The New Biographical Dictionary of Film: Completely Updated and Expanded (188 page)

Hellman studied drama at Stanford University and then moved to film at UCLA. Like so many young cinema talents, he fell in with Roger Corman, who produced his first film. Thereafter, Hellman directed a lot of
The Terror
(62, Corman) and did some editing. His next two films were quickies made in the Philippines; the two Utah Westerns were again made at Corman’s behest, costing $150,000 for the pair. After that he had many lost projects—including
MacBird
—edited
The Wild Angels
(66, Corman), and worked as dialogue director on
The St. Valentine’s Day Massacre
(67, Corman).

Two-Lane Blacktop
was by far his largest assignment, an $850,000 project for Universal. It starred Warren Oates, Dennis Wilson, James Taylor, and Laurie Bird, and was filmed nomadically in a tight unit, made uneasy by Hellman’s sparse communications with his actors on the script.
Blacktop
is another transformation of contemporary America into existential parable. The surface story of a wager auto race across America is casually denied narrative tension to emphasize the resonance of character and situation. Again, Hellman seems to have gone out of his way to neutralize the potential of his subject.
Blacktop
could have been made as gripping as
Duel
, or as atmospheric as
American Graffiti
. Instead, it is elliptical, oblique, and equivocal, marred by its own lofty intransigence toward audiences. It would seem that Hellman needs to be embattled, turning big projects into arbitrary, near-underground movies. Such fierceness may keep him out of work; he has been abandoned by several commercial projects. But no system could digest the willful arbitrariness of his best films.
Cockfighter
was once more dark, cryptic, and mythic—as well as hard to track down—but its use of Warren Oates as a silent pursuer of fate has few equals.

He worked as an editor on Peckinpah’s
Killer Elite
(75).
China 9, Liberty 37
was an uneasy mixture of commercial anxiety and mythic stereotypes perched uncomfortably between satire and conviction. It has become increasingly difficult for Hellman to keep working as a director:
Iguana
had little or no release, and it was as obscure as it was violent in its story of power on a remote island. But it was more interesting than
Silent Night
, a chore of no resort or hope.

Hellman has worked as a kind of doctoring editor—he served on Mark Robson’s
Avalanche Express
(79) after Robson died. He was also an executive producer on
Reservoir Dogs
(92, Quentin Tarantino).

Sonja Henie
(1912–69), b. Oslo, Norway
On ice, she was all twirling blades, chubby cheeks, and dimply smiles. (There was a look of Mae West’s kid sister.) Off ice, she was a bulldozer—no doubt you have to be, to become world champion at fifteen and a gold medalist in three successive Olympics (1928, 1932, and 1936). Her determination carried her to a phenomenal triple career as competitive skater, ice-show entrepreneur, and movie star: she not only bullied Darryl Zanuck into the contract she wanted from Fox (plus renegotiations), but catapulted herself into the American Film Exhibitors’ list of top boxoffice attractions for three successive years—she was the number-four female star in 1937, number two in 1938, and number four again in 1939. Then it all began to melt.

According to her autobiography,
Wings on My Feet
, everything was sweetness, spunk, and hard work. According to her brother, Lars, in a book that could well have been called
Sister, Dearest
, she was egomaniacal, greedy, sexually voracious, and far too friendly with Hitler & Co. (One of her gold medals, of course, was won at the 1936 games in Garmisch.) She married several times, but failed to snag Tyrone Power, with whom she starred in two films—
Thin Ice
(37, Sidney Lanfield) and
Second Fiddle
(39, Lanfield)—and with whom, according to Lars, a considerable amount of athletic activity took place in their dressing rooms. Most of her pictures were harmless (and brainless) excuses for the big skating numbers:
One in a Million
(36, Lanfield);
Happy Landing
(38, Roy del Ruth);
My Lucky Star
(39, del Ruth);
Everything Happens at Night
(39, Irving Cummings)—and already fading;
Sun Valley Serenade
, which was a hit, despite Henie, due to Glenn Miller, Lena Horne, and “The Chattanooga Choo Choo” (41, H. Bruce Humberstone);
Iceland
(42, Humberstone);
Wintertime
(43, John Brahm). In 1945 there was
It’s a Pleasure
(William A. Seiter). Three years later,
The Countess of Monte Cristo
(Frederick de Cordova). Finally, in 1958,
Hello London/London Calling
(Sidney Smith). There’s a Sonja Henie museum in Norway, where you can visit her medals and trophies, her jewels and her skates.

