under the urgent pleading of Henry Fonda, until only the most obdurate remains unmoved. You’re surprised to find yourself rooting for him in the darkness. The last three jurors give in together. What a fantastic idea it was—the most hesitant one changes his mind, becoming a lever on the other two, thus making a verdict of “not guilty” possible.
It’s a screenwriter’s film, and what an author! Justice is done; it is proven that we are all murderers. Lumet, in his first film, shows himself a director of more than ordinary gifts. The movie must have started as a sort of exercise, but the exercise turned into a courageous, powerful, intelligent, and idealistic film, both generous and moving. We must take this director seriously.
—1957
I recently saw A Letter to Three Wives for the second time and I realize that I can never ignore Joseph Mankiewicz again. Its story is brilliant, intelligent and elegant, tasteful and refined, packaged with an almost eerie precision, style, and professionalism. The actors are directed with an extravagant theatricalism. Mankiewicz has a sure instinct for extending his shots and using special effects in a way we don’t expect anymore except with Cukor. This is Mankiewicz’s art. He’s in control of his genre—dramatic comedy—and we shall leave aside its limitations for now, especially since its good qualities are too often ignored.
The Barefoot Contessa is perplexing. We leave it, uncertain that we have understood everything, but unsure that there was, in fact, more to understand. We don’t know what the author was up to. But what is beyond doubt is its total sincerity, novelty, daring, and fascination. Mankiewicz has been reproached as the favorite director of the snobs, but it’s the fashionable viewers (the very ones who made All About Eve a success) who gleefully hiss each evening at the Countess, while the housewives on the Place Blanche explain it to their husbands: “That one, yes, the Count. Well, he’s impotent…” And the husbands answer, “Oh, I see.”
After the failure of his novel Armance, whose theme was impotence, Stendhal remarked, “Lack of style caused the vulgar not to appreciate my novel. Too bad for them.” He could have been responding to Sainte-Beuve: “This basically enigmatic novel which lacks truth in every detail demonstrates neither invention nor genius.”
The one sure thing about Mankiewicz’s film is that he is cursing the cliques of Hollywood, of the idle, of the Riviera. It’s not an indulgent satire like his earlier films. This time he portrays a furious hatred of vulgarity. All right as far as that goes, but what about the Countess?
Three American movie executives discover an extraordinary and marvelous Spanish dancer, Maria Vargas (Ava Gardner). They bring her to Hollywood and “launch” her as a star. The producer, Kirk (Warren Stevens), a dictator, a sexist, and a bigot, courts her futilely. She despises him and finds her lovers among truck drivers, gypsies, guitarists, and handsome young men.
At a certain point, to humiliate Kirk, Maria agrees to go for a cruise along the Riviera with Bravano, a South American multimillionaire. Bravano (Marius Goering) won’t have any more luck than Kirk, but he comforts himself with the thought that everybody will think he’s Maria’s lover. Bravano turns out to be a weird imbecile and Maria leaves him for Count Vincenzo Torlato-Favrini (Rossano Brazzi) whom she falls in love with and who is in love with her. They marry. Then the Count tells his bride that he cannot “love her with all his heart,” since he has been mutilated in the war. Maria makes a daring resolution: the most beautiful gift she can offer her husband is a child. She is about to accomplish her purpose when her husband surprises her and kills her, along with her dupe.
The pivotal scene occurs in the cemetery in the rain, as the great star is buried. The story line is related by a number of the characters, among them the director Harry Dawes (Humphrey Bogart), who was Maria’s sole friend and confidant. He has arrived on the scene too late to make things right though he had anticipated how it would all end.
It would be off the mark to reproach Mankiewicz for opening up a number of themes without grappling with any of them since his idea was not so much to make a satire about Hollywood (although it is the most vicious one ever made), or a film about impotence (which is, of course, symbolic), or a guide to the Riviera and its denizens as to paint one of the most beautiful portraits of woman ever filmed, in the person of Ava Gardner, Hollywood’s most exquisitely beautiful actress.
Mankiewicz places his heroine—wild, natural, enigmatic—in four spots, in different life situations, faced with contradictory personalities, in order to watch her reactions and to visualize the separate moralities a famous star creates around her.
Maria Vargas is not, as some reviews have said, a nymphomaniac. It’s not perversion that pushes her into the arms of lower-class men, but profound disgust, really a physical repulsion, for the princes of her world, the producers, the millionaires, the displaced and idle kings. In her eyes they are the “sick” ones. Their infirmity is made concrete in the impotence of Vincenzo, the last count of an illustrious line. (It is no accident that his sister, Valentina Cortese, is also sterile.) Since it is his fate to find first love with this “child of nature,” it is reasonable that Vargas, to assure Vincenzo’s happiness, will react with an extravagance that matches his extravagant personality.
This is not a film to be picked apart; either one rejects it or accepts it whole. I myself accept and value it for its freshness, intelligence, and beauty. The opening credits announce a production of “Figaro Incorporated,” printed over a reproduction of “L’Indifférent,” with a few bars of The Marriage of Figaro in the background. Mankiewicz’ taste for the eighteenth century evidently moved him to place this film he wrote, directed, and produced, under the triple patronage of Beaumarchais, Watteau and Mozart. (Obviously, The Barefoot Contessa, because of its originality of plot and the fierceness of its attack on Hollywood, could never have been produced by a Zanuck or a Hughes.) It is a daring, novel, and most satisfying venture, and Mankiewicz uses it to settle scores with the Hollywood which condemned him to polishing furniture when he had dreamed of breaking down walls.
Thanks to the success of his psychological comedies, Mankiewicz had assured himself a privileged place in Hollywood, which makes it all the more praiseworthy to have risked such originality. The Barefoot Contessa, we can be sure, is hardly going to be welcomed by the same people who sang the praises of his earlier pleasant, intelligent, but more accessible films: All About Eve, A Letter to Three Wives, Five Fingers. When the moviegoers on the Champs-Elysées snicker as a man admits physical impotence to a woman, it says a great deal about the public’s responsibility for the banality and vulgarity of the average screenplay. It’s one more proof that the time has not come for adapting Stendhal’s Armance. In The Red and the Black, Claude Autant-Lara did not dare film Mathilde holding the severed head of Julien Sorel on her lap. Mankiewicz is more Stendhalian. The Countess’ last try—to have a baby by the chauffeur so that she can offer it to her husband—would be in character for Mathilde de la Môle.
It was wrong to bill Barefoot Contessa as a film à clef. It’s easy to recognize the two producers who are the models for the demagoguery, bigotry, and lewdness of the producer in the film, but Maria Vargas is no more Rita Hayworth than Bravano is Ali Khan. What is more likely is that Mankiewicz depicts himself in the personality of the director, played so well by Humphrey Bogart.
A subtle and intelligent film, beautifully directed and acted, it is the best thing around right now.
—1955
War movies are a Hollywood specialty. The commercial success of this kind of film is more certain than any other; as a result, you don’t have to make too many concessions. And if the screenplay isn’t too subversive, it’s possible to obtain the cooperation of the Armed Forces to borrow men, materiel, munitions, horses, airplanes, etcetera. After The Big Knife failed commercially, Robert Aldrich refloated his production company with Attack. If it is well conceived, a war movie can be made for peanuts: a few men in the sun in the underbrush, a small patrol, a few bayonets, a dozen helmets, fake rifles, and, if you don’t need the Army’s help, you can make an antimilitarist, or at least an antiwar, film.
All this is pertinent to Men in War, Anthony Mann’s latest film—and his favorite one, he said recently. It also marks the debut of a young actor, Aldo Ray, who will soon give us his view on war with Bitter Victory.
