The New Biographical Dictionary of Film: Completely Updated and Expanded (410 page)

As for
Inglourious Basterds
, it remains the war film of a kid incapable of understanding the war except in movie terms. Yes, Tarantino is facile, funny, and driven by furious energies, but he has not yet faced the issues of experience that will test any artist.
Basterds
is brilliant, and uninteresting—and I don’t think Tarantino knows why yet.

Andrei Tarkovsky
(1932–1986), b. Laovrazhe, USSR
1959:
There Will Be No Leave Today
(s). 1960:
The Steamroller and the Violin
(s). 1962:
Ivanovo Detstvo/Ivan’s Childhood
. 1966:
Andrei Roublev
. 1972:
Solaris
. 1975:
The Mirror
. 1979:
Stalker
. 1983:
Nostalghia
. 1985:
The Sacrifice
.

Tarkovsky sounded out of Russia like the triumphant bell cast at the end of
Andrei Roublev
—according to Nigel Andrews “the one indisputable Russian masterpiece of the last decade.” It is a very striking film, as spectacular and confident as any epic, but to call it a masterpiece may only reflect upon the conditions of Russian art in the sixties.

Tarkovsky studied at the Soviet State Film School under Mikhail Romm and graduated in 1961 with his friend Andrei Konchalovsky. His first feature seems to me his most conventional, his most Sovietized, and his most successful. It concerns the activities of a boy working for the Russian army to bring back information from behind the German lines. The unambiguously heroic situation, the patriotic conviction, and the sensitive but sentimental view of the boy make it a familiar Russian report from the war. But Tarkovsky’s eye was not commonplace, and the sentiment was given a poetic quality by the way he made the winter landscapes eerie and foreboding, and by the magical aura that hovered over the boy. Ivan is lost on a mission, and the film hurries forward to Berlin at the end of the war and the discovery of a file that describes his capture and death. That ending explains the film’s tone of awe: for this is a child touched by the cold hand of fate—his childhood sacrificed to war, his innocence turned into an unnatural skill and nobility. The child is presented to us through the eyes of reverent adults, as if he were a legend for the army.

Andrei Roublev
was not released in Russia until five years after its making, though more on account of its length, violence, and arbitrary structure than because it threatened to disturb the anxious order. Originally, it ran over three hours; it is in CinemaScope, with a concluding sequence in rich color. Its central figure is another legend—the most famous of Russian icon-painters. So little is known about the real Roublev that Tarkovsky was able to use him as a basis for a sketchy celebration of the creative process. Roublev moves with increasing horror and revulsion through scenes of medieval horror—slaughter, rapine, and destruction—until he resolves to give up art. His mind changes only when he finds a youth—played by Kolya Burlyayev, the boy in
Ivan
—who is attempting to cast a bell. As the moment of truth comes, the youth admits to Roublev that he has no knowledge of casting, that he simply yearned to try. The bell proves sound and the movie ends with a gorgeous sequence of the icons that, Tarkovsky supposes, Roublev went on to paint.

The simpleminded schematics of this may be illustrated by a comparison with
Lust for Life
, Vincente Minnelli’s biopic of Van Gogh. That film, too, ends with a series of Van Gogh’s greatest paintings, but Minnelli and Kirk Douglas managed to make “the artist” an unmistakable, tragic individual. The torment of Van Gogh is much more local than that faced by Roublev: it is personal, unique, and neurotic. But we share it, see how it fosters and hinders Van Gogh, and feel purged of tragedy by the way the paintings redeem the cornfield suicide. We never have such a knowledge of Roublev that we comprehend the thwarted passion in his art. He is too much “the artist” and his world as teeming a hell on earth as a Breughel—and quite as vivid and authentic. Most depressing is the way that Tarkovsky fell in with the Soviet notion of the artist as an archetype, rather than as a lonely individual. The length, bloodletting, and period detail of
Andrei Roublev
are extravagant because the film’s point was preconceived and not earned.
Andrei Roublev
suffers from the rhetoric and depersonalization that have always hung over Russian cinema, and that make as modest a writer as Solzhenitsyn a brave victim and exile while Nabokov was a master in another country.

