The New Biographical Dictionary of Film: Completely Updated and Expanded (283 page)

He remained in France throughout the war and made a lot of cheap
policiers
. In time, he caught on in several running roles as police inspectors:
Défense d’Aimer
(42, Richard Pottier);
La Ferme aux Loups
(43, Pottier);
Marie la Misère
(45, Jacques de Baroncelli);
L’Insaisissable Frédéric
(46, Pottier);
Macadam
(46, Jacques Feyder and Marcel Blistène);
La Fleur de l’Âge
(47, Marcel Carné);
Inspecteur Sergil
(47, Jacques Daroy);
Monsieur Chasse
(47, Willy Rozier);
Bethsabée
(47, Leonide Moguy);
La Dame d’Onze Heures
(48, Jean Revan);
Le Colonel Durand
(48, René Chanas);
Le Dessous des Cartes
(48, André Cayatte);
Sergil et le Dictateur
(48, Daroy);
Impasse des Deux Anges
(48, Maurice Tourneur);
Scandale
(48, René Le Henaff);
L’Ange Rouge
(49, Jacques Daniel-Norman).

He was a versatile figure who seldom made big pictures:
Agnès de Rien
(50, Pierre Billon);
Maria du Bout de Monde
(51, Jean Stelli);
Sérénade au Bourreau
(51, Stelli);
Je Suis un Mouchard
(53, René Chanas); Napoleon III in
La Contessa di Castiglione
(54, Georges Combret), playing with Yvonne De Carlo. It was then that the dark wit of Henri-Georges Clouzot looked at that composed but faintly sour face and cast Meurisse as the husband in
Les Diaboliques
(55). He had never had such a hit and his prospects flowered.

He made
Fortune Carrée
(55, Bernard Borderie);
L’Affaire des Poisons
(55, Henri Decoin);
Les Violents
(57, Henri Calef);
Échec au Porteur
(58, Gilles Grangier);
Le Septième Ciel
(58, Raymond Bernard); and then outstanding as the doctor in
La Tête Contre les Murs
(59, Georges Franju); in
Marie-Octobre
(59, Julien Duvivier); and as the blithe scientist in
Le Déjeuner sur l’Herbe
(59, Jean Renoir), where a little bit of the music hall showed.

He was established and he played Le Monocle, a blind detective, in a run of films directed by Georges Lautner that prospered in France. But he remained untouchable as far as the New Wave was concerned—or at least until Jean-Pierre Melville rescued him in 1966:
La Vérité
(60, Clouzot);
Le Monocle Noir
(61, Lautner);
L’Assassin Connaît la Musique
(63, Pierre Chenal);
Du Mouron les Petits Oiseaux
(63, Carné);
Méfiezvous Mesdames
(63, André Hunebelle);
Moi et les Hommes de 40 Ans
(65, Jacques Pinoteau);
Le Majordome
(65, Jean Delannoy); a gangster in
La Grosse Caisse
(65, Alex Joffe);
Quand Passent les Faisans
(65, Edouard Molinaro); as Talleyrand in
Der Kongress Amüsiert Sich
(66, Geza von Radvanyi).

The best was still to come: Commissaire Blot in
Le Deuxième Souffle
(66, Melville), brilliant but fair; and Luc Jardie, the resistance leader in
L’Armée des Ombres
(69, Melville). After that he made
Le Cri du Cormoran
(70, Michel Audiard);
Doucement les Basses
(71, Jacques Deray), with Alain Delon;
Les Voraces
(73, Sergio Gobbi);
Les Suspects
(74, Michel Wyn); and one more film with Delon
—Le Gitan
(75, José Giovanni).

Bette Midler
, b. Honolulu, Hawaii, 1945
The Rose
(79, Mark Rydell) is not a great film. It offended some people because it was not completely Janis Joplin, because the music was not always “authentic,” and because the atmosphere at the concerts was “wrong.” No matter. Bette Midler—who was nominated for best actress Oscar in what was really her debut—was remarkable: without ever being conventionally beautiful as movies measure that myth, she was pretty, appealing, sexy, needy, disturbing, and repellent. There was a commitment to the performance and the singing that legitimately carried the film. To be so good so far out on a limb is a way of indicating how “uncastable” a player may be. Ms. Midler ran into very difficult times from which she has only emerged as a comic, camp gorgon—often very funny, and usually defiantly likeable. But there is a hurt in her cocky grin, as if to say we have let the rose wither.

