The New Biographical Dictionary of Film: Completely Updated and Expanded (148 page)

That leads on to Ford’s notorious belief—spanning the years from
Fort Apache
to
The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance
—that “No sir! This is the West, sir. When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.” There have been defenders of Ford—notably Joseph McBride and Michael Wilmington—who have tried to claim irony and historical sophistication in this. But they fail to recall that Ford’s art was always that of a mythmaker, a wishful thinker, a man without stamina for reality—a moviemaker? In an age of diminishing historical sense in America, but of regular crises that dramatize our need to ask what happened (with Watergate, Vietnam, Iran-Contra, etc.), I marvel that Ford’s heady obscurantism has such defenders. But to take Ford properly to task may be to begin to be dissatisfied with cinema.

Adherence to legend at the expense of facts will ruin America—the work is well under way. And lovers of the movies should consider how far film has helped the undermining. Ford is not the only culprit: Clint Eastwood’s overpraised return to the West,
Unforgiven
, begins as an attempt to see things fresh, but at last its rigor collapses and it becomes not the West but just another Western. Still, Ford is the pioneer of this vision, and that is what I railed against in 1975.

The Searchers
is still a riveting, tragic, and complex experience, a movie in which Ford gives up many of his false certainties, and a story filled with disturbing, half-buried thoughts of race and failure. In recent years, valuable books by Scott Eyman and Joseph McBride have shown how troubled and troubling a man he was, just as they have allowed the chance that we can’t like (or stomach) all of his films.

Carl Foreman
(1914–84), b. Chicago
There is no reason why the House Committee on Un-American Activities should be regarded as a more reliable test of talent than any other. To be sure, it righteously excluded or impeded some of the most interesting writers, directors, and actors in America during the McCarthy era. But it was not always so discriminating; it also blacklisted Carl Foreman. Thus, in retrospect, the “talking clock” Western,
High Noon
(52, Fred Zinnemann), that Foreman had written, was reassessed as a trenchant critique of American social spirit—this in the year that
The Lusty Men
and
Bend of the River
(true American pictures) were neglected. Foreman glowed like a martyr, went to England, worked under pseudonyms, and gradually revealed himself as a plodding middlebrow, possessed of dull ideas and rigidly conventional means of expressing them.
High Noon
remains the product of pretension, commonplace mentality, and an inability to relate the Western genre to credible or intriguing people.

Foreman was on the edges of the film industry until the war, but then worked on military documentaries. In the peace, he joined Stanley Kramer and George Glass in what some took for the breakthrough of “tough, journalistic, socially orientated works.” These were problem pictures for complacent audiences, films that voiced commitment but offered easy answers. Foreman wrote many of them:
So This Is New York
(48, Richard Fleischer);
The Clay Pigeon
(49, Fleischer);
Home of the Brave
(49, Mark Robson);
Champion
(49, Robson); more at home with the Bix Beiderbecke biopic,
Young Man With a Horn
(50, Michael Curtiz);
The Men
(50, Fred Zinnemann); and
Cyrano de Bergerac
(50, Michael Gordon). As late as 1968, a National Film Theatre program thought that such films had helped “establish the concept that good movies require good scripts.” Whereas, they are bad, underlined scripts, vastly inferior to such contemporaries as:
I Was a Male War Bride, The Fountainhead, Adam’s Rib, They Live by Night, Whirlpool, Winchester 73, In a Lonely Place, All About Eve, Sunset Boulevard
, or
Strangers on a Train
.

In England, Foreman worked in pseudonymous collaboration on
The Sleeping Tiger
(54, Joseph Losey) and without credit on
The Bridge on the River Kwai
(57, David Lean). But soon after that, he set up as a writer/producer and moved toward his real home—mundane, commercial cinema:
The Key
(58, Carol Reed), a pretentious love story against a war background;
The Guns of Navarone
(61, J. Lee Thompson);
The Victors
(63, which he also directed);
Born Free
(65, James Hill), a film that not even McCarthy could have disapproved of;
The Virgin Soldiers
(69, John Dexter), which he only produced;
MacKenna’s Gold
(69, Thompson), as writer and producer;
Living Free
(72, Jack Couffer); that inane piece of conservative hagiography,
Young Winston
(72, Richard Attenborough);
Force 10 from Navarone
(78, Guy Hamilton), a sad return to past glory; and
When Time Ran Out
(80, James Goldstone).

