The New Biographical Dictionary of Film: Completely Updated and Expanded (426 page)

Add to that the assured balance of Gable, Tracy, MacDonald, and the near-Soviet montage of the earthquake in
San Francisco
, an Andy Hardy, a Kildare, the barmy
Rage in Heaven;
Mickey Rooney, Jackie Cooper, and Freddie Bartholomew together in
The Devil Is a Sissy;
the somber
They Gave Him a Gun
, starring Tracy and Franchot Tone—and still one has not reached his shrewdest moment. On
Manhattan Melodrama
, he had noticed that Loy and Powell worked together better than most other couples. He persuaded the studio to cast them as Nick and Nora Charles in
The Thin Man
, thus inaugurating one of the most entertaining of series, and one so successful that it went on after Van Dyke himself was dead. Van Dyke may have been only a fast worker, but the flippant exchanges of
The Thin Man
are long-lasting and the relationship in that film is both artificial and plausible, a very pleasing image of a happy marriage on the rocks.

Jo Van Fleet
(1914–96), b. Oakland, California
Twice in her career, when she was too young to seem capable of it, Jo Van Fleet delivered extraordinary performances for Elia Kazan that bring a mysterious extra dimension to the films. In
East of Eden
(1955), she is Kate, Cal’s mother, the brothel keeper who lives in Monterey and who realizes in the foggy morning that some youth is dogging her steps. Kazan’s shaping of the Steinbeck novel cuts out Kate’s early life, including all the reasons why she has left the rest of the family in Salinas. But van Fleet uses her time so well that you feel the arrogance of Adam (her former husband and Cal’s father), just as you feel her terrible mixed feelings when she sees her boy again and realizes he is like her. Van Fleet allowed herself no prettiness. Her character is in pain that is moral as much as physical. Hers may be the best scenes in the film, and she took the supporting actress Oscar.

She was forty when she shot
East of Eden
, from the stage (
The Trip to Bountiful
and
Look Homeward Angel
) and the Actors Studio. She had done a lot of television, but
East of Eden
was her first movie. It persuaded her to stick with the medium but only for just a few years:
The Rose Tattoo
(55, Daniel Mann);
I’ll Cry Tomorrow
(55, Mann);
The King and Four Queens
(56, Raoul Walsh); quite vicious with Kirk Douglas in
Gunfight at the O.K. Corral
(57, John Sturges);
The Sea Wall / This Angry Age
(58, René Clément); and then as Ella Garth in her other Kazan movie,
Wild River
(60), a grandmother—like figure fixed to her land and her chair and denying every liberal hope for benevolent improvement in the attempt to hold on to what she has. The role was perched on the edge of caricature, and the rest of the film was shaky in its authenticity—but Van Fleet grounded it and she was unforgiving.

Then more television—far too much—and very few films:
Cool Hand Luke
(67, Stuart Rosenberg);
I Love You, Alice B. Toklas
(68, Hy Averback);
80 Steps to Jonah
(69, Gerd Oswald);
The Gang That Couldn’t Shoot Straight
(71, James Goldstone);
The Tenant
(76, Roman Polanski); and
Seize the Day
(86, Fielder Cook).

There are not many careers that seem so aimless most of the time, and so exact on just two occasions.

Gus Van Sant
, b. Louisville, Kentucky, 1952
1985:
Mala Noche
. 1987:
Five Ways to Kill Yourself
(s);
Ken Death Gets Out of Jail
(s);
My New Friends
(s). 1988:
Junior
(s). 1989:
Drugstore Cowboy
. 1991:
My Own Private Idaho
. 1994:
Even Cowgirls Get the Blues
. 1995:
To Die For
. 1997:
Good Will Hunting
. 1998:
Psycho
. 2000:
Finding Forrester
. 2002:
Gerry; The Best of Bowie
(codirected). 2003:
Elephant
. 2005:
Last Days
. 2007:
Paranoid Park
. 2008:
Milk
.

Van Sant’s father was a traveling salesman, and so the boy had an itinerant upbringing, ranging through the Midwest into Colorado and California, and living in Connecticut, before settling in Portland, Oregon. He studied painting at the Rhode Island School of Design, but switched the emphasis of his studies to film. With a degree, he tried Los Angeles, where he did some commercials. But he decided to make Portland his base, and his Paris: there is something sublimely casual and confident in the way
My Own Private Idaho
moves from Portland to an empty road in Idaho to “Rome.” Whatever else, Van Sant has established a view, a place, and an axis as his own.