She had a small role in
Hawaii
(65, George Roy Hill), years before
The Rose
. After that, she worked as singer and comedienne before the great challenge of the Joplin biopic. Thereafter, she did a concert film,
Divine Madness
(80, Michael Ritchie), and got into much publicized disputes during and after the making of
Jinxed!
(82, Don Siegel).

For several years she did no film work, and then made a happy return in
Down and Out in Beverly Hills
(86, Paul Mazursky). This was the start of a run of films in which she was encouraged to overdo everything:
Ruthless People
(86, Jim Abrahams, David Zucker, and Jerry Zucker);
Outrageous Fortune
(87, Arthur Hiller);
Beaches
(88, Garry Marshall);
Big Business
(88, Abrahams);
Stella
(90, John Erman); and patently ill-matched with Woody Allen in
Scenes from a Mall
(91, Mazursky). She then took another big role, as the entertainer in
For the Boys
(91, Rydell), a call resolutely resisted by audiences. After
Hocus Pocus
(93, Kenny Ortega), she had a personal success on TV as Rose in
Gypsy
(93, Emile Ardolino).

Her uneasy relationship with the movies has not altered: she had an uncredited bit in
Get Shorty
(95, Barry Sonnenfeld); she excelled in
The First Wives Club
(96, Hugh Wilson) and
That Old Feeling
(97, Carl Reiner); but
Drowning Mona
(00, Nick Gomez) did nothing, and with
Isn’t She Great
(00, Andrew Bergman), where she played Jacqueline Susann, it was as if the audience had forgotten the woman from history.

In 2001, she did her own TV series,
Bette
(Andrew D. Weyman), then a break before
The Stepford Wives
(04, Frank Oz). There was another break before
Then She Found Me
(07, Helen Hunt) and
The Women
(08, Diane English).

Toshiro Mifune
(1920–97), b. Tsingtao, China
If any hundred customers at the New York or London film festivals were asked to make a list of Japanese actors and actresses, I doubt if anyone would get more than ten votes—except for Toshiro Mifune, who might get ninety. It is also likely that he would be the
only
name appearing—with no mention of Kinuyo Tanaka, Machiko Kyo, Hideko Takamine, Setsuko Hara, or even Takashi Shimura, who is magnificent as the man who is dying in
Ikiru/Living
(52, Akira Kurosawa), as the leader of the
Seven Samurai
(54, Kurosawa), and in
The Life of Oharu
(52, Kenji Mizoguchi).

I have nothing against Toshiro Mifune (or nothing much—I
am
averse to actors who huff and puff that much). The greater problem is the degree to which he is revered in the West for endorsing so many Western fallacies about the virtues of valor, swordplay, and rigor mortis in the upper lip (or upper head). Japanese film may be innately feminine—its actresses are more glorious than its actors—but Japanese acting (as witness Shimura) is so rich in restraint, detail, and inner life. While Mifune was, patently, an actor made for such barbarous things as
Grand Prix
(66, John Frankenheimer); the animalistic confrontation with Lee Marvin in
Hell in the Pacific
(68, John Boorman);
Red Sun
(71, Terence Young);
Paper Tiger
(75, Ken Annakin); his Admiral Yamamoto in
Midway
(76, Jack Smight);
1941
(79, Steven Spielberg);
Winter Kills
(79, William Richert); on TV in
Shogun
(80, Jerry London);
The Bushido Blade
(81, Tom Kotani);
The Challenge
(82, Frankenheimer); and
Inchon
(82, Young).

Of course, there is more to Mifune than that drab list. In Japan, he was an heroic actor, furiously energetic when young, yet laconic in middle age. Surely he copied John Wayne, and surely others (like Eastwood) have copied him. He functioned as a producer on several samurai films. Yet note that he was never used by Ozu or Naruse—just as Mifune needs to be put in his decent place, so there is greater need to understand Akira Kurosawa’s secure hold on the second rank.

Though born in China, he had Japanese parents. After service in the army during the war, he made
Snow Trail
(47, Senkichi Taniguchi);
Drunken Angel
(48, Kurosawa); the bandit in
Rashomon
(50, Kurosawa);
The Life of Oharu; Miyamoto Murashi
(54, Hiroshi Inagaki); a little mature for the young showoff in
Seven Samurai; Throne of Blood
(57, Kurosawa);
The Rickshaw Man
(58, Inagaki);
The Bad Sleep Well
(60, Kurosawa);
The Important Man
(61, Ismael Rodriguez);
Yojimbo
(61, Kurosawa);
Legacy of the 500,000
(62), which he directed himself;
Red Beard
(65, Kurosawa);
Rebellion
(67, Masaki Kobayashi);
Akage
(69, Kihachi Okamoto), and many others.

