Awake in the Dark: The Best of Roger Ebert (23 page)

No other director has been more successful at the box office. Few other directors have placed more titles on various lists of the greatest films. How many other directors have bridged the gap between popular and critical success? Not many; one thinks of Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton, John Ford and Alfred Hitchcock, John Huston and Cecil B. DeMille, and although the list could go on, the important thing is to establish the company that Spielberg finds himself in.

Now he owns his own studio, DreamWorks. A few other directors have grown so powerful that they could call their own shots: in the silent days, D. W. Griffith, Chaplin, DeMille, and Rex Ingram. Since then, not many, and those who have founded studios, like Francis Coppola, have lived to regret their entry into the world of finance. But Spielberg's success has been so consistent for so many years that even the mysteries of money (in some ways, so much more perplexing than the challenge of making a good film) seem open to him.

Consider some of his titles (Spielberg has made a dozen films known to virtually everyone): E. T., Jaws, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Raiders of the Lost Ark, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, The Color Purple, the two Jurassic Parks, and his 1993 Oscar winner for best picture, Schindler's List. Consider his current release, Amistad, concerning a trial about the moral and legal basis of slavery; he has used his success to buy the independence to make films that might not otherwise seem bankable.

If Spielberg had never directed a single film, however, he would still qualify as one of Hollywood's most successful producers. Look at these titles: Who Framed Roger Rabbit, the three Back to the Future movies, An American Tail, Gremlins, Twister, and many more. Yes, he's had failures (1941, Always, Hook) but more often than not when Spielberg makes a movie it finds one of the year's largest audiences.

To make a good movie is very difficult. To make a popular movie is not easy. To make both, time after time, is the holy grail which Hollywood seeks with the same fervor that Indy Jones devoted to the original grail. Talking to Spielberg over the years, and particularly during a four-hour conversation in the spring of 1996, I got the feeling that his success is based on his ability to stay in touch with the sense of wonder he had as a teenager-about the world, and about movies.

"I'm greedy about trying to please as many people, all in the same tent, at the same time," he told me. "I've just always wanted to please, more than I've wanted to create controversy and exclude people. And yet, when I made E. T., I really thought I was making it, not for everybody in the world, but for kids. I actually told George Lucas that parents would drop their kids off at E. T. And the parents would go off and see another movie playing a block away."

And yet he made a movie that more people have seen, perhaps, than any other. What deeper need did it fill than simple entertainment? Why does the story of a little boy and a goofy-looking extraterrestrial make people cry who never cry at the movies?

"From the very beginning," Spielberg said, "E. T. was a movie about my childhood-about my parents' divorce, although people haven't often seen that it's about divorce. My parents split up when I was fifteen or sixteen years old, and I needed a special friend, and had to use my imagination to take me to places that felt good-that helped me move beyond the problems my parents were having, and that ended our family as a whole. And thinking about that time, I thought, an extraterrestrial character would be the perfect springboard to purge the pain of your parents splitting up."

It's that deeper impulse, that need, that operates under the surface of E.T., making it more emotionally complex than the story itself might suggest. And in the third Indiana Jones movie, there's that bond between Indy (Harrison Ford) and his father (Sean Connery). In Close Encounters, the hope that alien visitors might be benign, not fearsome as they always were in science fiction movies. And in The Color Purple, again the impulse to heal a broken family.

Spielberg may begin with a promising idea, but in his best films he doesn't proceed with it unless there is also a connection to his heart. That may be why his Holocaust film, Schindler's List, is not only about horror, but about help, about man's better nature even in the worst times.

Spielberg told me that he got into the movies by sneaking onto the lot at Universal. He'd buy a ticket on the tour bus, jump off the bus, and hang around. After awhile the guards had seen him so often (always dressed in his bar mitzvah suit, not T-shirt and jeans, so that he didn't look so much like a kid) they waved him through.

By then he had already made a lot of movies. His first involved his Lionel train set. "The trains went around and around, and after a while that got boring, and I had this eight-millimeter camera, and I staged a train wreck and filmed it. That was hard on the trains, but then I could cut the film a lot of different ways, and look at it over and over again."

And what boy wouldn't rather make a movie than have a train set?

INTRODUCTION

Movie critics are required by unwritten law to create a list of the ten best films of every year, and although I avoid "best" lists whenever possible, this is a duty I fulfill. Because ranking films is silly and pointless, but gathering a list of good ones is useful, I wish it were possible to make the lists alphabetical. Well, actually, it is, but doesn't it seem like cheating?