Great claims have been made for Van Sant already: Donald Lyons has called
Idaho
the best American film of the nineties, daring anything else to top it. Moreover, Van Sant gives every sign of believing in the security of his independence as much as he cleaves to the sad, rain-swamped epic extent of the northwest. He has used “Hollywood” actors, but he keeps them shabby, quiet, and unglamorous—and he helps them be better than any system has allowed: Matt Dillon in
Drugstore Cowboy
and River Phoenix in
Idaho
. Van Sant is gay, gritty, and arty all at the same time. There is no trace of camp or swishiness: he is determined on heartfelt feelings and commonplace tragedy. He has a great eye, and an even better sense of adjacency—not quite cutting, but a feeling for cut-up simultaneity.

He has not yet made a film I find fully satisfying—or entirely without some lapse of judgment. But the characters and the potential are unquestioned. Whenever
Idaho
is dealing with the River Phoenix story, it has stirrings of greatness. Phoenix is superb (and there are moments when one gives him more credit than Van Sant), but the idea of his character—a troubled, gay hustler, searching for his mother, vulnerable to narcoleptic attacks, yet slow, patient, and decent—is Faulknerian. Why, I wonder, did Van Sant feel the need to crowd this character with the Keanu Reeves friend, altogether slicker and less substantial? And why did he persist with the whim of dragging the Falstaff story into this subplot? It’s as if, half-drunk one night, Van Sant had seen
Chimes at Midnight
and resolved to pay tribute.

The two parts of the movie do not quite work or match, despite the bold flights of interaction and crosscutting. The mannered attempt compromises the riveting authenticity of everything Phoenix does. Everything vital about the Reeves character could have survived the omission of Van Sant’s northwest Falstaff, Bob, no matter how good a job William Richert does in the role.

This is a big disclaimer, but still
Idaho
has fine passages: the easy movement from neorealism to dream to joke to flashback; the wondrous poetry of a blow-job orgasm that cuts to a whole house landing on the prairie (with all the resonance of
The Wizard of Oz);
the sense of gaudy and brash colors against the somber beauties of nature; the endless readiness for waywardness and the kindliness that gathers so many things in; and, of course, the acting.

But it hasn’t worked out very well.
To Die For
is his best picture, very funny, rather sinister, with a wicked eye on suburbia, beautifully acted, and one of the first films in which Nicole Kidman was given her (and anyone else’s) head.
Good Will Hunting
was Van Sant’s biggest hit, but it shows a horrible lurch towards the sentimentality of saving lives and is one of the grossest examples of Robin Williams-ism.
Psycho
was bereft, insane and glaring evidence of someone uncertain where to go. And
Finding Forrester
was just another version of
Good Will Hunting
. In summary: it’s very hard to know who Van Sant is, or what he wants to do.

His
Elephant
was dismayingly trite and should not be confused with the Alan Clarke masterpiece of the same name.
Milk
was a big picture, though its great virtues were small—so Sean Penn’s temptation to be outstanding was restrained by the great ensemble work.

Agnès Varda
, b. Brussels, Belgium, 1928
1955:
La Pointe Courte
. 1957:
O Saisons, O Châteaux
(d). 1958:
L’Opéra-Mouffe
(s);
Du Côté de la Côté
(d). 1959:
La Cocotte d’Azur
(d). 1962:
Cléo de 5 à 7/Cleo from 5 to 7
. 1963:
Salut les Cubains
(d). 1965:
Le Bonheur
. 1966:
Les Créatures
. 1967:
Loin du Vietnam
(codirector) (d);
Elsa
(d). 1968:
Black Panthers
(d). 1969:
Lions Love
. 1975:
Daguerreotypes
(d). 1977:
L’Une Chante, l’Autre Pas/One Sings, the Other Doesn’t; Réponses des Femmes
(TV). 1981:
Murs Murs
(d);
Documenteur: An Emotion Picture
(d). 1983:
Ulysse
(d). 1984:
Les Dites Caryatides
(d). 1985:
Sans Toit ni Loi/Vagabond
. 1988:
Jane B par Agnès V
(d);
Kung Fu Master
. 1991:
Jacquot de Nantes
(d). 1993:
Les Demoiselles Ont eu 25 Ans
(d). 1995:
The Universe of Jacques Demy
(d). 2000:
Les Glaneurs et la Glaneuse/The Gleaners and I
(d). 2003:
Le Lion Volatile
(s). 2008:
Les Plages d’Agnès
.

