The Big Screen (19 page)

That Christmas perennial is a comforting piece of work (if that's how you determine to see it). It's a romantic comedy about a decent man and a marriage, about a cozy town and its community, but it's a nightmare, too, in which George Bailey, haggard over his own failure as a small-town banker, is on the brink of suicide and is then shown what will become of his town without him. That vision is as credible and as damning as anything Capra ever did, and the lasting record of how perceptive and worried he was. After that, he went off the boil and, like many Hollywood people, failed to grasp the postwar mood. He became a government informer and an uneasy rich man frightened by the way America was going. But he had always been as suspicious of the huddled masses as he longed to believe in noble souls from the hinterland.

No less esteemed and no less confused was John Ford. Sean Aloysius O'Feeney, or O'Fearna, was born in Cape Elizabeth, Maine, in 1894, the thirteenth child of Irish immigrants. As Jack Ford first, he did many jobs in pictures, including riding with the Ku Klux Klan in
The Birth of a Nation
. He was associated with Westerns in the silent era (when Westerns were common but not prestigious). To the end of his days, he stuck with the genre and turned Monument Valley (in southern Utah) into its ideal epic setting.

But he would try anything, and in the 1930s his range included Shirley Temple in
Wee Willie Winkie
(1937) and Katharine Hepburn as
Mary of Scotland
(1936; they were devoted), as well as a couple of Will Rogers pictures and Victor McLaglen as
The Informer
(1935), for which actor and director won Oscars—you have to see that one to believe it, and you may decide it is insufferable, embarrassing, and the worst kind of stage Irishness. Far more impressive, at the turn of the decade, Ford delivered three mature films in a row:
Stagecoach
,
Young Mr. Lincoln
(with Henry Fonda as Lincoln), and
The Grapes of Wrath
, derived from the John Steinbeck novel and the look of photographs by Dorothea Lange (though Gregg Toland shot it, and got a little over-pretty at times).
The Grapes of Wrath
is unquestionably a tribute to the people, even if it is sententious and self-satisfied some of the time. In hindsight, it seems odd that
Rebecca
won Best Picture that year, the second such win in a row for producer David O. Selznick, but a work blithely removed from the feeling of 1940 and which typifies Hollywood's love of England, or is it olde England?

Vidor, von Sternberg, Capra, and Ford were sketchily known as names, and at the time they worked, few people still could have told you what a director did. The public knew what actors did, and went to the movies for them. In any study of creative power or auteurship (a term that was not current yet), you would have to deal with the stars—with Shirley Temple as well as Bette Davis, with Gable as well as Gary Cooper.

Cooper has figured already in this chapter. He is the figurehead of
Morocco
,
Mr. Deeds Goes to Town
, and
Meet John Doe
. His other work includes an indolently suave Hickok in DeMille's
The Plainsman
and his Oscar-winning role in
Sergeant York
. No one seemed more handsome, resolute, or taciturn than Cooper—don't forget that Clint Eastwood was born in 1930, an ideal boy for watching Coop. Then discover that in real life, Cooper was unreliable, promiscuous, and rather cowardly. We know that now. But the 1930s could not handle such difficult truths, and the studios had a publicity machine to protect their properties. The system and the nation had not yet turned on their celebrities.

And don't forget the franchises, by which I mean the people or the teams who made a string of films that now look like all one film—Temple for one, but also the Marx Brothers, W. C. Fields, Laurel and Hardy, Mae West, and Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers.

“Fred Astaire” is the Americanization of Frederic Austerlitz, born in Omaha, Nebraska, in 1899. He danced from childhood with his sister, Adele, and he broke into films in the early 1930s after initial estimates that he was not very good-looking and rather thin in personality. Of course, sound made more of him than it did of Jolson. I don't just mean the singing voice, which becomes ever more endearing and ghostly. I mean the sly clatter of his feet. He made a debut in
Dancing Lady
(1933), with Joan Crawford, a vigorous but unappealing dancer. But then he settled at RKO, with Ginger Rogers, and they spun into a series as fanciful and lovely as the von Sternberg–Dietrich films:
Flying Down to Rio
(1933),
The Gay Divorcee
(1934),
Roberta
(1935),
Top Hat
(1935),
Follow the Fleet
(1936),
Swing Time
(1936),
Shall We Dance?
(1937),
Carefree
(1938), and
The Story of Vernon and Irene Castle
(1939). They reunited in 1949, at M-G-M, for
The Barkleys of Broadway
.

Astaire did not direct these films. He did not write them, or seem to care that they were so lamely written. He was not credited as choreographer. But he dominated the films and then had the cool nerve to act shy or deferential. The films are black and white. This is the famous era of panchromatic black and white, printed on nitrate stock: it's the medium for Fred and Ginger, von Sternberg and Dietrich, Toland and Welles. It is one of the finest inventions America ever made, and then it was largely abandoned.

