The New Biographical Dictionary of Film: Completely Updated and Expanded (217 page)

His 1969 return as a director suggested a man who had outlived his time. Indeed, his memoir,
Tracy and Hepburn
, published in 1971, is glazed with his own nostalgia for one vivid decade. At this distance, it is hard to see him as the most talented member of that group, but there are situations that call for gobetweens: if it was Adam and Eve that played the main parts, it still needed someone with the wit to see that shifting a rib would set them in motion.

His book
Moviola
, published in 1979, was turned into a television miniseries (80, John Erman). In the same year, he and Ruth Gordon cowrote a TV movie,
Hardhat and Legs
(Lee Philips).

Anna Karina
(Hanne Karin Blarke Bayer), b. Copenhagen, Denmark, 1940
When Jean-Luc Godard and Anna Karina separated, it marked Godard’s abandonment of the heritage of commercial, and especially American, cinema. Within that heritage, the idea of a relationship between a director and an actress that becomes virtually the subject of their films was often illustrated, but never as trenchantly worked out as it was between Godard and his wife. Griffith and Lillian Gish always spoke with Victorian respect for one another; parted, von Sternberg and Dietrich still shimmered in the ambiguous glow of their films at Paramount.

The closest ancestor to the mutual despair in
Pierrot le Fou
is Orson Welles’s
The Lady from Shanghai
, made when he and Rita Hayworth were already separated, but with the couple held together by the revelation of incompatibility. The personal confession at the end of that film is mordant and harsh, but it is only a single film into which the entire sequence of meeting, enchantment, struggle, and alienation is compressed. With Godard and Karina, the story was drawn out over seven full-length films. And because Godard is so intellectual an artist—classifying his own responses but not always feeling them—his work with Karina is the peak of his art, where he attains a glimpse of emotion that illuminates its omission in the rest of his films. Throughout
Pierrot le Fou
, Belmondo represents Godard, forever discussing and writing about art and emotion, but Karina is the feminine movie sensibility, a photographed woman who turns the spectator’s heart with the speed of the projector. Her silence withers the desperate words of Ferdinand/Pierrot; her staring into the camera transfixes Godard behind it.
Pierrot le Fou
is Karina’s masterpiece as well as Godard’s. It shows how far a former model had progressed in six years, and proves how intense an impression a girl can make if she knows how to be filmed, if she divines how far the camera exploits her and yet still consents to it without mannerism, irritation, or prudishness. There is not a fuller picture of a woman in movies: beautiful and ugly; spontaneous but brooding; tender but arbitrary; reflective and instinctive; turning capriciousness into an assertion of transience that astounds Ferdinand’s fixed commentaries on her:

F
ERDINAND
(off): What’s the matter, Marianne?

M
ARIANNE:
I’m fed up! I’m fed up with the sea, with the sun, with the sand, tinned food, everything! … I’m fed up with wearing the same dress every day! … I want to get away from here!… I want to live!

F
ERDINAND
(off): What do you want me to do?

M
ARIANNE:
I don’t know, I want just to go. Anyway, I’ve thrown away the money we had to keep us for the winter.

F
ERDINAND
(off): Where did you throw it?

M
ARIANNE:
Into the sea, you idiot!

The film is caught in an anguished mixture of rapture and incomprehension at the cinematic beauty of Karina in the south in the sun: standing on a balcony experimenting with scissors; weaving through the trees singing about her luck; Girl Friday to her melancholy lover Crusoe; tucking a rifle butt into her breast; lying on a beach at evening; or, finally, wreathed in red. There is a magnificent passage in which Ferdinand admits to the camera his inability to treat this nymph as real, even though he suffers from the effects she has on his imagination. This moment is like the last room in the Museum of Romantic Cinema:

F
ERDINAND:
Perhaps I am dreaming even though I am awake.… Her face makes me think of music. We have entered the age of the Double-Man. One no longer needs a mirror to speak to oneself. When Marianne says “It is a fine day” what is she really thinking? I have only this image of her, saying “It is a fine day.” Nothing else. What is gained by trying to explain this? We are made of dreams … and dreams are made of us.… It is a fine day, my love, in dreams, in words, and in death. It is a fine day, my love.… It is a fine day … in life.

Karina had come to Paris in 1958, having made one short in Denmark. She turned down the part in
Breathless
played by Jean Seberg, but appeared in Godard’s second feature,
Le Petit Soldat
(60), and was immediately rhapsodized over by his camera but pushed into betrayal through the force of the film’s suspicions. In the same year she was in Michel Deville’s
Ce Soir ou Jamais
. In 1961 she went to England for
She’ll Have to Go
(61, Robert Asher), appeared in
Une Femme est une Femme
(Godard), and married its director. They appeared together briefly in the film within
Cléo from 5 to 7
(62, Agnès Varda), and then they made
Vivre Sa Vie
(62).