I rate Men in War very highly, higher than Attack. (We have to keep seeing certain films and revising our judgments.) With the same methods at his disposal as Aldrich, Anthony Mann takes them further, employs purer, less theatrical approaches. There is no sadism, nothing gratuitous, just a strong, solid, strict, implacable story.
A small patrol in Korea is commanded by a lieutenant, Robert Ryan, humane, intelligent, courageous, a good officer. A jeep driven by a rough, cynical sergeant arrives. Next to him, in utter silence, sits a colonel, who appears to be completely wiped out, and whom the sergeant appears to idolize, lighting his cigarettes, keeping him neat, whispering to him, watching over him like a baby or an old grandmother.
The colonel remains in that state, and the film revolves around the lieutenant and the sergeant, two distinct types of fighters—the intelligent, poised, logical lieutenant (Ryan), and the sergeant (Ray), who acts on instinct but is stronger, probably because he knows the terrain better. If a blade of grass moves, he fires without a second thought. There is no question of taking prisoners. A character alternately fascinating and repugnant, he is magnificently played by Ray.
The ending resembles Bandera, but is even more sober: there are only two survivors, the two main characters, surrounded by corpses.
Unless I am mistaken, it has been a long while since Anthony Mann has shot in black and white, but Ernest Haller’s magnificent photography removes any need for regret. At this moment Mann is the American director who is most sensitive to nature. In Men in War, each blade of grass, each bush, every branch of a tree, every ray of sunlight is given the same emotional weight as a rumbling tank. Besides, there are no tanks in Men in War—just a handful of men walking the trails.
Morally, the story is very fine, noble, irreproachable, concerned simply with man, his fears and sweat, his shoes and cigarettes. To the obvious virtues of this beautiful work we must add that there is the quality of what it is not—the absence of certain clichés which are usually considered essential to this kind of film: the stereotypes, the soldier who makes his buddies laugh with dumb remarks, the one who spends all his time reading his wife’s letters.
It should be pointed out that the screenplay is signed by Philip Yordan, the author of Johnny Guitar, one of the most gifted writers in Hollywood.
—1957
Shown as a “filler” before the holidays, one of the best American films of this year is about to disappear without notice. This is Fear Strikes Out, the first film of a young American filmmaker, Robert Mulligan. Like Sidney Lumet, he comes to movies from television, but you’d have to be told that to know it. Fear Strikes Out, as distinct from Twelve Angry Men, is utterly cinematic. Its realism, the truth of its setting and its facts, and the stylization of the acting put it in the “New York school,” the style imposed by Elia Kazan in his most recent films, a deliberately anti-Hollywood manner.
Fear Strikes Out is the story of a young boy through whom his father acts out all his dreams of being a baseball player. He trains his son, overworks him, forces him into precociousness until he becomes a “pro.” He never compliments the boy; indeed, he’s always finding something to carp at. He is the perfectionist ever thirsting after the unattainable. Predictably the young champion’s nerves give out, and one day he breaks down. The film ends with his first session of psychoanalysis, which is described at length and in detail on screen, precise and lifelike, remarkably exact and well directed.
It is rare to see a first film so free of faults and bombast. Everything is in proportion; no one scene is less good than another in this serene, calm, frank film, whose high quality would suggest long and solid experience.
The undertaking rests squarely on the broad shoulders of Karl Malden, the father, and on the considerably frailer shoulders of the young actor Anthony Perkins, who combines the simplicity of the young stars of an older generation, Jimmy Stewart and Gary Cooper, with the physical modernity of the Brandos and James Deans, without ever resorting to trickiness or exhibitionism.
Fear Strikes Out is a bitter and disillusioned film that doesn’t make you want to live in America. But if there were French directors as lucid and talented as Mulligan, as capable of telling something more than anecdotes, the image of our country on the screen would be a bit less oversimplified.
—1958
I can spare the reader the usual speech about faithful or unfaithful adaptation, since I haven’t read Françoise Sagan’s Bonjour Tristesse, or her two other novels. Each of her published interviews is more remarkable than the previous one; rich in ideas, they show a lucidity, tact, and cool intelligence that belong more to the essayist than to the novelist.
In short, what Sagan thinks interests me more than what she invents, and what she is more than what she does. A solemn Mademoiselle Teste * slumbers within her, and her efforts to kill the marionette make Sagan infinitely more likeable than her fellow novelists who pretend to be the dupes of their laborious tales.
Otto Preminger, on the other hand, seems to me more valuable for what he does rather than for what he is. To the interviewer who loves films he offers nothing beyond commonplaces about Catholic censorship, the profitability of films, the box-office draw of certain stars. A famous and envied businessman and former actor, this fifty-year-old Viennese is also an artist, the kind that is often called, with a slightly pejorative meaning, a formalist. This director, and he is nothing if not that—he can bring order into any piece of confusion—is as little interested as a blood donor in knowing who is the beneficiary of the transfusion.
So, if Françoise Sagan is “of her age,” the twentieth century and its thinkers, Otto Preminger is a man of a hundred years ago, a man of instinct, an inspired artist whose work defies scientific exegesis.
Let the fervent admirers of the novel Bonjour Tristesse howl at its betrayal by the film. That is their right. Just as it is mine to prefer a work by Preminger alone to one of those collective enterprises that end by being anonymous, like one I shall not name,* which we don’t know whether to attribute to Pierre Boulle, David Lean, Alec Guinness, or Sam Spiegel.
Have you noticed that the inherent sterility of their function leads critics always to pay more attention to the character than to the actor who plays him? It is certainly also a pretentious sterility that leads them to prefer the screenplay to the film itself, to the intentions rather than the result, the idea to the deed, in short, the abstract to the concrete. Yet, a director must work with what military strategists call the “human materiel.” A novelist talking about “his” characters has often struck me as ridiculous, but a filmmaker talking about his actors, never. This is probably why I prefer cinema to literature.
Cinema is an art of the woman, that is, of the actress. The director’s work consists in getting pretty women to do pretty things. For me, the great moments of cinema are when the director’s gifts mesh with the gifts of an actress: Griffith and Lillian Gish, Sternberg and Marlene Dietrich, Fritz Lang and Joan Bennett, Renoir and Simone Simon, Hitchcock and Joan Fontaine, Rossellini and Anna Magnani, Ophuls and Danielle Darrieux, Fellini and Giulietta Masina, Vadim and Brigitte Bardot. Now we can add Preminger and Jean Seberg to the list.
When he organized the “Bonjour Tristesse Competition,” Preminger was not looking for Cecile, he was looking for Jean Seberg. And, when he had found her, it wasn’t a question of whether she was worthy of Cecile, but whether Cecile was worthy of being made real by Jean Seberg. So, faithful or not, Arthur Laurents’ adaptation consists of leaning toward what I shall call, in the best sense of the word, the “exhibition” of Jean Seberg, or if you prefer, bringing out her strong points, setting her in motion, placing her in her setting.
The automobile racers of Le Mans obviously don’t risk their necks for the people who come to see them, and yet, do they not put on quite a show? Preminger is like them: he offers us a show, but it stays his secret, the show concerns only him.
Preminger is not a very commercial filmmaker, probably because he devotes himself to a search for a bit of truth that is particularly well hidden, almost imperceptible, the truth that is hidden in looks, gestures, attitudes. If he is happy working in the realm of scandal (recall his films: Forever Amber, The Moon Is Blue, Carmen Jones, The Man with the Golden Arm), it is because he can safeguard his purity better that way. With this loving painter of small unstriking detail, the magnificence of the frame accents the deliberate insignificance of the design. Preminger’s pretentious openings are deliberate jokes. In this case, the combination of the names of Sagan, Juliette Greco (who sings “Bonjour Tristesse”!!) and Georges Auric is a cynical gag. If Preminger were making Bonjour Tristesse today, he’d probably have Yves Saint-Laurent do the costumes and Bernard Buffet the decor.
