The New Biographical Dictionary of Film: Completely Updated and Expanded (312 page)

The watch, therefore, is huge, whatever Ustinov may have fancied. It is as large as
La Ronde
, as far-reaching as the flashback, and as spacious as the circus ring in
Lola Montès
—where Ustinov himself stood, whip in hand, conducting proceedings, but as much in love with Lola as every other man in her life. Those contrary circles are like wheels within a watch. Ophüls’s is the cinema of movement because time and the heart die when they stand still. His films are not decorated by movement, they consist of it. Thus, in
Caught
, the slow track across the dance floor becomes James Mason’s decision to propose to Barbara Bel Geddes.

That, in itself, is a vindication of cinema, which asserts that the moment never stays to be studied, it can only be participated in. There is nothing petty or shameful in responding to the crane and tracking shots of Max Ophüls, they are the mainstream of cinema. Just as time never stands still, so feelings never stay certain, and Ophüls’s camera must move on because it conforms to the nature of the celluloid strip where still pictures become alive only so long as they keep pace with time.

And look—I haven’t even mentioned
Letter From an Unknown Woman
, which is only a perfect film, and only less obvious because it is a rehearsal for the greater tragedy of
Madame de.…
But
Letter
makes Joan Fontaine a youth, a romantic young woman, and then a victim; it employs the solemn handsomeness and self-regard of Louis Jourdan to wonderful effect; it makes a quite credible Vienna and Linz; and in its melodic variations on staircases, carriages, rooms, glances, and meetings, it is a film about forgetfulness and the inescapable rhyming of separate times. No one had more sympathy for love than Ophüls, but no one knew so well how lovers remained strangers.

Julia Ormond
, b. Epsom, England, 1965
I say it without glee or joy, but Julia Ormond probably shouldn’t be here. For her early stardom was a mystery, as well as easy evidence that so many acting careers perish very quickly. (On the other hand, Jeanne Tripplehorn was cast in lead roles over a full seven years, so there’s no reasoning.) Ms. Ormond was seen on television in
Traffik
(89, Alastair Reid),
Young Catherine
(91, Michael Anderson), and
Stalin
(92, Ivan Passer), and that led to the year in which she had three lead parts: Guinevere in
First Knight
(95, Jerry Zucker);
Legends of the Fall
(95, Edward Zwick); and
Sabrina
(95, Sydney Pollack). Isn’t that enough in the way of opportunity or exposure, even if Ormond showed promise in
The Baby of Macon
(93, Peter Greenaway); as the dentist who falls for prisoner Tim Roth in
Captives
(95, Angela Pope);
Nostradamus
(94, Roger Christian)?

However, once the curtains had started to close—as it were—Ms. Ormond showed a tougher and much more interesting persona in at least the first half of
Smilla’s Sense of Snow
(97, Bille August). If she’d done that first and avoided the black hole of
Sabrina
, who knows what might have happened? She was also in
The Barber of Siberia
(98, Nikita Mikhalkov) and did a voice in the TV
Animal Farm
(99, John Stephenson). Of late, she has done notably little:
The Prime Gig
(00, Gregory Mosher);
Varian’s War
(00, Lionel Chetwynd) for TV;
Resistance
(03, Todd Komarnicki);
Iron Jawed Angels
(04, Katja von Garnier).

Then her work grew more adventurous: in the TV series
Beach Girls; Inland Empire
(06, David Lynch);
I Know Who Killed Me
(07, Chris Silverton);
Surveillance
(08, Jennifer Lynch);
Che, Part One
(08, Steven Soderbergh);
Kit Kittredge: An American Girl
(08, Patricia Rozema);
The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
(08, David Fincher);
Temple Grandin
(10, Mick Jackson).

