The New Biographical Dictionary of Film: Completely Updated and Expanded (49 page)

Boyer was working in France when the war began and was sent back to the United States by the French authorities for his value as a propagandist. He then made
All This and Heaven Too
(40, Litvak);
Back Street
(41, Robert Stevenson);
Hold Back the Dawn
(41, Mitchell Leisen);
Appointment with Love
(41, William A. Seiter);
Tales of Manhattan
(42) and
Flesh and Fantasy
(43), both for Julien Duvivier;
The Constant Nymph
(43, Edmund Goulding); one of his best roles, as the husband of Ingrid Bergman in
Gaslight
(44, George Cukor);
Together Again
(44, Charles Vidor);
The Confidential Agent
(45, Herman Shumlin); with Jennifer Jones in
Cluny Brown
(46, Ernst Lubitsch);
A Woman’s Vengeance
(47, Zoltan Korda); with Bergman again in
Arch of Triumph
(48, Lewis Milestone). He went on to the New York stage and returned in 1951 as a clearly older man:
The Thirteenth Letter
(51, Otto Preminger);
The First Legion
(51, Douglas Sirk); and
The Happy Time
(52, Richard Fleischer).

After that, versatility was his watchword. In the early 1950s he began returning to France—for the magnificent
Madame de …
(53, Max Ophuls);
Nana
(55, Christian-Jaque); and
La Parisienne
(57, Michel Boisrond). For American TV, he was one of the founders of Four Star Playhouse and of a series,
The Rogues
. In the cinema, he kept up a stream of character parts:
The Cobweb
(55, Vincente Minnelli);
The Buccaneer
(57, Anthony Quinn);
Fanny
(60, Joshua Logan);
The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse
(61, Minnelli);
Love Is a Ball
(62, David Swift);
A Very Special Favor
(65, Michael Gordon);
How to Steal a Million
(65, William Wyler);
Barefoot in the Park
(67, Gene Saks);
The Madwoman of Chaillot
(69, Bryan Forbes);
The April Fools
(69, Stuart Rosenberg); as the sage of sages in
Lost Horizon
(72, Charles Jarrott);
Stavisky
(74, Alain Resnais); and
A Matter of Time
(76, Minnelli).

Boyer killed himself just two days after his wife died. They had been married forty-four years. Their only child, a son, had killed himself in 1965. It was a mark of the integrity and lasting feeling in a man famous as a “continental” seducer.

Danny Boyle
, b. Manchester, England, 1956
1994:
Shallow Grave
. 1996:
Trainspotting
. 1997:
A Life Less Ordinary
. 2000:
The Beach
. 2001:
Vacuuming Completely Nude in Paradise; Strumpet; Alien Love Triangle
. 2002:
28 Days Later
. 2004:
Millions
. 2007:
Sunshine
. 2008:
Slumdog Millionaire
.

In
Shallow Grave
and
Trainspotting
, writer John Hodge and director Danny Boyle seemed to have achieved a wonderfully nasty edge—as cold as Edinburgh in winter, but as startling to the taste as your first sip of Laphroiag whisky.
Shallow Grave
was a kind of screwball
Repulsion
, much affected by its bleak (yet pretty) flat, with spiffy performances from Kerry Fox, Christopher Eccleston, and Ewan McGregor.
Trainspotting
(adapted from Irvine Welsh’s novel) was an hilarious surreal fantasia on hard drugs—overrated at the time, perhaps, but a very striking movie.

So much for promise.
A Life Less Ordinary
was a title that seemed upside down: the setup was very weird but nowhere near life. And Ewan McGregor and Cameron Diaz together were not quite chemistry. Still, that was a minor misstep compared with the lamentable
The Beach
, an attempt to exploit Leonardo DiCaprio that proved all the wrong ways to go with a movie career.

So, in effect, Boyle had to start again—and my guess is that his most likely ground is still Edinburgh.
Vacuuming
and
Strumpet
were headed in the right direction: rigorously cheap, scathing social satire, and a thousand miles from Hollywood.

No one could have predicted
Slumdog Millionaire
—yet it thrived on Boyle’s restless energy; on the first uninhibited attempt to use Bollywood; on the zest of the cast; and on the providential seizing on
money
as a driving theme and spirit. Will it prove a sidebar, a dead end, or as vital as the Suez Canal?

