WHEN several newspaper critics in New York were hard put to find something good about the movie “For Whom the Bell Tolls” they dug up production and called it fine. Production to them means any technical element that remains after discussing the subject matter, acting, directing and editing, and it is something on which they feel their readers should concede Hollywood’s excellence. The critics’ belief that Hollywood has production all wrapped up and put away is based on the infinite money, pains and time Hollywood spends on a movie production, the infinite money, pains and time it spends telling the public how much it has spent, and the knowledge that Hollywood production techniques have changed little since the late twenties, and that therefore what has become a standard technique must be either a good one or a bad one. They would rather think it is a good one. They feel it is a minor item to be taken for granted the way you take a paint job on a new automobile. It is obvious from the rigidity of production that they and Hollywood’s producers have one standard for production goodness: actual-looking sets furnished with actual-looking furniture, costumes that seem accurate as to time and place, photography which is not cracked or blurred and which centers properly on the players’ faces, and sound which does credit to American mechanics. This, what they feel is excellence, is actually the lowest mean requirement of a movie, like the lumber you haul up to the building site. It is what can be accomplished in a movie without recourse to the mind or the sensibilities, and it has neither significance nor merit until the moment arrives at which it is integrated with the movie idea. Hollywood stops too often before this moment is reached and consequently too often its production is not excellent at all but inferior.
The main thing about Hollywood production is that Hollywood no longer uses photography to any advantage. Its photography is characterized by a tone of watery gray, by an abuse of artificial lighting and by the paltriness of its detail. This puts it in exactly the opposite state from that in which its founding fathers—Griffith, Sennett, von Stroheim, Chaplin—left it. It no longer has any particularity of person, place and thing. Particularity (the personality of a given image) is a matter of texture, detail and warm and cool tones. The gray monotone has distilled all the warm tones from the image, the all-over glossiness has negated textural differences, and the theatrical lighting which producers have substituted for natural lighting either blacks out too much of the detail or splatters too many highlights over it so that light is divorced from form and a pattern or embroidery of light is placed in front of the detail, removing its character. This photography is banal compared to the work of the early days. Today the main effect is one of pretense or shallow sophistication; the Chaplins and Sennetts were beholden to the power of the scene around them and believed with idolizing patience that the camera’s creative function was to integrate that power with their picture’s story.
Modern movies approach nature and human affairs with the same insecurity as the merchandiser who gives you two pairs of pants for the price of one. The producer must add ten more shadows to each forest glade, three more crags to each mountain, five more turns to each road, yards more chromium to each interior. Thus, a picture like “For Whom the Bell Tolls” approaches a scene loaded; there is not one iota of wanting to understand it and use it significantly, the feeling that comes first, before it can be sifted, selected and clarified for art. Instead, “For Whom the Bell Tolls” has the single purpose of making nature a wow, and you get such a fantastically cheap scene as the one in which Pilar and Jordan pose amid falling snow, a scene false and meaningless, utterly without reference to anything.
At the bottom of most production errors is an underestimation of the camera eye and its ability to make apparent the slightest value, texture or form, combined with a grandiose attitude toward make-up, sets and costuming. “For Whom the Bell Tolls” may serve as evidence of what this leads to. Here was pulled the characteristic trick of advertising character actors as character actors by covering their faces with so many age lines, chin whiskers and skin shadings that whatever relation the actors might have held to the movie idea is destroyed in the beginning. So much did the director relish the whites of eyes against a leathery face that Pablo and Pilar were like nothing so much as oncoming automobiles at night. How much of the personality of Bergman’s Maria was diluted by leaving her clipped hair long enough to be beautiful by Hollywood standards is an interesting speculation. And the velvet quality of her skin and the whiteness of her teeth were so accented as to take your mind completely off the after-effect of mass rape on her, and off the action of the moment, be it love or talk called love, and to make you think instead of candy and Sunbonnet Sue. Equally, the dress of the guerrillas is accurate in detail, but the effect of each detail on the whole is disregarded and there is no arrival at the idea of “guerrilla,” but only at a certain kind of costume.
The goal of production, in costume, sets, make-up, is the creation of a scene out of which the story and character drama will directly emerge. The coal-mining environment of “The Hard Way” poetically expressed the lives of the characters, and whatever they wore, whatever they moved in, was added up to a single movie idea. The environment of “The Stars Look Down” seemed the main determinant of its people’s look and soul. One recalls Emlyn Williams sprawled on the low roof of a dwelling, where he, his clothes, the way he wore them, the dreary smallness of the dwelling, were a unit expressing the idea which each of them aimed at alone. It is a curious fact that Hollywood is very often done with environment after the first few moments of the picture; after you have spiraled up from the street, up the side of the skyscraper, into the big shot’s office and on to the face of his secretary, you have left environment for good.
August 2, 1943