The New Biographical Dictionary of Film: Completely Updated and Expanded (153 page)

Hugo Fregonese
(1908–87), b. Buenos Aires, Argentina
1943:
Pampa Barbara
. 1946:
Donde Mueren las Palabras
. 1947:
Apenas un Delincuente
. 1950:
Saddle Tramp; One Way Street
. 1951:
Apache Drums; Mark of the Renegade
. 1952:
My Six Convicts;
Untamed Frontier
. 1953:
Blowing Wild; Decameron Nights; Man in the Attic
. 1954:
The Raid; Black Tuesday
. 1956:
I Girovaghi
. 1957:
Seven Thunders
. 1958:
Live in Fear; Harry Black
. 1961:
Marco Polo
. 1964:
Apache’s Last Battle/Old Shatterhand
. 1966:
Savage Pampas
. 1975:
Mas Alla del Sol
.

In the days when European art houses were welcoming the rather sweaty films of Leopoldo Torre Nilsson, Hugo Fregonese was hard put to find work. He may not be worthy of Borges, but he was an exponent of American violence: economical, abrupt, a visual narrator able to inflict ordeal on his characters within moments of a film’s start.
Black Tuesday
and
The Raid
—both from Sidney Boehm scripts—are intricately organized, the first a true gangster movie, the second about a Confederate attack on a Vermont town.
Harry Black
and
Blowing Wild
are triangle stories set in exotic parts—the first in India, the second in South America—pressurized in one case by a rogue tiger and in the other by an unruly oil well.
Blowing Wild
has Fregonese’s laconic bleakness at its best: Gary Cooper is visited one night by an old flame, Barbara Stanwyck; in a darkened room, he puts on a desk lamp, directs it first at her face, and then at her legs.

It is a dislocated career, begun in Argentina, the bulk in Hollywood, disappointed by the death of Val Lewton (who produced
Apache Drums
) and by the failure of Stanley Kramer at Columbia, for whom he made
My Six Convicts
, and then driven out into Europe. There are dull films—
Untamed Frontier
is one—but at his best, Fregonese has that smoldering, grudging beauty that is characteristic of Boetticher and Ulmer—men who clung to Hollywood’s underbelly. Given an opening—such as Jack Palance as Jack the Ripper in
Man in the Attic
—Fregonese shows all his instinct for sharpness. On second thought, who better to handle those Borges stories about gauchos, machismo, and the communion of knife fights?

Karl Freund
(1890–1969), b. Königinhof, Czechoslovakia
He entered the German industry in 1906 as a newsreel cameraman and became one of the greatest lighting cameramen, a master of shadow and movement, and the favorite photographer of F. W. Murnau, for whom he shot
Setanas
(19),
Der Bucklige und die Tanzerin
(20),
Der Januskopf
(20),
Marizza, genannt die Schmugglermadonna
(21),
Der Brennende Acker
(22),
The Last Laugh
(24), and
Tartuff
(25). In addition, Freund worked on
Venetianische Nacht
(14, Max Reinhardt);
Der Golem
(20, Paul Wegener/Carl Boese);
Die Spinnen, part 2
(20, Fritz Lang);
Der Verlorene Schatten
(21, Rochus Gliese/Wegener);
Lukrezia Borgia
(22, Richard Oswald);
Mikael
(24, Carl Dreyer);
Variété
(25, E. A. Dupont);
Metropolis
(27, Lang); and
Donna Juana
(27, Paul Czinner). Freund also helped to write the script of Ruttmann’s
Berlin, die Symphonie der Grosstadt
(27).

In 1930 he went to America, thus forming one of the most interesting links between German expressionism and the American horror film. For he photographed two of the best early sound horror films at Universal:
Dracula
(31, Tod Browning) and
Murders in the Rue Morgue
(32, Robert Florey) as well as the women’s picture harrowed soft focus of
Back Street
(32, John M. Stahl). The studio even promoted him to director and he made
The Mummy
(32),
Moonlight and Pretzels
(33),
Madame Spy
(33),
The Countess of Monte Cristo
(34),
Uncertain Lady
(34),
Gift of Gab
(34),
I Give My Love
(34), and
Mad Love
(35). The first is a subtle picture of the occult, while the last is one of the enigmas of film history: starring Peter Lorre, and with Gregg Toland as one of its photographers, it clearly influenced Welles in some details of Kane.

