The New Biographical Dictionary of Film: Completely Updated and Expanded (116 page)

She was never again that woman, and she may have resented the loss just as much as she failed to comprehend it. One can hardly explore her career chronologically. Those few years at Paramount grow in history just as the subsequent decades shrink. She stands as an ambiguous demonstration of how people are transformed and glorified by cinema. No matter how many words one expends, the moving image says everything about Dietrich. Perhaps she was a plain German girl, forever intrigued by the glimpses of herself that von Sternberg had given her. When they made
Rancho Notorious
, in 1952—in which Dietrich is at least good—she constantly told Fritz Lang how Sternberg would have filmed it. She was not a great popular star; indeed, her persona was always too barbed and the insights of the Sternberg films too disturbing for coziness. But great men aspired to her, and she was the darling of the intellectuals. Though she never divorced her husband, she had many affairs—as if real sex could ever keep up with the dream. Let Sternberg have the last word: “Here was no enthusiast, but a cold-eyed mechanic critical of every movement. If there was any flattery, it was concentrated in a ‘That’s fine, it will do.’ More often she listened to ‘Turn your shoulders away from me and straighten out … Drop your voice an octave and don’t lisp … Count to six and look at that lamp as if you could no longer live without it … Stand where you are and don’t move; the lights are being adjusted.’ ”

Having been away from movies for nearly two decades, she returned as the Baroness in
Just a Gigolo
(78, David Hemmings), in great pain, but in greater need of the money. She lived in Paris, reclusive yet eternally on the phone. There was the sketch of an autobiography, and she kept several biographers on strings. She gave her voice to a remarkable documentary,
Marlene
(84, Maximilian Schell), which is a magisterial maintaining of the legend, to such an extent that she managed not to appear. She was radio, and in charge.

She died, and there was a flurry of books, including an expert, fond, and witty biography by Steven Bach, and a fascinating memoir by her daughter, Maria Riva, that quoted from Marlene’s diaries and letters. The death helped one see that a certain creature had been left to us all—in stills, as a wearer of clothes, as a mask on which a smile is drawn. Was she always a ghost? Isn’t it incidental that some actual woman had to be Marlene Dietrich, for surely the idea of her and its mystery were only waiting to be freed?

Matt Dillon
, b. New Rochelle, New York, 1964
There was a moment when the world seemed ready—it was the late eighties—to say that Matt Dillon hadn’t really made the transition from a teen to a young man. Then came
Drugstore Cowboy
(89, Gus Van Sant). A few years later, opinion had shifted: now the pretty-boy adult was never going to take on a fully adult edge. Next came
Wild Things
(98, John McNaughton), and his amazing restraint in the face of a witty, sexy movie all set up for him. At this rate, he could outlive the medium.

He began when he was still in junior high school:
Over the Edge
(79, Jonathan Kaplan);
Little Darlings
(80, Ronald F. Maxwell);
My Bodyguard
(80, Tony Bill);
Liar’s Moon
(81, David Foster); attracting real attention in the S. E. Hinton adaptation
Tex
(82, Tim Hunter), and then in two more films from Hinton—
The Outsiders
(83, Francis Ford Coppola) and
Rumble Fish
(83, Coppola); excellent in
The Flamingo Kid
(84, Garry Marshall); Gene Hackman’s son in
Target
(85, Arthur Penn); to Australia to make
Rebel
(85, Michael Jenkins);
Native Son
(86, Jerrold Freedman); disappointing in
The Big Town
(87, Ben Bolt);
Kansas
(88, David Stevens);
The Bloodhounds of Broadway
(89, Howard Brookman).

After his electric junkie for Gus Van Sant, he did the manipulative lead in
A Kiss Before Dying
(91, James Dearden);
Singles
(92, Cameron Crowe);
Mr. Wonderful
(93, Anthony Minghella);
The Saint of Fort Washington
(93, Hunter);
Golden Gate
(93, John Madden);
Frankie Starlight
(95, Michael Lindsay-Hogg); the dumb husband in
To Die For
(95, Van Sant);
Albino Alligator
(96, Kevin Spacey);
Beautiful Girls
(96, Ted Demme);
Grace of My Heart
(96, Allison Anders);
In & Out
(97, Frank Oz);
There’s Something About Mary
(98, Bobby and Peter Farrelly).

