The Big Screen (50 page)

Les Dames
is not typical Bresson: it uses significant actors; it has a lusher camera style than he would work toward; the dialogue is sharp and theatrical; the story is built on surprise; the melodrama is not denied. It is still a masterpiece, a “woman's picture,” if you will, cut through with classical severity, the emotionalism countered by the dispassionate distancing of the filming. If we recall that is also a time of intense, barely restrained melodramas such as
Mildred Pierce
,
Brief Encounter
, and
Duel in the Sun
, Bresson shows a startling disciplining of that essential cinematic genre and condition.

Bresson was launched on an immense and perilous discovery, antithetical to all commercial impulses: that the emotion may be more powerful if reined in. He called for “not beautiful images, but necessary images.” Our cinema is still grappling with this—and
Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne
was a drastic failure in 1945, a year of natural exuberance (and recrimination) in France when Marcel Carné's
Les Enfants du Paradis
, a tribute to French theater and theatricality, was the picture of the year.

Bresson paused six years, and then in 1951 he released
Diary of a Country Priest
, from a novel by Georges Bernanos, about a priest who is dying in a grim rural parish, haunted by the problems of some of his parishioners. Now the actors were nonprofessionals, playing not quite as amateurs (he called them models) but without attempting to act out the inner situations. More than the Italian neorealists at work in those years, and more than that other contemporary approach, the strenuous naturalism of the Method, Bresson had discovered a principal that had always existed in the thing we call underplaying (a method found in players from Gary Cooper to the Japanese actors in Ozu and Mizoguchi). It says that if the situation is strong enough, and the face eloquent, there is no need for acting: simple presence will guide the viewer into the feeling and the idea. (And are there really any faces that are not eloquent? Bresson avoided professionals, and did not like to cast anyone more than once.)

Beyond that,
Diary of a Country Priest
shows Bresson's growing interest in simplicity or minimalism. He rarely moves the camera or bothers with expressive angles. He is more and more interested in sound, often off-screen sound—the scathing rake in the garden outside a window makes an anguished confessional all the more potent. Bresson would say, in his aphoristic and absorbing book
Notes on the Cinematographer
, “When a sound can replace an image, cut the image or neutralize it. The ear goes toward the interior, the eye to the exterior.”

Cocteau said the
Diary
was less a film than the skeleton of a film. But if you care to follow its strict ways, the feeling was overwhelming and enough to suggest that too much regular movie feeling was overdone, trashy, or bogus.
Diary
was about the spirit as seen in what Paul Schrader would call “a man alone in a room.” (
Taxi Driver
has that motif “Are you talking to me?,” and Robert De Niro improvised that line from Schrader's script.) Bresson was often regarded as a Catholic artist. But his true inwardness was in his dedication to cinematic essence and abstraction.

Then came another pause before, in 1956, Bresson offered
Un Condamné à Mort S'Est Echappé (A Man Escaped
). Fontaine is a French Resistance fighter captured by the Gestapo. Can he escape from his prison in Lyon? Should he trust the other prisoner put in his cell? Still working in black and white, with the cameraman Léonce-Henri Burel, Bresson was refining his styleless style: this is a film of claustrophobic shots with a world of unseen sounds (as befits its situation); it is a series of faces and hands, and the implacable present tense that prison only emphasizes—of course it is the moment of film and of life. François Leterrier (who played or represented Fontaine) said of the process, “[Bresson] did not want us to ever express ourselves. He made us become part of the composition of an image. We had to locate ourselves, as precisely as possible, in relation to the background, the lighting, and the camera.”

In 1956, Truffaut said
A Man Escaped
was “the most important film of the last ten years.” What that meant was a new realism in which, maybe for the first time, the visual, the cinematic, was not primary but nearly incidental (albeit necessary). Now, of course, the cinema is the embodiment of “let there be light,” but the light and the visual can amount to a tyranny. Bresson had understood that, and in the process he had liberated movies or brought them closer to the depth of literature and music. He had seen everything he wanted, and then pared it away, until just that skeleton remained. Truffaut said that
A Man Escaped
made us feel we had been in Fontaine's cell for two months, instead of watching a one-hundred-minute film.

It is less the visual we notice than the human gesture and the human existence. Pauline Kael said this: “In this country [the United States], escape is a theme for action movies; the Bresson hero's ascetic, single-minded dedication to escape is almost mystic, and the fortress is as impersonal and isolated a world as Kafka's…I know all this makes it sound terribly pretentious and yet, such is the treacherous power of an artist, that sometimes even the worst ideas are made to work.”

Four months after the Paris opening of
A Man Escaped
, Max Ophüls died in Hamburg in March 1957. As Max Oppenheimer, he was born in Saarbrücken in 1902. He is the epitome of the itinerant filmmaker, whose camera tracked and craned with the same soaring fatalism no matter where he was. Just as Murnau had been seeking a fusion of European and American approaches to the medium on
Sunrise
, so Ophüls was in quest of universal strains of romance, memory, time, and tragedy across the world. But he is treated here because his career ended and peaked in France.