Milos Forman
, b. Káslov, Czechoslovakia, 1932
1963:
Konkurs/Talent Competition
(s);
Kdyby Ty Muziky Nebyly/If There Was No Music
(s). 1964:
Cerny Petr/Peter and Pavla
. 1965:
Lásky Jedné Plavovlásky/A Blonde in Love
. 1967:
Horí má Penenko/The Firemen’s Ball
. 1971:
Taking Off
. 1973: “The Decathlon,” episode from
Visions of Eight
(d). 1975:
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
. 1979:
Hair
. 1981:
Ragtime
. 1984:
Amadeus
. 1989:
Valmont
. 1996:
The People vs. Larry Flynt
. 1999:
Man on the Moon
. 2006:
Goya’s Ghosts
.

It indicates Forman’s preference for the everyday rather than the melodramatic that the modest
Taking Off
was derived from a newspaper story in which an apparently diligent teenager was one day found murdered. The idea that intrigued Forman was that daughter and parents could be leading intense private lives out of sight of the common family ground. Perhaps it is because a Czech coming to America has known more brutal disruptions of life that
Taking Off
is so charmingly unemphatic: the girl in Forman’s film wanders off only briefly and comes back, at an inopportune moment, to find her parents driven by perplexity to strip poker. Most American directors would have scathed the parents with rhetoric, adored the young, and spared nothing from the eventual tragedy.

Forman’s own parents were taken to die in concentration camps when he was a child—as were Polanski’s, a director unable to look on people as warmly as Forman. (But, years later, Forman learned that the man he called father was not his real father.) He went to the Prague Film Faculty of the Academy of Dramatic Arts and graduated from there in 1957. His first work was as scriptwriter on
Dedecek Automobil
(56, Alfred Radok), and he was with Radok for several years in magic lantern theatre.

His Czech films showed a new vitality and relaxation for that country, and a very interesting set of influences. The Italian neorealists, Karel Reisz, and Lindsay Anderson may have affected his liking for casual, ordinary stories and his affection for nonprofessional players. Equally, Forman was intrigued by the possibilities of candid camera, telephoto filming of amateurs in some formal situation that made them try to be professional. But Forman was not a grainy realist so much as a man able to fit spontaneity into a disguised and rather artful, old-fashioned narrative. He has confessed a liking for silent American comedy, and
A Blonde in Love
and
Firemen’s Ball
could be the sort of romantic/ironic short story beloved of Maupassant and D. W. Griffith. Certainly, they are more frank, more inventive, and charged by the generally withdrawn recording of party scenes where Forman shows a sharp skill at catching people in the moment of revelation. And although his stories endeavor to like all the characters, he does not go too deep into the characters or the environment.

Without in any way dispelling or questioning the genuineness of Forman’s sympathy for people,
Taking Off
showed the mannered comedian more clearly and raised serious questions about his style. That moment when Buck Henry almost swallows his wineglass on hearing that his daughter has fallen into the company, not of a layabout but of a pop music composer who made $290,000 last year, before taxes, is as predictable and accomplished a double take as anything in 1930s comedy. The central pose of baffled parents abandoning their own inhibitions is a mild version of Feiffer cartoons. Above all, the exhilarating editing of the audition—especially when Forman has a song sung by dozens of girls, phrase cut into phrase—is no more than playful. The skill of execution and the wit of the motion only emphasize his withdrawal from the central characters.

Cuckoo’s Nest
, by contrast, was full of risk, pain, and inventive courage. Whatever the project owed to Ken Kesey’s novel and the cohesive presence of Jack Nicholson, Forman deserves great credit for the sudden but controlled movements from hilarity to tragedy. The metaphor of the insane institution works in terms of challenging entertainment, largely because of Forman’s very balanced awareness that oddity, madness, and acting are overlapping conditions. The asylum may be the more sinister because of Kafka and 1968.

