The New Biographical Dictionary of Film: Completely Updated and Expanded (444 page)

The hurt in that is made all the more comic by the subsequent revelation that
Fahrenheit 451
never ignited, and by Truffaut’s slightly petulant siding with the disconsolate Julie Christie.

Poor Oskar! He had been in and out of films for several years:
Eroica
(49, Walter Kolm-Veltee);
Decision Before Dawn
(51, Anatole Litvak); and
Der Letzte Akt
(55, G. W. Pabst). Never much of an actor, it seemed, but endearing himself as the student whose scarf brought him to the eye and caravan of
Lola Montès
(55, Max Ophüls), and who proved a most touching innocent in
Jules et Jim
(61, Truffaut). Images persist from that film, of Werner in the trenches writing letters, and of his blond waif escorting the ashes of Jim and Catherine to the grave. All Truffaut’s lofty disapproval of the Hollywood Werner is borne out by the handful of films he made as an international actor:
Ship of Fools
(65, Stanley Kramer);
The Spy Who Came In From the Cold
(65, Martin Ritt);
Interlude
(68, Kevin Billington);
The Shoes of the Fisherman
(68, Michael Anderson); and
The Voyage of the Damned
(76, Stuart Rosenberg).

After that, he returned to the theatre. His face never lost its boyishness but turned sulky in middle age. Werner looked the eerie proof of Truffaut’s principle that men are happy fools or unhappy fools.

He died two days after the death of Truffaut …

Lina Wertmuller
(Arcangela Wertmuller von Elgg), b. Rome, 1928
1963:
I Basilischi/The Lizards
. 1965:
Questa Volta Parliamo di Uomini/Let’s Talk About Men
. 1971:
Mimi Metallurgico Ferito nell ’Onore/The Seduction of Mimi
. 1972:
Film d’Amore e d’Anarchia/ Love and Anarchy
. 1973:
Tutto a Posto e Niente in Ordine/All Screwed Up
. 1974:
Travolti da un Insolito Destino nell’ Azzuro Mare d’Agosto/ Swept Away by an Unusual Destiny in the Blue Sea of August
. 1975:
Pasqualino Settebellezze/ Seven Beauties
. 1977:
The End of the World in Our Usual Bed in a Nightful of Rain
. 1979:
Fatto di Sangue fra Due Uomini per causa di una Vedova. Si Sospettano Moventi Politici/ Blood Feud
. 1981:
E una Domenica sera di Novembre
(TV). 1983:
Scherzo del Destino in Agguato Dietro l’Angolo come un Brigante di Strada/A Joke of Destiny, Lying in Wait Around the Corner Like a Street Bandit
. 1984:
Sotto, Sotto
. 1986:
Notte d’Estate, con Profilo Greco, Occhi Amandorla e Odore di Basilico/Summer Night with a Greek Profile, Almond Colored Eyes and the Scent of Basil
. 1989:
In una Notte di Chiaro Luna; Decimo Clandestino
. 1990:
Saturday, Sunday, Monday
. 1993:
Io Speriamo Che Me La Cavo/Ciao, Professore!
1996:
Ninfa Plebea; Metalmeccanico e Parrucchiera in un Turbine di Sesso e di Politica
. 1999:
Ferdinando e Carolina
. 2004:
Too Much Romance: It’s Time for Stuffed Peppers
.

When they come to be exported, Lina Wertmuller’s films do usually shed their train-length titles. (Though, nowadays, they often fail to get a foreign release.) But if anyone watching them, and wondering what toffee it is he’s trapped in, needs a clue, the original titles will confirm the pretensions toward facetious cuteness. Which is no small thing. Cuteness generally is perfunctory, and facetiousness normally a superficial response meant to evade demanding issues. But Wertmuller makes a liberal monument out of declamatory whimsy; it is a sugar monument, even when it marks concentration camps.

