The New Biographical Dictionary of Film: Completely Updated and Expanded (352 page)

The supposed “free” cinema of
Momma Don’t Allow
was soon channeled into an extraordinary nailing down of unlikely literary sources. The films are all abject, but I still feel provoked by the mistreatment of some of the original authors. As far as Osborne, Shelagh Delaney, and Alan Sillitoe were concerned, Richardson tacked a literal-minded realism on to their rhetoric. But the inconsequential
Sanctuary
had to be seen to be believed;
Tom Jones
was a tricksy evasion of one of the best constructed of English novels, shaming the audience who thought it original and replacing Fielding’s robust humor with flashy knowingness;
The Loved One
was very dilute acid;
Mademoiselle
was ludicrous, made worse by the fact that Franju had been deprived of the chance of filming Genet’s original with Anouk Aimée;
The Sailor from Gibraltar
was one of the wettest films of all time, though Richardson always protested that there should have been a great film in the Marguerite Duras novel.
Hamlet
can look after itself, but Nabokov’s
Laughter in the Dark
is a novel that even a competent director would have to go out of his way not to make stunning—Richardson strenuously hacked out such a path. The fact that he squandered Anna Karina in it was in character; already he had misused Claire Bloom, Lee Remick, Susannah York, Jeanne Moreau, not to mention Vanessa Redgrave, and Mick Jagger in
Ned Kelly
.

It is such a pitiful record that I should add a word for the intermittent period verisimilitude of
The Charge of the Light Brigade
.

Alan Rickman
, b. London, 1946
Born and raised in West London, Rickman went to art school and was functioning as a graphic designer before—around his mid-twenties—he decided he preferred acting. He has had a notable stage career, playing
Valmont
and
Private Lives
, but he has also significantly added to that American sentimentality: that if you want a great villain, well-spoken in every curse and condemnation, hire an English actor. So the general public knows and cherishes Rickman for his Hans Gruber opposite Bruce Willis in
Die Hard
(88, John McTiernan), and for his Severus Snape in six Harry Potter films. The general public has its point, but this book prefers to remember Rickman as perhaps the cinema’s most testy, tender, and amiable of ghosts—I refer to his Jamie in
Truly Madly Deeply
(90, Anthony Minghella), the director’s most original and achieved film.

Die Hard
and
Harry Potter
are certainly mainstream chores, but the fuller list of Rickman’s work shows his determined independence: Tybalt in
Romeo and Juliet
(78, Alvin Rakoff);
Thérèse Raquin
(80, Simon Langton); as the Rev. Obadiah Slope in TV’s
The Barchester Chronicles
(82, David Giles);
The January Man
(89, Pat O’Connor);
Quigley Down Under
(90, Simon Wincer);
Closet Land
(91, Radha Bharadwaj); the Sheriff of Nottingham in
Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves
(91, Kevin Reynolds);
Close My Eyes
(91, Stephen Poliakoff);
Bob Roberts
(92, Tim Robbins); as
Mesmer
(94, Roger Spottiswoode);
An Awfully Big Adventure
(95, Mike Newell);
Sense and Sensibility
(95, Ang Lee); as
Rasputin
(96, Uli Edel); as Eamon de Valera in
Michael Collins
(96, Neil Jordan); strangely Southern in
Judas Kiss
(98, Sebastian Gutierrez);
Dark Harbor
(98, Adam Coleman Howard);
Dogma
(99, Kevin Smith);
Galaxy Quest
(99, Dean Parisot); in a version of Beckett,
Play
(00, Minghella);
Blow Dry
(01, Paddy Breathnach);
Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone
(01, Chris Columbus);
The Search for John Gissing
(01, Mike Binder);
Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets
(02, Columbus);
Love Actually
(03, Richard Curtis);
Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban
(04, Alfonso Cuarón);
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
(05, Garth Jennings);
Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire
(05, Newell);
Snow Cake
(06, Marc Evans);
Perfume
(06, Tom Tykwer);
Nobel Son
(07, Randall Miller);
Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix
(07, David Yates); Judge Turpin in
Sweeney Todd
(07, Tim Burton);
Bottle Shock
(08, Miller);
Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince
(09, Yates).

