The New Biographical Dictionary of Film: Completely Updated and Expanded (172 page)

Suppose Calloway was the grim, helpless core to
The Third Man
. That is not so hard, for Trevor Howard was an ideal Greene protagonist. Howard had a rueful harshness, tight with emotion, and some hint of not liking himself. He was the only man who could have played Bendrix in
The End of the Affair
, the only voice for this tortured reverie:

I sat on my bed and said to God, You’ve taken her but You haven’t got me yet. I know Your cunning. It’s You who take us up to a high place and offer us the whole universe. You’re a devil, God, tempting us to leap. But I don’t want your Peace and I don’t want Your love. I wanted something very simple and very easy: I wanted Sarah for a lifetime, and You took her away. With Your great schemes You ruin our happiness as a harvester ruins a mouse’s nest. I hate You, God. I hate You as though You existed.

For over sixty years Greene had mixed feelings about the movies—the only legitimate ones. Yet I wish he had written a movie on Kim Philby—another role made for Howard—that consummate dishonest team-player who had to be so guarded an observer. Greene knew Philby and wrote about him in a strangled mix of compassion and confession: “ ‘He betrayed his country’—yes, perhaps he did, but who among us has not committed treason to something or someone more important than a country?”

Philby could have made Greene’s most troubling watcher, leading the life of the club while slipping colleagues down the greased chute. The admiration for Philby is shocking when one recalls how that traitor’s career killed off others. Dots? Greene once said he’d rather live in the Soviet Union than in the United States. Yet the persistent traveler knew little of those places. From bases in the elitist Albany, in London, and in Antibes, he only pictured himself as Philby’s neighbor in Moscow.

That envisioning was Greene’s highest flight of imagination, and it could be dishonest as well as creative. Sometimes it was both at once—that’s why he’s so important to the movies. But one cannot forget the tortured, secret witnessing granted his people: Harry Lime back as ghost and player in his own life; Baines in
The Fallen Idol
, watching the slow flight of a paper plane that may ruin him; the man in
The Tenth Man
who has purchased a coward’s rescue and with it the humiliation of being saved; Fowler in
The Quiet American
looking back on the life and death of Pyle—“Everything had gone right with me since he had died, but how I wished there existed someone to whom I could say that I was sorry.”

But in an age where all of us may watch and spy, omniscience and other godlike attributes are retired.

Sydney Greenstreet
(1879–1954), b. Sandwich, England
It has always been a convention of the film industry to “introduce” potent new players. But few introductions have been as dramatic as that of Greenstreet: monstrous, over sixty, hostile, and so clearly familiar with every wrinkle in the world’s corruption. Where could such bulk have been hiding? (In fact, he was a seasoned stage actor, a regular with the Lunts.) How would audiences feel less than cheated that he had been withheld for so long? To redress the balance, Warners worked him hard over the next eight years—twenty-four pictures—forgetting perhaps that he was an old man who needed to sit down for as much of a film as possible. Indeed, there were several men trapped in his grossness: the conventional thin man; a young man; an aesthete; a romantic. He made a florid, sybaritic monster. His Gutman in
The Maltese Falcon
(41, John Huston) was very close to Hammett’s conception, perpetually devious and yet tickled by such a complicated plot and by Spade’s professionalism. It was a happy chance that his first film put him in the company of Peter Lorre, for they were inspired, tormenting company held together by some unspoken perversity.

He took what came thereafter:
They Died With Their Boots On
(41, Raoul Walsh);
Across the Pacific
(42, Huston);
Casablanca
(43, Michael Curtiz);
Danger
(43, Walsh);
Passage to Marseilles
(44, Curtiz) and the Eric Ambler adaptation,
The Mask of Dimitrios
(44, Jean Negulesco), both with Lorre. His long stage career was now subsumed by Warners’ shadowy melodrama: tormenting Bogart in
Conflict
(45, Curtis Bernhardt);
Christmas in Connecticut
(45, Peter Godfrey);
Pillow to Post
(45, Vincent Sherman); with Lorre and Geraldine Fitzgerald as
Three Strangers
(46, Negulesco); as Thackeray in the Brontës’ biopic
Devotion
(46, Bernhardt); as a Victorian London police inspector in
The Verdict
(46, Don Siegel), his last film with Lorre;
The Hucksters
(47, Jack Conway) at MGM;
Ruthless
(48, Edgar G. Ulmer); as Wilkie Collins’s Count Fosco in
The Woman in White
(48, Godfrey); with Joan Crawford in
Flamingo Road
(49, Curtiz); and
Malaya
(49, Richard Thorpe). It is difficult not to believe that he is still in search of the falcon—“Ah yes, sir, the falcon!”

