SOMEBODY once told me, no doubt inaccurately, that lady golfers in the Victorian era used a certain gimmick that went by the name of “Gimp.” It was a cord running from hem of skirt to waistband; when preparing to hit the ball, you flicked it with your little finger and up came the hem. Thus suddenly, for a brief instant, it revealed Kro-Flite, high-button shoes, and greensward, but left everything else carefully concealed behind yards of eyeleted cambric. Something like this device has now been developed in Hollywood. Whenever the modern film-maker feels that his movie has taken too conventional a direction and is neglecting “art,” he need only jerk the Gimp-string, and—behold!—curious and exotic but “psychic” images are flashed before the audience, pepping things up at the crucial moment, making you think such thoughts as “The Hero has a mother complex,” or “He slapped that girl out of ambivalent rage at his father image, which, he says, he carries around in his stomach,” or “He chomps angrily on unlit cigarettes to show he comes from a Puritan environment and has a will of iron.”
Over the past couple of years, one movie after another has been filled with low-key photography, shallow perspectives, screwy pantomime, ominously timed action, hollow-sounding voices. All this pseudo-undershot stuff, swiped from any and every “highbrow” work of films, painting, literature, has gone into ultraserious movies that express enough discontent with capitalist society to please any progressive. In these beautifully controlled Freud-Marx epics, the only things that really move are the tricks and symbols designed to make you think, “God, this is sensitive!”
Somehow the nature of this new mannerist flicker has been misinterpreted by critics, by the good ones as well as the merely earnest publicists. With their preconceptions, their ennui, and their formularized responses to stimuli, the critics go their complacent (or disgruntled) ways, finding movies better (or worse) than ever, but never noticing that movies aren’t movies any more. Not so long ago, the movies, whatever their oversimplifications and distortions, still rested on the assumption that their function was to present some intelligible, structured image of reality—on the simplest level, to tell a story and to entertain, but, more generally, to extend the spectator’s meaningful experience, to offer him a window on the real world. What are they now?
Well, icebergs of a sort, one-tenth image, action, plot, nine-tenths submerged popular “insights” à la Freud or Jung, Marx or Lerner, Sartre or Saroyan, Frost, Dewey, Auden, Mann, or whomever else the producer’s been reading; or they are Dali paintings, surrealist fun-houses with endless doors leading the spectator to inward “awareness” and self-consciousness, and far away from a simple ninety-cent seat in a simple mansion of leisure-time art and entertainment, or they are expressionistic shotguns peppering the brain of that deplored “escapist” with millions of equally important yet completely unrelated pellets of message—messages about the human personality and its relations to politics, anthropology, furniture, success, Mom, etc., etc. The trick consists in taking things that don’t belong together, charging them up with hidden meanings, and then uniting them in an uneasy juxtaposition that is bound to shock the spectator into a lubricated state of mind where he is forced to think seriously about the phony implications of what he is seeing.
Most readers will remember the calculated moment in Sunset Boulevard—the kept man in the fashionable men’s shop, ashamed of buying the vicuña coat with the ex-star’s money. Up to a certain point, this scene was unfolded in a straight narrative line, and then Director Billy Wilder pulled his Gimp-string. The camera moved in for a very close close-up, the atmosphere became molecular and as though diseased—and there was a sleek clerk whispering to the slightly ill gigolo: “After all, if the lady is paying. . . .” Thus Wilder registered spiritual sickness and business-world corruption in an ad-libbed shot that had all the freshness of an old tire-patch, consisting as it did, under the circumstances, of naïve moral gibberish that no adult in his right mind would mouth. This indirect shot, with its leaden overpantomiming going back to and beyond Theda Bara, offers a classic example of what the Gimp can do for a director, helping him avoid monotony (by switching from storytelling to symbolic “pseudoaction”), explaining hidden content, and ensuring his position in movies as a brave, intransigent artist.
One of the most confusing films of all time, People Will Talk, dealt with an unflaggingly urbane gynecologist, a liberal-minded doctor, who cured patients with friendliness, played with electric trains, scoffed at ration programs and packaged food, and generally behaved like a Lubitsch portrait of an enlightened college professor. One scene showed him making vague epigrams and looking down his nose at overconscientious note-takers in an anatomy class. Obviously all this suavity needed some excitement, and so Director Mankiewicz jerked his string and provided the well-analyzed doctor with a weird trick that you’ll never see again in a movie. The doctor undrapes the corpse on the slab before him, and—surprise!—you are looking at a naked brunette, not only the most ravishing person in the movie but the whitest and least dead-looking. While the doctor talks on about heartless people and gracefully does things with the corpse’s Godivalike tresses, the audience is so shocked by the beauty and lifelikeness of the corpse that it starts thinking all sorts of things about how society nags the individual, even unto death. (Visually, in the best Gimp tradition, this scene was bewitching for its pure unusualness; Cary Grant’s classy erotic playing with the dead girl evokes a compound of evil, new kinds of sex, and terrific grace.)
The Gimp is the technique, in effect, of enhancing the ordinary with a different dimension, sensational and yet seemingly credible. Camera set-ups, bits of business, lines (“They don’t make faces like that any more”) are contrived into saying too much. Every moment of a movie is provided with comment about American society. “Original” characters are sought, the amount of illogical and implausible material is increased, to such a point that movies which try to be semidocumentary actually seem stranger than the Tarzan–Dracula–King Kong fantasy.
