The New Biographical Dictionary of Film: Completely Updated and Expanded (174 page)

Why did Griffith hardly work in his last twenty years? It can only be half the answer that the studios mistrusted him; it was also a matter of his disdain for the cinema of the 1930s. He had always been a proud man, and bitterness may have been inevitable. Like Orson Welles in years to come, Griffith carved out his eventual solitude, perhaps a little attracted to its splendor. He died at the Knickerbocker Hotel in Hollywood, a drunken, womanizing spectator of the industry to which he had acted as frontier scout.

Melanie Griffith
, b. New York, 1957
Does this actress have a better grasp on what she’s doing than her admirers? She has married Don Johnson twice (the first time as a teenager); she has had recurring problems with drink and drugs—to say nothing of men and her own weight. Volatility here seems very close to disturbance. Maybe the little girl
was
traumatized when Alfred Hitchcock gave her a toy coffin with a doll of mother in it. Or maybe the joke was Melanie’s idea.

She was the daughter of Hitchcock’s actress Tippi Hedren (The
Birds
and
Marnie
, made when Melanie was five and six) and of a real estate agent, Peter Griffith. Hedren married again, to Noel Marshall, a keeper of wild animals: one result of that was
Roar
(81, Marshall), a disastrous picture that took many years to make and which featured the family and their man-eaters.

Griffith was riveting in her screen debut,
Night Moves
(75, Arthur Penn), as a full-bodied child keeping grownup company, bewildered by the mismatch of her carnality, her shy manner, and her infant voice. That dilemma has never quite been settled.

She was in
Smile
(75, Michael Ritchie);
The Drowning Pool
(76, Stuart Rosenberg);
One on One
(77, Lamont Johnson); and
Joyride
(77, Joseph Ruben). There was a gap of four years before the onset of her “adult” career, first stunning and seeming stunned as Holly Body in
Body Double
(84, Brian De Palma), and in
Fear City
(84, Abel Ferrara).

Nothing suggested the depth of
Something Wild
(86, Jonathan Demme), where she goes from the Brooksian tempest of Lulu to the wounded, provincial Audrey with absolute ease: these two halves of one creature showed Griffith as an actress, but they also illustrated the talent of Demme. Nothing since has been in the same class:
Cherry 2000
(88, Steve DeJarnatt) had been on the shelf and was probably freed by
Something Wild; The Milagro Beanfield War
(88, Robert Redford) was a party for guest spots;
Stormy Monday
(88, Mike Figgis) was too intent on making Newcastle look like Gotham; she was a solid worker in
Working Girl
(88, Mike Nichols), yet unaccountably Rubens-like in her underwear, leered at by the hitherto unarousable Nichols.
In the Spirit
(90, Sandra Seacat) was an oddity; in
Pacific Heights
(90, John Schlesinger) she did not always look like herself; and she was blithely perky in the archaic
Shining Through
(91, David Seltzer).

She played on TV in the Hemingway story “Hills Like White Elephants,” in
Women and Men: Stories of Seduction
(90, Tony Richardson). She was the one leading figure in
Bonfire of the Vanities
(90, De Palma) who might have been retained in sensible recasting. With Don Johnson, she made the minor and harmless
Paradise
(91, Mary Agnes Donoghue). But
A Stranger Among Us
(92, Sidney Lumet) is such a folly it seems more like a camp dream than a project that survived a daily schedule of work. She was with Johnson again in a remake of
Born Yesterday
(93, Luis Mandoki), reliably a half-beat off Billie Dawn’s dumb rhythms.

And yet … Despite the loss of Don Johnson, and perhaps because of gaining Antonio Banderas, Melanie keeps going. Who knows what reconstructions there may have been? On screen, she has become funnier without losing one drop of sexiness. She begins to become an institution (and one I would lean on):
Milk Money
(94, Richard Benjamin); given a sublime moment in
Nobody’s Fool
(94, Robert Benton); on TV in
Buffalo Girls
(95, Rod Hardy);
Now and Then
(96, Lesli Linka Glatter); with Banderas in
Two Much
(96, Fernando Trueba); very touching in
Mulholland Falls
(96, Lee Tamahori); as Charlotte Haze in
Lolita
(97, Adrian Lyne); brilliant in
Another Day in Paradise
(98, Larry Clark); very sexy in
Celebrity
(98, Woody Allen); a lush Marion Davies in
RKO 281
(99, Benjamin Ross); eating up the fun in
Crazy in Alabama
(99, Banderas);
Cecil B. Demented
(00, John Waters). She was in
Forever Lulu
(00, John Kaye);
Tart
(01, Christina Wayne);
Tempo
(03, Eric Styles); as Frank Sinatra’s last wife in
The Night We Called It a Day
(03, Paul Goldman);
Shade
(03, Damian Neiman);
Heartless
(05, Robert Markowitz).

