HOLLYWOOD’s fair-haired boy, to the critics, is director John Huston; in terms of falling into the Hollywood mold, Huston is a smooth blend of iconoclast and sheep. If you look closely at his films, what appears to be a familiar story, face, grouping of actors, or tempo has, in each case, an obscure, outrageous, double-crossing unfamiliarity that is the product of an Eisenstein-lubricated brain. Huston has a personal reputation as a bad boy, a homely one (called “Double-Ugly” by friends, “monster” by enemies), who has been in every known trade, rugged or sedentary: Mexican army cavalryman, editor of the first pictorial weekly, expatriate painter, hobo, hunter, Greenwich Village actor, amateur lightweight champ of California. His films, which should be rich with this extraordinary experience, are rich with cut-and-dried homilies; expecting a mobile and desperate style, you find stasis manipulated with the surehandedness of a Raffles.
Though Huston deals with the gangster-detective-adventure thriller that the average fan knows like the palm of his hand, he is Message Mad, and mixes a savage story with puddin’-head righteousness. His characters are humorless and troubled and quite reasonably so, since Huston, like a Puritan judge, is forever calling on them to prove that they can soak up punishment, carry through harrowing tasks, withstand the ugliest taunts. Huston is a crazy man with death: he pockmarks a story with gratuitous deaths, fast deaths, and noisy ones and, in idle moments, has his characters play parlor games with gats. Though his movies are persistently concerned with grim interpersonal relationships viewed from an ethic-happy plane, half of each audience takes them for comedies. The directing underlines a single vice or virtue of each character so that his one-track actions become either boring or funny; it expands and slows figures until they are like oxen driven with a big moralistic whip.
Money—its possession, influence, manufacture, lack—is a star performer in Huston’s moral fables and gilds his technique; his irony toward and preoccupation with money indicate a director who is a little bitter at being so rich—the two brief appearances Huston makes in his own films are quite appropriately as a bank teller and a rich, absent-minded American handing out gold pieces to a recurring panhandler. His movies will please a Russian audience: half the characters (Americans) are money mad, directly enriching themselves by counterfeiting, prospecting, blackmail, panhandling.
His style is so tony it should embarrass his threadbare subjects. The texture of a Panama hat is emphasized to the point where you feel Huston is trying to stamp its price tag on your retina. He creates a splendiferous effect out of the tiniest details—each hair of an eyelid—and the tunnel dug in a week by six proletarian heroes is the size of the Holland Tunnel.
Huston’s technique differs on many counts from classic Hollywood practice, which, from Sennett to Wellman, has visualized stories by means of the unbroken action sequence, in which the primary image is the fluid landscape-shot where terrain and individual are blended together and the whole effect is scenic rather than portraiture. Huston’s art is stage presentation, based on oral expression and static composition: the scenery is curiously deadened, and the individual has an exaggerated vitality. His characters do everything the hard way—the mastication of a gum-chewing gangster resembles the leg-motion in bicycling. In the traditional film, life is viewed from a comfortable vantage point, one that is so unobtrusive that the audience is seldom conscious of the fact that a camera had anything to do with what is shown. In Huston’s, you are constantly aware of a vitaminized photographer. Huston breaks a film up into a hundred disparate midget films: a character with a pin head in one incident is megacephalic in another; the first shot of a brawl shows a modest Tampico saloon, the second expands the saloon into a skating rink.
The Huston trademark consists of two unorthodox practices—the statically designed image (objects and figures locked into various pyramid designs) and the mobile handling of close three-figured shots. The Eisenstein of the Bogart thriller, he rigidly delimits the subject matter that goes into a frame, by chiaroscuro or by grouping his figures within the square of the screen so that there is hardly room for an actor to move an arm: given a small group in close quarters, around a bar, bonfire, table, he will hang on to the event for dear life and show you peculiarities of posture, expression, and anatomy that only the actor’s doctor should know. The arty, competent Huston would probably seem to an old rough-and-ready silent-film director like a boy who graduated from Oxford at the age of eight, and painted the Sistine Chapel during his lunch hours.
