Chapter One
Chinatown (1974)
Tell me the story again, please.
Very well, there was this detective in
Los Angeles, Jake Gittes, as honest as
he could be after years with the LAPD. But
he had had trouble in Chinatown and so
retired into independent operation. Then he
was set up, and you have to realize that he
was sought out in just the way that Scottie was
in Vertigo. Someone picked him to receive
the story that Hollis Mulwray was having an
affair. Trace it back and you’ll see it was all a
cruel design. Jake Gittes did his best, but he
was as much damage as he was good, because
he fell in love on the job with a woman who
was such trouble it smelled like gangrene.
And so, finally, the bad man, Noah Cross, was
left in charge, and they led Jake away to some
hiding hole and they whispered in his ear that
it was all “Chinatown.” I really don’t see why
you love the story so much.
It was a story that Robert Towne, an Angeleno,
dreamed up for his pal Jack Nicholson
to play. And another friend, Robert Evans,
would produce it at Paramount. But Evans
thought that Roman Polanski should direct,
and Polanski battled with Towne over the
script-it had to be clearer and tougher.
Towne had had a gentler ending, with less
death. But Polanski knew it was a story that
had to end terribly-so no one forgot. The
director won, and the picture worked with its
very bleak ending.
What’s more, the picture worked in every
way you could think of. Faye Dunaway was
the woman, and she was lovely but flawed and
incapable of being trusted. John Huston was
Noah Cross, and the more you see the film,
the better you know that that casting is crucial,
because Cross is so attractive, so winning,
so loathsome. And the rest of the cast
was a treat: Perry Lopez, John Hillerman,
Darrell Zwerling, Diane Ladd, Roy Jenson,
Burt Young, Belinda Palmer, and the others.
John Alonso shot it. Richard Sylbert was the
production designer. Sam O’Steen edited the
film. Jerry Goldsmith delivered a great score.
The craft work, the details, are things to
dream on. We are in 1937. And don’t forget
Polanski’s own little bit of being himself.
So it’s a perfect thriller, and a beautiful
film noir in color. Moreover, if you care to
look into how William Mulholland once
brought the water from the Owens Valley to
Los Angeles, it is a piece of local history. But
with this extra aspect-that accommodation
of the history of southern California itself,
and the fable of how sometimes power and
corruption make life and the future possible-you
also get another reflection on filmmaking
in that world: It is that you can do
very good work, work so full of affection and
detail and invention that you can live with it
over the years, but in the end the system will
fuck you over and someone will whisper in
your ear that you are not to mind, because
“It’s Chinatown.”
And that’s how it worked out. There had
been a trilogy in the reasonably honest mind
of Robert Towne. They let him make the first
part near enough to his own dream so that he
would always know it could have been. And
then they crushed him on the second (The
Two Jakes)-blew it straight to hell-so no
one had the heart ever to ask about the third.
Duck Soup (1933)
Duck Soup is all credentials: Leo
McCarey directed; Herman J. Mankiewicz
produced it; Bert Kalmar and
Harry Ruby wrote it; Ansel Adams photographed
it, mostly at magic hour; it was Marcel
Proust’s favorite Marx Brothers film; the
Duke of Windsor watched it constantly in his
years of exile. Are you believing this? Where
does that get you? It was the poorest performer
of all their Paramount films-there
was a time when the University of Chicago
economics department was stocked with
people who’d done their Ph.D. on “Duck
Soup and the Collapsing Cash Nexus” and
similar titles. In other words, how could you
expect a dazed, defeated, demoralized, and
de-walleted population to go to see a film that
mocked government when the folks were
waiting for a New Deal?
In case you can’t place the film, this is the
one where Mrs. Teasdale (Margaret Dumont)
will give the nation of Freedonia $20
million if Rufus T. Firefly is appointed its
leader (and if she gets the fire in the fly). Aha,
you may say, such cynicism and manipulation
the affairs of modest third-world nations
was far more likely the cause of public
despair. Enter Trentino (played by that very
respectable actor Louis Calhern), the ambassador
from Sylvania (before it was in the TV
business), and soon we are on the brink of
world war. But why remind the public of
that?
