The New Biographical Dictionary of Film: Completely Updated and Expanded (34 page)

More recently, Belmondo has become a middle-aged player in very middle-class films: brisk, urbane, successful, but cynical. He was the kind of actor (at sixty) who might be called upon once more to deliver a great performance—but which of his great directors could need him now? He has made
Flic ou Voyou
(79, Georges Lautner);
Le Guignolo
(80, Lautner);
Le Professionel
(81, Lautner);
Ace of Aces
(82, Gerard Oury);
Le Marginal
(83, Deray);
Les Morfalous
(83, Verneuil);
Joyeuses Paques
(84, Lautner);
Hold-Up
(85, Alexander Arcady); and
L’Itineraire d’un Enfant Gaté
(88, Lelouch).

After several years away, he came back as a charismatic Valjean in an ambitious, modernized and very successful version of
Les Misérables
(95, Lelouch); the Sacha Guitry play
Désiré
(96, Bernard Murat); with Alain Delon in
Une Chance sur Deux
(98, Patrice Leconte);
Peut-être
(99, Cedric Klapisch);
Amazone
(00, de Broca);
L’Aîné des Ferchaux
(01, Bernard Stora).

He suffered a stroke in 2001 and did not work between then and
A Man and His Dog
(09, Francis Huster).

Laslo Benedek
(1907–92), b. Budapest, Hungary
1948:
The Kissing Bandit
. 1949:
Port of New York
. 1951:
Death of a Salesman
. 1953:
The Wild One
. 1954:
Bengal Brigade
. 1955:
Kinder, Mutter und ein General
. 1957:
Affair in Havana
. 1959:
Moment of Danger
. 1960:
Recours en Gràce
. 1966:
Namu the Killer Whale
(d). 1971:
The Night Visitor
. 1975:
Assault on Agathon
.

Benedek never settled, and he seemed as uneasy with the solemn allegory of
Death of a Salesman
as with the rampant motorbike horniness of
The Wild One
. How that last film ever came to be banned in some tender quarters, or regarded highly anywhere, is a puzzle. It is too willing to be a motorized Western; too preoccupied with surly youth to catch the real urban baroque of shining motorbikes and leather. And if, unlike Michael Curtiz, Benedek has never managed to adapt Hungarianness to Hollywood, he has not been much happier elsewhere. The French and German films are dull, and he later divided his time between American TV, a documentary study of whales and the hardly released
Night Visitor
. Benedek was a writer and photographer who worked as cameraman and editor in Germany in the 1930s:
Der Mann der den Mord Beging
(31, Kurt Bernhardt). He was one of several odd talents who gathered round Joe Pasternak and Universal in Berlin. Moving from Paris to London, he scripted
Secret of Stamboul
(36, Andrew Marton). In 1937 he went to Hollywood and to MGM’s montage department. Thereafter, he became a production assistant to Pasternak who produced his first film, a musical starring Sinatra and Ann Miller.

Roberto Benigni
, b. Misericordia, Italy, 1952
1983:
Tu Mi Turbi/You Upset Me
. 1984:
Addio a Enrico Berlinguer; Non Ci Resta Che Piangere/Nothing Left to Do But Cry; Il Piccolo Diavolo/The Little Devil
. 1991:
Johnny Stecchino
. 1994:
Il Mostro/The Monster
. 1997:
La Vita è Bella/Life Is Beautiful
. 2002:
Pinocchio
. 2005:
The Tiger and the Snow
.

Despite the enormous effect Bambi had on me as a child, I have had difficulty digesting Thumperism—I mean, the philosophy that if you can’t say anything nice, don’t say nothing at all. I see the point, or the kindness, even if I am inclined on principle to suspect any nostrum offered by the Disney Corporation. And who, honestly, would want to spend much time with Thumper and his sealed lips? There are candidates for honest bad-mouthing, reaching from one’s relatives to the alleged leaders of your world. And there is Roberto Benigni.

Now, I have credentials in this matter: I loathed his simpering and his weird mix of knockabout and sentimentality in such things as
Johnny Stecchino
(a massive hit in Italy),
The Monster
, and
Son of the Pink Panther
(93, Blake Edwards). I thought he was a time-wasting aberration in a few films by Jim Jarmusch—
Down by Law
(86),
Coffee and Cigarettes
(86), and
Night on Earth
(91). But with that record, I would simply have omitted Benigni from this book and saluted Thumper. I might have thought to myself that
You Upset Me
and
Nothing Left to Do But Cry
were sufficient as titles.