Aside from its typical compressions and endless padding with perspiration, mad scenes, and talking, the chief fact about the tempoless, shapeless We Were Strangers is that Huston doesn’t know where the movie’s going or how long it’s going to take to get there. Played largely in interiors and demanding lightness rather than philosophic noodling, his Cuban picture is divided between two huge white figures: Jennifer Jones, who wears a constant frown as though she has just swallowed John Garfield. Garfield acts as though he’s just been swallowed.
The Asphalt Jungle, directed for MGM with a surface vivacity and tricky hucksterish flash that earlier Huston doesn’t have, sums up a great deal about his work and adds a freakishness that isn’t far from Camp. Almost all of his traits, the strange spastic feeling for time, lunging at what he feels is the heart of a scene and letting everything else go, the idea that authority is inherent in a few and totally absent in everyone else, a ticlike need for posh and elegance, are funneled into this film, which describes the planning, organization, specialization, and cooperation surrounding a million-dollar jewel heist. At best, it is a trade-journal report of the illegal acquisition of jewels, its most absorbing stretch being the painstaking breakdown of a professional robbery, recalling the engineering details of the mine operation in Sierra Madre in which huge men seem nailed in front of mountains, or the tunnel-digging in the Cuban film, the tunnel ending up slightly smaller than the ones entering Grand Central Station.
Apparently influenced by French 1930’s films like Port of Shadows, with their operatic underworld portraits getting lost in the gray trashiness of back rooms, Asphalt Jungle is just as inventive as Huston’s other job-oriented films in its selection: a top-flight safe-cracker wears a magician’s coat honeycombed with the tools of his trade—monstrous crowbar for prying open a manhole cover, three-eighth-inch mortar chisel for separating bricks, lapel-anchored cord for safely suspending the bottle of nitro (no jostling, as any student knows), extra bits for his electric drill. Few directors project so well the special Robinson Crusoe effect of man confronted by a job whose problems must be dealt with, point by point, with the combination of personal ingenuity and scientific know-how characterizing the man of action. Two exquisite cinematic moments: the safe-cracker, one hand already engaged, removing the cork from the nitro bottle with his teeth; the sharp, clean thrust of the chisel as it slices through the wooden strut.
Throughout this footage, Huston catches the mechanic’s absorption with the sound and feel of the tools of his trade as they overcome steam tunnel, door locks, electric-eye burglar alarm, strongbox. It is appropriate that the robbers dramatically subordinate themselves to their instruments and the job at hand, move with the patient deadpan éclat of a surgical team drilled by Stroheim.
Huston unfortunately betrays the documentary invention of the robbery by clumsy stratagems for making his gangsters something more than human. Borrowing Battleground’s racy technique of divulging character by idiosyncratic tabs, actors are distinguished unto extinction: as in a masquerade, red, yellow, blue harlequin costumes urge contrast while withholding identity. The safe-cracker (Anthony Caruso) worries over a wife and kids; the hunchbacked driver (James Whitmore) loves cats; the mean-faced murderer (Sterling Hayden) jabbers nostalgically about the horses on his father’s farm; the mastermind (Sam Jaffe) leers at young girls in the flesh or sprawled on calendars. These traits are so arbitrary and unilluminating that Huston’s effort to show the Criminal as Human Being deteriorates into humorless Damon Runyon. Like Runyon’s gunsels, Huston’s thugs terrorize shopkeepers by night, but morning returns them to their homes, gentle-faced and clean-shaven, again to defend the dispossessed (cats, etc.) from the citizenry who terrorize by day.
The citizenry of Huston’s movies, like Robin Hood’s opponents, are dreary, anemic souls who fail every crisis through constitutional deficit of the courage of which every gangster worth his salt has an abundance. When the hoodlum slowly bleeds to death through the last third of the movie as he tries to reach the old farm, Huston has the attending physician say admiringly, “Anyone else would be dead after bleeding that much!” Victims of hemophilia have bled for years without comparable eulogy. It is really this laboring of the outcast’s courage that raises a point which seems to turn Huston’s blood to water; isn’t it fear of the citizenry’s ordinary responsibilities that provokes the criminal to crime and makes him unequal to the citizen unless he is fortified by gun and gang? By his evasion of the criminal’s central cowardice, Huston is unable to countenance the possibility of every gentleman being a murderer at heart, preferring instead every murderer being a gentleman at heart.
