The New Biographical Dictionary of Film: Completely Updated and Expanded (104 page)

Daniel Day-Lewis
(Michael Blake Day-Lewis), b. London, 1958
The son of actress Jill Balcon (daughter of Michael Balcon) and writer C. Day-Lewis, Daniel was trained at the Bristol Old Vic, and he has already done impressive work in the theatre—in Christopher Bond’s
Dracula
, Julian Mitchell’s
Another Country
, as Mayakovsky in
Futurists
, and in several Shakespeare plays, including a London
Hamlet
that he gave up because of exhaustion. There is an electric volatility to Day-Lewis, as well as a rare poetic feeling, that makes him seem like the Olivier of his talented generation. At present, Day-Lewis is seriously stretching his own range in ways that promise a career of uncommon power.

He had small roles in
Gandhi
(82, Richard Attenborough), and
The Bounty
(84, Roger Donaldson), and he played Mr. Kafka in
The Insurance Man
(85, Richard Eyre), written by Alan Bennett. His breakthrough was in
My Beautiful Laundrette
(85, Stephen Frears), playing a mysterious drifter who develops a serious gay relationship. He was very funny in
A Room with a View
(86, James Ivory), and then at a loss in
Nanou
(87, Conny Templeman) and
Stars and Bars
(88, Pat O’Connor).

Philip Kaufman cast him in the lead role, Tomas, in Milan Kundera’s
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
(88), but Day-Lewis seemed too young and thus too deliberately cynical in the part—it needed more age and a more hard-earned sourness. But he seized on the role of Christy Brown in
My Left Foot
(89, Jim Sheridan), as hungrily as Jimmy Greaves with a loose ball in the goal area. Day-Lewis had strong Irish sympathies, and he felt no inhibition about delivering Brown’s anger and sexuality to the screen. Actors playing cripples have won Oscars before, but Day-Lewis let us see and feel how true and human a warped spirit can be. The part begged for bravura playing, but Day-Lewis took the performance into real areas of danger. He made Christy fearsome and uncontainable. He was better than the modest context of the film.

For no clear reason, he played a spokesman for dental consciousness in
Eversmile, New Jersey
(89, Carlos Sorin), filmed in Argentina. Whereupon, Day-Lewis took a great challenge: as Hawkeye in
The Last of the Mohicans
(92, Michael Mann), the kind of role that even Olivier would have declined. He seemed physically changed—larger, more muscular, and completely in his element, hurtling silently through the primal forest. He then returned to fine clothes and complicated manners as Newland Archer in
The Age of Innocence
(93, Martin Scorsese). But he seemed lost, and even effete, and he could not bring the necessary tragedy to bear.

He fell on the role of Gerry Conlon in
In the Name of the Father
(93, Sheridan) like a freed prisoner. Day-Lewis was bold enough to show Conlon as a martyr scarcely deserving of a film—feckless, immature, lazy—until prison made him a man worthy of his own father. The performance brought substance to an overly simple film.

Day-Lewis continues to be hard to please: in the last seventeen years he has made eight pictures—De Niro, with whom he is sometimes compared, did thirty-seven. I’d argue that both numbers are excessive, and hope that Day-Lewis finds a happier medium. He played John Proctor in
The Crucible
(96, Nicholas Hytner) and married Arthur Miller’s daughter, Rebecca. He was
The Boxer
(97, Jim Sheridan), which had little more than Irishness to recommend it—but he is an Irish citizen. Then years of absence turned into his gangleader in
Gangs of New York
(02, Scorsese)—so full of panache that the ostensible hero seemed feeble.

In 2005, Day-Lewis did
The Ballad of Jack and Rose
, directed by his wife. Alas, it did not excite many people outside the family. But his Daniel Plainview in
There Will Be Blood
(07, Paul Thomas Anderson) was immense, fearsome and endearing—a bold return to pretence and masquerade, it may prove as influential as Brando in
On the Waterfront
. Day-Lewis won his second Oscar, and then he played the director, Guido Contini, in
Nine
(09, Rob Marshall)—from a script cowritten by Anthony Minghella.

James Dean
(1931–55), b. Fairmount, Indiana
It is sad for any moviegoer to have no great star burning during his or her most impressionable years. Many stars, no matter how well they survive passing time, are only eminent because of the way they first mark consciousness. Once penetrated, we never forget the scar. And knowing what Dean meant in 1955 and 1956 makes it possible to understand how Valentino once moved viewers to the quick. It is reasonable to say that Dean and I came in together. Eight years earlier, Montgomery Clift in
Red River
had seemed a possible older brother; but Dean was oneself and, at first, one marveled in the way a savage might be awed by a mirror.

