The New Biographical Dictionary of Film: Completely Updated and Expanded (250 page)

She was away for a while, in recovery and rehabilitation, and she returned for
Some Girl
(98, Rory Kelly);
The Other Sister
(99, Garry Marshall);
The 4th Floor
(99, John Klausner); strenuously pregnant in
The Way of the Gun
(00, Christopher McQuarrie);
Room to Rent
(00, Khalid Al-Haggar);
Gaudi Afternoon
(00, Susan Seidelman);
My Louisiana Sky
(01, Adam Arkin) for TV;
Picture Claire
(01, Bruce McDonald);
Enough
(02, Michael Apted);
Hysterical Blindness
(02, Mira Nair);
Old School
(03, Todd Phillips); on TV in
Free for All
(03);
Cold Creek Manor
(03, Mike Figgis);
Chasing Freedom
(04, Don McBrearty);
Blueberry
(03, Jan Kounen);
Starsky & Hutch
(04, Todd Phillips).

She spends as much time as a singer now (with Scientology allegiances), and she has been a voice in video games as well as an actress still:
Daltry Calhoun
(05, Katrina Holden Bronson);
The Darwin Awards
(06, Finn Taylor);
Aurora Borealis
(06, James Burke);
Catch and Release
(07, Susannah Grant);
Whip It
(09, Drew Barrymore).

Val Lewton
(Vladimir Ivan Leventon) (1904–51), b. Yalta, Russia
There was a time when James Agee, speaking to MGM executive Dore Schary, called Val Lewton one of the three most creative men in American films. That may have been too fanciful a claim to make Schary reappraise Lewton’s place at the studio. Equally, it would be a disservice to Lewton’s achievement to regard him as more than a maverick producer, eccentric if only because he was involved personally in several movies that restored the psychological basis of the horror genre. Just as it seems likely that he brought many ideas and a general theme of withheld horror to his films, it is unlikely that he possessed the concentrated artistic ambition or the studio stamina to direct or produce more penetrating films.

The good things in Lewton productions were unexpected and against the grain of B pictures. Their visual originality lay in the oppressive use of shadow to disguise cheap sets—a device that RKO may have learned from
Citizen Kane
. The brooding fascination with morbid subjects—which seems to have been Lewton’s own contribution—is beautifully realized by that concealing cloak, but it remains B-picture philosophy, justified by the inventive handling of action devised by Jacques Tourneur, Mark Robson, and Robert Wise.

Lewton’s mother brought him to America in 1909, and he was brought up by her and his aunt, Alla Nazimova. He was a fertile writer, if slapdash. During the 1930s he published several novels, wrote news articles, and radio scripts. One of these novels,
No Bed of Her Own
, became the film
No Man of Her Own
(33, Wesley Ruggles). He worked for the MGM publicity department and from 1933–42 he was on David Selznick’s staff. That involved a variety of tasks: writing, directing some crowd scenes for
A Tale of Two Cities
with Tourneur, recommending Ingrid Bergman and
Intermezzo
to his boss, and dissuading Victor Fleming from shooting a dinner table sequence of
Gone With the Wind
with two grapefruit in line with Vivien Leigh’s breasts.

He left Selznick to join RKO as a producer and from 1942–46 he fortified the studio, the horror movie, and the reputation of the B picture. It is clear, too, that he filmed no script unless he had reworked it to his own satisfaction:
Cat People
(42, Tourneur), with Simone Simon amid a screen dark with feline images; the masterly sixty-eight-minute
I Walked With a Zombie
(43, Tourneur);
The Leopard Man
(43, Tourneur), so overtly violent that producer and director apologized for its crudeness; marvelous amends made with
The Seventh Victim
(43, Mark Robson) about a devil cult, with Jean Brooks balefully beautiful as the member who kills herself;
The Ghost Ship
(43, Robson);
The Curse of the Cat People
(44, Robert Wise and Gunther von Fritsch)—a lovely rendering of child psychology;
Youth Runs Wild
(44, Robson), an adventurous departure in subject, about teenage reaction to the war; a Maupassant translation,
Mademoiselle Fifi
(44, Wise);
Isle of the Dead
(45, Robson), with Boris Karloff;
The Body Snatcher
(45, Wise), from Robert Louis Stevenson, with Karloff as Cabman Gray; and
Bedlam
(46, Robson) based on Hogarth’s Rake in the asylum. Most of these films were shot in four weeks with variable acting. They still intrigue and frighten, because of Lewton’s originality, directorial skill, and those RKO craftsmen: photographer Nicholas Musuraca, art director Albert D’Agostino, and set decorator Darrell Silvera.

