The New Biographical Dictionary of Film: Completely Updated and Expanded (349 page)

The contradictions are troubling.
Nuit et Brouillard
was based on the imperative not to forget, yet in 1961 Resnais’s growing emphasis on emotional forgetfulness produced this odd statement: “If one does not forget, one can neither live nor function. The problem arose for me when I made
Nuit et Brouillard
. It was not a question of making yet another war memorial, but of thinking of the present and the future. Forgetting ought to be constructive.” That seems to lead to an interest in time more philosophical than dramatic, more a matter of sophistry than of personal response. His first three features seem to me avid, overwrought melodramas imposed upon by a heavy but speculative interest in temporality. Again, there is a contradiction in the way, after
Hiroshima
, Resnais spoke like a stranger of the possible direction the characters might take after the last frame. That sort of objectivity—offered again with
Marienbad
—and the erroneous faith in real life detract from the artist’s paramount concern with what happens within the film. It is also flatly challenged by this statement from Marguerite Duras, scenarist of
Hiroshima:

Before shooting his film, Resnais wanted to know everything about the story he would tell, and about the story he would not tell. As to the characters we were dealing with, he wanted to know everything about them: their youth; their lives before the film and, up to a point, their future after the film ends. Therefore I did biographies of my characters. And Resnais translated those biographies into images, as though he was conveying a film that already existed from the previous lives of those characters.

The discrepancy between such preliminary thoroughness and the subsequent open-mindedness is a sign of Resnais’s dependence upon writers—Duras, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Jean Cayrol, Jorge Semprun, and Jacques Sternberg—and of the doubts that arise as a philosophical attitude rather than as an artistic statement. It is a confusion to think of movie characters having actual lives. Just as cinema exploits real people—actors and actresses—so its characters are kidnapped by the fantasies of the audience. The variation in Resnais’s style—from the elaborate tracking shots of
Marienbad
to the static, fragmented
Muriel
—is deliberate and schematic and not something that arises naturally from the subject. The anguish in Resnais films, and the women who suffer it, are too often held back from us by the deadly intelligence of the approach. It is something that afflicts Virginia Woolf and sometimes drains experience out of the work, as if it were vulgar. The emotional relationships in Resnais’s work are invariably denied the present tense—but strongest when recollected, or invented. The love scenes in
La Guerre est Finie
are the exception to that: lush, sensual, and trying to compensate for the cerebral emphasis elsewhere.

The resort to English-speaking actors in
Providence
seemed no problem for Resnais; he may have had more difficulty with David Mercer as a scenarist. Mercer likes to wear away at his characters with their guilts and fears; Resnais generally regards such things as elements of a pattern.
Providence
is a fascinating project, sumptuously realized: a dying novelist in a dark house where the phantoms of family memory and a new novel mingle together. But it took the cruel amusement of John Gielgud’s best-ever film acting to make the pattern gripping. Elsewhere, it seems an intellectual construction, lacking the humor required and, as ever, willing to treat its women as mannequins in the cold avenues of memory.

Over eighty now, and still working, Resnais is in need of serious reappraisal. Several of the earlier films are hard to track down now—
Muriel
, especially. Also, much of the recent work has seemed caught between intellectual theory and conventional melodrama. Yet
Mèlo
seems to me the best of his recent films by far, the one in which formal intricacy is most devoted to character and feeling. It may yet emerge as a pattern that Resnais has been constantly torn between artistic aspirations and a deeper sense of old-fashioned dramatic impact. But should the struggle be closer to being settled? Still,
Providence
grows as time passes. Once upon a time, Emmanuelle Riva in
Hiroshima
was the emblem of Resnais’s work. But now I think of Gielgud’s novelist, torn between bodily pain and the rapture of invention.

Fernando Rey
(Fernando Casado Arambillet Vega) (1917–94), b. La Coruña, Spain
Is there a tastier piece of internal rhyming in the history of cinema than the way, in the early seventies, the serene insouciance of Fernando Rey served as both the archetypal bourgeois gentleman for Luis Buñuel, wondering if dinner would ever be served, and the ungraspable Frog One, Alain Charnier, ready to serve everyone, in
The French Connection?
What’s more, the politeness, the discretion, he exhibited for Buñuel was so very close to the modest wave of the hand that teased Gene Hackman for being on the wrong side of the subway window.