The consequence of his evasion is an endless piling up of mawkish footnotes on how the gangster passes his time between jobs. The safe-cracker’s apartment ($20,000 per caper?) is standard Italian-tenement decor: narrow hallway, beaten-up four-poster bed, harassed mother with her arms protectively outstretched toward her weeping child. With equal banality, the hunchbacked driver, Whitmore, pitifully explains his deformity, “I didn’t grow this, I was born with it,” belying the whole previous impression of his being an eager, cheery, indomitable assassin. Sterling Hayden begins credibly enough as an unthinking, prideful brute, meeting every remark with uncomprehending surliness, yet, twenty-four hours later, he is so intoxicated by the mastermind’s charm that he is willing to forgo his fee for the unsuccessful robbery, wishes Jaffee godspeed with the wistful comment “That little squarehead, I can’t figure him.”
While it is Huston’s talent to untype the familiar character actor by blowing up a particular physical gesture, he seems also to incapacitate actors with anticipated, summarized characters. Hayden, mostly a curled lower lip and hick sullenness, is practically stapled to what must have been a one-line comment, “stoic but sentimental farmer,” in the shooting script. Jean Hagen’s stylized jerkiness as a debauched gangster’s moll, while eye catching for a few seconds, incapacitates her in terms of credibility for the materialism asked of her at the end of the picture, when she tends the bleeding Hayden.
With the end of the movie, Huston’s faults—working against his adventurous self by telegraphing punches: 90 per cent of We Were Strangers, everything but the gray bit player going mad, is taken care of in written compressions—combine with MGM’s postcard elegance in a scene almost unequaled in vulgarity: on the ripe green meadow of his father’s farm, Hayden breathes his last, while colts gently lick his face in bucolic farewell. The ending suggests that Huston may not have the simple underworld courage to withstand MGM’s glossy impositions.
June 4, 1949, and July 15, 1950
THE weariest myth of critics tabs Hollywood for the formularized movies and foreign studios for the original ones; actually the worst Hollywood B has more cinematic adrenaline than most English or French movies, and no one is more eclectic than the English director Olivier, reactionary than the Frenchman Pagnol, victimized by easy sensibility than the Italians De Sica and Rossellini. The art of these prize-plastered directors washes like a waterfall over their movies so that you feel common for paying only $1.50 for your ticket to culture, they are more dispiritedly indebted to pre-1935 Hollywood technique than Sturges, Huston, or Korda. The decadence of the French film, dominated by pooped-out aesthetes, is somewhat belied by “Devil in the Flesh,” which has almost the weight and fulness of a “Madame Bovary” (more than can be said for the Radiguet novel on which it is based). This film’s decadence—its novelistic approach; the smooth, velvet finish of ten-year-old MGM films, time-worn images like fire for passion, raindrops on water for sadness—does not keep it from being the best movie condemned by the Legion of Decency since “Monsieur Verdoux.”
The love affair in “Devil in the Flesh”—a restless, bored young wife (Micheline Presle) bed-locked with an unstable charmer (Gérard Philipe) who doesn’t yet shave—is a staple as old as the French novel but never realized so well on film. This disastrous affair moves with an inexorable logic the love film hasn’t had since psychiatry took over Hollywood, the inexplicable last shot (sky breaking into V-formations of airplanes) is a minor disturbance.
Director Autant Lara creates a tapestry of unemphasized details; density and depth, currently ignored by directors in favor of the one-thread effect, are produced here by some old-fashioned ideas of what makes a beautiful movie. Trying as Griffith did for the serenely articulated image drenched in sentiment, he sinks his actor into a perfectly ordered environment emptied of discord (sunlit scenes glow without heat, rain is soft and warm, family scenes are as unhectic as a Childe Hassam canvas). The impression of profusion comes from the bountiful detailing of each shot and of the central characters; like the treatment of the Chaplin figure, these two roles are loaded with expression and gesture and seen from all sides. The attempt to imbed the story like a pearl in a period (World War I) and a milieu (suburban Paris) results in the use of some banal devices: figures are back-lit with halo-like contours, viewed obliquely behind grillwork, lace curtains, flowers; the last shot of a scene is cemented in time by a lingering camera. But the over-all effect is of being submerged in and idling through a self-contained world.