Nagisa Oshima
, b. Kyoto, Japan, 1932
1959:
Ai to Kibo no Machi/A Town of Love and Hope
. 1960:
Seishun Zankoku Monogatari/Naked Youth, a Story of Cruelty; Taiyo no Hakaba/The Sun’s Burial; Nihon no Yoru to Kirz/Night and Fog in Japan
. 1961:
Shiiku/The Catch
. 1962:
Amukusa Shiro Tokisada/The Rebel
. 1965:
Etsuraku/The Pleasures of the Flesh; Yunbogi no Nikki/The Diary of Yunbogi
. 1966:
Hakuchu no Torima/Violence at Noon
. 1967:
Ninja Bugeicho/Band of Ninja; Nihon Shunka-ko/A Treatise on Japanese Bawdy Song
. 1968:
Daitoa enso/The Pacific War; Koshikei/Death by Hanging; Kaeyyekita Yopparai/Three Resurrected Drunkards; Shinjuku Dorobo Nikki/Diary of a Shinjuku Thief
. 1969:
Shonen/Boy; Mo Taku-To to Bunkadaikatumei/ Mao Tse-tung and the Cultural Revolution
. 1971:
Tokyo; Senso Sengo Hiwa/He Died After the War; Gishiki/The Ceremony
. 1972:
Natsu no Imoto/ Dear Summer Sister
. 1976:
Ai no Corrida/In the Realm of the Senses
. 1978:
Ai no Borei/Empire of Passion
. 1982:
Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence
. 1987:
Max Mon Amour
. 1991:
Kyoto, My Mother’s Place
(d). 1994:
100 Years of Japanese Cinema
(d). 1999:
Gohatto/Taboo
.

Japanese cinema in the 1960s produced a battery of young talent, but none as serious, precise, or versatile as Oshima. Arguably, he was the first Japanese director who seemed to be functioning within a totally modern world. He had rejected the period film and grappled with the agonizing forces compelling Japan to choose between its traditions and modernity. Much of his early work is still unknown in the West, but his subject matter indicates the new postwar consciousness:
The Sun’s Burial
is a picture of a seething slum community;
The Catch
deals with a Negro soldier taken prisoner during the war.

But it was in 1968 that Oshima made his decisive impact with
Death by Hanging
and
Diary of a Shinjuku Thief
. The first is the story of the execution of a young Korean who had raped and killed two Japanese girls. It has the icy clarity of composition, scraped clean of direct emotional associations, and with the first evidence of Oshima’s almost surrealist eye for the ritual workings of Japanese society. As for
Shinjuku Thief
, it is not fanciful to compare it with the Buñuel of
L’Age d’Or
, for it sees animal self-expression as being in brutal confrontation with social mores and the codes of Japanese living. Like Buñuel, Oshima is effortlessly shocking but always chaste, watching the vivid sexual performance of his characters as if they were insects.

Oshima has shown a taste for dramatic human stories that are metaphors of the recent history of Japan.
Boy
, an extraordinary account of a wandering family that fake road accidents for insurance settlements, as well as having great narrative interest, is a portrait of the moral confrontations forced upon the new Japan.

But his masterpiece is
The Ceremony
, a bleak but luminous picture of how domestic ritual destroys or perverts the life force in a family. Once again, the stinging touch of a Buñuel is evident in the scenes like that in which the young mistress is discovered bound to a tree dead and, as the camera circles, the sword is drawn out of her body and an arc of blood jumps out behind it.

In the Realm of the Senses
and
Empire of Passion
were erotic events of the 1970s, provoking censorship and controversy, and treating the body with a new graphic directness seldom free from sadomasochism. These films made Oshima famous, but they seemed calculated sensations compared with his earlier films. There was worse to come.
Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence
was a story about British and Australians in a Japanese prisoner-of-war camp, but it was also smitten with the aura of David Bowie—in short, it came out bizarre, confused, and with little bearing on reality. In trying for an international picture, Oshima had lost his roots.
Max Mon Amour
attempted to describe the love between a woman and a gorilla—and it made
King Kong
seem ever better than one had thought. Oshima must be regarded now as an example of fatal hesitation or misdirection.

Oshima was then hampered by illness for many years. In response, he turned to documentary and work for television. But in 1999, he returned with the remarkable
Gohatto
—a triumph of style and wit, dazzlingly beautiful, and full of poetic innuendo about gender and role-playing. It was so complete a return that Oshima was automatically reacclaimed as a master.

Haley Joel Osment
, b. Los Angeles, 1988
Young Mr. Osment has been good (at least) on screen too many times now for anyone to have doubts. He is a brilliantly skilled and intuitive actor who carries the natural, and ordinary, charm of childhood without ever milking it. It’s not possible, or useful, to wonder what he might be like grown up. But it is instructive to consider how far modern filmmakers now like to employ child characters to reach their audience, but also to mine the more timeless and universal aura of the child’s experience. So it’s notable how often Osment has been used as the emblem of some greater, or purer, knowledge of life that may exist in a child. To that extent, of course, his growing up is not only beside the point; it may be counterproductive.