Leni Riefenstahl
(1902–2003), b. Berlin,
1932:
Das Blaue Licht/The Blue Light
. 1933:
Sieg des Glaubens
(d). 1935:
Tag der Freiheit—Unsere Wehrmacht
(d). 1936:
Triumph des Willens/ Triumph of the Will
(d). 1938:
Olympiad: Fest der Schonheit
(d);
Olympiad: Fest der Volker
(d). 1945:
Tiefland
. 1956:
Schwarze Fracht
(uncompleted).

If succeeding generations find it harder to understand the mood that carried Nazism across Europe in the period 1933–45, then
Triumph of the Will
may be the most succinct proof of that hysterical confidence. The film is not simply a record of a fascist event, it is an event in itself. And now that all the leaders have been tracked down, the camps made into museums, and memories fuddled by guilt, remorse and self-righteousness,
Triumph of the Will
may be the most honest and compelling fruit of fascist temperament. I have watched it in small viewing theatres, with a handful of people, and been stirred by its confusion of power and regeneration. That experience helps to explain how so many Germans responded to National Socialism. For
Triumph of the Will
is such a monument to warped beauty that it serves to make us cautious of beauty itself.

Its maker, Leni Riefenstahl, has never escaped the ambiguous pall of her film. Since the end of the war, she has been in turn prisoner, wanderer, and litigant, a director without work; arguably the most talented woman ever to make a film, she is still neglected in an age of feminist militancy. In 1964, she could look back on her career and see it as the work of destiny:

I was thinking of this: in
The Blue Light
, I played the role of a child of nature who, on the nights of the full moon, climbed to this blue light, the image of an ideal, an aspiration dreamed of, a thing to which each being, above all when young, ardently desires to attain. Well, when her dream is destroyed Yunta dies. I spoke of that as my destiny. For that is what was accomplished, much later, in me, after the war when everything collapsed on us, when I was deprived of all possibility of creating. For art, creation—this is my life, and I was deprived of it. My life became a tissue of rumours and accusations through which I had to beat a path; they all were revealed to be false, but for twenty years they deprived me of my creation. I tried to write, but what I wanted to do was to make films.

I tried to make films, but I couldn’t. Everything was reduced to nothingness. Only my vocation was left. Yes, at that moment, I was dead.

Leni Riefenstahl was a haughty, handsome girl, absorbed in painting and dance. It would be hard to find features nearer the ideal of purposeful, Aryan health, or a body so caught up in the fulsome postures of vitality. She studied fine art at the Berlin Academy and was a ballet student with Mary Wigman and Max Reinhardt before an injury turned her toward movie acting.

She was the spirit of the mountains, an intense naïf, aspiring to the dramatic purity of mountains and the towering sharpness of peaks. There was a whole school of German mountain films, vaguely pantheistic, fumbling toward some great force that could capture idealism—the hills were alive with the echo of the future:
Der Heilige Berg
(26, Arnold Fanck, her mentor);
Der Grosse Sprung
(27, Fanck);
Die Weisse Holle von Piz Palu
(29, Fanck and G. W. Pabst);
Sturme über den Mont Blanc
(30, Fanck); and
Die Weisse Rausch
(31, Fanck). She also appeared in
SOS Eisberg
(33, Fanck and Tay Garnett).

But by then she had formed her own production company and made
The Blue Light
, the preeminent work of mountain mysticism, from a screenplay by Bela Balasz. What followed is open to some debate, but Hitler himself admired her work and wanted her to make a film of the 1934 Nazi Party rallies at Nuremberg. That she was never a party member seems true, but that she meekly recorded those rallies is a nonsense. Her resources were extensive, and the rally itself was conceived and organized with filming in mind.

One must go further. It is a question of seeing this, on the one hand, from Leni Riefenstahl:

A commission was proposed to me. Good, I accepted. Good. I agreed, like so many others, to make a film that so many others, with or without talent, could have made. Well it is to this film that I am obliged for spending several years, after my arrest by the French, in different camps and prisons. But if you see this film again today you ascertain that it doesn’t contain a single reconstructed scene. Everything in it is true. And it contains no tendentious commentary at all. It is history. A pure historical film … it is film-vérité. It reflects the truth that was then, in 1934, history. It is therefore a documentary. Not a propaganda film. Oh! I know very well what propaganda is. That consists of recreating certain events in order to illustrate a thesis or, in the face of certain events, to let one thing go in order to accentuate another. I found myself, me, at the heart of an event which was the reality of a certain time and a certain place. My film is composed of what stemmed from that.