The solidity of this movie, as of current French films, is partly a gift from the past gods of art. In a Hollywood movie each event is seen for itself, without cultural overtones; events in Lara’s movie are unconsciously burdened by the painting, literary, and movie tradition of the preceding century. Both in subject and treatment (boating scene, François’s home) this movie recalls Seurat and Manet; the movie would not have been so laden if Proust had not created such a dense atmosphere; with decades of precedent to draw upon, directors like Pagnol, Lara, Clouzot do impeccable funerals and walks through the streets with their eyes shut and both hands behind their backs. The wry treatment of incidental people, waiters, school teachers, mothers, is an old snobbery that should have been given up before it was started. It would be nice to see a French movie free of its academic albatross.
Gérard Philipe, a new, momentous figure in European films, is an original actor, so absolutely the ill-starred creatures he plays—the glum, impudent adulterer in this, an over-sweetened but near-perfect Myshkin in the excellent “The Idiot”—that his performances are less magical for being so real. French movie actors (Raimu, Barrault) have tried for an absolute naturalism based on theatrical expression, and the spectacularly gifted Philipe is the $64 end-product of this tradition. The average player presents a threefold personality—the script character, the type he represents in the public mind, and his private-life personality. Philipe presents one whole different character in each movie, no carry-overs. His François—arrogantly sensitive, disaffected, histrionically bad-tempered, a social sneerer but indolently dependent—seems to have walked into the movie from an art-colony garret bringing no acting baggage with him. His performance is as rich a characterization as any in Tolstoi and one bound to amuse people who think of the boudoir hero in terms of physical beauty and bourgeois virtues; François lies, tricks, wilts at the tiniest obstacle, flees, and is generally a whirlwind of unsavory attitudes. Philipe seems to live on the screen rather than perform; he manages to be three-dimensionally in action so that the cubistic effect is of seeing from all sides. Compared with this fresh, realistic performance, the Boyer-Cooper-Stewart lover seems to be built out of the old nuts and bolts of romantic acting.
June 18, 1949
THE film industry has moved with a scythe and a prayer into a golden period of civic uplift, sparked by soul-savers bent on a joyless excision of every social wart—Jew-baiting, Jim Crow, philistinism in art, bookmaking, dope addiction, non-democratic administration, euthanasia. The bloodlessly earnest psychiatry movie is another sleep-making example; like a busy St. George, it hacks away at everything from destructive parenthood to Bedlam asylum conditions. Through its primer-simple, roseate presentation Hollywood has sold psychiatry to an audience which only a few years ago rated it as phony as wrestling and as dangerous to mankind as a loaded cigar butt.
The static conditions of real-life psychoanalysis—couch-pinned heroes, plot buried in the patient’s subconscious, expensive free associations—are not a hot subject for an action-hungry medium. Realizing this, screen writers have linked psychiatry to the violent story—murder, war, catastrophic insanity—thrill-exploited everything from shock treatment to extra-sensory perception, melodramatically juiced therapy for as much terror as possible: the hypodermic needle is always aimed at the audience’s heart. While seeming to accept the fact of scrambled psyches and their scientific rearrangement, the movies have concentrated only on spectacular symptoms like paralysis and on patients too severely disturbed to fall within general experience—in the filming of a street-common ailment like alcoholism psychiatry never shows its rehabilitating face. Hollywood might succeed in distressing its audience if it filmed the suffering of an everyday neurotic (a few early films like “Now, Voyager” went in that direction); as it is, the sensational collapse-therapy-cure cycle works like a barbiturate. The average fan is no longer surprised when the movie Horowitz freezes on the Polonaise, expects him to be chucked into a new and photogenic device like the Orgone Box, awaits impassively the flashback to a fateful day when the hero was lashed to the piano to make him practice.