We are getting such characters as the abortionist in Detective Story, a close-mouthed Dutchman dressed like a low-paid respectable clerk from an early Sinclair Lewis story about department-store life in the Midwest. To make him look as though he has emerged from the bowels of common life in America, he is given a pinched, deathly pallor and a sickly personality that hardly allows him to breathe, much less talk. The apparent intention was to set up a significantly ordinary, true-to-life, entirely evil, grass-roots American; the result was a surrealistic creature who seemed ready at any moment to throw up. Thanks to the canny acting of George Macready, possibly Hollywood’s most impressive character actor, this sour figure provided the film with its only good moments.
Two recent pictures have made especially adroit and unrelenting use of the Gimp. In A Place in the Sun, Director George Stevens, not content with letting a climax of violence follow naturally upon an inevitable train of events, treats us constantly to macabre darkenings of the landscape, metronome-timed hootings of a loon, and about six other sensational effects reeking with recondite significance. The story is about a not-quite-bright social climber, and Stevens so buries him in symbols of money, dominance, and sex that every last member of the audience must become involved with the vague meanings of the boy’s daydreams. Wherever he walks, there is sex or wealth—usually both together—written out so big that no one can miss it: billboards that out-Petty Petty, languid and sophisticated aristocrats, a Gus Kahn love lyric coming from a midget radio. And of course his dingy furnished room in a depressed urban area must have a window facing on a huge neon factory sign standing for wealth and achievement.
In one protracted example of contrivance, a luscious babe in a Cadillac flashes by the boy as he hitchhikes on some spacious highway, and then comes a broken-down truck chugging straight out of The Grapes of Wrath to pick up the disappointed hiker. Immediately, the audience was saying to itself one or all of these things: “This is about the unfair distribution of wealth in the United States,” or “His spirit is crying out for joy, ease, and love,” or “He has a complex about being raised in a poor, harsh, confined neighborhood.” Whenever any particularly delectable symbol crossed the boy’s line of vision, he would freeze up with yearning, refusing to act, not answering questions for minutes on end, his wispy shoulders almost but not quite jerking, and occasionally one dead word straying out of his twisted mouth. There were eccentric scenes in which the boy met up with a deputy cop and a suspicious boatman, who—with the help of acting that was probably coached by Emily Brontë, and camera angles that gave the actors height and took away width—looked like ominous scoundrels from the Dark Ages and showed you Society intimidating the Outcast, American Justice breaking the Common Man on the wheel.
Symbols are a dime a dozen in Hollywood’s storehouse, and Stevens bought up the stock: police sirens, train whistles, double shots of a boy’s face and a remembered kiss, the lame leg of the sadistic district attorney (which makes him more formidable), a shadow going over a face to indicate an evil thought. Such things may seem to come from real life, but actually they are the products of medieval imaginations capable of grasping glaring features of contemporary life only in cliché terms. These creators have entrenched themselves within a vicious circle of decay: having helped to create and foster the world of lurid wealth, romantic love, and Big City glamour, they now express despair and chaos by exaggerating the same corny symbols they originally invented.
It has always been obvious that the movie camera not only reflects reality but interprets it. This fact used to imply the deepening and enrichment of an intelligible structure of plot and character. What is happening now is the complete disappearance of reality in the fog of interpretation: the underground “meaning” of every shot displaces the actual content, and the moviegoer is confronted with a whole crowd of undefined symbolic “meanings” floating entirely free. Shove the camera up against the pimple on an actor’s face, and you automatically produce an image of immense importance: it will mean something—no matter if you don’t know exactly what, and no matter if you have made it impossible to tell your story. Just as comedians now manufacture their humor out of immense card indexes of gags, so directors dip into their mental gag file of disconnected bits of social significance, amateur psychiatry, and visual shock effects.
In A Streetcar Named Desire, Elia Kazan pulls the Gimp-string so mercilessly that you never have one plain character or situation, but vast bundles of the most complicated sociological phenomena. For example, the hero, a sharp-witted Polish mechanic, conveys heavy passion by stuttering the first syllables of his sentences and mumbling the rest as though through a mouthful of mashed potatoes, a device that naturally forces the spectator to sociological speculation; disgusted with the fact that the hero has apparently been raised in a pigpen, the spectator is impelled to think about the relation of environment to individual development. Tennessee Williams’s hero is getting ahead in his work, is a loving husband, makes “those colored lights” with his sexual genius, and is possessed of a delicate moral sensitivity. But all these bourgeois attributes have to be matched with their opposites for the sake of excitement, and so Kazan pulls his string and you see the Polack slobbering, licking his paws, howling like a troglodyte, hitting his wife so hard that he sends her to the maternity hospital, playing poker like an ape-man, exuding an atmosphere of wild screams, rape, crashing china, and drunkenness. And to make sure every two-year-old will understand how bad life is in this Grimm’s fairy-tale hovel, Kazan hammers his point home with continual sinister lights, dancing shadows, gaseous oozings.
