The New Biographical Dictionary of Film: Completely Updated and Expanded (19 page)

Astruc is a fascinating example of a man from literary culture identifying his true allegiance to the movies. He holds a special place in the still small library of worthwhile cinema theory, even if his own films rarely live up to all his admirable principles.
Une Vie
, though, is a perfect collaboration of Maupassant’s novel, Astruc’s treatment, the photography of Claude Renoir, Roman Vlad’s music, and the presence of Maria Schell, Christian Marquand, Ivan Desny, Pascale Petit, and Antonella Lualdi. Rather out of fashion today, not even the considerably inferior quality of Astruc’s other work can prevent it from some future rediscovery. It justifies the man as surely as
Night of the Hunter
does Charles Laughton.
Une Vie
is the demonstration of a view of cinema
—la camérastylo
—that is a most fruitful critical bond between classical and modern cinema.

Astruc was a critic, a novelist—
Les Vacances
(45)—and assistant to Marc Allégret on
Blanche Fury
(47). In 1948, in
Écran Français
, he wrote a short article, “The Birth of a New Avant-Garde: La CaméraStylo.” It argued for a new appreciation of the language of film:

… the cinema will gradually break free from the tyranny of what is visual, from the image for its own sake, from the immediate and concrete demands of the narrative, to become a means of writing just as flexible and subtle as written language.… We have come to realise that the meaning which the silent cinema tried to give birth to through symbolic association exists within the image itself, in the development of the narrative, in every gesture of the characters, in every line of dialogue, in those camera movements which relate objects to objects and characters to objects. All thought, like all feeling, is a relationship between one human being and another human being.…

That can still claim to be the most important critical theory the cinema has yet produced. It led Astruc to the identification of a pantheon that was shared by most of the
Cahiers
group and that enriched the films they made: Eisenstein, Welles, Renoir, Bresson, von Stroheim, Murnau, Hawks, Mizoguchi, Hitchcock, Lang, and Rossellini.

At the same time, it was not difficult to detect the young novelist at work, who looked forward to the cinema’s achieving the autonomy of, say, Sartre, Camus, or Faulkner. Astruc’s own films showed that in
la camérastylo
he remained very conscious of the pen. His movies relied not only on literary models, but what was often an academic demonstration of his theories. For example,
Le Rideau Cramoisi
is a very cold film, more engaged by the abstract realization of human connection than actually involved in it. Astruc is capable of passages of extraordinary beauty and utter clarity, but the heart is often left behind. No surprise that he once listed Anthony Mann’s
Men in War
as a favorite film, for in that film Mann achieves an eerie detachment through cinematic grace.
Une Vie
works because of Maria Schell’s insistent emotionalism—a quality that has marred other films, but brings a touching plaintiveness to
Une Vie
. Elsewhere, Astruc’s films have the distinction of blueprints; by contrast, Renoir’s are untidy houses. It is a serious limitation, but Astruc’s theory is still correct and vital. No student of the movies should neglect it or leave
Une Vie
unseen.

Lord Richard Attenborough
, b. Cambridge, England, 1923
1969:
Oh! What a Lovely War
. 1972:
Young Winston
. 1977:
A Bridge Too Far
. 1978:
Magic
. 1982:
Gandhi
. 1985:
A Chorus Line
. 1987:
Cry Freedom
. 1992:
Chaplin
. 1993:
Shadowlands
. 1996:
In Love and War
. 1999:
Grey Owl
. 2007:
Closing the Ring
.

Attenborough has blithely mapped out the way to success in the British film industry. He began at RADA, and in 1942 he won the Bancroft Medal there and made his debut as a seaman in
In Which We Serve
(42, Noel Coward and David Lean). The next year, he had a big success as Pinkie in the stage version of Graham Greene’s
Brighton Rock
and was in the film
Schweik’s New Adventures
(Karel Lamac). After war service with the RAF film unit, he appeared in
The Man Within
(46, Bernard Knowles),
A Matter of Life and Death
(46, Michael Powell), the film of
Brighton Rock
(47, John Boulting), and
London Belongs to Me
(48, Sidney Gilliat). Although his role as Pinkie was truly frightening it had not detracted from a grubby, baby-faced vulnerability. This youthful appeal was grotesquely exploited in
The Guinea Pig
(49, Roy Boulting) when, at age twenty-six, he played a lower-middle-class boy at Winchester half his age—and played it straight. Attenborough was swallowed by the British public as smoothly as margarine and for ten years he took whatever cheerful or heroic nonsense the industry spread him on:
Morning Departure
(50, Roy Baker);
Boys in Brown
(50, Montgomery Tully);
The Gift Horse
(52, Compton Bennett);
Private’s Progress
(55, J. Boulting);
Brothers in Law
(57, J. Boulting);
The Man Upstairs
(58, Don Chaffey); and
Dunkirk
(58, Leslie Norman).

