The New Biographical Dictionary of Film: Completely Updated and Expanded (77 page)

Cimino earned a bachelor’s and then a master’s degree in art from Yale in the early sixties. He studied acting and directing with Lee Strasberg, and then worked in New York on industrial films, documentaries, and TV commercials. As a screenwriter, he had a shared credit on
Silent Running
(71, Douglas Trumbull) and
Magnum Force
(73, Ted Post). The introduction to Clint Eastwood led to
Thunderbolt and Lightfoot
, which is expert, scary, and a rare example of character interplay in an Eastwood film. In the bracing 1970s, that kind of modest debut could set a guy up with a great challenge.

The Deer Hunter
won best picture and best director; it made a lot of money at 183 minutes; it was the subject of bitter controversy, being deemed fascist, racist, historically inaccurate, and small-minded, despite its epic canvas. I can recall people in the first audience crying out with anguish, regret, and suspense. Few movies have ever stirred audiences so powerfully. And, upon consideration, I think it is a great picture, large enough to carry its flaws.

Consider these virtues: the working-class setting, managed without condescension; the symphonic shift of tone and pace as it moves from steel-town doldrums to the fearful jungle of Southeast Asia; the desperate tension of the first roulette sequence; the group playing of De Niro, Walken, Cazale, Savage, and Dzundza; the forlorn attempt at something like love or comfort between De Niro and Meryl Streep; the primeval air of the hunting sequence; and the overall notion of a blinded, battered American self-belief struggling to move forward.
The Deer Hunter
is not politically correct, but it is one of the few American movies that understand the state of outrage and mistake within American hope. It is a picture to put beside
Bonnie and Clyde, King Kong
, and
Birth of a Nation
, monuments worthy of some shame and much exhilaration.

Its success changed the movie world, and led to one of our best pieces of contemporary movie history, Steven Bach’s
Final Cut
, a book one is ready to trust because it never denies the executives’ blame or Cimino’s creative urge on what became
Heaven’s Gate
. Egomania destroyed budget; United Artists succumbed; the film was a disaster, at 205 or 149 minutes. It seemed like a Western, as opposed to some mixing of Charles Ives, Edward Hopper, and Willa Cather. In its making, it paraded all the ordinary madnesses of Hollywood, and it showed how disastrous the cult of the director had become: this was
la pathologie des auteurs
.

The full version survives on video, whereas it is very hard now to see the shorter form.
Heaven’s Gate
was poorly cast and badly written, and Cimino was, for the first time, the sole credited writer. The Harvard sequence is a perverse folly of delay; the violence sickens us without ever bringing moral pain. Still, anyone should be able to see the scheme of immigrant and individual against the capitalist system; and even with its handicaps, one feels the gigantic tug of faith and dismay about America. But the famous “beauty” is fatally apparent just because we have so much time to study it and no sense of its dramatic place.

Heaven’s Gate
needed, let us suppose, the chance to start again (something painters and novelists take for granted). It needed Redford and De Niro, instead of Kristofferson and Walken; it needed to shed an hour—something only possible in a restart and a script by someone like Richard Brooks, an oldtimer and a taut storyteller. Then Cimino needed to be bullied, oppressed, and treated wretchedly, until he felt for the poor immigrants. But perhaps he wanted to make an impossible film. We should not exclude that wanton urge.

What next? The four subsequent films are by someone in hiding, at rest, or gone away. Perhaps he cannot muster the guile, the nerve, or the need to become enormous again. Just as he seemed dormant, the monster stirred: there were rumors of sex change—but from what to what? He wrote a novel, in French. Was it man or ghost?

René Clair
(René-Lucien Chomette) (1898–1981), b. Paris
1923:
Paris Qui Dort
(s). 1924:
Entr’acte
(s);
Le Fantôme du Moulin Rouge
. 1925:
Le Voyage Imaginaire
. 1926:
La Proie du Vent
. 1927:
Un Chapeau de Paille d’Italie/The Italian Straw Hat
. 1928:
La Tour
(s);
Les Deux Timides
. 1930:
Sous les Toits de Paris
. 1931:
Le Million; A Nous la Liberté
. 1932:
Quatorze Juillet
. 1934:
Le Dernier Milliardaire
. 1935:
The Ghost Goes West
. 1937:
Break the News
. 1939:
Air Pur
(uncompleted). 1941:
The Flame of New Orleans
. 1942: an episode from
Forever and a Day; I Married a Witch
. 1944:
It Happened Tomorrow
. 1945:
And Then There Were None/Ten Little Indians
. 1947:
Le Silence Est d’Or
. 1950:
La Beauté du Diable
. 1952:
Les Belles de Nuit/Night Beauties
. 1955:
Les Grandes Manoeuvres/Summer Manoeuvres
. 1957:
Porte des Lilas
. 1960: “Le Mariage,” episode from
La Française et l’Amour
. 1961:
Tout l’Or du Monde
. 1962: “Les Deux Pigeons,” episode from
Les Quatre Vérités
. 1965:
Les Fêtes Galantes
.

