1974: a discourse on cinema
I have come to like the word discourse. From it comes the adjective ‘discursive’, which has, strangely, two contrasting definitions. Namely, ‘rambling or digressive’; and, ‘proceeding by argument or reasoning’. So it’s difficult to go wrong, isn’t it?
I shall not attempt to talk about the social context of this year’s films, partly because it is irrelevant to our enjoyment of them, and partly because attempts to do that are usually uninformed and motivated by a desire to promote some sociological or political hobby horse. For example, The Magnificent Seven is all about the Peace Corps and The Wild Bunch is the Vietnam war.
In any case, I can’t think offhand of too many interesting things about 1974. Maybe I was preoccupied.
We did have two general elections. Ted Heath called one early in the year on the theme, ‘Who runs the country?’ Well, not Ted, apparently, because Harold Wilson got back into power. In fact, the National Union of Mineworkers was confirmed as the real power in the land, as they had been two years before, when Heath had capitulated to them. How they must crowed! I’ll bet the Brighouse and Rastrick played The Red Flag non-stop for a fortnight, whippets and pigeons were renamed Arthur; and no doubt Comrade Scargill was secretly honoured as a Hero of the Soviet Union.
But we all know that hubris is inevitably followed by nemesis, and we all know too that the goddess, Nemesis, is female.
Westerns
According to the inscription I wrote at the time, I bought Philip French’s Westerns on 22 March 1974, a book which still informs any conversation I have on the subject (which is a pain when I think I’m being original)l. And yet, in retrospect, it was around this year that the Western ceased to exist as a regular banker for film-makers. John Ford had died the previous year. John Wayne would finish with The Shootist the following year. Clint Eastwood would return to the West occasionally, but his cash cows would be Dirty Harry rip-offs and thick-eared comedies. Kevin Costner tries to keep the flame alive, but you sense it is a personal mission that he will only be able to pursue as long as he has some box-office clout. But I’m grateful to him. To see a genuinely classic Western like Open Range, thirty years on, was a true delight, even if there was too much concentration on Annette Bening and too little on the villains.
Howard Hawks
While on the subject, 1974 was the year that Howard Hawks received a Lifetime Achievement Oscar. His film career had ended with a whimper called Rio Lobo in 1970, the second rehash of Rio Bravo. To be honest, apart from Red River, I never rated Hawks highly as a Western director. Rio Bravo, I know, is a film that appears in most critics’ top ten Westerns, but to me it is slack, stagey and self-indulgent. It’s the kind of film an untalented Hawks fan would make, making sure he ticks all the correct auteurist boxes – a group of ‘professionals’, a young woman who has to prove herself as worthy of the men, tough talk about ‘being good enough’, a couple of well-staged action scenes, a sense of the cast ‘having fun’, etc. . . etc.
Having written that, I thought I’d watch it again, in the spirit of fairness. And, on reflection, I can add that it is sloppily edited, overlong, amateurishly acted; the dialogue is stilted and knowing; it is embarrassing.
But there was a time when Hawks had been great: Not just Red River (where he drew a breakthrough performance from Wayne); Only Angels Have Wings (another of those dark/light Cary Grant heroes and a showcase of how being studio-bound does not necessarily detract from an action film), Bringing Up Baby, His Girl Friday (frenetic comedies with Grant again – only Hitchcock used him as well as Hawks); The Big Sleep (substantially remade when he recognised the chemistry between Bogart and Bacall); To Have And Have Not, with Bacall again. By the way, in 1974, Bacall was still only 50, while Bardot was already 40. To Have and Have Not is the main source for all those auteurists, who seem to think it’s the height of artistry to repeat yourself in every film you make. I think it was critic Robin Wood, who relegated The Big Sleep to a footnote in his book on Hawks, because it didn’t conform to what he saw as Hawks’ usual themes, whereas a piece of garbage like Hatari did, and was duly and dutifully analysed.
Walter Brennan
One of Hawks regular support actors was Walter Brennan, and 1974 was the year of his death. Three times winner of the best supporting actor Oscar, always worth watching – and listening to, with that much-imitated, but inimitable, voice. He was John Wayne’s conscience in Red River (‘You was wrong, Mr Dunson’); frontiersman in Northwest Passage; devious and dictatorial in The Westerner as Judge Roy Bean (‘That’s ma rulin’); black-bearded, black-hatted and black-hearted as Old Man Clanton in My Darling Clementine (‘When you pull a gun, kill a man’); cantankerous and desperate to be useful in Rio Bravo; drunken object of Bogart’s affection and loyalty, but not pity, in To Have and Have Not.
