The New Biographical Dictionary of Film: Completely Updated and Expanded (160 page)

In the nineties, Gazzara made a movie called
Too Tired to Die
(98, Wonsuk Chin)—one of those titles that reflects on a career. Gazzara was nearly a star once, a figure of promise on stage and screen. Yet he has been reduced to working constantly in small roles in pictures hardly seen or heard of by the people he meets. The glamour of acting:
Blindsided
(93, Thomas Michael Donnelly); as Joe Bonanno in
Love, Honor & Obey
(93, John Patterson);
Fatal Vows: The Alexander O’Hara Story
(94, John Power);
Hirondelles ne Meurent pas à Jerusalem
(94, Ridha Behi);
The Zone
(95, Barry Zetlin);
Banditi
(95, Stefano Mignucci);
Shadow Conspiracy
(97, George P. Cosmatos);
The Spanish Prisoner
(97, David Mamet);
Vicious Circles
(97, Alexander Whitelaw);
Buffalo ’66
(98, Vincent Gallo);
The Big Lebowski
(98, Joel Coen);
Happiness
(98, Todd Solondz);
Illuminata
(98, John Turturro);
Summer of Sam
(99, Spike Lee);
The Thomas Crown Affair
(99, John McTiernan);
Very Mean Men
(00, Tony Vitale);
The List
(00, Sylvain Guy);
Home Sweet Hoboken
(00, Yoshifumi Hosoya).

He was in
Believe
(00, Robert Tinnell);
Brian’s Song
(01, John Gray);
Hysterical Blindness
(02, Mira Nair);
Dogville
(03, Lars von Trier);
The Shore
(04, Denis Adam Zervos);
… and Quiet Flows the Don
(04, Sergei Bondarchuk).

Daniel Gélin
(1921–2002), b. Angers, France
Gélin has invariably appeared as a sophisticated, literate, and sensitive man, especially suited to articulate inquirers into their own emotions. Born a little later, he might easily have played one of the men in Eric Rohmer’s
contes moraux
. But doubtless his young man in
La Ronde
(50, Max Ophuls), who goes to bed with Danielle Darrieux but cannot quite, and recollects Stendhal’s
De l’Amour
, was a moment from cinema that influenced Rohmer. Gélin has published poetry and directed one film himself,
Les Dents Longues
(53).

He played small parts during the war and only took on large roles in the late 1940s:
Premier RendezVous
(41, Henri Decoin);
Martin Roumagnac
(46, Georges Lacombe);
RendezVous de Juillet
(49, Jacques Becker);
Edouard et Caroline
(51, Becker);
Les Mains Sales
(51, Fernand Rivers); as the painter in the “Modèle” episode from
Le Plaisir
(52, Ophuls);
La Minute de Vérité
(52, Jean Delannoy);
Rue de l’Estrapade
(53, Becker);
Sang et Lumières
(53, Georges Rouquier);
Si Versailles M’Était Conté
(53, Sacha Guitry);
L’Affaire Maurizius
(54, Julien Duvivier);
La Romana
(54, Luigi Zampa);
Napoléon
(55, Guitry);
Les Amants du Tage
(55, Henri Verneuil); as the dying man whose whispers ensure that James Stewart is
The Man Who Knew Too Much
(55, Alfred Hitchcock);
Mamzelle Striptease
(56, Marc Allégret);
Mort en Fraude
(57, Marcel Camus);
Retour de Mainivelle
(57, Denys de la Patellière);
La Fille de Hambourg
(58, Yves Allégret);
Charmants Garçons
(58, Decoin);
Cartagine in Fiamme
(59, Carmine Gallone);
Le Testament d’Orphée
(60, Jean Cocteau);
La Proie pour l’Ombre
(60, Alexandre Astruc);
Austerlitz
(60, Abel Gance and Roger Richebé);
La Morte-Saison des Amours
(61, Pierre Kast);
Climats
(62, Stellio Lorenzi);
Les Vacances Portugaises
(63, Kast);
La Bonne Soupe
(64, Robert Thomas);
The Sleeping Car Murders
(65, Costa-Gavras);
Is Paris Burning?
(66, René Clément);
Soleil Noir
(66, de la Patellière);
La Ligne de Demarcation
(66, Claude Chabrol);
La Trêve
(68, Claude Guillemot);
Détruire, Dit-Elle
(69, Marguerite Duras);
Dearest Love
(71, Louis Malle); and
Pardon Mon Affaire, Too
(77, Yves Robert).