He had been a stage director in Germany and already the father of the future documentary maker Marcel Ophüls when he made his first important film,
Liebelei
(1933), a love story taken from a play by Arthur Schnitzler about a young officer and a musician's daughter. He moved to France and then to Italy, where he made
La Signora di Tutti
(1934), that groundbreaking study on the life of an actress. Then it was France and Holland and France again before he went to Hollywood in 1941.

His time in America was always difficult. Howard Hughes fired him from a project called
Vendetta
, but then he did three remarkable pictures. The first, produced by John Houseman, was
Letter from an Unknown Woman
(1948), from Stefan Zweig, with Joan Fontaine as the woman in love with, seduced by, but then forgotten by a world-weary concert pianist, played by Louis Jourdan. Then, working closely with the actor James Mason, he made
Caught
and
The Reckless Moment
(both in 1949), the first about a young woman who gives up marriage to a Howard Hughes–like tycoon (chillingly played by Robert Ryan) to work for a doctor (Mason); the second a story in which Mason begins by blackmailing Joan Bennett, only to fall in love with her.

Ophüls was regarded as a failure in America. His name was misspelled and mispronounced, and he moved from one project to another like a refugee. It was said that he made melodramas, but what few identified at the time was his sympathy for stories about women misunderstood by men, abused, but trying to find their life. In
Letter from an Unknown Woman
, Joan Fontaine's portrait of a girl becoming adult, sadder but still misled by life, is desperately touching, yet the film was barely recognized.

So Ophüls went back to France and in his last years (he was never strong and would die of a rheumatic heart condition aggravated by stress) he made
La Ronde
(1950; his single hit),
Le Plaisir
(1952),
Madame de
…(or
The Earrings of Madame de
…; 1953), and
Lola Montès
(1955).
La Ronde
, from Schnitzler again, has Anton Walbrook as a master of ceremonies who observes the infection and the gift of romance passed from one person to another. It is witty and elegant, with an all-star cast, superb production design (by Jean d'Eaubonne), and Ophüls's winding and unwinding tracking shots. It picked up an Oscar nomination for Best Screenplay by his frequent collaborator Jacques Natanson, and it was still dismissed as typical French “sophistication.” French film in those days had a strange reputation in censorious countries (such as America and Britain) for being naughty and allowing some nudity.

Madame de
…—the earrings were thrown in the title in America, to make shopping seem more available?—is about a wife, her husband, and her lover: Danielle Darrieux, Charles Boyer, and Vittorio De Sica. She is the heroine but she is silly and she will damn herself out of vanity and foolishness. She is also the endearing victim in a tragedy she cannot avert and hardly realizes she has caused.
Le Plaisir
(1952) is a trio of stories taken from Maupassant.

Then there is
Lola Montès
(1955), the masterpiece among abused masterpieces. Lola is the legendary courtesan of the nineteenth century and she could be every great woman in show business. Close to the end of her life, sick and demoralized, she is selling her life story as a circus act. Here is the finest film yet that seeks to deconstruct the career of a female star. Her ringmaster (Peter Ustinov) is her manager and probably her latest lover. In the circus as the camera whirls around her, she flashes back to her youth, to affairs with Liszt and the king of Bavaria (Walbrook again). At the very end of the show the camera tracks away from her exhausted figure over the line of men waiting to pay to kiss her as attendants collect the money in pots made in the form of her head. This is a pioneering image of the alienation that befalls people who live on or through screens.

It is also a high point in the history of the moving camera and the belief that in melodrama we can find the roots of film fantasy, the very force that has celebrated and ruined people such as Lola Montès (or Marilyn Monroe). The actress Ophüls cast as Lola, Martine Carol, has been criticized over the years for being pretty but not too interesting. Though she was a notable star in France, the film might have been helped by an international figure. And Monroe in life was often an exhausted beauty, best filmed in dismay or doing nothing—which is what the part needs. Her half-desolate, half-alive face was right for Ophüls's view of Lola as a burnt-out beauty. Of course, given such a big, foreign opportunity, Monroe might have believed she had to “act” and have gone to pieces. She never trusted her presence.

Lola Montès
looks like the nineteenth century, to be sure, but Truffaut caught its real aim exactly:

Bresson and Ophüls could hardly be further apart. Yet in their different ways, both had reached a point of seeing that the old cinema not simply was in decline, but might be a reflection of a decline of civilization itself. At almost the same time, in 1954, Twentieth Century–Fox made a very poor film called
There's No Business Like Show Business.
(It starred Ethel Merman, Marilyn Monroe, Johnnie Ray, Dan Dailey, and Donald O'Connor—a mad family, if you like.) It was in Scope and minestrone color and it hurled out its musical routines, including that old, mindless assertion about there being no business like show business. More than
Sunset Blvd.
,
Lola Montès
sees that feverish claim as a subject for sorrow and pity. The old confidence behind “entertainment” was draining away.

David Selznick had been impressed enough by Ingrid Bergman to take Sweden seriously. In the years just after the war, he had box office monies accumulating in foreign countries not easily withdrawn because of currency restrictions. He also had several stars on his books who were not working enough. So he thought he would use that money to do a film in Sweden, and in his vague sense of culture, he thought why not do Ibsen's
A Doll's House
—wasn't that a story for the ages? Norway? Sweden? Were they different? He had in mind Dorothy McGuire and Robert Mitchum for Nora and her husband.