The French
Incidentally, Brennan was used in Swamp Water by Jean Renoir, another Life Achievement winner this year. Now, Renoir is one of those ‘great’ directors about whom I know little. It’s a long time since I saw La Grande Illusion, which I remember enjoying, but La Règle du Jeu left me cold. I’ll have to try it again some time with the advantage of maturity.
Truffaut’s Day for Night won 1974’s Oscar for best foreign film, despite the presence of Jacqueline Bissett. It’s enjoyable, I suppose, and a bit of a film buff’s film, but I’ve almost completely forgotten it. Better was Lancelot du Lac, directed by Robert Bresson. Your studies will have taught you what we in this country often forget, that French literature made as much use of the Arthurian legends as did English. It was John Boorman’s Excalibur which reflected best my childhood imaginings of the Camelot tales. The 1954 Robert Taylor film was just a medieval swashbuckler, but Boorman captures the magic and the unreality of a golden age of forested England and doomed idealism. Apparently, Britain has the richest vein of fantasy fiction in the world and I would say it all arises from the myths of Arthur. They are also, of course, prototype Westerns.
All I remember of Bresson’s Lancelot is that it was impressive, but I can’t remember why. There was a lot of clanking metal and shots of legs tramping heavily through mud. No doubt an attempt to contrast myth and reality.
The Bresson film to see is Un condamne a mort s’est echappé, the methodical account of the true story of a resistance man’s escape from the Gestapo. Quite riveting, in the way that only French films can make detail and lack of action. Don Siegel went for the same approach in Escape from Alcatraz, but seems to have lost his nerve and allowed too much Eastwood machismo and prison film cliché.
Jean Gabin, the French Spencer Tracy and star of La grande Illusion, made his last film this year.
Support actors
It’s one of my great joys in watching films to recognise the support actors, like Brennan, who turn up again and again. Watch any old British comedy, say I’m All Right, Jack, and you can count on seeing Liz Fraser, Irene Handl, Margaret Rutherford. Maybe Joan Hickson, who earned long-delayed fame as Miss Marple on TV. Again, take any fifties British war film and expect to see Brian Forbes, David Lodge, Richard Wattis, Harold Goodwin. It’s the same with old Hollywood films, Warner Brothers: Alan Hale, Donald Crisp (died 1974) and Una O’connor; John Ford, with John Qualen, Mildred Natwick and Russell Simpson; Peckinpah, with Luke Askew, Strother Martin and L Q Jones.
Of course, there are all sorts of support actors. There are the second leads, like Arthur Kennedy, Claude Rains and Dean Jagger, who might get lead status in support features (Randolph Scott achieved it by producing his own films).
There are whole films made up of supporting actors, with or without a nominal lead – The Magnificent Seven, The Great Escape, Twelve Angry Men.
Some, like Lee Marvin would go on to big-star status; others became household names on television – Telly Savalas, Raymond Burr and Richard Boone.
Then there are the hundreds of reliable actors, without whom the stars cannot shine: old Universal movies with Dwight Frye, Una O’Connor, E E Clive; the broads, whores, waitresses of Eve Arden, Celeste Holm, Thelma Ritter; the sheriffs, cops and sergeants of Ward Bond, Will Geer and Jay C. Flippen; the outlaws of Robert J. Wilke, Jack Elam, Lyle Bettger; the villains of Basil Rathbone, Henry Daniell, George Zucco; the comic characters of Andy Devine, Nigel Bruce, Mickey Shaughnessy, Paul Ford. (Just as I write this, The Times publishes obituaries of Sheree North, Lloyd Bochner and Mark Lawrence). More recently Terry O’Quinn, Pat Hingle and J T Walsh.
Everyone’s favourite character actor? Probably Harry Dean Stanton. Mine? Ben Johnson. But I have soft spot for Frank Thring (Ben Hur, The Vikings). And where would Laurel and Hardy be without Mae Busch and James Finlayson?
But the one who must be given prominence is Thomas Mitchell, whose annus mirabilis was 1939, when he featured in 6 films: Trade Winds, Mr Smith goes to Washington, The Hunchback of Notre-Dame, Gone with the Wind, Stagecoach (an Oscar for that); and Only Angels have Wings. The last was for Hawks and he played the ‘Walter Brennan’ role.
On their way out
I’ll mention just a couple more deaths. This year saw the departure of Sam Goldwyn. One of the great pioneers, who said that a verbal contract isn’t worth the paper it’s written on, and who became annoyed when critics talked of a film as belonging to the director, not the producer. If you ever see his film Dead End, you’ll notice that the credits make this point very clearly.
