The New Biographical Dictionary of Film: Completely Updated and Expanded (237 page)

He graduated from Syracuse University and he made it nearly a point of pride that he was giving himself to the theatre: He played a young Shakespeare in
A Cry of Players
, and he won Tonys in Edward Albee’s
Seascape
, Turgenev’s
Fortune’s Fool
, and Peter Morgan’s
Frost/Nixon
. He was also nominated for his 1977
Dracula
in the famous production designed by Edward Gorey. His other notable parts include Scrooge in
A Christmas Carol
and More in
A Man for All Seasons
.

He made his movie debut in less than sympathetic parts: as the very cold lover in
Diary of a Mad Housewife
(70, Frank Perry);
The Twelve Chairs
(70, Mel Brooks). He was the husband in
The Deadly Trap
(71, René Clément); helpless against Mitchum in
The Wrath of God
(72, Ralph Nelson); doing the thing never done before or since, making a hash of
The Mark of Zorro
(74, Don McDougall).

Then, against his better judgement, he did the film of
Dracula
(79, John Badham). It was agreed he was sexy, but cold, and upstaged by Olivier. Thereafter, he worked intermittently:
Sherlock Holmes
(81, Peter Hunt) for TV;
Sphinx
(81, Franklin J. Schaffner); as a dire villain in
Masters of the Universe
(87, Gary Goddard);
And God Created Woman
(87, Roger Vadim);
True Identity
(91, Charles Lane). It would be hard to assemble a worse bunch of films, but Langella kept trying:
1492: Conquest of Paradise
(92, Ridley Scott);
Body of Evidence
(93, Uli Edel); as the Chief of Staff in
Dave
(93, Ivan Reitman);
Brainscan
(94, John Flynn);
Doomsday Gun
(94, Robert Young);
Junior
(94, Reitman);
Cutthroat Island
(95, Renny Harlin);
Eddie
(96, Steve Rash)—with Whoopi Goldberg, who helped end Langella’s marriage.

A turn seemed to open up, and his great voice was revealed in his Clare Quilty in the remake of
Lolita
(97, Adrian Lyne);
The Ninth Gate
(99, Roman Polanski);
Sweet November
(01, Pat O’Connor);
House of D
(04, David Duchovny);
Back in the Day
(05, James Hunter). And then, out of nowhere, he played William S. Paley in
Good Night, and Good Luck
(05, George Clooney)—he was not like Paley, but he was like what Paley wanted to be, and the result was brilliant.

He was Perry White in
Superman Returns
(06, Bryan Singer); and then the elderly novelist in the superb
Starting Out in the Evening
(07, Andrew Wagner)—his best film work so far.
Frost/Nixon
followed, with a ton of praise and nominations. Since then, he has been Arlington Steward, magnificent, despite the very silly
The Box
(09, Richard Kelly).

Henri Langlois
(1914–77), b. Smyrna, Turkey
Towards the end of his life, there were young, trained archivists who said that, well, of course, Henri Langlois was all very well, but he was chronically untidy, unsystematic, and so passionate that he was not above or beyond sometimes losing or inadvertently destroying some of the very things he treasured. People consumed with passion are not reliable, are they? Henri Langlois, they said, was his own worst enemy, and helplessly old-fashioned. In 1968, the famous attempt to remove Langlois from what was his Cinémathèque owed a great deal to clerical and bureaucratic squeamishness at his methods, and to the matter-of-fact observation that, after all, the Cinémathèque belonged to the nation.

Very well; there is some truth in the argument. But, just to take ownership as an issue, it is the case that one day in 1945 Langlois called upon Pierre Braunberger, a fine man and a good producer, Renoir’s producer sometimes in the thirties, but Jewish and hounded during the war, and gave Braunberger a thing he thought was lost forever—the negative of Renoir’s
Partie de Campagne
. One way or another, during German occupation, Langlois had saved those cans—and kept that film alive. He handed it over and asked for nothing in return (except a print for the Cinémathèque, perhaps).

And how many times could that story be multiplied?

Langlois was born in Smyrna because his father was a journalist posted there, as well as someone involved in a variety of export-import deals. His mother was of Italian descent, but from a family that had gone to America in the middle of the nineteenth century and then returned. It was only in 1922 that Henri was taken by his family to France, and to Paris.