Solaris
is on as grand a scale as
Roublev
. A science-fiction movie, from a novel by Stanislaw Lem, it is 165 minutes long, and again in Scope and color. Its central scientist, Kris Kelvin, is posted to the planet Solaris where a crew has been all but wiped out. The “enemy” on Solaris is the way the planet can generate the people that its inhabitants are thinking about. I do not mean to be snide when I say that an episode of
Star Trek
explored this theme with more wit and ingenuity, less sentimentality, and at a third the length. Kelvin is confronted by a wife who committed suicide, which is a long way to go for a story about a failed marriage and enough of a gimmick to evade any adequate study of how love failed. The visualization of
Solaris
is as senselessly elaborate as in
2001
, and the philosophy as mediocre.

After
The Mirror
and
Stalker
, Tarkovsky became an exile
—Nostalghia
was made in Italy, and
The Sacrifice
in Sweden (with many people who had worked for Ingmar Bergman). He was inclined to deliver mighty, earnest harangues at film festivals on the devastation of world culture. I was at the Telluride Film Festival when Tarkovsky’s lengthy and humorless speech was followed the next night by a wry, yet just as earnest Richard Widmark who opted for less self-laceration and more honest entertainment. But Tarkovsky was distraught at being an exile, and he was suffering from lung cancer. Those things added to his foreboding, and enhanced the mountingly baroque pessimism of his films.

Nostalghia
is lustrous, deliquescent almost (it dwells in water and rain), brimming with pain—yet close to parody.
The Sacrifice
is a parable, about nuclear holocaust being averted by some great personal sacrifice. It has some of the most glorious extended shots in film history. The mise-en-scène is relentless. The perfection has something monstrous about it, as if trouble had made Tarkovsky into a magnificent island gradually receding from the rest of the world. For this viewer, there is something tyrannical about it that spurs irreverent thoughts of resistance.

Frank Tashlin
(1913–72), b. Weehawken, New Jersey
1951:
The Lemon Drop Kid
(uncredited, but codirected with Sidney Lanfield). 1952:
The First Time; Son of Paleface
. 1953:
Marry Me Again
. 1954:
Susan Slept Here
. 1955:
Artists and Models
. 1956:
The Lieutenant Wore Skirts; Hollywood or Bust; The Girl Can’t Help It
. 1957:
Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter?
. 1958:
Rock-a-Bye Baby; The Geisha Boy
. 1959:
Say One for Me
. 1960:
Cinderfella
. 1962:
Bachelor Flat; It’s Only Money
. 1963:
The Man from the Diner’s Club; Who’s Minding the Store?
. 1965:
The Disorderly Orderly
. 1966:
The Glass-Bottom Boat; The Alphabet Murders
. 1967:
Caprice
. 1968:
The Private Navy of Sergeant O’Farrell
.

Frank Tashlin was absorbed in the most unrestrained products of Americana; yet he never resolved his conflicting feelings about throwaway culture. He filmed a caricature America, but never found an equivalent of the distancing permitted by cartoon. His failure becomes clearer when one sees
The Nutty Professor
, made by his onetime pupil, Jerry Lewis. That resorts to myth as a way of commenting on modern America, and a myth that cleverly exploits the idea of metamorphosis inherent in animation. The way in which cartoon creatures are nearly obliterated and then made whole again was something Tashlin’s features never matched. As a result, his satire is an unsatisfying tirade against hollow, helpless characters.

He began in the studio of Max Fleischer in 1928 and worked almost twenty years as cartoonist, animator, and writer. Among other jobs, he was a gagman for Hal Roach, a magazine cartoonist (“Tish-Tash”), story director for Disney, and director on
Merrie Melodies, Looney Tunes
, and
Bugs Bunny
. He worked on the scenario for
Delightfully Dangerous
(44, Arthur Lubin), invented gags for Harpo Marx in
A Night in Casablanca
(46, Archie Mayo)—including the house that collapses—and, in 1946, joined Paramount. He had writing credits on
Variety Girl
(47, George Marshall);
The Paleface
(48, Norman Z. McLeod);
The Fuller Brush Man
(48, S. Sylvan Simon);
One Touch of Venus
(48, William A. Seiter);
Miss Grant Takes Richmond
(49, Lloyd Bacon);
Love Happy
(50, David Miller);
A Woman of Distinction
(50, Edward Buzzell);
Kill the Umpire
(50, Bacon);
The Good Humor Man
(50, Bacon); and
The Fuller Brush Girl
(50, Bacon).

