The New Biographical Dictionary of Film: Completely Updated and Expanded (428 page)

Long live the consciousness of the pure who can see and hear!

Down with the scented veil of kisses, murders, doves and conjuring tricks!

Long live the class vision!

Long live Kino-Eye!

Trained as a musician and neurologist, Vertov was also a poet and journalist who had served in the Red Army. By 1918 he was involved on the Committee of Cinematography and, with Lev Kuleshov’s encouragement, he took over
Cine Weekly
and formed the Kino-Eye group to launch a massive campaign of newsreel coverage of Russia. The result was one of the most exciting manifestations of the Revolution: an attempt to break down the social barriers by showing the life of Russians to other Russians. Dziga Vertov was part of the first flush of Constructivism and a disciple of Mayakovsky, but he blended education, propaganda, and artistic thrill better than any other Russian artist.

His group included his brother, Mikhail Kaufman, as cameraman, and Yelizaveta Svilova, his editor and wife. There was originally a dynamic tension between the two forces—photography and editing. Vertov loathed the theatre, staged events, and fiction in film. In part, he was rejecting a bourgeois mode, but Vertov had a genuine sense of observing life. He used a candid camera, filming undercover or from a distance, and he proudly went into the streets, the factories, and roamed across the interior of the Soviet Union. The tricks of the camera fascinated him:
Man with a Movie Camera
has split screen, dissolves, superimposition, slow motion, crude animation, and freeze frames. But it also contains some very beautiful and uncontrived footage of citizens caught unawares. That liveliness is still undiminished. It goes with Vertov’s friendly eye for life, his irrepressible sense of humor, and the endearing insistence on the cameraman as a proletarian hero, a worker like any other, simultaneously recording and activating the Revolution.

Vertov also loved machines, without any hint of it being an enthusiasm recommended by the need for production. He seems devoted to the tramcars, shuttle looms, hydraulic power, traffic signals, slimming apparatus … the whole range of urban engines. In
Man with a Movie Camera
there is a sequence of a factory girl folding cigarette packets. Today, that drab task might epitomize industrial alienation of the worker. But Vertov sees the job lyrically. He speeds up the process—for the sake of cinematic fun, and to comment playfully on the need for more production, and the girl only smiles the more. Was Vertov ingenuous or insensitive? Both, perhaps, but there is no suggestion that he lied. He did love machines and he did see hope in them: his footage still celebrates them, no matter how much we are culturally suspicious of the message. And, in that sense, montage was another engine. Vertov’s montage, like his photography, is both suppler and more energetic than any other Russian examples. The close of
Man with a Movie Camera
is deliriously cheerful, and as heartening as Norman McLaren’s movies.

But the seeds of conflict are there already: as Vertov pressed on, the clash between his righteous emphasis on cinema verité and his naïve pleasure at orchestrating the natural became greater. But by 1930, the bases of his attitude had all been removed. Constructivism, Lenin, and Bolshevik idealism had been replaced by realist cliché, Stalin, and bureaucracy. The ideological complexity of cinema verité was more than Russia in the 1930s could have tolerated. By the mid-1930s, Vertov was no longer favored by the regime.
Three Songs of Lenin
was delayed in its release, allegedly because it neglected Stalin. Thus Vertov was denied the chance to make films of his own. However, by 1989, in the supposedly liberating air of perestroika, Vertov was labeled as an exponent of totalitarian cinema, on a par with Leni Riefenstahl, as someone who did not stand up sufficiently against the cruel and inhuman system. You can’t win.

Lullabye
was his last full-length film, the prelude to semiretirement. His roving reportage was carried on in name only during the Second World War. Much of the work was done by his wife, and his personal contributions to
Daily News
were few and far between.