Yet
Triumph of the Will
is entirely lacking in doubt, accident, or uncomposed shots; that is why its beauty becomes relentless, oppressive, and demented. The camera is a party to the staging of events. It characterizes them in the way it frames and shoots them. The pace of the film shatters real time, the tedium of waiting crowds, and moves with the destined gravity of editing. The film shrieks with camera aptitude, integrated design, sense of composition, the flush of light, a feeling for martial resolve, for the shapes of crowds, for the splendor of the lone individual, the resonance of banners and trumpets and of torchlight seen through the languorous folds of a flag stirred on a summer night. Few films so illustrate the effects of camera angles, of moving shots, of editing. The whole is based on a dynamic tension between monolithic close-ups of uneasy, unwholesome demagogues and surging traveling shots of burnished masses—a fatal mixture of immense destiny and fake heroism.

The skill is not only subordinated to fascist conviction. It has a sense of beauty that is trite, vulgar, and stupid. The beauty of
Triumph of the Will
is predesigned and underlined; it never risks any threat to visual order; it smothers the momentary and mistrusts the viewer’s ability to perceive. Thus, it defines the simpleminded craving for respectability that leads to dogma in fascism. But it is still terrifying to watch, for it shows how far we all nurture that urge to be conclusive and sure.

The films of the 1936 Olympic Games are far less of an achievement: prolix, arty, and pretentious. The Games were so much more diffuse an event that the film has none of the total mise-en-scène of
Triumph of the Will
. It is notable for foolish, heady excesses—the Isadora Duncan-like scenes in Greece, the emphasis on shape at the expense of competition, the slightly prurient relish of glistening muscle, and the editing delirium over high-diving.

Since then, Leni Riefenstahl has been in camps, trying to rehabilitate herself and, for many years, in Africa, doubtless trying to recapture the remote, ardent conviction of the mountain films. Her own life is sad, troubled, and intriguing. But her greatest work is triumphant, certain, and dreadful.

In her astonishing longevity she did books of photographs, and at last she did an autobiography—a fascinating, dotty, and unreliable book. Along with the remarkable documentary film made about her
—The Wonderful Horrible Life of Leni Riefenstahl
(93, Ray Muller)—she has remained an issue in the age of
Schindler’s List
.

Molly Ringwald
, b. Sacramento, California, 1968
Molly Ringwald was on the cover of
Time
once, as part of a celebration of herself and the John Hughes films that embodied a rather sweet, nostalgic view of teenagers. A few years later, it was unclear whether she wanted, or could sustain, an “adult” career. She was pretty, cool, with haughty, deadpan eyes. She could say a line; she was a magnet of appeal and likability—she was, maybe, an advertising icon for the high concept of Teen U.S.A. or Teenagers ‘r’ Us. I do not underestimate her: she kept powerful company, and kept it at bay. That very guarded look of hers masked a considerable intelligence.

She was the daughter of jazz musician Bob Ringwald, with whose band she sang as a child.
Tempest
(82, Paul Mazursky), her debut, cast her as a modern-day Miranda, but she quickly settled in midtown America, an apparently independent teenager, the suburban dream child for anxious parents:
P.K. and the Kid
(82, Lou Lombardo);
Spacehunter: Adventures in the Forbidden Zone
(83, Lamont Johnson);
Sixteen Candles
(84, John Hughes);
The Breakfast Club
(85, Hughes);
Pretty in Pink
(86, Howard Deutsch); as a kind of Cordelia for
King Lear
(87, Jean-Luc Godard); venturing into a lurid, adult world in
The Pick-up Artist
(87, James Toback), a film silently produced by her advisor, Warren Beatty;
For Keeps
(88, John Avildsen); not too comfortable playing a slut in
Fresh Horses
(88, David Anspaugh);
Strike It Rich
(90, James Scott);
Betsey’s Wedding
(90, Alan Alda);
Women & Men: Stories of Seduction
(90, Ken Russell), doing Dorothy Parker’s “Dusk Before Fireworks.”