The New Biographical Dictionary of Film: Completely Updated and Expanded (62 page)

Cagney’s Warners contract expired. He was anxious to form his own company, but was persuaded to stay at the studio for Wellman’s
The Fighting 69th
(40); Keighley’s
Torrid Zone
(40); Litvak’s
City for Conquest
(40); Walsh’s
Strawberry Blonde
(41); Keighley’s
The Bride Came C.O.D
. (41); and Curtiz’s
Captain of the Clouds
(42). Charges of Communist associations had been made against Cagney, and with his brother William he persuaded Warners to put him in
Yankee Doodle Dandy
(42), the biography of the superpatriotic showman, George M. Cohan, directed by Michael Curtiz. It won Cagney an Oscar, even if it did not fully reinstate him. It survives as his masterpiece, a manic Punchinello Uncle Sam, arse out, head forward, strutting his way through routines as if he had reinvented dance. Only this ferocious animation could have tamed the jingoism of the film; as Cohan, above all, Cagney seems to be driven by nonhuman forces, like a toy running wild.

He was at the point now of having either to search for a mellower character or reprise his earlier roles. He was less successful as sentimental heroes in
Johnny Come Lately
(43, William K. Howard); Hathaway’s
13 rue Madeleine
(46); and H. C. Potter’s Saroyan adaptation,
The Time of Your Life
(48). He was happier in the rough stuff of Frank Lloyd’s
Blood on the Sun
(46) and Warners invited him back to play Cody Jarrett in Walsh’s
White Heat
(49), a delirious, psychopathic farewell to gangsterdom in which he was able to kick Virginia Mayo off a chair, cuddle in his mother Margaret Wycherly’s lap, and perish in a lurid explosion. But most fascinating of all was the way Cagney “choreographed” Jarrett when suffering from one of his “headaches”: he staggered endlessly, moaning and shrieking until some half a dozen prison guards were needed to restrain the rapt, seething doll. All the naïveté of Cagney’s character was brought out in these crises and
White Heat
is one of his finest films.

Sadly, his career then declined: del Ruth’s
West Point Story
(50); two films for Gordon Douglas—
Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye
(50) and
Come Fill the Cup
(51); John Ford’s failure,
What Price Glory?
(52); as a demagogue in Walsh’s
A Lion Is in the Streets
(53); good as a veteran gunfighter in Nicholas Ray’s
Run for Cover
(55); in Charles Vidor’s
Love Me or Leave Me
(55), not nearly as rough on Doris Day as he might once have been. He was in Robert Wise’s
Tribute to a Bad Man
(56) and then rediscovered all his old interest as Lon Chaney in Joseph Pevney’s
Man of a Thousand Faces
(57)—being called upon to portray a master of the grotesque revived Cagney’s strange mime and the film carries great conviction. He then directed his only film,
Short Cut to Hell
(58); played Admiral Halsey in Robert Montgomery’s
The Gallant Hours
(60); and roared off on the overdrive acceleration of Billy Wilder’s
One, Two, Three
(61). Happily, the conniving Pepsi-Cola executive of that Berlin farce is one of his best parts and proof of how near Cagney’s devil was to comedy.

He came back again, as police chief Rheinlander Waldo, in
Ragtime
(81, Milos Forman), sitting very still, but issuing his lines with whispered force, and on TV in
Terrible Joe Moran
(84, Joseph Sargent), as an ex-boxer in a wheelchair.

Dead and undimmed, he is proverbial now, a force of life and one of those stars who grow more lovely and mysterious as the years pass.

