The New Biographical Dictionary of Film: Completely Updated and Expanded (184 page)

The optimism derived from a delight in people expressed in the finding of new faces and the production of new expressions on old faces. In that sense Hawks blended classical narrative cinema and cinema verité. After all,
The Big Sleep
was like a home movie, made amid the dark interiors of a Warners studio; that view of intimacy has time and again shattered the supposedly imprisoning circumstances of entertainment movies. Hawks is the supreme figure of classical cinema. Because he is so unassuming an innovator, so natural an entertainer, his work has still not been surpassed.

Which leaves me on my island: with Lombard kicking Barrymore in the stomach in
Twentieth Century;
with Hepburn sinking that long putt in
Bringing Up Baby;
with Grant asking “Who’s Joe?” in
Only Angels Have Wings;
with the flower pot coming through the window in
Rio Bravo;
with the slow dawn pan before the cattle drive begins in
Red River;
and with Bacall snapping “help yourself” in
The Big Sleep
.

There’s a motto, if you want one: you need only relax old, dull muscles, flex those undiscovered by other movies, and help yourself.

Thirty years after writing the above, I don’t want to change a word of it, or do without the Hawks pictures on my island. Nothing I have reviewed has dated or deteriorated—and I wish I could say as much for most American directors of the golden age. There’s only one thing to add: that the mystery of Hawks builds.

The more one learns of his life, the clearer it is that he was a chronic liar and compartmentalizer, a secretive rogue, a stealthy dandy, and a ruinous womanizer. The Todd McCarthy biography began to set the mess of his life beside the heroic grace of the films. But Hawks was always a maker of comedy and play (even when the tone is tragic). There was an absurdist in Hawks, and a Nabokovian delight in the game for its own sake. Thus, in a very important way, this seeming American may have been against the grain of his time and place. That may help explain why the films grow in wonder.

Goldie Hawn
, b. Washington, D.C., 1945
I don’t think any film has ever captured the lyrical blonde naïveté that Goldie showed on TV’s
LaughIn
. She is usually pert and engaging: amiability perches on her high, child’s voice and gurgles from her baby’s mouth. The eyes are still eyes from Lolita’s face. But she will soon be too old to play the gamine, and may suffer the problems of a middle-aged baby-face. As it is, in most of her pictures she has been no more than a pretty, available comedienne, whose pop-eyed surprise reminds us of her sublime merriment on
LaughIn
. That show had an extraordinary capacity for finding fresh comic personalities and presenting them in a familylike context, presided over by Uncles Dan and Dick. Goldie was hired for the show as a dancer, and she regularly undulated in a bikini and body paint. But she was given a few lines to read, and in fluffing them she uncovered a comic potential all the more delicious when the older men on the show became paternal in their efforts to help her see straight or to comfort her helpless giggles. She disrupted the stupid propriety of TV and was one of the few people who ever caught the amateurishness of the medium with style and nerve. She went bananas forgetting things, but she never lost her cool. She didn’t worry, and that gave her a lovable dignity. She was a ding-a-ling, but never dumb, and she managed to bridge the gulf between daffy nymphet and tipsy lady.

Her pictures are an odd lot: a supporting actress Oscar for her none too remarkable debut in
Cactus Flower
(69, Gene Saks); with Peter Sellers in
There’s a Girl in My Soup
(70, Roy Boulting); with Warren Beatty in $ (71, Richard Brooks);
Butterflies Are Free
(72, Milton Katselas); helping to produce
The Girl from Petrovka
(74, Robert Ellis Miller), a major flop; easily her best performance as the muddleheaded wife, determined to rescue her husband in
The Sugarland Express
(74, Steven Spielberg); Beatty’s girlfriend again in
Shampoo
(75, Hal Ashby);
The Duchess and the Dirtwater Fox
(76, Melvin Frank);
Foul Play
(78, Colin Higgins); and
Travels with Anita
(79, Mario Monicelli).