Looking over my lists of the best films in the appendix to this volume, I find an occasional tendency to place what I now consider the year's best film in second place, perhaps because I was trying to make some kind of point with my top pick. For example: In 1968, I should have ranked 2001 above The Battle of Algiers. In 1971, McCabe and Mrs. Miller was better than The Last Picture Show. In 1974, Chinatown was probably better, in a different way, than Scenes from a Marriage. In 1976, how could I rank Small Change above Taxi Driver? In 1978, I would put Days of Heaven above An Unmarried Woman. And in 1980, of course, Raging Bull was a better film than The Black Stallion.

That I always ranked those years' best films second, instead of placing them further down the list, is curious; it's as if I knew they were best, but had some perverse reason for not admitting it. Trying to remember my reasoning, I think that in 1968, a year of political upheaval. Battle of Algiers seemed more urgent than 2001 (which after all is timeless). The Last Picture Show was so emotionally involving and felt so new that I undervalued what I now see as the perfection of McCabe. Small Change was a heart-warmer, but I completely fail to understand why I thought it outranked Taxi Driver. And although I later chose Raging Bull as the best film of the entire decade of the 198os, it was only the second-best film of 1980.

Readers often ask, "Do you ever change your mind about a film?" Yes. The question itself is pointless. Am I the same person I was in 1968, 1971, or 1980? I hope not. Have I learned something in the meantime? I hope so. But to read what I wrote then, rather than what I might write today, provides a reflection of the way the movies and the years reflected each other.

SEPTEMBER 25, 1967

Bonnie and Clyde is a milestone in the history of American movies, a work of truth and brilliance. It is also pitilessly cruel, filled with sympathy, nauseating, funny, heartbreaking, and astonishingly beautiful. If it does not seem that those words should be strung together, perhaps that is because movies do not very often reflect the full range of human life.

The lives in this case belonged, briefly, to Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker. They were two nobodies who got their pictures in the paper by robbing banks and killing people. They weren't very good at the bank robbery part of it, but they were fairly good at killing people and absolutely first-class at getting their pictures in the paper.

Bonnie was a gum-chewing waitress and Clyde was a two-bit hood out on parole. But from the beginning, they both seemed to have the knack of entertaining people. Bonnie wrote ballads and mailed them in with pictures Clyde took with his Kodak. They seemed to consider themselves public servants, bringing a little sparkle to the poverty and despair of the Dust Bowl during the early Depression years.

"Good afternoon," Clyde would say when they walked into a bank. "This is the Barrow Gang." In a way Bonnie and Clyde were pioneers, consolidating the vein of violence in American history and exploiting it, for the first time in the mass media.

Under Arthur Penn's direction, this is a film aimed squarely and unforgivingly at the time we are living in. It is intended, horrifyingly, as entertainment. And so it will be taken. The kids on dates will go to see this one, j ust like they went to see Dirty Dozen and Born Losers and Hells Angels on Wheels.

But this time, maybe, they'll get more than they counted on. The violence in most American movies is of a curiously bloodless quality. People are shot and they die, but they do not suffer. The murders are something to be gotten over with, so the audience will have its money's worth; the same is true of the sex. Both are like the toy in a Crackerjack box: worthless, but you feel cheated if it's not there.

In Bonnie and Clyde, however, real people die. Before they die they suffer, horribly. Before they suffer they laugh, and play checkers, and make love, or try to. These become people we know, and when they die it is not at all pleasant to be in the audience. When people are shot in Bonnie and Clyde, they are literally blown to bits. Perhaps that seems shocking. But perhaps at this time, it is useful to be reminded that bullets really do tear skin and bone, and that they don't make nice round little holes like the Swiss cheese effect with Fearless Fosdick.

We are living in a period when newscasts refer casually to "waves" of mass murders, Richard Speck's photograph is sold on posters in Old Town, and snipers in Newark pose for Life magazine (perhaps they are busy now getting their ballads to rhyme.) Violence takes on an unreal quality. The Barrow Gang reads its press clippings aloud for fun. When C. W. Moss takes the wounded Bonnie and Clyde to his father's home, the old man snorts: "What'd they ever do for you boy? Didn't even get your name in the paper." Is that a funny line, or a tragic one?