The New Biographical Dictionary of Film: Completely Updated and Expanded (122 page)

He gave his most brilliant (and pained) performance as the chronic liar in
Two Girls and a Guy
(98, Toback);
The Gingerbread Man
(98, Altman);
In Dreams
(99, Neil Jordan);
Friends & Lovers
(99, George Haas);
Bowfinger
(99, Frank Oz); very funny in
Wonder Boys
(00, Curtis Hanson); flirting with Mike Tyson in
Black and White
(00, Toback). He showed great calm in a recurring role on
Ally McBeal
(00–01). The future was his to make or break, but he had to prove that the big money could trust him.

A new beginning started with
Lethargy
(02, David Gelb and Joshua Safdie); in the Michael Gambon role in
The Singing Detective
(03, Keith Gordon);
Whatever We Do
(03, Kevin Connolly);
Gothika
(03, Mathieu Kassovitz).

It’s tempting to say that Downey has come all the way back—not just rehabilitated, but beloved, Oscar-nominated, and seemingly at ease. But, alas, he is not the same. Not as sharp or as dangerous. Of course, he is alive and he has franchises.

He did an episode in
Eros
(04, Soderbergh);
Game 6
(05, Michael Hoffman);
Kiss Kiss Bang Bang
(05, Shane Black), which was produced by Downey’s wife, Susan; a small role in
Good Night, and Good Luck
(05, George Clooney);
The Shaggy Dog
(06, Brian Robbins);
A Scanner Darkly
(06, Richard Linklater); coproducing
A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints
(06, Dito Montiel); daring and brilliant in
Fur
(06, Steven Shainberg); very gloomy in
Zodiac
(07, David Fincher);
Lucky You
(07, Hanson);
Charlie Bartlett
(08, Jon Poll);
Iron Man
(08, Jon Favreau); in roaring black face and getting a nomination in
Tropic Thunder
(08, Ben Stiller);
The Soloist
(09, Joe Wright); and as
Sherlock Holmes
(09, Guy Ritchie).

Marie Dressler
(Leila Marie Koerber) (1869–1934), b. Coburg, Canada
Dressler was as close to a Mother Courage as Hollywood could run. She was a large, ugly woman who had generally been imposed on as the ungainly object of comedy for more agile and appealing spirits.
Tillie’s Punctured Romance
(14, Mack Sennett), her film debut, and an adaptation of one of her most successful stage roles, was the original of this character: a harridan, armed only with money, trying to divert the gigolo Chaplin from the lovely Mabel Normand. Suffering had not been limited to the screen for Dressler. In the 1920s, she slumped drastically from fame and only generous offers from the movies had rescued her. David Shipman has argued that her popularity in the first years of sound was based not only on her talent as a comedienne but because she was, visibly, a fustian woman who had survived depression, her resilience intact. In fact, she proved a worldly and engagingly cynical old lady. It is Dressler who, in
Dinner at Eight
(33, George Cukor), listens skeptically to Jean Harlow’s anxiety that machinery will take the place of every profession and murmurs, “Oh my dear, that is something you need never worry about.”

Marie Dressler began in opera, moved on to straight theatre—where she played Mrs. Malaprop—but was most successful in vaudeville from about 1900 onward. That led to
Tillie’s Punctured Romance
, as important an innovation in comedy films as
Judith of Bethulia
had been in dramas. She made four more films for Sennett and Goldwyn, but none was successful and by 1919 she was in decline.