That was the turning point. In 1959, he produced (with Bryan Forbes) and acted in
The Angry Silence
(59, Guy Green), a portentous attempt to introduce realism to British features. In fact, the film is vulgar and sentimental. Only the subject matter had changed, but Attenborough has always believed more in content than style, in sincerity rather than intelligence. That film marked a new resolution to take himself seriously. As an actor Attenborough went in for some studied character parts and even ventured into American movies:
The League of Gentlemen
(60, Basil Dearden), which he also produced;
Only Two Can Play
(61, Sidney Gilliat);
The Great Escape
(63, John Sturges);
Seance on a Wet Afternoon
(64, Forbes), which he produced;
The Flight of the Phoenix
(65, Robert Aldrich);
The Sand Pebbles
(66, Robert Wise);
Dr. Dolittle
(67, Richard Fleischer);
David Copperfield
(69, Delbert Mann);
Loot
(70, Silvio Narizzano);
A Severed Head
(70, Dick Clement); and very good as Christie the murderer in
10 Rillington Place
(70, Fleischer).

In addition to
League of Gentlemen
and
Seance on a Wet Afternoon
, Attenborough produced two other movies directed by Bryan Forbes
—Whistle Down the Wind
(62) and
The L-Shaped Room
(64). Such ventures stimulated him and in 1969 he directed and coproduced
Oh! What a Lovely War
—a gallant failure, helped by the initial ingenuity of using Brighton pier, but without any interest in how to photograph people. It was a commercial success, proving how far his preference for content was a national failing. After that, he delved deeper into patriotism with
Young Winston
(72), a movie more influenced by that seasoned middlebrow Carl Foreman.

At fifty-five, Attenborough still looked and behaved like head prefect for British films and was rewarded with a knighthood. He acted regularly:
Rosebud
(74, Otto Preminger);
And Then There Were None
(74, Peter Collinson); in lopsided harness with John Wayne in
Brannigan
(75, Douglas Hickox);
Conduct Unbecoming
(75, Michael Anderson); and a manipulating administrator in
The Chess Players
(77, Satyajit Ray). He also directed Joseph Levine’s Arnhem epic, scattering $26 million like toy parachutes, and handling combat with a cheerful gusto that belied his first film’s indignant horror.

At seventy, Attenborough was a lord, as if some parties in or around Buckingham Palace had been impressed by
Gandhi
, a soporific, nonthreatening tribute to nonviolence that allegedly moved millions to tears and to mending their ways. It won best picture and now looms over the real world like an abandoned space station
—eternal
, expensive, and forsaken.
A Chorus Line
set no toes tapping, and
Cry Freedom
failed to unleash the forces of political liberalism and safe correctness. But then came
Chaplin
, a disaster of concept and construction such as few people could deny or avoid. Not that Robert Downey Jr. was its flaw: he impersonated Charlie with skill and courage. The blame had to rest with Lord Attenborough, whose proud but unseeing eyes failed to notice what a remarkable little madman Chaplin was. And in all these drab years of making respectable epics, Attenborough the actor has been denied to us—except for
The Human Factor
(80, Preminger) and
Jurassic Park
(93, Steven Spielberg).

After
Chaplin, Shadowlands
was a pleasant relief, a well-crafted weepie for book people, energized by Debra Winger and Anthony Hopkins (for long a favorite of Attenborough’s). It was Hopkins who gave such a hyperactive performance as the haunted ventriloquist in
Magic
, Attenborough’s best film.
Magic
also reminds us of the director as an actor: drawn to the creepy, as witness
10 Rillington Place, Seance on a Wet Afternoon
, and
Brighton Rock
.

After the 1994 edition, I felt that maybe I had been hard on milord—after all, he had once been a director at Chelsea Football Club. So I resolved to be kinder—and he made
In Love and War
and
Grey Owl!
As an actor, he played Kriss Kringle in
Miracle on 34th Street
(94, Les Mayfield)—why has no one thought to cast Attenborough in The Edmund Gwenn Story?; as the English ambassador, visible only in the long version of
Hamlet
(96, Kenneth Branagh);
E=mc2
(96, Benjamin Fry); as Cecil in
Elizabeth
(98, Shekhar Kapur);
The Railway Children
(00, Catherine Moorhead); as Magog in
Jack and the Beanstalk: The Real Story
(01, Brian Henson);
Puckoon
(02, Terence Ryan);
Snow Prince
(04, Charles Jarrott).