Another gag: David Niven, sitting on the beach, opens a copy of Elle. This is an amiable greeting to Pierre Lazareff, whose sumptuous villa is, after Seberg, the star of the film. But that isn’t all: on the cover of Elle is a photograph of Christine Carrère, chosen by Fox to star in A Certain Smile, a film based on another Sagan novel, which will certainly be massacred by that obtuse drone, Jean Negulesco. The mischievous Otto is signaling Fox: “Sorry about that, old boy, but I know my film will be out before yours.”
When I read the early notices of Sagan’s first novel, I was struck by the resemblances to and analogies with an American film, Angel Face. In this film, like Bonjour Tristesse also produced and directed by Preminger, the exquisite Jean Simmons is living a boring life in a luxurious mansion with a father whom she adores and a killjoy stepmother. She intends to get Robert Mitchum, whom she has hired as chauffeur and lover, to murder her stepmother. In the end, unknown to Mitchum, she herself causes a fatal car accident in which not only the hated stepmother but also the adored father die. The lovers are both accused, and they get married in prison on the advice of their lawyer, who sees this as their only hope for acquittal.
Without going so far as to suggest that Sagan’s first novel was inspired by Angel Face, it is clear that Bonjour Tristesse immediately interested Preminger, who bought the film rights three months later from Ray Ventura, an inspired college student who pocketed in passing a goodly sum as payment for having a good nose for that sort of thing. This is why it’s stupid to write that Preminger was not the man to make Bonjour Tristesse. The film is only a remake, a pretext to embroider on his favorite theme: the child-woman and her sadness at approaching age. I would even suggest that Saint Joan and Bonjour Tristesse complement each other perfectly. In the first, the English land in France, and Joan is burned; in the second, the same character, one year later, doesn’t give herself to the first Bishop Cauchon who comes along, but defends herself, attacks the Englishwoman Deborah Kerr, and kicks her out of France.
I haven’t really analyzed the film. Is it my fault if it is obscure in mysterious ways? It would seem that Preminger, who has proved himself an admirable storyteller ten times over, doesn’t want to tell us anything this time, only wants to show, almost without imposing any order, things that interest him just as they are. He does nothing to make us believe in this frail, simple, and basically incredible tale. Worse, he cuts it up, taking us from a colored past to bathe us in a black-and-white present. Does his Riviera with its Provençal folk dancers strike you as ridiculous? Don’t forget that two years ago, when Preminger was named to the Cannes Festival jury, he had to watch the beach promenade of a “War of the Flowers” that was ten times more ridiculous. His vision of Saint-Tropez is not overly severe. Bonjour Tristesse is not France naïvely seen by an American, but France shown to Americans as they like to see it by a sharp and disdainful observer.
The acting, which is uneven, is nonetheless the essential point of the film. In any case, when Jean Seberg is on the screen, which is all the time, you can’t look at anything else. Her every movement is graceful, each glance is precise. The shape of her head, her silhouette, her walk, everything is perfect; this kind of sex appeal hasn’t been seen on the screen. It is designed, controlled, directed to the nth degree by her director, who is, they say, her fiancé. I wouldn’t be surprised, given the kind of love one needs to obtain such perfection. In the blue shorts slit on the side, in pirate pantaloons, in a skirt, an evening gown, a bathing suit, a man’s shirt with the shirttails out, or tied in front over her stomach, or wearing a corsage and behaving herself (but not for long), Jean Seberg, short blond hair on a pharaoh’s skull, wide-open blue eyes with a glint of boyish malice, carries the entire weight of this film on her tiny shoulders. It is Otto Preminger’s love poem to her.
—1958
We discovered Nicholas Ray about seven or eight years ago with Knock on Any Door. Then, at the film festival, “Rendezvous de Biarritz,” there was the dazzling confirmation of They Live By Night, which is still his best film. Then followed, though unnoticed in Paris, In a Lonely Place, On Dangerous Ground, The Lusty Men, and now, Johnny Guitar.
A young American filmmaker—of the generation of Robert Wise, Jules Dassin, Joseph Losey—Nicholas Raymond Kienzle is an auteur in the best sense of the word. All his films tell the same story, the violent man who wants to renounce violence and his relationship with a morally stronger woman. Ray’s constant hero, the bully, is a weak man-child, when he is not simply a child. He is wrapped in moral solitude, always hunted, sometimes lynched. Those who have seen the films I have just mentioned can multiply and enrich these connections for themselves; the others will simply have to take my word for it.
Johnny Guitar is not far from being its author’s best film. Ray’s films usually bore the public because of their leisurely pace, their seriousness, their realism—the realism of words and poetic insights, much like Cocteau. This film is a string of preciosity, truer than the truth. The cowboys in Johnny Guitar, ridiculously, call each other “monsieur” in the dubbed French version, which is superior for once to the subtitled version because it lets us see the film’s theatricality better. We already have learned that this Western was shockingly extravagant. Johnny Guitar is a phony Western, but not an “intellectual” one. It is dreamed, a fairy tale, a hallucinatory Western. It was only a step from the dream to Freud, which our Anglo-Saxon colleagues took up when they began talking about “psychoanalytic Westerns.” But the qualities of Ray’s film are something different, not very visible perhaps to those who have never looked through a camera’s viewer. We are going to try, as opposed to a different form of criticism, to trace the sources of this cinematic creation. Contrary to André Bazin, I believe it is important for a director to be able to recognize himself in the portrait of him and his films that one draws.
Insofar as we can divide filmmakers into two groups, the cerebral and the instinctual, I would certainly classify Ray in the second, the school of sincerity and sensitivity. And yet, we sense in him an intellectual who can abstract everything that does not come from the heart. He is not a particularly great technician, but what is clear is that his aim is less to achieve the traditional, universal success of his films than to give each shot a certain emotional quality. Johnny Guitar was “made” rather hastily, out of very long scenes that were cut up into ten segments. The editing is jerky, but what interests us is something else: for example, an extraordinarily beautiful placement of individuals in a certain setting. (The members of the patrol at Vienna’s, for example, arrange themselves in the V of migratory birds.)
There are two films in Johnny Guitar: Ray’s recurring theme—the relationships among the two men and two women, the violence and bitterness—and an extravagant catch-all done in Joseph von Sternberg style, a style which is absolutely foreign to Ray’s work, but which in this case is no less interesting. For instance, we watch Joan Crawford, in a white dress, playing the piano in a cavernous saloon, with a candlestick and a pistol beside her. Johnny Guitar is the Beauty and the Beast of Westerns, a Western dream. The cowboys vanish and die with the grace of ballerinas. The bold, violent color (by Tru-color) contributes to the sense of strangeness; the hues are vivid, sometimes very beautiful, always unexpected.
The public on the Champs-Elysées wasn’t mistaken to snicker at Johnny Guitar. In five years they’ll be crowding into the Cinéma d’Essai to applaud it (as they did the Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne). The audience in Montmartre received the dubbed version very well. For the Champs-Elysées crowd, it lacks Huston’s wink.
Johnny Guitar was made to order for Joan Crawford, as Rancho Notorious was made by Fritz Lang for Marlene Dietrich. Crawford used to be one of the most beautiful women in Hollywood. Now she is beyond considerations of beauty. She has become unreal, a phantom of herself. Whiteness has invaded her eyes, muscles have taken over her face, a will of iron behind a face of steel. She is a phenomenon. She is becoming more manly as she grows older. Her clipped, tense acting, pushed almost to paroxysm by Ray, is in itself a strange and fascinating spectacle.