Joan Greenwood
(1921–87), b. London
The British cinema allowed audiences to see and hear just enough of Joan Greenwood to let them know what they were missing. In another time or place—Cukor’s Hollywood or Renoir’s France of the 1950s—there might have been whole films devoted to her. Above all, she possessed the unerring voice of exaggeration and restraint, drawling forth in unison. What seemed at first like a mannerism proved within minutes entirely genuine: a rather dotty, genteel sexpot. She was what Lady Bracknell must have been like when young.

She was a stage actress who made her film debut in the early years of the war, and was at her peak in the period 1948–55:
John Smith Wakes Up
(41, Jiri Weiss);
My Wife’s Family
(41, Walter Charles Mycroft);
He Found a Star
(41, John Paddy Carstairs);
The Gentle Sex
(43, Leslie Howard and Maurice Elvey);
They Knew Mr. Knight
(44, Norman Walker);
Latin Quarter
(45, Vernon Sewell);
Girl in a Million
(46, Francis Searle);
The Man Within
(47, Bernard Knowles);
The October Man
(47, Roy Baker);
The White Unicorn
(48, Knowles);
Saraband for Dead Lovers
(48, Basil Dearden and Michael Relph); as Lady Caroline Lamb in
Bad Lord Byron
(48, David Macdonald);
Whisky Galore
(49, Alexander Mackendrick);
Kind Hearts and Coronets
(49, Robert Hamer);
Flesh and Blood
(50, Anthony Kimmins);
The Man in the White Suit
(51, Mackendrick);
Young Wives’ Tale
(51, Henry Cass); perfect in
The Importance of Being Earnest
(52, Anthony Asquith);
Father Brown
(54, Hamer);
Knave of Hearts
(54, René Clément);
Moonfleet
(55, Fritz Lang);
Stage Struck
(58, Sidney Lumet);
Mysterious Island
(61, Cy Endfield);
The Amorous Mr. Prawn
(62, Kimmins);
Tom Jones
(63, Tony Richardson);
The Moon-Spinners
(64, James Neilson);
Girl Stroke Boy
(71, Bob Kellett);
The Hound of the Baskervilles
(77, Paul Morrissey);
The Uncanny
(77, Denis Heroux);
The Water Babies
(79, Lionel Jeffries); in a Barbara Cartland adaptation for TV,
The Flame Is Love
(79, Michael O’Herlihy);
Country
(81, Richard Eyre);
Ellis Island
(84, Jerry London);
Past Caring
(85, Eyre); and
Little Dorrit
(87, Christine Edzard).

Jane
(Bettejane)
Greer
(1924–2001), b. Washington, D.C.
“I go there sometimes,” says Kathie Moffat, as an afterthought, to Jeff Bailey. They have met, as if by chance, in a cafe in Acapulco next to a small movie house. She has strolled in out of the day’s last sunlight in a pale dress and a wide-brimmed straw hat. In fact, he’s been sent to find her, and maybe she knew that or guessed it already. Knowing things seems to be her trade, or her personality. She tells Jeff about this other place, where they play American music, and the way she says it—“I go there sometimes”—makes for one of the more mysterious lines in American film. Somehow, you have the worst thoughts about the other things she does.

This is
Out of the Past
(47, Jacques Tourneur). Jeff is Robert Mitchum, and Kathie Moffat is Jane Greer—who didn’t have much more going for her than dark hair that stirred like drapes in a breeze, the best mouth, eyes like blueberries in cream, and that threat of knowledge. That’s what Howard Hughes noticed, and Rudy Vallee, when they saw pictures of her modeling uniforms for the Women’s Army Corps. That’s what a war can do for you: Hughes signed her up with a contract that forbade marriage; and then she married Vallee, who was twenty-three years older than she was, and wild! As for Jane Greer, did it mean she was naughty, or perverse? “Can’t I be both?” she would have asked.