Charles Vidor
(1900–1959), b. Budapest, Hungary
1929:
The Bridge
(s). 1932:
The Mask of Fu Manchu
(codirected with Charles Brabin). 1933:
Sensation Hunters
. 1934:
The Double Door
. 1935:
Strangers All; The Arizonian; His Family Tree
. 1936:
Muss ’em Up
. 1937:
A Doctor’s Diary; The Great Gambini; She’s No Lady
. 1939:
Blind Alley; Romance of the Redwoods; Those High Gray Walls
. 1940:
My Son, My Son!; The Lady in Question
. 1941:
New York Town; Ladies in Retirement
. 1942:
The Tuttles of Tahiti
. 1943:
The Desperadoes
. 1944:
Cover Girl; Together Again
. 1945:
A Song to Remember; Over 21
. 1946:
Gilda
. 1948:
The Loves of Carmen
. 1951:
It’s a Big Country
(codirected). 1952:
Thunder in the East; Hans Christian Andersen
. 1954:
Rhapsody
. 1955:
Love Me or Leave Me
. 1956:
The Swan
. 1957:
The Joker Is Wild; A Farewell to Arms
. 1960:
Song Without End
(completed by George Cukor on the death of Vidor).

After service in the First World War, Vidor joined UFA and became an assistant director. He came to America in the late 1920s, financed the short
The Bridge
himself, and made second features at MGM, Paramount, and RKO before joining Columbia in 1939. There he became a leading director, especially of musicals and romances. But in 1946 he was involved in comic, angry litigation with Harry Cohn, the head of Columbia, over Cohn’s profane language. He lost the case and was obliged to return to Columbia in humiliation. It was an impossible situation, and in 1948 Vidor bought out his contract for $75,000.

It is difficult to become enthusiastic about Vidor as a director. His only talent was for glamour: he made two good Rita Hayworth films—
Cover Girl
and
Gilda
, the latter deserving a place in the history of screen erotica and perverse psychology. Some credit should go to the actress, photographer Rudolph Maté, and writer Virginia Van Upp, but the fact remains that very few men managed to make Hayworth relax as much as she does in
Gilda
. Elsewhere, Vidor was no more than pretty and insubstantial. The
Joker Is Wild
gave Sinatra one of his better parts as comedian Joe E. Lewis and repeats the pleasing bittersweet view of showbiz menaced by gangsters first established in
Love Me or Leave Me
(Doris Day as Ruth Etting, with Cagney as her lover). Under the eye of Selznick, Vidor managed to make a weepie out of
A Farewell to Arms
. Finally, he had Dirk Bogarde as Liszt in
Song Without End
, a piece of posh hokum, made as if there was only a pause between movements separating it from 1945 and
A Song to Remember
, which is Cornel Wilde as Chopin—a world in which composers retreat to the piano to avoid clinging women. In all, it is hard to credit that Vidor had sufficient squeamishness to be disturbed by bad language.

King Vidor
(1894–1982), b. Galveston, Texas
1919:
The Turn in the Road; Better Times; The Other Half; Poor Relations
. 1920:
The Jack-Knife Man; The Family Honor
. 1921:
The Sky Pilot; Love Never Dies
. 1922:
Conquering the Woman; Woman, Wake Up; The Real Adventure; Dusk to Dawn
. 1923:
Peg o’ My Heart; The Woman of Bronze; Three Wise Fools
. 1924:
Wild Oranges; Happiness; Wine of Youth; His Hour; Wife of the Centaur
. 1925:
Proud Flesh; The Big Parade
. 1926:
La Bohème; Bardelys the Magnificent
. 1928:
The Crowd; The Patsy; Show People
. 1929:
Hallelujah
. 1930:
Not So Dumb; Billy the Kid
. 1931:
Street Scene; The Champ
. 1932:
Bird of Paradise; Cynara
. 1933:
Stranger’s Return
. 1934:
Our Daily Bread
. 1935:
Wedding Night; So Red the Rose
. 1936:
The Texas Rangers
. 1937:
Stella Dallas
. 1938:
The Citadel
. 1940:
Northwest Passage; Comrade X
. 1941:
H. M. Pulham Esq
. 1944:
An American Romance
. 1946:
Duel in the Sun
. 1948:
A Miracle Can Happen/On Our Merry Way
(codirected with Leslie Fenton). 1949:
The Fountainhead; Beyond the Forest
. 1951:
Lightning Strikes Twice
. 1952:
Japanese War Bride; Ruby Gentry
. 1955:
Man Without a Star
. 1956:
War and Peace
. 1959:
Solomon and Sheba
.

