The New Biographical Dictionary of Film: Completely Updated and Expanded (107 page)

He was in
Sin City
(05, Frank Miller and Robert Rodríguez) and
Things We Lost in the Fire
(07, Susanne Bier). He then gave himself to the two-part
Che
(08, Soderbergh)—he won the acting prize at Cannes and a Goya, but the movie is hard to endure.

Guillermo del Toro
, b. Guadalajara, Mexico, 1964
1993:
Cronos
. 1997:
Mimic
. 2001:
The Devil’s Backbone
. 2002:
Blade II
. 2004:
Hellboy
. 2006:
Pan’s Labyrinth
. 2008:
Hellboy II: The Golden Army
.

It is a story worthy of del Toro himself—of how a prodigy escapes from Mexico, a huge man with an enchanting childhood sweetheart, a man who flees the interference of the Church and organized crime, a genius-craftsman of special effects, a spirit that creates bizarre creatures with his bare hands and then sets them down in great metaphorical encounters. He is driven from his own Mexico and he lives in Los Angeles where he becomes a central figure of the new horror industry, to such an extent that it was decreed by Lord Peter Jackson that del Toro would make
The Hobbit
—in faraway New Zealand. And only when he had made
The Hobbit
would he be permitted to do the films of which he dreams most intensely, like
At the Mountains of Madness
by H. P. Love-craft. Then
The Hobbit
collapsed.

From childhood play to proper apprenticeship in the Mexican film industry, he carried his love of special effects and creatures—and to this day, though bent by the winds of digital, del Toro would rather make his wonders than program them. But what really distinguishes his work, and controls his teeming imagination, is the strength of the literary structure of his material—the way
Mimic
grows out of the attempt to create a parasite that could destroy pests; the arc by which Hellboy (a demon made in the Second World War) has become a weapon for future wars; and the ingenuity with which
Pan’s Labyrinth
is placed as one of the last struggles in the Spanish Civil War. Del Toro is a writer as much as a creator of warped visions, and that is how he has had such a profound influence on the way Latin American cinema has come to enrich the dying strain of fantasy in American pictures, At 2010, Jackson, James Cameron, and Guillermo del Toro make a striking trio of visionary filmmakers who might be able to reforge the child’s sense of cinema as a metaphor for the universe. And del Toro, just because of his power as a writer, may be the most significant of the three. Of course, their movies are horrendously expensive—for the moment. As if the film world ever regarded extravagance as anything other than the Kong it was destined to bring back to the city and put on show.

Cecil Blount De Mille
(1881–1959), b. Ashfield, Massachusetts
1913:
The Squaw Man
(codirected with Oscar Apfel). 1914:
The Call of the North; The Virginian;
What’s His Name?; The Man from Home; Rose of the Rancho
. 1915:
The Girl of the Golden West; The Warrens of Virginia; The Unafraid; The Captive; The Wild Goose Chase; The Arab; Chimmie Fadden; Kindling; Carmen; Chimmie Fadden Out West; The Cheat; The Golden Chance
. 1916:
Temptation; The Trail of the Lonesome Pine; The Heart of Nora Flynn; Maria Rosa; The Dream Girl
. 1917: J
oan the Woman; Romance of the Redwoods; The Little American; The Woman God Forgot; The Devil Stone
. 1918:
The Whispering Chorus; Old Wives for New; We Can’t Have Everything; Till I Come Back to You; The Squaw Man
. 1919:
Don’t Change Your Husband; For Better, For Worse; Male and Female
. 1920:
Why Change Your Wife?; Something to Think About
. 1921:
Forbidden Fruit; The Affairs of Anatol; Fool’s Paradise
. 1922:
Saturday Night; Manslaughter
. 1923:
Adam’s Rib; The Ten Commandments
. 1924:
Triumph; Feet of Clay
. 1925:
The Golden Bed; The Road to Yesterday
. 1926:
The Volga Boatman
. 1927:
The King of Kings
. 1929:
The Godless Girl; Dynamite
. 1930:
Madame Satan
. 1931:
The Squaw Man
. 1932:
The Sign of the Cross
. 1933:
This Day and Age
. 1934:
Four Frightened People; Cleopatra
. 1935:
The Crusades
. 1937:
The Plainsman
. 1938:
The Buccaneer
. 1939:
Union Pacific
. 1940:
North West Mounted Police
. 1942:
Reap the Wild Wind
. 1944:
The Story of Dr. Wassell
. 1947:
Unconquered
. 1949:
Samson and Delilah
. 1952:
The Greatest Show on Earth
. 1956:
The Ten Commandments
.

