The Big Screen (52 page)

In the late 1950s, without discussion, America happened to produce some surprising pictures that asked, “How seriously do you take the movies?” Douglas Sirk was yet another German director who had come to America. He was born in Hamburg in 1897 (son to a Danish father) as Hans Detlef Sierck. He had worked extensively in German theater and done some accomplished and stylish melodramatic pictures—
Zu Neuen Ufern
(1937) and
La Habanera
(1937)—both with the beautiful Swedish actress Zarah Leander. He came to America in 1940 and made dramas, thrillers, and women's pictures, with mounting success.
Magnificent Obsession
(1954) and
All That Heaven Allows
(1955), both starring Jane Wyman and Rock Hudson, had been great hits for Universal International, and they are films in which the personal crises are narrative cover for an unusual displeasure with American emotional honesty betrayed by social convention.

Written on the Wind
(1956) goes just a little further. It is the story of money, love, sex, family, and oil in Texas, and it opened only weeks after
Giant
, a bigger production, taken from the Edna Ferber novel, but grown in the same soil.
Giant
takes itself very seriously; there is only respect in that title. But
Written on the Wind
has a breath of satire or self-mockery to it.

Its characters tremble on the edge of exposé: Kyle Hadley (Robert Stack) is heir to an oil fortune, but he's a lost soul—alcoholic and without sexual confidence. He marries Lucy (Lauren Bacall), a decent woman from New York. She will come to love Mitch Wayne (Rock Hudson), Kyle's amazingly stalwart and loyal best friend, but Mitch is lusted after by Kyle's sister, Marylee (Dorothy Malone), a restless nymphomaniac in the habit of cuddling up to toy oil derricks. The film had a theme song, sung by the Four Aces, with this opening line: “A faithless lover's kiss is written on the wind!” It was shot in florid, overdone color by Russell Metty. It has sets from a deluxe death hotel. The camera moves like a drunk. Malone won the Best Supporting Actress Oscar, and in 1956 audiences could take it straight if they wished, or they could see the expensive wallpaper beginning to curl off the walls. Here is part of a commentary on
Written on the Wind
from 1971, far beyond the estimates of 1956, yet piercingly apt and a model of how the ways of thinking about movies were shifting:

It's unclear whether Douglas Sirk intended all that in 1956. But in 1971, Rainer Werner Fassbinder—the most radical of the young German directors of that age, and the delighted demolition artist of melodrama—saw that film, felt the satirical edge and the contempt for that world of money, the very source and image of the advertising that was dominating the television screen in America.

Or take Otto Preminger's
Anatomy of a Murder
(1959). The courtroom drama was a staple of American entertainment.
Perry Mason
was a television show that had begun in 1957 in which, week after week, Mason would defeat the addled efforts of the Los Angeles district attorney, Hamilton Burger. Innocent viewers believed the show was “educational” in that it gave guidance on how trials worked, and of how reliably justice was done!

Otto Preminger was a far warier man: in
Laura
(1944), he had dismantled a murder mystery to reveal the hero and heroine (Dana Andrews and Gene Tierney) as very ordinary and awkward people caught in a dream. Preminger took little at face value.
Anatomy of a Murder
(1959) was from a novel, but on-screen it was a breakthrough. To start with, the defense lawyer (played by Jimmy Stewart) was a sly trickster, ready for any maneuver; the accused man (Ben Gazzara) was plainly possessed by hostile impulses; and the wife (Lee Remick), whose honor the accused was defending—he killed her rapist—was so flirtatious you had to wonder at what had happened.
Anatomy
proposed several fresh things about the law and movies based on trials. It said the law was a game in which the best player wins, because we can never be sure about truth.

Preminger kept the film at a level of smart entertainment. It has a superb score by Duke Ellington—it even has Ellington playing piano in a tavern in an upstate Michigan nowhere town. It has George C. Scott and Eve Arden. And to play the judge, in a characteristic marketing coup, Preminger enlisted Joseph N. Welch, the attorney known to America from the televised Army-McCarthy hearings. That's where Welch had asked McCarthy, “At long last, have you left no sense of decency?”
Anatomy of a Murder
deserved its big success, but it is clear about one message: keep your critical faculty sharpened, because the scheme of
Perry Mason
is monotonous junk likely to make an idiot out of you.

Or look at Howard Hawks's
Rio Bravo
(1959). This was a John Wayne film, and Wayne's career seemed sacrosanct. You had to believe you were in the West, where everyone played by the rules of the genre. Of course, not so far ahead—in films such as Sam Peckinpah's
The Wild Bunch
(1969)—we would learn that the West was nasty, dirty, and a place where no one played by any rules. But
Rio Bravo
is less an authentic Western than the amiable eavesdropping on a group of friends in 1959—not just Hawks and Wayne, but Dean Martin (the least nineteenth-century persona America ever put in cowboy clothes), Ricky Nelson, Walter Brennan, and the intensely immediate Angie Dickinson—there was no smarter woman on the American screen then—on a set where they are pretending to make a “Western.”

The gap doesn't show, though Hawks had been kidding his own genres for years. But in
Red River
you do believe you are on a cattle drive. In
Rio Bravo
you know you are on a Hollywood lot.

