The New Biographical Dictionary of Film: Completely Updated and Expanded (138 page)

Non-Italian audiences were hardly prepared for the beauty of
Dillinger e Morto
. Amid the abstraction of Antonioni’s films and Fellini’s gloating advertising of his own fantasies, here, without much announcement, was a superb account of the universal alienation of materialism and dream.
Dillinger
is a domestic Odyssey that so thoroughly explores the spiritual distances between people and the dazzling objects of their lives that it can merely refer to the actual journey that its central character will make to Tahiti when he has shot his wife. Quite simply, the film deals with an evening at home in the house of a designer of industrial masks, played by Michel Piccoli, and with his nearly lyrical resort to disruption to overcome the oppressive weight of household objects and the dead emotions caught between their cold, plastic surfaces.
Dillinger
is a major film made with tranquil clarity so that its fierce sense of humanity seems almost apologetic. Its content is totally cinematic: in color, composition, form, spatial relationship, and in small movements within so many fixed tableaux.

And yet, we know too little about Ferreri before
Dillinger
. He was a journalist who, in 1951, helped to found a regular celluloid magazine consisting of fictional episodes, newsreels, documentaries, and cinema verité exercises. “Documenti Mensile” was something like the sort of cinematic venture Dziga Vertov had intended in the 1920s. Although it failed, it still seems an interesting venture, albeit an attempt to imitate the variety offered by TV and to give it a structural awareness denied by the small box. It was during this period that Ferreri collaborated with Cesare Zavattini on the episode-film,
L’Amore in Citta
(53).

Then, with something of the blithe arbitrariness of
Dillinger
, he went to Spain to sell anamorphic lenses. That led him into his first three films, of which only
El Cochecito
is well known: a black comedy about a healthy, wealthy man determined against all social opposition to have a wheelchair of his own. At the time, it seemed like a deliberate miming of Buñuel’s black comedy, but Dillinger suggests that Ferreri is a companion surrealist and anarchist, worthy of attention and opportunity.
La Grande Bouffe
is an assault on the grossness and hypocrisy of human appetites, a shocking, tumultuous, but oddly self-contained film; whereas
Dillinger
’s initial blandness allows meanings to stream out of it.

Later Ferreri grew increasingly eccentric, but
Tales of Ordinary Madness
was an adaptation of stories by Charles Bukowski that starred Ben Gazzara and Ornella Muti, while
The Story of Piera
had Hanna Schygulla and Isabelle Huppert as mother and daughter.

Louis Feuillade
(1873–1925), b. Lunel, France
Incomplete list: 1906:
C’est Papa Qui Prend le Plunge; Le Billet de Banque
. 1907:
Un Facteur Trop Ferré; Vive le Sabotage; La Course des Belles-Mères; L’Homme Aimante
. 1908:
Le Roman de Soeur Louise; Un Tic
. 1909:
Les Heures
. 1910–13:
Bébé
(series in sixty-three parts). 1911:
Aux Lions des Chrétiens
. 1911–13:
La Vie Telle Qu’Elle Est
(series in fifteen parts). 1912:
Le Proscrit
. 1912–16:
Bout-de-Zan
(series in forty-five parts). 1913:
L’Intruse; Erreur Tragique; Une Drame au Pays Basque; Fantômas
(serial in five episodes);
Juve Contre Fantômas
(serial in four episodes);
La Mort Qui Tuer
(serial in six episodes). 1914:
Fantômas Contre Fantômas
(serial in four parts);
Le Faux Magistrat
. 1915–16:
Les Vampires
(serial in ten episodes). 1916:
Judex
(serial in twelve episodes). 1917:
La Nouvelle Mission de Judex
(serial in twelve episodes). 1918:
Vendémiaire
(in four parts);
Tih Minh
(serial in twelve episodes). 1919:
Le Nocturne; L’Homme sans Visage; Énigme; Barabas
(serial in twelve episodes);
Les Deux Gamines
(serial in twelve episodes). 1921:
L’Orpheline
(serial in twelve episodes);
Parisette
(serial in twelve episodes);
Saturnin ou le Bon Allumeur
. 1922:
Le Fils du Filibustier
(serial in twelve episodes). 1923:
Vindicta
(in five parts);
Le Gamin de Paris
. 1924:
La Fille Bien Gardée; Lucette; Le Stigmate
(serial in six episodes).