Ray is a kind of Hollywood Rossellini. Like Rossellini, he never explains, never underscores his meaning. He makes outlines rather than films. Another point they have in common is that Ray is horrified by the death of children. Nicholas Ray lovingly fashions pretty little objects out of holly wood. Down with the amateur! There are no Ray films that do not have a scene at the close of day; he is the poet of nightfall, and of course everything is permitted in Hollywood except poetry. So, in Hollywood, a Howard Hawks arrives on the scene and takes his time, flirts with tradition in order to flout it, and always triumphs. Ray is incapable of getting along with the devil, and when he tries to make a pact for profit, he is defeated before the fight even begins.
Hawks and Ray are opposites, a little bit as Castellani and Rossellini are. In Hawks we see the triumph of the mind; in Nick Ray, the triumph of the heart. One can argue against Hawks and for Ray—or the other way around; one can condemn Big Sky in the name of Johnny Guitar or accept them both. But anyone who rejects either should never go to the movies again, never see any more films. Such people will never recognize inspiration, poetic intuition, or a framed picture, a shot, an idea, a good film, or even cinema itself.
—1955
If the film he prefers is Rebel Without a Cause, which is all his, Nicholas Ray seems satisfied enough with Bigger Than Life, whose screenplay, attributed to Cyril Hume and Richard Maibaum in the opening credits, was almost entirely rewritten by Clifford Odets, Gavin Lambert and himself.
The enormous freedom Ray enjoyed in making Bigger Than Life was undoubtedly due to the fact that the producer, James Mason, was also the star of the film. He bought the rights to the story, which had appeared in The New Yorker, and which is based on a true incident: a teacher suffering from an arterial inflammation was being treated with cortisone, a new medicine still in the experimental stage but already being hailed as a “miracle drug.” Despite the fact that he was scrupulous about the dosage, he gradually succumbed to megalomania. He became harsh, excitable, paranoid, manic; he threw himself feverishly into utopian projects to reform education; he became a domestic tyrant, terrorizing all around him until he was taken off to a hospital and given a new treatment.
In their first screenplay, Hume and Maibaum made the hero a cousin of Jekyll and Hyde. During the day he was perfectly balanced; at night he was a terrifying brute who struck out at everything. Ray preferred to go back to the true story and push it as far as possible dramatically.
An underpaid teacher, Ed Avery (James Mason), works several nights a week as a switchboard operator in a taxi garage unknown to his wife and son. As a result of overwork, he falls ill with an inflammation of the arteries and is treated with cortisone. Under pressure from the medical associations, which are very powerful in the United States and were extremely hostile to the film, Ray had to change one detail. In the film, Avery increases the prescribed dosage in order to attain the euphoric state the cortisone brings him. Soon he begins using it as a narcotic.
His behavior changes; he develops a self-assured and self-satisfied manner that he had never shown before. One day, in a high-fashion salon, he makes his wife buy two dresses he hasn’t got the money to pay for. He becomes critical of everybody and everything, arrogant, and extremely irritable.
Soon, as in the real story, he claims to have discovered his mission: he must reform education. He will write a series of important articles. He tries out his new principles of education on his young son; he is going to make him a genius. A veritable nightmare for the mother and son begins. The family scenes become increasingly violent. One day, Avery discovers his son trying to throw out the vials of cortisone. Shortly after that, upon hearing a sermon in church on Abraham, he decides he is a theologian and makes up his mind to imitate the deed of the Father of faith with his own son. His wife tries to prevent him: “God didn’t want Abraham to sacrifice his son.” Avery responds exaltedly, “God was wrong.” But, at the moment when he sets out to sacrifice his son, a scissors in his hand, he is seized with a fainting spell. God has intervened, and Avery sees a spinning ball of fire, as in Genesis: “When the sun set and the darkness came, a fire passed between the parted animals.” When Avery comes to, he is restrained by one of the neighbors, and a little later we see his wife and son visit him at a hospital from which he will emerge cured.
This is the screenplay which a number of my colleagues judged unconvincing after its presentation at the Venice festival. They argued that you cannot construct a tragedy out of as ordinary an incident as a man taking an overdose of cortisone. In fact, Ray did not want to make a tragedy, or even tell a believable psychological story. He conceived his film as a fable. He filmed an idea, a process of reasoning, a supposition. It could have been alcohol instead of cortisone. The prime consideration is not the pretext but the way it is worked out.
Ray wanted to show the public that it is wrong to believe in medical miracles and “miracle drugs,” since any one of them, just like the atom, can both save and destroy. Science has its limits and it is unwise to put blind faith in it. The only thing he couldn’t show openly was his own antipathy for doctors. Nonetheless, he filmed the doctors in groups of three, and framed them like gangsters in crime films. He had them speak arrogantly in a pedantic and detached manner. Had he wished to make his unusual message more easily acceptable, Ray could have enclosed the entire film in a dream: the teacher would awaken having dreamed the adventure, including his wish to kill his son. The public would have received the film more warmly, but he would have given in to the worst possible film convention, and the critics would still have sneered.
The screenplay of Bigger Than Life is intelligent, subtle, and completely logical. The cortisone wasn’t responsible for Avery’s megalomania; it simply revealed it. From the outset, the authors offer hints: travel posters cover the walls of the Avery house; before his first giddy spell he says to his wife, “We’re dull, you know.”
Even when he feels lucid, he really is dull, and yet, just as a drunkard sometimes does, he still states a number of truths. The marvelous thing is that he is never completely wrong or right. This is best illustrated in a meeting with the parents of the pupils. Avery gets up to explain to the parents that the children they are so proud of are at the evolutionary stage of chimpanzees. An offended woman stalks from the room in fury. Avery takes a puff of his cigarette, smiles with satisfaction, and goes on with his talk, which slowly takes on fascist overtones. “The truth is that we need a leader.” With that, a great bear of a man with a mustache comes up to Avery, his eyes on fire. “That’s what I like to hear. Bravo!” Truths, countertruths, that’s what the whole film is about. It is sprinkled throughout with touches of a rather restrained black humor.
In his first films Ray treated violence and the moral solitude of the violent with a certain approval. Gradually he has set out to demonstrate the vanity of violence and the importance of clearheadedness. Now, he gives us again the portrait of a man whose intransigence leads him to moral solitude, but, although he shows him as wrong, he nevertheless, while demonstrating the emptiness of violence, also offers proof that lucidity is not an end in itself; his hero is an escapee from the hell of logic.
Although the essence of the film belongs in the category of fable rather than psychology, it is extraordinarily accurate to the last detail. Rather than inventing crises, the authors preferred to portray the evolution of Avery’s illness by showing us how he reacted to everyday occurrences. One morning Avery takes the milkman aside and accuses him of deliberately rattling the milk bottles in the metal case to bother him, to keep him from working, probably out of jealousy.
The character of Avery is close to Francesco in Buñuel’s El, and the two films bear other bonds of kinship as well. The scene in which Avery gazes with satisfaction into the bathroom mirror while his wife brings up hot water for his bath, kettle by kettle, could be out of the Buñuel film.
Mason’s acting has extraordinary precision. Under Ray’s masterful direction, he is given three or four of the most beautiful face closeups I have had the chance to see since the advent of CinemaScope. The trenchant direction imposes a terrific pace. Short scenes sweep across the screen, all concerned with Ed Avery’s deterioration. Bigger Than Life is the very opposite of a decorative film, but the slightest detail—clothing, an accessory, a stance—has an overwhelming beauty.
