The New Biographical Dictionary of Film: Completely Updated and Expanded (259 page)

Their father, Antoine, had a photographic firm that moved in 1871 from Besançon to Lyons, and which they joined when they were old enough. Louis was a trained physicist, while Auguste managed the business. During the 1880s and early 1890s, Louis had a hand in several refinements of the still photographic process, but it was only in 1893, on the retirement of Antoine, that the brothers set themselves to produce moving film. Their most important patents concerned the engineering by which the film strip could be made to pass through the camera and projector. History recognizes their original use of sprocket holes in the film strip with a mechanical claw to pull the film through the gate. They used a single machine as camera and projector and called it the cinématographe. During 1895 they demonstrated this machine to scientific societies and then, on December 28, in the Grand Café, Boulevard des Capucines, they showed films to the public on a screen and charged for admission.

In 1896, the exhibition went on a tour that included London and New York. There was no question about the impact: although some spectators ran fearfully away from
L’Arrivée d’un Train
, they came back for more, hustled out of bourgeois complacency into a half-panicked, half-tickled inspection of themselves. Used to the frozen mirror of stills, people began to see for the first time how they walked, smiled, and gestured, how they looked from the back, and how other people watched them. Introspection and exhibitionism were thus simultaneously stimulated by the cinématographe.

But the scientific preoccupation of Louis and the questionable acumen of Auguste were not distracted by success. There is a story that Georges Méliès, dazzled by what those modest beginnings might lead to, begged to be allowed to buy the invention. Witless innovators, the Lumières insisted on saving him from his own recklessness and assured him that the cinématographe had no commercial future. That decision meant that the Lumières were out of cinema history as soon as they had inaugurated it. But the crassness is remembered affectionately, partly because we adhere to landmarks, but also because the Lumière movies have not dated. When, in
Contempt
, Jean-Luc Godard has a sequence in a screening room, he prints Lumière’s finality beneath the screen—“The cinema is an invention without any future”—but fondly and in the knowledge that images sometimes speak more eloquently than words.

The Lumières used their camera in the way domestic customers employed still cameras: to keep a reference to the life around them. They did little more than record those fragments of the everyday that were too much for a still: workers coming out of a factory; a train entering the station; a baby being fed by its parents. Many of those fragments last only seconds and consist of single fixed shots. But the Lumières’ films now lead to crucial insights: that train is frightening because it comes toward the camera, thereby involving it in the action; the sunlight that they needed is not physically warm but emotionally mellow; the people being filmed are already recognizing the need to address themselves to the camera, to organize themselves so that they may be more plausible and convincing—they sense the need to act themselves; and the camera is far enough away to cover all the action. Too often, the history books have seen that as a limitation, compared with D. W. Griffith’s introduction of different shots from varying angles to produce a narrative. In fact, the meal table in
Le Déjeuner de Bébé
needs to be embraced in a single shot to convey the community of the family and the charm of the occasion. The violent meals of
The Miracle Worker
conform to the same principle.

But the Lumières went a little further. In
L’Arroseur Arrosé
, a single setup recorded a naïve prank involving a garden hose. That incident looks forward to comedy—slapstick and sophisticated—not just in the visual fun, but because the audience is made to anticipate the moment when the joker falls victim to his own trick and is soaked. That brief, flickering, sunny game of
L’Arroseur Arrosé
involves us in a process that leads directly to the way in which for over thirty minutes
The Godfather
schools us for Michael Corleone killing two men as they eat in an Italian restaurant. Anticipation was born, and we were accomplices in the action.

Ida Lupino
(1918–95), b. Brixton, London
1950:
Outrage; Never Fear
. 1951:
Hard, Fast and Beautiful
. 1953:
The Bigamist; The Hitchhiker
. 1966:
The Trouble with Angels
.

Ida Lupino had not worked in fifteen years. Nor did she seem inclined to come out for tributes. Surely she had been invited. For she was a woman director of real personality; her pictures are as tough and quick as those of Samuel Fuller. She was a pioneer for women, especially because she carved out her own territory instead of just waiting to be asked. But her own movies should not obscure Ida Lupino the actress. She knew how to play routine roles and play them well. But there are a few occasions when she had an out-of-the-ordinary part, and then she was riveting.

