The New Biographical Dictionary of Film: Completely Updated and Expanded (198 page)

There was a dream, in about 2003, with Alicia Keys in the role. But then ABC said they preferred Janet Jackson, and that ponderous thought carried until a Super Bowl halftime and a flash of action. Whereupon Ms. Horne herself—imperious as ever—crushed the venture. She was ninety-two finally, and not seen much, but you know the bitterness that will not perish—why the hell do they think they can go get someone else now?

By the late 1930s, a few things were evident: Lena Horne was as good a singer as existed; she was also astonishingly beautiful; but she was barred from movies as anything except a cameo curiosity. We still don’t know whether she could have acted—but we do know that in her ripeness it was next to impossible to write a part for her. In fact, she had starred in
The Duke Is Tops
(38, William L. Nolte), a picture made for black theatres and shot in ten days where she is a discovered singer. Not surprisingly, her acting was way behind her voice—and the picture had nothing to do with Duke Ellington!

But M-G-M were excited enough to put her under contract. To give them their due, they released her records and gave her a real part in
Cabin in the Sky
(43, Vincente Minnelli), where she sings “Honey in the Honeycomb,” but takes a back seat to Ethel Waters (who loathed her). In
Stormy Weather
(43, Andrew L. Stone), she sang the title song and tried to have a love affair with Bill “Bojangles” Robinson. At that moment, it needed a genius (and a candidate for a lynching) to make her one of the Smith sisters in
Meet Me in St Louis
. It was wretchedly unfair, and cruel and stupid, but it was hardly a surprise.

That anyone with taste liked Lena was not in doubt (though she was cranky and difficult even when young). So she had to get used to being given numbers in Metro musicals that could be omitted when the film hit the southern circuits: she sang “Jericho” in
I Dood It
(43, Minnelli); she did “Somebody Loves Me” in
Broadway Rhythm
(44, Roy Del Ruth); and in
Till the Clouds Roll By
(46, Richard Whorf and Minnelli) she did “Can’t Help Lovin’ Dat Man,” Julie LaVerne’s number from
Show Boat
.

That was apparently her greatest torment, the role she thought she might get—because, after all, Julie has mixed blood. In fact, the studio wanted Judy Garland for the part and when she cracked up they reassigned it to Ava Gardner (and gave her Lena’s footage to study). But the excellent Horne biography by James Gavin makes it clear that Horne could never have had the part. The same fate befell thoughts of Horne doing
Pinky, Uncle Tom’s Cabin
, and of her playing the part taken by Ruby Dee in
The Tall Target
(51, Anthony Mann). And yet, within a few years, Dorothy Dandridge did make the transition. So while the times were horrible, Horne was not always her own best friend. Surely, she could have played Carmen Jones. Equally, she might have been a smart-tongued Prissy in
Gone With the Wind
and made that picture something else.

In later years, Horne played in just two films:
Death of a Gunfighter
(69, Allen Smithee—i.e., no one would own up to it); and as Glinda in
The Wiz
(78, Sidney Lumet, her son-in-law at the time). Suppose she could act, just think of
Casablanca
if Lena turned up on Paul Henreid’s arm and no one bothered to notice. Then try telling yourself the old bromide that
Casablanca
is “sophisticated.”

Bob Hoskins
, b. Bury St. Edmunds, England, 1942
Twice at least, Bob Hoskins has commanded the perilous ground at the center of extraordinary ventures. In the one,
Pennies From Heaven
(81, Piers Haggard, for British TV), he was the essential bond between drama and song; and in the other,
Who Framed Roger Rabbit?
(88, Robert Zemeckis), he was the character who talked to humans and toons—and had a hard time with both. Perhaps the bursting energy of Hoskins needs some unusual challenge, some heightening of forms. Asked to do no more than act, he can seem too much of a good thing, especially when trying to be sympathetic. In
Roger Rabbit
, it is particularly useful that the technological tensions required him to underplay. His energy is so great that it shines forth. But when the little man feels bound to generate, to mime, to signal—then some viewers need to back away.