And Jack Benny died. He was famous as a radio comedian, noted for his image of tight-fistedness and his comic timing.
Typical Benny routine:
(Sound effects of Benny walking down the street).
MUGGER: This is a stick-up! Your money or your life!
Silence.
MUGGER (louder): I said this is a stick-up! Your money or your life!
Silence.
MUGGER (even louder): Your money or your life!
BENNY: I’m thinking it over.
He turned up as guest in several films, but the only memorable one in which he starred is To be or not to be, a black comedy set against the Nazi invasion of Poland. That’s quite amazing, considering it was made in 1942. The word ‘Jew’ is not mentioned, but it’s obvious the whole cast is Jewish, and there are jokes such as one actor saying to another, ‘What you are I wouldn’t eat.’
The great stars of the thirties had died (Gable, Bogart, Tracy), retired (Grant, Crawford) or lapsed into cameo roles (Stewart, Fonda, Davis). Only Wayne remained a star to the end. The post-war generation was petering out: Douglas would direct and star in Posse (1975, his last work of consequence); Peck surprisingly didn’t do much special after I Walk the Line (1970); Mitchum was excellent in The Friends of Eddie Coyle (1973) and Farewell, My Lovely (1975) and should have left it there, on a high; Lancaster’s last great film was Ulzana’s Raid (1972). It was touching to see Kirk and Burt reunited for Tough Guys in 1986. The big names from the fifties, apart from Newman, had exploded in various ways from the inflation of their own egos. I’m not a great fan of Dean, Brando or Clift.
The Godfather
Going back to Harry Dean Stanton, he appeared, uncredited in The Godfather part II, which won the best picture Oscar for this year (awarded 1975), plus awards for Coppola, de Niro and in various technical categories, not to mention a clutch of nominations.
What more can be said about The Godfather series? The original still leaves a nasty taste in my mouth. I feel guilty for enjoying it so much. But I do love it. Its pace and narrative drive, tension, the handling of a long complicated, multi-charactered story, camerawork, acting. Particularly Pacino, who is quite mesmerising. It’s just that I hate being made to care about this psychopathic scum. More than that – after all, you could say the same thing about The Wild Bunch - the film goes out of its way to justify the Corleones. You don’t see, after all, the intimidation of innocent people offered ‘protection’, the beatings, torture and murders; the corruption of unions, police, judges; the exploitation of American freedom and civil rights to escape justice. I’m thinking of the drugs debate, all the family stuff, loyalty, all the down-trodden immigrant versus corrupt police and politicians crap. It’s the self-righteous self justification of every anti-social thug.
At least, Part II is more honest. Pacino is a paranoid monster by the end, but the flashback scenes are still bathed in a rosy glow of nostalgia. It’s as if Michael’s real crime is to betray the ‘moral’ approach to organised crime of his father. The irony is supposed to be that in serving what Senator Geary describes as his ‘whole fucking family’, he destroys his own, real family.
Other Oscars
Pacino did not win the Oscar. In one its regular spasms of sentiment, Hollywood gave that to Art Carney for Harry and Tonto. De Niro won best support. Meanwhile, Jack Nicholson was nominated for Chinatown, Dustin Hoffmann for Lenny and Jeff Bridges for Thunderbolt and Lightfoot. The new generation was making its mark.
Overall, Oscar-wise, the list of films is impressive. Hollywood’s new wave, which one could argue started in the late sixties with films like Bonnie and Clyde, Easy Rider, etc was in full swing. Even John Cassavetes is nominated for A Woman under the Influence. Sex, violence, four-letter words, cynicism, downbeat endings; directorial power and no attempt to tailor a film for a mass audience; stars who played characters. For a while the director would see himself as king, and there would be financial disasters and pretentious claptrap to prove it. Nothing is new of course (the previous year Orson Welles had bowed out with F for Fake), but what might have got through the system in the past, because of subtlety or sheer, shining merit, was now almost de rigeur.
Is it any wonder when you look at the old-fashioned entertainments still being produced? The Towering Inferno, for example, was nominated, as was Murder on the Orient Express. Sidney Lumet directed that. Why? Sidney Lumet, who made Twelve Angry Men, The Hill, The Offence, Dog Day Afternoon, Q and A. Did he need the money? Was it for a bet or part of a deal? It did get Ingrid Bergman an Oscar, a sign that her scandalous behaviour of twenty years before was forgiven, but not, I’m afraid, that she put in a good performance.
