The New Biographical Dictionary of Film: Completely Updated and Expanded (21 page)

Autry worked as a railroad telegrapher in Oklahoma, and he sang a bit. That led to some radio work, being noticed and recommended by Will Rogers. By 1934, Autry had a brief appearance, singing in
In Old Santa Fe
, a Ken Maynard film. A year later, he starred in
Tumbling Tumbleweeds
, and by 1937 he figured high in the boxoffice charts. His character was impeccable. He neither smoked nor drank; he was meticulous with the ladies—if you discount the singing; and he was white hat through and through. He had a horse named Champion and a sidekick, Smiley Burnette. He also had a home studio that loved him—Republic—where he was a money machine until 1942, when he went into Air Transport Command.

Len Slye had come to California in 1930 to pick fruit. He reflected that his name was not a plus, became “Dick Weston” and joined a singing group called Sons of the Pioneers. He entered radio and made a number of films in the late thirties, sometimes in support of Autry. So when Autry went patriotic, Roy jumped in behind him. At this distance in time, it’s unclear why he didn’t serve his country—maybe his feet were as flat as his singing vowels. But Rogers was an Autry duplicate. His sidekick was Gabby Hayes. His horse was Trigger. He had only one innovation—a girl, Dale Evans, who became his second wife in 1947.

Roy held strong at Republic, but Gene found room after the war at Columbia, and they both kept going until the early 1950s. Roy even had a TV show that ran from 1951 to 1957. It’s not really to the point to list any—let alone all—of their titles, though Roy occasionally appeared in bigger films—with Bob Hope and Jane Russell, for instance, in
Son of Paleface
(52, Frank Tashlin). That’s the one where Bob goes to bed with Trigger!

Autry was a very good businessman, who made far more money in local radio and television stations than he had done in movies. Indeed, it was enough to support his ownership of the California Angels baseball team. Roy’s métier was ranching, rodeo shows, thoroughbreds, and real estate.

They are without intrinsic screen interest now, I fear, but as examples of how a certain benign image of the cowboy became translated into Western lifestyles and politics (think of Barry Goldwater), they are fascinating. You can see them both blushing at that very notion.

John G. Avildsen
, b. Chicago, 1936
1968:
Okay Bill
(s). 1969:
Turn on to Love
(s);
Sweet Dreams
(s). 1970:
Guess What We Learned in School Today?; Joe
. 1971:
Cry Uncle
. 1972:
The Stoolie
. 1973:
Save the Tiger
. 1975:
W.W. and the Dixie Dancekings; Foreplay
. 1976:
Rocky
. 1978:
Slow Dancing in the Big City
. 1980:
The Formula
. 1981:
Neighbors
. 1983:
A Night in Heaven
. 1984:
The Karate Kid
. 1986:
The Karate Kid II
. 1987:
Happy New Year
. 1988:
For Keeps; Guardian Angels; Lean on Me
. 1989:
The Karate Kid III
. 1990:
Rocky V: The Final Bell
. 1992:
The Power of One
. 1994:
8 Seconds
. 1998:
A Fine and Private Place
. 1999:
Inferno
.

Avildsen worked as an assistant director and as a cameraman, and he had credits on
Mickey One
(65, Arthur Penn),
Hurry Sundown
(67, Otto Preminger), and
Out of It
(69, Paul Williams), before he made his own breakthrough with
Joe
, in which Peter Boyle played a blue-collar bigot. Since then, Avildsen has handled a best picture Oscar-winner (
Rocky
) and brought a trio of
Karate Kids
to fruition without demonstrating an atom of character. Far more interesting are the truly scabrous
Save the Tiger
and
Neighbors
, which was a decent shot at the delirious narrative spiral of Thomas Berger’s novel.

George Axelrod
, (1922–2003), b. New York
It was more entertaining to hear Axelrod talking about his work than to see it. As a raconteur, his glimpses of show business were smart, indiscreet, and funnier than the rather cautious smartness of his films. But Axelrod was a very good representative of the continuing influence on Hollywood of Broadway’s fast repartee, decorative snideness, and skillful construction. His humor is too knowing, cold, and too much based on the lewd sneer to rival the work of Garson Kanin. Axelrod is indelibly associated with Marilyn Monroe, on account of his writing on
Bus Stop
(56, Joshua Logan) and
The Seven Year Itch
(55, Billy Wilder) and because of his reminiscences of her since her death. In both films she is a sexual object, unaware of the effect she has on other people. The innocence was never really convincing or wholesome, but was set up to enable us all to smirk at the dumb broad. Although Axelrod did not write
Let’s Make Love
, Monroe has a line in it that might have been a reference to his style: “I got tired of being ignorant. I never knew what people were referring to.”