Forman made three films in the eighties, all literary adaptations and all period pictures. One may wish, or hope, that his very shrewd observation of the world around him will return to the America he lives in. But that is not to scorn the adaptations.
Ragtime
was an underrated film, true to Doctorow, complex and challenging, a movie about a time and its ideas—just as the title supposes.
Amadeus
repeated the
Cuckoo’s Nest
triumph, winning Oscars for best picture and best director. It is a rich, smart entertainment, lustrous yet eccentric in its period recreation, luminous and satanic in its Salieri, and so entirely assured that its final impersonality comes as a surprise. In
Valmont
, Forman was scooped. Stephen Frears’s
Dangerous Liaisons
(88) came out first, with a starrier cast, and took all the praise. Yet
Valmont
is the better film, the one that grasps tragedy as well as irony in the Laclos story.

Forman is nearly eighty, committed to America and New York (he chaired the film program at Columbia for a while), an engaging storyteller—surely he should have acted: imagine him as the man in
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
. Yet he works too sparingly—and with too much smart, worldly distance, finally—to be a major artist. But he is searching for material, and he is good enough to find it yet.
The People vs. Larry Flynt
was an intriguing view of American rights as seen from outside, and
Man on the Moon
was a study of comedian Andy Kaufman. Neither film worked well (especially with audiences), but they reaffirmed how far Forman is devoted to Americana.
Goya’s Ghost
was a sad failure.

Bill Forsyth
(William David Forsyth), b. Glasgow, Scotland, 1946
1969:
Language
(d). 1970:
Waterloo
(d);
Still Life with Honesty
(d). 1972:
Islands of the West
(d). 1973:
Shapes in the Water
(d). 1974:
Tree Country
(d). 1976:
Connection
(d). 1977:
The Legend of Los Tayos
(d). 1979:
That Sinking Feeling
. 1980:
Gregory’s Girl
. 1981:
Andrina
(s). 1982:
Local Hero
. 1984:
Comfort and Joy
. 1987:
Housekeeping
. 1989:
Breaking In
. 1994:
Being Human
. 1999:
Gregory’s Two Girls
.

Forsyth has nothing to do with the very positive thoughts of the average moviemaker who loves the medium and what he or she is doing with it. Indeed, he was candid about his own loss of belief after 1989: “And so the passion ultimately fizzles out because of the limitations of the goal; because movies are really not that important. At the very end of the day you’re sitting with an audience of four or five hundred people and all they want is to be entertained.… You see we’re dealing with a medium which really only wants to involve itself in the superficial manipulation of emotions.”

That dispassionate estimate is by no means inconsistent with the dry, droll mood of Forsyth’s world. He is a Scot, evidently, yet he is French in many of his instincts. He likes slight, unsettling situations that do not solve the lives of his characters. He is funny, yet his world is steeped in melancholy. He dislikes the compromise of production and big budgets—he is, maybe, a classic BBC TV–type of director. Not that Forsyth ever did any TV fiction until
Andrina
.

From
That Sinking Feeling
to
Breaking In
, Forsyth told a series of wry, moral tales with feeling and skill. If
Housekeeping
is his most profound film that may be because of Marilynne Robinson’s novel, Christine Lahti’s performance, and the vast perspectives of the Pacific Northwest, epic yet endlessly sad. It may simply be that Forsyth is a melancholy man who has gone as far as he can, like Bartleby the Scrivener.

Bob Fosse
(1927–87), b. Chicago
1968:
Sweet Charity
. 1972:
Cabaret
. 1974:
Lenny
. 1979:
All That Jazz
. 1983:
Star 80
.

Fosse was a dancer on the Broadway stage before appearing in and choreographing
Kiss Me Kate
(53, George Sidney). He also danced in
The Affairs of Dobie Gillis
(53, Don Weis),
Give a Girl a Break
(53, Stanley Donen),
My Sister Eileen
(55, Richard Quine),
Damn Yankees
(58, Donen and George Abbott), and later,
The Little Prince
(75, Donen). As a choreographer, he worked on
My Sister Eileen, The Pajama Game
(57, Donen),
Damn Yankees
, and
How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying
(66, David Swift).