And they nominated Albert Finney as best actor in it! Put on a lot of make-up and a stupid moustache, pad out your belly, affect a strange accent; and Hollywood is impressed by your ‘acting’. Just be easily and naturally brilliant, like Mitchum or Grant, and you’re ignored. They nominated Fred Astaire for The Towering Inferno. Same thing. Totally ignored when he was making his musicals, he had to make do with a special award in 1949 and now a sentimental gesture.
Women in the movies
So what about women? Best actress was Ellen Burstyn for Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore. Directed by Martin Scorsese, another sign of things to come. I haven’t seen it, doesn’t appeal. I believe it’s one of these ‘feisty woman, good mother, bad husband, proves she doesn’t need men’ tales, Joan Crawford material.
Film actresses are always complaining that Hollywood is not interested in starring them when they reach forty. Maybe so, but Hollywood is a business, run for profit. You might as well criticise Escort for not publishing photos of naked gays.
Women in the cinema. From an early age I resented their presence in my favourite action movies. ‘They sure do slow a man down,’ as Richard Widmark said in one western. There would always be this love-dovey stuff delaying the hero from his gunfight, or a cop would arrive home late after seeing his partner shot dead, only to be nagged about the dinner being burnt. If a hero said that a man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do, there would be some woman telling him he hadn’t got to at all, in fact he shouldn’t do it, and, if he really loved her, he wouldn’t dream of it. What was it that the great sage said? ‘Every woman wants her man to change; every man wants his woman never to change. Tragically, both are doomed to disappointment.’
Of course, my attitudes matured as I grew older and I genuinely appreciated the presence of women in the films of Russ Meyer (a genuine ‘auteur’ creator of fully developed characters and well-rounded performances); and Susan George’s presence in Straw Dogs was fundamental to Peckinpah’s masterly analysis of the masculine-feminine interface.
But look at Bullitt. It won an Oscar for best editing. What a travesty! No doubt a decent functional job of cutting the car chase swung it, but they neglected to edit Jacqueline Bissett out. She’s pretty, I grant you, in a sexless way, but what is the point of her character, except to nag at Steve McQueen for doing a necessary but dirty job. She’s the kind of woman who wouldn’t understand the need for sewage workers, because I doubt she’s ever taken a shit in her life. That prissy English accent! Even the way she eats her breakfast cereal is irritating.
So, women in films: dumb, decorative, dangerous; they care, they console, they control, they castrate; their role is education, civilisation, moralisation; they represent community against individualism, stasis against movement, caution against action, peace against violence, weakness against strength.
Crawford and Davis were exceptions. Their personalities, their drawing power meant they could be central. So too was Scarlett O’Hara. Ellen Burstyn’s character allows her to be the same. Years later we would have Thelma and Louise, where female characters take over the usually male roles of buddies in a road movie. But these characters all remain believable females. It got a bit silly in The Long Kiss Goodnight, where Geena Davis tries to be Bruce Willis, but a good believable woman in an action film is Sigourney Weaver in Alien, a part that could have been played by a man or a woman. The power of the alien is such that the usual physical disparity of male and female becomes irrelevant. Mental strength and intelligence become all.
Conclusion
What did the future hold? Well, John Carpenter released Dark Star, the beginning of his career and the first draft of Alien. Jonathan Demme, later to make The Silence of the Lambs, made Caged Heat. It’s an exploitational ‘women in prison’ film, starring Meyer favourite Erica Gavin – if only I could learn to insert pictures into this text – and is now a cult movie. And Scorsese was making his mark, of course. Steven Spielberg came out with The Sugarland Express.
Jodie Foster appeared in Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore and Harrison Ford in The Conversation.
Jane Fonda produced the documentary Vietnam Journey, which fortunately I’ve managed to miss all these years. I expect Michael Moore has seen it. Documentaries are so much more ‘truthful’, aren’t they?
John Carpenter was planning unashamedly to make the kind of B-movies that he’d always loved. So were Spielberg and Lucas, but their plan was to retain their independence and still work within the big studio system. In fact, their strategy was to make A-list films from second feature material and their independence would come from running the system. You make more money that way.
I admire Spielberg tremendously and Schindler’s List is one of the greatest films ever made, but there is so much to regret in this trend. Compare Jaws with Moby Dick; Raiders of the Lost Ark with The African Queen or Treasure of the Sierra Madre; Jurassic Park with King Kong. All the stunts, all the special effects amount to sound and fury signifying nothing, because there’s little humanity. And Spielberg can do humanity: Schindler, Empire of the Sun, The Colour Purple, Amistad. Discuss!