John Brahm
(Hans Brahm) (1898–1982), b. Hamburg, Germany
1935:
Scrooge
(codirected with Henry Edwards). 1936:
The Last Journey
(codirected with Bernard Vorhaus);
Broken Blossoms
. 1937:
Counsel for Crime
. 1938:
Penitentiary; Girls’ School
. 1939:
Let Us Live; Rio
. 1940:
Escape to Glory
. 1941:
Wild Geese Calling
. 1942:
The Undying Monster
. 1943:
Tonight We Raid Calais; Wintertime
. 1944:
The Lodger; Guest in the House
. 1945:
Hangover Square
. 1946:
The Locket
. 1947:
The Brasher Doubloon/The High Window; Singapore
. 1951:
The Thief of Venice
. 1952:
The Miracle of Fatima;
“The Secret Sharer,” episode from
Face to Face
. 1953:
The Diamond Queen
. 1954:
The Mad Magician; Die Goldene Pest
. 1955:
Special Delivery/Von Himmel Gefallen; Bengazi
. 1957:
Hot Rods to Hell
.

Brahm was the son of German stage director Otto Brahm, and he worked in the Vienna and Berlin theatres until 1934. He then went to England where he made his first three films. In 1937 he left for Hollywood and for the next ten years he worked in America as an accomplished and careful director of nonsense. His modest but entertaining peak was with Laird Cregar in
The Lodger
and
Hangover Square
, sumptuous Fox soundstage evocations of the London of Mrs. Belloc Lowndes and Patrick Hamilton. The latter is especially worthwhile. Marvelously photographed by Joseph La Shelle and with a thunderously romantic score from Bernard Herrmann, it has Cregar as a composer driven to murder at the sound of discord. Inevitably, Linda Darnell is one of his victims, but not before her beauty has been made clear. Brahm’s flamboyance comes fully into play when Cregar dumps her body on a huge Guy Fawkes bonfire. Later he dies himself, playing his terrible concerto, surrounded by fire. That special mood did not last long, and Brahm went into TV after a poor Ava Gardner romance,
Singapore
, and
The High Window
, a very Germanic Chandler adaptation, suffering from George Montgomery’s Marlowe, but blessed by two untrustworthy women, Florence Bates and Nancy Guild.

Kenneth Branagh
, b. Belfast, Northern Ireland, 1960
1989:
Henry V
. 1991:
Dead Again
. 1992:
Swan Song
(s);
Peter’s Friends
. 1993:
Much Ado About Nothing
. 1994:
Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein
. 1995:
In the Bleak Midwinter
. 1996:
Hamlet
. 1999:
The Betty Schimmel Story
. 2000:
Love’s Labour’s Lost
. 2003:
Listening
(s). 2006:
The Magic Flute; As You Like It
. 2007:
Sleuth
.

By the age of thirty, Branagh was being talked of in Britain as the new Olivier. (And Olivier was thirty in 1937, the moment of
Fire Over England
.) Branagh had rather more to offer: he had directed, acted in, and generally assembled his stock company for
Henry V;
he had been a whirling triumph on the English stage, not just as Shakespearean actor but in a variety of contemporary plays; and was the leader of the Renaissance Theatre Company, a roving operation that took on the classics with modern attack, and that asked established actors to do the directing. More than that, Branagh had the glorious and very droll Emma Thompson on his arm—rather more interesting, and challenging, support than Vivien Leigh offered Olivier.

Nevertheless, caution reigned. Branagh’s
Henry V
is spectacular, youthful, brutal, and listless, next to the exquisite interplay of Globe, rolling Irish countryside, and the Beautiful Hours of the Duc de Berri in Olivier’s film. Of course, in 1944–45,
Henry V
meant so much more—it could be romantic, timeless, and mercurial.

Beyond that,
Dead Again
was a stupidity in which Branagh demonstrated little more than lofty superiority to the genre.
Peter’s Friends
was another film that seemed hardly worth the effort. Has Branagh begun to think hard enough about what the screen requires, or might sustain? Has his fabled daring come into focus? Even as actor, he has not yet managed the qualities he showed in
High Season
(87, Clare Peploe);
A Month in the Country
(87, Pat O’Connor); in the TV series adapted from Olivia Manning,
Fortunes of War
(87, James Cellan Jones)—or, in the most impressive work I have seen from him, his Oswald in a made-for-TV
Ghosts
(86, Elijah Moshinsky). Branagh also made an inexplicable cameo appearance as a Nazi in
Swing Kids
(93, Thomas Carter).

His
Much Ado
was sunny, alfresco, robust, and nearly as popular as Olivier’s
Henry V
. Whereupon, Branagh elected to direct
Frankenstein
with himself as the doctor and Robert De Niro as the monster.