Jacques Audiard
, b. Paris, 1952
1994:
Regarde les Hommes Tomber
. 1996:
Un Héros Très Discret/A Self-Made Hero
. 2001:
Sur Mes Lèvres/Read My Lips
. 2005:
De Battre Mon Coeur S’Est Arrêté/The Beat That My Heart Skipped
. 2009:
Un Prophète/A Prophet
.

It has been observed that anyone who likes those eccentric American thrillers not quite attached to major auteur names—Siodmak’s
The Killers
, Siegel’s
The Line-Up
, or even Toback’s
Fingers
—is likely to esteem Jacques Audiard, a near veteran who can deliver Jean-Pierre Melvillean material with the timing and panache of Ray Robinson (without the Sugar). He was the son of Michel Audiard (1920–85), a writer-director who never seems to have made the top rank, but who never let that cloud his enthusiasm for movie storytelling. Jacques worked with his father as a screenwriter and he was an apprentice editor on
The Tenant
(76, Roman Polanski).

He began to get writing credits in the 1980s:
Mortelle Randonnée
(83, Claude Miller);
Réveillon Chez Bob
(84, Denys Granier-Deferre);
Baxter
(89, Jérôme Boivin); and
Fréquence Meurtre
(89, Élisabeth Rappeneau).

His first film as director,
Regarde les Hommes Tomber
, was a road movie starring Jean-Louis Trintignant and Mathieu Kassovitz. It won a César for best debut and it established Audiard in the tradition of films about tough, tight-lipped men. Those same two actors played the same part, young and old, in
A Self-Made Hero
, a delicate comedy about a would-be novelist who writes himself into the history of the French Resistance.
Read My Lips
was a significant departure in which a deaf woman takes on a criminal as her assistant. As played by Emmanuelle Devos and Vincent Cassel, it was a psychological crime story that broke fresh ground but never really overcame problems of plausibility and a story so intricate that it was hard to follow. Sometimes with Audiard, cleverness smothers feeling.

It was then that he elected to do a remake of and homage to Toback’s
Fingers
, with Romain Duris in the Harvey Keitel part. The French film is not as extreme or surreal as the American. It does not plumb the same psychological depths. But Duris has more charm than Keitel and the film deserved its success—eight Césars, including best director and best film (granted that Toback deserved something in America, too).

By now Audiard was established as a director of strong properties and
Un Prophète
is a big prison-break story—reminiscent of Becker, Melville, and Duvivier—excellent, but not quite outstanding. In truth, it has to be said that Audiard is more professional and proficient than Toback—but not yet as unique or as self-destructive. But he is close to sixty, reasonably funded, and as secure as anyone has a right to be—so if he’s going over his own edge, why wait any longer? The comic danger of
A Self-Made Hero
still seems his most fruitful path ahead and his most audacious film.

Stéphane Audran
(Colette Suzanne Jeannine Dacheville), b. Versailles, France, 1932
It is characteristic of Chabrol’s enigmatic work that one might not deduce from it that Stéphane Audran was his wife. Counting the black comedy of the episode from
Paris Vu Par …
(64), she has made twenty-one films with her husband. At first her parts were small, but after a brief appearance in
Les Cousins
(59), she was one of
Les Bonnes Femmes
(59), in
Les Godelureaux
(61), and one of
Landru
’s victims (63).
L’Oeil du Malin
(62) was her first starred part. In
Paris Vu Par …
she was the quarrelsome mother whose son puts cotton wool in his ears so that he never hears her cry for help in an emergency. That seemed a sardonic, marital joke from Chabrol, and even in
La Ligne de Démarcation
(66) and
The Champagne Murders
(67), there was no hint that he regarded her as anything more than a conventionally beautiful fashion plate. It was
Les Biches
(68) that properly discovered her as an actress. In one sense, her acutely made-up beauty needed very little heightening to suggest lesbianism, but the eventual sexual reversal of the film allowed her a new poignancy that was an advance for both actress and director. From that point, the note of thoughtfulness beneath such mannequin elegance has become central to Chabrol’s work. It is difficult not to attribute the tenderness and growing human commitment of
La Femme Infidèle
(69),
La Rupture
(70), and
Le Boucher
(70) to her presence, even if he continued to photograph her in a strangely detached manner. Or is it that there is a glossy coldness in the woman herself that makes her attractive to Chabrol? One thinks of the way her Dordogne teacher in
Le Boucher
wears false eyelashes throughout, and of her remote calm in the yoga sequence. She is herself exquisitely uncommitted, although it is her playing of the woods sequence in
Le Boucher
on which the insecure humanity of the film is based. It remains impossible to see her as a major actress, as if Chabrol’s ultimate reticence had affected her too.