The Big Screen (18 page)
Authors: David Thomson
By contrast, Josef von Sternberg was a business failure, very unpopular personally, and a consistent artist who saw no other subject for film than handsome men adoring and being humiliated by beautiful, self-sufficient women, all of whom looked like Marlene Dietrich. No one else in America in the 1930sâexcept perhaps for Groucho Marx (who had a wounded mustache just like so many von Sternberg protagonists)âstarted from the idea that movies were so absurd they deserved to be mocked.
Josef von Sternberg (or was it plain Joe Stern?) was born in Vienna in 1894. His early years were split between that city and New York. He was a man of all trades in the early picture business in New Jersey and he served in the Signal Corps during the war. By the mid-1920s he had directed the unusual realism of
The Salvation Hunters
(shot on the San Pedro waterfront, south of Los Angeles) and the early gangster picture
Underworld
, which is the first manifestation of his search for style: moody lighting, fatalistic men and femmes fatales, and a visual fetishism in which the image becomes an open wound of frustrated desire. It was in 1930 that he went to Berlin, working for both Paramount and Ufa, to direct the first talking picture with Emil Jannings, who shared the widespread public feeling that he was the greatest actor alive. Von Sternberg and Jannings had already made one film in America,
The Last Command
(1928), where Jannings played a tsarist general reduced to being a movie extra.
Von Sternberg, who acted out his own preferred style of laconic restraint, saw Jannings as an excessive bore so conceited he believed he could act with his back. In part, this clash of approaches was simply sound pulling away the carpet of silence. Von Sternberg was one of the first directors to see that beautiful people need do very little on film except be photographed. Dietrich's pensiveness in
Shanghai Express
, say, is still an acting class where we wonder what she is thinking. Such moments can encourage thought itself.
Von Sternberg's Berlin project was
Der Blaue Engel
(
The Blue Angel
), based on Heinrich Mann's novel
Professor Unrat
, in which Jannings would play the pompous schoolteacher dragged down by an insolent cabaret singer, Lola Lola. It is not true that von Sternberg discovered Marlene Dietrich (born in Berlin in 1901) for that role. She was known for a few small parts already. And von Sternberg went to see her in a play,
Zwei Krawatten
, by Georg Kaiser. It was a famous meeting:
I saw Fräulein Dietrich in the flesh, if that it can be called, for she had wrapped herself up to conceal every part of her body. What little she had to do on that stage was not easily apparent: I remember only one line of dialogue. Here was the face I had sought. And, so far as I could tell, a figure that did justice to it. Moreover, there was something else I had not sought, something that told me my search was over. She leaned against the wings with a cold disdain for the buffoonery, in sharp contrast to the effervescence of the others, who had been informed that I was to be treated to a sample of the greatness of the German stage. She had heard that I was in the audience, but as she did not consider herself involved, she was indifferent to my presence.
This is one of many such meetings in film history, and they have built the myth of “discovery” for all of usâthat moment when we may be picked out of the anonymous crowd, identified, known, and loved. (If it never happens, you can try it in the mirror.) “Love at first sight” is a movie scenario concept, but it lives in the notion that seeing is the first step in falling. Dietrich and von Sternberg were both married, but not to each other. So the desire and the sex were the greater for the restrictions. That frustration is the heart of von Sternberg's vision, just as Dietrich's indifference was the lash to flay him.
In
Der Blaue Engel
, Lola Lola takes Rath for everything, while Dietrich's insolence and hesitationsâher ironic glanceâdevastated Jannings just as Ali ambushed George Foreman in Zaire. Ufa didn't quite get the message that audiences would swallow, so von Sternberg and Paramount were able to steal Marlene away for American pictures. It was a great assetâas good as her legs, her eyes, or her nerveâthat she spoke clear English with a sweet lisp that swayed from seduction to contempt in a single line.
At Paramount, then, they made six films in a row, from 1930 to 1935:
Morocco
;
Dishonored
;
Shanghai Express
;
Blonde Venus
;
The Scarlet Empress
; and
The Devil Is a Woman
. Those pictures earned less and less money and mounting critical abuse. It doesn't matter. They are sublime, radiant, and utterly undated, where earnestness, noble intentions, showing real life with pained sincerity (all plausible in the difficult times of the 1930s), have perished by the wayside. Take
Morocco
.
Its story was already a pastiche of movie scenarios. Amy Jolly is a cabaret singer who comes to North Africa. She is attended by a would-be protector (Adolphe Menjou, with mustache, a brother to von Sternberg in looks), but she notices Tom Brown (Gary Cooper), an American in the foreign legion who is crazy about her but averse to admitting it. In the end, as he marches off on desert duty, she follows him in the gang of Arab groupies, discarding her fashionable high-heel shoes to manage in the dunes. (And that is the happiest ending in von SternbergâDietrich films.)
It is as daft as it sounds as a story, and no less artificial than
Road to Morocco
(1942), with Hope, Crosby, and Lamour, also shot at Paramount and with the same casual attitude to what North Africa looks like. Amy sings, of course, and in the cabaret scene, wearing a tuxedo, tails, and a top hat, she kisses a pretty girl in her audience. What was that? you feel the system asking itself. Was that You Know What? It was too swift and elusive for any censor to intervene, but if the movies are all about sex, it might as well be any sex and not just the usual kind of kiss.
Morocco
resists aging because von Sternberg inspired his two stars to be amused about the silliness of longing (even if they succumbed to it out of sight of the camera).