And maybe there was something in her that knew, after
Out of the Past
, that bothering or building her career seriously was hardly worthwhile, not with people like Hughes running the show. So she didn’t take herself seriously. She did just a few movies in the late forties and the early fifties, and then, maybe, wandered in and out of rooms waiting for someone to say. “My God, aren’t you Jane Greer?” And she’d say, “Sometimes”?

Well, yes and no. She also married again, had sons, and lived quite well. All of which should be remembered and nailed down—but hardly stands up to the possibility that in Acapulco, in 1947, having run away with forty thousand dollars of Kirk Douglas’s money, she has rented a cottage where she listens to Charlie Parker records and works her way through
The Sheltering Sky
, cutting the uncut pages with this knife she has acquired.

These are some of her other films:
Two O’Clock Courage
(45, Anthony Mann);
Dick Tracy
(45, William Berke);
The Falcon’s Alibi
(46, Ray McCarey);
The Bamboo Blonde
(46, Mann);
Sinbad the Sailor
(47, Richard Wallace);
They Won’t Believe Me
(47, Irving Pichel);
Station West
(48, Sidney Lanfield); with Mitchum again, and very funny, in
The Big Steal
(49, Don Siegel);
The Company She Keeps
(50, John Cromwell), a melo where she has the lead;
You’re in the Navy Now
(51, Henry Hathaway);
You for Me
(52, Don Weis); in the old Mary Astor role in
The Prisoner of Zenda
(52, Richard Thorpe);
Desperate Search
(52, Joseph H. Lewis);
The Clown
(53, Robert Z. Leonard), with Red Skelton;
Down Among the Sheltering Palms
(53, Edmund Goulding);
Run for the Sun
(56, Roy Boulting), with Richard Widmark and Trevor Howard; and one of the wives in
Man of a Thousand Faces
(57, Joseph Pevney).

There were a few later films, but the only interesting one was the remake of
Out of the Past—Against All Odds
(84, Taylor Hackford)—where she plays the mother of the Kathie Moffat character. “I go there sometimes.”

Jean Grémillon
(1901–59), b. Bayeux, France
1923–28: eighteen shorts.
1926:
Un Tour au Large
. 1927:
Maldone; Gratuites
. 1928:
Bobs
. 1929:
Gardiens de Phare
. 1930:
La Petite Lise
. 1931:
Dainah la Métisse; Pour un Sou d’Amour
. 1932:
Le Petit Babouin
. 1933:
Gonzague, ou l’Accordeur
. 1934:
La Dolorosa
. 1935:
Centinella! Alerta!
. 1936:
La Valse Royale; Pattes de Mouches
. 1937:
Gueule d’Amour
. 1938:
L’Étrange Monsieur Victor
. 1941:
Remorques
. 1943:
Lumière d’Été
. 1944:
Le Ciel Est à Vous
. 1945:
Le Six Juin à l’Aube
(d). 1949:
Pattes Blanches
. 1950:
L’Apocalypse de Saint-Sevres; Les Charmes de l’Existence
(codirected with Pierre Kast) (d). 1951:
L’Etrange Madame X; Les Désastres de la Guerre
(codirected with Kast) (d). 1952: “Alchimie” and “Astrologie,” episodes from
Encyclopédie Filmée
(d). 1953:
L’Amour d’une Femme
. 1954:
Au Coeur de l’Ile de France
(d). 1956:
La Maison aux Images
(d). 1957:
Haute Lisse
(d). 1958:
André Masson et les Quatre Eléments
(d).

Grémillon was trained as a musician; his first contact with cinema was as a violin accompanist to silent films. He made many industrial documentaries and began directing features in 1926. Because of scant success, he was forced to look for assignments in Germany and Spain:
Centinella! Alerta!
had Buñuel as its executive producer. Grémillon often composed the music for his own films. Only with war did he return to France and produce fully personal films, especially
Lumière d’Été
, a Jacques Prévert allegory about a group of failures living on the edge of the abyss, mordant and sad. Grémillon’s essential bleakness was maintained in
Pattes Blanches
, an Anouilh script about sexual rivalry, and in his documentary on the D-Day landings, which concentrates on the ravages left in the Normandy countryside—the director’s own homeland. After the war, Grémillon was president of the Cinémathèque until his death, and largely preoccupied with documentaries. Thus, he made few features with real freedom. He may be a subject for reevaluation. Certainly his films are intensely felt, the work of a man sensitive to music, painterly composition, and the subtleties of Normandy and Brittany.