Manners maketh the man, whether he is a bishop, a pillar of respectability, or the blackest scoundrel ever photographed—for the movies note surfaces first. In that sense, Fernando Rey is unrivaled as an ambiguous front, a bystander waiting to be charged, or canonized. And as the bearer of one of the screen’s great mustaches with the pubic triangle of beard, he is always poised on the brink of being exposed as fraud or lecher. Until then, of course, he is to be trusted with valuables, daughters, and intimate confessions. He would have made a very fine Clare Quilty—and a perfect Humbert. Imagine a Buñuel film where Rey takes both roles, with a different Lo in every shot. After all, the mystery of
That Obscure Object of Desire
is held in place, lovely yet unanswerable, by Fernando’s pious and steadfast inability to see the switch that keeps occurring.

Now, the IMDb lists well over two hundred works, film and television, in which Rey acted, or let the light slip off his surface. There’s a way in which he might have been in every film ever made, and simply assigned his ghosts—like George Sanders, Marcel Dalio, Adolphe Menjou, Dennis Price, et cetera—to those beyond his reach. So we must be stringent with our selection. Suffice it to say that before 1940 Rey studied architecture at the University of Madrid, fought for the Republican Army in the Civil War, and made a few movie appearances, but then really settled in (as a beautiful young man) after 1945.

He was in
La Pródiga
(46, Rafael Gil);
La Princesa de los Ursinos
(47, Luis Lucia); with Maria Félix in
Mare Nostrum
(48, Gil);
Locura de Amor
(48, Juan de Orduna);
Aventuras de Juan Lucas
(49, Gil);
Cielo Negro
(51, Manuel Mur Oti);
La Señora de Fátima
(51, Gil);
La Laguna Negra
(52, Arturo Ruiz Castillo);
Cómicos
(54, Juan Antonio Bardem);
Billete par Tánger
(54, Ted Leversuch);
El Amor de Don Juan
(56, John Berry);
El Cantor de México
(56, Richard Pottier);
El Andén
(57, Eduardo Manzanos Brochero);
La Venganza
(57, Bardem);
Heaven Fell That Night
(57, Roger Vadim).

Fluent in French and English, he was well suited to “international” production:
The Last Days of Pompeii
(59, Mario Bonnard);
Sonatas
(59, Bardem); with Lex Barker in
Mission in Morocco
(59, Anthony Squire);
Culpables
(60, Castillo);
Teresa
(60, Alfredo B. Crevenna); in the Rhonda Fleming epic,
Revolt of the Slaves
(61, Nunzio Malasomma); and then Don Jaime in
Viridiana
(61, Luis Bunuel).

He was Bokan, the Usurper in
Goliath Against the Giants
(62, Guido Malatesta);
The Running Man
(63, Carol Reed);
The Ceremony
(63, Laurence Harvey);
Échappement Libre
(64, Jean Becker);
La Nueva Cenicienta
(64, George Sherman);
Son of a Gunfighter
(65, Paul Landres); Worcester in
Chimes at Midnight
(65, Orson Welles); Goldginger himself (this is not made up) in
Due Mafiosi contro Goldginger
(65, Giorgio Simonelli)—big G was an evil genius who sought to turn all government employees into drones; on TV in support in
Don Quijote
(66, Jacques Bourdon and Louis Grospierre); in an Eddie Constantine picture,
Attack of the Robots
(66, Jesus Franco);
Return of the Seven
(66, Burt Kennedy); with Burt Reynolds in
Navajo Joe
(66, Sergio Corbucci); as the king in
El Greco
(66, Luciano Salce); and the king again in
Cervantes
(66, Vincent Sherman).

Enough kings and you get a castle:
Run Like a Thief
(67, Bernard Glasser and Harry Spalding);
The Immortal Story
(68, Welles);
Land Raiders
(69, Nathan Juran);
Un Sudario a la Medida
(69, José María Elorrieta);
The Adventurers
(70, Lewis Gilbert); and then, sublime in the chaos—
Tristana
(70, Buñuel), with Catherine Deneuve;
Il Prezzo del Potere
(70, Tonino Valerii);
Aoom
(70, Conzala Suarez);
Trinity Sees Red
(71, Mario Camus);
A Town Called Hell
(71, Robert Parrish), as Old Blind Man; and
The French Connection
(71, William Friedkin), where he is suave and suaver.

