The Big Screen (45 page)

The
New York Times
called the film one of Bogart's best: he gave “a maniacal fury to his rages and a hard edge to his expressions of sympathy.” But the film did no business and never seems to have inspired its distributor, Columbia. Their big film that year was
Born Yesterday
, an enjoyable stage-based comedy about a dumb blonde (Judy Holliday, one of Ray's lovers, who won an Oscar in it) who learns too much for the mobster who keeps her as a mistress.

Ray's career was as volatile as Dixon Steele's life. In the next few years he made several good films (though none of them unflawed):
On Dangerous Ground
(1952), produced by Houseman again, with Robert Ryan frightening as a violent cop;
The Lusty Men
(1952), about the rodeo world, with a world-weary Robert Mitchum;
Rebel Without a Cause
(1955), his great hit, James Dean's second film, and identification of the troubled American teenager;
Bigger Than Life
(1956), a study of megalomania, with James Mason as a man whose life is taken over by the “miracle” drug cortisone; and
Bitter Victory
(1957), a North African desert war story, with Richard Burton as one of Ray's most anguished heroes.

Nick Ray succumbed to gambling, drugs, wandering, and the general fury of self-destruction. He was at his best in the supposed confines of the 1950s, though he always believed he needed liberty. He also depended on structure and producers, despite railing against them. But in a few films and many scenes he was so exciting—with color, space, and with actors in desperate, trapped situations. You can feel Ray and his untidy desires and roaming instability in Dean's prowling, sighing talk in
Rebel
, and it's fair to say that while Ray was having an affair with the teenage Natalie Wood during that shoot, he also yearned for Dean. For all those reasons he became a test case in the 1960s for people who wanted to idolize thwarted genius. François Truffaut captured him in a comparison with Howard Hawks that speaks to the American tension over who should make films—and why: “In Hollywood, a Howard Hawks arrives on the scene and takes his time, flirts with tradition in order to flout it, and always triumphs. Ray is incapable of getting along with the devil, and when he tries to make a pact for profit, he is defeated before the fight even begins.”

Robert Aldrich was not as high-strung a talent as Ray, but he was better organized—and it's arguable that in
Kiss Me Deadly
(1955) he made a more complete film than Ray ever managed. Born in Cranston, Rhode Island, in 1918, Aldrich was the child of wealth disowned by his family after he abandoned law and business for pictures. But he made his way sensibly as an assistant director, an obvious path but one seldom taken—good ADs are so prized that they are seldom allowed to escape that managerial task. He directed Burt Lancaster in
Apache
(1954), one of the earliest movies to treat Native American life with respect, and an opportunity for Lancaster to be a surly, athletic god.

At that point, working on his own (through his company, Aldrich and Associates) he made a deal with the pulp fiction sensation of the 1950s, Mickey Spillane, to adapt his novel
Kiss Me Deadly
. Aldrich and his screenwriter, A. I. Bezzerides, dropped the conventional syndicate drug dealing of the novel and replaced it with a large, seething, magical box containing fire, a growling noise, and nuclear Armageddon. The metaphor was primitive, blunt, and poetic all at the same time.

That box comes at the end. Before then, we have Ralph Meeker's Mike Hammer. Strutting, odious, fascistic—all those descriptions have been used, but still Meeker is not just toxic; he is unrebuked. Ordinary viewers may wonder where the censor was. Hammer is set up as a private-eye hero, but he is truly an overflowing id. The villains are worse, yet less frightening. Then there are the women: from the automated, obedient sexpot Velda (Maxine Cooper) through the wounded and doomed Christina (Cloris Leachman) to the demented and depraved nemesis Lily Carver (Gaby Rodgers). There are no other American films from the 1950s where young women are so boring, desperate, or lethal. Hollywood still worshiped the female (as a way of neutralizing her, perhaps), and so you wonder how Aldrich dared present these creatures.

In addition,
Kiss Me Deadly
is an early example of filming Los Angeles as a built-up wasteland, instead of “home” or paradise. The final sequence, with Hammer and Velda stumbling into the Pacific as a beach house becomes an inferno, is spectacular and disturbing. And in 1955 Aldrich got away with it—anyone who suggests that the 1950s was a time of conformity and close-carpeted positivism needs to see
Kiss Me Deadly
and feel how law, police, and decency have given up the ghost. The film is the more intriguing in that it seems too beautiful for its own director—he had
What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?
(1962) and
The Dirty Dozen
(1967) to come, complacent, moneymaking shockers. Whereas
Kiss Me Deadly
is an outrage, apparently without a care about its own success.

Aldrich had control over the film and shot it in three weeks for just over $400,000. United Artists released it, and it did nothing until the Kefauver Commission on crime said it was a major threat to American youth. (But who was looking after the grown-ups?)

In
The Night of the Hunter
(1955) our guardian was a fairy godmother looking like Lillian Gish. And if
Kiss Me Deadly
was an unlikely venture,
Hunter
, the only film ever directed by Charles Laughton, was so hard to credit or place that the public ignored it. Taken from a rural gothic novel set in the 1930s by Davis Grubb, it had a script by the former film critic James Agee. There is still dispute over how much of Agee's script was usable and how much of it Laughton had to rework. But the picture was always a far-fetched collaboration in which the famously neurotic Laughton and his producer, Paul Gregory, were supposed to command the whole enterprise.

A criminal gives stolen money to his two young children before he is taken away to prison and execution. But another inmate, Harry Powell, a self-styled preacher, learns enough to come after the children. He marries their widowed mother (Shelley Winters), murders her, and then pursues the children through a studio-made nightscape from the Grimm Brothers, or Audubon on acid, all photographed in nightmare black and white by Stanley Cortez, the man who shot
The Magnificent Ambersons
(1942).