The Astaire-Rogers pictures take place on sets that feel like hardened cellophane, or film stock. Is that coincidence? And they have the songs of Irving Berlin, Jerome Kern, George Gershwin, and Cole Porter. Was that luck, or did the country produce a wave of talents across the board who joined forces in the musical? Were they the true spit of the 1930s? The results are unsurpassed and a defense of film to put beside Renoir, Buñuel, Bresson, or Ozu. Fred's smile acknowledges the earliest impulse of the medium—hey, look at me move!—the thrill that gripped Eadweard Muybridge as it has any of us recording our child's first steps or his making a mess with profiteroles.

Astaire-Rogers were wildly popular, though as time went by, their films became more expensive and less profitable. Carefree perhaps, yet always linked to business calculations. Astaire would make other notable pictures after Ginger—
The Band Wagon
(1953),
Funny Face
(1957),
Silk Stockings
(1957)—and Ginger became a fine comedienne in the 1940s. But if you feel for the medium and its power in the late 1930s, you have to recognize how far they were a light unto themselves and cherished. Fred has been dead more than twenty-five years now. His films were foolish the moment they opened—seventy years ago and more—yet they are bliss.

With France, we have to start again, because the French know they invented cinema, and they live with a wry bitterness that says America then stole it away—as if theft could do anything except characterize an adolescent nation.

Several French pioneer figures were devoured in competition with America. Moreover, the French cineaste has lived all his life with very mixed feelings about America. When Jean Renoir (son of a great painter) began to think of doing movies, his older brother Pierre (an actor) warned him, “The cinema doesn't suit us [the French]. We must leave cinema to the Americans. French dramatic art is bourgeois; whereas the American cinema is working class.” Forty years or so later, when the French New Wave broke on the shore (with Renoir as one of its gods), the new young films were defiantly French, modern, and insolent, but they had a nostalgia for American forms and moods. That paradox renews a persistent question: Are the people of the world an unmodified block, a global village, a web or a net, or are they just as different, unique (yet alike), as snowflakes in a blizzard?

In those first fragments of film or domestic newsreel shot by Louis and Auguste Lumière the populace is seen as a busy crowd, lively and idiosyncratic—it's like looking at the Parisians in impressionist paintings (some of them convivial groups by Auguste Renoir). Those moving photographs seem to be a measure of passing time and human vagary; the mood is comic, curious, and sympathetic. Years later, in
La Règle du Jeu
(1939), Jean Renoir would pass this verdict on his turbulent and tragic house party: everyone has his or her own reasons. And you can feel that as optimism in the father's paintings, in the Lumière fragments, and in the French tradition of still photography that stretches from Lartigue to Cartier-Bresson (who was Jean Renoir's assistant sometimes in the 1930s). We all have our different reasons, but the light is shared.

In films as varied as
Metropolis
,
Strike
,
Man with a Movie Camera
,
Triumph of the Will
, and even
Mr. Deeds Goes to Town
, we have felt the tendency to regard the crowd as a force, or a shape—it may be cheerful or merry; it may be sullen and poised. That threat involves an aspect of huddling in which the light no longer sees individual faces. Whereas, the light in France—or in its paintings and photographs—is often warmer, more general and generous; it may even have a touch of democracy to it.

The condition is more subtly borne out in the case of Georges Méliès, the most notable instance of the magician turned moviemaker before Orson Welles. Méliès was born in Paris in 1861 to a boot and shoemaker who catered to the fashionable bourgeoisie. It was during his military service, at Blois, that Méliès visited the home of Jean-Eugène Robert-Houdin, who, though retired, had been the leading stage magician in France. Méliès was fascinated by the collection of tricks and contrivances Houdin had on show, and soon thereafter he went to London to study at Maskelyne and Cooke's Egyptian Hall, probably the leading magic theater in business in the late nineteenth century.

It was in 1888 that Méliès got together 40,000 francs and purchased the Robert-Houdin theater (on the Boulevard des Italiens) from the great man's widow. The theater was busy, but not commercially successful. Méliès was already intrigued by the potential of photographs. He grasped that, among other things, the photograph was a way of altering our faith in reality, the essence of magic. Antoine Lumière, father to the brothers and owner of a photographic business, had a shop above the Robert-Houdin theater. So it was no wonder that Méliès should attend their first professional screening of movies with a projector—at 14 Boulevard des Capucines, on December 28, 1895.

The Lumières' material was what we would call “documentary.” It was a cinematic record of things that proved the viability of the cinematograph. It would take a strict historian to deny the legend that an eager Méliès approached the Lumières and asked to buy or rent their machine, to be met by the wintry assurance that it had no commercial future. Méliès never wavered. For 1,000 francs he bought a camera from Robert Paul in London, and soon he was on his way.

What followed is one of the outstanding early careers in film. From 1896 to 1912, he made hundreds of short films, most of them inspired to show his audience something even more wondrous and mystifying than his repertoire of stage tricks. In the process, in a primitive way—by double and multiple exposures, winding the film back in the camera; by matting different images together—he laid down the essence of a special effects system that would last for decades. But he also built fantastical sets and put many actors in fanciful costumes. So the aspiration to the miraculous is always offset in Méliès by a cheerful but untidy or improvised human action. He was a technician, to be sure, but he was as fond of people as any showman who relied on the loyalty of audiences. Some of his films are Jules Verne-ish, with trips to the moon and many other dream places, but they feel like homemade amateur theatricals. There is a nice messy reality to them, plus the bravura flourish of the voice that cries, “Ladies and gentlemen…Before your very eyes!”