Like many Marx Brothers films, Duck
Soup has the suspicious air of a few set pieces
strung together with Christmas lights and
Hollywood was learning with talk and plots
and so forth that the manufacture of whole
films (as opposed to scene anthologies) was a
dirty job, even if you were being paid for it.
There has never been a better answer to the
question of what holds this film together than
glue. The essential ethos of the Marx Brothers
(this is Irving Thalberg talking as he prepared
to ship them off to Culver City) is to
make their fragmentation seem natural. So
Thalberg foresaw Marxian nights with a film
program continually interrupted by little
scenes from Marxist groups. This was a principle
applied fully on the BBC years later
with the arrival of Monty Python. The show
might be over, but still somehow the other
programs-the news, Gardeners’ Question
Time, England v. Pakistan-could not but
take on a Pythonesque flourish. This could
have revolutionized TV, but the Python boys
(who had been to university) asked for
ghostly residuals.
Anyway, Duck Soup has the extended routine
where Chico (as Chicolini) and Harpo
(as Pinky) harrass Edgar Kennedy. And it also
has Groucho and the mirror, which is enough
to persuade you all to get every bit of polished
glass out of the house.
If you find you like this sort of thing, you’ll
be glad to know that The Cocoanuts, Animal
Crackers, Monkey Business, and Horse Feathers
once existed. There was a moment-we
call it sound-when the Marx Brothers made
the trip from vaudeville to Hollywood, and it’s
like Neil Armstrong stepping down onto the
moon and landing on a banana peel.
Seven Samurai (1954)
In sixteenth-century Japan, an idyllic village,
in a valley below steep mountains,
discovers that bandits will attack as soon as
the barley crop is ripe. They have suffered
before-should they yield again, or fight
back? A small committee is appointed to find
samurai who will defend the village. This is a
long film, drawn out by a master of suspense
and control (over 200 minutes in its full version).
We meet the seven samurai. We see
them living in the village, doing their best to
train the farmers and work out a strategy. And
then there is battle, begun in sunlight and
ending in pouring rain. Why seven?
The film is over fifty years old now, and it is
impossible for anyone to see it today without
thinking of the traditions it inspired: not just
The Magnificent Seven and the Sergio Leone
pictures; not just the immense field of
martial-arts films based on the Western fascination
with samurai armor and Japanese discipline;
not just Melville’s Le Samourai, or
Frankenheimer’s Ronin, but the laser-beam
sword battles of the Star Wars series.
(George Lucas was a huge admirer of Akira
Kurosawa-and the eventual coproducer on
Kagemusha.)
Yet I urge you to do your best to regard
this film with the eyes of 1954, and to see the
astonishing vigor from Kurosawa that goes
into every frame and meeting. I suspect that
by the time he made Seven Samurai, he was
well aware of and much in love with tropes
from the American Western. But then consider
the things that are uniquely his: the
restless camera movements, the urge like that
of a mettlesome horse, to be galloping and
moving; the intense, burning close-ups and
the way in which the cadet samurai can look
at the weary master and say, “You are simply
great!,” and we feel the justice of it, but
understand the sad smile on the master’s face.
There are the lovers on the forest floor,
spread-eagled and surrounded by wildflowers.
There is the terrible look on the face of
the kidnapped wife as she realizes her husband
is about to rescue her. There is the sudden
use of slow motion (so that you wonder if
you really saw it). And the sounds of running
water, of bird cries, of the wind and of Toshiro
Mifune’s snorts of derision for everyone-himself
included. These images and sounds
are like moments in Shakespeare.
