The New Biographical Dictionary of Film: Completely Updated and Expanded (346 page)

Serge Reggiani
, (1922–2004), b. Reggio Emilia, Italy
Having come to France as a child, Reggiani went into films in his late teens. For half a dozen years after the war, in the mood of romantic pessimism, he was a handsome lead, especially good as the doomed man in
Casque d’Or
(52, Jacques Becker). He has worked on, but never again with the success he enjoyed in those years:
Nuit de Décembre
(39, Curtis Bernhardt);
Le Voyageur de la Toussaint
(42, Louis Daquin);
Le Carrefour des Enfants Perdus
(43, Leo Joannon);
Étoile sans Lumière
(45, Marcel Blistène); as the brother who commits suicide in
Les Portes de la Nuit
(46, Marcel Carné); and in Carné’s unfinished
La Fleur de l’Age
(47);
Le Dessous des Cartes
(47, André Cayatte);
Manon
(48, H. G. Clouzot); as the Romeo figure in
Les Amants de Vérone
(48, Cayatte);
Au Royaume des Cieux
(49, Julien Duvivier);
Le Parfum de la Dame en Noir
(49, Daquin); as the soldier in
La Ronde
(50, Max Ophuls);
Secret People
(52, Thorold Dickinson);
Act of Love
(53, Anatole Litvak);
Napoléon
(55, Sacha Guitry);
Les Salauds vont en Enfer
(55, Robert Hossein);
Echec au Porteur
(57, Gilles Grangier);
Les Misérables
(57, Jean-Paul le Chanois);
Marie-Octobre
(58, Duvivier);
Tutti a Casa
(60, Luigi Comencini);
Paris Blues
(61, Martin Ritt);
Le Doulos
(62, Jean-Pierre Melville);
The Leopard
(63, Luchino Visconti);
Compartiment Tueurs
(64, Costa-Gavras);
Marie-Chantal Contre le Docteur Kha
(65, Claude Chabrol);
Les Aventuriers
(67, Robert Enrico);
La Vingt-Cinquième Heure
(67, Henri Verneuil);
Il Giorno della Civetta
(68, Damiano Damiani);
L’Armée des Ombres
(69, Melville);
Comptes à Rebours
(70, Roger Pigaut);
Les Caids
(72, Enrico);
Cat and Mouse
(75, Claude Lelouch);
Vincent, François, Paul et les Autres
(75, Claude Sautet);
Une Fille Consue de Fil Blanc
(77, Michel Lang);
Violette et François
(77, Jacques Rouffio);
Fantastica
(80, Gilles Carles);
The Beekeeper
(86, Theo Angelopoulos);
Mauvais Sang
(87, Leos Carax); and
I Hired a Contract Killer
(90, Aki Kaurismaki).

He appeared in
Plein Fer
(90, Josee Dayan), and then in
De Force avec d’Autres
(93), directed by his son, Simon Reggiani. He has also made
Rosenemil
(93, Radu Gabrea);
Le Petit Garçon
(94, Pierre Granier-Deferre);
Héroïnes
(97, Gerard Krawczyk);
La Clef des Champs
(98, Charles Nemes);
El Pianista
(98, Mario Gas).

Wallace Reid
(1891–1923), b. St. Louis
There’s no top Hollywood star we know less about today than Wallace Reid, because there’s no single movie that defines him for us—and no single image. But he’s a central figure in the story of American film, as well as the protagonist of one of the greatest tragedy/scandals ever to hit Hollywood. Think back to the great silent male stars: the comics, swashbuckling Fairbanks, sheik Valentino, passionate lover Gilbert, freak Chaney. Where’s the great-looking all-American guy, the prototype of Gable, of Robert Redford, of Tom Cruise? It’s Wallace Reid.

He was the son of a successful playwright, and grew up in the world of theatre, but he wasn’t just a kid actor: he was a star athlete, a musician, a writer. And amazingly handsome. He seems to have appeared in at least 100 two-and three-reelers before he caught Griffith’s eye and was given the small but highly visible part of the blacksmith in the 1915
Birth of a Nation
—stripped to the waist. That did it. Immediately he became a leading man, then a star, summoned to Famous Players–Lasky (later Paramount) and trusted to play five times opposite their great catch from opera, Geraldine Farrar: in her
Carmen
(15, as Don Jose);
Maria Rosa
(16, Spanish again);
The Woman God Forgot
(17; Farrar is Tecsa, daughter of Montezuma, and Reid is the conquistador who loves her);
The Devil Stone
(17, nonsense about an emerald); the love interest (!) in
Joan the Woman
(17). De Mille was crazy about him, casting him as well in
The Golden Chance
(15), and the very different
Affairs of Anatol
(21), in which he’s newly married to swanky Gloria Swanson but swarmed over by Bebe Daniels, Agnes Ayres, and Wanda Hawley. This was Schnitzler—dinner jackets rather than bare chests or the racing outfits he wore in a wildly successful series of car-racing dramas. (He was a superb driver in real life.) But he carried it off easily.

