The New Biographical Dictionary of Film: Completely Updated and Expanded (430 page)

It is certainly true that on the international art-house circuit Visconti’s flamboyant treatment of a few prestigious ventures passed for respectability. If there was a Nobel prize for cinema, Visconti would have had it long ago; he was as deserving as a Steinbeck, and he was very social. But he does not begin to rate at the highest level: his work is trivial, ornate, and unconvinced. Dressed up so solemnly, the result is not without humor. Visconti never lost that shameless but calculated illustration of significance, what Nabokov once celebrated as
poshlust
. Remember that he is a minor director, a sedate melodramatist, and he can be entertaining. Thus, think of
Rocco
not as translated Dostoyevsky but as a coy challenge to King Vidor, Douglas Sirk, and John Stahl, directors more deeply respectful of melodrama than Visconti.

The secret lies in Visconti’s shockingness, which genteel ladies can clasp to their bosoms as if it were a fur coat. Visconti may have known that he never quite owned up to his own melodrama. Despising his own instinctive garishness, he went for ever more dignified projects, until
Death in Venice
, a disguised tearjerker, its surface a sticky crust, covering nothing. His style was depressingly literal, full of theatrical gesture, ignoring the quality of the image. The rape and final killing in
Rocco
are such as the bourgeoisie think necessary for “the point of the film”: the momentous way in which Annie Girardot lifts up her arms to the crucifixion pose satisfies the plainest sensibility because of its predictability.

Visconti was a wealthy aristocrat whose chief interest was horses before his attention turned to cinema. He went to France and assisted Jean Renoir on
Une Partie de Campagne
(36) and
Les Bas-Fonds
(36), designed sets in Italy, and assisted Carl Koch when Renoir abandoned
La Tosca
(40). In 1942, he made his first film,
Ossessione
, based on James M. Cain’s novel
The Postman Always Rings Twice
. Against the zabaglione lightness of Italian cinema,
Ossessione
was like a meat sauce. It was adopted as the herald of neorealism simply because Visconti had used real locations, emphasized grossness in his players and sets, and underlined greed, malice, and selfishness as human motives. In fact,
Ossessione
is realistic only in the totally organized way that Balzac’s pessimism passes for naturalism.
La Terra Trema
, two hours forty minutes of Sicilian fisherfolk, was called a proof of Marxist attitudes. In fact, it is a film made in the spirit of Greek tragedy, sure of its own composed splendor and attitudinizing universality. Here is Visconti’s romantic description of how his supposedly realistic film came into being: “The peasant episode came to me in the center of Sicily. This is a region of the latifundia, the immense domain left uncultivated by their rich owners. These huge plateaux are like the most spectacular landscapes in Mexico. Suddenly there came the sound of galloping horses. Hundreds of peasants galloped up from over the horizon. The sound came closer, the land trembled (whence the title of my film).”

Visconti soon abandoned the trappings of realism.
Bellissima
is a woman’s pic vehicle for Anna Magnani;
Senso
is genteel melodrama, modeled on Italian painting where, say,
Viva l’Italia
is based on an entirely open-air reality. But with
Notti Bianche
, Visconti’s taste for high-minded literary thunder grew apace.
Rocco, Il Gattopardo
, and
Death in Venice
are splendid art-circuit packages, with dazzling production values, meticulous if unsurprising acting and well-signposted significance.
The Damned, Lo Straniero
, and
Vaghe Stelle dell’Orsa
show that even amid so much photogenic obviousness Visconti’s control could desert him. Those three are silly movies, ornamental studies of corruption and decay. No wonder he offered to film Proust, or that he shared his time between cinema, theatre, and opera.

Toward the end of his life, as social attitudes advanced, so Visconti felt more able to let his homosexual aesthetic show. But somehow he made it resemble consumption in nineteenth-century melodramas. Visconti had a gloomy premonition of something like AIDS (especially in
Death in Venice
) years before the virus was recognized. There is always the feeling in those last films that Visconti is composing (or arranging) his own requiem opera, full of morbid art direction, fateful pauses, and the wistful glances of stricken beauties.

Monica Vitti
(Maria Luisa Ceciarelli), b. Rome, 1933
Vitti is inextricably bound up with Antonioni’s sentimental pessimism, a forlorn figure of sensibility in a world of lost feelings and alienated beauty. In other men’s films, she tended to look coarser than Antonioni ever permitted. He made her face graven and her blondeness a sign of spirituality. She is a numb disapproving observer of emotional mortality, a bleak Mrs. Dalloway in the
Metropolis
. There was a halfhearted nod toward such a figure in
Modesty Blaise
(66, Joseph Losey), but it only showed her up as an ungainly comedienne.