Her brief rage in America in the mid-seventies was probably inevitable in a country ravenous for a female purveyor of smart cultural artifacts. How sad: Stephanie Rothman, Chantal Ackerman, and Yvonne Rainer, say, could feast on the attention given erroneously to the Italian lady and her woeful
lumpen
lapdog, Giancarlo Giannini. She has sometimes been called a feminist and a socialist, a modern Aristophanes and a Chaplinesque defender of humble individuals. Jerzy Kosinski delivered an opposing rebuke when he called
Seven Beauties
a cartoon trying to be a tragedy. (There was a more complete protest from Bruno Bettelheim.) Wertmuller’s family was of Swiss origin, but she identifies herself with Rome. Her creative career began as a writer with traveling puppet shows, and there is still an undisciplined sprawl in her films that might serve in street theatre. She wrote plays and one of them,
Two and Two Are No Longer Four
, was a hit. She worked on musical and variety shows for radio and television, and in 1962 she was assistant to Fellini on
8½
. Surely his flamboyant self-rapture influenced her fussy, picaresque allegories with so little grasp of style and so little love of people. Her films are top-heavy with captions, yet the cinematic form is often only a flashy skin stretched over them. The lyricism is garish, the pleas for tolerance are cold-blooded. There is neither pain nor joy, despite the insistence that those things count above all.

I will end unscrupulously with a pretense of balance. This is Lina Wertmuller’s own credo: “I’m a socialist. I love anarchists very much, even though I know very well that anarchism is a total utopia, and that it can have horrendous faces. But in the utopian ideology of anarchism is the key to the human being, which means the desire of man to become a free and civilized being. The freedom of each of us must end where the other person’s freedom begins. This is wonderful, even if anarchy is utopian.” And this is Ellen Willis, in
Rolling Stone:
“Wertmuller’s basic appeal is a clever double-dealing that allows high-minded people to indulge their lowest-minded prejudices. She is … a woman hater who pretends to be a feminist. She pities the benighted masses and calls it radicalism, evades responsibility for what she says and calls it comedy.”

Mae West
(1893–1980), b. Brooklyn, New York
It was never likely that a plump, forty-year-old from vaudeville could be a basis for movies. In fact, Mae West made very few films—nine in the thirties, a halfhearted comeback in 1943, and against every expectation, at age seventy-eight, the appalling
Myra Breckinridge
(70, Mike Sarne). Ironically, Gore Vidal’s novel was the richest source material she ever had, a view of sexual extremism and moral confusion as witty as her own. But the film required a cross between Luis Buñuel and Russ Meyer, and was ruined by directorial ineptness and studio jitters.

Mae West still emerged intact. It had never mattered who directed her films. She looked a faintly blurred version of her former self, but the voice was unchanged—in the 1960s she made an album of modern pop, singing the Beatles’ “Day Tripper” like a Billie Holiday who had come through. Most important, the return capitalized on a reputation that had been growing steadily with the revival of her old films. For Mae West is one of the most subtly influential and mysterious of superstars. Those who discern in Marilyn Monroe either the inclination or the ability to satirize her own sexuality can never have seen the great Mae, or held an unpeeled grape and wondered.

Her films are about suggestiveness, private jokes that slide through every institutional defense of prudery to encourage randiness in a shy audience. No other major star knows such contentment and such libidinous Arcadia. Few sex goddesses have been as swathed in so many yards of gown; but no one else has spoken so tenderly of sexual pleasure and been so resplendent a monument to it. Mae West was low-down—some of her innuendo is limpidly provocative—but she was a lady. Sex itself remains private in her world, a thing to be known rather than described. The discussion of its satisfaction and, most important, the persistent faith that it can be seen and read into all things, shows how far she was a philosopher: the real conclusion of her work is that sex is an idea, an obsession for the human being, and one of the most reliable distractions from the equally potent idea that life is tragic. One of her great lines is, “It’s not the man in my life, but the life in my man”—an epigram worthy of Oscar Wilde and underlining her sense of the 1890–1910 period. Such verbal dexterity, and the disposition toward inversion of accepted ideas, shows how far she meant to chide established attitudes to sex, disparaging sexual reputations but at the same time provoking them: “When I’m good I’m very good, but when I’m bad I’m better.”