He is the son of a teacher and an actor (Eugene Osment), and he appeared in his first TV commercial when he was only four. He then got a role in the TV series
Thunder Alley
(94) and the role of Tom Hanks’s son in
Forrest Gump
(94, Robert Zemeckis). Still, he had those normal, dues-paying years before his big breakthrough in
The Sixth Sense: Mixed Nuts
(94, Nora Ephron); a lead role, a woeful orphan, in
Bogus
(96, Norman Jewison);
Last Stand at Saber River
(97, Dick Lowry); redoing the George Winslow role for TV in
The Ransom of Red Chief
(98, Bob Clark).

The Sixth Sense
(99, M. Night Shyamalan) was an exceptional film, a very canny merger of horror and those few movies that deal in a child’s perception of the immense world. He gave a fine performance, much aided by Bruce Willis and his director, both of whom could truly claim that it would have been impossible without the kid. In turn,
Pay It Forward
(00, Mimi Leder) was a horrible exploitation in which the boy’s grace barely survived. Farmore intriguing was
A.I.: Artificial Intelligence
(01, Steven Spielberg), in which Osment was uncannily good as the robot/puppet coming to life, but ultimately betrayed by the inability of his director to keep control of the very ambitious material.

His voice is used in
The Country Bears
(02, Peter Hastings). He did other voice jobs and then reappeared as a teenager in
Secondhand Lions
(03, Tim McCanlies). His one acting job since has been
Home of the Giants
(07, Rusty Gorman).

Gerd Oswald
(1916–89), b. Berlin
1956:
A Kiss Before Dying; The Brass Legend
. 1957:
Fury at Sundown; Valerie; Crime of Passion
. 1958:
Paris Holiday; Screaming Mimi
. 1959:
Am Tag als der Regen Kam
. 1960:
Three Moves to Freedom/Schachnovelle
. 1961:
Brainwashed
. 1963:
Tempestà su Ceylon
. 1965:
Agent for H.A.R.M
. 1969:
80 Steps to Jonah
. 1970:
Bunny O’Hare
.

The son of German director Richard Oswald (1880–1963), Gerd worked all over Europe as an assistant director in the late 1930s, and in 1940 he went to America. He was assistant to Litvak, Kazan, Mankiewicz, Hathaway, King, Wilder, and Stevens and on his father’s
The Loveable Cheat
(49). He was producer of
Man on a Tightrope
(53, Kazan),
Oasis
(54, Yves Allégret), and
Night People
(54, Nunnally Johnson) before becoming a director.

In the space of five years, when the film industry was revealing little enterprise and few fresh talents, Oswald showed some skill with the low-budget quickie. In fact, his first film, based on an Ira Levin novel, was a large project, and proved a tense, ingenious thriller, with an exciting climax at an industrial plant and with excellent performances from Robert Wagner and Joanne Woodward.
Fury at Sundown
and
Valerie
were enjoyable Westerns, the latter being that paradox, a complex film involving Anita Ekberg;
Crime of Passion
was an outstanding thriller with Barbara Stanwyck and Sterling Hayden.
Paris Holiday
was a canceling out of Bob Hope and Fernandel, but
Three Moves to Freedom
, about a man in prison obsessed by chess, was as good as anything he had done. After that, Oswald found TV more receptive than movies. His work there was prolific but far less interesting.

Peter O’Toole
, b. Connemara, Ireland, 1933
The 1960s was a period of foundering for commercial cinema, and rather than true stars it produced quasars—quasi-stellar personalities. One of those, it seems to me, is Peter O’Toole, a striking but unnerving figure. His blue eyes were pale and staring, and drama exaggerated the strain in his face.

After national service in the navy, O’Toole went into the theatre and had a big success in
The Long and the Short and the Tall
. He made a promising film debut in
Kidnapped
(60, Robert Stevenson) and, uncredited, as the Mountie rescued by Anthony Quinn in
The Savage Innocents
(60, Nicholas Ray). After
The Day They Robbed the Bank of England
(60, John Guillermin), he played
Lawrence of Arabia
(62, David Lean) with a desperate intensity as unrevealing as it was uncharacteristic of the director. While Lean was content for a placid historical epic, with a curt nod toward the Lawrence enigma, O’Toole seemed to be searching in a smaller, more neurotically based film.