I first saw Dean in
Rebel Without a Cause
(55, Nicholas Ray) at the Granada, Tooting. That is relevant because it was a huge and fabulously decorated cinema, the most beautiful I have ever known, modeled on a Venetian palace. It had mirrored corridors, the softest of carpets, and an interior so spacious that it was possible to evade the usherettes. Especially in the dark. I arrived early, some ten minutes before the end of the previous showing. As I stepped into the auditorium, my feet pushing through the pile, so, on the screen, Dean edged into the planetarium, doing what he could to talk Sal Mineo into surrendering to the police. Even then, it was apparent how far the moment drew upon Ray’s use of color and composition. But so much also depended on Dean. He made it clear that he wanted Mineo’s safety, but guessed already that the cause was perilous. Dean’s cry of anguish when Mineo is shot down was the very antithesis of the film’s inadequate title.

No matter that it was seized on at the time, Dean’s potency was not that of a rebel without a cause. Although he was vulnerable and sensitive, he never suggested youthfulness or callowness. On the contrary, he seemed older, sadder, and more experienced than the adults in his films. More than that, he seemed to sense his own extra intuition and to see that it was of no use. His resignation and fatalism showed up the restricted personality of the world he inhabited. Occasionally driven to anger or violence, Dean was not a rebel, but a disenchanted romantic, as brooding and knowing as the darkest Bogart—the Bogart of
In a Lonely Place
. Dean’s isolation is that of profound understanding; and his dislike of the world, far from being causeless, was based on the extent to which the world had fallen away from its proper nobility, into vulgarity, materialism, and self-deception. America today is broken apart. But in 1955 it seemed whole, tight, and solid, except when Dean’s tragic eyes surveyed it.

He appealed to the young because he understood that youth knew some truths about the world that adults had looked away from: about the unfriendly cities, the instinct for violence, and forsaken emotional sensibility. The parents in
Rebel
are trite, hollow people: Ray signaled that by casting Jim Backus (Mr. Magoo) as the father. And in
East of Eden
(55, Elia Kazan), it is Dean alone who is prepared to make the trip from Salinas to Monterey, who bridges the worlds of his arrogant, puritan father and his resentful, unprincipled mother. It was through Dean’s eyes and Kazan’s dramatic skill that we saw no need to condemn either and no prospect of their ever living together. Thus he had a kind of bastard robustness, horribly caricatured in his Jet Rink in
Giant
(56, George Stevens), too plain a film to sense Dean’s depth. Nevertheless Dean was lucky with directors. Kazan gave him a charge, confidence, patience, and Julie Harris. But only Nicholas Ray could have given him a part that guessed at the looming alienation in America.

Dean died in a car crash as
Giant
finished shooting. He was set next to play in
Somebody Up There Likes Me
, proof that he could not always have expected parts or directors as good as
Rebel
and Ray. He might have faltered, as often as Brando has done. Equally, he might have become the man in
Last Tango
.

Before fame, he won prizes playing an Arab boy in a Broadway version of Gide’s
The Immoralist
, and then went to Hollywood and three small parts:
Sailor Beware
(51, Jack Arnold);
Fixed Bayonets
(51, Samuel Fuller); and
Has Anybody Seen My Gal?
(52, Douglas Sirk).

When Dean died, Valentino had been gone just thirty years. Now, Dean is over fifty years dead. But Dean is not dated yet. New kids, without great movie theatres to find him in, still fall under his sway. It’s easier now to see Dean’s intelligence, his dismay, and his sexual ambiguity. But he changed so much, in such a short time.