The greatest coup of this shifting moment comes last. In that same 1959 the irrepressible Billy Wilder said suppose you pull the leg of such things as the St. Valentine's Day Massacre, the sturdy outlines of the gangster picture, male star authority, Cary Grant, Edward G. Robinson, George Raft, and the whole legend of Marilyn Monroe. And why not make it subversively gay, too? I am talking about
Some Like It Hot
, which really was made in the same year as
Ben-Hur
.

Some Like It Hot
was written by Wilder and his colleague I. A. L. Diamond, vaguely mindful of a minor German film of the 1930s but locked into America in 1959. Two hard-up musicians (Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon) witness a gangster firing squad. On the run, they take jobs as bull fiddle and tenor sax in an all-girl band where Marilyn is the hapless singer, Sugar Kane. The action shifts from Chicago to Florida, states of the movie mind. Curtis goes after Marilyn, gets her on board a yacht, where he does a Cary Grant–sounding millionaire who is impotent. Sugar makes every attempt to give him a hard-on—yet again she is the oblivious dirty joke in her own picture. Meanwhile, Lemmon is pursued by an aging playboy, in the person of Joe E. Brown.

I'd like to think everyone knows
Some Like It Hot
in the way they know
Sunset Blvd.
—when Wilder hit a home run it was gone forever. You can see the film tonight and it has not dated. You may marvel that the absurd censor let so much get past him—he was losing confidence. You may need a little commentary to catch the allusion to the MCA talent agency, when Jules Stein and Lew Wasserman were just midwestern operators. You may need footnotes on how the son of Edward G. Robinson tosses a coin under George Raft's nose, with George snapping, “Where did you pick up a cheap trick like that?”—when it came from Raft's performance in
Scarface
(1932). But you'll get the point: Wilder's sharp mind has seen not just that sexuality is so slippery and appealing no one can claim perfection. This is a mainstream film that says, “You might be gay,” as well as, “For Christ's sake, what have the movies done to us?,” and it does so with the full velocity of barbed entertainment.

Some unexpected observers could feel the shift in the reliability of old truths and virtues. Saul Bellow, writing in
Horizon
, would say, “Plain goodness, blunt badness, the honor of strong silent men, simple love, and classical jealousy went out of fashion. Hollywood went on making action pictures, of course, but significant actions became harder to find as we entered this present age of disarray.”

Out of the screen comes sound, breathing, and music, and the first streaks of light on skin. Or is it dawn?

Not the least wonder in
Hiroshima Mon Amour
(1959) is that it begins at night, in bed. As a rule, our films build up to love. We do not realize it yet, despite the title of the film, but the bed holds a French woman and a Japanese man. We see the bodies, or parts of them, and they are crystalline nearly. Is that the perspiration of lovemaking or the ashes from some burning? The script calls the residue “cendres atomiques,” but when you first see encrusted arms you do not know that yet. The bodies might be buried, in the night or in their love, and the flesh might be decomposing. The title is a riddle to be answered.

You hear a piano refrain. It is by Giovanni Fusco, probing, questioning, feeling, wondering. You see the skin change. The cinders seem to run, like sweat or putrescence, like rain or moisture or film's dissolve. And the voice of the man says, in French, “Tu n'as rien vu à Hiroshima. Rien”—“You saw nothing at Hiroshima. Nothing.” But we are trying to see.

The nature of our engagement has been laid down: we are asked to look very closely, to identify something strange happening to skin, and yet we are told by a voice that shares the beat of the piano that we have seen nothing.

A woman's voice answers that she saw everything. She saw the hospital at Hiroshima. As if we are watching a documentary, the screen shows us a hospital—you know what a hospital looks like. But the man tells her, “Tu n'as pas vu d'hôpital à Hiroshima. Tu n'as en vu à Hiroshima.” He is denying her, yet the rhythm of claim and response is also like the touching in lovemaking: touch me, please—yes, touch me there. Even though he insists on her ignorance, there is tenderness in the telling. Even though the film is in French, you are alerted to a rare feeling for the rhythm in words and speech. You are looking, as if your life depended on it, in this nocturnal embracing, but the words are like kisses.

The opening of
Hiroshima Mon Amour
begins to teach us how to attend; it is the same with every real film, or every departure in film. The night talk is very erotic. It speaks of love in the act of breathing. So these people never need to say they are in love. We know. We have felt it, even though they are a French woman, Elle (Emmanuelle Riva), an actress come to Hiroshima to make a film about peace, while he, Lui (Eiji Okada), is a Japanese architect who has met her. But their bodies are so alive with metaphor—Are they damp with love's heat? Are they rebuilding or acting? Are they turning into something else in radiation? Or are they dead already, buried? So much fluidity, but we have not seen their faces yet. There is more talk in this night, about how it was ten thousand degrees at the Place de la Paix, the heat of the sun. In documentary-like sequences, we see the story of August 6, 1945—there is even a clip from a Japanese feature film about the horror—as well as hospital footage where patients live with warped faces and sheared-off limbs.

Alain Resnais (born in Vannes in 1922) had been a documentarian previously: he made two films about Van Gogh (one won an Oscar) and Guernica;
Les Statues Meurent Aussi
(about African art), made with Chris Marker;
Night and Fog
(about Auschwitz); and
Toute la Mémoire du Monde
(about the Bibliothèque Nationale). These are pictures about forgetfulness and the obligation of holding on to memory.
Hiroshima Mon Amour
is his first feature film, and he had asked the novelist Marguerite Duras to write the script.