Antonioni’s declared method: “The film actor ought not to understand, he ought to be. One might argue that in order to be, he needs to understand. This is not true. If it were true, the most intelligent actor would be the best actor.… It is not possible to have true collaboration between actor and director. They work on two quite different levels.” This was most fully demonstrated in his treatment of Vitti. It would be trespassing to say how far he made her a character in his autobiography; but from the films alone it is impossible to ignore the weight he put upon her by subjecting her to the tragic ordeal of his mise en scène. She is the imaginative consciousness on which the films turn; and as they resort to comprehensive neurosis, the wound works on her.

She first worked for Antonioni dubbing Dorian Gray in
Il Grido
(57). Thereafter, she was the girlfriend drawn into replacing the vanished Lea Masari in
L’Avventura
(60); the brittle society girl who sees the impossibility of loving Mastroianni in
La Notte
(61); the girl subtly brutalized by Alain Delon in
The Eclipse
(62); and the demented wife in
The Red Desert
(64). That is her most anguished film, less through acting than because the actress is struggling to grasp the unexplained psychosis of the part. Against that, we can remember the lifted sky at certain moments in
The Eclipse:
the airfield scene, and the brief abandon of the African dance. It is a series of films that will always be of importance in the history of director-actress relations—not least because of her relative ordinariness in other directors’ hands.

Away from Antonioni, Monica Vitti has often seemed thick-lipped, husky, and stolid, no more or less than the young Silvana Mangano: an episode from
Les Quatres Vérités
(62, Luis Garcia Berlanga);
Château en Suède
(63, Roger Vadim);
Dragées au Poivre
(63, Jacques Baratier); in an episode from
Alta Infidelta
(64, Luciano Salce); “La Minestre,” episode from
Le Bambole
(65, Franco Rossi);
Il Disco Volante
(65, Tinto Brass);
Fai in Fretta ad Uccidermi …
(65, Francesco Maselli); “Fata Sabina,” episode from
Le Fate
(66, Salce); as a Sicilian girl hunting for her seducer in Britain in
La Ragazza con la Pistola
(67, Monicelli);
La Femme Ecarlate
(68, Jean Valére);
La Cintura di Castita
(69, Festa Campanile);
La Moglie del Prete
(69, Dino Risi);
Amore, Mio Aiutami
(69, Alberto Sordi);
Nini Tirabuscio la Donna che Invento la Mossa
(70, Marcello Fondato);
La Pacifista
(71, Miklos Jancsó); in two episodes from
Le Coppie
(71, Monicelli and Vittorio de Sica);
Teresa la Ladra
(72, Carlo di Palma);
Tosca
(73, Luigi Magni);
The Phantom of Liberty
(74, Luis Buñuel);
La Raison d’Etat
(78, André Cayatte);
An Almost Perfect Affair
(79, Michael Ritchie);
The Mystery of Oberwald
(80, Antonioni);
I Know That You Know I Know
(82, Alberto Sordi);
Trenta Minuti d’Amore
(83, Marco Vicario); and
Scandolo Segreto
(89), which she also directed.

Jon Voight
, b. Yonkers, New York, 1938
This is one of the least explicable of American careers. Nominated three times for the best actor Oscar, and winner once, Voight can easily be regarded as one of the best actors of his generation (which includes Nicholson, Hoffman, Beatty, Pacino, and Redford). For a while, he hardly worked, and when he did it was often in projects that perplex anyone who has heard Voight’s earnest pleas that actors should do only responsible and meaningful work.

He was educated at Catholic University in Washington, D.C., and his first film was
Fearless Frank
(67, Philip Kaufman), which was actually made in 1964, and in which he plays a country boy who comes to Chicago. He had a small part as a baby-faced gunslinger against Wyatt Earp in
Hour of the Gun
(67, John Sturges), and was then cast in
Midnight Cowboy
(69, John Schlesinger), where he gave a fine performance as another naïve country kid trying to live up to the big city (and got his first nomination).

But he wasn’t easy to cast, or to be persuaded into a film, and so disorder set in early:
Out of It
(69, Paul Williams);
Catch-22
(70, Mike Nichols);
The Revolutionary
(70, Williams);
Deliverance
(72, John Boorman); as a boxer in
The All-American Boy
(73, Charles Eastman); as the teacher in
Conrack
(74, Martin Ritt); tracking down Nazis in
The Odessa File
(74, Ronald Neame).