Of the currently fashionable movie characters—morally inflamed cowboys, unprincipled athletes, the Holy Ghost of a psychiatrist—the last is the most oafishly glamorized. Even directors like Hitchcock, Robson, Huston, Litvak, Meyers of “The Quiet One” lose their nerve when the irreproachable analyst angel-flaps onto the screen: at these points the story looks like a paid ad for the American Psychoanalytic Association. The movie psychiatrist—haunting the ward at 3 am to cheer up his patients!—rates higher in the film firmament than the Catholic priest or the FBI agent. The role of this Dr. Ingenious Bland is played by a “square” actor like Ingrid Bergman or Leo Genn, who habitually performs with ponderous self-consciousness and both feet on the Oscar. Only Chekhov (a slapstick Freud in “Spellbound”) and Corey (the noisy, sickle-like doctor in “Home of the Brave”) have shown any glee in the part; the others have all been stuffed so full of heavy, dull, unparticularized virtues that they have the constricted look of people doing a public service, like air-raid wardens. Yet compared to his real-life counterpart, the movie therapist has a soft snatch: where he sees only a few troublesome traits that have to be scrubbed off the patient, the real analyst knows that the analysand’s everything—posture, wife, type of tie—will have to go; the screen genius has a deadline two days hence, while the other finds himself in the situation of Magellan still in Portugal; Dr. I. Bland is only called on to ferret out one big childhood trauma, but Dr. Central Park West flounders in a lifetime’s dirty laundry of personal data.
The formularized psychoanalysis in current films is a product of the Popular Science mentality: the director goes overboard for gadgets and a drugstore version of Freud. Mechanical procedure is the whole battle, once the patient, juiced by electricity, drug, or doctor (“Think, think, you’ve got to remember!”) starts recalling his one trauma—straining like a man lifting the Woolworth Building—the cure follows immediately. The documentary filming of machinery—loading the hypodermic needle, identifying the ink spots, turning the knobs of the shock machine—produces the most effective scenes. Stripped of emotional difficulties and subtleties, unpredictable consequences, analyst-patient realignments, the therapy you are shown is a dull memory game. Subjective material—dreams, free association, unconscious imagery—which the shiny instruments are a means of getting at, is concretized and made immobile by these Boy-Scientists. The dreams in “Spellbound” are turned into little surrealistic maps, those in “Blind Alley” (refilmed as “The Dark Past”) are just as arbitrarily represented by what looks like the linear version of a film negative. It is disconcerting that the director always credits the patient with total cinematic recall, instead of showing the blurred, spotty, personalized texture of spontaneous recollection. The psychiatry film looks like the kitchen of tomorrow, lined with labor-killing devices, in which the patient’s poor addled soul is pressure-cooked into a functional, flavorless stew to fill the stomach of respectable society.
July 9, 1949
A QUIETLY dignified fame attaches to Producer Louis De Rochemont who developed his pseudo-documentary style—real life stories reduced to streamlined banality—in “March of Time” and three fact-packed movies* stuffed with sober, official hot air. The DR style is easily spotted: its sanitary realism is midway between Norman Corwin and Walker Evans, it avoids the problems of human relations and glories in objects, job-routines, and skills (how to fall on one’s head without breaking it). Its Hero is an institution like the FBI, and its trademark is the dignified, know-it-all narrator whose voice drips with confidence in an America that is like a Watson Business Machine. His terrain-conscious titles spotlight De Rochemont’s managerial outlook in which the postoffice, Parish House dance, time-honored remark (“Some fighting man may lose his life because of this, Miss Richmond.”) are the determinants that shape, protect, and dominate Americans, lucky cogs in a golden social machine. Aiming at spontaneity, his writers dote on the actions, remarks, and facial expressions made most often by Americans; in no movies do characters spend so many serious moments and such concentrated energy on pedestrian actions like parking a car and walking to a telephone, the implication being that a commonplace culture is full, rich living. Unlike his other films, De Rochemont’s latest, “Lost Boundaries,” is mildly poignant, has a simple, direct honesty (Director Werker had a much smaller budget), and tells a good story dedicated to the idea that silence about being a Negro is golden if you can get away with it. Though it is over-populated by creamy people, friendly smiles, the least exciting real-life talk (“You’ll have to excuse me, I’m not the ballroom type.”), it has a homespun, non-Hollywood plainness unmatched in current movies, even by “The Quiet One.”