Paul Henreid
(Paul George Julius von Henreid) (1908–92), b. Trieste, Austria
1952:
For Men Only
. 1956:
A Woman’s Devotion
. 1958:
Live Fast, Die Young; Girls on the Loose
. 1964:
Dead Ringer/Dead Image
. 1966:
Blues for Lovers
.

Ten years after Henreid’s birth, Trieste became Italian. He made his early career on the Austrian stage, but was destined for wider fame as an archetypal refugee, such as Victor Laszlo, the Resistance hero, who sets the mechanism of
Casablanca
(43, Michael Curtiz) into motion. It is a nice thought that the benign endeavors of everyone in that film except Conrad Veidt save him for noble work in America. Whereas, the real-life Henreid stayed on in Hollywood to direct several pieces of shamelessly crass hokum. What a marvelous cockpit of movie history
Casablanca
is: looking back to
La Règle du Jeu
and
M;
but as capable of anticipating
Dead Ringer
and that eerie moment in
The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse
(61, Vincente Minnelli), when Henreid is once more a Resistance agent whose wife has a neutralist lover.

Along with the Laszlos of Europe, Henreid came west in the late 1930s, first to England and then to America. He lasted throughout the 1940s as an insubstantial romantic support, and it was only when that appeal faded that he took to direction:
Victoria the Great
(37, Herbert Wilcox);
Goodbye, Mr. Chips
(39, Sam Wood);
Night Train to Munich
(40, Carol Reed);
Joan of Paris
(42, Robert Stevenson); very good with Bette Davis in
Now, Voyager
(42, Irving Rapper);
Between Two Worlds
(44, Edward A. Blatt);
The Conspirators
(44, Jean Negulesco);
In Our Time
(44, Vincent Sherman);
The Spanish Main
(45, Frank Borzage);
Hollywood Canteen
(45, Delmer Daves);
Deception
(46, Rapper);
Of Human Bondage
(46, Edmund Goulding);
Devotion
(46, Curtis Bernhardt); as Schumann in
Song of Love
(47, Clarence Brown);
Rope of Sand
(49, William Dieterle);
Thief of Damascus
(52, Will Jason);
Siren of Bagdad
(53, Richard Quine);
Deep in My Heart
(54, Stanley Donen);
Meet Me in Las Vegas
(56, Roy Rowland);
Ten Thousand Bedrooms
(57, Richard Thorpe);
Never So Few
(59, John Sturges);
Operation Crossbow
(64, Michael Anderson);
The Madwoman of Chaillot
(69, Bryan Forbes); a cardinal in
Exorcist II: The Heretic
(77, John Boorman).

Of his own films,
Dead Ringer
is a juicy shocker with Henreid as referee between twin Bette Davises.

Jim Henson
(1936–90), b. Greenville, Massachusetts
I’m writing this entry late in 2001, and it happens that in the paper today there’s talk of next year’s new Oscar—the one for the best animated film—as well as steady marveling over the success of
Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone
. Of course, that blockbuster movie was always an AOL Time Warner project—it was bound to be a hit, and it had to have that safe magic that would please children of all ages all over the world. Whereas, as kids know, some kids get it and some don’t. And what I wonder is what has happened to the odd kids, the weird ones, the prickly, difficult, bright, awkward, shining kids—the real ones?

Jim Henson’s early death was all the harder to take in that he worked with the odd, the personal, the wild, and the homemade, and flourished in the last age before the computer. It’s therefore very important that Henson was not just the entrepreneur and the visionary, but often the hand in the glove, the voice, and the tall man bent double, putting on the show.

When only a senior in high school, Henson began to work as a puppeteer for a Washington, D.C., television show,
Sam and His Friends
. Thus, throughout the sixties, Henson made and characterized a series of puppets that were to become international figures: the Cookie Monster, Bert and Ernie, Kermit the Frog (Henson’s chief alter ego), and, eventually, Miss Piggy. It was in 1969, when American public television launched
Sesame Street
, that Henson moved from being a local entertainer to a national figure.