Christopher Guest
, b. New York, 1948
1989:
The Big Picture
. 1991:
Morton & Hayes
(TV). 1993:
Attack of the 50 Ft. Woman
(TV). 1996:
Waiting for Guffman
. 1998:
Almost Heroes
. 1999:
D.O.A
. (TV). 2000:
Best in Show
. 2003:
A Mighty Wind
. 2006:
For Your Consideration
.

That curious phrase “guest appearance” begins to take on universal applications, entirely welcome in a world that takes itself too seriously. Thus, is a “guest appearance” in a film or a TV show a sign that someone is being paid far too much—or nothing at all? Does it mean he was simply one of those visitors who would not leave? Or—and this is really promising—does the term refer to an inner core of ghostliness in the world of celebrity, the anti-matter of fame in which a gentle creature of parody has become far more real than the original objects of the satire? Anyway, think of this as a “guest entry”—and a very welcome guest, too.

Not the least entertaining thing about this career is its unashamed and entirely unneurotic air of not really caring. After all, why should anyone know what they wanted to do before middle age? Why should the mere fact of having been married to Jamie Lee Curtis for twenty years mean that you have to put her in your films? Perhaps the pleasures of the marriage depend on not working together. Perhaps it is just a guest marriage.

Still, Christopher Guest did some writing and some acting from the early seventies on, and he was one of those American performers who had taken in not just the anti-worldliness of, say, Monty Python, but the way in which not even the silently turning BBC globe could convince you that normal programming had—or ever could—resume. The first great highlight of Guest’s po-faced documentary fiction was
This Is Spinal Tap
(84, Rob Reiner), where he was “Nigel Tufnel” (is it really only one “l”?) in the rock band that went from utter fabrication to successful albums and touring, and seemed rather more probable than many bands that had noisier careers.

But before that, Guest had written for Lily Tomlin and for
Saturday Night Live
, and he has been a writer on most of his films, often with Eugene Levy. As an actor, Guest has credits that are a torture to memory—was he really in the film, or is filmography itself a sham? Were these uninvited guest appearances? Will you believe that he was in
The Hospital
(71, Arthur Hiller);
The Hot Rock
(72, Peter Yates);
Death Wish
(74, Michael Winner);
The Fortune
(75, Mike Nichols)—as “boy lover”?; was he Jeb Magruder in the TV
Blind Ambition
(79, George Schaefer)? Well, someone must have been. And so on, including the “TV director” in
Haywire
(80, Michael Tuchner) and Charlie Ford in
The Long Riders
(80, Walter Hill)—why, yes, with his brother Nicholas! He is the “first customer” in
Little Shop of Horrors
(86, Frank Oz); Bob in
Beyond Therapy
(87, Robert Altman); and Count Tyrone Rugen in
The Princess Bride
(87, Reiner—you might have guessed that). And he is rigidly straightfaced as the medical evidence in
A Few Good Men
(92, Reiner).

Gradually, this busy life clarified Guest’s own destiny.
The Big Picture
is a very modest, nearly tender satire on Hollywood—it has the air of a BBC gardening program, and in general Guest places the camera and does what is often known as directing with the least possible guile or design.
Morton & Hayes
was a short-lived TV program, led by Rob Reiner, about an oldtime comic double act that never existed.
Attack of the 50 Ft. Woman?
I think some titles say it all.
Waiting for Guffman
is the turning point movie (if you believe in turning points), about a musical to celebrate the sesquicentenary of a small and insignificant town in Missouri.
Almost Heroes
was a complete flop—about an expedition that coincided with Lewis and Clark. I don’t know what
D.O.A
. is.