Lewton went to Paramount for one bad movie
—My Own True Love
(48, Compton Bennett)—and to MGM for another,
Please Believe Me
(50, Norman Taurog). But at Universal he was responsible for one cheap, worthwhile Western,
Apache Drums
(51, Hugo Fregonese). He died on the point of taking up a job as associate producer with Stanley Kramer.

Marcel L’Herbier
(1890–1979), b. Paris
1917:
Phantasmes
. 1918:
Rose France
. 1919:
Le Bercail; Le Carnaval des Vérités
. 1920:
L’Homme du Large
. 1921:
Prométhée Banquier; Eldorado; Villa Destin
. 1922:
Don Juan et Faust
. 1924:
L’Inhumaine
(s). 1925:
Feu Mathias Pascal
. 1927:
Le Vertige; Le Diable au Coeur
. 1928:
L’Argent
. 1930:
Nuits de Prince
. 1931:
L’Enfant d’Amour; Le Mystère de la Chambre Jaune; Le Parfum de la Dame en Noir
. 1933:
L’Epervier
. 1934:
L’Aventurier; Le Bonheur
. 1935:
Veillées d’Armes; La Route Impériale; Children’s Corner
. 1936:
Le Scandale; Les Hommes Nouveaux; La Porte du Large; Nuits de Feu
. 1937:
La Citadelle du Silence; Forfaiture
. 1938:
La Tragédie Imperiale; Adrienne Lecouvreur; Terre de Feu; Entente Cordiale
. 1939:
La Brigade Sauvage; La Mode Revée
. 1940:
La Comédie du Bonheur
. 1941:
Histoire de Rire; La Vie de Bohème
. 1942:
La Nuit Fantastique; L’Honorable Cathérine
. 1945:
Au Petit Bonheur
. 1946:
L’Affaire du Collier de la Reine
. 1947:
La Revoltée
. 1948:
Les Derniers Jours de Pompeii
. 1953:
Le Père de Mademoiselle
(codirected with Robert Paul Dagan).

L’Herbier was a Parisian intellectual and literary critic who served in the army film unit during the First World War and emerged convinced of the new art form. Thus, in the early 1920s he assembled a number of outstanding supporting talents and made some aggressively expressionist films:
Eldorado
, with its distorted images suggesting subjectivity;
L’Inhumaine
, involving architect Mallet Stevens, painter Fernand Léger, designer Alberto Cavalcanti, and composer Darius Milhaud; and
Feu Mathias Pascal
, from a Pirandello novel. Alain Resnais has talked about how far the ambition of these films now seems more valuable than their actual achievement. Within a few years, L’Herbier began making much more conventional films, and diverting his conviction about cinema’s importance into institutional channels. As well as writing several books—including
Intelligence du Cinématographe
—in 1932 he became advisor to the Comité Internationale du Cinéma d’Enseignement et de la Culture. During the Second World War, he founded IDHEC and served as president of the Cinémathèque Française. As soon as TV was active in France, he made a series of programs proclaiming and explaining cinema.

Max Linder
(Gabriel-Maximilien Leuvielle) (1883–1925), b. Caverne, France
Despite the reissue, in 1958, of a Max Linder anthology, only a fraction of this early comedian’s work is now known. What little evidence we have is muddled by assertions that Chaplin was influenced by Linder. Although Linder went to America and was reasonably successful there, he was the epitome of a French comedian. A Bordelais, he came to Paris when he was twenty-one and, after a year in theatre, he began acting in films. From 1905–07 he made some four hundred films for Pathé while starring in the Paris music hall. But after 1907, he took over from André Deed as the leading comedian at Pathé, at a steady rate of a film a week.

By 1911, he was writing and directing his own films, and the character of “Max” had emerged: remarkably restrained and adult; a diffident, handsome dandy; accident-prone but whimsical. He might have stepped out of a Feuillade serial, in evening dress, cloak, top hat, and moustache. Eschewing slapstick, his humor relied on gesture and facial reaction, and there was little of the sentimentality that American comedians resorted to. Linder was the rake, softened by a dreamy vagueness and by a fatalistic, bemused view of the frantic action around him.