You can say that the film was a canny
attempt to win Western audiences-and it
undoubtedly achieved that. But over fifty
years later, you can marvel at the rich black-and-white,
the natural sounds, the drumbeats,
the hooves on the ground and the
music. It is a landmark in action films, but in
its treatment of heroism, too. These samurai
work and some of them die, for mere food.
You wonder if they may seize the village, or
be turned on by the villagers, for there is not
too much trust between those parties. But the
integrity of the contract prevails. There has
always been a vein of cinema in which people
do the right thing. And Seven Samurai comes
as that notion was being treated with cynicism.
But there is no denying or forgetting
the faces of these men. They are the seven
samurai, and they have found themselves.
They do not need to say so, because we
understand it.
The Sign of the Cross (1932)
“Bib-lit” is mercifully light on the ground
these days, but in a world afflicted by
bank closures and food lines, thoughts
of sin and the sinning class could be stirred.
No one had more history in this than Cecil B.
DeMille, and as it turned out The Sign of the
Cross is one of the more intriguing social
commentaries of 1932, even if one is not
quite sure whether it is a Marx Brothers film
or not. No, it can’t be-it moves too slowly.
There was a play, by Wilson Barrett, which
seems to owe a few centavos to Henryk
Sienkiwicz’s Quo Vadis? in that it involves
Christians, lions, and Nero. Waldemar Young
and Sidney Buchman shrugged off whole
libraries of “research” to come up with a
script in which a noble Roman, actually
named Marcus Superbus (Fredric March)
falls for a coy handmaiden (Elissa Landi), and
thereby rejects the sinuous offerings of the
Empress Poppaea (Claudette Colbert),
whose sexual energies are not exactly fulfilled
by Nero (Charles Laughton).
This is the one where Colbert takes a bath
in asses’ milk. The man who handled that
scene was DeMille’s top designer and costumer,
Mitchell Leisen. DeMille wanted an
effect whereby Ms. Colbert’s nipples might
fleetingly appear, like bubbles, above the
milk. So Leisen and the actress had a lot of
fun measuring and pouring, while DeMille-apparently-was
in the wings trying to get a
glimpse. Colbert takes her bath like a good
sport, and it’s apparent that she’s wearing
nothing. But then, under the lights of Karl
Struss, the bath began to demonstrate the
fermentation process that makes cheese. The
story is that Leisen and Colbert went out to
dinner, and while they were out the milk
hardened so that a visitor to the set thought it
was marble, fell in, and was only just saved.
You don’t have to believe all this, but the
surge in yogurt sales in Los Angeles plainly
dates from this period.
What you cannot avoid believing-because
it’s there onscreen-is the unbridled
way in which Laughton seems to say to Colbert,
“Well, if you’re the empress, I’m the
queen!” In other words, he gives what is the
most flagrant and fleshy portrait of an abandoned
homosexual spirit seen in an American
film until that time. DeMille was said to be
unsure of what was happening. He tried to
direct Laughton, but it was impossible. And
at the end of it all, when DeMille asked
Laughton whom he wanted to play next,
Laughton answered, “You!”
Rome burns, Nero plays the harp. Christians
are gnawed by lions-Leisen said they
used prime rack of lamb to get the lions interested.
(Otherwise, Leisen said, they were
inclined to chat about the last film they’d
made.) DeMille reissued the film in 1944,
with fresh scenes and a prologue written by
Dudley Nichols. Apparently he had had a
vision that the Nazis were like Nero. It is a
business terribly vulnerable to visionaries.
But Nero and Poppaea are more than they
seem: They are the first onscreen portrait of
the Hollywood marriage where he’s gay and
she’s viciously carnal because of it. And you
can still see that today.
To Be or Not To Be (1942)
The point may be obvious. It may gloss
over fine issues of taste. But in some
total conflict, if one side is making To
Be or Not To Be in the middle of a war and
the other is not-you know which side to root
for. No, there are no Nazi equivalents to
this film, no film in which the Goethe Institute,
let’s say, sends a Schubert lieder singer
on a tour of the United States and she tries
to conduct an affair with a spokesman for
the Bund. (You’re tempted by the sound
of it? But only because you’ve grown up
in a culture addicted to irony, sarcasm, self-effacement,
and that essential ingredient of
American acting once identified by Kenneth
Tynan-its Jewishness.)
