The New Biographical Dictionary of Film: Completely Updated and Expanded (273 page)

Beyond the age of seventy, Mason was at the mercy of the business—yet until the end he was capable of lovely things, especially if they called for a silken faintly malign intelligence:
Bloodline
(79, Young); the antique dealer in
Salem’s Lot
(79, Tobe Hooper);
ffolkes
(80, Andrew V. McLaglen);
A Dangerous Summer
(81, Quentin Masters);
Evil Under the Sun
(82, Guy Hamilton); as Isaac of York on TV in
Ivanhoe
(82, Douglas Camfield); as the master lawyer in
The Verdict
(82, Lumet); as
Dr. Fischer of Geneva
(83, Michael Lindsay-Hogg);
Yellowbeard
(83, Mel Damski);
The Shooting Party
(84, Alan Bridges);
A.D
. (84, Stuart Cooper); and
The Assisi Underground
(85, Alexander Ramati).

Raymond Massey
(1896–1983), b. Toronto, Canada
Originally on the English stage, Massey’s film debut was as Sherlock Holmes in
The Speckled Band
(31, Jack Raymond). Although he made efforts to remain a theatre actor, his sinister leanness, staring eyes, and creaking voice made him a natural for films. His career was very varied: as well as such staple heroes as
Abe Lincoln in Illinois
(39, John Cromwell) and Dr. Gillespie to Richard Chamberlain’s Kildare on TV in the early 1960s, he was a notable villain. But he was best as an ambiguous figure, a smiling threat or a calm tyrant:
The Woman in the Window
(44, Fritz Lang);
The Fountainhead
(49, King Vidor);
East of Eden
(55, Elia Kazan); and
The Naked and the Dead
(58, Raoul Walsh).

Those may be his most striking performances, but there is a long list of good supporting work, with the occasional lead:
The Face at the Window
(32, Leslie Hiscott);
The Old Dark House
(32, James Whale); Chauvelin in
The Scarlet Pimpernel
(34, Harold Young);
Things to Come
(36, William Cameron Menzies);
Fire Over England
(37, William K. Howard); as Michael in
The Prisoner of Zenda
(37, Cromwell);
Dreaming Lips
(37, Paul Czinner);
Under the Red Robe
(37, Victor Sjostrom);
The Hurricane
(37, John Ford);
Black Limelight
(38, Paul L. Stein);
The Drum
(38, Zoltan Korda); as John Brown in
Santa Fe Trail
(40, Michael Curtiz);
49th Parallel
(41, Michael Powell);
Dangerously They Live
(41, Robert Florey);
Desperate Journey
(42, Raoul Walsh);
Reap the Wild Wind
(42, Cecil B. De Mille);
Action in the North Atlantic
(43, Lloyd Bacon);
Arsenic and Old Lace
(44, Frank Capra);
God Is My Co-Pilot
(45, Florey);
Hotel Berlin
(45, Peter Godfrey);
A Matter of Life and Death
(46, Powell);
Possessed
(47, Curtis Bernhardt);
Mourning Becomes Electra
(47, Dudley Nichols);
Roseanna McCoy
(49, Irving Reis);
Chain Lightning
(50, Stuart Heisler);
Dallas
(50, Heisler);
Come Fill the Cup
(51, Gordon Douglas);
Carson City
(52, André de Toth);
The Desert Song
(52, Bruce Humberstone);
Prince of Players
(55, Philip Dunne);
Battle Cry
(55, Walsh); as John Brown again in
Seven Angry Men
(55, Charles Marquis Warren);
Omar Khayyam
(57, William Dieterle);
The Great Imposter
(60, Robert Mulligan);
The Queen’s Guards
(61, Powell);
The Fiercest Heart
(61, George Sherman); and
MacKenna’s Gold
(69, J. Lee Thompson).

Marcello Mastroianni
(1923–96), b. Fontana Liri, Italy
Melancholy and postcoital disenchantment shine in Mastroianni’s eyes. Alexander Walker has analyzed his mixture of advertised sex appeal and actual apathy verging on impotence. Whether at the hands of Sophia Loren in the Italian sex comedies, disparaged by Jeanne Moreau in
La Notte
(61, Michelangelo Antonioni), or dismissed by Ursula Andress in
The Tenth Victim
(65, Elio Petri), Mastroianni cannot credit sexual satisfaction. Is it possible, then, that he appeals to women because he is partly gelded by satiation? Or is his inertia a goad to women, to provoke their amorousness?