For instance, when her character turns nasty and crazy in
They Drive By Night
(40, Raoul Walsh), there is nothing to do but sit back and watch an astonishing emotional explosion. In
The Hard Way
(42, Vincent Sherman), as the strong sister driving Joan Leslie into show business, she senses a movie unknown to the other players. She is a demon, so forceful we have to realize how often in her career she kept the brakes on. In the first few scenes of
Road House
(48, Jean Negulesco), we could be meeting a woman from Jim Thompson—burned, dangerous, impatient, and pitiless. But then she sees that she has only a dud script and plain guys to work with. She decides to behave and the film goes downhill. “If only,” you say so often with Ida Lupino. If only she and Gloria Grahame could have played wicked sisters—they looked alike, and they were both too odd for placid movies.

The daughter of comedian Stanley Lupino, she added to her family’s vaudeville heritage a formal training at RADA. She was on the fringe of the British film industry when the visiting Allan Dwan gave her a small part in
Her First Affaire
(33). She made several more films and Paramount signed her up (she was still only fifteen) with the idea of her playing Alice in Wonderland. That fell through, but she appeared in
Come On, Marines!
(34, Henry Hathaway);
Paris in Spring
(35, Lewis Milestone);
Smart Girl
(35, Aubrey Scottio);
Peter Ibbetson
(35, Hathaway); and
Anything Goes
(36, Milestone). Her career faltered, picked up with
The Gay Desperado
(36, Rouben Mamoulian), but lapsed again with
Sea Devils
(37, Ben Stoloff) and
Artists and Models
(37, Walsh). She was even out of work for some time, but returned with
The Lone Wolf Spy Hunt
(39, Peter Godfrey),
The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes
(39, Alfred Werker), and
The Light that Failed
(39, William Wellman).

Warners then signed her as the mollish interest for gangster films and she flourished in
They Drive by Night
and
High Sierra
(41, Walsh) as well as the Jack London–based
The Sea Wolf
(41, Michael Curtiz). A variety of good, tough parts followed in which she seemed more worldly-wise than her age might have suggested:
Out of the Fog
(41, Anatole Litvak);
Ladies in Retirement
(41, Charles Vidor);
Moontide
(42, Archie Mayo);
The Hard Way; Forever and a Day
(43, Frank Lloyd et al.);
In Our Time
(44, Sherman);
Devotion
(46, Curtis Bernhardt), playing Emily Brontë;
The Man I Love
(46, Walsh), with its great opening, and then the sentimental camp of
Deep Valley
(47, Negulesco);
Escape Me Never
(47, Peter Godfrey); and
Road House
, in which she credibly stills the assembly with a husky performance of several songs. Her delivery was randy and bossy, and in Hemingway’s
Across the River and Into the Trees
his Italian heroine had copied Lupino’s way of talking.

Finished with Warners, and with her first husband, actor Louis Hayward, she married the Columbia executive Collier Young, and turned to writing, directing, and producing. She produced
Not Wanted
(49, Elmer Clifton), and directed
Never Fear
and
Outrage
, two minor but interesting films. She played the blind woman in Nicholas Ray’s
On Dangerous Ground
(51) and reportedly did some directing while Ray was ill. As an actress, she worked in
Woman in Hiding
(49, Michael Gordon);
Beware, My Lovely
(52, Harry Horner);
Private Hell 36
(54, Don Siegel);
The Big Knife
(55, Robert Aldrich);
Women’s Prison
(55, Lewis Seiler);
While the City Sleeps
(56, Fritz Lang); and
Strange Intruder
(56, Irving Rapper).