With its freakish acting, nightmare sets, and dreamy pace, Streetcar may seem like traditional, Hollywood poeticism, but looked at more closely, it becomes very different from movies of the past, and in the same odd, calculated way as A Place in the Sun, People Will Talk, etc. For one thing, the drama is played completely in the foreground. There is nothing new about shallow perspectives, figures gazing into mirrors with the camera smack up against the surface, or low intimate views that expand facial features and pry into skin-pores, weaves of cloth, and sweaty undershirts. But there is something new in having the whole movie thrown at you in shallow dimension. Under this arrangement, with the actor and spectator practically nose to nose, any extreme movement in space would lead to utter visual chaos, so the characters, camera, and story are kept at a standstill, with the action affecting only minor details, e.g., Stanley’s back-scratching or his wife’s lusty projection with eye and lips. On the screen, these grimly controlled gestures appear huge, florid, eccentric, and somewhat sinister. Again, there is nothing new about shooting into incandescent lights and nebulous darks, but there is something new in having every shot snotted up with silvery foam, black smoke, and flaky patterns to convey decay and squalor. Never before has there been such a use of darkness in masses as we find in the new films (at least not since the Russians, who probably didn’t have any lights). All this to jazz up a pseudodrama in which nothing really happens on the screen except dialogue in which you see two faces talking, then a close-up of the right speaker asking, then a close-up of the left speaker answering, then back to the two, etc. The spectator is aware that a story is being told, but mostly he feels caught in the middle of a psychological wrestling match.
Though there has never been so massive a concentration on technique, the fact is these films actually fail to exploit the resources of the medium in any real sense. Kazan, Stevens, and their colleagues have been shrinking films down to an almost babyish level in situation and grouping. With slumbrous camera movement, slow choreographies of action, sustained close-ups of enigmatic faces surrounded by areas of gloom, and drifting dialogue that seemed to come out of the walls, Stevens in A Place in the Sun had time only to unreel in grandiose terms a kiss, a seduction, and a drowning that would have taken him all of five minutes to examine with the straight story-telling technique he used in Penny Serenade and Alice Adams, both of which he made in the 1930’s. Streetcar, for dramatic action, shows one big character—a neurotic Southern girl on the last lap to the mental ward—in one main situation: talk, talk, talk with an uninhibited couple in a two-room apartment. The African Queen was shot entirely in the Belgian Congo, but the characters do almost nothing that couldn’t have been done on one studio set with the aid of some library shots.
Movies have seldom, if ever, been so physically overbearing in their effect. The scenarios are set up so that the story can be told with a small cast, little movement, and few settings. The camera fastens itself on the actors with such obsessive closeness that every moment becomes of overwhelming importance and threatens to disclose some terrifying psychic or emotional fact. The effect becomes even stronger and more curious when the actors occasionally move across the room and this all-revealing eye just barely moves to keep them in focus—as in Something to Live For, when a worried advertising ace paces his office, while the camera seems to move back and forth no more than a fraction of an inch. One has the feeling that nothing is any longer of importance except a magnification of face, gesture, and dress, and that these can tell you all you need to know about life in our time.
All this seems to have started in an exciting, if hammy, 1941 picture called Citizen Kane. This grim mixture of suspense thriller and tabloid obituary, in which most of the surface facts paralleled events in the career of William Randolph Hearst, combined the thunderous theatrical trickery of Orson Welles with a reckless use of darkish photography and funny angles by a top cameraman named Gregg Toland. Toland threw into the film every device ever written into the accomplished cameraman’s handbook—everything from undercranking (to make the people in “newsreel” clips jerk and scuttle) to crane-shots, two-shots, floor-shots, and his favorite perspective shot in which figures widely spaced and moving far off down long rooms were kept as clearly in focus as the figure closest to the audience. This stuff helped make an exciting film, though marred by obvious items of shopworn inspiration: camera angles that had been thoroughly exploited by experimental films, and the platitudinous characterization of Kane as a lonely man who wanted love from the world but didn’t get it because he had no love of his own to give. This unpeeling of a tycoon was clearly the most iconoclastic stroke in major studio production since the days when D. W. Griffith and his cameraman, Billy Bitzer, were freeing movies from imitation of the stage. Orson Welles’s bold jumbling of techniques from theater, radio, and film led inevitably to a shock-happy work that anticipated everything that has since become fashionable in American films.
Oddly enough, this film, which had the biggest cultural build-up before release since Eisenstein’s Mexican film, made little impression at the time on Hollywood’s veterans. Only in the 1950’s did the ghost of Citizen Kane start haunting every A picture out of Hollywood. Before the advent of Orson Welles, the most important thing in motion-picture technique had been the story, the devising, spacing, and arranging of shots into a plot line that moved easily from one thing to another. Welles, more concerned with exhibiting his impudent showmanship and his deep thought about graft, trusts, yellow journalism, love, hate, and the like, fractured his story all along the line, until his film became an endless chain of stop effects. At every instant, the customer was encouraged to pause over some Kublai Khan setting, some portentously lit floor-shot of an actor, or some symbol (the falling-snow toy, the bird screaming in escape), and think in the terms of what it had to tell about a publisher’s immoral pursuit of love-power-respect. The plot was simple enough: a famous man said something (“Rosebud”) just before dying in his castle on a mountain, and “March of Time” sent out an inquiring reporter to make a story out of it. Eventually we did get the answer, not through the flashbacked memories of those interviewed—Kane’s oldest friend, his newspaper manager, the girl, the butler in the castle—but in a final nerve-tingling shot, privy to the director and audience, of the “Rosebud” sled of Kane’s lost, barren childhood. The story was presented in such complicated ways and made so portentous with the shadows of meaning cast off by a hundred symbols that you could read almost anything into it, including what Welles had put there. There were certain dramatic high points like the rough-cut in the “March of Time” projection room, the kid outside the window in the legacy scene, and the lurid presentation of an electioneering stage. But in between these was a great deal of talk, much less action, and almost no story.
