The New Biographical Dictionary of Film: Completely Updated and Expanded (178 page)

To this point, Hanks had survived getting on for ten worthless pictures of the sort that should be kept for crowded flights. Then, at least, he had a real chance, as the twelve-year-old who finds himself
Big
(88, Penny Marshall), for which he got a best actor nomination for sheer charm and skill.

But woe to those who got too excited. Hanks was set up as a bigger star, but the projects were no better:
Punchline
(88, David Seltzer);
The ’burbs
(89, Joe Dante);
Turner & Hooch
(89, Roger Spottiswoode);
Bonfire of the Vanities; Joe Versus the Volcano
(90, John Patrick Shanley); uncredited in
Radio Flyer
(92, Richard Donner);
A League of Their Own
(92, Penny Marshall);
Sleepless in Seattle; Philadelphia
, for which he won the Oscar; and
Forrest Gump
(94, Robert Zemeckis), for which he won the Oscar again, two in a row, with a performance that did nothing to sharpen or argue with the benign mindlessness of the picture.

Now, it is ten years later. I like Tom Hanks. I’ve met him and found him smart, funny, and interested in the larger world. But, truly—apart from his two voice-overs, as Sheriff Woody in
Toy Story
(95, John Lasseter) and
Toy Story 2
(99, Lasseter)—what challenges has he faced as an actor? Instead, he has become the American Actor, rather than someone actually involved in character and story—thus
Apollo 13
(95, Ron Howard), where he played a dull man to a T;
Saving Private Ryan
(98, Steven Spielberg), surely the film that gave him the sense of capital letters descending on him; the schtick of
You’ve Got Mail
(98, Ephron); the empty humanism of
The Green Mile
(99, Frank Darabont); the abominable FedEx promo (and I like FedEx, too, but I don’t go to them to be moved, just sent)
Cast Away
(00, Zemeckis).

It actually helps understand the numbness of those films, the aura around Hanks that protects him, to see that he is more than ever a producer, a figure who walks through his own films as if they were on parade for him. Hanks has become that person—supervising a vast TV series on space travel, and then
Band of Brothers
(01), a spin-off from
Saving Private Ryan
. What I’m saying is that he has become always Tom Hanks, without letting us into that persona.

He has directed one film,
That Thing You Do!
(96), and it was a promising debut, without ever revealing substantial character. He was the father in
Road to Perdition
(02, Sam Mendes) and the FBI man in
Catch Me If You Can
(02, Spielberg).

He took time off, but came back with
The Ladykillers
(04, Joel Coen and Ethan Coen),
The Polar Express
(04, Zemeckis) and
The Terminal
(04, Spielberg).

Hanks was very touching in
The Terminal
, but neither the film nor his performance got its due. That seemed to urge Hanks into production. He was deft, funny, and self-effacing in another neglected film,
Charlie Wilson’s War
(07, Mike Nichols), and he gave himself over to the lunacy of
The Da Vinci Code
(06, Ron Howard)—an offense to his own smartness—and then
Angels & Demons
(09, Howard).

So he was executive producer on
The Polar Express
(04, Zemeckis) and then producer on three grand television series that show the influence of Spielberg and
Private Ryan
, and which affirm Hanks’s considerable identification with the American mainstream
—John Adams
(08),
Big Love
, and
The Pacific
(10). He also produced
Where the Wild Things Are
(09, Spike Jonze), but for the second time he was guilty of over-inflating a classic children’s book. And then there is his cowboy voice on the
Toy Story
franchise.

Curtis Hanson
, b. Reno, Nevada, 1945
1987:
The Bedroom Window
. 1990:
Bad Influence; The Hand That Rocks the Cradle
. 1994:
The River Wild
. 1997:
L.A. Confidential
. 2000:
Wonder Boys
. 2002:
8 Mile
. 2005:
In Her Shoes
2007:
Lucky You
.

In the first four films he directed, Curtis Hanson had proved himself to be workmanlike, suspenseful, and blessed with a writer’s strong sense of situation.
The Bedroom Window
begins with a very human attempt to escape an embarrassing situation;
Bad Influence
is a variation on the chancemeeting setup;
The Hand That Rocks the Cradle
is rooted in the reasonable notion that child minders can become overattached; and
The River Wild
has the novel idea of letting a woman be the hero. Equally, those films are really no more than their own smart proposals.
L.A. Confidential
is a different kind of picture: a period piece; a group portrait; and a multilevel study of corruption. It was fair to the James Ellroy original, to our nostalgia for forties and fifties noir. But it was more than that in making the Bud character into an unusual, unsmart hero.

