The New Biographical Dictionary of Film: Completely Updated and Expanded (384 page)

I have three other things to say: (1) his script for
Paris, Texas
(84, Wim Wenders) may have been embroidered, improved upon, and improvised upon, but it is his contribution to film that comes closest to the poetic sundering of family in his best plays; (2) he really acts in
Voyager
(91, Volker Schlöndorff), that remarkable parable of coincidence and incest, about family being put back together; and (3) his book of sketches, views, and moods from the road,
Motel Chronicles
, is one of those books movie people seem to have read. Its influence on the urge to road pictures, loneliness, and a fateful wildness is very large.

I think it’s to be regretted that Shepard has acted so often lately (without anyone noticing how little he brings to the party). For he seems to have been distracted from theatre. Even when writing a play
—The Late Henry Moss
—his mind seemed to be wandering. But there is, in view, another collaboration with Wim Wenders
—In America
(02). Meanwhile, he is a rather gloomy presence in
The Pelican Brief
(93, Alan J. Pakula);
Safe Passage
(94, Robert Allan Ackerman);
The Good Old Boys
(95, Tommy Lee Jones); as Pea-Eye Parker in
Streets of Laredo
(95, Joseph Sargent);
Lily Dale
(96, Peter Masterson);
The Only Thrill
(97, Masterson);
Purgatory
(99, Uli Edel); with Judy Davis in
Dash and Lily
(99, Kathy Bates);
Curtain Call
(99, Peter Yates);
Snow Falling on Cedars
(99, Scott Hicks); the Ghost in
Hamlet
(00, Michael Almereyda);
All the Pretty Horses
(00, Billy Bob Thornton);
The Pledge
(01, Sean Penn);
After the Harvest
(01, Jeremy Podeswa);
Swordfish
(01, Dominic Sena);
Shot in the Heart
(01, Agnieszka Holland); the increasingly dismayed commander in
Black Hawk Down
(01, Ridley Scott);
Leo
(02, Mehdi Norowzian);
Blind Horizon
(03, Michael Haussman);
The Notebook
(04, Nick Cassavetes); acting in and cowriting
Don’t Come Knockin’
(04, Wenders).

We are grateful that he still writes plays and short stories, for he does not seem made for this alone:
Bandidas
(05, Joachin Rønning and Espen Sandberg);
Stealth
(05, Rob Cohen);
Walker Payne
(06, Matt Williams); narrating
Charlotte’s Web
(06, Gary Winick); celebrating a horse in
Ruffian
(07, Yves Simoneau); as Frank James in
The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford
(08, Andrew Dominik);
The Accidental Husband
(08, Griffin Dunne);
Felon
(08, Ric Roman Waugh);
Brothers
(09, Jim Sheridan).

Larissa Shepitko
(1939–79), b. Armtervosk, USSR
1961:
Slepoj Kukhar/The Blind Cook
(s). 1962:
Zhivaya Voda/Living Water
(s). 1963:
Znoj/Heat
. 1966:
Krylya/Wings
. 1968:
The Homeland of Electricity
(not released until 1987). 1972:
Ty i Ya/You and I
. 1977:
Voskhozhdeniye/The Ascent
.

Larissa Shepitko could hardly help being a romantic figure—for she was as close to beautiful as film directors can hope to come. In addition, she had been a young student of Dovzhenko and had helped his widow, Yulia Solntseva, complete
Poem of the Sea
(58). She was also a spokesperson for new moods and hopes in Soviet life, a harbinger of thaw. Then, finally, she and several members of her crew were killed in a car crash near Moscow, so that her husband, Elem Klimov, was left to complete her last project
—Farewell
(81).

In her best work,
You and I
and
The Ascent
, Shepitko tackled modern morality issues with vigor and boldness.
The Ascent
, set during the Second World War, won the Golden Bear at Berlin, and it is likely that Shepitko would have left for America. How would that have worked out? Why would a real artist have wanted to escape (or miss) what has happened in the old Soviet Union in the last ten years? Sooner or later, a terrifying new Russian cinema will be revealed.