Few of his non-De Mille movies are very good, but he dominates them with his virile looks, energetic acting, and sunny, dependable nature that conceals an inner toughness. Maybe it’s Gary Cooper he most resembles. (Apparently, the influential Elinor Glyn saw him on a set and announced, “My dear boy, you’re really very wonderful to look at. And, besides, you know you have—It.” This was long before she anointed Clara Bow and Antonio Moreno.) In 1923, the year of his death, a poll was taken of 37,000 high-school students across the country. The boys voted Fairbanks their favorite male star, the girls picked Valentino. But Wallace Reid was number two with both sexes, a stunning demonstration of his mass appeal. Years later, Conrad Nagel tried to explain his unique popularity: “Wallace was the number-one boxoffice star, the King. And he was one of the most charming, most lovable, wonderful guys I’ve ever known. There wasn’t the slightest bit of conceit in him. He never took himself seriously. No ego there at all.” For half a dozen years he was the reigning male star, like the later King, Clark Gable, and like Gable he even affected fashion. In 1922, when men were all wearing detachable starched collars, Reid appeared in a soft white shirt. The Errol Collar people went to the Motion Pictures Producers’ Association, crying, “Can’t you do something about this? The collar manufacturers are being put out of business. Can’t you get Wally Reid to wear a starched collar?” That’s stardom!

In 1913 he had married costar Dorothy Davenport, a famously happy marriage, and had two children. He was generous, easygoing, unaffected by his fame. (He also liked a drink or two, and may have been more susceptible than the fan mags acknowledged to the countless women who pursued him.) Then he was in a train accident, was given morphine for the pain, and slowly became an addict. Finally, making a heroic effort, he went cold turkey, but the damage had been done and he slipped into a coma and died. This wasn’t a seamy scandal, like Fatty Arbuckle’s in 1921, or a sinister, unsolved crime, like the William Desmond Taylor murder of 1922. It was the drug death of Mr. Straight Arrow, and, wrote De Mille decades later, “the terrible shock of his death shattered the public’s image of him and almost shattered Hollywood.” Apparently, Reid had said to De Mille just before entering the sanitarium where he died, “I’ll either come out cured or I won’t come out.”

After his death, his wife dedicated herself to publicizing the terrible story of his narcotics addiction in an attempt to warn others of the dangers of dope. His mother, Bertha Westbrook Reid, wrote a memorial book:
Wallace Reid: His Life Story
. She quotes many of the condolence letters she received, of which one will suffice:

Naïve, playful, the soul of a boy in the body of a giant. Irresponsible, carefree, gentle-hearted, forgiving. With malice toward none, and limitless charity for all—Wallace Reid. The world is a fairer, lovelier place for us all to live in and the path to the Garden of God, plainer and the distance to everlasting joy and peace many weary miles less because God lent us your gifted, gladsome, loving lad for just a little while.

—A Mother

That famous sob sister/scriptwriter/Hollywood know-all Adela Rogers St. Johns was perhaps the Reids’ closest friend—he called her his mother confessor. In her memoirs, she speaks of him with passionate affection, and with fury at De Mille, whom she accuses of having exposed the naïve young man to every kind of temptation (though not directly to drugs). “What he did was constantly flaunt his philosophy of hedonism, of virtue begging pardon of vice, of wickedness as the
most fun
of anything. De Mille made Wally feel that his natural loving kindness and tenderness, his desire for true love, was ridiculous and immature and, again that horrid word that can somehow tempt and mortify people—unsophisticated.” St. Johns and Dorothy Reid collaborated on a movie,
Human Wreckage
, that somewhat fictionalized the story of Wally’s destruction, and they barnstormed it across the country, arousing women to band together to halt the drug wave. They didn’t succeed, and they didn’t succeed, either, in keeping the name of Wallace Reid prominent in film history. But that’s where it belongs.