There is another aspect of Ray’s film that rings profoundly true. Even if one refused to follow the author in the upheavals of his screenplay (and why refuse?), we still have to admire one thing: this is the first time the relationship of an intellectual with his simpler wife has been depicted on the screen with an almost shocking clarity and frankness. For the first time we see the intellectual at home, confident of the superiority of his vocabulary, knowing that his understanding of dialectics works in his favor vis-à-vis his wife, who feels things but has given up trying to express them, since she cannot handle the language. She is, like many women, intuitive, governed above all by love and sensitivity. All sorts of variations on this theme make Bigger Than Life, even aside from its exceptional story, an excellent portrait of marriage.
A film of implacable logic and sanity, Bigger Than Life uses those very qualities as targets, and scores a bull’s-eye in every frame.
If Bigger Than Life throws some people off, it’s because Ray’s films resemble each other too much for the newest one to display its meaning immediately. But isn’t the critic’s duty to serve as intermediary between the authors of such a film and the audience it’s aimed at?
—1957
Publishers of “true romance” wring hearts like so many sponges. “Heart”…“Dreams”…“Secrets”…“The Two of Us”…“Intimate.” For a dollar and a half, young lady, you can have six hours of reading while luxuriating in your tears. The little orphan who has been taken in by her godfather, a simple Breton fisherman living on a rock whipped by the fierce waves of the Channel, has been noticed by Norbert de la Globule, the son of the manor, called Monsieur Norbert around here. A sweet idyl.
There is a certain style and tone in these famous “true romance” magazines that I regret not to find more often in minor movies. A good melodrama, filmed by a director who is not afraid of emotional upheavals, would be closer to Balzac than Charles Spaak’s Crime and Punishment is to Dostoevsky.
All of which brings me to Written on the Wind, the best work that has been done in this direction; both visually and intellectually, it is an exact equivalent of a very good “photo-novel” in color.
Robert Stack, who plays the alcoholic son of a wealthy oilman, and his boyhood friend, Rock Hudson, his father’s trusted adviser, meet Lauren Bacall, a secretary. Stack marries Bacall and she cures him both of his inferiority complex and his drinking. Stack’s sister, Dorothy Malone, a nymphomaniac, is hopelessly in love with the upright Rock Hudson, who is, of course, in love with Lauren Bacall, his best friend’s wife.
Stack, his body poisoned by alcohol, learns from his doctor that he is partially impotent, more exactly, intermittently sterile. So, when Lauren Bacall tells him one evening that she is pregnant, he thinks he has been betrayed by his friend. He is encouraged in this belief by his malevolent sister who becomes more and more disturbed as the movie progresses. There are fistfights, pistol shots, breathtaking chases in the night, bottles emptied and then broken. In the end, Stack kills himself by accident, the old trick of confusion working in favor of disarmament. The beautiful Dorothy redeems her ten years of debauchery by telling the truth in court, so that Rock Hudson and Lauren Bacall, a beautiful widow indeed, can satisfy their perfect love.
At the end, Douglas Sirk, who is a villain, shows us Dorothy Malone, the nymphomaniac, dressed in a skin-tight suit, sitting beside her father’s fireplace, caressing a minature gold oil derrick, the symbol of her new preoccupation: the black gold may flow instead of sperm, but Oedipus will always be there!
Sirk is no newcomer. A Dane, born at the turn of the century in Skagen, he was a theater director in Berlin and he made films in Germany, Spain, and Australia before reaching Hollywood, where he matured with excellent little films, which Parisian film lovers know well: Summer Storm; Lured; Sleep, My Love; Shockproof; Thunder on the Hill; Mystery Submarine; and Captain Lightfoot. All these movies, none of which achieved the virtuosity of his latest, had the same precision and the same fantasy. This is moviemaking unashamed of what it is, with no complexes, no hesitations, simply good workmanship.
But it is in visual terms that Written on the Wind merits our attention. In the old days critics used to say, “There will be good color films when painters get involved.” Nonsense! The quality of movie color has nothing to do with the painter’s taste, nor even, for that matter, with good taste. We watch Stack in the half-shadow of a blue bedroom, watch him dash into a red corridor and jump into a yellow taxi which lets him out in front of a steel-gray airplane. All these hues are vivid and frank, varnished and lacquered to such a degree that a painter would scream. But they are the colors of the twentieth century, the colors of America, the colors of the luxury civilization, the industrial colors that remind us that we live in the age of plastics.
I would not recommend Written on the Wind to the film lover who only goes to see the fifteen or twenty undoubted masterpieces of each year, because its naïveté, deliberate or not, and its absurdity would offend him. But the real movie nut, the guy who forgives Hollywood a lot because its films are so alive, will come out ecstatic, dazzled, satisfied for one evening—at least until the next good marital comedy comes along.
—1957
I’ll make my praise brief. The Girl Can’t Help It is more than a good film, more than a funny film, more than an excellent parody; it is a kind of masterpiece of the genre.
After The Lieutenant Wore Skirts and Artists and Models, I wrote (and I ask your pardon for quoting myself, since I do so in order to contradict myself): “Since he cannot delude or fascinate us, Frank Tashlin intrigues us.” This time, there can be no doubt about it: Tashlin fascinates us.
We are dealing with a variation—or, if you will, variations—on the Pygmalion theme. In this case, the sculptor falls in love with a model he refuses to carve. He’s more like the happy playboy of The Seven Year Itch, an impresario lost in alcoholic daydreams because of unrequited love, making a star out of a bleached-blond doll who’s kept by an ex-gangster. But the doll in question is the exact opposite of Baby Doll. Her dream is to prepare delicious meals for a loving husband who will give her a pack of kids. She either can’t (or won’t) sing. When she moves up the scale even to “re,” the electric bulbs break. Still, everything turns out in the best possible way, thank heavens, for Tashlin is so effective that an unhappy ending to one of his films would probably cause suicides.
The story is put together out of 347 gags—Tashlin counted them himself—with seven or eight musical numbers that are remarkably well directed and elevate rock and roll even as they satirize it.
This is a crucial point. Parody in movies is a minor genre. It brings us only a small moment of spiteful pleasure, like a good cabaret number. Parody is full of surprises and invitations to share the joke but almost always disappoints on a second look, since it depends on caricature, an unsightly exaggeration. If Frank Tashlin is a great filmmaker, it’s because he has solved the problem of satirical comedy and even criticism. Rather than mock a subject with caricature, he exaggerates the very excesses of what he parodies—in the present film, rock and roll. The numbers he chooses are the epitome of stupidity, howling hysteria, perverted taste. He clothes them in even more garish colors, tightens the rhythms, and syncopates them. He literally hammers them out and gives them a power, even a purity they previously lacked. In The Girl Can’t Help It, rock and roll is refined and becomes, in its own way, rather grand.
This is an even more radical version of Howard Hawks’s lesson in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. I’m using the word “lesson” intentionally. It’s not a question of making fun of the original by going it one better with the same instruments. In this case, you want rock and roll; OK, here it is! And it’s very beautiful.
His work with the screenplay and the characters is all of a piece. Tashlin exaggerates Jayne Mansfield’s statuesque figure with false breasts and all the rest of it, but instead of ridiculing her, he makes her a likable and moving personality, like Marilyn Monroe in Bus Stop.
The Girl Can’t Help It is funny all the way through, and beautiful all the way through as well. The picnic on the beach, when Jayne Mansfield sits by the sea in a bathing suit and talks, is a wonderful example.