Basil Dearden
(1911–71), b. Westcliffe-on-Sea, England
1941:
The Black Sheep of Whitehall
(codirected with Will Hay). 1942:
The Goose Steps Out
(codirected with Hay). 1943:
My Learned Friend
(codirected with Hay);
The Bells Go Down
. 1944:
Halfway House; They Came to a City
. 1945: “The Hearse Driver,” episode from
Dead of Night
. 1946:
The Captive Heart
. 1947:
Frieda
. 1948:
Saraband for Dead Lovers
(codirected with Michael Relph). 1949:
Train of Events
(codirected with Sidney Cole and Charles Crichton);
The Blue Lamp
. 1950:
Cage of Gold
. 1951:
Pool of London; I Believe in You
(codirected with Relph). 1952:
The Gentle Gunman
. 1953:
The Square Ring
(codirected with Relph). 1954:
The Rainbow Jacket
. 1955:
Out of the Clouds
(codirected with Relph);
The Ship that Died of Shame; Who Done It?
(codirected with Relph). 1957:
The Smallest Show on Earth
. 1958:
Violent Playground
. 1959:
Sapphire
. 1960:
The League of Gentlemen; Man in the Moon
(codirected with Relph). 1961:
The Secret Partner; Victim
. 1962:
All Night Long
(codirected with Relph);
Life for Ruth
. 1963:
The Mindbenders; A Place to Go; Woman of Straw
. 1964:
Masquerade
. 1966:
Khartoum
. 1968:
Only When I Larf; The Assassination Bureau
. 1970:
The Man Who Haunted Himself
(codirected with Relph).

When Dearden died, in a road accident,
The Guardian
called him “a proficient technician who could tell a good story well and get a film completed on schedule and without over-budgeting.” Such a breathless epitaph was capped by this brief absurdity from
The Times:
“a versatile British film director.”

Kindness and tact in obituaries are civilized things, but Dearden’s versatility was with essentially inert subjects and his proficiency was at the expense of inventiveness or artistic personality. Filmmaking is not a matter of telling a good story well when the end product is the spurious social alertness of
The Blue Lamp, Sapphire
, and
Victim
. Nor is there any virtue—for the audience—in that a film was completed at 5:30 on the proper day with the due number of tea breaks. Dearden’s coming in on time is replete with the obedient, leaden dullness of British studios. His films are decent, empty, and plodding and his association with Michael Relph is a fair representative of the British preference for bureaucratic cinema. It stands for the underlining of obvious meanings, for the showy resort to “realism,” for the middlebrow ticking off of “serious” subjects, for the lack of cinematic sensibility, for the acceptance of all the technical shortcomings of British productions, for the complacent description of problems and the resolute refusal to adopt critical intelligence for dealing with them.

Dearden worked for Basil Dean at Ealing in the early 1930s and was involved on several George Formby films. From being the executive producer on Will Hay films, he moved without demur from the postwar refugee in
Frieda
to the tosh of
Saraband for Dead Lovers
. And in later years, the string of problem films was unalloyed by the coziness of
The Smallest Show on Earth
and
The League of Gentlemen
. The posting to
Khartoum
was outside his normal range, and if the film was better than one feared—especially in Heston’s Gordon—still it was blind to the agonizing dilemma that, say, Nicholas Ray might have discerned in it.

Jan de Bont
, b. Eindhoven, Holland, 1943
1994:
Speed
. 1996:
Twister
. 1997:
Speed 2: Cruise Control
. 1999:
The Haunting
. 2003:
Lara Croft Tomb Raider: The Cradle of Life
.

To say that de Bont’s four directing jobs have shown a steady decline in interest is to be generous to
Speed
, which was riveting, and absolutely of its time, but proof, too, that excruciating tension could be a test of patience. De Bont is likely to get several more effects shows yet, for two out of four have been hits, and he has an eye for sensation as well as enthusiasm for that mad hurry that threatens to take over modern films. Also, in his odd way, he prefers “real” marvels to the entirely fabricated—it may be all that is left of his Dutch tradition.

He won his chance as a director by being an expert director of photography on action films, in Holland and Los Angeles:
Turkish Delight
(73, Paul Verhoeven);
Cathy Tippel
(75, Verhoeven);
Max Havelaar
(76, Fons Rademakers);
Soldier of Orange
(79, Verhoeven);
Private Lessons
(81, Alan Myerson);
I’m Dancing As Fast As I Can
(82, Jack Hofsiss); the mad-dog
Cujo
(83, Lewis Teague);
All the Right Moves
(83, Michael Chapman); the eroticism of
The Fourth Man
(83, Verhoeven);
The Jewel of the Nile
(85, Teague);
Flesh & Blood
(85, Verhoeven);
Ruthless People
(86, Jim Abrahams, David Zucker and Jerry Zucker);
Die Hard
(88, John McTiernan);
Black Rain
(89, Ridley Scott);
The Hunt for Red October
(90, McTiernan);
Flatliners
(90, Joel Schumacher);
Shining Through
(92, David Seltzer);
Basic Instinct
(92, Verhoeven);
Lethal Weapon 3
(92, Richard Donner).