In the years immediately before the First World War he was very successful in France. His output was sadly reduced during the war, when illness prevented him from enlisting. Many of his films at this period were patriotic propaganda efforts. But in 1916 he went to America to replace Chaplin at Essanay and made
Max Comes Across
(17), followed by
Max Wants a Divorce
(17), and
Max in a Taxi
(17). He returned to France and did live theatre shows for troops. But after two more films—
Le Petit Café
(19, Raymond Bernard) and
Le Feu Sacré
(20, Henri Diamant-Berger)—he went back to Hollywood and made three features:
Seven Years Bad Luck
(21),
Be My Wife
(21), and
The Three Must-Get-Theres
(22), a parody of the Douglas Fairbanks films with Linder playing “Dart-in-Again.”

But Goldwyn had declined to handle his work in America and Linder went back to France, sick and depressed. His last years were increasingly melancholy. He played in
Au Secours!
(23, Abel Gance) and in 1925 he went to Austria to make
Roi de Cirque
. That same year, he and his wife killed themselves. It is clear that Linder’s career was blocked by American interests, and this may have aggravated his nervous illness. But “Max” had always been an abstracted character, one who could never fully adapt to the world.

Richard Linklater
, b. Houston, Texas, 1960
1985:
Woodshock
(s). 1989:
It’s Impossible to Learn to Plow by Reading Books
. 1991:
Slacker
. 1993:
Dazed and Confused
. 1995:
Before Sunrise
. 1996:
subUrbia
. 1998:
The Newton Boys
. 2001:
Waking Life; Tape
. 2003:
Live from Shiva’s Dance Floor
(s);
School of Rock
. 2004:
$5.15/Hr.; Before Sunset
. 2005:
Bad News Bears
. 2006:
A Scanner Darkly; Fast Food Nation
. 2008:
Inning by Inning: A Portrait of a Coach
(d). 2009:
Me and Orson Welles
.

Richard Linklater is an intriguing spokesman for a kind of provincial cinema in America that is refreshing, just as his rather deadpan attitude to modern youth is far more candid than anything that has emerged from southern California in his time. So it’s natural enough that there should be a short about Linklater—Irshad Ashraf’s
Linklater: St. Richard of Austin
, made for Channel 4—though it’s entirely proper to remain skeptical about sainthood, or Austin. After twenty-five years of work, after all, Linklater seemed to discover a very rich subject for film in a man (named Welles) who may never have been in Austin in his life.

Linklater dropped out of Sam Houston State University, worked on an offshore oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico, and then moved to Austin, Texas, the home of the University of Texas as well as the state government, and so much the most livable city in Texas that it attracted the residence of many graduates, dropouts, and “slackers.” Linklater helped found the Austin Film Society and began to make movies about “slacker” life (or the lack thereof). These were documentary-style features about dropout life, very friendly to amateur or emerging actors, and vaguely influenced by French ideas of random association and chance meetings.

Slacker
and
Dazed and Confused
enjoyed a nice faith in going nowhere, and they threw up a number of modest talents—Milla Jovovich, Ben Affleck, Parker Posey, Matthew McConaughey and Renée Zellweger. In addition, Linklater’s timid urge to tie plots together was distinctly promising. But he branched out in odd ways
—The Newton Boys
was a real-life crime spree (it was
Slacker
meets
Bonnie and Clyde), Waking Life
was the start of rotoscope animation, and then there were
Before Sunrise
and—ten years later—
Before Sunset
. Those two have sincere fans, and they may stand as enterprising road trips for romantic slackers, with Vienna as the exotic port of call. But the films were left to their actors’ improvisation—and if Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy appealed to enough fantasies, they did little else. It seems to me that the
Before
films are painful, portentous, and a grim detour (once upon a time, Linklater had regarded Ulmer’s
Detour
as a model of cheap storytelling).

But
School of Rock
is very lively and has good work from Jack Black, Mike White, and Joan Cusack.
A Scanner Darkly
is a true exploration of Philip K. Dick in an unexpected way—the rotoscoping rocks! But why then do
Fast Food Nation
(a fairly straight filming of the Eric Schlosser book) or a tribute to a University of Texas baseball coach?