De Mille was the son of a man torn between being a minister and a David Belasco-like playwright—which is a proof of genetics as emphatic as the primitive confidence in American righteousness in De Mille’s own films. Many of the best Hollywood anecdotes feature De Mille’s extravagance; directors like Hawks and von Sternberg are on record as finding his tasteless exuberance as bewildering as his enormous popular success. There is a photograph in
Fun in a Chinese Laundry
of von Sternberg and Lubitsch chuckling together as they watch De Mille directing
Cleopatra
. And it is ironic that De Mille should have flourished with his unique independent unit within Paramount, the studio pledged to sophistication. But De Mille predated both Lubitsch and Sternberg and he still thrived at Paramount after Lubitsch was dead and Sternberg retired.

He attended Pennsylvania Military College and the American Academy of Dramatic Arts before he began acting and writing plays. In 1913, he, Jesse Lasky, and Samuel Goldfish (Goldwyn) formed the Lasky Feature Play Company, for which he made
The Squaw Man
in the frontier village of Hollywood. When, in 1916, Lasky merged with Adolph Zukor’s Famous Plays, that allowed Paramount to gain an early foothold in Hollywood. De Mille stayed at Paramount until after
The Golden Bed
(25), when he formed Producers Distributing Corporation. It was short-lived:
Dynamite, Madame Satan
, and
The Squaw Man
(for the third time) were made at MGM, whereupon he returned to Paramount and stayed there for the rest of his life—briefly interrupted by the visit Norma Desmond/Gloria Swanson makes in
Sunset Boulevard
(50, Billy Wilder).

A case can be made that, from about 1918 to 1950, De Mille did more than anyone—including Griffith—to make the American public appreciate directors (especially through the Lux Radio Theater movie adaptations, begun in 1936). He was personally flamboyant; he made hit films that introduced what some regarded as “new ideas”—as Benjamin Hampton put it, “De Mille decided that the majority of theatre patrons were fundamentally curious about only money and sex.” But we need to be finessed on that, and De Mille did the trick. That he became a figure of fun, a synonym for blind arrogance (“Ready when you are, C.B.!”) disturbed him not a bit. Forget auteurism—he knew the show needed a ringmaster (and he did turn to the circus in
The Greatest Show on Earth
, which won him best picture and the Thalberg award). Gloria Swanson was his star turn and his discovery, and she persuaded him to give up theatre greats for new faces.

De Mille’s movies are barnstormers, rooted in Victorian theatre, shamelessly stereotyped and sentimental, but eagerly courting twentieth-century permissiveness, if only solemnly to condemn it. The movies are simple, raw, pious, and jingoistic; but though De Mille was commercially cynical, his conviction in the human relevance of his rubbish is undisturbed, and the energy of his imagination seldom flags. He is silliest in his biblical and Roman films—peeping lewdly at Claudette Colbert’s Poppaea in a bath of milk, seemingly oblivious of Laughton’s reckless overacting in
Sign of the Cross
, hampered by the huge, rigid sets and unconscious of his dreadful dialogue. But in the 1930s, De Mille made a series of “American” films, not as good as King Vidor’s, but worth comparing with them. They are twopence-colored historical Westerns, celebrating the pioneering spirit, racial purity, tomboy heroines, and the American flag.
The Plainsman, Union Pacific, North West Mounted Police
, and
Unconquered
stand up amazingly well.

Gary Cooper was the De Mille hero—naïve as Hawkeye—Barbara Stanwyck, Jean Arthur, and Paulette Goddard were his hoydens. In fact, the four films all reflect one another: they share the military, an independent hero, his gutsy girl, and rogues selling guns and hooch to the savages. They share, too, the second-unit direction of Arthur Rossen who provided most of their action set pieces. But they still have a boyish gusto and an enthusiastic relish at forests being carved into pulp by noble enterprise. They are not historically authentic, but they are dead in line with American idealism. In that sense, De Mille had a purity that survived every compromise.

