The New Biographical Dictionary of Film: Completely Updated and Expanded (429 page)

But epic and feminine psychology were deliriously combined (or melted) in
Duel in the Sun
, his second film for David Selznick. The operatic use of inflamed color, the balladlike simplicity, the unremitting obsessiveness of the two central characters, the ferocity of Jennifer Jones, and—above all—the ability to see a woman’s pic story in terms of battle make it arguably the greatest—and last—primitive film in the American cinema. Selznick’s contribution cannot be denied, but there is no reason to attribute the power of the image to anyone other than Vidor. If proof is wanted, the vastly cheaper
Ruby Gentry
has the same Jennifer Jones, a similar story, and at least 70 percent the power of Pearl Chavez (albeit in black and white).

It is a tragedy that Vidor did not work after
Solomon and Sheba
and that he is not more widely recognized.
The Fountainhead
is one of the most beautiful and mysterious of films;
An American Romance
has no equal as a rags-to-riches epic;
Duel in the Sun
has a ketchup prairie bathed in
l’amour fou;
and who else in America would have had the confidence to make
War and Peace
so simple a film?

In his last years, Vidor lectured and taught; he made two short films—
Truth and Illusion: An Introduction to Metaphysics
(64) and
Metaphor
(80); he researched the murder of William Desmond Taylor; and he gave a lovely performance as the irascible grandfather in
Love and Money
(82, James Toback).

No other American director of his time is more engaging or less easy to pin down. Vidor could be radical and conservative (Our
Daily Bread
and
The Fountainhead
). He could handle so many genres while retaining such a vibrant sense of the oddity of people. For example, in the very melodramatic setup of
Duel in the Sun
, notice how the characters grow in complexity as the film advances. Moreover, Vidor could be shocking—there’s a kind of spiritual violence in, say,
Beyond the Forest, The Fountainhead
, or
Stella Dallas
that is still engrossing. Was he optimist or pessimist?

Jean Vigo
(1905–34), b. Paris
1929:
À Propos de Nice
(d). 1931:
Taris
(d). 1933:
Zéro de Conduite
(s). 1934:
L’Atalante/Le Chaland Qui Passe
.

The polling of critics to arrive at the “ten best films ever made” that
Sight and Sound
conducts every ten years has shown some surprising changes of taste. Not least, the apparently declining reputation of Jean Vigo. It does not necessarily mean that if asked, “How good is Vigo?” most critics would not reply “more than good.” But whereas in 1962
Zéro de Conduite
and
L’Atalante
collected twenty-four votes, and
L’Atalante
was “tenth best film,” in 1972 they had only six votes between them. The decline continued in 1982, but by 1992
L’Atalante
was back where it belonged—in the top ten. I have known students retreat wearily from a poor 16mm copy of
L’Atalante
, but I have seen children entranced by an excellent TV print of the same film. The 1992 recovery had much to do with the fully restored
L’Atalante
. That may suggest that much of Vigo’s impact is in the sensuousness of the image.

But it is still mysterious that the poignancy of Vigo’s career has been treated lightly. He is the first young martyr to “cinema,” and it is not clear why his fame should have suffered when his self-consuming devotion to film has become increasingly current among young people. There is a prize named after him in France, and there could equally be film schools pledged to his example. Vigo needed film, and died in its pursuit.

Biography, therefore, is worth spelling out, and we are lucky to have the thorough life by P. E. Salles Gomes. Vigo was the son of the French anarchist known as “Miguel Almereyda.” That led him into politics and the first potent sense of outrage when Almereyda died in mysterious circumstances in Fresnes prison in 1917, and Vigo was taken south to be educated. He returned to Paris at age nineteen, to study at the Sorbonne, but soon succumbed to illness that was to hinder him for the rest of his life. It was while in a tubercular clinic that he met his future wife, “Lydou,” Elisabeth Lozinska. He had already been encouraged by Autant-Lara and worked as assistant to the photographer Léonce-Henry Burel. But in 1929, his father-in-law loaned or gave him money with which he bought a camera and made
À Propos de Nice
, with the aid of photographer Boris Kaufman, younger brother of Dziga Vertov.