Hanson edited
Cinema
magazine before he became a screenwriter:
The Silent Partner
(78, Daryl Duke), a bank-robbery film with unusual plot departures;
White Dog
(82, Samuel Fuller), derived from a Romain Gary novel;
Never Cry Wolf
(83, Carroll Ballard), adapted from Farley Mowat.

It is worth adding—in light of
L.A. Confidential
—that for a period Hanson was an assistant to Robert Towne, who served as executive producer on
The Bedroom Window
. You can feel that influence in
Confidential
, I think, and above all in
Wonder Boys
(adapted from Michael Chabon), one of the best recent American films and a terrific encouragement to the middle-aged.

Setsuko Hara
, b. Yokohama, Japan, 1920
The two things said about Setsuko Hara are that she was Ozu’s favorite actress, and the Garbo of Japan. Certainly she was Ozu’s favorite—she appeared in six films for him between 1949 and 1961, and they were close offscreen as well. And, like Garbo, she retired at the height of her popularity: in 1962, she announced that she had never enjoyed making films and secluded herself in an elegant suburb of Tokyo. She is still there, spending time with family and school friends and remaining an object of curiosity and affection for the public. Like Garbo, Hara came to represent an ideal of womanliness, nobility, and generosity.

She was discovered in 1935 and cast in a German-Japanese venture,
The New Earth
(37, Mansaku Itami and Arnold Fanck). By the time Japan entered the war, she was a star and the perfect war-movie heroine in such films as
The Suicide Troops of the Watchtower
(42, Tadashi Imai) and
Toward the Decisive Battle in the Sky
(43, Kunio Watanabe). When the war ended, she made two important movies: Kurosawa’s
No Regrets for Our Youth
(46), in which she is a politically committed idealist who embraces the life of her peasant in-laws, clawing away implacably in the fields; and Kozaburo Yoshimura’s
Ball at the House of Anjo
(47), a Chekhovian drama of an upper-class family down on its luck in the postwar world—and the critics’ best picture of the year.

She made one movie with Kinoshita,
A Toast to the Young Miss
(49); and four with Naruse—his comeback film, about a failing marriage,
Repast
(51);
Sounds from the Mountains
(54),
Sudden Rain
(56), and
Daughters, Wives and Mothers
(60). And there was a second (misguided) film with Kurosawa,
The Idiot
(51), in which she was cast against type. But it was her work with Ozu that dominated.

Their best-known film in the West is
Tokyo Story
(53), in which she is the widowed daughter-in-law of the old couple who come to Tokyo to visit their children—the emblem of feminine duty and love, redeemed from sentimentality by her grave understanding and acceptance of the sadness life brings. In 1949, she had been the daughter in
Late Spring
, content to live on with her widower father until he realizes that she must marry—that life must go on—and gently tricks her into abandoning him. Remarkably, only eleven years later Ozu remade this film as
Late Autumn
, this time casting Hara as the sacrificing parent, a widow who maneuvers her daughter into marriage. Together, the films justify Ozu’s belief in the continuities of life. Their other films together were
Early Summer
(51); the uncharacteristically melodramatic
Tokyo Twilight
(57); and
The End of Summer
(61).

Less versatile than Kinuyo Tanaka, less erotic than Machiko Kyo, less provocative than Hideko Takamine, Hara, with her long face, broad shoulders, and sorrowful eyes, her outward modesty and inner strength, stands as the epitome of Japanese womanhood. As Ozu said of her, “Every Japanese actor can play the role of a soldier and every Japanese actress can play the role of a prostitute to some extent. However, it is rare to find an actress who can play the role of a daughter from a good family.”