He was playing to preschool children for the most part, and he created a style—slow, tender, repetitive—that was easily parodied, but which actually fits in with all our knowledge about how children learn, and was even more accentuated with
Teletubbies
. Inevitably, Henson and his band of Muppets were drawn into movies—and extraordinary success, which led to toys and other forms of merchandising.

Henson had mixed feelings about the success, and its exploitation. It is not easy to predict the way in which he would have moved. He had sought an offer to be bought out, by Disney, for $150 million. But before the contracts were complete, Henson died, suddenly, from a respiratory illness. Since when, his company has passed into the Disney machine, just as his special character has nearly vanished.

It’s not easy nowadays to ensure that work made for children stays personal. Any sign of success is taken over, promoted, and deprived of strangeness. The several Muppet movies were not always natural or comfortable solutions. Miss Piggy could not quite resist the urge to be the last of the Gabors. And the guest stars came from a disturbingly different species.

At the same time, Henson’s vision had already been of huge value to a few uncommon films:
Dreamchild
(85 Gavin Millar), where Henson provided characters to go with Dennis Potter’s script and the live actors;
Labyrinth
(86, Henson), where Terry Jones’s script incorporates David Bowie’s King of the Goblins and Henson’s imaginary landscape; and
The Witches
(90, Nicolas Roeg), a rare combination of child’s story and horror.

Of course, it was always asking too much to expect Jim Henson to withstand Walt Disney. But he has left a valuable tradition or direction, and we are in urgent need of young artists taking it up all over the world.

Audrey Hepburn
(Edda van Heemstra Hepburn-Ruston) (1929–1993), b. Brussels
Of Irish-Dutch parents, Hepburn was brought up in Holland, worked in England from 1948–51, and then moved to Hollywood, where she was a fairy queen for some fifteen years. She seemed English; she had a sense of manners and kindness that came close to grace; and she achieved a “look”—the knockout gamin who inspired a generation of thin, flat-chested, upper-class girls.
Funny Face
(57, Stanley Donen) was the movie that embraced her different atmospheres—from blue stocking to a
Vogue
Ondine. It also gave her an older man as company. She was a perfect princess for veteran knights: Astaire, Cooper Bogart, Holden, Fonda, Grant. She was never as happy with men her own age; she made them seem older and crude. There was always an untouched glory in her: it was close enough to the quality of Lillian Gish for their meeting in
The Unforgiven
to seem blessed, like a discovery of lost links.

In England, she had small or barely detectable roles in
Laughter in Paradise
(51, Mario Zampi);
The Lavender Hill Mob
(51, Charles Crichton); and
Secret People
(52, Thorold Dickinson), before being cast as the incognito princess in
Roman Holiday
(53, William Wyler)—released in the year of Queen Elizabeth II’s coronation. Her Oscar for that was generous, but it showed how far Hollywood had been swept off its democratic feet by her outrageous purity. She was rather better in
Sabrina
(54, Billy Wilder) and beautifully presented as Natasha by King Vidor in
War and Peace
(56).
Love in the Afternoon
(57, Wilder) was touching, and she had the face for the white surround of
The Nun’s Story
(59, Fred Zinnemann). But Rima in
Green Mansions
(59) was beyond her, past sense, and too much for her husband and director, Mel Ferrer.

Hepburn was a creature of the fifties: she was sustained by the real-life royalty of Princesses Margaret and Grace (neither of whom matched the actress’s perfection). Hepburn’s most testing performance came in a failure, as the Indian girl in
The Unforgiven
(60, John Huston), where she was a kind of cousin to Natalie Wood in
The Searchers
(both films came from novels by Alan Le May). Though
Breakfast at Tiffany’s
(61, Blake Edwards) was a hit, Hepburn largely ignored and smoothed away the ironies and awkwardness in Capote’s woman. She was uneasy in
The Children’s Hour
(62, Wyler), but social realism and teary melodrama were not her strengths. So she was quickly restored to romantic comedy in
Paris When It Sizzles
(63, Richard Quine) and
Charade
(63, Donen). The last vindication of her boxoffice appeal came when Jack Warner preferred her to Julie Andrews for the film of
My Fair Lady
(64, George Cukor). But he would not let her sing, and could not keep her from seeming like a clothes horse.