Her career peaked with
Private Benjamin
(80, Howard Zieff), which grossed over $100 million, and on which she was executive producer. But new power only exposed her as a repetitive comedienne, with questionable judgment of material:
Seems Like Old Times
(80, Jay Sandrich);
Best Friends
(82, Norman Jewison);
Swing Shift
(84, Jonathan Demme), which she produced, took away from Demme, and reworked to the film’s detriment;
Protocol
(84, Herbert Ross);
Wildcats
(86, Michael Ritchie);
Overboard
(87, Garry Marshall), in which she played with Kurt Russell, her companion;
Bird on a Wire
(90, John Badham); and
Deceived
(91, Damien Harris). The films were getting more strained, yet she won a long-term production deal at Hollywood Pictures:
Crisscross
(92, Chris Menges);
Housesitter
(92, Frank Oz); and
Death Becomes Her
(92, Robert Zemeckis).

She has gracefully backed away from the camera while taking on more demanding roles. And so she directed for the first time—a TV melodrama,
Hope
(97)—and she produced
Something to Talk About
(95, Lasse Hallstrom) and the far more entertaining
When Billie Beat Bobby
(01, Jane Anderson), about the King-vs.-Riggs tennis match. As an actress, she has done the very successful
The First Wives Club
(96, Hugh Wilson);
Everyone Says I Love You
(96, Woody Allen);
The Out-of-Towners
(99, Sam Weisman);
Town & Country
(01, Peter Chelsom);
The Banger Sisters
(02, Bob Dolman). She also produced
The Matthew Shepard Story
(02, Roger Spottiswoode).

Sterling Hayden
(Sterling Relyea Walter) (1916–86), b. Montclair, New Jersey
Hayden always looked shy of glossy stardom, more his own master than smile-flexing Flynns and Powers. At his best, Hayden was solid, weathered, and fatalistic: a taciturn, gangling John Hamilton, as calm as a Melville sailor who had seen great sights and was puzzled by the need to talk of them. Three times that placid strength was invoked: as the horse-loving perfectionist in
The Asphalt Jungle
(50, John Huston); as the stranger in
Johnny Guitar
(53, Nicholas Ray), deliberating over the operatic dialogue of that film; as the organizer in
The Killing
(56, Stanley Kubrick), finally dismayed by the dollar bills winnowed in aircraft slipstream. His seeming spiritually wearied by that debacle only added to the impression of stoicism that he conveyed.

He came to the movies as a sailor who married the English actress Madeleine Carroll. He appeared with her at Paramount in
Virginia
(41, Edward H. Griffith) and
Bahama Passage
(41, Griffith). Apart from
Manhandled
(44, Lewis R. Foster), he spent the war years in the marines. When he emerged, the marriage ended in divorce and Hayden found himself moving from studio to studio:
Blaze of Noon
(47, John Farrow);
Albuquerque
(47, Ray Enright);
Flaming Feather
(51, Enright);
Journey into Light
(51, Stuart Heisler);
So Big
(52, Robert Wise);
Denver & Rio Grande
(52, Byron Haskin);
The Star
(53, Heisler);
Take Me to Town
(53, Douglas Sirk);
Prince Valiant
(54, Henry Hathaway);
Crime Wave
(54, André de Toth);
Suddenly
(54, Lewis Allen); as Jim Bowie in
The Last Command
(55, Lloyd);
Naked Alibi
(55, Jerry Hopper);
Arrow in the Dust
(56, Lesley Selander);
Valerie
(57, Gerd Oswald);
Crime of Passion
(57, Oswald); and
Terror in a Texas Town
(58, Joseph H. Lewis).

He dropped out of circulation during the early 1960s, apart from his colonel in
Dr. Strangelove
(63, Kubrick). He sailed some more and published an autobiography,
Wanderer
. Only at the end of the decade did he return to movies:
Hard Contract
(69, S. Lee Pogostin); in the remarkable
Sweet Hunters
(69, Ruy Guerra);
Loving
(70, Irvin Kershner);
Le Saut de l’Ange
(71, Yves Boisset); as the corrupt policeman assassinated over the pasta in
The Godfather
(71, Francis Ford Coppola); the drunken writer in
The Long Goodbye
(72, Robert Altman); as Major Wrongway Lindbergh in
The Final Programme
(73, Robert Fuest).