Axelrod was a stage manager and actor before he began writing for TV. That led to the Broadway success of his play
The Seven Year Itch
, and Hollywood invitations.
Phffft
(54, Mark Robson) was his first film, from his own story. As well as the two Monroe films, he has scripted
Breakfast at Tiffany’s
(61, Blake Edwards), a cool bowdlerization of Capote’s story;
The Manchurian Candidate
(62, John Frankenheimer), from a book written so that an idiot could film it;
Paris When It Sizzles
(63, Richard Quine);
How to Murder Your Wife
(64, Quine), an amusing use of the profession of cartoonist; he also wrote the play of
Goodbye Charlie
(64, Vincente Minnelli). In the mid-sixties, he started directing his own material: two sex-oriented comedies,
Lord Love a Duck
(66) and
The Secret Life of an American Wife
(68). The latter is a soulless thing made for Walter Matthau’s virtuosity. But
Lord Love a Duck
is his best script, helped by the inventive presence of Tuesday Weld as a blonde more sensitive than the script’s conception of her.

After several years of obscurity, he got another credit as writer on
The Lady Vanishes
(79, Anthony Page). He also cowrote
The Holcroft Covenant
(85, Frankenheimer) and got a story-adaptation credit on
The Fourth Protocol
(87, John Mackenzie).

Lew Ayres
(Lewis Ayer) (1908–96), b. Minneapolis, Minnesota
The moment in
Advise and Consent
(62, Otto Preminger) when Vice President Lew Ayres (still youthful-looking, honest, and likeable) is elevated by the death of Franchot Tone to the biggest opportunity is both touching and ironic—one of those barely visible barbs that Preminger liked to leave in his films. For Ayres’s career is sweet with youthful salad days, but bitter with public fickleness. Twice, he rose and fell; and still he remained decent and reasonable. It is not clear what special drive or ruthlessness he lacked or what led him from stardom into dreadful B pictures. But there went with it a calm that apparently enabled him to live through so much disappointment.

Although later events might make it seem implausible, he studied medicine at the University of Arizona. A versatile musician, he was spotted by Paul Bern—then at Pathé—and given a small part in
The Sophomore
(29, Leo McCarey). Bern moved to MGM and hired Ayres to play opposite Garbo in
The Kiss
(29, Jacques Feyder). On the strength of this, he was signed up by Universal to play the young soldier sickened by war in
All Quiet on the Western Front
(30, Lewis Milestone). For a few years Ayres remained at the top, only gradually undermined by his sheer boyishness:
Doorway to Hell
(30, Archie Mayo);
Common Clay
(30, Victor Fleming);
East Is West
(30, Tod Browning);
The Iron Man
(31, Browning);
The Impatient Maiden
(32, James Whale);
Night World
(32, W. S. Van Dyke);
Okay America
(32, Tay Garnett); and
State Fair
(33, Henry King). Soon after this, Universal let him go to Fox, and he found himself in B pictures. One of them,
Hearts in Bondage
(36) at Republic, he even directed himself. He worked with hectic energy, but hardly anything memorable survived until in 1938 he was put with Cukor, Grant, and Hepburn in
Holiday
, and produced a beautiful performance. MGM retrieved him and gave him some vacuously jolly parts before launching him as Dr. Kildare. With Lionel Barrymore as Dr. Gillespie and Laraine Day as his sweetheart, Ayres made nine Kildare pictures in three years and became the idol of national hypochondria. But then he chose to display in life some of the humane feelings he was most admired for onscreen: he became a conscientious objector—and suffered a fierce boycott. He did not work again until Robert Siodmak’s
The Dark Mirror
(46). He was good in
The Unfaithful
(47, Vincent Sherman) and a doctor again for
Johnny Belinda
(48, Jean Negulesco). But after
The Capture
(49, John Sturges),
New Mexico
(50, Irving Reis), and
No Escape
(53, Charles Bennett), he retired to make a personal, religious documentary,
Altars of the East
. There was another interval before Preminger recalled him to the highest office, after which he made only
The Carpetbaggers
(64, Edward Dmytryk);
Battlestar: Galactica
(79, Richard A. Colla);
Letters from Frank
(79, Edward Parone);
Salem’s Lot
(79, Tobe Hooper);
Of Mice and Men
(81, Reza Badiyi);
Under Siege
(86, Roger Young); and
Cast the First Stone
(89, John Korty).