She proved herself a competent director of second features, and an early discoverer of feminist themes. Thus
The Bigamist
is not just melodrama, but a critique of woman’s vulnerability. Married again, this time to actor Howard Duff, she turned to TV but directed again, in 1966,
The Trouble with Angels
—which gathered together Rosalind Russell, Hayley Mills, and Gypsy Rose Lee in a convent, showing that idiosyncrasy was not dead yet. She directed for TV, and was outstanding as a man’s woman fed up with the man in
Junior Bonner
(72, Sam Peckinpah). She also appeared in
The Devil’s Rain
(75, Robert Fuest);
The Food of the Gods
(76, Bert I. Gordon); and
My Boys Are Good Boys
(78, Bethel Buckalew).

David Lynch
, b. Missoula, Montana, 1946
1970:
The Grandmother
(s). 1977:
Eraserhead
. 1980:
The Elephant Man
. 1984:
Dune
. 1986:
Blue Velvet
. 1990–91:
Twin Peaks
(TV). 1990:
Wild at Heart; Industrial Symphony #1
(TV). 1992:
Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me
. 1993:
Hotel Room
(TV). 1997:
Lost Highway
. 1999:
The Straight Story
. 2001:
Mulholland Dr
. 2006:
Inland Empire
.

It was in 1986, as film critic for
California
magazine, that I saw
Blue Velvet
, alone, in the theatre of what was then Dino de Laurentiis’s D.E.G. building on Wilshire Boulevard in Los Angeles. The occasion stood as the last moment of transcendence I had felt at the movies—until
The Piano
. What I mean by that is a kind of passionate involvement with both the story and the making of a film, so that I was simultaneously moved by the enactment on screen and by discovering that a new director had made the medium alive and dangerous again. I was the more captivated in that I had not much liked David Lynch’s earlier work.

My passion is the more mysterious now because Lynch’s later work seemed horribly disappointing and jaded. Thus, for the moment, at least,
Blue Velvet
represents the precarious difficulty in making—or seeing (in the sense of recognizing)—great films. Had I blundered into comprehension, or had Lynch drifted into clarity? Did I need a great movie experience in 1986 as much as Lynch, or more? Having made
Blue Velvet
, did he need to turn his back on the challenging prospect of fusing art and box office? I ask that because the career of David Lynch seems so intertwined with his foxy sense of himself. At least, it does if one assumes that Lynch understood what he was doing in
Blue Velvet
. In conversation, he makes every effort to be nonchalant or dismissive of that burden. Why not? It would be as hard to advance on
Blue Velvet
as it must have been to work after
Citizen Kane
.

Lynch was the son of a research scientist with the U.S. Department of Agriculture: the family traveled a good deal and that fostered Lynch’s love of middle America. By high school, however, they were in Alexandria, Virginia, so Lynch took art classes at Washington’s Corcoran School of Art. He then studied painting at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts and at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in Philadelphia in the late sixties. He even won a three-year scholarship to Europe, which he quit after fifteen days.

He made a one-minute animated film for a contest while in Philadelphia, and that led him to the American Film Institute, where he made
The Grandmother
and began
Eraserhead
. He continues to do some work as a painter, just as, since
Blue Velvet
, he has had a TV partnership with Mark Frost for the
Twin Peaks
venture and for the Fox show
American Chronicles
. In 1992, another series,
On the Air
, had a limited network run; and in 1993 Lynch was involved on
Hotel Room
, a series for HBO. In addition, he has made some television commercials, notably a series for Calvin Klein’s Obsession.

It remains natural, I think, to wonder what Lynch wants.
Eraserhead
was not just a student film, but as private as any solitary art, like writing or painting. It seemed to indicate someone who saw his future in experimental cinema. Yet
The Elephant Man
and
Dune
were attempts at mainstream movies, no matter how personal or obscure they ended up.
The Elephant Man
was a prestigious stage play; it had Mel Brooks as a father figure, as well as a solid cast and properly focused pathos. John Hurt’s hero was exactly that, whereas nothing in
Eraserhead
acknowledges the function of heroism.
Dune
was a de Laurentiis sci-fi epic, taken from Frank Herbert. It cost, and lost, a lot of money. It is often brilliant, but frequently ponderous and unintelligible. Some observers marveled that Dino had let it happen.