The Big Screen (27 page)

As we grow older, we watch the old movies over and over again. But it's asking too much to expect them to remain the same. Frame by frame, except for natural deterioration, they are the old films; but
our
deterioration is likely greater, and more concerned with understanding. The first time I saw
The Big Sleep
, at a Howard Hawks retrospective at the London National Film Theatre in 1963, I watched it three times in a row. I wanted to repeat the pleasure and the marvel as quickly as possible, and every screening showed something I hadn't seen, or noticed, before.

I loved Hawks once, and I am fond of him still. But whereas once I was an unquestioning kid diving into his fantasy, by now I cannot help but recognize the fantasist in the man and wonder at the damage it did to him, and to me. He romances romance—yet Slim said that in life he was cold and hurried. He womanizes the women, of course (just recall how many pretty and ready passing women there are in
The Big Sleep
). But he “womanizes,” or dreams up, violence, action, cars, clothes, flying, doing anything well, having fun, whatever you want to call it. In that sense, “womanizing” means realizing a dream on screen, trying to exist in that flat brightness. It's an impossible venture, but it is a legacy of American film—the gift of unreality. “Womanizing” is so much more addicted to imaginary beings than it is to real women.

Hawks went so close to the line sometimes, we wonder if he saw or understood it. Amid the delirious chatter of
His Girl Friday
(1940), Walter Burns (Cary Grant) sweeps the European war and Hitler off the front page of his newspaper to make way for the Earl Williams melodrama (though he holds on to the rooster story because that's human interest). In the same way, Mollie Malloy (Helen Mack) goes out of the window—and out of the picture. The furious game being played by Walter and Hildy (Rosalind Russell) obscures every object of pity. Then, in 1944, with war at its climax, Hawks made a fabulous film,
To Have and Have Not
, which is a travesty of the Hemingway novel. The Marie on screen—nineteen, Lauren Bacall, insolent yet pliant—is such a hottie, while the Marie in the novel is human and battered, humane and ordinary. For good and ill, Hawks defied the ordinary and celebrated “fun.”

It would be said of British cinema that it was nothing until a band of Hungarians took it over. There was certainly a sheepish mood in Britain, disarmed equally by the way American films reached out for fantasy and wide open spaces without an atom of modesty, and then drove their business ahead in the home country as if there were no such thing as showmanship in Britain. Of course, the British were victims twice over in that American pictures seemed to use their own language, and then bastardized it with abandon. The author can recall a distinct, grieving disapproval in the parental class at the way American movies encouraged fanciful notions of glory and casual attitudes toward grammar and slang. My devoutly agnostic parents, who would not have dreamed of going to church themselves on a Sunday, still regarded Sunday moviegoing as improper.

More than forty years earlier, when Victoria was queen, young Alfred Hitchcock was raised in another part of London as a Catholic, and that may help explain his rapt feeling for the illicit glance, and the way peeping or spying might subvert morality and the social order. That's how, after all the solemn explaining, the mother's skull in Norman Bates is left smiling at us as the car in
Psycho
(1960) is hauled back from the swamp. In the real age of movies, there always was a battle between decorum and depravity, dutiful devoutness and dreams of disorder. Is that why Norman feels more plausible as a suburban Englishman than a Californian?

This is not just nostalgic meandering. There was an English skepticism that reckoned it was “silly” to look like Errol Flynn or Hedy Lamarr, in that the automatic movie equation between being good and good-looking was so obviously flawed and ready to make suckers of us all. The British press was especially fond of Flynn because his shortcomings were so evident. That was held to be a disqualification of the movies as “true” dramas, in that the pictures were based on fraudulence and foolishness. In turn, this was another way of discovering how fully Americans did believe in the dream and the equation of looks with character. Once upon a time, that was part of the world's amused and half-forgiving awareness that America never quite grows up.

So British film was impeded—still is?—by a certain shamefaced squirming over fantasy and daydreaming? Does that seem plausible in the land that made Shakespeare, Dickens, and Hardy, not to mention Chaplin, Cary Grant, and James Mason? Yes, I think it may, for the imaginative leap with literature is earnest, respectable, and enlarging in Britain. Think of the stern arbiter of England's great tradition, F. R. Leavis, on those authors—and then imagine the attempt to take Leavis to see a Hitchcock film. Remember Virginia Woolf's disdain for cinema.