His undoubted resonance as a Lord Jim–like flawed hero was aided by his tattered, maudlin self-contempt at the way he abandoned friends by turning state’s evidence to the House Un-American Activities Committee. The willing self-portrait in
The Long Goodbye
testified to Hayden’s real-life prowess as a novelist in
Voyage
. On screen, he was a newspaper editor called Pulitzer in
Cry Onion
(75, Enzo Castellari) and a peasant patriarch in
1900
(76, Bernardo Bertolucci). He refused to shave, but still played
King of the Gypsies
(78, Frank Pierson), and he was at ease in the madness of
Winter Kills
(79, William Richert). He went to Ireland for
The Outsider
(79, Tony Luraschi), and also appeared in
9 to 5
(80, Colin Higgins);
Gas
(81, Les Rose); and
Venom
(82, Piers Haggard).

Helen Hayes
(Helen Brown) (1900–93), b. Washington, D.C.
When
Miss
Helen Hayes departed, at the age of ninety-two, obituaries observed how far she had been inspired by a moment in her greatest hit, the stage play
Victoria Regina
, when a citizen cries out to the queen on her ninetieth birthday, “Go it, old girl! You’ve done well!” Long before the end, the actress was as beloved as the queen, and esteemed as one of the great actresses, or one of the first ladies, of the American theatre.

There was no doubt about her Broadway reputation in the twenties and thirties, earned in
Dear Brutus, What Every Woman Knows, Coquette
, Maxwell Anderson’s
Mary of Scotland
, and
Victoria Regina
(which she played for three years). Subsequently, she had successes as a rather older actress in
Harriet, Mrs. McThing, The Skin of Our Teeth
, and
Happy Birthday
. Her reputation was also boosted by her long, devoted marriage to the playwright Charles McArthur.

She had done a couple of short silent films, but her movie career began seriously with her Oscar for the grand weepie
The Sin of Madelon Claudet
(31, Edgar Selwyn). Yet she never found popularity in movies as a young woman. The business doubted her because she was reckoned unattractive. Did audiences find her too solemn, or was it simple bad luck that got her in a series of failures:
Arrowsmith
(31, John Ford); as Catherine Barkley with Gary Cooper in
A Farewell to Arms
(32, Frank Borzage); very poor in
The Son-Daughter
(32, Clarence Brown); with Gable in
The White Sister
(33, Victor Fleming); with Robert Montgomery in
Another Language
(33, Edward H. Griffith);
Night Flight
(33, Brown), a famous disaster;
What Every Woman Knows
(34, Gregory La Cava); and
Vanessa, Her Love Story
(35, William K. Howard), which closed her “young” career.

By the time she returned to pictures, she was a mother or a little old lady—and now, at last, public affection came her way:
My Son John
(52, Leo McCarey); as the Grand Duchess in
Anastasia
(56, Anatole Litvak); winning the supporting actress Oscar in
Airport
(70, George Seaton); on TV with Mildred Natwick in the series
The Snoop Sisters
(73–74);
Herbie Rides Again
(74, Robert Stevenson);
One of Our Dinosaurs Is Missing
(76, Stevenson);
Victory at Entebbe
(76, Marvin J. Chomsky);
Candleshoe
(77, Norman Tokar);
A Family Upside Down
(78, David Lowell Rich);
Murder Is Easy
(82, Claude Whatham); as Miss Marple in
A Caribbean Mystery
(83, Robert Lewis) and
Murder with Mirrors
(85, Dick Lowry).

Todd Haynes
, b. Los Angeles, 1961
1985:
Assassins: A Film Concerning Rimbaud
(s). 1987:
Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story
(s). 1991:
Poison
. 1995:
Safe
. 1998:
Velvet Goldmine
.2002:
Far from Heaven
. 2007:
I’m Not There
.

For me,
Velvet Goldmine
was a serious disappointment after
Poison
and
Safe
—the latter one of the most arresting, original, and accomplished films of the nineties, in which abstraction and a very strange human situation were perfectly embodied in Julianne Moore’s immense but tenuous presence.

At that point, the semiotics student from Brown had a fair claim as the most talented independent filmmaker in America—for consider the documentary-with-dolly reflection on Karen Carpenter; the tripartite study of warping in
Poison;
and the strange sci-fi hypothesis in
Safe. Velvet Goldmine
, on the other hand, was a clumsy gesture towards the mainstream—a mixture of glam-rock iconography with
Citizen Kane
, so much less than one had hoped for. Still, only a real mind could have produced
Velvet Goldmine
, and there are few careers that deserve more anticipation.