Her part in the chorus-girl strike of 1917 seems to have made it hard for her to find work, either onstage or in the movies, and she was driven to France where she made some comedy shorts. She was in real need when she got a small part in
The Joy Girl
(27, Allan Dwan); Dwan saw her in a hotel one day, sent her a note, and Dressler almost fainted from relief. Dwan claimed that she told him she was about to kill herself. In fact, Dressler had the cancer that would kill her seven years later, and in her famous films she often looks ill. But the meeting changed her fortunes. Frances Marion, a writer at MGM, insisted that she play in
The Callahans and the Murpheys
(27, George Hill), with Polly Moran. Slowly she regained popularity:
Breakfast at Sunrise
(27, Malcolm St. Clair);
Bringing Up Father
(28, Jack Conway), with Moran; and with Marion Davies in
The Patsy
(28, King Vidor). Talkies really underlined her weather-beaten dryness:
The Divine Lady
(29, Frank Lloyd);
The Vagabond Lover
(29, Marshall Neilan);
Chasing Rainbows
(29, Charles Reisner); with Garbo in
Anna Christie
(30, Clarence Brown); with Lillian Gish in
One Romantic Night
(30, Paul Stein);
The Girl Said No
(30, Sam Wood);
Caught Short
(30, Reisner); and
Let Us Be Gay
(30, Robert Z. Leonard). Then in
Min and Bill
(30, Hill), she was cast with Wallace Beery, and won the best actress Oscar. With Polly Moran, she made
Reducing
(31, Reisner) and in 1932, she was with Jean Hersholt in
Emma
(Clarence Brown). The year before her death, she and Beery played together in
Tugboat Annie
(33, Mervyn Le Roy) and she was in
Dinner at Eight
and
The Late Christopher Bean
(Wood).

In those last few years, she was an enormous boxoffice star and a grand old lady. Louis B. Mayer reckoned that he had only ever had three great actors (apart from himself): Garbo, Tracy, and Dressler.

Carl Theodor Dreyer
(1889–1968), b. Copenhagen, Denmark
1919:
Praesidenten/The President; Blade af Satans Bog/Leaves from Satan’s Book
. 1920:
Prastankan/The Parson’s Widow
. 1922:
Die Gezeichneten/Love One Another; Der Var Engang/Once Upon a Time
. 1924:
Mikael
. 1925:
Du Skal Aere Din Hustru/Thou Shalt Honour Thy Wife/Master of the House; Glomsdalsbruden/The Bride of Glomdal
. 1928:
La Passion de Jeanne d’Arc
. 1932:
Vampyr/The Strange Adventure of David Gray
. 1943:
Vredens Dag/Day of Wrath
. 1945:
Tva Maniskor/Two People
. 1954:
Ordet/The Word
. 1964:
Gertrud
.

It is easy, because of his Danishness, Lutheran upbringing, and the outward attention to spiritual ordeal in his films, to regard Dreyer as an austere, Scandinavian examiner of psychological guilt and metaphysical concentration. But the Danishness is of limited relevance; Dreyer made some of his finest films in Norway, France, and Germany. Nor is it wise to accept the traditional interpretation of him as a foreboding and transcendental religious artist.

Dreyer’s work is always based on the beauty of the image, which in turn is a record of the luminous conviction and independence of human beings. His films are devoted principally to human emotions, and if they seem relatively subdued, then that may be a proper reason for calling in Danishness. But simplicity and purity of style do not argue against intensity. Dreyer’s greatness is in the way that he makes a tranquil picture of overwhelming feelings. His art, and his intelligence, make passion orderly without ever cheating on it. Passion is the word—so often included in the title of the Joan of Arc film without proper consideration. Dreyer films human passion and it is only as a secondary function that that passion takes on a universal spiritual significance. The sanctity of emotions is his faith and the cinematic ability to make an aesthetic and ordered narrative work is his aim. All his works are passions—in the sense of being like musical celebrations of feelings, and in the sense that they are devoted to specific human responses to situations defined by stories. To say that Dreyer is concerned simply with the life of the emotions is to rescue him from that northern recess where he still, sadly, remains and put him where he belongs—in the company of Mizoguchi, Vigo, Ophuls, Renoir, Rossellini, Bergman, and Godard.

That last name recalls the most moving attempt to place Dreyer in the mainstream of cinema. When, in
Vivre Sa Vie
(62), Anna Karina goes to a cinema and is moved to tears by the sight of Falconetti in
La Passion de Jeanne d’Arc
, Godard was bowing in respect to Dreyer, referring to Karina’s Danishness (her mother worked for Dreyer), and comparing Karina with Falconetti—both beautiful women made grave by contemplation of themselves through acting. He was also asserting a vital cinematic continuity through the potency of the close-up that evokes the inner life, and thereby seeing that there may be an emotional saintliness in the mind of a Parisian tart. It is a bitter footnote to this that, after so eloquent a French tribute, when
Gertrud
opened in Paris it was greeted with such brutal incomprehension that it had to be withdrawn within days. Yet
Gertrud
is the last masterpiece of one of the greatest of directors.