Whatever the answer, Mastroianni is clearly appreciative of a world of sexuality so permissive that it has begun to invent psychic contortions: in his case, the limp male—“What makes up for his deficiency,” writes Walker, “is the wishful thinking of his mass public, in the main female and romantic, which is attracted by the sight of him as a suitable case for their care and at the same time aroused by the thought of him with all his powers restored.” Mastroianni has certainly had an international appeal, but he has seldom ventured outside Italy to work. Perhaps he fits best in the matriarchal, Catholic conception of male sexuality.

Nor, in fact, was he an immediate star. During a distinguished stage career, he entered films in 1947
—I Miserabili
(Riccardo Freda)—and worked steadily through the 1950s:
Domenica d’Agosto
(50, Luciano Emmer);
Parigi e Sempre Parigi
(51, Emmer);
Le Ragazze di Piazza di Spagna
(52, Emmer);
Tempi Nostri
(54, Alessandro Blasetti);
Peccato che Sia una Canaglia
(54, Blasetti);
Cronache di Poveri Amanti
(54, Carlo Lizzani);
Giorni d’Amore
(54, Giuseppe de Santis);
Il Bigamo
(56, Emmer);
Padre e Figli
(57, Mario Monicelli); as the wistful suitor in
White Nights
(57, Luchino Visconti);
La Loi
(58, Jules Dassin);
I Soliti Ignoti
(58, Monicelli); and
Racconti d’Estate
(58, Gianni Francolini).

His reputation was enlarged when Fellini cast him as the center that does not hold amid the dissoluteness of
La Dolce Vita
(59), unsatisfied with and not satisfying fiancée, mistress, the fountain statue Anita Ekberg, or his own vapid conscience. In the 1960s, Mastroianni was in high demand, and his passivity should not disguise the variety and humor of his playing: as the near impotent husband in
Il Bell’-Antonio
(60, Mauro Bolognini);
Adua e le Compagne
(60, Antonio Pietrangeli); in
La Notte
scuffling with his wife in a bunker as another unpromising dawn leaks from the night; as the harassed suspect in
L’Assassino
(61, Petri); as an effete Sicilian in
Divorce, Italian Style
(61, Pietro Germi); the perplexed support to Bardot in
Vie Privée
(62, Louis Malle);
Cronaca Familiare
(62, Valerio Zurlini); as the bemused director in
8½
(63, Federico Fellini); as the professor in
I Compagni
(63, Monicelli); endlessly stuffing his wife with babies in
Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow
(63, Vittorio de Sica); reluctant to marry Loren in
Marriage, Italian Style
(63, de Sica); making a fetish of dangerous romance in
Casanova 70
(65, Monicelli); as the Camus outsider in
Lo Straniero
(67, Visconti); opposite Faye Dunaway in
A Place for Lovers
(69, de Sica);
Sunflower
(69, de Sica);
Dramma della Gelosia
(70, Ettore Scola); the benign but ineffectual rich man in
Leo the Last
(70, John Boorman);
La Moglie del Prete
(71, Dino Risi);
What?
(72, Roman Polanski);
Mordi e Fuggi
(72, Risi);
Blow-Out
(73, Marco Ferreri);
Salut l’Artiste
(73, Yves Robert);
Rappresaglia
(73, George Pan Cosmatos);
The Slightly Pregnant Man
(73, Jacques Demy);
Allonsanfan
(74, Paolo and Vittorio Taviani);
Per le Antiche Scale
(76, Bolognini); as the homosexual in
A Special Day
(77, Ettore Scola);
Bye Bye Monkey
(78, Ferreri);
Cosi Come Sei
(78, Alberto Lattuada); and
Revenge
(79, Lina Wertmuller).

In his last twenty years, he became increasingly prone to comedy (even in serious roles), and so relaxed that he trusted his battered, wry face and his faithful presence to testify to the trials of modern man. Sometimes he trusted too much—for Mastroianni had an indolence that did not always disguise his own boredom:
L’Ingorgo
(79, Luigi Comencini);
City of Women
(79, Fellini);
La Terrazza
(79, Scola);
Giallo Napoleano
(79, Corbucci);
Fantasma d’Amore
(80, Risi);
La Pelle
(80, Liliana Cavani); as Casanova in
La Nuit de Varennes
(81, Scola);
Oltre la Porta
(82, Cavani);
Gabriela
(83, Bruno Barreto);
Enrico IV
(83, Marco Bellocchio);
Storia di Piera
(83, Ferreri);
Il Generale dell’ Armata Morta
(83, Luciano Tovoli);
Macaroni
(85, Scola);
Ginger and Fred
(85, Fellini);
The Beekeeper
(86, Theo Angelopoulos);
Intervista
(87, Fellini); very touching in the Chekhovian
Dark Eyes
(87, Nikita Mikhalkov);
Splendor
(89, Scola);
Verso Sera
(90, Francesca Archibugi);
Stanno Tutti Bene
(90, Giuseppe Tornatore);
The Suspended Step of the Stork
(91, Angelopoulos);
Used People
(92, Beeban Kidron); and
Do Eso No Se Habla
(93, Maria Luisa Bemberg).