Extraordinary as this artistic personality is, and though it was based on the control of scripts and writing of her own dialogue, her originality and impact are as much visual as verbal. She was a cornucopia of rococo shapes—the sweep of a hat brim; the froth of curls; the undulating feather boa; the sequin swirls on her dress; and that body—a padded arabesque, a chaise-longue, a bed on which the Cheshire cat face seemed always nestling. She was physically a dreadnought, but emotionally dainty: as a result she moved very slowly. Films have a steady pace that imposes itself on all players. Hurry and you seem nervous; delay and the effect is ponderous. And yet, intrigue an audience, and then pause, and they are yours forever. Every great star acted according to that precept. But Mae West made languor virtually the plot line of her films. The stories were no more than contrived buildups for her eventual appearance; the camera drooled over her sailor’s roll; dialogue scenes existed for her drawling boasts and for those moments of reflection in which the anticipation of sexual encounter to come merges with the recollection of encounters just concluded. She had such timing that one could see an entire way of life—and she was pleased with it. Censorship might trim her lines, but it could not alter the way she appraised a man. Lucky Cary Grant, that he played opposite her twice as a young man.

The career is as remarkable as the personality. She went on the stage as a child and by the First World War was a leading vaudeville performer, with a special skill at impersonation. During the 1920s she rose to unique eminence: as singer, rather lazy dancer, and author of her own plays. The most notorious of these were
Sex, The Drag, Diamond Lil
, and
The Pleasure Man
. A succession of legal battles reflected the uncompromising sexual celebration in these shows. In 1932, she accepted an offer from Paramount and appeared with George Raft in
Night After Night
(Archie Mayo).

She was a sensational success and went on to make
She Done Him Wrong
(33, Lowell Sherman), based on
Diamond Lil
, and
I’m No Angel
(33, Wesley Ruggles). Her next film,
Belle of the Nineties
(34, Leo McCarey), suffered a little from censorship and heralded the attempts of the Motion Picture Production Code and the League of Decency to curtail suggestiveness. In the event, she was hobbled by restrictions and her subsequent films lack the sweltering intimation of an orgy that will be begun as soon as the camera stops. She was a serious casualty of the studios’ decision to pursue mass wholesomeness, and the later films have moments of banality when she is made to mouth such bourgeois sentiments as, “Any time you take religion for a joke, the laugh’s on you”:
Going to Town
(35, Alexander Hall);
Klondike Annie
(36, Raoul Walsh);
Go West Young Man
(36, Henry Hathaway);
Every Day’s a Holiday
(37, Edward Sutherland); the disappointing pairing with W. C. Fields in
My Little Chickadee
(39, Edward Cline).

She made one more film,
The Heat’s On
(43, Gregory Ratoff), and then gave way to war, secure in the knowledge that every sailor in the drink would think of her no matter that he kept the underfed Betty Grable in his locker. Sex in the cinema is often related to audience anxiety. Warners’ musicals of the 1930s offered dames to welfare lines and young soldiers kept blonde pinups. But the girls had to be modestly desirable, in case lusting GIs deserted. And the Depression of the 1930s could not tolerate the convincing way that Mae West spoke of satisfaction and paradise. That is a very private domain, only fully admitted in Andy Warhol’s family movies. Sex in movies is withheld, no matter how much it is advertised. In that connection, one recalls the verdict of George Jean Nathan who saw a magazine picture of West as the Statue of Liberty and retitled it the Statue of Libido. Mae West gazes at us as if to say the two are one, liberty can be yours as easily as it can be the delight of a plump, middle-aged broad.

In 1978, she appeared once more after
Myra Breckinridge
, in
Sextette
(Ken Hughes).

James Whale
(1896–1957), b. Dudley, England
1930:
Journey’s End
. 1931:
Waterloo Bridge; Frankenstein
. 1932:
The Impatient Maiden; The Old Dark House
. 1933:
The Kiss Before the Mirror; The Invisible Man; By Candlelight
. 1934:
One More River
. 1935:
The Bride of Frankenstein; Remember Last Night?
. 1936:
Show Boat
. 1937:
The Road Back; The Great Garrick
. 1938:
Sinners in Paradise; Wives Under Suspicion; Port of Seven Seas
. 1939:
The Man in the Iron Mask
. 1940:
Green Hell
. 1941:
They Dare Not Love
. 1949:
Hello Out There
(never released).

Whale is a notable figure in a limited but rich strain: of Englishmen who went to direct films in America. Despite his “respectable” theatrical background, he was involved in several of cinema’s rawest genres. And very often, there is an absorbing tension between his wish to keep tongue in cheek and the ability to find unexpected depths in hokum. His films fluctuate wildly, and it is all too clear that some sequences engrossed him, while on others he didn’t give a damn. One never knows with Whale when imagination will set in; he may not have been sure himself.