In Europe, he made
End of the Game
(76, Maximilian Schell); and then he won the Oscar as the paraplegic vet in
Coming Home
(78, Hal Ashby)—sincere and tender, but rather arranged in the scheme of the film.
The Champ
(79, Franco Zeffirelli) was a bizarre follow-up and an unconvincing film. Then came an interval before Voight scripted and produced as well as acted in the very poor
Lookin’ to Get Out
(82, Ashby), about gambling.

He again produced and acted in the routine weepie
Table for Five
(83, Robert Lieberman). All his career, Voight had been boyish and gentle, but next he played the roaring demon in
Runaway Train
(85, Andrei Konchalovsky), his best performance, which got him a third nomination, but led nowhere.

After that, he played the alcoholic stepfather in
Desert Bloom
(86, Eugene Corr), and did several things for TV: as the surgeon helping victims of
Chernobyl: The Final Warning
(91, Anthony Page); as the anthropologist in
The Last of His Tribe
(92, Henry Hook); and in
Return to Lonesome Dove
(93, Mike Robe).

Then, in the early nineties some passion came back to him—perhaps it was the urge to impress his emerging daughter, Angelina Jolie. Perhaps he saw the fun to be had as a supporting actor: he was sly, edgy, and furtive as the fence in
Heat
(95, Michael Mann); another villain in
Mission: Impossible
(96, Brian De Palma);
Rosewood
(97, John Singleton); a hammy snake poacher in
Anaconda
(97, Luis Llosa); ostentatiously blind in
U Turn
(97, Oliver Stone);
Most Wanted
(97, Glenn Hogan); a lovely Southern lawyer in
The Rainmaker
(97, Francis Coppola); coproducer on
The Fixer
(98, Charles Robert Carner), for TV; a ruthless National Security chief in
Enemy of the State
(98, Tony Scott); very good as the Dublin cop in
The General
(98, Boorman); the coach in
Varsity Blues
(99, Brian Robbins); the captain in
Noah’s
Ark
(99, John Irvin);
A Dog of Flanders
(99, Kevin Brodie);
Second String
(00, Robert Lieberman); so good as FDR in
Pearl Harbor
(01, Michael Bay), you wanted more of him; with Angelina in
Lara Croft: Tomb Raider
(01, Simon West);
Zoolander
(01, Ben Stiller); as Howard Cosell in
Ali
(01, Mann);
Second String
(02, Lieberman);
Jasper, Texas
(03, Jeff Byrd);
Holes
(03, Andrew Davis);
The Karate Dog
(04, Clark);
The Manchurian Candidate
(04, Jonathan Demme);
National Treasure
(04, Jon Turteltaub).

This intriguing roster of biopics mounted with
Pope John Paul II
(05, John Kent Harrison);
Glory Road
(06, James Gartner);
Transformers
(07, Michael Bay);
September Dawn
(07, Christopher Cain);
Bratz
(07, Sean McNamara);
National Treasure: Book of Secrets
(07, Turteltaub);
Pride and Glory
(08, Gavin O’Connor); as George Washington in
An American Carol
(08, David Zucher);
Tropic Thunder
(08, Ben Stiller);
24: Redemption
(08, Jon Cassar);
Four Christmases
(08, Seth Gordon).

Josef von Sternberg
(Josef Stern) (1894–1969), b. Vienna
1925:
The Salvation Hunters
. 1926:
The Exquisite Sinner
(codirected with Phil Rosen);
A Woman of the Sea
. 1927:
Underworld; Children of Divorce
(codirected with Frank Lloyd). 1928:
The Last Command; The Dragnet; The Docks of New York
. 1929:
The Case of Lena Smith; Thunderbolt
. 1930:
The Blue Angel/Der Blaue Engel; Morocco
. 1931:
Dishonored; An American Tragedy
. 1932:
Shanghai Express; Blonde Venus
. 1934:
The Scarlet Empress
. 1935:
The Devil Is a Woman; Crime and Punishment
. 1936:
The King Steps Out
. 1937:
Claudius
(unfinished). 1939:
Sergeant Madden
. 1941:
The Shanghai Gesture
. 1943:
The Town
(d). 1951:
Jet Pilot
(codirected with Jules Furthman). 1952:
Macao
(codirected with Nicholas Ray). 1953:
The Saga of Anatahan
.