More recently, he has been in
Nous Irons Tous au Paradis
(77, Robert);
L’Honorable Société
(78, Anielle Weinberger);
La Nuit de Varennes
(82, Ettore Scola);
Les Enfants
(85, Duras); and
Mister Frost
(90, Philip Setbon).

He is the father of actress Maria Schneider, by his own marriage to actress Danielle Delorme.

In his seventies, Gélin still worked very hard:
Mauvaise Fille
(90, Regis Franc); as the Shah in
L’Amérique en Otage
(91, Kevin Connor);
Un Type Bien
(91, Laurent Benegui);
Crimes et Jardins
(91, Jean-Paul Salome);
Les Marmottes
(93, Elie Chouraqui);
Roulez Jeunesse!
(93, Jacques Fansten);
Warrior Spirit
(94, Rene Manzor);
Maigret et la Vente à la Bougie
(94, Pierre Granier-Deferre); with Daniel Delorme in the TV series
Madame le Proviseur
(94, Sebastien Grall and Alice Vandelen);
Fugueuses
(95, Nadine Trintignant);
Fantôme avec Chauffeur
(96, Gerard Oury);
Hommes, Femmes, Mode d’Emploi
(96, Claude Lelouch);
Obsession
(97, Peter Sehr);
Une Femme d’Action
(97, Didier Albert);
Les Marmottes
(98, Jean-Denis Robert and Daniel Vigne).

Sergei Gerasimov
(1906–85), b. Zlatoust, Russia
1930:
Dvadtsat Dva Neschastya/Twenty-two Misfortunes
(codirected with C. Bartenev). 1932:
Serdtsye Solomona/The Heart of Solomon
(codirected with M. Kressin). 1934:
Lyubliyu li
Tebya/Do I Love You?
. 1936:
Semero Smelykh/Seven Brave Men
. 1938:
Komsomolsk
. 1939:
Uchitel/The Teacher
. 1941:
Maskarad/Masquerade
. 1943:
Nepobedimye/The Invincibles
(codirected with Mikhail Kalatozov). 1944:
Bolshaya Zemlya/The Big Land
. 1948:
Molodaya Gvardiya/The Young Guard
(in two parts). 1952:
Osvobozhdennyi Kitai/China Liberated; Selskii Vrach/The Country Doctor
. 1955:
Nadezhda
. 1956: an episode from
Die Vind Rose
. 1958:
Tikhii Don/Quiet Flows the Don
(in two parts). 1962:
Lyudi i Zveri/Men and Beasts
(in two parts). 1967:
Zhurnalist/The Journalist
. 1970:
U Ozera/By the Lake
. 1984:
Leo Tolstoy
.

Gerasimov was one of those sleepy animals in the Soviet zoo—Wild once? Who knows? But inured to captivity and regarding it as a natural state. In 1969, he was interviewed for
Film
and gave this unprincipled statement of the necessary alertness in the artist/bureaucrat in Russia:

Being a convinced dialectician, I believe that life is developing towards a synthesis. It is inevitable that the old will die out and be replaced by the new. I am convinced we can influence people’s consciousness by creative activity such as films but only by the dialectic.… We should affirm the need to fight the old and welcome the new … but this doesn’t mean that within a year I wouldn’t criticize what I’ve just said, because the world is always changing.

The potential for sudden change inflicted on society from above had for years overawed the creative spirit in Russia. How essential it was for a Gerasimov to be ready to jump in newly perceived directions. In 1947, for instance, while he was directing the first part of it,
The Young Guard
was revealed to be based on unviable notions. But dialectic found a way, and Gerasimov went back on his tracks, expunging the unworthy.

He had the credentials that admit a Soviet artist to high office. Originally an actor with the Factory for Eccentric Actors, he only began directing in the 1930s, attempting whenever possible “to show a piece of life”—“I’m sure no artist should close his eyes to life because he’ll miss the most important things and because any self-appraising, withdrawing into oneself is the beginning of the end in art, the end of communication. The force of the artist is his ability to express his opinion about life which is common to everybody and therefore understandable to everybody.”

Anybody, I think, could see that
Quiet Flows the Don
is flatulent melodrama dressed up as if it were Tolstoy and filmed without taste, talent, or a sense of the moment. One had only to recollect that Russian art was also represented by Nabokov to realize that the leaden handicaps to Russian cinema had kept it as yet from the main event. Gerasimov was also in charge of acting and directing at the Soviet Institute of Cinematography and a member of the State Committee for Film.