Then came the thing called
La Vita È Bella
. As a matter of fact, I often echo that sentiment myself, but if there is anything likely to mar the
bella
-ness it is not so much Hitlerism (I am against it), which is fairly obvious, as Benigni-ism, which walks away with high praise, box office, and Oscars. I despise
Life Is Beautiful
, especially its warmth, sincerity, and feeling, all of which I believe grow out of stupidity. Few events so surely signaled the decline of the motion picture as the glory piled on that odious and misguided fable.

I am sure Mr. Benigni is kind to children and animals. I am prepared to accept that he is a model citizen and a good companion. Still,
Life Is Beautiful
is a disgrace.

Benigni has been an actor for well over twenty years:
Clair de Femme
(79, Costa-Gavras);
Chiedo Asilo
(79, Marco Ferreri);
La Luna
(79, Bernardo Bertolucci);
Letti Selvaggi
(79, Luigi Zampa);
Il Pap’occhio
(81, Renzo Arbore);
Il Minestrone
(81, Sergio Citti);
Effetti Personali
(83, Giuseppe Bertolucci);
La Voce della Luna
(89, Federico Fellini);
Asterix et Obelix Contre César
(99, Claude Zidi).

Annette Bening
, b. Topeka, Kansas, 1958
Yesterday’s paper announced that Annette Bening and Warren Beatty were expecting their fourth child. That campaign has been carried on with such diligence and love that her enterprising screen career deserves all the more respect. At the same time, I don’t feel that she has securely won the public’s affection, or their sense of exactly who she is. So she covers a range—and that’s one of the things acting is supposed to be—but she seems too guarded and intelligent to settle on a definite or passionate inner being. This may be one of the several things she has in common with her husband.

Raised in San Diego, she did some theatre there and then moved north to San Francisco State University and the American Conservatory Theatre in San Francisco. Her stage work includes Tina Howe’s
Coastal Disturbances
, for which she won a Tony nomination. Her first film was
The Great Outdoors
(88, Howard Deutsch), but she soon surpassed that with her stunning Madame Merteuil in
Valmont
(89, Milos Forman), a role ideally suited to her intelligence and its capacity for putting a chill on feelings. But then she was far more relaxed, very naughty, sexy and funny in
The Grifters
(90, Stephen Frears). At that point, her prospects seemed more than exciting.

After
Postcards from the Edge
(90, Mike Nichols), she won the role of Virginia Hill and so met Warren Beatty in
Bugsy
(91, Barry Levinson). She was good enough in the film nearly to mask a flaw in its script—we never know whether or not Virginia is robbing Ben Siegel. Then, in the next few years, unaccountably, she made several poor films in a row:
Guilty By Suspicion
(91, Irwin Winkler);
Regarding Henry
(91, Nichols); and the really woeful
Love Affair
(94, Glenn Gordon Caron), with Warren. Somehow one had the impression that the happy couple would not work together again. And maybe she had learned to reject some of his advice.

She was lively and touching in the pleasant
The American President
(95, Rob Reiner), but again there were signs of drift with
Richard III
(95, Richard Loncraine);
Mars Attacks!
(96, Tim Burton);
The Siege
(98, Edward Zwick); and the unhappy
In Dreams
(98, Neil Jordan). But in
American Beauty
(99, Sam Mendes), she was restored to the high comedy of manners to very good effect, so that she went from being hilarious to wretched on a phrase. That rare skill was gone again in
What Planet Are You From?
(00, Nichols).

There was another gap before she did
Open Range
(03, Kevin Costner) and
Being Julia
(04, István Szabó). She played the lead in
Mrs. Harris
(05, Phyllis Nagy), a great opportunity;
Running with Scissors
(06, Ryan Murphy);
The Women
(08, Diane English);
Mother and Child
(10, Rodrigo Garcia);
The Kids Are All Right
(10, Lisa Cholodenko).