It is based on the fascinating biography of New Hampshire’s Dr. Albert Johnson—twenty-eight years a Negro, twenty years a white, then colored again by courtesy of the Navy—and is the second round in the movie battle with the Negro problem. The benevolent writers—working in studios where as far as I know there are no colored directors, writers, or cameramen—so far have placed their Negroes in almost unprejudiced situations, presented only one type of pleasant, well-adjusted individual, and given him a superior job in a white society. The light-skinned Negro couple (played like Mother Hen and Young Lincoln by Beatrice Pearson and Mel Ferrer) are passive, innocuous, duty-happy creatures totally unscarred by discrimination except for an anxious flutter in the mother’s voice and the melancholy stare of the father who looks as though he had just remembered getting a parking ticket that morning. They are mournfully stoical, quietly dignified, and custom-built for upright citizenship; they personify as Moss did in “Home of the Brave” the current movies argument that the Negro will be accepted if he lives according to the rules of the stuffiest white gentility.
A few scenes with authentic bite—a Goya-like view of Lenox Avenue highlighting grotesque faces, ambling Dead End Kids, clusters of suspicious Negroes—are inserted to show the results of brutal segregation. Next to the sticky depiction of the folksy, respectable characters in Keene, New Hampshire, these shots tend to make the audience feel that the macabre position of the Negro is due to mysterious factors that have nothing to do with small-town America and probably stems from the fact that the Negro on his own does not know how to live. After all of these demi-tasse versions of the Negro problem are filmed, none of them will come close in cinematic power to the greatest of all films, the unfortunately anti-Negro “Birth of a Nation”; the movie progressives as yet seem frightened of authentic emotions and to lack the nerve to deal with prejudice at its primitive, ugly level.
“Lost Boundaries” is an affecting, wholesome affair held down by De Rochemont’s belief that the documentary should be safe, artless, and free of variety. The photographer’s head evidently comes off if he tries anything but the orthodox, group-portrait composition: central details a little above screen center, neither close to nor far from the camera. The prime concerns in composition are that there shall be no exercise of taste—either good or bad—and that every detail shall be crystal clear and easily understood. This, plus the spontaneous energy lost through reconstructed realism, leads to compositions as spineless as vanilla pudding and a non-atmospheric movie that seems to have been scrubbed with Spic ’n Span. There is a Henry Ford-like passion for traditional American architecture, all of it looking mended and polished, and the people carefully devitalized so that they don’t steal the scene from the decor. One of the exceptions is a casually constructed scene between teen-aged sweethearts in a river-side setting where everything—clumsily sincere talk, troubled movement, flexible camerawork and directing—is geared beautifully to a rustic landscape and an intense, adolescent grappling with prejudice. These smooth, even-paced documentaries are a catch-all for actors from grocery stores, straw-hat circuits, and Broadway, but most of the actors behave as though they were being watched by the FBI for any outrageous display of individuality. A few scenes in which the movie comes to life occur when it deals with the doctor’s daughter (Susan Douglas); Miss Douglas is busy being her intense, sober-mouse self, poignantly and credibly touched by the ramifications of discrimination. All the others—hawk-faced New Englanders and silky Negroes—act as though they were on a two-day furlough from real-life to create a poster-like portrait to show the virtues of the Democratic Man of Tomorrow.