It was one of the worst films of the decade, and nothing suggests that Branagh is either competent or interesting when detached from Shakespeare. His
Hamlet
was much praised, but is it really good value at nearly one hundred minutes longer than the Olivier version? Olivier, it seems to me, had a true sense of the movies, and that’s what makes his
Henry V
and
Hamlet
more lasting, mercurial and atmospheric.

In other fields: Branagh’s marriage to Emma Thompson ended. He had become involved with Helena Bonham Carter (who was in his
Frankenstein
film). So Branagh tried to extend his range and appeal, with not much success. He has been in so many failures, that it was truly startling to see his superb Heydrich in
Conspiracy
(01, Frank Pierson), proof that ability has survived.

His recent acting credits are: Iago opposite Larry Fishburne’s
Othello
(95, Oliver Parker);
Looking for Richard
(96, Al Pacino); southern in
The Gingerbread Man
(98, Robert Altman); a priest in
The Proposition
(98, Lesli Linka Glatter); so harassed you wanted to rescue him from
Celebrity
(98, Woody Allen); with Bonham Carter in the risible
The Theory of Flight
(98, Paul Greengrass);
The Dance of Shiva
(98, Jamie Payne);
Wild Wild West
(99, Barry Sonnenfeld);
How to Kill Your Neighbor’s Dog
(00, Michael Kalesniko);
Rabbit-Proof Fence
(01, Phillip Noyce).

But he was good again as
Shackleton
(01, Charles Sturridge)—playing the hero. That and his Heydrich, in
Conspiracy
(01, Frank Pierson), leave room for hope. He was in
Rabbit-Proof Fence
(02, Phillip Noyce),
Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets
(02, Chris Columbus);
Alien Love Triangle
(02, Danny Boyle).

As a director,
The Magic Flute
and
As You Like It
got limited releases—as for
Sleuth
, it should have been confined. As an actor, Branagh did
Five Children and It
(04, John Stephenson); as FDR in
Warm Springs
(05, Joseph Sargent);
Valkyrie
(08, Bryan Singer); as Swedish detective
Wallander
(08, Philip Martin and Niall MacCormick);
Pirate Radio
(09, Richard Curtis).

Marlon Brando
(1924–2004), b. Omaha, Nebraska
Educated at Shattuck Military Academy and the drama workshop of the New School for Social Research in New York, Brando came to movies from an uncertain Broadway career that culminated in his astonishing Stanley Kowalski in
A Streetcar Named Desire
(1947). There had never been such a display of dangerous, brutal male beauty on an American stage—its influence can still be felt, in fashion photography and sport as well as acting. More than that, Brando was used by director Elia Kazan to steal a part of the play from Tennessee Williams’s vision. In its debut,
Streetcar
was more about Stanley and less about Blanche than it would ever be again.

Brando was established for a generation of Americans as a great actor. A career like Olivier’s seemed in prospect. Yet Brando has never returned to the stage, and even allowing for his disillusion with movies, we have to feel a kind of laziness, or a decisive lack of ambition, compared, say, with Olivier. Or is there something in Brando that found so much pretending unwholesome or dishonorable? In his withdrawal, as much as in his best work, he has altered the way we think of acting.

Although an introspective person, Brando was at first cast as inarticulate, morose, and often violent men: his debut as a paraplegic in
The Men
(50, Fred Zinnemann); the film of
Streetcar
(51, Elia Kazan);
Viva Zapata!
(52, Kazan); the hero of that strangely dated hymn to motorbikes,
The Wild One
(53, Laslo Benedek); again for Kazan, as the ex-fighter in
On the Waterfront
(54), for which he won an Oscar. In all these roles, Brando seemed intent on immersion in the shambling and muttering details of butchered simplicity. It was the Method at work, and few actors have so conscientiously applied a theory to their films. In popular terms, Brando became synonymous with mumbling rebellion, and he clearly reacted against such a stereotype. There followed a calculated attempt to widen and lighten his range. A respectable Antony in Mankiewicz’s
Julius Caesar
(53) was followed by a richly conceived but imperfectly conveyed Napoleon in
Desirée
(54, Henry Koster); by an enjoyable Sky Masterson in
Guys and Dolls
(55, Mankiewicz), singing nasally and dancing like a boxer; the Okinawan in
Teahouse of the August Moon
(56, Daniel Mann); and a blond German in
The Young Lions
(58, Edward Dmytryk).