Freund then went back to photography, and his output included
Camille
(36, George Cukor);
The Good Earth
(37, Sidney Franklin et al.);
Manproof
(37, Richard Thorpe);
Parnell
(37, Stahl);
Conquest
(38, Clarence Brown);
Letter of Introduction
(38, Stahl);
Rose of Washington Square
(39, Gregory Ratoff);
Golden Boy
(39, Rouben Mamoulian);
Pride and Prejudice
(40, Robert Z. Leonard);
A Yank at Eton
(42, Norman Taurog);
Du Barry Was a Lady
(43, Roy del Ruth);
The Seventh Cross
(44, Fred Zinnemann);
Key Largo
(48, John Huston); and
South of St. Louis
(49, Ray Enright). Notice the range here: from the dark opulence of
Camille
, to MGM’s Jane Austen lightness, to the fogbound images of
Key Largo;
from the ingenious tricks of
The Good Earth
, to the heartfelt romance of the Stahl films. His last years were spent working in TV, especially for Lucille Ball.

William Friedkin
, b. Chicago, 1939
1967:
Good Times
. 1968:
The Night They Raided Minsky’s; The Birthday Party
. 1970:
The Boys in the Band
. 1971:
The French Connection
. 1973:
The Exorcist
. 1977:
Sorcerer/The Wages of Fear
. 1978:
The Brink’s Job
. 1980:
Cruising
. 1983:
Deal of the Century
. 1985:
To Live and Die in L.A
. 1986:
Stalking Danger
(TV). 1987:
Rampage
. 1990:
The Guardian
. 1994:
Blue Chips; Jailbreakers
(TV). 1995:
Jade
. 1997:
12 Angry Men
(TV). 2000:
Rules of Engagement
. 2003:
The Hunted
. 2006:
Bug
. 2007: episodes from
CSI
(TV).

Out of television and into movies, William Friedkin has impressed mainly with his energy for hustling up projects, several that would have been better left to rest, but two of which
—The French
Connection
and
The Exorcist
—put him, temporarily at least, on top of the creaking, swaying pile.

Friedkin looks like a jumped-up TV director, glib enough to make a credo out of price-cutting and convinced that the zoom and the insistent violence of unexpected images need only a raw feeling for sensation to outflank traditional requirements of construction and meaning.
The French Connection
is an inept film that shoves its impact in our face and employs the most deliberately mechanical sort of editing. Time and again it becomes incoherent or impossible to follow
—The Godfather
is a paragon of exposition and dramatic pace beside it, while
Dirty Harry
presents a far more somber view of the predicament of the policeman. As with
Naked City
twenty years before,
French Connection
is made in the blind hope that authenticity will disguise insight. Its one touch of originality—that the crook is well mannered and the cop boorish—seems unnoticed by Friedkin.

The success, commercially, of
The French Connection
followed two faithful translations of very different stage works, neither of which had any compelling reason for being made. The compulsion of
The Exorcist
is sadly short-lived and exploitative. The movie is an efficient Val Lewtonesque horror story, reveling in dirty language, swiveling heads, blood and bile, shock cuts, and Mercedes McCambridge’s voice coming out of the wizened Linda Blair. The effects are frightening, but not as fearful as the simpleminded conception of evil. To see
The Exorcist
is to renew one’s respect for those glimpses of grim malignance in Bresson’s films.

There was a significant rest, during which he entered into a brief marriage with Jeanne Moreau, before the hugely expensive and obscure
Sorcerer
. Chastened by its failure, he went back to being the modest, conventional Friedkin and made a nice period comedy out of the story of Boston’s biggest heist ever.

In the eighties, Friedkin looked increasingly stranded. He tried comedy in
Deal of the Century
and his old car-chase skills in
To Live and Die in L.A.
, but the results were conventional at best.
Rampage
is the interesting exception, a film made in 1987 but not properly released for several years and then much changed. It is a murder story, the first version of which was opposed to capital punishment. But by the time of the second version, Friedkin had shifted his ground and become a spokesman for the victims.