Alan Bennett
, b. Leeds, England, 1934
In 1960, when
Beyond the Fringe
opened at the Edinburgh Festival, and in its glory years thereafter, Alan Bennett was the least known and spectacular of the team. By now, a case could be made that his work and his influence have risen far above that of the others. But as to being known … Bennett is the very image of privacy, and that alone could qualify him for a notable place in this survey of the most glaring and over-publicized of media.

In the early 1960s, there was brashness, youth, and energy in Peter Cook, Dudley Moore, and Jonathan Miller. Miller was so plainly electric; Moore was giddy with overthrown shyness, his piano, and the limping devil of teasing; and Cook was somewhere not too far from a Don Juan ready to be a thug. In their company—and Bennett was only in their company then—the sandy-haired Yorkshireman seemed like someone who had never known youth. He was guarded, cautious, a deft character actor. Yet he never seemed to risk the others’ flights of improvisation. So he never stumbled, as they did, and never soared. He was word perfect, a fusspot, a writer.

Bennett has become a major figure in the English landscape despite versatility and his steadfast wish to remain hidden. He has worked very little in what he might call “the cinema.” Yet he commands a place, and a large one. For he is one of those people who have kept England’s role in movies significant even as its picture business has withered. Principally, he has worked in television. But Bennett’s influence is climatic: he is an astringent dampener that seeps in everywhere—in theatre, prose, and journalism, almost in the way of sniffing the air suspiciously. Bennett is a model for the notion that wintry wariness may be the surest way to memorialize the passage of feelings in this headlong world. Just as Noel Coward’s collected talents, works, words, and pauses once delivered a kind of moral briskness that represented an age, so Bennett now is characteristic. He may be Britain’s best surviving miniaturist.

To keep up with Alan Bennett, one needs to be in England all the time, for he is always popping up in some shape or manner, on television or in a literary weekly. (His other works include the stage play
The Madness of George III
.) Nothing is to be treated lightly: he is a gatherer of his own small things, a genius of the quotidian, a master of oneline roles or glances off in mid-interview. I can only list some things that bear broadly on film: 1. Bennett has done film scripts for hire:
The Insurance Man
(85, Richard Eyre);
A Private Function
(85, Malcolm Mowbray), on the treasuring of a pig in postwar provincial England;
Prick Up Your Ears
(87, Stephen Frears), his least adroit work in that it chose to dramatize writer John Lahr’s inquiry into the life of playwright Joe Orton, and thus missed too much of the life.

2. Then he has done scripts, as it were, from the heart. In particular, there are two works that have saved the reputation of John Schlesinger in the last twenty years:
An Englishman Abroad
(84), which is derived from actress Coral Browne’s meeting with the exiled spy Guy Burgess in Moscow; and
A Question of Attribution
(91), taken from Bennett’s own play about Sir Anthony Blunt, scholarly guardian of the Queen’s paintings—which included a delicious, dreamlike, and very subversive conversation between Blunt and HRH (James Fox and Prunella Scales; though it was Bennett himself and Ms. Scales on the London stage).

Ostensibly, Bennett the Yorkshireman, son of a butcher and then scholarship boy at Oxford, someone uneasy far away from London NW1 or Yorkshire, is a patriot as well as a determined, gloomy loner. Yet beneath the comedy of the two plays/films, there is so much rueful passion for the urge to remake England and such wistfulness about irregular sexual conduct. Bennett is only interested in writing about failure. Is there anything else? he might ask querulously. And so the passing triumph of Burgess and Blunt—in living well and in knowing the grace of Tiepolo—is all the more tender because they are losing point in Bennett’s England. These are very sly works, as befits stories about spies.

3. Then there are “plays” written for television, especially a series of five done in 1978–79:
Me, I’m Afraid of Virginia Woolf
(Stephen Frears), narrated by Bennett, a study in health, happiness, and indefatigable unease;
All Day in the Sands
(Giles Foster; produced by Frears), on the desolation of seaside getaways;
One Fine Day
(Frears);
The Old Crowd
(Lindsay Anderson, produced by Frears);
Afternoon Off
(Frears).

These are Bennett’s great works, plays about a society and its slow sighing way toward demise. It is no coincidence that the plays precede the violence of Mrs. Thatcher and seem to feel the last ebbing of the old England that cherished its humdrum decency. The stories are slight; the acting is communal. And these plays are also the best work Stephen Frears has ever done—a nagging question to him about why he ever went to America.