And
Best in Show
is a simple case of paradise. You either get it or you don’t. But if you do—you know, and you could take Michael McKean, Bob Balaban, Catherine O’Hara, Parker Posey, Eugene Levy, C. Guest, and the others for ever.

A Mighty Wind
(about folk music) was, I thought, a bit of a letdown. But it really doesn’t matter. As and when the earth’s solitude is marred only by stray dogs,
Best in Show
will be remembered in the fading camp firelight.

John Guillermin
, b. London, 1925
1949:
Torment
. 1951:
Smart Alec; Two on the Tiles; Four Days
. 1952:
Song of Paris; Miss Robin Hood
. 1953:
Operation Diplomat
. 1954:
Adventure in the Hopfields; The Crowded Day
. 1955:
Dust and Gold; Thunderstorm
. 1957:
Town on Trial
. 1958:
The Whole Truth; I Was Monty’s Double
. 1959:
Tarzan’s Greatest Adventure
. 1960:
The Day They Robbed the Bank of England; Never Let Go
. 1962:
Waltz of the Toreadors;
Tarzan Goes to India
. 1964:
Guns at Batasi
. 1965:
Rapture
. 1966:
The Blue Max
. 1967:
New Face in Hell
. 1968:
House of Cards
. 1969:
The Bridge at Remagen
. 1970:
El Condor
. 1972:
Skyjacked
. 1973:
Shaft in Africa
. 1974:
The Towering Inferno
. 1976:
King Kong
. 1978:
Death on the Nile
. 1980:
Mr. Patman
. 1984:
Sheena, Queen of the Jungle
. 1986:
Kong Lives
. 1988:
Dead or Alive/The Tracker
(TV).

Guillermin has come a long way from the modest charm of a children’s film like
Adventure in the Hopfields
to the sham Apache Western,
El Condor
. Not that there is any feeling of progress. He has jumped as frantically as spit on a stove: thus in one year the bittersweet
Waltz of the Toreadors
and a Tarzan adventure. On the whole, however, Guillermin has a taste for violence and tension, and
House of Cards
is pastiche Hitchcock. He was trained in France and launched initially by John Grierson, but no trace of either shows.
Town on Trial
was a moderate thriller, but his larger action films are very impersonal. It speaks for the unease of modern cinema that so plain a director should handle
The Towering Inferno
. But the remake of
King Kong
was a delight: pretty, amused, touching, and very clever in seeing the love story within the famous horror.

Sir Alec Guinness
(1914–2000), b. London
Of all the British “theatrical knights,” Guinness had the most interesting career in films. Not that he ever forsook theatre. But Guinness had a remote, reflective personality that often worked well in movies. Perhaps film taught him a love of detail best noticed by the camera. It may also be that he enjoyed the challenge to stay hidden or secret when under intense scrutiny. His 1985 autobiography was called
Blessings in Disguise
, and it made clear his tranquil pleasure doing films, as well as the dreamy Catholic assurance that nothing in life is too important.

Despite his Oscar for
The Bridge on the River Kwai
(57, David Lean) and an honorary Oscar in 1979; despite his high reputation in America, where he was seen as the key actor in Ealing comedies—and he
was
nominated for best actor in
The Lavender Hill Mob
(51, Charles Crichton); despite all of that, he never went Hollywood. Instead, he sometimes pursued personal projects that must have seemed farfetched. Thus his superb, monstrous Gulley Jimson in
The Horse’s Mouth
(59, Ronald Neame), which he scripted out of love for the Joyce Cary novel (and he got an Oscar nomination for the script—in the same year, Spencer Tracy was nominated for
The Old Man and the Sea
, but Guinness’s Jimson was ignored—you see, nothing is too important); and the religious
The Prisoner
(55, Peter Glenville), from a Bridget Boland play.

He made his debut in
Evensong
(34, Victor Saville), but
Great Expectations
(46, Lean) was the true beginning, and it was his Fagin in
Oliver Twist
(48, Lean) that drew attention. The real man was unrecognizable within that wonderfully Dickensian performance. Then the multiplicity of roles in
Kind Hearts and Coronets
(49, Robert Hamer) established him as a master of makeup and artful disguise.