Ann Harding
(1901–81), b. Fort Sam Houston, Texas
Elegant, refined, serene, classy, superior, noble, aristocratic—perhaps “patrician” best suggests the quality Ann Harding conveyed at the height of her starring career, from 1929 through the mid-thirties. Even her hair was patrician—usually parted in the middle and pulled back in a simple yet starry bun, and pure ash blond rather than rowdy platinum blond or, even worse, sleazy bleached blond. She had been a successful Broadway leading lady in the twenties, and it’s not by accident that three of her early vehicles were from Philip Barry plays: her first movie,
Paris Bound
(29, Edward H. Griffith),
The Animal Kingdom
(32, Griffith), and in between, the first version of
Holiday
(30, Griffith yet again). Harding’s
Holiday
sticks closer to the Barry play than the later Hepburn version and has a different but considerable effect, Harding being more plaintive and vulnerable, less take-charge, than Hepburn. (It also has the advantage of Mary Astor as the sister, and the disadvantage of Robert Ames, rather than Cary Grant, as the leading man.) Like other Broadway actresses imported to Hollywood to cope with sound (Ruth Chatterton, Helen Hayes, Hepburn herself), Harding started at the top—she is the star, and the essence of fineness, in every one of her thirties vehicles:
Her Private Affair
(29, Alexander Korda);
Condemned
, a penal colony movie with Ronald Colman (29, Wesley Ruggles);
The Girl of the Golden West
, Belasco rather than Barry (30, John Francis Dillon);
East Lynne
(30, Clive Brook);
Devotion
, with Leslie Howard (31, Robert Milton);
Prestige
, in a different penal colony, with Melvyn Douglas (32, Tay Garnett);
Westward Passage
, with the young Laurence Olivier (32, Milton);
The Conquerors
—imitation
Cimarron
, with Richard Dix (32, William A. Wellman); the first version of
When Ladies Meet
—the lady she meets is Myrna Loy, the man they share is Frank Morgan (33, Harry Beaumont);
Double Harness
, with William Powell (33, John Cromwell);
The Right to Romance
(33, Alfred Santell);
Gallant Lady
(34, Gregory La Cava);
The Life of Vergie Winters
(34, Santell)—imitation
Back Street; The Fountain
, from a prestigious and pretentious bestseller by Charles Morgan (34, Cromwell);
Biography of a Bachelor Girl
, Sam Behrman in place of Barry (35, Griffith);
Enchanted April
(35, Beaumont), a flop, unlike the recent remake;
The Flame Within
(35, Edmund Goulding); in a time warp with Gary Cooper in George Du Maurier’s
Peter Ibbetson
(35, Henry Hathaway);
The Lady Consents
(36, Stephen Roberts);
The Witness Chair
(36, George Nicholls, Jr.). By this time, bad scripts and changing tastes had undercut Harding’s Hollywood career, and after escaping from Basil Rathbone’s wife-killer in
Love from a Stranger
, a cheap British thriller (37, Rowland V. Lee), she retired from the screen. But she had been a unique icon of amused sophistication, throaty vulnerability, and brave integrity—at her best when coolly composed and wryly humorous, at her worst when turned into fodder for weepies.

Five years after her retreat from Hollywood, she was back—for a series of appealing wife-and-mother roles. First came
Eyes in the Night
(42, Fred Zinnemann). Then she was Walter Huston’s wife on their
Mission to Moscow
(43, Michael Curtiz);
North Star
(43, Lewis Milestone); Joyce Reynolds’s mother in the teenage comedy
Janie
(44, Curtiz);
Nice Girls
(44, Leigh Jason); Laraine Day’s mother in
Those Endearing Young Charms
(45, Lewis Allen); Janie’s mother again but with a different Janie, Joan Leslie, in
Janie Gets Married
(46, Vincent Sherman);
It Happened on Fifth Avenue
(47, Roy Del Ruth); and performing the hat trick in
Christmas Eve
(47, Edward L. Marin), in which her three sons grow up to be George Brent, Randolph Scott, and George Raft. Then a gap of three years until she’s Jane Powell’s mother in
Two Weeks with Love
(50, Roy Rowland); Mrs. Oliver Wendell Holmes in
The Magnificent Yankee
(51, John Sturges); and
The Unknown Man
(51, Richard Thorpe). Finally, in 1956, three last ventures: Fredric March’s wife in
The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit
(Nunnally Johnson) and two programmers:
I’ve Lived Before
(Richard Bartlett) and
Strange Intruder
(Irving Rapper). Only Mary Astor and Myrna Loy had managed the transition from leading lady to Mom so successfully.