Méliès was endlessly productive and truly inspired. What's more, he had a greater readiness for using the camera simply to record reality than is generally reckoned. But he was not a sophisticated businessman. There was an early enthusiasm for his pictures in America, and Georges soon sent his brother Gaston to handle those affairs. In time, Gaston began making Westerns out of San Antonio, as well as handling his brother's films. But those films' whimsicality and their literary roots were not always to American tastes, and the Mélièses' interests fell foul of the Motion Picture Patents Company, which liked to ban or fine productions that had not used their approved equipment. That monopoly was restrictive inside America, but it fell most harshly on foreigners.

So Méliès was himself out-tricked in America. But there was also a move toward realism and longer narrative films. Méliès never felt or developed the story fluency that impressed Griffith, and by 1912 his films were looking old-fashioned. Then, in 1913, his beloved wife died. A year later, with the outbreak of war, many French theaters closed. His studio became a hospital for war wounded. He faded away, and ended up running a small toy shop at the Gare Montparnasse. Many of his films were lost, as the celluloid was used to make military boots.

In 1931 he was awarded the Légion d'Honneur, and in his last years, he dreamed of a movie museum, a Notre Dame du Cinéma. He died in 1938, not unknown but largely forgotten. History has been kinder. In 1952, Georges Franju made a very touching film about Méliès. Today Criterion has a boxed set of most of the Méliès that survives, and it has served to restore childhood or innocence to moviegoing. In
Hugo
(2011), Martin Scorsese had Ben Kingsley playing Méliès. More important still, we have passed through the way of seeing him as merely a fantasist or a magician. For he was a realist, too, as any photographer must be; he recorded what he set up. And while the surrealists formed an early attachment to Méliès, it is easier now to see how far he established the screen as a place where the real and the dream were married.

Whereas Méliès fabricated his world and tossed in the yeast of real people, Louis Feuillade had an eye for the actual Paris that lets us believe in conspiracy and secret purposes running the city instead of government. Those purposes are often criminal, but in the end it emerges that they are fiction itself, or its possibility. Without ever taking his eye from the real places, Feuillade is the first film artist who guesses that the real is a diversion.

Louis Feuillade was born in Lunel (between Montpellier and Nîmes) in 1873. It is an area of blazing sun, yet Feuillade is a poet of misty city prospects. His family was well-to-do from the wine business, and Feuillade's first thought was to be a writer. But he was swayed by the sight of moving imagery. By 1906 he had joined the Gaumont Film Company and begun to work as what we would call a storyteller for pictures. He furnished narrative material, and like many movie writers, he saw that the variations on plot, character, and action were repetitive and musical. So his serial films are the first in which we feel an elegant amusement at story itself. He reveled in great intrigues (and his films surely influenced Fritz Lang's
Mabuse
pictures), yet he intuited that plot (the interpretation of raw events) was the largest conspiracy.

I have said already that Méliès's career was terminated by the circumstances of the Great War, but Feuillade's was inspired by them. There are no rules: Méliès was ready to fade; Feuillade knew it was his moment to see the light. He was busy already in advance of the war, but his great works are serials:
Fantômas
(1913–14), with several sequels;
Les Vampires
(1915);
Judex
(1916);
Tih Minh
(1918).

Although Feuillade wrote his own scripts, Fantômas was a character created by Marcel Allain and Pierre Souvestre in 1911 in a series of books. He was a mastermind criminal, vaguely aristocratic, a man of many disguises, a thief, a murderer, and a sociopath, and opposed by Inspector Juve of the police. Prewar in his origins, Fantômas slips over into the war mood like a ghost and becomes a subversive figure. If we think of the protagonists of Griffith or his contemporaries, we may feel poleaxed by their virtue. The ambiguity of
Fantômas
, the mixture of charm and threat, is of a quite different order.

This allowed Fantômas, as image and character, to become a cult with the surrealists. Magritte painted the character many times. Suzi Gablik has observed the way this pulp character took on deeper and darker meanings—nearly ten years in advance of Mabuse:

There is so much to study in Feuillade: the trembling air of danger that never alludes to the war; the subsequent implication that society is being undermined anyway; the interest in disguise and masquerade, as if everyone were an actor; the astonishing and beautiful use of real city views to evoke a haunted mindscape. Feuillade is a father of noir (if hardly known by today's noiristas); he is a surrealist and an anarchist; and he is the first author in cinema who asks, Isn't crime delicious? Isn't it one of the great taboos we have come to see? Every treasured screen assassin owes something to him. He is also the clear warning that in France it will be possible to have a flagrantly antisocial attitude in cinema, so distant from the attempts at group positivism in America or the Soviet Union.