The New Biographical Dictionary of Film: Completely Updated and Expanded (173 page)

Gueule d’Amour
leaves one in no doubt—Grémillon was a remarkable director. It has Gabin as a soldier with a reputation for having his way with women … until he meets a wealthy Parisian (played by Mireille Balin). This is a cinema of inner, emotional realism, with subtle, secretive performances and an eye that invests objects and places with poetic meaning. The film is unerringly modern and it makes one want to see anything by Grémillon.

Edmond T. Gréville
(1906–66), b. Nice, France
1931:
Le Train de Suicides
. 1932:
Plaisirs de Paris
(uncredited);
Le Triangle de Feu
. 1933:
Remous
. 1935:
Marchand d’Amour; Princesse Tam-Tam
. 1936:
Gypsy Melody
. 1937:
Brief Ecstasy; Mademoiselle Docteur
. 1938:
Secret Lives; What a Man!; Veetig Jaren/Forty Years
(d). 1939:
Menaces/Cinq Jours d’Angoisse
. 1941:
Une Femme dans la Nuit
(codirected with Abel Gance). 1946:
Dorothée Cherche l’Amour
. 1947:
Pour une Nuit d’Amour/Passionelle; Le Diable Souffle
. 1948:
Noose; Neit Tevergeefs/But Not in Vain
. 1949:
The Romantic Age
. 1950:
Im Banne der Madonna
(unreleased). 1953:
L’Envers du Paradis
. 1955:
Le Port du Désir/Sauveur d’Epaves/The House on the Waterfront; Tant Qu’il y a Aura des Femmes
. 1956:
Je Plaide Non Coupable/Guilty?
. 1958:
L’Île du Bout du Monde/Temptation
. 1960:
Beat
Girl/Wild for Kicks
. 1961:
Les Mains d’Orlac/The Hands of Orlac; Les Menteurs/The Liars
. 1963:
L’Accident
. 1967:
Peril au Paradis
(TV).

Edmond Gréville was French, but with British blood, and so for much of his career he made films in England as well as France—ranging from Mai Zetterling and Hugh Williams in
The Romantic Age
(truly a trifle) to the wistful teen exploitation of
Beat Girl
, or
Wild for Kicks
, to a remake of
The Hands of Orlac
. Also known as a novelist and playwright, Gréville has his supporters in France as a stylist director. But few people, so far, have seen enough of his pictures for a consensus to develop.
Mademoiselle Docteur
was an English version of the Pabst film, with von Stroheim and Dita Parlo.
Le Port du Désir
is a good, moody Jean Gabin film, and
L’Envers du Paradis
was Stroheim again.

John Grierson
(1898–1972), b. Deanstown, Scotland
Grierson was a harsh, restrictive enthusiast. Although he proclaimed a yearning to liberate and extend filmmaking, he evolved a narrow doctrine hostile to many other types of cinema, essentially bigoted and unintelligent and isolated by history. Yet he was a man of fierce organizing energy and the undoubted centerpiece of the British documentary movement. If that movement now looks either stolid or arty and oblivious of some of the subtler implications of documentary, is Grierson to blame?

Alan Lovell has suggested that Scottish Calvinism influenced this righteous isolation and quoted Grierson’s underlying belief in a necessary severity: “Several of the young directors responsible for the success of the British documentary film have been Scots; and there may even be some odd relation between the Knoxist background and a theory of cinema which throws overboard the meretricious trappings of the studio.”

Grierson was at Glasgow University and then spent three years in America. But in 1927 he began his involvement with British documentary when he joined the Empire Marketing Board Film Unit. In 1928 he headed the unit and directed his only film,
Drifters
, which is symptomatic of the academic, Russian-influenced beauty of much British documentary, but which has little flavor of fish or men. From then until 1937 he was the key executive in documentary by virtue of his position as head of the GPO Film Unit. He functioned as producer, as muscular scrum leader of assorted talents and as critic and theorist. He brought Robert Flaherty and Alberto Cavalcanti to Britain and produced, among others:
Industrial Britain
(31, Flaherty);
The Voice of the World
(32, Arthur Elton);
Aero-Engine
(33, Elton);
Pett and Pott
(34, Cavalcanti);
Song of Ceylon
(34, Basil Wright);
BBC: The Voice of Britain
(35, Stuart Legg);
Coal Face
(35, Cavalcanti);
Night Mail
(36, Wright and Harry Watt); and
We Live in Two Worlds
(37, Cavalcanti).