I have come to like the word discourse. From it comes the adjective ‘discursive’, which has, strangely, two contrasting definitions. Namely, ‘rambling or digressive’; and, ‘proceeding by argument or reasoning’. So it’s difficult to go wrong, isn’t it?
I shall not attempt to talk about the social context of this year’s films, partly because it is irrelevant to our enjoyment of them, and partly because attempts to do that are usually uninformed and motivated by a desire to promote some sociological or political hobby horse. For example, The Magnificent Seven is all about the Peace Corps and The Wild Bunch is the Vietnam war.
In any case, I can’t think offhand of too many interesting things about 1974. Maybe I was preoccupied.
We did have two general elections. Ted Heath called one early in the year on the theme, ‘Who runs the country?’ Well, not Ted, apparently, because Harold Wilson got back into power. In fact, the National Union of Mineworkers was confirmed as the real power in the land, as they had been two years before, when Heath had capitulated to them. How they must crowed! I’ll bet the Brighouse and Rastrick played The Red Flag non-stop for a fortnight, whippets and pigeons were renamed Arthur; and no doubt Comrade Scargill was secretly honoured as a Hero of the Soviet Union.
But we all know that hubris is inevitably followed by nemesis, and we all know too that the goddess, Nemesis, is female.
Westerns
According to the inscription I wrote at the time, I bought Philip French’s Westerns on 22 March 1974, a book which still informs any conversation I have on the subject (which is a pain when I think I’m being original)l. And yet, in retrospect, it was around this year that the Western ceased to exist as a regular banker for film-makers. John Ford had died the previous year. John Wayne would finish with The Shootist the following year. Clint Eastwood would return to the West occasionally, but his cash cows would be Dirty Harry rip-offs and thick-eared comedies. Kevin Costner tries to keep the flame alive, but you sense it is a personal mission that he will only be able to pursue as long as he has some box-office clout. But I’m grateful to him. To see a genuinely classic Western like Open Range, thirty years on, was a true delight, even if there was too much concentration on Annette Bening and too little on the villains.
Howard Hawks
While on the subject, 1974 was the year that Howard Hawks received a Lifetime Achievement Oscar. His film career had ended with a whimper called Rio Lobo in 1970, the second rehash of Rio Bravo. To be honest, apart from Red River, I never rated Hawks highly as a Western director. Rio Bravo, I know, is a film that appears in most critics’ top ten Westerns, but to me it is slack, stagey and self-indulgent. It’s the kind of film an untalented Hawks fan would make, making sure he ticks all the correct auteurist boxes – a group of ‘professionals’, a young woman who has to prove herself as worthy of the men, tough talk about ‘being good enough’, a couple of well-staged action scenes, a sense of the cast ‘having fun’, etc. . . etc.
Having written that, I thought I’d watch it again, in the spirit of fairness. And, on reflection, I can add that it is sloppily edited, overlong, amateurishly acted; the dialogue is stilted and knowing; it is embarrassing.
But there was a time when Hawks had been great: Not just Red River (where he drew a breakthrough performance from Wayne); Only Angels Have Wings (another of those dark/light Cary Grant heroes and a showcase of how being studio-bound does not necessarily detract from an action film), Bringing Up Baby, His Girl Friday (frenetic comedies with Grant again – only Hitchcock used him as well as Hawks); The Big Sleep (substantially remade when he recognised the chemistry between Bogart and Bacall); To Have And Have Not, with Bacall again. By the way, in 1974, Bacall was still only 50, while Bardot was already 40. To Have and Have Not is the main source for all those auteurists, who seem to think it’s the height of artistry to repeat yourself in every film you make. I think it was critic Robin Wood, who relegated The Big Sleep to a footnote in his book on Hawks, because it didn’t conform to what he saw as Hawks’ usual themes, whereas a piece of garbage like Hatari did, and was duly and dutifully analysed.
Walter Brennan
One of Hawks regular support actors was Walter Brennan, and 1974 was the year of his death. Three times winner of the best supporting actor Oscar, always worth watching – and listening to, with that much-imitated, but inimitable, voice. He was John Wayne’s conscience in Red River (‘You was wrong, Mr Dunson’); frontiersman in Northwest Passage; devious and dictatorial in The Westerner as Judge Roy Bean (‘That’s ma rulin’); black-bearded, black-hatted and black-hearted as Old Man Clanton in My Darling Clementine (‘When you pull a gun, kill a man’); cantankerous and desperate to be useful in Rio Bravo; drunken object of Bogart’s affection and loyalty, but not pity, in To Have and Have Not.