Welles bequeathed to Hollywood, which had grown fat and famous on hurtling action films, a movie that broke up into a succession of fragments, each one popping with aggressive technique and loud, biased slanting of the materials of actual life. He told his story backward—which was nothing new—and slowed it even more by breaking it into four situations that didn’t flow together but settled stiffly and ambiguously into a sort of parallel construction. He also complicated and immobilized each shot with mismated shock effects that had never been seen before in Hollywood. For example, the ominous figure of Kane was shown in the dark alongside a clearly lit pseudo-Grecian statue and a vast undone jigsaw puzzle that the cameraman had cleverly shot so that it seemed strewn over a marble floor. The spectator had trouble arranging these disparate items into a convincing visual whole, but his brain was mobilized into all sorts of ruminations about avarice, monomania, and other compulsions. Even the devices for moving the story along were complicating and interrupting: again and again, you went from the first part of a sentence spoken at one time and place to the last part of the same sentence spoken years later; this made one less conscious of time passing than of a director stopping time to play a trick on reality.
Welles also showed the Hollywood craftsmen how to inject trite philosophy, “liberalism,” psychoanalysis, etc., into the very mechanics of moviemaking, so that what the spectator saw on the screen was not only a fat, contrived actor screaming down a staircase, but also some exotically rendered editorializing contributed by everyone from the actor to the set designer. The movie opened and closed on the iron fence around Kane’s castle. In between this repetition, which spelled out the loneliness and baronial character of a tycoon, were similarly meaningful images: Kane in his castle among the boxed accumulations of his collecting; hopeful and innocent Kane gesticulating in front of a huge electioneering poster that showed him as a sinister demagogue. And always, practically on top of the cameraman, his unreal figure suggesting a blown-up cue ball adorned with the facial features of Fu Manchu, with nothing inside him but a Freudian memory giggling around in the fumes cast off by Welles’s ideas about how an American big shot goes wrong.
The hidden meanings and the segmented narration were the two most obvious innovations of this film. Toland’s camera provided the third, and it was anything but what you’d expect from a film that was advertised as using an unbound camera. Toland’s chief contribution was a shallow concept of movie space. His camera loved crane-shots and floor-shots, but contracted the three dimensional aspect by making distant figures as clear to the spectator as those in the foreground. To accomplish this, Toland had to arrange his actors in widely spaced, parallel arrays across the screen. He also had to immobilize them and cut them off from the natural obscurations of scenery and atmosphere. His powerful lens did the rest. The spectator was faced with an image that exaggerated the importance of the figures it showed to a point where the deep space between them seemed to have been negated. The chief visual effect was the microscopically viewed countenance, one into which you could read almost anything. Almost as important was the static grouping of figures, amounting to a reversal of everything Hollywood had previously perfected in the creation of fluid groupings in unbounded space.
Citizen Kane and its Gimp-effects were generally laughed off by high-brows in Hollywood and elsewhere. Their opinion of the film was that it was too obviously theatrical and exhibitionistic to be linked to the main journalistic path of cinema. But one had the feeling, during the war years, that, as Hollywood turned out dozens of progressively more realistic action films—Western, war, detective—it was more than a little concerned with what Welles had done in the symbolic enriching of a movie through florid mannerisms. For Hollywood directors and actors couldn’t forget that Citizen Kane was crazily three-dimensional in the manner of a psychoanalytic hour and that it did start you thinking at every moment of ambiguous drives hidden inside each character. Citizen Kane seems to have festered in Hollywood’s unconscious until after the Wylers and Hustons returned from their government film chores; then it broke out in full force.
In the acclaimed films of the early postwar years (The Lost Weekend, The Best Years of Our Lives, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, Champion), one began to see Welles’s theatrical innovations effectively incorporated into certain films that otherwise tried to look like untouched records of reality. There still had to be a long training in what is known as “semidocumentary” technique (movies shot in real streets with nonstudio make-up, natural lighting, spontaneous pantomime) before Hollywood could link Welles’s florid symbolism with enough of the appearance or actuality to make it appear moderately reasonable. But by now the lesson has been learned, and the ghost of Citizen Kane stalks a monstrous-looking screen. The entire physical structure of movies has been slowed down and simplified and brought closer to the front plane of the screen so that eccentric effects can be deeply felt. Hollywood has in effect developed a new medium which plays odd tricks with space and human behavior in order to project a content of popular “insights” beneath a meager surface.
