On Screen

...On Screen LEAN YEARS BY JOHN SIMON David Lean, whose Ryan's Daughtei I discussed last time, is altogether a strange case a man afflicted with gigantism, who wants to make bigger and bigger movies even though his small and medium-sized ones are often very good, and his big ones tend to be disappointing Hobson's Choice, a small family comedy with social overtones, based on a play and set m a small town, is one of the finest comedies the English film—rich as it is m savory comedies—ever produced With the collaboration of Noel Coward, Lean made those two somewhat sentimental yet enormously affecting films, In Which We Serve and Brief Encounter, still modest in size, though the British Navy played a goodly part in the former—but nothing like the starring role Darryl F Zanuck would have given it Even here it was perceptible, however, that while Lean was a very fine craftsman indeed, he ultimately lacked the intense imagination, the vision of the artist Notable, too, were Lean's two medium-large, fetching adaptations from Dickens, Olivet Twist (mutilated m America at the insistence of Jewish pressure groups) and Great Expectations, the latter flawed only by the unappealing Valerie Hobson, the producer's wife, as the grownup Estella (the adolescent one was ably and alluringly embodied by Jean Simmons) Then came Hollywood and the big films, beginning with The Bridge on the Rivei Kwai, a solid entertainment based on a bestseller, beautifully acted, photographed and directed, as Lean's films generally are, but, typically, Lean changed the movie's ending to something more upbeat than Pierre Boulle, hardly a profound novelist, had provided Now Lean discovered his favorite screenwriter, the respectable upper-middlebrow playwright Robert Bolt, author of one good play, A Man foi All Seasons, and several poor ones The first Lean-Bolt collaboration was Lawrence of Arabia, which also marked the arrival of another partner of almost equal importance, the superb cmematographer Freddie Young (sometimes billed as Frederick, sometimes as Fred A , but by any name inspired) Lawience was an important film because it proved that a huge spectacular could be made intelligently and artistically, large production values not excluding literacy—something never fully achieved before or since To be sure, history was tampered with, often without compensatory gains in artistry, and a certain lack of depth was frequently felt Matters were worsened by considerable snipping of the film by Columbia very soon after its release and without Lean's permission, it is now to be re-released with additional cuts made by Lean himself, a fact I confess I find disappointing even about a conscientious craftsman, let alone an artist The next superproduction was Doctor Zhivago, in which Bolt made a balls of Pasternak's already uneven novel, and for which Maurice Jarre wrote an even soupier (but catchy, oh so catchy') score than he did for Lawrence Artistically, almost nothing was right about the film except, once again, Young's color photography, and there were, scattered throughout, some of those nice workmanlike details in the sheer crafting of the film, its facture, as French can felicitously put it Sadly, though expectably in our age, Zhivago proved a great popular success, whereas Lawrence has yet to recoup its outlay Still, the ambi-tiousness and scope of Zhivago were at least justified by the magnitude of its subject Ryan's Daughter is the first time Bolt, and one of the rare times Lean, opted for an original screenplay Yet again Young's camera performs miracles, but some of these miracles—no fault of Young's—are in highly questionable taste Thus when Rosy (get the symbolism of the name...

...Miss Alexander conveys human nobility and animal suffering (for circumstances end by robbing her of her very human dignity) with a fineness that is all the greater for its heroic curbing of ready-made pathos But Sackler's script and Ritt's direction cannot make more than a barely mediocre film out of this muddled play Still, it is far superior to something like The Twelve Chairs, in which the sublimely vulgar Mel Brooks indulges himself as author, director and actor (and almost as plagiarist Ilf and Petrov, on whose novel the film is based, are given credit so small as to be hardly perceptible to the naked eye) This crudely self-indulgent comedy about Russia immediately following the Revolution and a chase after 12 identical chairs—one has a treasure hidden in it—is on the level of the most primitive Hollywood farces about Communist countries, and makes the much weaker second half of Ninotchka look like a masterpiece by comparison We are asked to laugh here at people and situations that are merely outrageous, not outrageous and witty, outrageous and insightful, or at least outrageous and different The only exception among the stock farce gimmicks is the servant who worships his master's beating hand and kicking boot, but even this conceit is written and acted into the ground by Mel Brooks himself Unfunny as he is, Brooks is surpassed m witlessness by Dom De Luise, who must be the most distasteful effete comedian in this whole queer world I defy anyone to find me a more nauseating and ungifted comic than DeLuise, who keeps improvising like a magician out of whose hat no rabbit comes Moscow is enacted in the film by Subotica, the Yugoslavian town where I was born, and it gives the only passable performance Carl Reiner's Where's Poppa', though less stupid, is more tasteless yet Reiner thinks that absurd-ism means making everyone dumber, meaner, uglier than life But weird exaggeration is not enough, some sort of artistry, structuring, control of the overstatement is also needed In Ionesco's works, mothers never bare and kiss then: sons' be-hinds in front of their girlfriends, but shattering points are made nevertheless If Where's Poppa7 comments on anything, it is on its makers' mentalities...