Before turning to movies, Agnès Varda was a successful and widely traveled photojournalist. Her first feature, made when she was confessedly ignorant of movies,
La Pointe Courte
, was supposedly inspired by the parallel narratives of Faulkner’s
The Wild Palms
. Because of that pointless imitation, and because Alain Resnais edited it,
La Pointe Courte
’s dullness has been obscured by its putative place as a forerunner of
nouveau roman
cinema.

But the photographer of
Marie-France
asserted herself in the glossy imagery and superficially sardonic commentary of
O Saisons, O Châteaux
and
Du Côté de la Côté
. The mordantly pregnant consciousness of
Opéra-Mouffe
was much more personal: scenes of the Mouffetard area of Paris through an expectant mother’s eyes, but glibly intercut with an arty nude ballet. Varda was herself pregnant when the film was made, and its abrupt movement from disturbing slum reality to a chilly dreamlike romanticism proved typical of her work.

Opéra-Mouffe
is also broken into sections, like the parts of a photographer’s published oeuvre. It is all too easy to give such work the benefit of shape, to accept speculativeness as originality.
Cléo
certainly had a continuous shape, although it too is more photographs of two hours in a woman’s life than an organic structure. It also balances uneasily a morbid and a sentimental view of the world and uses Cléo herself as another anxious but depersonalized lens, not pregnant but waiting for a medical verdict.
Salut les Cubains
was still photographs put to music.
Le Bonheur
was a startling piece of romantic wish-fulfillment put to Mozart. It is colorful, sweet, and cold—like dessert fresh out of the deep freeze. Admittedly its abandonment of social morality is novel, but it is still hard to see the movie as anything other than a shamelessly pretty intellectual shocker—not dealing with real people. Such beauty is hollow because it is won against no opposition. The eye that arranges those relentless harmonies and skin tones is irresponsible and facile. This failure looks especially odd beside the genuine rapture of the films made by her husband, Jacques Demy.

After
Le Bonheur
, Varda made
Les Créatures
, another elegant fantasy with the same lack of human perspective.
One Sings, the Other Doesn’t
was a real step forward. Its feminist ardor was still led astray by prettification, but there was a new simplicity, a useful distance from the story and the dry narrative of the director herself that brought fiction and essay together.

Varda has stayed loyal to documentary, given the flavor of essay or even the charm of storytelling—as in
Jacquot de Nantes
, her tribute to the dying Jacques Demy. But easily her most powerful film of recent years—and probably her best ever—is
Vagabond
, the tracking of a fierce, willful outcast, set more surely on a path to death than Cléo ever contemplated.
Vagabond
burns in the memory, lucid and unsentimental, like the challenging gaze of Sandrine Bonnaire.

Conrad Veidt
(Conrad Weidt) (1893–1943), b. Potsdam, Germany
Veidt was the most highly strung and romantically handsome of German expressionist actors. He was a creature from Poe’s nightmares—tall, gaunt, glowing with a mixture of illness and ecstatic anxiety. Amid so many overweight actors, Veidt was an attenuated, hypersensitive figure, the aesthete or artist tormented by dark forces and driven to violence. His movements were deliberately slowed and prolonged, and the somnambulist Cesare in
Das Kabinett des Dr Caligari
(19, Robert Wiene) is one of the most influential performances in the history of fantasy and horror film. Veidt was supremely able to suggest the noble hero possessed by some torturing spirit. Thus the riveting first close-up of Cesare, a pale face and harrowed eyes, awakened from sleep; the rhythmic, boldly diagonal way he creeps along a wall to kidnap Lil Dagover; and the sense of emotional exhaustion in his collapse at the end of the chase. These are dancer’s movements. Lotte Eisner speaks of the way in
Orlacs Hande
(24, Wiene) Veidt “dances a kind of Expressionist ballet, bending and twisting extravagantly, simultaneously drawn and repelled by the murderous dagger held by hands which do not seem to belong to him.”