I had a chance to see The Girl Can’t Help It three times before I finished these notes. Like all great films, it’s more beautiful and more successful each time you see it. You laugh less, but you love it more each time, and you feel increased emotion.
—1957
Dean Martin, a gambler down on his luck, is counting on winning a luxurious convertible in a lottery; not to rely on mere luck, he has a suitcase full of phony tickets. At the same time, Jerry Lewis has bought up an enormous number of legitimate tickets so as to arrive in Hollywood at the wheel of a stunning convertible and to meet and seduce Anita Ekberg, whom he dreams about.
The upshot is that they are declared co-winners, and they drive off to Los Angeles together. In between songs Dean Martin tries unsuccessfully to shake down Lewis, who is protected by Mister Bascom, a huge Great Dane who can drive a car and applaud just like his elder brothers, the humans.
Frank Tashlin’s film (which was made before The Girl Can’t Help It) is the story of their trip, filled with incidents one funnier than the next—a nutty ride in a laugh-house Cadillac.
In the Paramount studios, when we at last get to Hollywood, there’s a wonderful satire of moviemaking, parodying War and Peace. Anita Ekberg in a nightgown is lying on a bed, listening to the director’s instructions: “Napoleon is about to return from Elba and you are waiting for him impatiently. He’s your husband and there you are trembling and sighing…”
I am very much afraid that this film will not meet with the approval of those who love “good taste.” But we should understand that the lens does not register simple reality, that good taste in cinema bears no relation to pictorial good taste. Splashes of vivid color on the screen, the roof of a taxi, a suspension bridge, a field of alfalfa, a swimming pool, a bathing suit are chosen and organized to create a whole by the director, in this case, Frank Tashlin, the maker of comedies today who best knows how to refine his material.
It’s not enough just to be funny. To give the gags some meaning, one must avoid vulgarity, elevate the humor, create beauty, establish harmony of forms and colors; only if satire is positive can it really destroy the mediocrity it mocks. And here is a lesson in good cinema that takes a slap at Hollywood’s mediocrities.
The title Hollywood or Bust has a double meaning. Hollywood or Die in the Attempt…and Hollywood or (Anita Ekberg’s) Bust. In comparison with this intelligent American innovation, Un Vrai Cinglé de Cinéma seems like typical French foolishness. But it is also true that Paramount, which in the age of VistaVision still offers black-and-white animated cartoons as program fillers, hasn’t found a good title since War and Peace!
Dean Martin, the habitual fall guy of the twosome, is handled very well here by Tashlin. He’s been able to transform what is usually a trial—listening to his songs—into sensitive poetic sequences. Jerry Lewis is more and more delightful with every picture. He is a nightclub artist who has been worked into cinema very cleverly as Robert Hirsh, Jacques Jouanneau, Poiret, Serrault and many others in France could be, if some of our better filmmakers would interest themselves in musical comedy.
Go see Hollywood or Bust and go see The Girl Can’t Help It again, and applaud Frank Tashlin, who doubtless has lots more surprises in store for us.
—1957
The Naked Dawn is one of those small American films with so little advance publicity that you might easily miss them. Universal sabotaged this film instead of distributing it, as if they wanted to keep it away from the critics. But we won’t give in to the merchandisers. The Naked Dawn, a low-budget film, is poetic and violent, tender and droll, moving and subtle, joyously energetic and wholesome.
The opening credits unfold during a train holdup on the Mexican border. One of the two bandits dies in the arms of his accomplice, Santiago (Arthur Kennedy), who wanders around all night until he meets a young farmer, Manuel (Eugene Iglesias), and his charming wife, Maria (Betta St. John). The film tells the story of Santiago and Manuel’s trip to the city to sell the watches Santiago has stolen, their stopover in a cabaret on the way home, and an explosive and unexpected finale.
What counts are the delicate and ambiguous relationships among the three, the stuff of a good novel. One of the most beautiful modern novels I know is Jules et Jim by Henri-Pierre Roché, which shows how, over a lifetime, two friends and the woman companion they share love one another with tenderness and almost no harshness, thanks to an esthetic morality constantly reconsidered. The Naked Dawn is the first film that has made me think that Jules et Jim could be done as a film.
Edgar Ulmer is undoubtedly the least-known American filmmaker. Few of my colleagues are able to boast of having seen the few films of his that have made it to France, all of which are surprisingly fresh, sincere, and inventive: The Strange Woman (Mauriac crossed with Julian Green), Babes in Baghdad (a Voltairean tease), and Ruthless (Balzac). This Viennese, born with the century, first an assistant of Max Reinhardt’s and then of the great Murnau, hasn’t had much luck in Hollywood, probably because he doesn’t know how to fit into the system. His carefree humor and pleasant manner, his tenderness toward the characters he depicts remind us inevitably of Jean Renoir and Max Ophuls. Nevertheless, the public on the Champs-Elysées took to this film, as they did a few months ago to Robert Aldrich’s Kiss Me Deadly.
Talking about The Naked Dawn is equivalent to drawing the portrait of its author, because we see him behind every image and feel we know him intimately when the lights go back on. Wise and indulgent, playful and serene, vital and clear, in short, a good man like the ones I’ve compared him to.
The Naked Dawn is one of those movies we know was made with joy; every shot shows a love of cinema, and pleasure in working in it. It is also a pleasure to see it again and to talk to friends about it. A small gift from Hollywood.
—1956
As I left the theater after watching Love Me or Leave Me, a psychological American musical, or if you prefer, a dramatic comedy with singing, I thought how apt Jean Renoir’s remark was: “There is no realism in American films. No realism, but something much better, great truth.”
Indeed, it often happens that searing flashes of truth, nuances whose sincerity is beyond doubt, creative and sublime mimicry of all sorts are injected into the most conventional Hollywood sequences. It sometimes seems that the element of truth is all the more powerful as the framework, ambience, or genre of the film are all the more phony and artificial.
When, in a psychological film based on a serious novel, a couple is breaking up, it is sad, of course, but such is life. The same scene in An American in Paris, or Singin’ in the Rain, or Love Me or Leave Me takes on more cruelty and gives off a more tragic, more disturbing resonance; it sounds more exact.
Love Me or Leave Me is filmed biography. The truth of its literary base may be what makes it superior to many others of the type. It is a personal drama, repeated many times over between a singer, Doris Day, who has great erotic presence, and her protector, who is first her friend, then her fiancé, then her husband, and finally her dependent. The man is James Cagney, magnificent in his spirit, his gaiety, and his naïve and crafty conviction. What an actor!
Ruth Etting (Doris Day) is a taxi-dance girl who longs for romance. Snyder (James Cagney) an obnoxious small-time gangster, takes her in hand, becomes her manager, and, with his fists, gets her jobs in a few nightclubs. The only thing wrong is that Ruth is a really gifted singer, and offers are soon flowing in. She no longer needs Snyder.
From that point on, they are at each other constantly. Snyder more or less forces Ruth to marry him. They leave for Hollywood. A gentle musician silently adores the pretty singer. There is a threeway scene with a revolver, and finally, Snyder sacrifices his own desires and lets his wife gather some of life’s less thorny roses.
It isn’t necessary any longer to continue to praise the American musical film, in which realism emerges all the more beneath a light cover. If we had to list the most shattering and moving scenes in movies, we would have to cite many of these Hollywood “singing comedies”: after a few refrains and a few dances, there is a sentimental rupture, and tears are all the more serious.
Love Me or Leave Me, a very pretty CinemaScope musical by Charles Vidor, is no exception. It is an extremely believable and intelligent picture of the married life of a singer and her manager, a story of rare finesse and authority.