Thus has a revolution taken place in Hollywood, probably unbeknownst to the very men—directors, actors, and critics—who have led it. If the significance of the New Movie is understood, it may well be that Hollywood will never be able to go home again. Any attempt to resurrect the old flowing naturalistic film that unfolds logically and takes place in “reasonable” space seems doomed to look as old-fashioned as the hoop skirt. For better or worse, we seem stuck with an absurdly controlled, highly mannered, overambitious creation that feeds on everything in modern art and swallows it so that what you see is not actually on the screen but is partly in your own mind, partly on the screen, and partly behind it. You have to read these pictures in a completely different way from the one you’ve been accustomed to. They are no longer literally stories or motion pictures, but a succession of static hieroglyphs in which overtones of meaning have replaced, in interest as well as in intent, the old concern with narrative, character, and action for their own sakes. These films must be seen, not literally, but as X-rays of the pluralistic modern mind. But the popular ideas deliberately half-buried in them have the hard, crude ring of Stone Age tools, though most of them come out of psychoanalysis and the Popular Front morality plays of the depression. The most ambitious of the current film-makers got their higher, and highest, education in the New York of the latter 1930’s and have never lost the obsessive need to “improve” the world through art. They are by now too sophisticated and weary really to believe that this will work, but the hangover of conscience, regret, guilt, and frustration still produces in their movies the new Worried Look. They have lost the spirit and convictions of the radical 1930’s, but the characteristic feelings of these years remain expressed vaguely in a bleak, humorless, free-floating, and essentially pointless misanthropy—social significance gone sour. There may be nothing wrong with misanthropy as a working viewpoint, but when, as in A Place in the Sun, it takes its conception of workers, tycoons, and debutantes from a world of ideas fantastically unrelated to current American experience, it is merely a negative sentimentality. The emotional impact of a technique committed to elegant, controlled, mismated power effects is as modern as ammoniated toothpaste; but the popular ideas to which this technique is wedded seem almost as dated and provincial as those in Damaged Goods or A Fool There Was.
June 1952
THE fourth instalment of de Rochemont’s perusal of New England character, “Walk East on Beacon,” plods through a leisurely-paced action story vaguely based on the Judy Coplon and Klaus Fuchs espionage cases. The de Rochemont film is always dedicated to lauding a certain American type which blends the qualities of a model Sunday-school student with the talents of a mad industrialist. The central character is a refugee scientist (Finlay Currie) revolutionizing everything from dinghies to flying missiles with a theory he has worked out on high-speed calculators. Looking like a huge Edam cheese topped by a flowing Jean Harlow hairdo, the scientist fits the de Rochemont formula for heroes in that he is pure and innocent and spends his time lifting the lids from high-powered machines and reading numbers from them with a mysteriously joyous tone. Before the film settles down to a series of chases on land and sea, a Communist-spy ring tries to blackmail the scientist with threats against his son being held in Germany’s Soviet zone. The movie is against Communists, but it pays a lot of respect to the shrewd, tortoise-like craftsmanship of the spies. Besides being so dedicated to their jobs that they tap their fingers, or sit down to lunch with a mechanical and somewhat hypnotized air, they are seldom seen doing anything except their daily jobs as taxi-driver, florist, or photo finisher. The idea is that they are too clever to expose their devilish skills. Occasionally the movie stops and hovers happily over a tiny electric fixture for blowing up a safe or a set of skeleton keys to lockers in the air terminal or a wristwatch that rings likes the chimes in Moscow, all of which symbolize the hard-plugging talents of the spies. By the time the FBI smashes the gang with a flurry of gadgets and techniques, the movie has been turned into a crushing bore by a producer who is so dryly factual and absorbed with mechanical wonders that his movies would ring like an anvil if you bounced them.
Since the first March of Time short de Rochemont produced for Luce, Inc., he has placed a peculiar restraint on the realistic skills of his movie crews. It consists of locking his films halfway between the total naturalism of a newsreel and the well-scrubbed, obviously reenacted realism of the old March of Time film which was almost methodically stripped of everything but dull facts. Here, as always, he uses an eye-level camera shot that seldom moves in any direction, so that his true story has to be arranged rather stiffly in hundreds of tiny shots accompanied by masses of explanatory dialogue. For example, a Russian agent on his first day in this country is glimpsed on a stroll through a Boston park; the camera catches him briefly in a middle-distance shot but that is all you get because the casual documentary quality would be destroyed if the cameraman followed him around in a normal movie fashion. The movie’s speed is dissipated everywhere in brief, head-on shots of inconsequential stuff: a blonde courier getting out of a taxi, a suave Russian dummy hurrying to a telephone, a fat dowager carrying stolen information on to a Pan-American plane. It takes de Rochemont about thirty leisurely minutes to get to his plot (the blackmailing of the scientist) and by that time the movie has settled down to the crawl of a Hawaiian travelogue.