It has to be said that Samson Raphaelson-Lubitsch’s
preferred writer-chose to
be unavailable for this project, because he
feared that it would end in charges of bad
taste. So Melchior Lengyel shaped the idea
and Edwin Justus Mayer wrote the script
about a Polish acting company in Nazi-occupied
Warsaw that has a hard time doing
Hamlet, but which gets drawn into a masquerade
against the Nazis that may help win
the war. This is the company led by Maria
and Joseph Tura (Carole Lombard and Jack
Benny), when he is doing Hamlet and she has
a Polish flier after her and she tells the boy to
rendezvous in her dressing room just after
her husband begins the speech “To be or not
to be …”
What follows is nothing less than a farce in
which the Nazis are the butt of the humor,
but in which “So, they call me concentration
camp Erhard, do they?” is relied upon to get
repeated belly laughs. Some find it too much.
I suggest that its brilliance lies in the concentration
on actors at the heart of the story
and the casting genius that saw how far the
already wounded face of Jack Benny could
consider no greater crime against humanity
than walking out on his big speech. And then
there is Carole Lombard, ravishing, sexy,
happy, and glorious in her gowns. She was
dead shortly after the film finished shooting,
and it may be that that took away from audience
numbers as much as any question of
taste.
Alexander Korda was a coproducer on
the venture and Vincent Korda did the
sets. Those gowns are by Irene, and Rudolph
Maté did the photography. The faultless cast
also includes Robert Stack, Felix Bressart,
Lionel Atwill, Stanley Ridges, Sig Ruman,
and Charles Halton. Of course, it is an artifice,
protected from the real horror of
war. But it has moments when to see the
Turas-vain, self-centered, essentially small-minded-
is still to recognize how far cinema
and egalitarianism can amount to models of
ordinary decency. The American cinema has
made few lastingly useful political statements,
and it has often taken fright at the risk
of trying. To Be or Not To Be is the sort of film
that would have earned murder gangs if the
other side had won. It is still brave, and it still
bespeaks a wholesome insolence in many
Americans toward tyranny and the way of life
ready to rationalize the death of flirtation.
To Die For (1995)
In Little Hope, New Hampshire, and yet
from the eternity of TV fame, too, Suzanne
Stone turns to us-direct to camera-the
freshest sundae, all pinks, creams, blondes,
and custards, and goes into the lovely ad lib
confession on what she did to her husband,
when any idiot can see that why she did it
was, quite simply, to be a sundae show on TV,
to be not just the weather center in Little
Hope, but the Whether Center in America
(the question being whether Suzanne is just
guilty or delicious-her show is called Your
Guilty Pleasures, in which on reality TV you
get to go through with the deepest, darkest
longings you’ve ever had).
Well, no, the glorious To Die For doesn’t
quite reach that far. It stays in Little Hope
with those grungy kids when its own great
vaulting esprit indicates the chance that
Suzanne could GO ALL THE WAY-she
could be Up Close & Personal, she could be a
Katie Couric, so wide-eyed and pretty that
she can take in all of America in what
amounts to the first TV blow job.
It’s a brilliant try, taken from a dark, witty
novel (based on a real case) by Joyce Maynard
and very well scripted by Buck Henry, even if
it falls short of some final manic, cartoon
surge where one murder makes Suzanne a
killer hit. It needs the zest of Network, that
satirical energy, and the understanding that
Suzanne Stone really is modern America-pretty,
sweet, shallow, and a killer-diller.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from “Have You Seen …?”
by David Thomson
Copyright © 2008 by David Thomson.
Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Knopf
Copyright © 2008
David Thomson
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-307-26461-9