The action takes place in 1930, which means the clothes, songs, and cars have added charm. Doris Day is a very attractive actress, and James Cagney, patiently limping, presents an enjoyable, sour portrait.
Less exotic and serious than the memorable Gilda that first brought us the name of Charles Vidor after the war, Love Me or Leave Me constitutes an entirely sympathetic work. You should see it.
—1956
The metaphor is exaggerated. It doesn’t take seven minutes to realize that The Seven Year Itch is beyond smut and licentiousness and that it takes us past the limits of evil to a kind of worn-down regret, good humor, and kindness.
An “average” American (Tom Ewell) accompanies his wife and son to the train as they go off on vacation. He returns home alone, determined on conjugal morality, and determined also to follow the advice of his doctor not to drink, and maybe that of his minister.
But a girl—the likes of which you’ve never known (in the biblical sense) except in dreams—has just moved into the apartment upstairs, and she sows troubled thoughts in his mind, already disoriented by temporary celibacy.
The most important character in the play, the focus of all attention, is the man who is deliberately ordinary, somewhat less than average both physically and intellectually, so as to ensure the identification of the male audience and the greater enjoyment—sadistic, “superior,” maybe envious—of the women. In the film, the center of interest shifts to the heroine, for the excellent reason that when she is on screen there is nowhere to look but at her body, from head to toe, with a thousand stops along the way. Her body draws us up from our seats to the screen as a magnet attracts a scrap of metal.
On screen, there is no chance to reflect. Hips, nape, knees, ears, elbows, lips, palms of the hand, profiles win out over tracking shots, framing, sustained panoramas, dissolves. All this, it must be admitted, doesn’t happen without a deliberate, measured, finally very effective vulgarity. Billy Wilder, the libidinous old fox, moves along with such incessant suggestiveness that, ten minutes into the film, we aren’t sure what are the original or literal meanings of faucet, Frigidaire, under, above, soap, perfume, panties, breeze, and Rachmaninoff.
If we admire, rather than grow annoyed, it is because the film’s verve and inventiveness, its cavalier vigor and naughtiness demand complicity.
The film is sincere, really much better than that. The bawdyness lies not in you or me but in Wilder, who has pushed daring to the point of directing a few purely pornographic shots with great precision (although because they are stylized they will elude 98 percent of the audience). Take, for example, the milk bottle between Tom Ewell’s legs as he squats on the floor in front of a half-open door.
Another interesting thing about the film is that, maybe for the first time, we are given a filmed critique of films. Jacques Rivette says, and I agree with him pretty much, that the first scene in Scarface, when a nightclub employee angrily throws out confetti, streamers, and a forgotten brassiere, signifies in Hawks’s mind that the film bears no relation to the exoticism of Underworld, made the year before by Joseph von Sternberg, also with a script by Ben Hecht. In both cases, in Underworld and in Seven Year Itch, we have a polemical cinema that is also something more.
We may also recall in Stalag 17 a happy prisoner doing a series of imitations, including a pretty good one of Cary Grant. In The Seven Year Itch, for the first time we are given deliberate citations from other directors, with the same frames, angles, and positions of the actors. Elia Kazan, Fred Zinnemann, Frank Borzage and others are more or less directly cited. But the film Wilder constantly refers to, so that each scene becomes a vengeful slap, is David Lean’s Brief Encounter with its streams of tears and its amorously awkward couple—the least sensual and most sentimental film ever wept over. Some people even weep thinking about it—inexhaustible tears from English crocodiles. “Rachmaninoff! His second concerto for piano and orchestra never loses its effect,” Tom Ewell declares, just because he’s seen Brief Encounter and he has figured out that Rachmaninoff is infallible in affairs of the heart and body.
If The Seven Year Itch were only a weapon aimed at the English cinema it would already be estimable for its attempt at demystification.
I have not mentioned the name of the actress. I have loved her since Niagara and even before. She is a person of grace, somewhere between Chaplin and James Dean. How could anyone resist a film that has Marilyn Monroe in it?
—1956
Before he became a director, Billy Wilder was a marvelous screenwriter of American comedies. We are indebted to him for the scripts of Bluebeard’s Eighth Wife, Ball of Fire, and others. As a director he has made only three comedies—the wonderful The Major and the Minor, the worthy A Foreign Affair, and The Emperor Waltz—and four or five films inspired by French “psychological realism,” in a style that wavers between German expressionism and purest Americanism.
Stalag 17, which I admire, is both a psychological and a comic film, but the comedy is far weaker than that “psychology” I’ve just disparaged. The latter is so unusual and subtle that I think it makes this Wilder’s best film.
Taking note that Stalag 17 is, in Wilder’s fantastic work, the exception that proves the rule, let us provide a quick plot summary, which in this case is necessary.
An evil spell seems to have been cast on Barracks 4 of an American prisoner of war camp somewhere in Austria. (Barracks 4 is distinguished from the other barracks in that a number of well-known Paramount actors are billeted there, while the others are inhabited by extras.) Whenever the occupants of this particular barracks break the rules—trying to escape, assassination attempts, sabotage, listening to clandestine radios—they are immediately caught by the guards, in spite of the fact that the guards aren’t very sharp. Among the prisoners is Sefton (William Holden), who behaves oddly, keeping to himself, never taking part in the dubious jokes or puerile tricks of his simpleminded companions. Sefton is not vulgar, and that seems fishy; he’s intelligent, and that makes him unusual; he’s a loner, and that’s disturbing.
Two prisoners (who have not seen Grand Illusion) are digging a tunnel for reasons that are obviously forbidden. Sefton is the only one who does not encourage them, and as soon as they disappear into the tunnel, he bets that they’ll fail. Shamed by Sefton, the others all take the bet, putting on the table their entire ration of Red Cross cigarettes. A few minutes go by and there is the sound of gunfire; the men look at each other, stunned. Without a word, Sefton puts the cigarettes in his pockets and goes to bed.
One day, some Soviet women prisoner-soldiers are billeted nearby. Using what materials are at hand, Sefton constructs a makeshift telescope and rents it out for a small sum to spy on the women as they take their showers.
An American lieutenant who was captured alone is brought in. He tells his fellow prisoners how he blew up a German train. That fact immediately becomes known to the authorities. The lieutenant is “invited” to the camp commandant’s office, where he isn’t tortured but simply told that as soon as he chooses to talk, he’ll be allowed to sit down and even go to sleep.
Obviously there is an informer in Barracks 4. When idiots conduct an investigation, it’s dangerous to be intelligent. Sefton is immediately suspect, Sefton the racketeer, Sefton who makes money off his buddies every Sunday by organizing races using white mice, Sefton who is always swapping and selling for profit, who collaborates with the enemy, Sefton the haughty skeptic.
One day, Sefton suddenly disappears. They talk about him in his absence: “It’s got to be him, he must be the stool pigeon.” He returns, and when his companions learn that, with the guards’ blessing, he has spent two hours with the Russian women, they are even more certain he is guilty. They gang up on him, twenty to one, and beat him up.
Meanwhile the exhausted lieutenant has admitted his sabotage and will be executed unless he is helped to escape. The barracks’ trusted leader volunteers to direct the escape, but Sefton, who has already figured out that the leader is the guilty party, publicly accuses him of it, and decides that he himself will help the lieutenant escape. Everybody learns that Sefton was innocent. They ask his pardon.
Sefton and the lieutenant get away. But before he goes, Sefton turns to his companions, who are wishing him luck, and says, “If I get away and we meet some day after the war, don’t try to shake hands with me; it’d be better if you crossed the street.” Stalag 17 is a harsh and uncompromising film.