De Rochemont’s helpers can set up a scene that bristles with excitement and shows a sharp eye for the personalities of headline figures tried as traitors. The characterizations are never pure mimicry, but it is obvious that Hiss, Coplon, and Elizabeth Bentley are in the film in slightly disguised performances by little known actors. These actors are at the top of their skill when de Rochemont is trying for stark realism (as in the FBI film shots taken of suspects) and at low tide on the sort of inauthentic reenactment he used on March of Time. One of the actresses, Virginia Gilmore, turns up on the FBI screen as an efficient runner for the spies, with a loping stride, a nervous headachey appearance, and a dedicated manner in everything from snubbing out cigarettes to kissing. In these newsreel-type shots, she is realistic in the manner of neo-naturalistic Italian actresses, with a jerky, erratic vitality that seems to belong in the rough gray atmosphere that is caught on location around Boston. However, when she is not being watched by a hidden FBI camera, Miss Gilmore consciously oversimplifies and overstates the mannerisms of a determined but somewhat unhinged neurotic (in line with de Rochemont’s theory that a semi-documentary should be controlled and manipulated by its artists, resulting in a more expensive and studied-seeming film than the pure newsreel). Throughout the film the scenes that have an authentic look and the tangled energy of real life (the scientist’s midnight walk to the church on Beacon Street, the Coplon figure snapping at her FBI questioner) are balanced by shots in which the movie crew deliberately plays to the audience in thriller fashion. The combination of styles gives the film its peculiar fugue-type composition as well as a certain kind of grotesque and schizophrenic effectiveness.
June 21, 1952
“Clash by Night,” a passable movie about sexual unrest on Cannery Row, is like a blues number given class by a Stokowski arrangement and a hundred-piece symphony orchestra. Barbara Stanwyck returns to her clapboard homestead near a sardine cannery after ten years of romantic misery in the city. Working around San Something, California, are Paul Douglas, a dumb fisherman whom Stanwyck decides to marry for security, and Robert Ryan, a movie projectionist who not only speaks in the hard, poetic language of Stanwyck but has the kind of left-handed charm that causes the lady to stay up nights gazing at the most costly sky-and-sea shots ever to grace a Howard Hughes-RKO production. Ryan is fine “for a ride on a roller coaster,” but after a cataclysmic affair—their “last shot at happiness”—Stanwyck finds she can’t forsake her year-old child and hurries back to the fishing boat where Douglas is busy fixing the baby’s formula. This old-fashioned sex drama is supposed to hit you in the belly with its candid shots of men and women screaming, yearning, fighting, and suddenly coming together in rib-cracking embraces. But what was intended as a hot James Cain type of shocker was cooled considerably in the making by a hundred classy devices for making clichés look important and artistic. For instance, that old gimmick in which the man mouths two cigarettes at once is dragged in for kicks and then neatly twisted around. When Ryan hands Lady Stanwyck her cigarette she throws it away as though she thought it unsanitary. Several reels later, after Ryan’s excitement has wormed its way into her torn and twisted little bitch’s heart, Stanwyck is lighting Chesterfields two at a time just like her boy friend.
Stanwyck has occasionally been thawed out—by Sturges and Wilder—but here she is up to her old trick of impersonating a mentholated icicle. With his mellifluous broadcaster’s voice and cafeteria manager’s body, Douglas just seems out of place as a Sicilian fisherman and silly in a turtleneck sweater that outlines every pound of his C-shaped stomach. Marilyn Monroe, who is supposed to be burning up the screen with her size-361/2 bosom and horizontal walk, has several scenes custom-built to her measurements. Someone holds her upside down on the beach—to shake the water from her ears; she gets out of bed in a tricky hip-length shirt—designed by Adrian for cannery workers; she walks around in dungarees which must have been broken in by a midget cowboy. Nothing happens because Monroe is still a tight amateur presented as a spectacle. Given four-word sentences and simple actions like eating a candy bar, she seems to break them up into dozens of little unrelated pieces paced in a slow, sing-song fashion.
“Clash by Night” doesn’t have too much to offer outside of two good actors (Ryan and J. Carrol Naish) and fluid, flexible direction (Fritz Lang), but they make it worth your time. Ryan is supposed to be enacting a “sort of imitation,” “the Kingfish of Buckman County” run down and out of luck, a cynical guy who plays every word and gesture halfway into paranoia and with hard-bitten pathos. The role has been played by everyone from Widmark to Mitchum, but Ryan is the first one to give you the sense of an ordinary citizen being destroyed by a neurotic urge to act and admire himself at the same time. With pantomime that gives the sensation of a clock ticking away inside his skull, he is almost always caught in the process of observing himself while seeming to be observing and philosophizing about his friends.
Starting with a talkative script that offers nothing more active than a “tight two” set-up between talkative characters, Director Lang moves the story around a Monterey village with the space-devouring glide of a seagull. One of his neatest tricks is to keep the central fact of a scene at a tantalizing distance, so that he forces you to use your own eyes and imagination on something the average director would wear out in a minute of screen time. He takes you to the beach with Monroe and her boy friend and then watches their antics from a block away as they affect a cynically interested onlooker. He plays through the first Stanwyck-Douglas date at a movie house without ever showing the action on the screen that draws at least five revealing comments from the mismatched love birds. The script, like so many adaptations of Broadway plays, consists of endless exits and entrances, but Lang makes you so familiar with the architecture that one of the minor pleasures of the movie is trying to guess which stairway, door, or hallway will pull forth the next action.