Ann Sheridan
(Clara Lou Sheridan) (1915–67), b. Denton, Texas
Called the “Oomph Girl” by Warners, Ann Sheridan always appeared too intelligent to be merely a glamour queen. Far more versatile than Hollywood ever allowed, she had an unusually broad face, a wide, full-lipped mouth, and eyes set far apart. Asked to be sultry, she invariably appeared to be making fun of her admirers.

Trained as a teacher, she won a beauty contest, the prize of which was a test at Paramount, where she made her debut in
Search for Beauty
(34, Erle C. Kenton). She remained with Paramount for two years, generally wasted on bit parts, but with larger roles in
Behold My Wife
(35, Mitchell Leisen),
The Glass Key
(35, Frank Tuttle), and
Mississippi
(35), an Edward Sutherland musical. In 1936, she was put under contract by Warners, originally for musicals—Ray Enright’s
Sing Me a Love Song
(36)—but most successfully as the romantic interest in gangster films. She appeared in Mayo’s
Black Legion
(36), Dieterle’s
The Great O’Malley
(37), and Lloyd Bacon’s
San Quentin
(37) in small parts, and was then worked up in B-picture leads, including three directed by John Farrow:
She Loved a Fireman
(38);
Little Miss Thoroughbred
(38); and
Broadway Musketeers
(38), another musical.

She was loaned to Universal for
Letter of Introduction
(38, John M. Stahl) and returned to thrillers as the good girl opposite Cagney in Curtiz’s
Angels with Dirty Faces
(38), then with John Garfield in
They Made Me a Criminal
(39, Busby Berkeley). After another musical,
Naughty But Nice
(39, Enright) and playing a floozy in
Dodge City
(39, Curtiz), she was publicized by Warners as a wartime sex symbol:
Castle on the Hudson
(40, Anatole Litvak); Lewis Seiler’s
It All Came True
(40); William Keighley’s
Torrid Zone
(40), where she sings like Lauren Bacall’s elder sister, throws sandwiches at Cagney, and generally lolls about; Raoul Walsh’s
They Drive by Night
(40); and Litvak’s
City for Conquest
(40). Her extra knowingness worked well in these hardboiled films, but she was quickly switched to more conventional, dramatic films: at first excellent in Keighley’s
The Man Who Came to Dinner
(42) and Sam Wood’s
King’s Row
(42), but wasted in Milestone’s
Edge of Darkness
(43) and back to musicals in David Butler’s
Shine On, Harvest Moon
(44).

After the war, she was never again as successful, and after two women’s pictures
—Nora Prentiss
(47, Vincent Sherman) and
The Unfaithful
(47, Sherman)—and Raoul Walsh’s Western,
Silver River
(48), Warners did not renew her contract. She reacted by making
Good Sam
(48, Leo McCarey) and then one of America’s most sophisticated comedies, Howard Hawks’s
I Was a Male War Bride
(49). No question of whether she understands the joke of that film. But as a freelancer, her career declined and she made a few musicals and romances at Universal:
Woman on the Run
(50, Norman Foster); Pevney’s
Just Across the Street
(52); excellent as the woman with a past in
Take Me to Town
(53, Douglas Sirk), a musical. She was as good as ever in Tourneur’s
Appointment in Honduras
(53) and better than either film deserved in
Come Next Spring
(55, R. G. Springsteen) and
The Opposite Sex
(56, David Miller). She made one more film,
Woman and the Hunter
(57, George Breakston), in Britain, and was a regular on the TV soap,
Another World
, before her death from cancer.

She married three actors, one of whom was George Brent.

Jim Sheridan
, b. Dublin, Ireland, 1949
1989:
My Left Foot
. 1990:
The Field
. 1993:
In the Name of the Father
. 1997:
The Boxer
. 2003:
In America
. 2005:
Get Rich or Die Tryin
. 2009:
Brothers
.

There are so many reasons to hope for a lively film business in Ireland. The country has all the creative stimulus of being “on the edge” of Europe. For most of the history of the movies it has known the ferment of battles with England for independence, and with Northern Ireland over union. That struggle has served to mask the deeper confrontation between modernism, free thinking, Europe, and enlightenment and a repressive social system, the Catholic Church, determined existence on the fringe, illiteracy, poverty, and a strange, willful brutality. Then again, Ireland is a land of actors, writers, and storytellers. One way or another, it has given to the movies through the careers of Rex Ingram, John Ford, John Huston, Orson Welles, Barry Fitzgerald, Brian Donlevy, Greer Garson, Maureen O’Hara, Cyril Cusack, Richard Harris, Peter O’Toole, John Boorman, and Neil Jordan—to say nothing of Scarlett O’Hara.