In his 1953 autobiography,
A Tree Is a Tree
, Vidor recounted a meeting with Irving Thalberg:

“Well, what are you going to try next?” asked Thalberg. “It’s going to be hard to top The Big Parade.…”

I really hadn’t an idea ready, but one came to me in the emergency. “Well, I suppose the average fellow walks through life and sees quite a lot of drama taking place around him. Objectively life is like a battle isn’t it?”

“Why didn’t you mention this before?” he asked.

“Never thought of it before,” I confessed.

“Have you got a title?”

“Perhaps One of the Mob.”

Thalberg showed immediate enthusiasm. “That’s a wonderful title … How long will it take you to write it?”

“Two or three days.”

It is hard to believe that Thalberg’s empire functioned with such sunny casualness, but it’s unlikely that Vidor deliberately misrepresented his recollections. There is an unconscious simplicity and naïve straightforwardness in that passage characteristic of Vidor’s best films, just as the conception he offered Thalberg is the one that obsessed him for forty years. His hero was the ordinary man, whether the doughboy of
The Big Parade
, the urban archetype of
The Crowd
or
Our Daily Bread
, the immigrant in
American Romance
, the ambitious architect in
The Fountainhead
, or Pierre in
War and Peace
. It is typical of Vidor that he should want the simplicity of Gary Cooper for the Frank Lloyd Wright figure in
The Fountainhead
and John Ford’s prairie philosopher Henry Fonda for Tolstoy’s observer.

The battle Vidor describes is not only between men, but between man and the land, man and the physical world, man and the elements. In
The Fountainhead
, as in
The Crowd
, there is a constant stress on the visual tension of man and concrete filmed with a simplicity that would be audacious if it were studied. Vidor’s eye for composition is unendingly based on the emotional content of man’s struggle. It takes many forms: the human chain that crosses a torrent in
Northwest Passage;
Robert Donat blowing up the tainted water system in
The Citadel;
Brian Donlevy learning to operate the huge excavator in
American Romance;
Gary Cooper drilling in the stone quarry in
The Fountainhead;
the sudden glare of sun on shields in the climactic battle of
Solomon and Sheba;
the sequence in
War and Peace
when the retreating French are caught crossing the river; the delirious close of
Duel in the Sun
when Peck and Jennifer Jones crawl toward each other over the cruel rocks.

Nothing demonstrates Vidor’s vitality more than the way his natural sense of the primitive concentrated with the years. Many of his silent films are lost—though
The Jack Knife Man
is full of emotional energy and is a glowing tribute to Griffith.
The Big Parade
is often slack and clumsy, while
The Crowd
is too deliberate a social comment for Vidor’s inventiveness to be unfettered. In addition, he is not at his best with oppressed characters, preferring achievement, survival, and victory. For most of the 1920s he was at MGM, indulged with
The Crowd
and
Hallelujah
, and employed to bring visual distinction to such films as the Lillian Gish
La Bohème
and the John Gilbert
Bardelys the Magnificent
.

His three Marion Davies comedies—
The Patsy, Show People
, and
Not So Dumb
—leave one marveling that he never tried comedy again.

But in the 1930s he freelanced, directing
Bird of Paradise
for Selznick and setting up
Our Daily Bread
himself. Until about 1935, Vidor had dealt only in generalized characters, but with
So Red the Rose
(starring Margaret Sullavan) and Barbara Stanwyck in
Stella Dallas
, a new theme appeared: the emotional life of a woman, the power of it when properly directed and the hysteria when thwarted. Thus, years before
Duel in the Sun, Beyond the Forest
, and
Ruby Gentry
, Vidor had tapped this raw feminine strength, and seen it as a driving commodity in America, as much as wheat, rock, and steel, his other favorite subjects. Not that he gave up the epic:
Northwest Passage
is an immensely vigorous film about the great woods, and
An American Romance
is a homespun legend on an immigrant’s rise from miner to tycoon.