As a writer, he hacked out what he called a “minor manifesto” on the virtuousness of documentary. Its principles were that

the cinema’s capacity for getting around, for observing and selecting from life itself can be exploited in a new and vital art form. The studio films largely ignore this possibility of opening up the screen on the real world.… We believe that the original (or native) actor, and the original (or native) scene, are better guides to a screen interpretation of the modern world.… They give it power of interpretation over more complex and astonishing happenings in the real world than the studio mind can conjure up or the studio mechanician recreate.… We believe that the materials and the stories thus taken from the raw can be finer (more real in the philosophic sense) than the acted article.… Add to this that documentary can achieve an intimacy of knowledge and effect impossible to the shimsham mechanics of the studio, and the lily-fingered interpretations of the metropolitan actor.

Grierson went on, without much conviction, to say that he didn’t mean that studios could not produce works of art. But his fervor detected something unclean in their product and, like a pulpit orator, he warned: “I make this distinction to the point of asserting that the young director cannot, in nature, go documentary and go studio both.” The limb he chose for himself now looks very naked. The films of the 1930s look monotonous and dreary beside the fusion of documentary and fiction in many of the Drew-Leacock films, in the work of Rouch and Marker, and in the films of Godard. What would Grierson have made of Godard, Resnais, or Warhol—three men who have seen much more variety and complexity in the “raw” than the confident Grierson ever identified?

After 1937, Grierson went through the mill of international bureaucracy. All through the war he was Film Commissioner for Canada and instrumental in setting up the National Film Board of Canada. He returned to Europe after the war under a cloud, worked briefly for UNESCO, and then, from 1948–54, was Controller of Film at the Central Office of Information, as unrewarding an experience as it is possible to imagine. His creative energy at this period was channeled into Group Three, an offshoot of the National Film Finance Corporation, for whom he produced
Judgment Deferred
(51, John Baxter);
Brandy for the Parson
(51, John Eldridge);
The Brave Don’t Cry
(52, Philip Leacock);
Laxdale Hall
(52, Eldridge);
The Oracle
(52, C. M. Pennington-Richards);
Time, Gentlemen, Please
(52, Lewis Gilbert);
You’re Only Young Twice
(52, Terry Bishop); and
Orders Are Orders
(54, David Paltenghi)—a drab collection.

He then returned to Scotland and from 1955–65 produced and presented for Scottish TV an anthology of international documentary,
This Wonderful World
. His breezy zest was undiminished and he seemed quite happy inside a studio.

D. W. Griffith
(David Wark Griffith) (1875–1948), b. La Grange, Kentucky
1908: two-reel pictures made at Biograph (1908, 61; 1909, 141; 1910, 87; 1911, 70; 1912, 67; 1913, 30), itemized in Robert Henderson’s
D. W. Griffith: The Years at Biograph
. 1913:
Judith of Bethulia
. 1914:
The Battle of the Sexes; The Escape; Home Sweet Home; The Avenging Conscience; The Mother and the Law
. 1915:
The Birth of a Nation
. 1916:
Intolerance
. 1918:
Hearts of the World; The Great Love; The Greatest Thing in Life
. 1919:
A Romance of Happy Valley; The Girl Who Stayed at Home; Broken Blossoms; True Heart Susie; The Fall of Babylon; The Mother and the Law; Scarlet Days; The Greatest Question
. 1920:
The Idol Dancer; The Love Flower; Way Down East
. 1921:
Dream Street; Orphans of the Storm
. 1922:
One Exciting Night
. 1923:
The White Rose
. 1924:
America; Isn’t Life Wonderful?
. 1925:
Sally of the Sawdust; That Royale Girl
. 1926:
The Sorrows of Satan
. 1928:
Drums of Love; The Battle of the Sexes
. 1929:
Lady of the Pavement
. 1930:
Abraham Lincoln
. 1931:
The Struggle
. 1940:
One Million B.C
. (produced by and credited to Hal Roach, some of this film was supervised by Griffith).