Von Sternberg was skilled enough to light and photograph his own pictures, and no one knew more about luminous passivity, the capacity to let the camera in past your eyes. It may be that no one else found such intimacy in Marlene. And he directed her as if she were his slave or his dream: “Turn your shoulders away from me and straighten outâ¦Drop your voice an octave and don't lispâ¦Count to six and look at the lamp as if you could no longer live without it.” He is speaking to an actress, but he could be describing the moviegoer in the dark.
He is maybe the greatest example of a director who appreciates that movie is a matter of beholding something you desire but cannot touch. And he prizes that as a sardonic joke. (Von Sternberg's
The Devil Is a Woman
, 1935, would be remade later by Luis Buñuel as
That Obscure Object of Desire
, 1977, where Fernando Rey is so besotted he cannot see that his beloved is played by two actresses!)
Von Sternberg must have guessed his way of working was doomed, because he didn't believe in being serious. He was lucky to get six pictures in America with Dietrich. After that, his career trailed away. Did he care anymore?
Frank Capra was a very funny filmmaker, and an unsurpassed entertainer, but his ambition was so intense he had no problems with caring. He was born in Palermo in 1897, and never made a Mafia picture. Coming to California at the age of six, he was later educated at what would become CalTech. He messed around in pictures for a few years and then, in 1927, he got a contract to direct at Columbia, securely in the second rank of Hollywood studios and led by Harry Cohn, a boss Capra loved to hate.
Capra never abandoned the professional urge to entertain, and he was as good with actors as he was blessed by having the screenwriter Robert Riskin at hand. But he was obsessed with the question of social conscience (which is not always the same as having one). In the early 1930s, he made a string of intriguing pictures, often about sex and women's status, and often with Barbara Stanwyck, with whom he was having an intense affairânotably
The Miracle Woman
(1931),
Forbidden
(1932), and
The Bitter Tea of General Yen
(1933). His breakthrough occurred in 1934, with
It Happened One Night
.
Nobody liked the idea at first. And nobody wanted to play in the film. A dozen actresses declinedâincluding Myrna Loy, Margaret Sullavan, Carole Lombard, and Constance Bennett. When M-G-M offered to loan a male star, Capra asked for Robert Montgomery. Louis B. Mayer said no, but then he thought to punish the cocksure Clark Gable, who required too much money, by sending him instead. At last, Claudette Colbert agreed to play the runaway heiress, with Gable as the reporter she falls for. The budget was set at $325,000 (Columbia was cheap and proud of it). Gable did the picture for just $10,000, while Colbert got $50,000. Gable was grumpy (not uncommon for him), but he liked Capra's touch. “You know,” he said to Colbert, “I think this wop's got something!”
The picture opened in New York on February 23, 1934, and broke records at Radio City Music Hall. Then, without reason, business fell off, and the picture failed in many cities. But in the sticks it built steadilyâand it is a film where urban smarts are mocked in favor of provincial good sense. The Capra common man was coming into view, and the public must have been flattered. It ended up with rentals of $2 million, a dazzling figure. Capra's contract gave him 10 percent of the net profits, but net is not gross, especially when Cohn block-booked his picture with poorer studio productâso Capra felt he had been cheated, and being wronged was at his core.
His bitter triumph was made complete at the Oscars awarded on February 27, 1935, at the Biltmore Hotel in Los Angeles. Capra won the award for Best Director. Robert Riskin won for his script. Then Gable won: “I feel as happy as a kid and a little foolish they picked me,” he said. Colbert won, but she was at the rail station about to board the train for New York. A car was sent after her. Studio publicists implored her to return, and so she did. She blurted out that she wouldn't have been there but for Frank Capra, and she survived the stony smile on the face of Bette Davis (who had wanted the part and then been overlooked for
Of Human Bondage
). Then Colbert rushed off to get the train being held in her honor. At last, Cohn stepped up to receive the award for Best Picture. He admitted, “I was just an innocent bystander.”
For the first time, Columbia had won Best Picture, and for the first time in Oscar history a comedy had won and swept the top five awards. For Capra and the studio it was the beginning. Ahead lay
Mr. Deeds Goes to Town
(1936) and
Mr. Smith Goes to Washington
(1939), archetypal Capra pictures in their feeling for an America in which government is being subverted by cynical and corrupt leaders, so along comes the spirit of rural integrity, Deeds and Smith, Gary Cooper and James Stewart, who risk disaster and humiliation in their battle against compromise.
These are crowd-pleasing but deeply ambivalent works, in which the comic touch can turn somber and even hystericalâStewart filibustering in the Senate to defend his honor is excruciating and filled with Capra's own paranoid instincts. On the one hand these pictures say they love the people, their natural decency, and the way it stands for American values. On the other, they fear the ease with which that crowd can be carried away by hatred and the lust for melodrama. Such pictures are still taught in American high school, and they have not faded as powerful shows. But they deserve warnings or caution, for they show how confused Hollywood and its best talents were over their place in an anxious society, coming out of Depression and anticipating war. As portraits of politics, the Capra films are so afraid of compromise that they seem poised for an urge toward extremism. And usually in a right-wing direction. So it was easier always for filmmakers to say they were mere entertainers and let the larger issues go fish. They still do that.
That is far from the whole Capra story. Between
Deeds
and
Smith
, he won for Best Picture and Best Director again with
You Can't Take It with You
, another comedy, from the play by George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart, and a film that has not survived as well as
Smith
and
Deeds
. In the late 1930s, Capra was nominated five times as Best Director. Then, after
Meet John Doe
(1941, another ambiguous picture about power and politics, with Gary Cooper anguished as the bum burdened by being a folk hero), Capra went into the military and made very effective propaganda films. He came back in 1946, with Jimmy Stewart, and they made
It's a Wonderful Life
(1946) together.