B

Hector Babenco
, b. Buenos Aires, Argentina, 1946
1975:
King of the Night
. 1978:
Lucio Flavio
. 1981:
Pixote
. 1985:
Kiss of the Spider Woman
. 1987:
Ironweed
. 1991:
At Play in the Fields of the Lord
. 1998:
Corazón Iluminado/Foolish Heart
. 2003:
Carandiru
. 2007:
El Pasado
.

Babenco is an idealist, possessed of a vivid documentary eye. As such, he was an important cultural figure in Brazil in the seventies—
Lucio Flavio
was the story of a real man, a criminal, who promised to tell stories about death squads run by the police. The film was hugely controversial, and Babenco’s life was threatened.
Pixote
was a gruesome study of the homeless children in Brazil, much of it improvised from research Babenco had done with authentic street children.
Pixote
is like de Sica cut with Céline, and it is all the tougher to watch in that there seems so little scope for optimism left.

This achievement led Babenco beyond his natural range—I suggest.
Kiss of the Spider Woman
won great acclaim. It played on the international art-house circuit, and William Hurt’s faded-flower performance won an Oscar. But
Spider Woman
is not really true to Manuel Puig, and it introduces a fatal strain of melodrama. For, in truth, Babenco is not a sophisticated storyteller. Similarly, given William Kennedy’s
Ironweed
, he went for exactly the wrong starry cast and blurred the implacable firmness in Kennedy’s book. The reality was gone, replaced by so much fussy, earnest attempt.
At Play in the Fields of the Lord
was all the more misguided, ponderously long, and placid in its human story.

So where does an Argentinian director go? Babenco’s parents were Russian and Polish Jews. He traveled for much of the sixties, and went to Brazil originally as a visitor. Clearly, he was never “at home” doing American films, and he is not likely to get more offers from there. Can he go back to Brazil? Can he be Brazilian? Or is he at risk of being a wandering, universal poet of the outcast?

Lauren Bacall
(Betty Joan Perske), b. New York, 1924
Her parents divorced when she was six years old and she was raised by her German-Rumanian mother. She was educated at the Julia Richman High School and studied dancing for thirteen years. While still at school, she modeled and played truant to watch Bette Davis films. She was briefly at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts, and in 1942 made her Broadway debut in
January 2 × 4
. That and her next play were flops, and it was only when she appeared on the cover of
Harper’s Bazaar
in March 1943 that Howard Hawks’s wife recommended her to Hawks. He put her under a seven-year contract, perhaps showed her Ann Sheridan in
Torrid Zone
, and cast her opposite Humphrey Bogart in
To Have and Have Not
(44). Her Slim in that picture (named after Mrs. Hawks) was an outrageous reversal of the meek ingenue, instructing the master in whistling and watching everyone as if she had been up all night writing the script. Only nineteen years old, she stole that film, turned it from an adventure to a love story and captivated Bogart. Warners called her “The Look” and she was a publicity phenomenon for a season. Warners worked her hard:
Confidential Agent
(45, Herman Shumlin); magnificent again in set pieces with her new husband, Bogart, in
The Big Sleep
(46, Hawks);
Dark Passage
(47, Delmer Daves);
Key Largo
(48, John Huston);
Young Man With a Horn
(50, Michael Curtiz); and
Bright Leaf
(50, Curtiz). Hawks had sold his interest in her to Warners, and she was constantly in trouble, being suspended twelve times for refusing parts. But she made
How to Marry a Millionaire
(53, Jean Negulesco) and
Blood Alley
(55, William Wellman). At last she bought her freedom and enjoyed better parts in Minnelli’s
The Cobweb
(56), Sirk’s
Written on the Wind
(56), and Minnelli’s
Designing Woman
(57) without ever rekindling her earlier uniqueness. Indeed, the Sirk movie gave the straight role to her and the flashy one to Dorothy Malone, a cute sideshow only in
The Big Sleep
. After Bogart died, she seemed disenchanted with Hollywood. In 1961, she married Jason Robards Jr. (divorced in 1969) and made
Shock Treatment
(64, Denis Sanders),
Sex and the Single Girl
(64, Richard Quine), and
Harper
(66, Jack Smight). Meanwhile, in 1959 she returned to Broadway in
Goodbye Charlie
and achieved great success in 1965 in
Cactus Flower
and then, in 1970, in
Applause
(a musical version of
All About Eve
, in which she took the Bette Davis part).
Murder on the Orient Express
(74, Sidney Lumet) was her first film in eight years.