He has branched out further still. He started directing, for the HBO series
Oz
, and in 2001 he directed a movie,
Beneath the Banyan Tree
, a noir story set in Cambodia, and coscripted with Barry Gifford. It all suggests how much the “kid” has learned. He was in
One Night at McCool’s
(01, Harald Zwart);
Deuces Wild
(02, Scott Kalvert). He directed and acted in
City of Ghosts
(2003) and starred in
Employee of the Month
(04, Mitch Rouse).

He had his best part ever in
Crash
(05, Paul Haggis), and he got an Oscar nomination; doing Charles Bukowski in
Factotum
(06, Bent Hamer);
You, Me and Dupree
(06, Anthony and Joe Russo);
Loverboy
(06, Kevin Bacon);
Nothing but the Truth
(08, Rod Lurie);
Old Dogs
(09, Walt Becker);
Armored
(09, Nimród Antal).

Walt Disney
(Walter Elias Disney) (1901–66), b. Chicago
There have been plenty of books on Disney and the world he made, and there will be more. He is one of the great American subjects: the unholy mix of artist and businessman; the slender soul who exerts enormous influence; a giant of movies, yet one of its betrayers; and the pied piper to fifty years of American children whose extraordinary insistence on fantasy has come to change the look of the land and the jungle of suburbia. In the career of Walt Disney one may see the passage from a culture of comic books to that of computer-generated imagery. He makes God seem a little slow and old-fashioned.

An article like this can only scratch the surface. We should say first that Walter Elias was educated at the Kansas City Art Institute, which he gave up (still only sixteen) to be a volunteer ambulance driver on the Western Front. On his return to Kansas City, he teamed up with commercial artist Ub Iwerks (1901–71) and they began to work on cartoons and short animated films—the filming of progressive drawings. They formed a company, Laugh-O-Gram, but they went bust, and so, in 1923, allegedly with $40, Walt, his brother Roy, and Iwerks went to Hollywood.

Animation was very competitive in the 1920s, and it was not until the end of the decade that Disney gained supremacy. Mickey Mouse was created in 1928, and with his third film,
Steamboat Willie
(28), he gained sound. Iwerks was doing the drawing, Roy Disney was the manager, and Walt was boss—no one disputed his authority, or his role as ideas man. The Silly Symphony cartoons began in 1929, and Disney started to build a team of young animators. By the early thirties, he was working with two-strip Technicolor and building his zoo with Minnie, Donald Duck, Goofy, and Pluto. By 1935, he was using three-strip color and the new multiplane cameras.

It was Walt’s drive never to settle for what he had. This was a relentlessly ambitious man, driven more by technology than ideas or ideology. His next goal was a full-length animated feature—
Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs
(37), which grossed about $8 million in its first release. (Two years later,
The Wizard of Oz
pulled in $2 million.) Yet the Disney organization was still hanging on by Mickey’s whiskers. The costs of development kept it in debt until that run of animation features made during the war—note, Disney was always reassuring in his message.
Snow White
was a popular sensation,
and
a travesty of the original story. From the outset, Disney was digesting great stories and complex material to produce pretty pabulum. Not even the fantastic skills in animation disguised this. Disney’s drawing was never more intricate or lovely than in the forties, but the prettiness had no core or heart. It was the start of technological beauty:
Pinocchio
(40); the very ambitious
Fantasia
(40);
The Reluctant Dragon
(41);
Dumbo
(41);
Bambi
(42), which—in the death of Bambi’s mother—was maybe the most daring film he ever made, as well as the grossest example of anthropomorphic garbage;
The Three Caballeros
(44);
Make Mine Music!
(46); and
Song of the South
(46), which mixed animation and live action.

The next step was a series of live-action features and natural-history documentaries:
Treasure Island
(50, Robert Stevenson) was a very good version of the old classic, while
The Living Desert
(53, James Algar) was a grotesque alliance of documentary coverage and the “moods” established by films like
Bambi
.