As for the country's ability to produce actors or stars who can beguile millions, my failure to add actresses to that short list is telling. The British man—handsome, eloquent, mysterious—can be a dream figure (and dreamy). But somehow the women are raised to lack that confidence, to laugh at themselves. Deborah Kerr had close-ups for Powell and Pressburger that could stop you in your tracks. But, later on, Jean Simmons did not much like herself in
Angel Face
(1952), her most iconic and erotic film. Vivien Leigh may be the closest to an exception—but the British opinion is that Leigh went mad, whereas her counterpart for years, Laurence Olivier, was a contented (if not smug) chameleon, a man whose attractiveness rested in his quick-change versatility.

I can think of other small examples that help build the idea of a wall against movies in Britain. Graham Greene recalled his own father, a schoolmaster, who encouraged boys to see Tarzan films until he realized they were anthropologically worthless. Then there is Greene himself, a terrific film fan, a good critic, and a serious screenwriter—and a true friend to the producer Alexander Korda—but someone suspicious of Hollywood's flimsy and frivolous escapism. Indeed, Greene was a man and an author suspicious about any idea of escaping—but then in life he turned out to be something of a fraud, a liar, and a hidden force. To take the matter to its ultimate level, in Britain Alfred Hitchcock was often teased away from full immersion in his own dream, so his pictures from the 1930s are deft, playful, knowing, ironic, and rather superior. But then he goes to Hollywood, embraces the technical sophistication and the habit of swimming in the dream, and makes pictures that are increasingly his own, truer to himself, naked and painful. Even the French, constitutionally opposed to the thought of Anglo-Saxon cinema, have to admit that there is Hitchcock, who also became more comically English the longer he lived in America.

There had been pioneer figures in Britain, and by the 1930s there were British film stars, local heroes and heroines who seldom carried overseas—Jessie Matthews, George Formby, Will Hay, Gracie Fields, Leslie Banks. But the British had had no luck at putting together a native industry. There wasn't the funding; so American operations took over London. When Alfred Hitchcock first found movie employment, in 1920, it was as a graphic artist with the Famous Players–Lasky offices just opened. Filmgoing was very popular—there were said to be four hundred cinemas in London alone—but American pictures dominated the market and would lead to government action to ensure a minimal number of “quota quickie” English films. It was on those, in the early 1930s, that Michael Powell got a start.

Hollywood had another power, that of enticing British talent to California. That became even stronger after the coming of sound, but the list of British performers who went to America begins with Chaplin and Stan Laurel, and it includes Donald Crisp, Rex Ingram (Irish), Edmund Goulding, Clive Brook, Herbert Marshall, Ronald Colman, Frank Lloyd, Boris Karloff, Leslie Howard, Charles Laughton, Robert Donat, and Cary Grant.

Of those names, Laughton's is the most significant in that he played the lead in Alexander Korda's
The Private Life of Henry VIII
(1933), the film that, in Korda's view, introduced the idea of a worthwhile British film industry. The role of the king promoted Laughton to American stardom:
Mutiny on the Bounty
(1935),
Les Misérables
(1935), and
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
(1939).

Alexander Korda was born in Hungary in 1893, and we need not doubt his view of himself, even if he had a habit of ignoring competitors and copying Hollywood styles in a way that was counterproductive for Britain. Korda deserves his place on charm alone. He became a writer-director in Hungary and Berlin in the 1920s, and not a bad director. He discovered and married an actress, María Antonia Farkas, changed her name to María Corda, and then took her to Hollywood. When they divorced, Alex elected to try England, and English history.

He developed, or stole from Lubitsch, the trick of doing backstair views of upper-class life, and he determined that a candid, funny treatment of Henry VIII might prove both royalist and modern. He had the wit to cast Laughton in the central role, with Robert Donat in support, and it suited his nature to have six different love stories to pursue. The wives included Binnie Barnes, Wendy Barrie, Elsa Lanchester (Mrs. Laughton), and Merle Oberon, who would become the second Mrs. Korda. The film was a big success everywhere, by which I mean that it was that rarity, a British film that cleaned up in America, and won Laughton the Best Actor Oscar. It wasn't a great film, and far from reliable history, but it was a satisfying and novel entertainment, and you may say that Korda had stumbled upon an essential ingredient of British television in years to come. Moreover, using his brother Vincent as production designer, Alex took great care of the sets and believed in putting a lot of money up on the screen.