Sir Michael Caine
(Maurice Micklewhite), b. London, 1933
The movie business once monopolized surreal success stories: lumberjacks who conveyed the proper thrill in Paramount boudoirs; failed nuns who found themselves in low-key close-ups. Today, such unlikely metamorphoses are reserved for politics and commerce. But Michael Caine is an exporter at Smithfield meat market, quite securely in the movies, and seemingly perplexed that he has not yet turned into a swan. Perhaps the public is heartened by his ordinariness, yet it seldom enables Caine to relax. He tends to be as cold and barricaded as his spectacles; he may need to be rescued by a Pygmalion who will take away the horn-rims and discover something more than a cockney made nervous by awesome circumstances. He made one film in 1956—
A Hill in Korea
(Julian Amyes)—but it was in the early 1960s that he became what swinging Britain took for a star, principally as Len Deighton’s sour hero, Harry Palmer:
Zulu
(64, Cy Endfield);
The Ipcress File
(65, Sidney J. Furie);
Alfie
(66, Lewis Gilbert)—his big hit;
The Wrong Box
(66, Bryan Forbes);
Gambit
(66, Ronald Neame);
Funeral in Berlin
(66, Guy Hamilton);
Hurry Sundown
(67, Otto Preminger);
Woman Times Seven
(67, Vittorio de Sica);
Billion Dollar Brain
(67, Ken Russell);
Play Dirty
(68, André de Toth);
Deadfall
(68, Forbes);
The Magus
(68, Guy Green);
The Italian Job
(69, Peter Collinson);
The Battle of Britain
(69, Hamilton);
Too Late the Hero
(70, Robert Aldrich);
Get Carter
(71, Mike Hodges);
The Last Valley
(71, James Clavell);
Kidnapped
(71, Delbert Mann);
Pulp
(72, Hodges);
Sleuth
(72, Joseph L. Mankiewicz), in which the trite two-hander makes him look sentimental;
The Black Windmill
(74, Don Siegel);
The Marseille Contract
(74, Robert Parrish);
The Wilby Conspiracy
(74, Ralph Nelson);
Peeper
(75, Peter Hyams); as the novelist in
The Romantic Englishwoman
(75, Joseph Losey); at last interesting and engaged in
The Man Who Would Be King
(75, John Huston);
Harry and Walter Go to New York
(76, Mark Rydell);
The Eagle Has Landed
(76, John Sturges);
A Bridge Too Far
(77, Richard Attenborough);
Silver Bears
(77, Ivan Passer);
The Swarm
(78, Irwin Allen);
California Suite
(78, Herbert Ross); and
Ashanti
(79, Richard Fleischer).

Caine has risen to the state of beloved veteran, widely acclaimed as a resourceful actor who will try anything (he has done a clever, if rather obvious, book and video onscreen acting). By the time he published his autobiography, in 1992, he seemed like an institution. This writer remains unconvinced: Caine’s work is indiscriminate, and he is still more at ease in supporting roles. I do not see or feel the evidence of character or depth in the mass of parts:
Beyond the Poseidon Adventure
(79, Allen);
The Island
(80, Michael Ritchie); as the killer in
Dressed to Kill
(80, Brian De Palma);
The Hand
(81, Oliver Stone);
Victory
(81, Huston);
Deathtrap
(82, Sidney Lumet); the professor in
Educating Rita
(83, Gilbert);
The Honorary Consul
(83, John Mackenzie);
Blame It On Rio
(84, Stanley Donen);
The Jigsaw Man
(84, Terence Young);
Water
(85, Dick Clement); and
The Holcroft Covenant
(85, John Frankenheimer).

He won the supporting actor Oscar in
Hannah and Her Sisters
(86, Woody Allen)—Berenger and Dafoe in
Platoon
were among the losers. He also played in
Sweet Liberty
(86, Alan Alda);
Mona Lisa
(86, Neil Jordan);
Half Moon Street
(86, Bob Swaim);
The Whistle Blower
(86, Simon Langton);
Jaws—The Revenge
(87, Joseph Sargent);
The Final Protocol
(87, Mackenzie);
Surrender
(87, Jerry Belson);
Without a Clue
(88, Thom Eberhardt);
Dirty Rotten Scoundrels
(88, Frank Oz); as the police inspector in
Jack the Ripper
(88, David Wickes), for TV; A
Shock to the System
(90, Jan Egelson);
Mr. Destiny
(90, James Orr); out of his depth in
Jekyll & Hyde
(90, Wickes);
Bullseye
(90, Michael Winner); very adroit in
Noises Off
(92, Peter Bogdanovich); as Scrooge in
The Muppet Christmas Carol
(92, Brian Henson); and
Blue Ice
(93, Russell Mulcahy).