...is finally gorgeously made love to deep in the woods, a naming cross of sunlight appears in the overhanging foliage—of the sort that the heavens formerly lavished only on Roman emperors they wanted to convert to the true faith, two dandelions (two, you see'') loose their seeds, and a moss-covered, horizontal log at the scene of the fulfillment performs double duty as a sort of joint g-strrng covering the operative parts of the lovers, and as a symbol for one of those parts That entire ride into the forest and subsequent lovemakmg should be analyzed shot by shot, it is so clever and horrible—with details like bits of plant life bending under the horses' hooves in extreme close-up If someone now told me that there was even a shot of two hares or squirrels m amorous pursuit, I would believe that too As it is, I can neither affirm nor deny it, for my memory is just as capable of playing tricks on me as is Lean's latter-day filmmaking It would be interesting to compare Rosy's seduction with the rape of the wife in Rashomon There Kurosawa, too, shoots up mto the trees to show the sunlight beatmg down through the leaves, but the effect is used with admirable restraint There is very little restraint of any kmd in Ryan's Daughter, and what there is actually is damaging The film lacks the courage of its own low romanticism and omits any number of scenes a faire the flashback to the Major's unhappy return to his wife, Rosy's and the Major's last night out on the heath together (Rosy's leaving her sleeping husband's bed and running out mto the chilly Irish night barefoot and in a filmy nightgown is, distinctly, a scene that should have been thought obligatory to avoid), the Major's suicide, the final happy ending Let me explain It is subtle of the film to eschew these obligatory scenes—just as it is subtle for it to allow Ryan's treachery to go unrecognized and, except by his conscience, unpumshed But subtlety is a mistake in a film whose blatant ambition it is to give cosmic importance to a trivial story of a young wife's coming of age through an unhappy episode of story-book adultery This by bringing in World War I, the ira, a spectacular storm that threatens to submerge the entire western coast of Ireland m the Atlantic, and 192 minutes of Super Panavision 70 including sea, sand, rocks, woods, and a specially built village of solid stone Solid workmanship is the Lean hallmark (and, hereafter, a landmark as well) On this film, too, the director spent two or three years planning and shooting But the vast edifice of the film only dwarfs its already pint-sized characters into Lilliputians The effect is one of dormice inhabiting the Temple of Karnak Now add to all this the gushy score of Maurice Jarre For Lawrence, Jarre had donned the mantle ot Tchaikovsky, for Zhivago, he picked up the pen of Rachmaninoff Here he tries to make like a bigger and splashier Nino Rota, and comes off worse yet, because you can be sweeping in the manner of those Russians and at least capture then-grand scale, but how will loudness and busyness render the delicacy of Rota's scores for the earlier Felhni films9 (The fact that even Rota can no longer write a good Rota score is beside the point ) Pretentiousness and banality are the salient features of this music and, to only a slightly lesser degree, of the movie as a whole The excuse Bolt and Lean give for all their shallow romanticizing is that the film is to be understood as representing Rosy's point of view, the way a girl who reads a piece of Georgian dime fiction...