He had small parts in
The National Health
(73, Jack Gold); in Dennis Potter’s
Schmoedipus
(74, Barry Davis);
Royal Flash
(75, Richard Lester);
Inserts
(75, John Byrum); and
Zulu Dawn
(79, Douglas Hickox), before he made an explosive impact as the gangster in the overblown
The Long Good Friday
(80, John Mackenzie). He was then Iago to Anthony Hopkins’s
Othello
(81, Jonathan Miller);
Pink Floyd—The Wall
(82, Alan Parker);
Beyond the Limit
(83, Mackenzie); very effective as Owney Madden in
The Cotton Club
(84, Francis Coppola);
Lassiter
(84, Roger Young);
Brazil
(85, Terry Gilliam);
The Dunera Boys
(85, Sam Lewin) for Australian TV; as Il Duce for TV in
Mussolini
(85, Alberto Negrin); verging too much on pathos in
Mona Lisa
(86, Neil Jordan);
Sweet Liberty
(86, Alan Alda);
The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne
(87, Jack Clayton); rather painful as the priest in
A Prayer for the Dying
(87, Mike Hodges).

He acted in and directed the antiwar picture
The Raggedy Rawney
(88), and he has acted in
Major League
(89, David S. Ward);
Heart Condition
(90, James D. Perriott);
Mermaids
(90, Richard Benjamin); as Smee in
Hook
(91, Steven Spielberg);
Shattered
(91, Wolfgang Peterson);
The Favor, the Watch and the Very Big Fish
(92, Ben Levin);
Passed Away
(92, Charlie Peters); and
Super Mario Brothers
(93, Rocky Morton and Annabel Jankel).

Around this time one noted the stealthy way in which Hoskins was collecting the roles of leaders in modern history. He had done Mussolini already. He was Beria in
The Inner Circle
(92, Andrei Kochalovsky). Just ahead was his Churchill in the fatuous
World War II: When Lions Roared
(94, Joseph Sargent). Keep alert:
The Big Freeze
(93, Eric Sykes);
The Changeling
(94, Simon Curtis); J. Edgar Hoover in
Nixon
(95, Oliver Stone);
Rainbow
(95, which he directed);
The Secret Agent
(96, Christopher Hampton);
Michael
(96, Nora Ephron);
Twentyfour Seven
(97, Shane Meadows);
Cousin Bette
(98, Des McAnuff);
Parting Shots
(98, Michael Winner);
Captain Jack
(98, Robert Young);
A Room for Romeo Brass
(99, Meadows);
The White River Kid
(99, Arne Glimcher); Micawber in
David Copperfield
(99, Curtis);
Felicia’s Journey
(99, Atom Egoyan);
American Virgin
(00, Jean-Pierre Marois); as Manuel Noriega in
Noriega: God’s Favorite
(00, Roger Spottiswoode); as Sancho Panza in
Don Quixote
(00, Peter Yates); Nikita Khrushchev in
Enemy at the Gates
(01, Jean-Jacques Annaud); excellent in
Last Orders
(01, Fred Schepisi);
Where Eskimos Live
(02, Tomasz Wiszniewski).

He then did
Maid in Manhattan
(02, Wayne Wang);
The Sleeping Dictionary
(02, Guy Jenkin);
Den of Lions
(03, James Bruce);
Danny the Dog
(04, Louis Leterrier); Pitt the Elder in
Vanity Fair
(04, Mira Nair);
Stay
(04, Marc Foster);
Beyond the Sea
(04, Kevin Spacey).

With six biggies already, he could easily make ten—The Harold Wilson Story? Gorbachev? Justice Scalia? A Pope Looks Back?

He was in
Unleashed
(05, Louis Leterrier);
Son of the Mask
(05, Lawrence Guterman); the impresario Vivian Van Damm in
Mrs. Henderson Presents
(05, Stephen Frears); as Eddie Mannix in
Hollywoodland
(06, Allen Coulter); as Badger in
The Wind in the Willows
(06, Rachel Talalay);
Outlaw
(07, Nick Love);
Go Go Tales
(07, Abel Ferrara);
Doomsday
(08, Neil Marshall);
The Englishman’s Boy
(08, John N. Smith);
A Christmas Carol
(09, Zemeckis).

Hou Hsiao-Hsien
, b. Meixian, China, 1947
1980:
Jiushi Liuliu De Ta/Cute Girl
. 1981:
Feng Er Ti Ta Cai/Cheerful Wind
. 1983:
Zai Na Hepan Quingcao Qing/The Green, Green Grass of Home; Fengkuei-lai-te Jen/All the Youthful Days; Erzi De Dawan’ou/The Sandwich Man
. 1984:
Dongdong De Jiaqi/A Summer at Grandpa’s
. 1985:
Tong Nien Wang Shi/The Time to Live and the Time to Die
. 1986:
Lianlian Fengchen/Dust in the Wind
. 1987:
Niluohe Nuer/Daughter of the Nile
. 1989:
Beiqing Chengshi/City of Sadness
. 1993:
Hsimeng Jensheng/The Puppetmaster
. 1995:
Haonan Haonu/Good Men, Good Women
. 1996:
Nanguo Zaijan, Nanguo/Goodbye South, Goodbye
. 1998:
Hai Shang Hua/Flowers of Shanghai
. 2001:
Qianxi Manbo/Millennium Mambo
. 2003:
Café Lumière
. 2005:
Three Times
. 2007:
The Flight of the Red Balloon
.