Tashlin’s films are intermittently and inorganically funny; the humor comes in splashes and quickly dries up. Sometimes his gags are actually destructive of visual continuity and can only be ended with a fade-out and a fresh start. Without animation’s capacity for remaking its image, Tashlin was always in danger of disrupting human reality or of stopping his jokes short of their distorting logic. This tension is reflected in his unresolved love-hate at the excessiveness of such things as advertising, packaging, rock and roll, TV, Jayne Mansfield’s breasts, and the general pixilation of rat-racing. The tone of his satire is momentarily much more mordant than the sentimental form of the finished films allows. Why should Jerry Lewis live happily ever after when Tashlin sees him as a demented creature, driven by pathos in one direction and the American success motor in the other?

As an example, one of Tashlin’s luckiest coups was in finding Jayne Mansfield, perhaps the nearest to a “drawn” woman ever to have appeared in films. In
The Girl Can’t Help It
there is much ogling mockery of her shape and breasts. One sequence begins with shots of her walking along a street in which her own shape is already hallucinatory: the cartoon arabesque of waist and hour-glass bulges that Jayne and corsets actually managed. Tashlin then has a succession of jokes about the way people react to her: an ice-lorry driver grabs an ice block and it melts; a milkman stands in awe and milk bottles in his hands boil over; another man gawks and his glasses shatter. This is the chronic gag-maker unable to choose one joke from several, and unable to see that the milk bottles are infinitely funnier and more suggestive in that they reflect back, nightmarishly, on the maternal function of Jayne’s boobs. The sequence is overextended, but also grotesque because it is based on a fallacy. Jayne was never sexy, but monstrous and pathetic; eventually, her own willingness to walk through so many cruel jokes makes her pitiable. Tashlin seems oblivious of the fact that we at last see a human being, visually and emotionally deformed by the treatment. Tashlin’s manic despair is unable to declare itself or to engage us with people. Tom and Jerry manage the lunatic American conflict of energy and sentiment far better. Logically Jerry Lewis ought to go into catatonia, Jayne become a milk-bar for teeny-boppers. But Tashlin remained the safe, cold-blooded side of bad taste, never came to terms with the full-length form or the live-action image, but never sensed the pungent onslaught in cartoon that, say, Gillray or Ralph Bakshi have achieved.

Jacques Tati
(Jacques Tatischeff) (1908–82), b. Le Pecq, France
1947:
L’Ecole des Facteurs
(s). 1949:
Jour de Fête
. 1953:
Les Vacances de M. Hulot/M. Hulot’s Holiday
. 1958:
Mon Oncle
. 1967:
Playtime
. 1970:
Trafic/Traffic
. 1974:
Parade
.

Tati was a deliberate exponent of austere charm who insisted on subjects of considerable public significance. His elaborate talent for refined visual comedy was expressed with the consistency and neatness of a great miniaturist. But the delicacy of line and mime was always vulgarized by a humorless preoccupation with such issues as the aridity of modern urban life. Tati’s theme was that personality is being warped by the unfeeling organization of our times. But his art so relied on detached, graceful views of mime that he omitted individuality. Hulot is, in outline, very close to Buster Keaton—a romantic bewildered by the vagaries of the world—but whereas Buster has a passive human strength, Tati made Hulot a remote creature, a shape in the landscape. The comedy seemed increasingly an inconsequential attempt at avoiding the harshness that Tati recognized in the world. Just as he never let a shot go by that was not formally balanced and tasteful, so he evaded the real nature of the destructiveness he loathed. It is not enough for comedy to be socially moralizing; it must deal with personal anguish and still make us laugh.

Tati came from a Russian family. As a young man he played rugby, and when he went into music hall and cabaret as a mime comedian he specialized in studies of sporting activity. This led to his first film, as writer and actor,
Oscar, Champion de Tennis
(32). During the 1930s, he appeared in several other shorts:
On Demande une Brute
(34, Charles Barrois);
Gai Dimanche
(35, Jacques Berr);
Soigne ton Gauche
(36, René Clément); and
Retour à la Terre
(38). After the war he had small parts in
Sylvie et le Fantôme
(45, Claude Autant-Lara) and
Le Diable au Corps
(47, Autant-Lara). But thereafter, he began his angular and rather haughty independence as writer, director, and actor on his own projects.
L’Ecole des Facteurs
became a tryout for his first feature, a rough-and-ready rural story centering on the village postman. It allowed Tati several virtuoso set pieces, the balletic meticulousness of which made an unsettling contrast with the technical shortcomings of the photography. The lovingly recreated rural setting was very much in keeping with the ideals of Tati’s absentminded hero, but the presence of the postman permitted him to contrast the rural operator and the obtusely progressive methods of the urban service, as shown in a documentary projected in the village.