...The Great White Hope Through good casting and effective staging, this fictionalized story of Jack Johnson, the first Negro heavyweight boxing champion, managed to look better than it was A tale of victimization by the racism of the boxmg world, reflecting the bigotedness of America itself, it had a certain timeliness, what with specious parallels to the case of Cassius Clay and to certain other present-day iniquities In the film (as in the play) I was not so much disturbed by historical inaccuracies, especially anachronisms, as by the stacking of the cards, the oversimplification, the simple-minded ten-dentiousness of it all Add to this Martin Ritt's inability or unwillingness to counteract the essential stag-mess of the material, so that scene after scene remains a set piece isolated from its neighbors Nothing flows or evolves, and though the dialogue has an occasional proleptic bite and cleverness, it has little or no density Everything is a "big scene," and almost nothing is basic texture of human lives Nevertheless, the film does inherit two remarkable performances from the Broadway production, even if, on screen, they have a slight hand-me-down look James Earl Jones was spectacularly good on stage as a Jack Jefferson (Johnson's name changed, as it were, to that of a more popular President) whose towering rage is contamed under a facade of smiling self-depreciation —i facade to which the windows of the eyes always, the doorway of the mouth sometimes, gave the he There was something exhilarating in the way his bulky but agile body, his heavy but musical voice—his presence, m short—would take possession of the stage first, then of the auditorium, to soar, finally, right through the roof On screen, this kind of expansion and transcendence is not possible there is no space, no architecture the actor's giant personality can take hold of and grow beyond Somewhat the same problem obtains with Jane Alexander as the boxer's white mistress, his good angel yet also his unwilling Nemesis She had a way of dominating the stage action through sheer quietness, understated pride, and an occasional powerful eruption that would fiercely and pathetically beat on those around her like a great, frangible wave on a cloddish shore On screen, you do not get the sense of surrounding people as a coastline on which a human wave is breaking there is not that land of simultaneous presence of several faces, and panning from face to face is not at all the same thmg Moreover, Miss Alexander is not pretty, and has a nose that is distinctly unphotogemc, the result is that Ritt and his overrated cinema-tographer, Burnett Guffey, tend to shy away from giving her face free rem Pretty or not, however...

...The King's Mistress, imagmes or rearranges the world around her But superficiality, overblownness, a prodigality of extreme long shots, fantastic bird's- or worm's-eye views dommate the film Even the scenes in which Rosy is not present are shot in this manner grand images, hollow gestures, and rather too homespun bits of wisdom from the priest or schoolmaster—themselves naive romanticizations of good, simple men—all contribute to makmg what should comment on Rosy scarcely different from what Rosy sees The sensibility that produces The King's Mistress is painfully close to the one that produces Ryan's Daughter Lean's best friend was the limited budget, he tried to escape it from the very beginning, and finally did Alas, the best years of Lean were his lean years Once again I shall note a few dreadful movies only briefly I realize that from the standpoint of those seriously concerned with film, a thumbnail review is unsatisfying, even of a bad movie, they would prefer a detailed, critically suggestive discussion But there is not space enough in all the world's magazines rolled together for analytical evaluation of the world's wretched films, and the general reader is entitled to some idea about—as well as warning agamst—them Thus I think it is enough to say about Little Fauss and Big Halsy and WUSA that they illustrate the mindless flashiness of their respective directors, Sidney J Fune and Stuart Rosenberg, and very little else Fauss is interesting only in that it takes the old Hollywood cliche of two buddies, one dashingly caddish, the other humble and devoted, falling afoul of each other over a girl, and follows it fairly consistently while decking it out with various new conventions the caricatured rustics out of Bonnie and Clyde, the ugly inside dope on a sport out of Downhill Racer, the nutty but lovable girl drifter out of any Diane Varsi movie Under the modern trappings, the same old schlock In WUSA, that lovable, raunchy girl drifter shows up again m the shape of Joanne Woodward, who plays her to the hilt, and still cannot suggest that she was born of anything but the mating of two B-movies The film is liberal propaganda of the sleaziest and most inept sort, and mostly shows up the book-reviewing trade Robert Stone's A Hall of Mirrors, from which the novelist prepared his own screenplay, was a book whose praises were choired everywhere, yet it must have been as flashily and foolishly gesticulating a work as is this film version Even more offensive than the chched treatment of Southern Rightist politics is the posturing of the dialogue, which fails equally with portentous statements in elaborately fuzzy language and with supposedly shattering simplicities that are shabbily simplistic Rosenberg's direction consists of an effect here, an even shoddier effect there, and the most colorless dragging on m between Another film stemming from an overpraised source and clearly revealing the original's exiguity is Howard Sackler's adaptation of his own stage hit...