What happened next is more fitting as a story than an account of real events. Korda took a liking to Englishness, and seeing a land full of great homes and tall stories, he went off in search of money. As elsewhere, these were the years of the Depression, but Korda persuaded Prudential, the country's most esteemed insurance company, to put up £1 million for picture production. He built a studio, at Denham, and in time he won even more money from Prudential.

All of which is tribute to a man of good humor and generous cunning. In the book
Charmed Lives
, Alex's nephew Michael, a champion publisher, with many of his uncle's qualities, tells a fine story. It is years later, Prudential is justifiably worried about its money. They call a meeting and are prepared to grill Alex. But he grills himself! He goes into a lavish, dramatic account of the perils of movie production in general, and of his own recent career. It is so funny, so compelling, and so involving that by the end of the meeting the directors of the Prudential are begging Korda to stay on and fight another day. Korda was not as handsome as his other brother, Zoltan. But he dressed beautifully, favored Rolls-Royces, an office on Piccadilly, and the finest cigars. He was always acting on his own advice, devised in his Hollywood years: arrive in town, stay at the best hotel, be seen with the most beautiful women, charge everything but tip lavishly—and wait for offers.

Alas, Korda did not have another hit like
Henry VIII
for years. But he made intriguing romantic pictures, often in Technicolor, and you can hear him pitching every one and wanting to be part of it. With Korda as director or producer, there was
The Private Life of Don Juan
(1934; with an aging Doug Fairbanks); Laughton in
Rembrandt
(1936; a very touching picture);
Knight Without Armour
(1937; with Dietrich and Donat—one of her most relaxed movies, where she is plainly naked in her bath scene); Sabu in
Elephant Boy
(1936); and a host of others. There was even the attempt to film Robert Graves's
I
,
Claudius
, with Laughton and Josef von Sternberg, the actor's neuroses grinding against the director's aloofness, until the ordeal was mercifully concluded by Merle Oberon's car accident. And don't forget
The Four Feathers
or
The Thief of Baghdad
.

Above all, there was Korda himself, the fabled presence of the man, his knighthood in 1942, his cheerful strip-mining of “English history,” and his flagrant disdain for English shyness. There were other ways to go, and one of them belonged to Michael Balcon.

Michael Powell, for one, found Balcon “very conventional, very suburban.” He was not even a Londoner—born in Birmingham in 1896, he worked in the jewelry and rubber businesses before movies got his attention. In the early 1920s he set up a production company with Victor Saville and John Freedman. They formed Gainsborough Pictures (with a Gainsborough portrait of a woman as their logo), and they bought the Islington studio when Paramount tired of it. Among other things, Balcon made pictures with Hitchcock—
The Pleasure Garden
(1925),
The Lodger
(1927), and
Easy Virtue
(1928). He then made a deal to produce pictures for Gaumont-British, working at Islington and Shepherd's Bush, and that series included more Hitchcock:
The Man Who Knew Too Much
(1934),
The 39 Steps
(1935),
Secret Agent
(1936), and
Sabotage
(1936).

These days, it is critical habit to assume that Hitchcock was always solitary and driven, but examination of the times suggests that Balcon understood Hitch and stimulated him. Balcon trusted only modest budgets and simple, suspenseful stories, but he is the producer who let Hitchcock rewrite John Buchan's
The Thirty-nine Steps
, introducing female characters and a kind of voyeurism that still seems saucy. We don't have to adhere to the old English orthodoxy (that Hitch was at his best in Britain). But neither is there any reason to miss how these pert, shapely comedy-thrillers developed the director's prowess and his feeling for wickedness. Balcon saw that and admired it, whereas Korda could easily have dismissed Hitch the greengrocer's son as hopelessly East End and lower class.

Balcon attracted attention in Culver City and so briefly he was put in charge of M-G-M's London operation (
A Yank at Oxford
, 1938, and even
Goodbye, Mr. Chips
). That's the only reason his name is missing from
The Lady Vanishes
. Still, it took Balcon less than a year to feel the oppressive hand of Louis B. Mayer, and in 1938 he quit Metro and took over the Ealing studio.