The fact that
Fantômas
antedates
Birth of a Nation
by two years is immaterial, so great is the gap between them in cinematic and theatrical reality.
Fantômas
is the first great movie experience, Feuillade the first director for whom no historical allowances need to be made. See him today and you still wonder what will happen next. With Griffith, we are forever urging him to come to a point we have foreseen.

Whereas Griffith’s world harks back to a Victorian, bourgeois morality and was tinged by nostalgia for the gentility of Gish-like ladies, Feuillade predicts a twentieth-century world yet to come. Even in the years of the First World War, he looked past the horrific clash of machine guns and cavalry, of mud and dress uniform, to an atmosphere of urban anxiety. The city scenes in his serials have all the ghostly anonymity of the street sets in Lang’s work, of the grey depths of
Paris Nous Appartient
and
Bande à Part
, or of the fantastic melodrama of Dealey Plaza in Dallas, 1963.

Feuillade’s genius is simply measured: he saw that it was possible to achieve intense photographic naturalism and yet convey an imaginative experience of the world. Thus his films still involve audiences. They respond to the startling contrast of the mundane and the unexpected; and they are intrigued by the relentless criminal organizations in
Fantômas
and
Vampires
. All the roots of the thriller and suspense genres are in Feuillade’s sense that evil, anarchy, and destructiveness speak to the frustrations banked up in modern society. Even the originality of Lang and Hitchcock fall into place when one has seen Feuillade: Mabuse is the disciple of Fantômas; while Hitchcock’s persistent faith in the nun who wears high heels, in the crop-spraying plane that will swoop down to kill, and in a world mined for the complacent is inherited from Feuillade. As Alain Resnais has said, “… Feuillade’s cinema is very close to dreams—therefore it’s perhaps the most realistic.” Not only has Feuillade’s pregnant view of grey streets become an accepted normality; his expectation of conspiracy, violence, and disaster spring at us every day.

Feuillade managed this alertness despite all the impediments of the age: he was the son of a civil servant; educated at a Catholic seminary; four years in the cavalry. He worked as a journalist and ran a magazine before he began to submit scripts to Gaumont. His energy was prodigious and when Alice Guy left Gaumont for New York he took her place as artistic director. He plunged into his serials and in a directing life of less than twenty years produced more than seven hundred films, despite service in the French army in 1915 and a wound sufficient for his discharge.

Fantômas and the Vampires were criminal gangs intent on gaining material and psychological power over a decadent bourgeoisie. Their names show how far they are destructive angels, dreaded and craved by their victims. And Feuillade’s inventiveness—of plot, action, and visual revelation—has exactly the same inspiration as the gang’s plans: a cheerful contempt for society that gains as much from Anarchism as it looks forward to Dada and Surrealism. Mabuse expresses the same compulsion in a narrower German setting in which anarchy fades into fascism. For that reason alone, Mabuse is ugly and frightening whereas Feuillade’s criminals—especially Musidora’s Irma Vep in
Vampires
—are glowing black humorists with all the ambiguous charm of Dracula. That is the importance of Feuillade as a cultural bridge: he transferred perhaps the most psychologically potent of Victorian fantasies to the new medium. It is worth emphasizing that, at the time,
Vampires
alarmed the authorities. The serial was briefly banned and
Judex
was Feuillade’s attempt to reassure the trembling bourgeois.
Tih Minh
, however, returns to organized malice, with the remnants of the Vampires in Nice planning world destruction, with England as first target.

The films themselves are still hard to see; only good anarchists have preserved Feuillade. The serials run for between four and six hours, and they are dreamlike if only because of the endlessly regenerating plots. The action is hallucinatory, but the images are astonishingly concrete. By comparison with Feuillade’s relaxed, subtle camera, Griffith’s is pompous and prettifying. Tom Milne has acclaimed the moment in
Fantômas
when a character in a box at the theatre is shown conceiving an idea—to use the actor masquerading on stage as Fantômas to replace the real one in jail—in the same shot as we see the stage behind her. It is this immediate appetite for the real world and the stirring up of fantastic events that make Feuillade the most serious of the pioneers. He foresaw that people who went into the dark to participate in stories, no matter how sophisticated their world, were still primitive creatures.