And who is Sefton? On the outside, he is an egoist, a hustler. His disdain for his companions makes him seem “pretentious” and “above them,” so they turn against him. He maintains friendly relations with the German guards and does “business” with them. He is a sort of collaborator. For these simpleminded men, whom imprisonment has robbed of whatever small mental abilities they had possessed, this man has to be the informer. But when they gang up on him and bloody his face, twenty to one, it is jealousy (he has just returned from two hours with the Russian women) rather than any certitude that he is the guilty party that moves them to this particular justice. Isn’t this a symbol of those so-called summary executions that leave us with a clear conscience?
Sefton is intelligent; that’s why he acts as he does. For the first time in films the philosophy of the solitary man is elaborated; this film is an apologia for individualism. (Certainly, the solitary man has been a theme in films, as with Charlie Chaplin and many other comedians. But he has usually been an inept person whose only desire was to fit into society.) Sefton is alone because he wants to be alone. He has the qualities of leadership, and everything would tend to establish him as the barracks’ trusted leader. After the deception has been uncovered by Sefton himself, and the leader the men trusted has been unmasked and convicted, we may wonder if Sefton escapes in order to avoid being named to take his place, knowing his fellow prisoners would do exactly that, both to exonerate themselves and because they finally recognize him as their only possible leader.
What’s sure is that Sefton escapes to get away from the companions whom he despises rather than from a regime he has come to terms with and guards he’s been able to bend to his needs.
Sefton needs those whom he despises to despise him in turn. If he remains, he will be a hero—a role he rejects no matter what the cost. Having lost his moral solitude, he hastens to regain it by becoming an escapee, with all the risk that entails.
The baseness of the crowd has frequently been portrayed in films in stories of lynchings in which, nine times out of ten, the victim is guilty and the respectable folk, led by contemptible leaders, become executioners. What can be more dreadful than good folk who take justice into their own hands? What is worse than this moral superiority born of a clear conscience and a certainty of total innocence? Here—better than with civilians, soldiers, or fighters—the authors have chosen prisoners to show that groups, majorities, or simply ten good men together are always wrong, even when they are right—especially when they are right. Prisoners always attract our sympathy, since they are wrong in the eyes of their captors; they are men whose very state elicits compassion. This is a supremely clever idea. With a single blow, the sophistry that shared misfortune brings out the best in us and creates closeness is exploded.
The depravity of the group versus the individual’s moral solitude, is this not a large theme? Are we not right to salute a movie that dares to depart from the exigencies of life that make the beggar an accomplice of the very order that he denounces, and shows us that the answers are in us and only in us? So, I would put Stalag 17 with Europe 51 and I Confess, after excusing myself for giving in to the taste of the day, which is not cinematographic.
—1954
Selena (Jane Wyman), a young orphan whose ruined father has killed himself, leaves school in 1898 and becomes a teacher in a hamlet in New Zealand. She has based her entire life on the love of beauty. When she arrives in the hamlet, looks at the immense stretch of the fields, and cries out, “How beautiful the cabbages are,” we see the sympathetic amusement she arouses. Selena has inherited a rather odd theory from her father, actually an ethical theory. According to Selena, the world is divided into two types: the first is wheat, the second diamonds. Those belonging to the first, bent over the soil to extract its material goods from it, nourish their fellows; they are wheat, or rather, blades of wheat. The second are the artists who create harmony and beauty; they are diamonds.
Selena teaches the young son of a farming family (Walter Coy—Roef) to play the piano, and he shows such great aptitude that she is sure she can make him a pure diamond. Meanwhile, she marries a blade of wheat, a young farmer (Sterling Hayden), who gives her a son, Dirck (Steve Forrest). When she is left a widow, and Roef has gone off to “live his own life,” Selena dedicates herself to the education of her son, whom she intends to make into a diamond also.
The years pass. Dirck receives his architectural degree with great honors—he will be a builder, a blade of wheat and a diamond at the same time. Unfortunately he falls into the hands of a worldly young woman and becomes engaged to her. Paula (Martha Hyer) is vain, superficial, flighty, and fiercely ambitious. The only thing on her mind is that Dirck should make as much money as possible; she turns him into a businessman. Roef has become a great musician and is in love with a painter, Dallas (Nancy Olson), who returns his love. Dirck also loves Dallas but realizes that he does not deserve her. Selena finds the words to console her son, who eventually renounces Paula, abandons his materialistic ambitions, and goes to work to become the pure diamond his mother had always wanted to make him.
The movie belongs to a category that could be called the “portrait” film, a typical genre of American films. It follows a person from birth or adolescence to death. We can compare So Big to others of the type: Mrs. Parkington, directed by Tay Garnett, The Keys of the Kingdom by John Stahl, The President’s Lady by Henry Levin. These are the most successful, and all of them are taken from big five-hundred-page saga novels.
Robert Wise is a director of importance who came to movie making from editing (he was chief editor to Orson Welles on Citizen Kane and The Magnificent Ambersons). The first film he directed, The Set-Up, attracted considerable attention, and, as we look back, his succeeding films, Born to Kill and Blood on the Moon, probably did not get enough attention. Using his own particular strength, Wise has made a kind of masterpiece from this long melodrama. His power as a director leads us to overlook the rather simplistic psychology of his characters. Selena is an exemplary figure, the magnificent mother with perfect dignity; she reminds us of Jouhandeau’s mother. The emotion is contained throughout, but this very reserve is an added cleverness of the auteur calculated to encourage the tears the women in the audience apparently cannot restrain. There’s not a lot more to say about this film; fifty years of cinematographic know-how have created a kind of total technique in terms of the screenplay’s construction, the direction of the actors, and the superb camera work. So Big raises the classic, traditional Hollywood style to its highest degree of effectiveness.
—1954
June 1945: A commander in the American Navy and seven sailors are on a mission in the heart of the Gobi Desert. The leader of a caravan of Mongols makes a deal to cooperate with the Americans in exchange for sixty saddles. Washington is consulted, the matter is discussed and it is decided to fly the saddles over. What happens to them, how they come to be traded for eight camels, sold, stolen, recovered, confiscated, and how they eventually save the lives of seven men is the story of this good and energetic film.
Is it an adventure film, a psychological film, or a burlesque? Destination Gobi is all those things and more. Every ten minutes you think you’ve got it figured out, and you’re wrong. There’s a new twist to open your eyes, confuse you one more time and move the story along.
Everett Freeman’s screenplay is one of the best to come out of Hollywood in a decade. It is an important contribution to the most important effort that’s being made in script-writing—breaking out of genres.
All the characters in Destination Gobi, both the Americans and the Mongols, are fully realized. The Technicolor, well photographed by Charles G. Clarke, brings to perfection the technique that Hathaway’s Niagara hinted at. As Sam MacHale, the first mate, Richard Widmark has one of the best roles of his career. Destination Gobi is an adventure film which pirouettes away from drama. We have to think of Huston except that the playfulness and casualness are on screen rather than behind the camera. Wise’s work is unusually serious, intelligent, tasteful, direct, and precise.
Ordinarily the absence of women in a film bothers me more than anything else. The fact that someone had to point that out to me about this film is a sign of how fascinated I was with it.
—1955
*L’Opinion publique is the French title of A Woman of Paris (1923), Charlie Chaplin’s only dramatic film, which established Adolphe Menjou as the prototypical European seducer in Hollywood films.
* A reference to Valery’s La Soirée avec Monsieur Teste; T. is “the monster of the intellect who ‘ne connait que deux valeurs…le possible et l’impossible.’…”—Oxford Companion to French Literature. Trans.
*The Bridge on the River Kwai—Ed.