Rob Reiner
(Robert Reiner), b. Bronx, New York, 1947
1984:
This Is Spinal Tap
. 1985:
The Sure Thing
. 1986:
Stand By Me
. 1987:
The Princess Bride
. 1989:
When Harry Met Sally
. 1990:
Misery
. 1992:
A Few Good Men
. 1994:
North
. 1995:
The American President
. 1996:
Ghosts of Mississippi
. 1997:
I Am Your Child
(d) (TV). 1999:
The Story of Us
. 2003:
Alex and Emma
. 2005:
Rumor Has It …
2007:
The Bucket List
. 2010:
Flipped
.

The son of comic actor and writer Carl Reiner, Rob moved with his family to Los Angeles in 1960. The son followed in the father’s footsteps, doing stand-up comedy, writing for TV, and forming an improvisational group, The Session. He appeared in a few movies:
Enter Laughing
(67, Carl Reiner);
Halls of Anger
(70, Paul Bogart);
Where’s Poppa?
(70, Reiner); and
Summertree
(71, Anthony Newley), which he helped write.

But he became a household figure as Michael Stivic, “Meathead,” that steady liberal stooge and dogged straight man to Archie Bunker in
All in the Family
. That lasted from 1971 to 1978 and won him two Emmys. He worked outside that hot show, too: acting in
Thursday’s Game
(74, Robert Moore) and
Fire Sale
(77, Alan Arkin); writing and beginning to produce—he launched the series
More Than Friends
in 1978, which starred his then wife, Penny Marshall.

As a director, Reiner is not unlike Michael Stivic: decent, self-effacing, reliable, and entertaining. Crushing praise? Not in these times.
Spinal Tap
was a novel debut.
Stand By Me
is sentimental but touching.
The Princess Bride
was unexpected.
When Harry Met Sally
was a sweet comedy about two cute people.
Misery
was much less than it might have been, because it settled for the basic character setup rather than a film about two tyrants, competing for authorship. There was a black comedy present in
Misery
that could have surpassed all of Reiner’s easy laughs.

A Few Good Men
was preposterous and rigged—why should that Marine colonel crack open so conveniently?—but it took a grim audience to resist having a good time. Reiner has that old, unbeatable sense of silly things that work. But he may be at that point where he needs to deliver something more lasting, and more rooted in life.

He acted again in
Sleepless in Seattle
(93, Nora Ephron). And kept up that work over the decade:
Bullets Over Broadway
(94, Woody Allen);
Mixed Nuts
(94, Nora Ephron);
Bye Bye, Love
(95, Sam Weisman);
The First Wives Club
(96, Hugh Wilson);
Mad Dog Time
(96, Larry Bishop);
For Better or Worse
(96, Jason Alexander);
Primary Colors
(98, Mike Nichols);
Ed TV
(99, Ron Howard);
The Muse
(99, Albert Brooks).

As a director, he seemed more struck (or poleaxed) by the notion that niceness could save the world. It is a pretty thought, but one that stifles so many human and social realities. And so his work turns to pie in the sky with “good” and “bad” all too clearly labeled. He’s carried along by a fundamental decency and a sense of scenes that play. But his films are predictable from their first moments, and they begin to establish a weird, dumb orthodoxy—that if we’re good to our kids everything will be okay. This is not true. Life is more interesting.

Karel Reisz
(1926–2002), b. Ostrava, Czechoslovakia
1958:
We Are the Lambeth Boys
(d). 1960:
Saturday Night and Sunday Morning
. 1964:
Night Must Fall
. 1966:
Morgan: A Suitable Case for Treatment
. 1968:
Isadora
. 1974:
The Gambler
. 1978:
Who’ll Stop the Rain?/Dog Soldiers
. 1981:
The French Lieutenant’s Woman
. 1985:
Sweet Dreams
. 1990:
Everybody Wins
. 2000:
Act Without Words 1
(s) (TV).

If ever there was thought to be a northwest passage to moviemaking in Britain, Reisz was its pathfinder. Having arrived in Britain shortly before the war, he served in the Czech squadron of the RAF and then read chemistry at Cambridge. He was a member of the
Sequence
group, the first critical attempt in Britain to look for moral earnestness in cinema; in 1953, he published
The Technique of Film Editing
, a curiously unenthusiastic, if helpful book; he was, briefly, programs officer of the National Film Theatre, and by the mid-1950s he was a leading figure in the Free Cinema movement. It is difficult now to decide what that movement stood for. The aim of showing and celebrating everyday life is one that TV was already wolfing down whole. Realism, by 1956, was an archaic mode, and yet for a few years in Britain it became a proof of social and political seriousness. In attaching itself to the “angry” movement and to the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, it constituted one of the most irrelevant of artistic breakthroughs that England has suffered.