Clair now looks something less than the major director he was known as in 1935. His work since that first venturing outside France has seldom lacked amusement or a sense of fantasy, but it does seem lightweight. Even his finest films—those made in the first experiment of sound—are rather precious and too vaguely opposed to “progress” when set beside
L’Age d’Or, L’Atalante, Boudu
, or
Toni
. Clair’s world is brilliantly conceived and wrought, but it remains self-contained. Increasingly, the orchestration of sounds and the balletic view of activity feel as emotionally detached as his slightly fey preference for the idea of companionship to the complexity of emotional reality. The comedy is slow and mannered, and the films have shrunk into glowing, ingenious miniatures. The adventurous range of a Vigo or Renoir are the highest comparisons, but Clair does not match up to them. Perhaps it is the very “finished” gloss on his films, the tying into decorative bows of loose ends, that makes his work seem too neat and restricted.

Wounded in the First World War, he spent some time in a monastery but soon opted for journalism. As well as writing film criticism he worked as an actor:
Les Deux Gamines
(20, Louis Feuillade);
Parisette
(21, Feuillade);
L’Orpheline
(21, Feuillade);
Pour une Nuit d’Amour
(21, Jacob Protazanov); and
Le Sens de la Mort
(22, Protazanov). Clair was assistant to Jacques de Baroncelli before starting to direct himself.

From the beginning, Clair was intent on ways of gently exposing social absurdity through deliberately artificial farces and by various forms of stylization that sprang from the cinema’s scope for movement and later its capacity for sound. Years later, in a book,
Reflexion Faite
(1951), Clair stated his faith in the autonomous reality of the concocted image; and it is this prettiness that now seems a crucial handicap. Thus, there was an academic, mechanical feeling to images that were merely illustrating a meticulous script—the preparation of which Clair has always regarded as the most creative stage in filmmaking. The whimsical and musical fabrication of
Le Million
, the satire on the machine in
A Nous la Liberté
, and the studio artifice of
Sous les Toits de Paris
are notional achievements that smother cinematic interest with the sheer cleverness of the conception and the technical mastery of the execution. The comparison between Renoir and Clair shows how much more fruitful open-air realism was in defining the potential of sound pictures. Too often, the human figures in Clair’s tableaux seem to be straining to stand on eggshells in a breeze.

It always was Clair’s practice to surround himself with master craftsmen, such as designer Lazare Meerson and photographer Georges Perinal. At times, he even left subsidiary scenes to be filmed by assistants, with something of Hitchcock’s indifference to the moment in front of the lens. That was a later recourse. On the key films of the early 1930s
—Sous les Toits de Paris, Le Million, A Nous la Liberté, Quatorze Juillet
, and
Le Dernier Milliardaire
—Clair was fully engaged if greatly aided by Meerson and Perinal. These films show a kindly sympathy for the little man—a Chaplinesque figure—but always dissipate their social criticism through the Méliès-like taste for the fantastic and the elaborate portrait of a toy world.

Clair’s silent films are surprisingly varied.
Entr’acte
, for instance, belongs to the most self-indulgent wing of the French avant-garde. Intended as a companion piece to an actual ballet, it was scripted by Francis Picabia and also involved Erik Satie, Duchamp, and Man Ray. Full of visual surrealism, it is almost entirely empty of purpose. More immediately elegant than, say,
Un Chien Andalou
, it grows stale as Buñuel’s lurcher dog becomes ever randier.
Entr’acte
was a diversion for Clair, not really in character.
Paris Qui Dort
was a comedy involving a ray that suspends motion; while
Voyage Imaginaire
was about a young man who dreams that he travels to fairyland.
The Italian Straw Hat
, his greatest early success, was taken from a stage farce by Eugene Labiche and Marc Michel and shows his taste for contrived narrative consequences and a rather dandified mocking of the bourgeoisie.