Friedkin’s recent years have had one highlight—the revival of
The French Connection
and
The Exorcist
. But who can then fail to wonder what has happened to the guy that he should make
Jade
or
Rules of Engagement?
The TV
12 Angry Men
supplies the answer: this is a chronic sensationalist driven to sobriety to stay in work.

Samuel Fuller
(1911–97), b. Worcester, Massachusetts
1948:
I Shot Jesse James
. 1950:
The Baron of Arizona; The Steel Helmet
. 1951:
Fixed Bayonets
. 1952:
Park Row
. 1953:
Pickup on South Street
. 1954:
Hell and High Water
. 1955:
House of Bamboo
. 1957:
Run of the Arrow; China Gate; Forty Guns
. 1958:
Verboten!
. 1959:
The Crimson Kimono
. 1961:
Underworld USA; Merrill’s Marauders
. 1963:
Shock Corridor
. 1964:
The Naked Kiss
. 1968:
Caine/Shark
. 1972:
Dead Pigeon on Beethoven Street
. 1980:
The Big Red One
. 1982:
White Dog
. 1983:
Thieves After Dark/Les Voleurs de la Nuit
. 1988:
Sans Espoir de Retour
.

Fuller is one of the most harsh artistic presences in the cinema. Like that preoccupied, cigar-smoking greyhead in dark glasses at the party in
Pierrot le Fou
, he concedes only that film is a battleground of alienated human energies all pursuing their private obsessions to the point of exhaustion. His films are like scenarios made from communities of rats, the camera itself a king rat, scarred and hurt, but still swooping in and out of every scuffle, commanding the spectacle and jumping in for gross close-ups like a thumb on a bug. Fuller’s meaning is expressed by this supremely active style: that every man must be his own protagonist, and that this free-for-all morality is exactly mirrored in the larger political arena. In turn, he had been involved in crime journalism and war and his great originality was in seeing the constant criminal element in life—whether in the American city, on the range, or in every theatre of war. The community is interchangeable with the criminal underworld. In
Pickup on South Street, House of Bamboo
, and
Underworld USA
, the police and the crooks are observed as identical instruments without even the saving gloss of cynicism. His central characters are invariably psychotics, chronically hostile to organization, thriving on double-cross, and resolving doubts through brutality. Their fate is usually absurd; the means contradictory.
Merrill’s Marauders
survive uselessly. O’Meara in
Run of the Arrow
returns to his own people without any hope. In
House of Bamboo
it is Robert Ryan’s single humane action that destroys him—and though we appreciate that fact, Fuller himself does not endorse it. The relentless grilling of his camera almost compels the gesture and then drives on victorious.

Fuller’s career passed from the obscurity of B pictures to intense critical controversy. But he made no concessions to interpreters. Many of his films were made at desperate speed and with little money, and yet they boast some of the most complex and successful traveling camera shots ever put on film. Although his material is at one level gutter plots, Fuller is the complete author—“written, produced, and directed by …” His opponents call him barbarous and even fascist, and his supporters have quoted Hobbes to elucidate him. In truth he is barbarous and that is why he is unique. No other American director has described American experience with such unremitting and participatory relish for its competitive corruption. Nicholas Garnham’s monograph on Fuller constantly relates the films to the works of Norman Mailer. In many ways the men are different, but Fuller is familiar with the creeping madness that Mailer warns against.

Is he a good director? becomes a meaningless question. His films are staggering visual achievements. But there is no assurance of the director’s being aware of what he is doing. It is a good thing that he is not, for there is a vulgarity in Fuller that would move swiftly from the impulsive to the ponderous if he once listened to his best critics. Fuller may be a tabloid director, as witness the sense of identity and commitment in
Park Row
, a newspaper story. That sort of outrageous vulgarity has always to resist respectability and seriousness; self-consciousness is the greatest enemy. If the director does not need to comprehend his own art, then it is not art—but raw cinema. In that case, the real meaning of Fuller’s films is in the minds of the mass audience from whom he has never been distracted. But one thing is clear: from the Civil War to the Vietnam War, Fuller has dealt with every major phase of American experience and returned with the conclusion that the world is a madhouse where ferocity alone survives.