June 26, 1952
THE only pastime that seems to bewitch citizens lately is game-playing—quiz programs, gambling, big-time athletics—and so to please the customers Hollywood has glutted theaters with sports films. The latest crop (“Pat and Mike,” “The Ring,” “The Winning Team”) proves that the industry continues its childish treatment of golf, tennis, and the like by concentrating on Success, casting unspectacular athletes, and using stationary camera set-ups on games that thrive on split-second relationships of movements that are a mixture of technique, personality, and accident. Of the above-mentioned films “Pat and Mike” is a Hepburn-Tracy starrer apparently created to prove that Hepburn is in a class with the Marbles and Didricksons. (With her cautiously orthodox form, Hepburn is not an explosive, highly individualized athlete whose games one enjoys watching in a two-hour film.) The second film, “The Ring,” is an unpretentious job built around the novel twist of a young Mexican fighter who does nothing but lose to the rankest small-club lightweights. “The Winning Team” is about the reprobate pitcher, Grover Alexander, as rendered by a lamb-like actor, Ronald Reagan.
“Pat and Mike” is an almost charming fairy story about two subjects that give most sports writers the creeps—a female athlete and the more mercenary type of language-mangling, underworld-haunting manager. Its chief trouble is that it is packed with such long-drawn-out scenes as golfers lining up for crucial putts and carefully tapping a ball that is predestined by the script either to drop in or not to. These scenes are supposed to have you on the edge of your seat, but they look so well rehearsed and are so lacking in the unpredictable that the spectator loses interest. At one point only does Hepburn display some spontaneous sport activity: when she bangs out about six balls in one continuous blur of swinging. The story, by the Kanins, is geared to the suave, exquisite by-play of the two stars, who have done their act—the frisky, spinsterish woman in love with a lackadaisical wolfish fat man—so often they are like a romantic version of the Hope-Crosby team. Both teams depend a lot on charming the customer by acting as though they were charmed to death with each other’s talents, but Hepburn and her partner tend to curdle their performance by behaving like elderly bobbysoxers who have just been necking in the rumble seat.
“The Ring” follows the dismal career of a young Mexican from a bar-room brawl by Mexican baiters to the moment a year later when he tosses his boxing togs into a neighborhood incinerator. Between the two points is an unkempt yarn that depicts a good deal of the painful effort, misdirected wilfulness, daydreaming, and heartache that go into the athletic record of a character who shouldn’t be an athlete. The movie is worked out mostly with a counter-attack technique that uses all sorts of conventional movie situations but simply turns them inside out. The hero (Lalo Rios) loses his girls and his friends when he takes up fighting; he falls in with a flashy manager who handles him with prudence and kindness; his first fight is with a poignantly untalented youngster rather than a broken-down pug; his ring earnings are offered to but turned down by his impoverished parents; he gives up fighting and then makes an inglorious comeback. The movie would seem more unique if it were not so apparent that the directors and actors were reversing clichés wherever they traveled. Well worth seeing for such episodes as dreary bus trips to small California fight towns, the educational depiction of a trainer’s chores, the tired routine that goes on after a losing fight. The film misses a lot of punch because of an amateurish, petulant performance by its star and certain glaring mistakes: the youth is supposed to be a welterweight, but he is usually put in the ring with someone too heavy or too light for his division.
Although “Shadow in the Sky”—not a sports film—is feeble-minded on its main subject of a war psychosis, it is needle-sharp on the ambivalent behavior of kindly, primly sensitive middle-brows trying to be nice to deranged war veterans. The movie, a low-budgeted M-G-M job from the pen of the studio’s most talented scripter, Ben Maddow, often looks like an ad for a surburban housing development—it is set in the clean bungalow section used in “The Next Voice” with the same wholesome couple, James Whitmore and Nancy Davis, whose acting is as standard and square as the décor. The story—whether or not an occasionally daft brother of Miss Davis should be taken out of the demoralizing atmosphere of a veterans’ hospital and allowed to hallucinate under Davis’s tables—pays only a stereotyped nod to the cause and character of the brother’s (Ralph Meeker) illness. Somewhat like the hero of “Blind Alley,” Meeker is a rugged type with a rain phobia: he turns to quivering protoplasm at the first unfavorable weather report and rushes for the protection of the nearest table. Meeker performs this business as though he were having a hard time with an embarrassingly silly parlor game, and afterward he starts shrieking with Whitmore about some vague trouble the two of them had in the war on a South Pacific isle during a rainy season. If you can make any sense out of their drivel, you have the key to Meeker’s psychosis. The rest of the film is confined to nice people being catty to each other in ordinary situations, and doing it so that it is almost imperceptible—a rare accomplishment for an M-G-M movie.
August 9, 1952
IT is perfectly safe to see “Don’t Bother to Knock,” which is a little more different from a Marilyn Monroe peepshow (as advertised) and a lot closer to the portrayal of the atmosphere of a second-class New York fleabag than the critics mentioned. Constructed like a stage play, with no more motion than can be found in a hotel restaurant between meals, it concerns a small-town Alice in the Wonderland of the “Franklin Hotel,” a place so dull and quiet that it is hardly able to wake itself up to the sordid problems of violence, suicide, and insanity that the girl brings in. She seeps through its revolving doors with a blank, questioning look, and is led out about three hours later wearing the same stare by two cops who handle her like an expensive glass figurine that might disappear into thin air. Her uncle, the elevator jockey, has put her on to a baby-sitting job, unfortunately for the baby—for she takes to the occupation in a way that should scare even tabloid readers. First, she dons her employer’s black negligee, jewelry, and perfume; next (no surprise) she invites a lonely pilot in; and then she really goes to work until all her crazy little dreams tumble down around her bobbysocks. For some unfortunate reason this story is split between the baby tender and a stock love affair (the pilot and the Dinah Shoreish canary in the lounge), but it is nevertheless a relief to find a new movie that hasn’t been foreshortened, polished and sensationalized out of all relation to its middle-class scene.