For Harry Powell, Laughton thought first of Gary Cooper, but the actor declined because he feared for his public image. It would have been a very different picture with Coop—perhaps an impossibility. So Laughton approached Robert Mitchum. The story is that he told Mitchum he had an unusual part to offer, “a diabolical shit.” “Present!” said the actor, and the two men proceeded to forge a bond. It was a part unlike anything Mitchum had done to date, yet it seemed to awaken the fiction writer and drifter he had been before he got into the acting trade he usually despised.

The babes in the wood find shelter with Lillian Gish, and her sturdy moral values will dispose of Powell. Laughton cast her as an evocation of Griffith's tradition.

United Artists released the film without a notion of how to sell it. The
New York Times
admitted it was “audacious,” and some reviewers said Mitchum had never been as good. But the film had cost $800,00 and it had rentals of only $300,000. As a result, plans for Laughton to film Norman Mailer's
The Naked and the Dead
were abandoned. Not that that sounds like Laughton material, or a suitable shoot for him, in the jungle. But who would have foreseen
The Night of the Hunter
? Decades later, that film would be taken into the Library of Congress as an American treasure. The lesson would spread that maybe anyone could direct. As Robert Benayoun, a French writer, said, “To make only one film. But to make it a work of genius: isn't that, in the context of a journeyman profession, the shining example that Laughton has given us?”

No small independent production company made a bigger splash than Hecht-Hill-Lancaster, with
Marty
as their greatest hit. Their product usually centered on Lancaster himself, an authoritative actor, to be sure, but not the easiest partner: he had radical ideas and enough ego to interfere and be difficult. The company was about to make its best film, the one that really startled and dismayed people,
Sweet Smell of Success
. (
Marty
, in comparison, was anodyne and cozy.) As its director, Alexander Mackendrick, observed at a San Francisco preview, the effect of the film on the public “was like dripping lemon on an oyster. They cringed with the body language of folding arms, crossing legs, shrinking from the screen.” To make matters worse, the intended budget of $600,000 had climbed to $2.6 million.

Mackendrick was an odd bird. Born in Boston, Massachusetts, in 1913, he was raised in Scotland. He was drawn to film, and had a hand in British propaganda as the Second World War began. In fact, for the Psychological Warfare Division, he went to North Africa and Italy, where he helped set up Rossellini's
Rome, Open City
(1945). After the war, he joined Ealing Studios, where he directed several successful comedies. But he was drafted to take on a novella about the New York publicity scene written by Ernest Lehman and modeled on Walter Winchell. In time, several others came to the script, and in the end a veteran, the playwright Clifford Odets, was typing up dialogue only hours before Lancaster and Tony Curtis would deliver it.

For forty minutes or so it is a unique picture as the relationship emerges between a columnist, J. J. Hunsecker (Lancaster in a crew cut and horn-rimmed glasses) and Curtis as Sidney Falco, a publicist and “a cookie dipped in arsenic,” a user, a hustler, and a person not seen in American movies before, even if his type was thick on the ground of show business.

The film was shot in a glittering, harsh black and white by James Wong Howe and looked like the hide of a crocodile in the moonlight. Howe took advantage of fast film stocks just emerging to work on the city streets at night—real night instead of the offset fakery of day for night, where humans throw shadows. The film was proudly nasty, and the cross-talk manipulations were the lemon juice on the oyster. There are still people who run those dialogue routines; they have become treasured models for young cynics and the
Entourage
crowd. It was one thing for Burt to be that grim. He had always had that side, and you can see it in
Criss Cross
(1949),
Apache
, and
From Here to Eternity
, even if he had just had huge success as a mainstream Wyatt Earp in
Gunfight at the O.K. Corral
(1957).

It was Tony Curtis who got under people's skin. Curtis was what he himself would call an “American prince,” a handsome kid with a lady-killer's smile and an aptitude for slick talk. He had been one of the last generation groomed for old-fashioned stardom (at Universal, where Rock Hudson was a fellow student), trained to fence, dance, shoot a gun, ride a horse, wear a costume, carry a line, and kiss the girl tastefully. He had made a long line of foolish adventures that had done very well:
The Prince Who Was a Thief
(1951),
Son of Ali Baba
(1952),
Houdini
(1953),
The Black Shield of Falworth
(1954),
The Purple Mask
(1955).

In 1951 he had married Janet Leigh in what the American public regarded as a picture-book union and a model of happiness, because that's how it was presented in the magazines that still ran a lot of Hollywood coverage, including intimate home pix. (In fact, Universal had offered Curtis a bonus of $30,000 if he would marry another studio player, Piper Laurie.) Curtis was ambitious—has there ever been a face in which that is so clear? He relished Sidney Falco and his spiteful dialogue. But Mackendrick was a perfectionist who liked to get everything right, and Lancaster soon grew angry at the delays. There was a famous scene at Hunsecker's table at the “21” Club. Who should sit where to play the scabrous talk? Mackendrick wanted a move.

But
Sweet Smell
was only half a film. The setup between J.J. and Sidney is as intoxicating as it was anathema to the large audience. But once J.J.'s sister gets a hold on the plot and we have to deal with Martin Milner's jazz guitarist who has drugs planted on him, we are into pallid melodrama. The look of the streets and the clubs in the film cry out for wilder jazz men—Miles Davis, Art Blakey, Monk, then at their prime—but all we get is the genteel salon jazz of the Chico Hamilton Quintet (with a lot of white guys in the band looking like business majors). The second half of the script was never right. There is a possibility in there that J.J. and Sidney could become a monstrous father-and-son pair—or could it even be lovers?—talkers who feed on their own poisonous exchanges.