The French
Incidentally, Brennan was used in Swamp Water by Jean Renoir, another Life Achievement winner this year. Now, Renoir is one of those ‘great’ directors about whom I know little. It’s a long time since I saw La Grande Illusion, which I remember enjoying, but La Règle du Jeu left me cold. I’ll have to try it again some time with the advantage of maturity.
Truffaut’s Day for Night won 1974’s Oscar for best foreign film, despite the presence of Jacqueline Bissett. It’s enjoyable, I suppose, and a bit of a film buff’s film, but I’ve almost completely forgotten it. Better was Lancelot du Lac, directed by Robert Bresson. Your studies will have taught you what we in this country often forget, that French literature made as much use of the Arthurian legends as did English. It was John Boorman’s Excalibur which reflected best my childhood imaginings of the Camelot tales. The 1954 Robert Taylor film was just a medieval swashbuckler, but Boorman captures the magic and the unreality of a golden age of forested England and doomed idealism. Apparently, Britain has the richest vein of fantasy fiction in the world and I would say it all arises from the myths of Arthur. They are also, of course, prototype Westerns.
All I remember of Bresson’s Lancelot is that it was impressive, but I can’t remember why. There was a lot of clanking metal and shots of legs tramping heavily through mud. No doubt an attempt to contrast myth and reality.
The Bresson film to see is Un condamne a mort s’est echappé, the methodical account of the true story of a resistance man’s escape from the Gestapo. Quite riveting, in the way that only French films can make detail and lack of action. Don Siegel went for the same approach in Escape from Alcatraz, but seems to have lost his nerve and allowed too much Eastwood machismo and prison film cliché.
Jean Gabin, the French Spencer Tracy and star of La grande Illusion, made his last film this year.
Support actors
It’s one of my great joys in watching films to recognise the support actors, like Brennan, who turn up again and again. Watch any old British comedy, say I’m All Right, Jack, and you can count on seeing Liz Fraser, Irene Handl, Margaret Rutherford. Maybe Joan Hickson, who earned long-delayed fame as Miss Marple on TV. Again, take any fifties British war film and expect to see Brian Forbes, David Lodge, Richard Wattis, Harold Goodwin. It’s the same with old Hollywood films, Warner Brothers: Alan Hale, Donald Crisp (died 1974) and Una O’connor; John Ford, with John Qualen, Mildred Natwick and Russell Simpson; Peckinpah, with Luke Askew, Strother Martin and L Q Jones.
Of course, there are all sorts of support actors. There are the second leads, like Arthur Kennedy, Claude Rains and Dean Jagger, who might get lead status in support features (Randolph Scott achieved it by producing his own films).
There are whole films made up of supporting actors, with or without a nominal lead – The Magnificent Seven, The Great Escape, Twelve Angry Men.
Some, like Lee Marvin would go on to big-star status; others became household names on television – Telly Savalas, Raymond Burr and Richard Boone.
Then there are the hundreds of reliable actors, without whom the stars cannot shine: old Universal movies with Dwight Frye, Una O’Connor, E E Clive; the broads, whores, waitresses of Eve Arden, Celeste Holm, Thelma Ritter; the sheriffs, cops and sergeants of Ward Bond, Will Geer and Jay C. Flippen; the outlaws of Robert J. Wilke, Jack Elam, Lyle Bettger; the villains of Basil Rathbone, Henry Daniell, George Zucco; the comic characters of Andy Devine, Nigel Bruce, Mickey Shaughnessy, Paul Ford. (Just as I write this, The Times publishes obituaries of Sheree North, Lloyd Bochner and Mark Lawrence). More recently Terry O’Quinn, Pat Hingle and J T Walsh.
Everyone’s favourite character actor? Probably Harry Dean Stanton. Mine? Ben Johnson. But I have soft spot for Frank Thring (Ben Hur, The Vikings). And where would Laurel and Hardy be without Mae Busch and James Finlayson?
But the one who must be given prominence is Thomas Mitchell, whose annus mirabilis was 1939, when he featured in 6 films: Trade Winds, Mr Smith goes to Washington, The Hunchback of Notre-Dame, Gone with the Wind, Stagecoach (an Oscar for that); and Only Angels have Wings. The last was for Hawks and he played the ‘Walter Brennan’ role.
On their way out
I’ll mention just a couple more deaths. This year saw the departure of Sam Goldwyn. One of the great pioneers, who said that a verbal contract isn’t worth the paper it’s written on, and who became annoyed when critics talked of a film as belonging to the director, not the producer. If you ever see his film Dead End, you’ll notice that the credits make this point very clearly.