The matter-of-fact treatment (Zanuck must have been looking the other way) makes for an old-fashioned movie with a nearly dormant pace, a greedy curiosity about small hotel matters, and people who fit in with the antiquated cigarette stands and radio outlets in their rooms. They all have a degree of unsophistication that has been missing for some time in American films, the kind of bourgeois sincerity which causes the housewife to look puzzled when Monroe aggressively tells her to have a good time, and which starts Widmark quaking and back-tracking almost before he gets to work as a seducer. Monroe, with her unconcerned dreaminess and ability to make any garment look as if it came from a bargain basement, generally seems to be working upstream as far as life is concerned, being nonplussed about everything except getting her own way and doing what she wants. She can also be shrewdly coy, as when she lures Widmark in from across the way by wigwagging the Venetian blinds and then turns with a cocky expression toward his inevitable phone call. It is the most direct and plaintive job of acting a hot, lost, peace-wrecking female since Keyes in “The Prowler.” Widmark has the lesser role (his bosses are trying to bury him in near “B” films), but he stands out as probably the only literate, salty-talking he-man who would play a fast pick-up with some embarrassment, doubt, and compassion.
The director (Roy Baker) keeps everything prosaic, leveling all incidents—including the baby-sitter’s steady maltreatment of her ward—and lulls you into always believing the girl is more normal than she is. Baker’s passive version of the Graham Greene type of controlled understatement keeps his people, and the audience, captives of hotel machinery, a trick that brings out all the jittery yearning for excitement that lies beneath the lack-luster surface. The film does have a studio-type face or two (Widmark and his girl) and occasionally there is a heavy touch in the middle of its naturalism. The story comes together too neatly at the end for a Daily Mirror-type yarn, but compared to “Fourteen Hours,” which dealt pretentiously with a suicidal castaway in a New York hotel, it is far from a turkey.
“Glory Alley” is also around but not worth looking into, primarily because of a preposterously cluttered script bent on making angels of the shake-down artists, grifters, and crackpots of skid row. It deals mainly with the endless ups and downs in the life of a swaggering fighter (rather well played by Ralph Meeker) who wants to be the biggest man on Bourbon Street, but even the author of “Moll Flanders” couldn’t have dreamed up a more involved, melodramatic biography. The whole picture might have come off better if Director Raoul Walsh had tried to counter the plot’s sensationalism (the hero runs out on a championship fight because he is afraid to show his stitched skull in public) with a more factual portrait of the street where jazz was born. As it is, he gives you soggy moments, overripened characters, and a swell assortment of such clichés as the nostalgic fighter wandering around the empty fight auditorium and the sawed-off scrounger pounding the change box on a telephone to save a dime (repeated five times for laughs). Then there are ill-advised moments with Louie Armstrong making faces in the style of the 1930’s cinema Negro and Jack Teagarden so busy swinging and swaying that you wonder how he is able to blow his trombone. Leslie Caron makes a good-enough cabaret dancer (though she smiles even more than Eisenhower) who forgoes a ballet career to take care of her blind poppa, Kurt Kasznar, who piles up Teutonic dulness until it is knee-deep and sits in his easy-chair throne in the middle of the fight gym. Poppa has a super-hatred for Meeker, but warms up when Meeker hires his childhood friend, now a famous Minneapolis doctor, to save his sight. Gilbert Roland is a likable bar owner, if not a flexible screen player, who is also Meeker’s manager, and who tries to take Meeker off the skids by giving him a fighter to manage and a job in his bar. As I was saying, Walsh and his crew should have been paid double time to work on a script as involved as this.
It’s not news that newsreels have been going nowhere for years, but they outdid themselves in dulling the impact of the record-breakingest Olympic Games. One of the “musts” of photographing track and field events is to clarify the race if it takes every trick in the camera man’s handbook (slow motion, stop camera, more than one camera set-up, etc.). The two-seconds screen time allotted to each event neither showed anything about the individual performers nor gave a sense of the continuity and vastness of the affair, making you wonder why the filmers traveled all the way to Helsinki just for a blitzkrieg coverage. Even Paramount, most dedicated and serious of the newsreel concerns, did a good job of missing the point. The shot of Les Biffle’s near-record broad jump, caught head-on from the ground, makes him look as if he were jumping all of six feet. Mathias was shown only in those decathalon events that took place around sunset, so that you got an illuminating glimpse of a lot of stadium shadow; the fantastic 100-meter dash (four runners hitting the tape simultaneously, with the chunky, barreling winner, Remigino, resembling no one else in sprinting history) seemed to have been glimpsed by a chance sparrow; Moore’s hurdle journey was photographed from a distance that made it impossible to discern which one was Moore and what kind of hurdles he was taking. Except for some good work in the walkathon—which the newsreelers think is “funny”—sportscasting companies can now go back to filming bangtails and skiers with the happy knowledge that, in comparison, they made Leni Riefenstahl, the Nazi photographer of the Berlin Olympiad, seem like a camera genius.
August 16, 1952