Griffith was the son of a Confederate officer who died from the effects of a war wound when the boy was ten. The family lived simply on a farm, reduced by the war, and then ran a boardinghouse in Louisville, Kentucky. At the age of twenty, Griffith was drawn into amateur theatricals and thence into the precarious life of an actor in small touring companies. He wrote for the stage and, in 1907,
The Fool and the Girl
was produced in Washington. Next year he approached the Edison company with some of his stories and, after initial success there, he moved to Biograph. That studio needed a director and was sufficiently impressed by Griffith’s varied talents to offer the post to him. Innocently, and penuriously, he accepted.

At Biograph, he had the opportunity to release American cinema from the technical and artistic limitations of constant reference to the theatre. To distill the stylistic advances of over three hundred films, Griffith abandoned the fixed point of view of the audience in the stalls and made his camera selective. He saw that there might be a balance between long shot, medium shot, and close-up, and that action might be heightened by the insertion of faces reflecting on or moved by the actions. The effect of introducing a cinematic language should not conceal Griffith’s preference for the standard sentimental melodrama of nineteenth-century theatre and cheap fiction, but he established the emotional impact of films by recognizing the value of sensitive acting. He stressed rehearsal, eliminated crude overacting, and saw that close-ups were more effective if restrained. The outstanding proponents of this novel cinema-acting style are Miriam Cooper in
Intolerance
and Lillian Gish, but Griffith organized a company of excellent players, just as he liked to use the same, loyal technicians—most notably the cameraman Billy Bitzer.

The longer films being made in Italy—particularly
Quo Vadis?
—urged Griffith into making the four-reel
Judith of Bethulia
. Biograph were unhappy at the expense of that film and Griffith moved on to Mutual, taking most of his chosen actors and technicians. But even at this stage, Griffith yearned for independence and the concentration of forces of the creative figures in cinema: thus he formed Triangle with Sennett and Thomas Ince, and produced those two flamboyant claims for the entertainment and artistic appeal of the cinema—
Birth of a Nation
and
Intolerance
. They made use of every innovation Griffith had begun at Biograph, and they are packed with brilliant fragments. But their overall effect is of portentousness: the size exceeds Griffith’s sense of detail; the racism in
Birth
is embarrassing; the notion of four separate stories to illustrate
Intolerance
, united as the film progresses, is essentially silly despite the liveliness of the editing, the pathos of the women, and the spectacle of the Babylonian sequences. The most damaging exposure is of Griffith’s adherence to a shallow, sentimental code of morality, at variance with the authenticity that he was able to obtain in performance and that he cultivated in art direction. For that reason, both the big films survive less as cinematic experiences than as works of historical interest.

This is not true of many of the films that followed.
Intolerance
had been financially disastrous and it forced Griffith back to simpler, intimate romances.
Hearts of the World
is a moving love story set against the background of the First World War.
Broken Blossoms
is a marvelous evocation of Limehouse and another tender love story, with Gish as good as ever, and with the bonus of a fine performance from Richard Barthelmess. (Griffith was better with women: perhaps he saw that their stoicism was made for the camera; certainly he adored his own leading ladies; but, in addition, he seems to have retained a Southern courtliness toward women.)
True
Heart Susie
is a glorious piece of rural charm and Gish’s best performance as the archetype of the self-sacrificing girl at the heart of the women’s-pic genre.
Way Down East
subdues sentimentality with melodrama and visual excitement, and
Orphans of the Storm
, with the Gish sisters versus the French Revolution, is his most satisfying treatment of suspense.

In the years after the war, Griffith’s insistence on conservative sentimentality marooned him. But, as he admitted, he was not amenable to the monopoly of the large studios. He could cope with neither the new morality nor the factory product. His participation in United Artists had been vague. Throughout the 1920s he lived uneasily, and
America
—a solemn and slow account of the War of Independence—put him in debt. In 1924, he made a deal with Adolph Zukor at Paramount and went to Germany to make
Isn’t Life Wonderful?
When De Mille left Paramount,
Sorrows of Satan
was handed to Griffith. Long before sound, he was looked on as a throwback and, though the commercial hostility may have been malicious, artistically the pioneer had been bypassed. Griffith, after all, mourned the loss of silence and said, “Give us back our beauty.” His twopence-colored view of story content could not absorb the enormous extra realism that came with sound, no matter that his eye for an image was very sophisticated.
Abraham Lincoln
, his first talkie, is, even so, very good, with a fine performance from Walter Huston.