Richard Gere
, b. Philadelphia, 1949
There are times when Richard Gere has the warm affect of a wind tunnel at dawn, waiting for work, all sheen, inner curve, and posed emptiness. And those are not his worst times. Indeed, the rather grimly passive beauty of Gere is his greatest asset; it is what made his confrontation with the folded designer shirts in
American Gigolo
(80, Paul Schrader) one of the great movie moments of a man looking in a mirror. Even in
Pretty Woman
(90, Garry Marshall), it was Gere’s subtlest trick (he can be a nearly motionless thief of scenes) to seem, in spirit, prettier than even Julia Roberts, more dedicated to the hope of some unruffled aestheticism. Only Alain Delon has been this way before, and it makes one realize that Gere was born to play Patricia Highsmith’s Ripley.

He has been in enough bad films to make one think his career was drawing to a close, to reveal the limits of his self-love, and to warn us that his most active, spontaneous outbursts of behavior are sometimes as calculated as dance. He
is
generally more interesting when doing less. But there have been sufficient occasions in which he has been unique to hold the attention. He is matured now; he is a good learner and capable of surprise, especially when encouraged to be sinister. He cannot relax; he seems afraid to let humor mar a superior sense of wit; but he has a whim of ineffable, albeit ridiculous grace.

He was raised in upstate New York, from which he went to the University of Massachusetts (in 1967) to study philosophy and film. Then he wandered, as an actor, from Provincetown, to Seattle, to New York, and to London. He would play Danny Zuko on Broadway in
Grease
, and a few years later he was very impressive in Sam Shepard’s
Killer’s Head
and in Martin Sherman’s
Bent
.

He had small roles in
Report to the Commissioner
(75, Milton Katselas); on TV in
Strike Force
(75, Barry Shear); and in
Baby Blue Marine
(76, John Hancock). But he grabbed attention as Diane Keaton’s most flamboyant and seemingly dangerous pickup in
Looking for Mr. Goodbar
(77, Richard Brooks). Gere’s “Tony” was really an extended audition piece—riveting but rootless—and it promised a Brando-like physicality that was actually anathema to Gere’s removed watchfulness.

For a few years, he was a hot actor: good in
Bloodbrothers
(78, Robert Mulligan); one of the photographed surfaces in
Days of Heaven
(78, Terrence Malick), not so much an actor as a model; passably ordinary in
Yanks
(79, John Schlesinger); and so vital to
American Gigolo
that it is easy to forget he was a late replacement for John Travolta. Travolta may have seen how easily he could be exposed in a precarious balance between modishness and pretension. Gere seems to have known Julian Kaye, and felt the acid poetry in the film’s view of Los Angeles. It is Schrader’s vision (and an important film), but Gere made it recognizable for a large audience, and introduced moral enervation as a theme in our movies. Seen again,
Gigolo
is oddly quietist, stoic, and resigned; there was already a hint of Oriental mindset.

An Officer and a Gentleman
(82, Taylor Hackford) was a much bigger hit, a mainstream film about a man eager to explain himself and find resolution. It was not Gere’s territory, and if the love scenes with Debra Winger had some heat, still the actress let it be known that Gere was off in his own head. He has never been an easy interacter in love scenes.

As soon as he was made, the luck ran out.
Breathless
(83, Jim McBride) was a flop. Yet it is Gere’s most adventurous work, his funniest and least guarded. Of course, the project was a remake of a pastiche, so no one could make claims on human nature. Still, Gere was startlingly kinetic, and he really goosed his staid leading lady.

Decline followed:
Beyond the Limit
(83, John Mackenzie), a shot at Graham Greene’s
The Honorary Consul;
the chaotic
Cotton Club
(84, Francis Ford Coppola), in which Gere played some trumpet and did some music while trying to hold the picture together;
King David
(85, Bruce Beresford); trying to be like Eastwood in
No Mercy
(86, Richard Pearce);
Power
(86, Sidney Lumet); and
Miles from Home
(88, Gary Sinise).

All of a sudden, in
Internal Affairs
(90, Mike Figgis) he delivered a smiling reptile, a cop who treated the LAPD as a talent agency. He was brilliant in a modest film, just as he did a great deal to steer
Pretty Woman
past its most lunatic and offensive holes.