Vigo now had four years to live, and he spent them in beleaguered communion with Lydou, Kaufman, and his camera. He and his wife had bouts of illness: he was forced to sell the camera for money to live on; none of his films prospered. Germaine Dulac helped him to set up the documentary on the French swimmer, Jean Taris. Jacques-Louis Nounez financed
Zéro de Conduite
, which caused such a controversy that it was banned. Finally, Vigo made his only feature,
L’Atalante
, again with Nounez’s support and Gaumont’s backing. But the distributor took fright at its intensity and released a “popularized” version. Vigo was too ill to contest the matter actively and within months he was dead.

The sequence of Vigo’s work is of anger being replaced by tenderness, and of his poetic surrealism moving from social survey to the realization of states of mind.
À Propos de Nice
was undoubtedly influenced by Dziga Vertov’s newsreel eulogies of Bolshevik Russia. But whereas Vertov’s lyricism is based in the hoped-for harmony between the movie man and a rejuvenated society, Vigo’s love of the visual is turned toward a satire of the Côte d’Azur playground.
À Propos de Nice
is startlingly modern: as with all important satire, the object of attack is enduring. The neurotic sunning of themselves of the rich and would-be rich beside a stagnant Mediterranean was already noticed in Vigo’s inquisitive documentary. There is an admirable, hostile irony in the way his dissolves strip down an idle young woman as she sits cross-legged at a table in the sun. Above all, the camerawork is strolling, intimate, and liberated.

There was ample reason in Vigo’s life for such antipathy toward the pleasure-seeking bourgeois.
Taris
was something of a diversion, an exercise in camera effects on an isolated subject, which nevertheless allowed Vigo to discover one of his most pregnant images, the underwater swimmer. All of his own wretched schooling was avenged in
Zéro de Conduite
, forty-four minutes of sustained, if roughly shot, anarchist crescendo. The attempt by society to regiment raw childhood, and the failure of the attempt, are conveyed by the very tender high-angle photography. What still impresses about
Zéro
is the vivid characterization of midget, straw-doll, or macabre authorities, and the engaging spontaneity of the children, very truthful to their private language, their casual fierceness, and the unflawed love that can exist between them.

That new warmth is at the heart of
L’Atalante
, a very simple story assigned to Vigo by Gaumont: a young skipper takes a wife and installs her on the roaming barge he works with an older man, Jules; the marriage falters and, in Paris, the wife runs away; but separation weighs on them and they are reunited. The distributor coarsened the love story, but in recent years the film has been restored. In addition,
L’Atalante
is a piece of working-class cinema: the harsh Seine towns and the barge life are shown without flinching and with a human directness that deflates such films as Ruttmann’s
Berlin
and is an advance on Dziga Vertov.

At the same time, Vigo gave
L’Atalante
an imaginary, dreamlike setting: the river is the flow of life; the barge a human island; and Paris the universal city. Godard’s delight in making Paris an imaginary city was felt years before by Vigo. But, most important,
L’Atalante
is about a more profound attitude to love than Gaumont understood. It is love without spoken explanation, unaffected by sentimental songs; but love as a mysterious, passionate affinity between inarticulate human animals. A fairy tale about plain, even ugly people, its intensity is always to be found in its images: of Michel Simon, an exotic tattooed figure in the cramped cabin; of the bride leaning uncertainly against the tiller of the barge; and of Jean Daste swimming underwater in search of his lost love.

The achievement was already enormous; but his nature was too prone to pain and disaster to survive. He was too deliberately an extremist to find a safe place in the French film industry, much less one advancing on war. Vigo’s vulnerable sensibility emphasizes Buñuel’s greater calm and robustness. But Vigo has been a primary influence on French cinema, especially on Truffaut; and
If
is a conscious tribute to
Zéro de Conduite
. Every film student scraping together money for a hopelessly unsalable project is following a hard path that Vigo pioneered.