Thirty when he first directed, Dreyer had been a journalist before he joined Nordisk to write titles for their films and then to work on scripts. As a journalist, he had reviewed plays and films and also served as a court reporter. The early stress on accuracy of records, the resort to legal confrontation, and the discipline of distilling narrative into cogent titles are all influences that one may detect in his work. His first films were confessedly made under the influence of Sjostrom and Griffith, especially
Intolerance. Praesidenten
is an uninhibited melodrama about illegitimate children, while
Leaves from Satan’s Book
is an imitation of
Intolerance
, even to the extent of being in four episodes.

The Parson’s Widow
, shot in the Norwegian countryside, is the first masterpiece. Its story shows Dreyer’s growing feeling for emotional surprise: a young clergyman comes to a new living, but has to marry the late incumbent’s elderly widow. He has a girl he loves who comes to the household as his sister. The young couple plan to kill the widow, only for it to be revealed that she is not an ogress but a wise and kind woman who understands their feelings and looks warmly on them. By the time she dies, the young people’s conception of love has been enriched by her example and by her description of her own happiness when young. Another melodrama has been elevated, without strain, into a celebration of happiness and spiritual intelligence. It is worth noting that the woman who played the widow was herself very old and died shortly after the shooting. This is an extreme example, perhaps, but typical of the importance Dreyer placed on the “emotional resemblance” between actor and character.

His next three films were made in Germany, and it is clear that Dreyer responded to the Expressionist taste for revealing emotion through decor and lighting. On
Mikael
, for instance, he had Karl Freund and Rudolph Maté as his cameramen. Another major film,
Mikael
is an important item in the collection of works that have an artist as a central figure. It deals with the triangular relationship between an elderly painter, his young male model, and the girl he loves. The casting is extraordinary: the director Benjamin Christensen as the artist, Walter Slezak as the young man, and Norah Gregor (Renoir’s Christine in
La Règle du Jeu
) as the girl. It is a tragic but resigned film, showing vitality slipping away from the artist as the love affair grows. Dreyer’s sense of precision was greatly developed and the emotional concentration is accentuated by the fin-de-siècle clutter of the sets. Back in Denmark,
Master of the House
showed how far Dreyer was abandoning narrative eventfulness for emotional action. With special care for the actuality of a small house in which man and wife live, Dreyer made a film out of the emotional interplay in a failing marriage. Again, reconciliation is achieved—as in
The Parson’s Widow
—and
Master of the House
, made in 1925, now looks like a superb piece of emotional realism. It foreshadows
Gertrud
in its study of a woman who feels herself oppressed by her husband and yet accomplishes emotional reawakening without melodrama.

Then to France for his best-known film,
La Passion de Jeanne d’Arc
, based rigorously on the records of the trial, demonstrating triumphantly that the close-up was not just a means but an end. It may be that Griffith first regularly employed the close-up for illustrative emphasis, but who can argue that
La Passion
is not built upon its variety and profundity? Dreyer’s method is illustrated by his own account of how he coaxed Falconetti through these close-ups to “give” the emotional charge that is still so moving:

With Falconetti, it often happened that, after having worked all afternoon, we hadn’t succeeded in getting exactly what was required. We said to ourselves then: tomorrow we will begin again. And the next day, we would have the bad take from the day before projected, we would examine it, we would search and we always ended by finding, in that bad take, some little fragments, some little light, that rendered the exact expression, the tonality we had been looking for. It is from there that we would set out again, taking the best and abandoning the remainder. It is from there that we took off, in order to begin again … and succeed.

Maté photographed
La Passion
and Dreyer’s next film,
Vampyr
, made in France from private money. It is a story by Sheridan le Fanu, played largely by amateurs, and one of the greatest of horror films. Its quality is not supernatural but inevitable. All talk of emotional or psychological content in the horror genre begins with
Nosferatu
and
Vampyr
. Filmed in real settings, it is invaded by a misty light, achieved by reflecting a light off a gauze back into the lens. Without ever discarding the Gothic elements of vampirism, it sees in its subject a universal emotional encounter. Thus the happenings of horror become heightened expressions of an inner life. Its intensity reflects back on all Dreyer’s other films, showing how entirely they are creations of light, shade, and camera position.