His final films lose nothing in their own grand claims.
The Ten Commandments
is burdened by sound, and some very amateurish effects, but in 1956 Heston as Moses still seemed to carry the weight of law. Heston believed what he was doing, and the film was a solemn hit in the moment before millions got their egalitarian hands on “sin.” Finally, a word for
Samson and Delilah
—one of the great trash epics, superbly cast, and made without one drop of irony or shame, and with momentous sexual daydreams in every scene.

Jonathan Demme
, b. Baldwin, New York, 1944
1974:
Caged Heat
. 1975:
Crazy Mama
. 1976:
Fighting Mad
. 1977:
Handle With Care/Citizens Band
. 1978:
Murder in Aspic
for
Columbo
(TV). 1979:
The Last Embrace
. 1980:
Melvin and Howard
. 1982:
Who Am I This Time?
(TV). 1984:
Swing Shift; Stop Making Sense
(d). 1986:
Something Wild
. 1987:
Swimming to Cambodia
(d). 1988:
Haiti Dreams of Democracy
(d);
Married to the Mob
. 1991:
The Silence of the Lambs
. 1992:
Cousin Bobby
(d). 1993:
Philadelphia
. 1994:
The Complex Sessions
(s). 1997: “Subway Car from Hell,” episode in
Subway Stories
(TV). 1998:
Storefront Hitchcock
(d);
Beloved
. 2002:
The Truth About Charlie
. 2003:
The Agronomist
(d). 2004:
The Manchurian Candidate
. 2006:
Neil Young: Heart of Gold
(d). 2007:
Jimmy Carter: Man from Plains
(d);
Right to Return: New Home Movies from the Lower 9th Ward
(d). 2008:
Rachel Getting Married
.

Around 1990, Demme seemed the most versatile director in America. He was interested in more odd things and people; he noticed and heard more. He loved the provinces, music of all kinds, character actors, the fusion of comedy and high drama. He had a way of guarding his rather capricious integrity in every testing commercial setup. He had not yet stopped surprising us. And he had already given us many lengthy passages of sheer
movie
that would grace the careers of Minnelli, Cukor, or the other Demy, Jacques. He was a natural in an age when so many people made moviemaking feel onerous.

He moved as a kid from Long Island to Miami, where his father worked (let us hope that very soon Demme has a shot at doing Miami onscreen—its fusion of races, its music, its smeary tropical air—beyond just producing George Armitage’s
Miami Blues
in 1990). He was a bit of a film critic, a salesman, and a maker of commercials before he found himself with Roger Corman. He did much more than survive that training:
Crazy Mama
is a rich movie, full of music, back country, and wild women—all later trademarks.

Handle With Care
, written by Paul Brickman, was an adventurous comedy in which a gang of loonies and mavericks were held in story by CB radio.
The Last Embrace
was an expert thriller.
Melvin and Howard
, written by Bo Goldman, made a lovely comedy of a piece of American apocrypha. It took a very special, very romantic comedian to envisage the film and to harness the desert, the infirmity of Howard Hughes, and the mundanity of Melvin Dummar without having the film veer off the road.
Who Am I This Time?
was a Kurt Vonnegut story done for
American Playhouse
with Christopher Walken and Susan Sarandon.
Swing Shift
was a major study of war and the home front until producer Goldie Hawn regulated it (Demme’s cut can sometimes be seen, and it is to be hoped that one day it may emerge as the best version of that film).
Stop Making Sense
is one of the best concert movies, as light, mercurial, and wicked as David Byrne’s stage presence.

It may be said that Demme has not yet made a great film. Maybe, but
Something Wild
is close to it, a miraculously zigzagging movie where screwball goes into sexpot, romance, and menace (several times) before the wildness settles. This may be Demme’s surest tribute to wayward vitality, and it works so well because he enjoys all the characters with the same uncritical wariness. By 2000, I’ll guess,
Something Wild
will be a great film—a fate that the very enjoyable
Married to the Mob
does not risk.

And so
… The Silence of the Lambs?
This has been Demme’s greatest hit, and some have seen in it the director’s concession to box office. But, remember, Demme was raised in exploitation films; and he seems to have suffered no damage. Hannibal Lecter is an unruly demon. Hopkins does make a hero of him. The sly hints of love story between Lecter and Clarice are disconcerting, and the close, with Lecter going off to dinner with all our good wishes is nothing to be proud of. Moreover, Demme is now so quick and assured he can’t hide his amusement at the plot mechanics. It
is
a problem picture, funnier and more lovelorn than we had any reason to expect. And surely Jodie Foster owes a great deal to Demme.