James Villiers
(1930–98), b. London
It comes as a disappointment to discover that James Villiers was educated “only” at Wellington College and RADA. Such languid elocution, such sigh-laden superiority seems to suggest at least a Vatican academy where the dirtiest jokes were in Latin, or an Eton where Villiers was known as a petit Flashman. He is an actor for connoisseurs of effortless breeding, a man who was descended from the earls of Clarendon and was always in his element as an exhausted or sated aristocrat who had gone on the road for the rest of his life to play Jeeves-like figures. If you are bewildered at his presence here, go quickly to
Eva
(62, Joseph Losey)—he was the kind of Englishman Losey loved to hate. If Tony in
The Servant
had a father, it would have been Villiers.

Villiers did act a little onstage, but he was ideal material for British film as it played the game of trying to give up on class distinction:
Carry On Sergeant
(58, Gerald Thomas);
Petticoat Pirates
(61, David MacDonald);
Operation Snatch
(62, Robert Day);
The Damned
(63, Losey);
Murder at the Gallop
(63, George Pollock);
Girl in the Headlines
(63, Michael Truman);
Father Came Too!
(64, Peter Graham Scott);
Nothing but the Best
(64, Clive Donner);
King and Country
(64, Losey);
Daylight Robbery
(64, Michael Truman);
Repulsion
(65, Roman Polanski);
You Must Be Joking
(65, Michael Winner);
The Alphabet Murders
(65, Frank Tashlin);
The Nanny
(65, Seth Holt);
The Wrong Box
(66, Bryan Forbes);
Half a Sixpence
(67, George Sidney).

He was Ian Kilbannock in the TV adaptation of Evelyn Waugh’s
Sword of Honour
(67, Donald McWhinnie);
Otley
(68, Dick Clement);
The Touchables
(68, Robert Freeman);
Some Girls Do
(69, Ralph Thomas); as Charles II in the TV series
The First Churchills
(69);
A Nice Girl Like Me
(69, Desmond Davis);
The Ruling Class
(72, Peter Medak);
Asylum
(72, Roy Ward Baker); on TV as Henry Higgins in a version of
Pygmalion
(73, Cedric Messina), with Lynn Redgrave as his Eliza; Mr. Booby in
Joseph Andrews
(77, Tony Richardson);
Saint Jack
(79, Peter Bogdanovich);
The Scarlet Pimpernel
(82, Donner);
Under the Volcano
(84, John Huston); Inchcape in
Fortunes of War
(87, James Cellan Jones);
Scandal
(89, Michael Caton-Jones);
Mountains of the Moon
(90, Bob Rafelson);
King Ralph
(91, David S. Ward);
Let Him Have It
(91, Medak);
Uncovered
(94, Jim McBride);
The Tichborne Claimant
(98, David Yates).

Luchino Visconti
(Duke of Modrone) (1906–76), b. Milan, Italy
1942:
Ossessione
. 1948:
La Terra Trema
. 1951:
Bellissima
. 1953: “Anna Magnani,” episode from
Siamo Donne
. 1954:
Senso
. 1957:
Le Notti Bianche/ White Nights
. 1960:
Rocco e i Suoi Fratelli/Rocco and His Brothers
. 1962: “Il Lavoro,” episode from
Boccaccio ’70
. 1963:
Il Gattopardo/The Leopard
. 1964:
Vaghe Stelle dell’Orsa/Of a Thousand Delights/Sandra
. 1966: “La Stregha Bruciata Viva,” episode from
Le Streghe
. 1967:
Lo Straniero/The Stranger
. 1969:
La Caduta degli Dei/The Damned
. 1970:
Mortea Venezia/Death in Venice
. 1972:
Ludwig II
. 1974:
Gruppo di Famiglia in un Interno/ Conversation Piece
. 1976:
L’Innocente/The Innocent
.

As with Antonioni, there is an unresolved conflict in Visconti’s work between socio-political awareness and the pursuit of more self-sufficient, aesthetic values. Antonioni sometimes toppled into his suave gravity; while Visconti’s solemnity only revealed him as a flagrant middlebrow.

Visconti is less penetrative than Antonioni, and more vulgar. The fortuitous association with neorealism, the increasing resort to heavy emotional drama—not to mention Visconti’s casually maintained sense of aristocracy—enabled him to appear, always politely, as a “great artist,” what Geoffrey Nowell-Smith called one of “a select company of major directors whose international reputation was established early in their careers and has been maintained, on the basis of a relatively small output, ever since.”