After
The Light at the Edge of the World
(71, Kevin Billington), he did
La Duda
(72, Gil);
Zanna Bianca
(72, Lucio Fulci);
The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie
(72, Buñuel);
Un Camino
(72, Jorge Darnell); Lepidus in
Antony and Cleopatra
(73, Charlton Heston);
Tarots
(73, José María Forqué);
Pena de Muerte
(73, Jorge Grau);
Challenge to White Fang
(74, Fulci); with Deneuve in
La Femme aux Bottes Rouges
(74, Juan Luis Buñuel);
Alle Origini della Mafia
(74, Enzo Muzii);
French Connection II
(75, John Frankenheimer);
Illustrious Corpses
(76, Francesco Rosi);
A Matter of Time
(76, Vincente Minnelli);
Striptease
(76, Germán Lorente);
El Segundo Poder
(76, Forqué);
Seven Beauties
(76, Lina Wertmuller).

He won awards for
Elisa, Vida Mía
(77, Carlos Saura); and eternity for
That Obscure Object of Desire
(77, Buñuel);
Le Dernier Amant Romantique
(78, Just Jaeckin);
Rebeldía
(78, Andrés Velasco);
Quintet
(79, Robert Altman);
Memorias de Leticia Valle
(79, Miguel Angel Rivas);
Caboblanco
(80, J. Lee Thompson);
El Crimen de Cuenca
(80, Pilar Miro);
La Dame aux Camélias
(81, Mauro Bolognini);
Monsignor
(82, Frank Perry);
Cercasi Gesù
(82, Luigi Comencini); as the dry policeman in
The Hit
(84, Stephen Frears);
Un Amour Interdit
(84, Jean-Pierre Dougnac);
Saving Grace
(85, Robert M. Young);
Rustlers’ Rhapsody
(85, Hugh Wilson);
Padre Nuestro
(85, Francisco Regueiro);
Hôtel du Paradis
(86, Jana Bokova);
Commando Mengele
(86, Andrea Bianchi);
L’Été 36
(87, Yves Robert),
El Túnel
(87, Antonio Drove);
Captain James Cook
(87, Peter Yeldham).

Closing in on seventy, he still labored:
Moon Over Parador
(88, Paul Mazursky);
Diario de Invierno
(88, Regueiro);
La Bahía Esmeralda
(89, Franco);
Naked Tango
(90, Leonard Schrader);
Diceria dell’ Untore
(90, Beppe Cino); on TV as the Don in
El Quijote de Miguel de Cervantes
(91, Manuel Gutiérrez Aragón);
Después del Sueño
(92, Camus);
1492: Conquest of Paradise
(92, Ridley Scott);
La Marrana
(92, José Luis Cuerda);
Madregilda
(93, Regueiro).

Burt Reynolds
(Burton Leon Reynolds Jr.), b. Waycross, Georgia, 1936
In the years from 1973 to 1980, Burt Reynolds was always in the top ten boxoffice attractions. In 1978, he was the most popular actor in America. Yet he worried: he wanted more respect, better material; he wanted to be like Cary Grant. His films came nowhere near Cary Grant, and Burt without his mustache (but with his rug) could look grim and shifty. Nevertheless, in his ongoing interview (and he is a great, helpless talker), he showed that he was smarter and funnier than his films led anyone to expect. It was an intriguing dilemma. But people who worry over respect seldom get it; those who own it do not notice it.

Reynolds was unable to find the strength to do without the sexual admiration he despised. He was a footballer when young; he retained a disciplined physique; and his grin made him the natural heir to Clark Gable, swaggering authority. His love life was sung in the gossip papers, and once Burt posed nude for a
Cosmopolitan
centerfold—with sweet, demure taste. He says now that that was a mistake, but he says it so often that he doesn’t help us forget it. I have seen him on a TV talk show, in front of a daytime devotion of women, struggling to define his earnest intentions. Opportunity faces him with the question, “How important to you is directing?” His face is taut: “Oh, it’s the best …” Then the knowing smirk slips in. “Well, the second-best sensation I’ve ever known.” Howls of glee from the ladies, and another chance is squandered. What the ladies don’t know, and even Burt may have forgotten, is that that afterthought was scripted: it comes from
Deliverance
where Burt’s character says exactly the same thing about shooting rapids.