In 1935, Clair went to England for Korda and directed Robert Donat in
The Ghost Goes West
. He stayed on for
Break the News
, with Jack Buchanan and Maurice Chevalier. After the abortive
Air Pur
, he went to Hollywood. His films there are modest but benign, far less vigorous than the American work of Renoir, Lang, or Ophuls.
The Flame of New Orleans
is a confection that allows Dietrich to be more than usually tender and is well photographed by Rudolph Maté, who had filmed
Le Dernier Milliardaire. I Married a Witch
was one of the films that established Veronica Lake, but it and
It Happened Tomorrow
have a relentlessly inventive infusion of fantasy that seems mannered.
And Then There Were None
is a version of Agatha Christie’s
Ten Little Indians
, not frightening, not funny, seemingly content with the restraints of the material.

The postwar Clair is perhaps the most interesting. Playfulness slipped away.
Le Silence Est d’Or
is an ironic comedy that has emotional depth;
Les Belles de Nuit
is a fantasy rooted in sex; while
Les Grandes Manoeuvres
is a tragi-comedy worthy of Ophuls. Michèle Morgan in that film, as a woman uncertain of her lover, Gérard Philipe, is the most mature and touching character creation in Clair’s work. The film itself is warmed by color and a loving care for the detail of a 1914 barracks town.
Porte des Lilas
was again a more sombre film, with a fine performance from Pierre Brasseur. After that, Clair’s work slipped back into shallow comedies and fragments.

Larry Clark
, b. Tulsa, Oklahoma, 1943
1995:
Kids
. 1998:
Another Day in Paradise
. 2001:
Bully
. 2002:
Teenage Caveman
(TV);
Ken Park
. 2006:
Wassup Rockers; Destricted
.

The son of a still photographer, Frances Clark, Larry Clark attended the Layton School of Art in Milwaukee on his way to being a naturalist still photographer, specializing in the lost lives of young people in his native Oklahoma. He did several books of photographs, notably
Tulsa
(71) and
Teenage Lust
(82).
Kids
was a fiction, set in New York, with actors, but it was in many ways Clark’s still vision sprung into melancholy life.

He remains an outsider
—Bully
was another examination of kids’ drab lives and
Ken Park
is a similar venture, somewhat disrupted by disagreements between Clark and the film’s sponsor. But he has made two movies toward the mainstream:
Teenage Caveman
was a television story about kids trying to survive in a post-nuclear wasteland. Far more interesting was
Another Day in Paradise
, a real noir in which Clarkian kids meet characters from Jim Thompson, embodied by James Woods and Melanie Griffith.

Alan Clarke
(1935–90), b. Seacombe, England
1967:
Shelter
(TV, s);
A Man Inside
(TV, s);
George’s Room
(TV, s);
Thief
(TV, s);
A Man of Our Times
(TV);
The Gentleman Caller
(TV, s);
Which of These Two Ladies Is He Married To?
(TV, s); an episode from
Sleeping Dogs Lie
(TV). 1968:
Goodnight Albert
(TV, s);
Stella
(TV, s);
Nothing’s Ever Over
(TV, s);
The Fifty-Seventh Birthday
(TV, s);
Stand by Your Screens
(TV);
Gareth
(TV);
The Piano Tuner
(TV). 1969: an episode from
The Arrangement
(TV);
The Ladies: Doreen & Joan
(TV);
The Last Train Through the Harecastle Tunnel
(TV). 1970:
Sovereign’s Company
(TV);
I Can’t See My Little Willie
(TV);
Hallelujah Handshake
(TV). 1971:
Everybody Say Cheese
(TV). 1972:
Under the Age
(TV, s);
Horace
(TV);
To Encourage the Others
(TV);
Achilles Heel
(TV);
A Life Is Forever
(TV);
Horatio Bottomley
(TV). 1973:
Man Above Men
(TV);
The Love Girl and the Innocent
(TV). 1974:
Penda’s Fen
(TV);
A Follower for Emily
(TV). 1975:
Funny Farm
(TV);
Diane
(TV). 1976: an episode from
Love for Lydia
(TV);
Fast Hands
(TV). 1977:
Scum
(TV, not shown). 1978:
Danton’s Death
(TV);
Nina
(TV). 1980:
Scum
. 1981:
Beloved Enemy
(TV);
Psy-Warriors
(TV). 1982:
Baal
(TV). 1983:
Made in Britain
(TV). 1984:
Stars of the Roller State Disco
(TV). 1985:
Contact
(TV);
Billy the Kid & the Green Baize Vampire
. 1986:
Rita, Sue & Bob, Too
. 1987:
Christine
(TV);
Road
(TV). 1989:
Elephant
(TV);
The Firm
(TV).