This is not to say that Mifune is other than remarkable—in the battle scenes of
Seven Samurai
he seems as powerful and as elemental as the great rain. But consider—in how many films does Mifune play a man who has a family relationship such as you know from your own life? In other words, he is America’s Japanese. If Ozu had made
Hell in the Pacific
, or half of it, Lee Marvin might have faced tougher competition—a shy, wordy man, with family stories to tell, habits to observe, and butterflies to follow on the island.
Talk in the Pacific
perhaps? Hell comes so early in the American imagination but is often so crude an ordeal.

Sarah Miles
, b. Ingatestone, England, 1941
Called up straight from RADA to seduce Olivier in
Term of Trial
(62, Peter Glenville), Sarah Miles was originally typed as slut material—a husky, wide-eyed nymphet. But in
The Servant
(63, Joseph Losey), as Vera from Manchester, she shattered the stereotype and thrust sexual appetite into British films. She managed the sultry authority of the waif on the kitchen table who pats her stomach as she complains of the heat and the wretched misery of the outcast who tumbles in out of the rain in a garish wig. Her performance, like that of Bogarde, was part of a sexual ballet, swooping in and out of seduction and dictatorship. It also smelled of a provincial scrubber up in the smoke—remember her excitement as she is driven away from the railway station.

Perhaps Sarah Miles’s unexpected willfulness had something to do with Vera being one of the few whole women in Losey’s work. It certainly affected her subsequent career. For she moved hesitantly away from the slut, to the short
The Six-Sided Triangle
(63, Christopher Miles, her brother) and
The Ceremony
(63, Laurence Harvey). She was a poppet in boater and scarf in
Those Magnificent Men in Their Flying Machines
(65, Ken Annakin) and then an Irish innocent in
I Was Happy Here
(65, Desmond Davis). She seemed bewildered and disenchanted by her peripheral part in
Blow-Up
(66, Michelangelo Antonioni) and dropped out of films.

She was brought back by Robert Bolt, whom she married: as another Irish girl,
Ryan’s Daughter
(70, David Lean), and a jittery rag doll
Lady Caroline Lamb
(72, Bolt). Neither was especially rewarding; whereas she might have saved
The GoBetween
from complacency if she had been coaxed into bringing the spite, selfishness, and sensuality to the part that Julie Christie ignored or if Alan Bridges had directed that film as sharply as he did
The Hireling
(73), with Miles in another L. P. Hartley story. She was incongruous in
The Man Who Loved Cat Dancing
(73, Richard C. Sarafian); Estella in
Great Expectations
(75, Joseph Hardy); at the soft center of some silly sex scenes in
The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea
(76, Lewis John Carlino); vainly trying to be a pre-Raphaelite Lauren Bacall in
The Big Sleep
(78, Michael Winner).

She was in
Priest of Love
(80, Miles) as a film star;
Venom
(81, Piers Haggard);
Walter and June
(82, Stephen Frears);
Ordeal by Innocence
(84, Desmond Davis);
Steaming
(85, Losey);
Hope and Glory
(87, John Boorman);
White Mischief
(87, Michael Radford);
A Ghost in Monte Carlo
(90, John Hough);
Dotkniecie Reki
(92, Krzysztof Zanussi);
Days of Grace
(01, Claver Salizzato);
Jurij
(01, Stefano Gabrini);
The Accidental Detective
(03, Vanna Paoli).

Vera Miles
(Vera Ralston), b. Boise City, Oklahoma, 1929
There is a moment in
The Wrong Man
(57, Alfred Hitchcock) when the audience’s agony for Henry Fonda is expressed on screen by the first sign of mental breakdown in his wife, Vera Miles. Immediately, the film becomes more profound, a marvelous touch of the coldness and sympathy that go hand in hand with Hitchcock. Vera Miles breaks up in a way that shows how seldom one has seen untheatrical distress. She turns plain and inept. No wonder Hitchcock put such ability under contract. But, in truth, she has never been used as searchingly again. Pregnant by her first husband, Tarzan Gordon Scott, she had to miss the part in
Vertigo
that Hitchcock had groomed her for, and that lifted Kim Novak into immortality.