And Jack Benny died. He was famous as a radio comedian, noted for his image of tight-fistedness and his comic timing.
Typical Benny routine:
(Sound effects of Benny walking down the street).
MUGGER: This is a stick-up! Your money or your life!
Silence.
MUGGER (louder): I said this is a stick-up! Your money or your life!
Silence.
MUGGER (even louder): Your money or your life!
BENNY: I’m thinking it over.
He turned up as guest in several films, but the only memorable one in which he starred is To be or not to be, a black comedy set against the Nazi invasion of Poland. That’s quite amazing, considering it was made in 1942. The word ‘Jew’ is not mentioned, but it’s obvious the whole cast is Jewish, and there are jokes such as one actor saying to another, ‘What you are I wouldn’t eat.’
The great stars of the thirties had died (Gable, Bogart, Tracy), retired (Grant, Crawford) or lapsed into cameo roles (Stewart, Fonda, Davis). Only Wayne remained a star to the end. The post-war generation was petering out: Douglas would direct and star in Posse (1975, his last work of consequence); Peck surprisingly didn’t do much special after I Walk the Line (1970); Mitchum was excellent in The Friends of Eddie Coyle (1973) and Farewell, My Lovely (1975) and should have left it there, on a high; Lancaster’s last great film was Ulzana’s Raid (1972). It was touching to see Kirk and Burt reunited for Tough Guys in 1986. The big names from the fifties, apart from Newman, had exploded in various ways from the inflation of their own egos. I’m not a great fan of Dean, Brando or Clift.
The Godfather
Going back to Harry Dean Stanton, he appeared, uncredited in The Godfather part II, which won the best picture Oscar for this year (awarded 1975), plus awards for Coppola, de Niro and in various technical categories, not to mention a clutch of nominations.
What more can be said about The Godfather series? The original still leaves a nasty taste in my mouth. I feel guilty for enjoying it so much. But I do love it. Its pace and narrative drive, tension, the handling of a long complicated, multi-charactered story, camerawork, acting. Particularly Pacino, who is quite mesmerising. It’s just that I hate being made to care about this psychopathic scum. More than that – after all, you could say the same thing about The Wild Bunch - the film goes out of its way to justify the Corleones. You don’t see, after all, the intimidation of innocent people offered ‘protection’, the beatings, torture and murders; the corruption of unions, police, judges; the exploitation of American freedom and civil rights to escape justice. I’m thinking of the drugs debate, all the family stuff, loyalty, all the down-trodden immigrant versus corrupt police and politicians crap. It’s the self-righteous self justification of every anti-social thug.
At least, Part II is more honest. Pacino is a paranoid monster by the end, but the flashback scenes are still bathed in a rosy glow of nostalgia. It’s as if Michael’s real crime is to betray the ‘moral’ approach to organised crime of his father. The irony is supposed to be that in serving what Senator Geary describes as his ‘whole fucking family’, he destroys his own, real family.
Other Oscars
Pacino did not win the Oscar. In one its regular spasms of sentiment, Hollywood gave that to Art Carney for Harry and Tonto. De Niro won best support. Meanwhile, Jack Nicholson was nominated for Chinatown, Dustin Hoffmann for Lenny and Jeff Bridges for Thunderbolt and Lightfoot. The new generation was making its mark.
Overall, Oscar-wise, the list of films is impressive. Hollywood’s new wave, which one could argue started in the late sixties with films like Bonnie and Clyde, Easy Rider, etc was in full swing. Even John Cassavetes is nominated for A Woman under the Influence. Sex, violence, four-letter words, cynicism, downbeat endings; directorial power and no attempt to tailor a film for a mass audience; stars who played characters. For a while the director would see himself as king, and there would be financial disasters and pretentious claptrap to prove it. Nothing is new of course (the previous year Orson Welles had bowed out with F for Fake), but what might have got through the system in the past, because of subtlety or sheer, shining merit, was now almost de rigeur.
Is it any wonder when you look at the old-fashioned entertainments still being produced? The Towering Inferno, for example, was nominated, as was Murder on the Orient Express. Sidney Lumet directed that. Why? Sidney Lumet, who made Twelve Angry Men, The Hill, The Offence, Dog Day Afternoon, Q and A. Did he need the money? Was it for a bet or part of a deal? It did get Ingrid Bergman an Oscar, a sign that her scandalous behaviour of twenty years before was forgiven, but not, I’m afraid, that she put in a good performance.