June 30, 1949
WHILE “The Great Gatsby” is a limp translation of Fitzgerald’s novel about the tasteless twenties, magical mid-Westerners on Long Island, and the champion torch-bearing hero in American literature, it captures just enough of the original to make it worth your while and rekindle admiration for a wonderful book. Its characters are like great lumps of oatmeal maneuvering at random around each other, but it tepidly catches the wistful tragedy of a jilted soldier (Alan Ladd) who climbs the highest mountains of racketeering and becomes an untalented socialite, trying to win back his Daisy (Betty Field) from a hulking snob and libertine (Barry Sullivan). Etched in old MGM-Renaissance style Fitzgerald’s panorama of the twenties takes on the heavy, washed-out, inaccurate dedication-to-the-past quality of a Radio City mural. Save for an occasional shot—the rear of a Long Island estate studded with country-club architecture and bulky town cars—that shrieks of the period, the movie has little to offer of Fitzgerald’s glory-struck but acrid perceptions of period, place, and East Egg society. The cottage scene, with an added touch of Booth Tarkington, talks and moves, as little else of the movie does, with some complication and emotional development.
Director Nugent’s forte is the country-club set tinkling delicately against each other amidst stupified living-room furniture, but it only appears in the scenes at Daisy’s and the Plaza, which have a timeless aura and show the leisure class at customary half-mast—summery weather, a glitter due to Betty Field’s delight with her role, and tasteful, knee-waisted dresses. The crucial lack is that Gatsby, Daisy, the cynical Jordan, don’t have enough charm to explain the story; in fact, they don’t have much more than the weary hulks that are currently beached on Long Island. Owing to a tired director who, however, knows the book with uncommon shrewdness, and Fitzgerald’s inspired dialogue combined with slow, conservative movie images this peculiarly mixed movie draws the most vociferous, uneasy audience response.
It would take a Von Stroheim to cast Fitzgerald’s characters, each as fabulous as Babe Ruth, but rendered with the fragmentary touches of a Cezanne watercolor; the cast is routine for Paramount (Ladd, Da Silva, Macdonald Carey—Frank Faylen, a studio perennial, must have been sick) and inspired only in the case of Betty Field, whose uninhibited, morbid-toned art blows a movie apart. Ladd might have solved the role of Gatsby if it had consisted, as his normal role does, of shocking, constant movement, no acting, and trench coats. An electric, gaudily graceful figure in action movies, here he has to stand still and project turbulent feeling, succeeding chiefly in giving the impression of an isinglass baby-face in the process of melting. He seems to be constantly in pain; and this, occasionally, as in the touching cottage scene, coincides with Gatsby’s. As a matter of fact, he gives a pretty good impression of Gatsby’s depressed, non-public moments. Barry Sullivan streamlines the aging (30) football player (“if we don’t look out the white race will be—will be utterly submerged. It’s all scientific stuff”) into a decent, restless gentleman whose nostrils constantly seem horrified. For a dismal C Western star, Sullivan is surprisingly deft and subtle in a role that has become meaningless without the sentimentality, fears, and shockingly comic scenes with Myrtle’s circle (probably dropped because they were too cinematic).
Betty Field is no more marked by Southern aristocracy than a cheese blintz, but she plays Daisy with her usual incredible daring and instinctive understanding. She hits the role (compulsive, musical voice; scared sophistication) so hard, giving Daisy a confused, ineffectual intensity, missing some of the scintillating charm, that her creation is a realistic version of the character Fitzgerald set up simply as a symbol for Gatsby to dream about. The music of the period, when it is played right, is heartbreaking, and Elisha Cook captures this nostalgia for a few minutes at Gatsby’s grand piano.
Academic Broadway veteran that he is, Elliot Nugent implies in his direction that the period and terrain—so consistently primary and wondrous to Fitzgerald—are simply a backdrop. In place of the wasteland of ashes that surrounds Wilson’s garage, morbidly counterpointing the story’s death-ridden conclusion, there are fleeting glimpses of a humdrum dumping ground. The huge, chaotic parties are a dispiriting blur of Arthur Murray dancing, Muzak orchestrations, stock drunks with one individualized detail (the stridently sequined stage twins) in place of the dozen needed to build the atmosphere that draws New York’s night life to Gatsby’s door. Fitzgerald’s broken story structure has been straightened so that the movie flows slowly without break through routine stage sets. In the occasional place where a contrasting shot is slashed into the “Old Man River” development, the strategy, because of its rarity, produces more excitement than the image warrants—the oculist’s billboard, with the enormous spectacled eyes, steals the movie.
August 13, 1949
* 13 Rue Madeleine, House on 92nd Street, Boomerang!