In 1954,
Walt Disney
began on television (on ABC)—it ran, in one form or another, until 1990. Moreover, in 1954, this was the first attempt by a movie major to get into TV production. ABC paid Disney $500,000 for the deal, plus $50,000 per show. Everyone profited: ABC had their first big hit show, while Disney used the money to fund the Disneyland park at Anaheim (it opened in 1955). The TV show was an anthology, but it introduced such live-action characters as Davy Crockett, many Westerns, and new animated characters.

Movies continued:
Cinderella
(49);
Alice in Wonderland
(51);
The Story of Robin Hood
(52, Ken Annakin)—live action, filmed in England, with Richard Todd as Robin;
Peter Pan
(53);
20,000 Leagues Under the Sea
(54, Richard Fleischer);
The Vanishing Prairie
(54, Algar);
Lady and the Tramp
(55);
Sleeping Beauty
(58);
Kidnapped
(60, Stevenson);
Pollyanna
(60, David Swift);
101 Dalmations
(61);
Mary Poppins
(65, Stevenson)—in which Julie Andrews became the first player in a Disney film to win an Oscar; and
The Jungle Book
(67), which had maybe one percent of the power of Kipling’s story.

Walt supervised
The Jungle Book
, but he died in December 1966. There is no question but that the drive was gone by then in anything but a marketing sense. The quality of animation was in decline. The live-action films are—it seems to me—less valuable as entertainment for children than, say,
The Secret Garden; Winchester 73;
Renoir’s
The River; Scaramouche; Shane; Singin’ in the Rain;
or
The Glenn Miller Story
(to take just the early fifties). In other words, Disney had sold the notion that there should be special films for children, backed up by merchandise advertised on the TV show. From cradle to college, Disney had possession of kids. There were protests, but we are reaping the rewards in so many ways, as “adult” films become more childish.

For most of the late sixties and seventies, Disney was a passive force, except in the steady accumulation of profit from TV, at Disneyland and Disney World, which opened in Orlando, Florida, in 1971. Nothing of note happened until 1984 when the company was effectively taken over by two young executives from Paramount, Michael Eisner and Jeffrey Katzenberg. They were worthy heirs to Walt, and demons of energy and efficiency. They set up Touchstone and Hollywood Pictures to develop live-action projects, many of which were tougher than Disney was used to. They built up the parks and they even returned to the tradition of feature-length animated films:
Return to Oz
(85, Walter Murch);
Down and Out in Beverly Hills
(86, Paul Mazursky);
Ruthless People
(86, Jim Abraham, David Zucker, and Jerry Zucker);
The Color of Money
(86, Martin Scorsese);
Stakeout
(87, John Badham);
Outrageous Fortune
(87, Arthur Hiller);
Adventures in Babysitting
(87, Chris Columbus);
Three Men and a Baby
(87, Leonard Nimoy);
Good Morning, Vietnam
(87, Barry Levinson);
Who Framed Roger Rabbit
(88, Robert Zemeckis)—maybe the best movie Disney ever made;
Cocktail
(88, Roger Donaldson);
Honey, I Shrunk the Kids
(89, Joe Johnston);
Dead Poets Society
(89, Peter Weir);
Three Fugitives
(89, Francis Veber);
The Little Mermaid
(89, John Musker and Ron Clements);
Pretty Woman
(90, Garry Marshall);
Dick Tracy
(90, Warren Beatty);
Stella
(90, John Erman);
Beauty and the Beast
(91, Gary Trousdale and Kirk Wise);
Father of the Bride
(91, Charles Shyer);
The Hand that Rocks the Cradle
(92, Curtis Hanson);
3 Ninjas
(92, Jon Turtletaub);
Aladdin
(92, Musker and Clements);
Sister Act
(92, Emile Ardolino); and
Mighty Ducks
(92, Stephen Herek).

There are failures to report: Eurodisney, the attempt to establish a Disney World in France, which incurred huge early losses; and, then, towards the millennium, a faltering in the whole business that not even Eisner (alone now in control) could prevent or disguise.

Disney is
the
test case. We may regret the limits the empire of the mouse has set on children’s reading and all our imagination. Yet “Disney” has delighted and consoled millions of children. There is no blunter example of the debate between the force of a mass medium and the depth of more elite work. For many people, movies held the promise of being both a great art and a pleasure for the people. But it is not quite enough now to say, “Trust the crowd.” For Disney would twist that trust to monopolize choice.