Still, for decades, it proved very hard for the Irish to make
their
films. Neil Jordan has managed it, though most of his Irish pictures are small stories that might have happened elsewhere. And Jordan has made repeated moves to get away. Jim Sheridan’s career as a director is thumpingly Irish, and so successful that it has woken the whole world up to the possibility, the necessity even, of Irish material.

Sheridan was educated at University College, Dublin, and he studied film at NYU. He has worked in the theatre as director and playwright, and he has been involved in the writing of his three pictures. His pictures take very different tacks on Ireland
—My Left Foot
is about that eternal Irish hero, a dangerous, warped genius who would not be ignored;
The Field
is a pastoral epic, strongly influenced by the plays of Synge and O’Casey; and the third,
Father
, is the greedy gobbling up of
the
subject, “the problem.”

The Field
is the one failure, as if Sheridan was himself too modern, too urban, to inhabit the theme of the dispossessed peasant patriarch. (The difficulty may have something to do with Richard Harris being a coarser actor than Daniel Day-Lewis.) Evidently, Lewis made
My Left Foot
not just because of his assured impersonation of so many handicaps but because of his insistence on the emotional danger—the sexiness—within all the physical problems.

As for
In the Name of the Father
, it is made with a bludgeon. But why not? What else would suit the story better? The case of the Guildford Four (in truth, several more than four) is such a disgrace to the English police and legal system, and so brimming with natural drama, it
had
to be made. And it is one of those films that might help alter our politics. It is, along the way, crude, evasive, manipulative—none of which matters too much. There is an air of “J’Accuse” to the film that dominates and surpasses failings.

Sheridan the director is still rather hidden. Can he do “quiet” subjects? What would he do in a peaceful Ireland? Perhaps then he would turn to the pressing subtext of all three films—the suffocating warmth of the Irish family. When you add to Sheridan’s credits as a director-writer the fact that he also wrote
Into the West
(93, Mike Newell) and helped write and produce
Some Mother’s Son
(96, Terry George), it’s clear how far he has cornered the market in modern troubled Irish stories. What would become of him if ever Ireland settled its differences? Some chance! His characters inhabit an Anglo-Irish antagonism that transcends immediate problems or disadvantages. So Sheridan is a kind of poet of grievance. That said, the handicap faced by the hero in
My Left Foot
felt more passionate than that of anyone suffering wrongful imprisonment. Sheridan’s work is hardly conceivable without Daniel Day-Lewis, though he has a terrific ear and eye for urban speech and the tight warren of Irish cities and English prisons. But the luck of urgency and excellence has declined:
My Left Foot
is his best film;
In the Name of the Father
feels a little too tricky to be trusted—and it seeks little else; and
The Boxer
is the most conventional. But recently, he has served as producer on several Irish projects:
Agnes Browne
(99, Anjelica Huston);
Borstal Boy
(00, Peter Sheridan);
On the Edge
(00, John Carney);
Bloody Sunday
(01, Paul Greengrass).

Lowell Sherman
(1885–1934), b. San Francisco
1930:
Lawful Larceny; The Pay-Off
. 1931:
Bachelor Apartment; The Royal Bed; High Stakes
. 1932:
The Greeks Had a Word for Them; Ladies of the Jury; False Faces
. 1933:
She Done Him Wrong; Morning Glory; Broadway Thru a Keyhole
. 1934:
Born to Be Bad
. 1935:
Night Life of the Gods
.

An urbane and romantic actor, Lowell Sherman’s brief career as a director showed real promise:
Morning Glory
is a crucial film in Katharine Hepburn’s early career; Mae West was seldom as lewd as in
She Done Him Wrong;
and
Born to Be Bad
was a stylish women’s picture with Cary Grant and Loretta Young. It was a modest talent, but Sherman was scheduled to direct
Becky Sharp
—the first full color film—when he died, and might have been an established figure in a few more years.