He was in his early teens when sound transformed the medium he loved already, and emotionally he seems to have been especially saddened by the way in which a whole range of films, and often their stars, effectively disappeared with the new rage for sound. He wanted to hold on to them. He frequented the few Parisian cinemas that kept an allegiance to silent pictures. And he began to develop the notion that anyone’s pleasure in the dark depended on cans of “stuff,” awkward, unmanageable snakes of it, all on the dangerous and unstable nitrate stock, and all of it so easily junked for the prospect of reclaiming the silver that made film alive.

Langlois never passed his baccalaureate examination. It is said that he got a zero on a paper where instead of writing about Molière, he tried to argue that Chaplin was superior. So he passed into the world unqualified. He went to work at a printing shop, and that’s how he met Georges Franju. Together, the two young men formed a Cercle du Cinéma, a club for enthusiasts, a place for showing rare movies. From that group there grew the idea of a Cinémathèque—an organization formed to collect, preserve, and show the great films of history. It was always Langlois’s sense that they must preserve everything. He had his own strong tastes, but he was curiously open to a contrary idea—that at any given moment you couldn’t be sure what would seem great later.

The Cinémathèque was founded in 1935, by Langlois and Franju, on a donation of 10,000 francs from Paul-Auguste Harle, publisher of a French film trade weekly. The first prints they bought were
The Fall of the House of Usher
(28, Jean Epstein) and
The Birth of a Nation
(15, D. W. Griffith). They soon persuaded Alexandre Kamenka, a producer of avant-garde films, to deposit his collection with their Cinémathèque. And so they needed somewhere to put the stuff. Franju was friendly with Georges Méliès, the pioneer, who was living in a retirement home. Close to that establishment was a building for rent. They leased it, and Méliès became the first caretaker of a collection that included many of his own films.

It was not Langlois’s choice to specialize, yet at the same time he was very ready to identify masters—often people in neglect, like Louis Feuillade, von Stroheim, Stiller, Sjöström, and Americans, too—Langlois was one of the first to see and crave more of the genius of Howard Hawks.

He also made moves to internationalize the archive movement by making friendships with Olwen Vaughan, at the British Film Institute in London, and with Iris Barry from the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Indeed, he cultivated a circle of women in love with film, and in Paris he employed Lotte Eisner (a refugee from Nazism), Mary Meerson (widow of the great art director Lazare Meerson), and Marie Epstein, sister to Jean.

War was the test, and the great victory, in Langlois’s approach. For he maintained what he had—sometimes lodging films with friends in the country; moving them around; keeping track, without written records—and also added to it. Richard Roud’s fine book on Langlois,
A Passion for Films
, adds this extra (something surely worthy of a movie): that Langlois found a fellow enthusiast on the German staff in Paris, Major Frank Hensel, who was secretly drawn into aiding and protecting the Cinémathèque. Shortly after the liberation of Paris, Langlois mounted a season of American films, most of which had been barred for the Nazi years:
Modern Times
(36, Chaplin);
Gone With the Wind
(39, Victor Fleming);
Goin’ to Town
(35, Alexander Hall);
Each Dawn I Die
(39, William Keighley);
Abe Lincoln in Illinois
(40, John Cromwell);
Our Town
(40, Sam Wood); and
Young Mr. Lincoln
(39, John Ford).

After the war, on the Avenue de Messine, Langlois began his unique programmed shows—three screenings in an evening, with the films made to compare and contrast, sometimes to follow a career. And it was there that, by around 1950, Langlois had attracted the greatest film society we have ever known (though maybe some of the Hollywood screening rooms of the golden age could rival it): André Bazin, Alexandre Astruc, Roger Leenhardt, Truffaut, Godard, Rohmer, Chabrol, Rivette, Chris Marker … and so on.
Cahiers du Cinéma
was not the publication of the Cinémathèque, but it was the yellow-covered clarion of that generation. To this day, there has never been a band of opinion makers who were so often right. It is the moment at which the history of film as a whole begins to be felt and described, and it would not have been possible without Langlois.