And they nominated Albert Finney as best actor in it! Put on a lot of make-up and a stupid moustache, pad out your belly, affect a strange accent; and Hollywood is impressed by your ‘acting’. Just be easily and naturally brilliant, like Mitchum or Grant, and you’re ignored. They nominated Fred Astaire for The Towering Inferno. Same thing. Totally ignored when he was making his musicals, he had to make do with a special award in 1949 and now a sentimental gesture.
Women in the movies
So what about women? Best actress was Ellen Burstyn for Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore. Directed by Martin Scorsese, another sign of things to come. I haven’t seen it, doesn’t appeal. I believe it’s one of these ‘feisty woman, good mother, bad husband, proves she doesn’t need men’ tales, Joan Crawford material.
Film actresses are always complaining that Hollywood is not interested in starring them when they reach forty. Maybe so, but Hollywood is a business, run for profit. You might as well criticise Escort for not publishing photos of naked gays.
Women in the cinema. From an early age I resented their presence in my favourite action movies. ‘They sure do slow a man down,’ as Richard Widmark said in one western. There would always be this love-dovey stuff delaying the hero from his gunfight, or a cop would arrive home late after seeing his partner shot dead, only to be nagged about the dinner being burnt. If a hero said that a man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do, there would be some woman telling him he hadn’t got to at all, in fact he shouldn’t do it, and, if he really loved her, he wouldn’t dream of it. What was it that the great sage said? ‘Every woman wants her man to change; every man wants his woman never to change. Tragically, both are doomed to disappointment.’
Of course, my attitudes matured as I grew older and I genuinely appreciated the presence of women in the films of Russ Meyer (a genuine ‘auteur’ creator of fully developed characters and well-rounded performances); and Susan George’s presence in Straw Dogs was fundamental to Peckinpah’s masterly analysis of the masculine-feminine interface.
But look at Bullitt. It won an Oscar for best editing. What a travesty! No doubt a decent functional job of cutting the car chase swung it, but they neglected to edit Jacqueline Bissett out. She’s pretty, I grant you, in a sexless way, but what is the point of her character, except to nag at Steve McQueen for doing a necessary but dirty job. She’s the kind of woman who wouldn’t understand the need for sewage workers, because I doubt she’s ever taken a shit in her life. That prissy English accent! Even the way she eats her breakfast cereal is irritating.
So, women in films: dumb, decorative, dangerous; they care, they console, they control, they castrate; their role is education, civilisation, moralisation; they represent community against individualism, stasis against movement, caution against action, peace against violence, weakness against strength.
Crawford and Davis were exceptions. Their personalities, their drawing power meant they could be central. So too was Scarlett O’Hara. Ellen Burstyn’s character allows her to be the same. Years later we would have Thelma and Louise, where female characters take over the usually male roles of buddies in a road movie. But these characters all remain believable females. It got a bit silly in The Long Kiss Goodnight, where Geena Davis tries to be Bruce Willis, but a good believable woman in an action film is Sigourney Weaver in Alien, a part that could have been played by a man or a woman. The power of the alien is such that the usual physical disparity of male and female becomes irrelevant. Mental strength and intelligence become all.
Conclusion
What did the future hold? Well, John Carpenter released Dark Star, the beginning of his career and the first draft of Alien. Jonathan Demme, later to make The Silence of the Lambs, made Caged Heat. It’s an exploitational ‘women in prison’ film, starring Meyer favourite Erica Gavin – if only I could learn to insert pictures into this text – and is now a cult movie. And Scorsese was making his mark, of course. Steven Spielberg came out with The Sugarland Express.
Jodie Foster appeared in Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore and Harrison Ford in The Conversation.
Jane Fonda produced the documentary Vietnam Journey, which fortunately I’ve managed to miss all these years. I expect Michael Moore has seen it. Documentaries are so much more ‘truthful’, aren’t they?
John Carpenter was planning unashamedly to make the kind of B-movies that he’d always loved. So were Spielberg and Lucas, but their plan was to retain their independence and still work within the big studio system. In fact, their strategy was to make A-list films from second feature material and their independence would come from running the system. You make more money that way.
I admire Spielberg tremendously and Schindler’s List is one of the greatest films ever made, but there is so much to regret in this trend. Compare Jaws with Moby Dick; Raiders of the Lost Ark with The African Queen or Treasure of the Sierra Madre; Jurassic Park with King Kong. All the stunts, all the special effects amount to sound and fury signifying nothing, because there’s little humanity. And Spielberg can do humanity: Schindler, Empire of the Sun, The Colour Purple, Amistad. Discuss!
All in all, not a bad year. Watch this space for 1957
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