Jacques Feyder
(Jacques Frédérix) (1885–1948), b. Ixelles, Belgium
All films are shorts up to 1919. 1915:
M. Pinson, Policier
(codirected with Gaston Ravel). 1916:
Têtes de Femmes, Femmes de Tête; L’Homme de Compagnie; Tiens, Vous Êtes à Poitiers?; L’Instinct Est Maître; Le Pied Qui Étreint; Le Bluff; Un Conseil d’Ami; Le Frère de Lait; Le Billard Cassé; Abrégons les Formalités; Le Trouvaille de Bouchu
. 1917:
Le Pardessus de Demi-Saison; Les Vieilles Dames de l’Hospice; Le Ravin sans Fond
(codirected with Raymond Bernard). 1919:
Le Faute d’Orthographie
. 1921:
L’Atlantide
. 1923:
Crainquebille; Visages d’Enfants
(codirected with Françoise Rosay). 1925:
L’Image; Gribiche
. 1926:
Carmen
(codirected with Rosay). 1927:
Au Pays du Roi Lépreux
. 1928:
Thérèse Raquin
. 1929:
The Kiss; Les Nouveaux Messieurs
. 1930: German version of
Anna Christie;
French version of
The Unholy Night; Si l’Empereur Savait Ça
. 1931:
Son of India; Daybreak
. 1934:
Le Grand Jeu
. 1935:
Pension Mimosas; La Kermesse Héroïque
. 1937:
Knight Without Armor; Fahrendes Volk
. 1939:
La Loi du Nord
. 1942:
Une Femme Disparaît
.

There was a time when Feyder was claimed as a great realist director, when
Kermesse Héroïque
was thought of as an important French film. It looks now like an intolerably pretty Dutch interior, proof that as fine a photographer as Harry Stradling can be reduced to inertia if asked simply to produce exquisite shots. Feyder is more interesting as a sympathetic director of women in fanciful material—his wife Françoise Rosay in several films, Garbo in
The Kiss
and the German
Anna Christie
, Dietrich in the dotty
Knight Without Armor
—Tom Milne has noted Feyder’s thematic pursuit of the woman who means different things to different men. And if overshadowed by such as
Vertigo, Lola Montès
, and
Elena et les Hommes
, Feyder may be unfairly neglected today just as once he was injudiciously acclaimed.

An actor originally, he worked for Louis Feuillade. Wounded in the First World War, he roamed around France, Switzerland, and Austria; wrote
Poil de Carotte
(25, Julien Duvivier); and in 1929 went to Hollywood. He did not last long there, and after some work on foreign language versions and two Ramon Novarro films—
Son of India
and
Daybreak
—he worked in France, England, and Germany before the outbreak of war. He went to Switzerland and made
Une Femme Disparaît
, and in 1946 he collaborated on
Macadam
(Marcel Blistène).

Sally Field
, b. Pasadena, California, 1946
Such a stubborn, anxious face, with three expressions: pert, sulky, and the rapture that knows we love her. Yet how swiftly glory passes on for an actress. The two-time Oscar winner of the early eighties is now hard-pressed to find worthwhile roles, and she must wonder whether anyone remembers.

She is the daughter of actress Margaret Field, and the stepdaughter of actor Jock Mahoney. By the time she was twenty-two, she was a veteran of TV series:
Gidget
and
The Flying Nun
, successes that she battled hard to live down. But on the big screen, she has often been a redneck girl, aligned with the South and reliant on such things as her friendship with Burt Reynolds and the kindness of Martin Ritt:
The Way West
(67, Andrew V. McLaglen);
Stay Hungry
(76, Bob Rafelson); an Emmy on TV as
Sybil
(76, Daniel Petrie), a case of multiple personalities;
Smokey and the Bandit
and
II
(77, 80, Hal Needham);
Heroes
(77, Jeremy Paul Kagan);
Hooper
(78, Needham);
The End
(78, Reynolds);
Beyond the Poseidon Adventure
(79, Irwin Allen); an Oscar for
Norma Rae
(79, Ritt);
Absence of Malice
(81, Sydney Pollack);
Back Roads
(81, Ritt);
Kiss Me Goodbye
(82, Robert Mulligan); another Oscar in
Places in the Heart
(84, Robert Benton);
Murphy’s Romance
(85, Ritt);
Surrender
(87, Jerry Belson);
Punchline
(88, David Seltzer);
Steel Magnolias
(89, Herbert Ross);
Not Without My Daughter
(91, Brian Gilbert);
Soapdish
(91, Michael Hoffman);
Mrs. Doubtfire
(93, Chris Columbus); and mother to
Forrest Gump
(94, Robert Zemeckis).