Well, the Queen obviously reckons him as an actor; she knighted him in 2000. He’s certainly worked for it, and stayed very cheerful, but I can only think of all the films HRH must have missed: like
On Deadly Ground
(94, Steven Seagal); a very silly and inscrutable Stalin in
World War II: When Lions Roared
(94, Sargent)—see Robert Duvall instead; doing Harry Palmer again in
Midnight in St. Petersburg
(95, Douglas Jackson) and
Bullet to Beijing
(95, George Mihalka);
Blood and Wine
(97, Bob Rafelson); again vacuous in
Mandela and de Klerk
(97, Sargent); Nemo in
20,000 Leagues Under the Sea
(97, Michael Anderson);
Shadow Run
(98, Geoffrey Reeve).

But I suspect the Queen saw
Little Voice
(98, Mark Herman) and
The Cider House Rules
(99, Lasse Hallstrom), where his Wilbur Larch won a second supporting-actor Oscar. After that, Sir Michael went back to habit with
The Debtors
(99, Evi Quaid);
Curtain Call
(99, Peter Yates);
Quills
(00, Philip Kaufman), where he is a little monotonous;
Shiner
(00, John Irvin);
Get Carter
(00, Stephen T. Kay);
Miss Congeniality
(00, Donald Petrie);
Last Orders
(01, Fred Schepisi).

He worked hard on
The Quiet American
(02, Phillip Noyce)—especially in saving it from the shelf—and he got an Oscar nomination. But truly he lacked the English class the role needed—the sourness of Graham Greene himself. After that he did
The Actors
(03, Conor McPherson);
Secondhand Lions
(03, Tim McCanlies);
The Statement
(03, Norman Jewison);
Around the Bend
(04, Jordan Roberts).

With the age of Michael Gough, he became “Alfred”:
Batman Begins
(05, Christopher Nolan);
Bewitched
(05, Nora Ephron);
The Weather Man
(05, Gore Verbinski);
The Prestige
(06, Nolan);
Children of Men
(06, Alfonso Cuarón); horrible in
Sleuth
(07, Kenneth Branagh);
Flawless
(08, Michael Radford);
The Dark Knight
(08, Nolan);
Is Anybody There?
(08, John Crowley);
Harry Brown
(09, Daniel Barber).

James Cameron
, b. Kapuskasing, Canada, 1954
1982:
Piranha II: The Spawning
. 1984:
The Terminator
. 1986:
Aliens
. 1989:
The Abyss
. 1991:
Terminator 2: Judgment Day
. 1994:
True Lies
. 1997:
Titanic
. 2002: “Freak Nation,” episode from
Dark Angel
(TV); 2002:
Expedition: Bismarck
(d). 2003:
Ghosts of the Abyss
(d). 2007:
The Lost Tomb of Jesus
(d). 2009:
Avatar
.

It could be said of Cameron that no one did so much to redeem the eighties genre of high-tech threat through the overlay of genuine human interest stories. But that description smacks of the formulaic. Perhaps it would be more to the point to ask who smothered so many promising stories with effects and apparatus? All is likely to be made clear soon, for Cameron has a bounteous production deal. But he has been so successful already, what awaits him now except some abyss?

After a degree in physics from California State University, Fullerton, Cameron found work with Roger Corman building miniature sets. He went on to do process work and to be an art director on
Escape From New York
(81, John Carpenter);
Galaxy of Terror
(81, B. D. Clark);
Forbidden World
(82, Allan Holzman); and
Battle Beyond the Stars
(80, Jimmy T. Murakami).

Of his directorial films,
The Terminator
has an echoing mythic story, a raw, gutsy Linda Hamilton, Schwarzenegger cast with flair and humor, and a relaxed, economical air.
T2
, seven years later, was then the most expensive film ever made, desperate to show it, and minus the original poetry.

Along the way,
Aliens
was the most human of that trio, while
The Abyss
had the start of a rich, troubled marriage between Ed Harris and Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio, before some stunning but lugubrious effects took over. Marriage might be Cameron’s real subject: he has had and ended four marriages already—to a civilian, to his producer Gale Ann Hurd, to director Kathryn Bigelow, whose
Point Break
(91) he produced; and to actress Linda Hamilton.

He also made
Titanic
, which … well, made him “king of the world,” if he thought so. Beyond its taking in more money than any other movie (so far), there’s little to be said for it—except that it is the least interesting of his films. Anyway, he has been living like a king, I suppose. He is married again—to actress Suzy Amis—and he brought a strange and silly TV series into being,
Dark Angel
.

He was doodling a bit in his fondness for dead ships, and he contented himself with doing just the script on
Terminator 3
(03, Jonathan Mostow).