Ang Lee and Hou Hsiao-Hsien are just seven years apart in age. Ang Lee was actually born in Taiwan, whereas Hou arrived there only at the age of one, brought by parents escaping the Communist upheaval in China. Yet, by now, Ang Lee is one of the best-known directors in the world, the bold master of so many supposedly foreign idioms, while Hou is hardly known outside the narrow circuit of international film festivals. He is also a person who travels reluctantly, and who therefore finds his material in the experience of Taiwan. As Godfrey Cheshire put it, “Taiwan looks at itself in Hou’s films and confronts indeterminacy: people, places, and eras caught always in the flux of becoming something else.” Yet might not the very same words apply to the anguish or the uncertainty in the best works by Ang Lee?

What I’m trying to suggest is that, increasingly as the medium grows older, so great filmmaking is invariably an urge to resist the massive, stupid, melodramatic, and false certainties of the medium, and the wish to stay loyal to doubt, quandary, and indeterminacy. Yet that steady need to use the camera to see, or to discover, infinite question as opposed to reliable message is more than ever at odds with the terrible commercial overloading of filmmaking. So, is it braver of Ang Lee to travel or of Hou to stay home? Which strategy has the better chance of deeper self-awareness, for them and for us?

Yet if one has the feeling that the Hou of
The Time to Live and the Time to Die, City of Sadness
, and
The Puppetmaster
is that of the highest mastery, how easy is it for the ordinary reader (I mean the conventional filmgoer) to find those films (on video, let alone at a theatre)? Which only leads to the question of whether the best of film can remain a universal art, or must it become as confined and elitist as, say, poetry, modern music, and the experimental novel? Not the least reason for asking that is because I don’t think film can actually compete with those narrow forms.

Hou is an extraordinary director—gentle, reflective, beautifully composed, inclined to hold his shots in space and duration. He exemplifies that natural, fluent style that unites so many of the most thoughtful directors. I urge any reader to seek out his work, in whatever form it can be found. I accept the criticism that he should have been in the previous edition of this book. And I regret all the ways in which the “internationalism” of the film world (and of your chance to see a picture) has actually been a loss of variety, richness, and difficulty. But I wonder, too, if the vitality of the medium is not always going to depend on those phenomena—from Chaplin to Spielberg—who can assert an astonishing sharing (and vulgarization) in human experience. In a real sense, it is a matter of whether cultures like those of Taiwan and Iran (and smaller places still—say, Bloomsbury, or Berkeley, California) can actually survive in our global village, as one gigantic screen dominates the world?

John Houseman
(Jacques Haussmann) (1902–88), b. Bucharest, Rumania
The regrettable lack of personal memoirs from movie people that are literate, characteristic, and halfway frank was illustrated by the publication, in 1972, of Houseman’s
Run-Through
. Perhaps its intelligence and enterprise are alien to the role of movie producer. Yet Houseman was in or around film production for some thirty years and contrived to nurse along an impressive list of works.
Run-Through
and its two sequels,
Front & Center
and
Final Dress
, comprise one of the best autobiographies in show business—honest, detailed, well written, generous without being sentimental, firm without sinking to cruelty.

Houseman’s most significant part in film history may be the way he coaxed Herman Mankiewicz—on the wagon with a broken leg—into writing the screenplay of
Citizen Kane
. Houseman describes the scriptwriting modestly, but the scenario has the qualities of subtle structure, dialogue, and character that he is most likely to have learned in theatre and radio. Of course, the film is Welles’s, just as the screenplay is Mankiewicz’s. Producers may be no more than potentially destructive, interfering creatures. Houseman on
Kane
looks like a good example of how to skirt that odious potential, and, instead, ease the path of a volatile project. How he thought Welles or RKO might evade the wrath of Hearst is another matter. It is clear from his books that Houseman was so moved by Welles that sometimes he just wanted to see what the boy would do next.