Finally, he tended to smile benignly at all the fuss:
Ready to Wear
(94, Robert Altman);
Al di là Delle Nuvole
(95, Antonioni and Wim Wenders);
A Che Punto è la Notte
(95, Nanni Loy);
Afirma Pereira
(96, Roberto Faenza);
Trois Vies & une Seule Mort
(96, Raul Ruiz);
Viagem ao Princípio do Mundo
(97, Manoel de Oliveira).

Rudolph Maté
(Rudolf Matheh) (1898–1964), b. Cracow, Poland
1947:
It Had to Be You
(codirected with Don Hartman). 1949:
The Dark Past; D.O.A.
. 1950:
No Sad Songs for Me; Union Station; Branded
. 1951:
The Prince Who Was a Thief; When Worlds Collide
. 1952:
The Green Glove; Paula; Sally and St. Anne
. 1953:
The Mississippi Gambler; Second Chance; Forbidden
. 1954:
The Siege at Red River; The Black Shield of Falworth
. 1955:
The Violent Men; The Far Horizons
. 1956:
The Rawhide Years; Miracle in the Rain; Port Afrique
. 1957:
Three Violent People
. 1958:
The Deep Six
. 1959:
For the First Time
. 1960:
The Immaculate Road; Revak the Rebel
. 1962:
The 300 Spartans
. 1963:
Seven Seas to Calais; Aliki
.

Educated in Vienna and Budapest, and a soldier in the First World War, Maté became an assistant to Alexander Korda in 1921, in Hungary. Next he went to Germany, first as an assistant to Karl Freund, then as director of photography on
Der
Kaufmann von Venedig
(23, Peter Paul Felner);
Pietro der Korsar
(24, Arthur Robison);
Mitgift-jager
(26, Gaston Ravel);
Die Hochstaplerin
(26, Martin Berger); and
Unter Ausschluss der Oeffentlichkeit
(27, Conrad Wiene). He had also assisted on Carl Dreyer’s
Mikael
(24), and in 1928 he went to France to be Dreyer’s cameraman on
La Passion de Jeanne d’Arc
and
Vampyr
(32), where he experimented to obtain a ghostly image. He also photographed
Le Petit Babouin
(32, Jean Gremillon),
Die Abenteuer des Konigs Pausole
(33, Alexis Granowsky),
Liliom
(33, Fritz Lang), and
Le Dernier Milliardaire
(34, René Clair).

In 1935, he went to America and worked for twelve years as a lighting cameraman:
Metropolitan
(35, Richard Boleslavsky);
Navy Wife
(35, Allan Dwan);
Dante’s Inferno
(35, Harry Lachman);
Professional Soldier
(35, Tay Garnett);
Dodsworth
(36, William Wyler);
Come and Get It
(36, Wyler and Howard Hawks);
Our Relations
(36, Lachman);
A Message to Garcia
(36, George Marshall);
Stella Dallas
(37, King Vidor);
Outcast
(37, Robert Florey);
Blockade
(38, William Dieterle);
Trade Winds
(38, Garnett);
Love Affair
(39, Leo McCarey);
Foreign Correspondent
(40, Alfred Hitchcock);
The Flame of New Orleans
(40, Clair);
My Favorite Wife
(40, Garson Kanin);
To Be Or Not To Be
(42, Ernst Lubitsch);
The Pride of the Yankees
(42, Sam Wood);
Sahara
(43, Zoltan Korda);
Cover Girl
(44, Charles Vidor);
Tonight and Every Night
(45, Victor Saville);
Gilda
(46, Vidor);
Down to Earth
(47, Alexander Hall); and
The Return of October
(48, Joseph H. Lewis).

As a director, Maté is a minor but distinct entertainer, working in a variety of genres with a sure sense of narrative and great visual clarity. He did good thrillers
—The Dark Past, Union Station
, and
Second Chance
(Mitchum, Darnell, and Palance)—but he had the humor necessary for
The Black Shield of Falworth
and reveled in the primeval forest explored by Lewis and Clark (or Fred MacMurray and Charlton Heston) in
The Far Horizons. The Violent Men
is a brutal range war, including Barbara Stanwyck’s denial of crutches to a crippled Edward G. Robinson as his ranch burns around him.