Thus, in 1968, when André Malraux, the minister of culture, attempted to oust Langlois and make his administration more modern, that generation rallied to the assistance of the great man. The French government caved in—which did not mean that Langlois by then was other than an autocrat, a muddle, and a man who could hardly recall where he had put everything. But he was an international figure, and he was involved in plans for an American Cinémathèque. In 1973, he received an honorary Oscar.

Of course, he died on the eve of video and before computerization had taken over so many archival processes. But we knew how much of the heritage of movies had been lost already, and we had the French example to inspire a generation of passionate archivists all over the world (it has embraced Enno Patalas, Bob Gitt, and David Meeker as well as Tom Luddy, William K. Everson, and David Packard—in short, anyone crazy about film and taking care of it).

Not that Langlois ever believed that films should be kept and not shown. He believed that the film stock needed to be exercised—to be run. No matter the hours and years he spent over cans, repairing sprocket holes, wiping off nitrate “sweat,” he knew that the real life was on the screen, in the act of projection, with audiences. He loved everything film had done, which included silents, nitrate stock, Technicolor, and real manual projection. He would have seen the drabness and the usefulness in video, the loss of life, and I suspect he would have decried the loss of light in so much modern filmmaking.

But, of course, today, without any credentials, he would never be employed. The only chance he ever had of getting in on the archive game was by inventing it—and by treating it as a matter of life and death.

And so, the rest of us face this riddle: in all he did to preserve and show, was he forward-looking, or reactionary? In other words, is Henri Langlois’s medium, the cinema, alive still, or is it to be found only in the archives he inspired—projected in perfect prints, with carbon-arc light, seen and felt as what one of his customers, Jean-Paul Sartre, once called “the frenzy on the wall”? However you answer, remember the great, shabby, untidy figure of Langlois, who might be walking around with
Eldorado
in his deep pockets—the Marcel L’Herbier version, from 1922, in one pocket, the later Hawks version in the other.

Angela Lansbury
, b. London, 1925
Actress Angela Lansbury is the granddaughter of George Lansbury, onetime leader of the British Labour Party, and daughter of the mayor of Poplar. In fact, entertainment ran more strongly in her family than politics, and early in the war she was evacuated to Los Angeles, there to continue drama training. In 1944, after a screen test, she made her debut as the sly maid in George Cukor’s
Gaslight
.

It was the start of a career as a supporting actress in which, pouting at the thought that she was not pretty enough to be a lead, she stole film after film from their advertised stars. Malicious, witty, fractious, bitchy, and highly attractive, she is a constant delight, and it is a sadness that Cukor or Minnelli never made more of her. She was very hardworking, and this list can only note some favorite moments: as the singer in Albert Lewin’s
The Picture of Dorian Gray
(45); in George Sidney’s
The Harvey Girls
(45); singing “How’d You Like to Spoon With Me?” in
Till the Clouds Roll By
(46, Richard Whorf); in Capra’s
State of the Union
(48); as an extravagant princess in
The Three Musketeers
(48, Sidney);
The Red Danube
(49, Sidney); as a Philistine in
Samson and Delilah
(49, Cecil B. De Mille); contemplating Danny Kaye in
The Court Jester
(55, Melvin Frank and Norman Panama); with Tony Curtis in
The Purple Mask
(55, Bruce Humberstone); with Randolph Scott in
A Lawless Street
(55, Joseph H. Lewis); regaling Orson Welles in
The Long Hot Summer
(58, Martin Ritt); as an aristocratic Mama in
The Reluctant Debutante
(58, Minnelli); Australian for
Summer of the 17th Doll
(59, Leslie Norman); in Delbert Mann’s
The Dark at the Top of the Stairs
(60); in
All Fall Down
(61, John Frankenheimer); impervious, chilling, and in heat for her son as Mrs. Iselin in
The Manchurian Candidate
(62, Frankenheimer)—only three years older than her “son” Laurence Harvey, but looking more interested in life; enjoying herself in
The World of Henry Orient
(64, George Roy Hill); the selfish mother in
Harlow
(65, Gordon Douglas); acid and peremptory in
Something for Everyone
(70, Hal Prince); and scarcely able to believe the magic of
Bedknobs and Broomsticks
(71, Robert Stevenson).