As the hapless girl in Paris who turns to prostitution, but who is moved by Falconetti in Dreyer’s
Passion de Jeanne d’Arc
, who is a home-movie Cyd Charisse round the billiard table, and who converses with the philosopher Brice Parain, she is the fragments of Godard’s ideal but always an actual, diffident, self-sufficient girl. Close-ups of her in that film are made consciously in the tradition of Gish, Falconetti, and Louise Brooks, but there is also that long opening when she sits with her back to the camera and the “documentary” letter-writing sequence. In another episode, Karina and her man read over Edgar Allan Poe’s
The Oval Portrait
, as if Godard already foresaw the dilemma of the artist who let his beloved perish as he refined her portrait.

Twice more for Godard, before
Pierrot
, she was a creature of intense black-and-white romance: as the timid girl in
Bande à Part
(64), and as Natasha von Braun, saint of the Capital of Tears, in
Alphaville
(65). Between these films she made one episode of
Les Quatres Vérités
(62);
Dragées au Poivre
(63, Jacques Baratier);
De l’amour
(64, Jean Aurel);
Le Voleur du Tibidabo
(64, Maurice Ronet); and
La Ronde
(64, Roger Vadim).

Immediately after
Pierrot
she played Diderot’s novice, Suzanne Simonin, in
La Religieuse
(66, Jacques Rivette) and worked for Godard, but in a visibly more professional way, in
Made in USA
(66) and in the episode “Anticipation,” from
Le Plus Vieux Métier du Monde
(67). She then ventured outside France, mostly in mediocre or overambitious films. In so many ways, she had fought to be free of Godard—yet, without him, she was ordinary. It isn’t the camera that loves an actress, or makes her exceptional. It’s the intent behind the camera, the awful hope:
Lo Straniero
(67, Luchino Visconti);
Lamiel
(67, Aurel);
Before Winter Comes
(68, J. Lee Thompson);
The Magus
(68, Guy Green);
Justine
(69, George Cukor);
Michael Kohlhaas
(69, Volker Schlöndorff);
Laughter in the Dark
(69, Tony Richardson);
L’Alliance
(70, Christian de Chalonge); excellent in the brooding
Rendezvous à Bray
(71, André Delvaux);
The Salzburg Connection
(72, Lee H. Katzin); and
Pane e Ciccolata
(73, Franco Brusati).

She acted in and directed
Vivre Ensemble
(74) and appeared in
Chinese Roulette
(76, Rainer Werner Fassbinder). Since then, she has appeared in
Historien om en Moder
(79, Claus Weeke);
L’Ami de Vincent
(83, Pierre Granier-Deferre);
Ave Maria
(84, Jacques Richard);
L’Ile au Trésor
(85, Raul Ruiz);
Cayenne-Palace
(87, Alain Maline);
L’Eté Dernier à Tanger
(87, Alexandre Arcady);
L’Oeuvre au Noir
(88, André Delvaux); and
Man, Der Ville Vaere Skyldig
(90, Ole Roos).

In recent years, she was in
Chloé
(94, Dennis Berry);
Up, Down, Fragile
(95, Rivette);
The Truth About Charlie
(02, Jonathan Demme). And a pop singer! In 2008, she directed a road film, called
Victoria
, and I was rebuked in a letter to
Sight & Sound
for saying that she was an old lady now. I’m sure she’s still pretty, but she was a veteran already in
Pierrot le Fou
.

Boris Karloff
(William Henry Pratt) (1887–1969), b. Dulwich, England
It is a credit to Peter Bogdanovich’s imaginative kindness that amid all the harassments of his first film,
Targets
(68), he managed to make it—among other things—an affectionate valediction to Karloff. In
Targets
, Karloff is barely disguised as Byron Orlok, the mandarin of horror, eighty years old, leaning on a stick and a lovely Asiatic secretary, his skin a blend of Californian tan, jaundice, and the old parchments of Gothic castles. Orlok thinks of himself as an antique: so used to the conventions of the horror genre, he can no longer play a straight role. But he is appalled by the efficient, spiritless slaughter of the young rifleman who hides behind the screen at a drive-in theatre, waits for Orlok/Karloff in
The Terror
(62, Roger Corman) to be projected, and then begins to pick off the audience in their cars. The end is grand guignol with apologetic built-in significance, as Orlok in life and Orlok on the screen both stride vengefully toward the killer.

At that moment the rather glib director’s conception is lent seriousness by the presence of Karloff: not just in the elderly dignity of his walk, but because he carried with him an honorable record of insisting on human values within one of the cinema’s most exploited forms. Karloff had always shown us monsters and mad magicians who had been isolated by the unthinking cruelty of the “wholesome” world.

Karloff died two years later in the rural setting of a Sussex hospital. He had opted for England in 1955, visiting America only to work. That choice was to be expected: in Hollywood, Karloff had retained English citizenship, read
Wisden
, and never yielded his lugubrious articulation. He was the son of a diplomat in the Indian Civil Service—and there were always stories that he had Indian blood. At Uppingham and Merchant Taylor’s he found his great passion: cricket. But something in the scheme of English duty must have rankled, for in 1909 he went to Canada and, after a variety of jobs, he took to acting with traveling companies. The roots of melodrama lay there, and, inevitably, by 1919 he wandered into the movies: a tall man, with striking, gaunt features and a natural slowness that could suggest menace.

For twelve years he worked in small parts, specializing in Oriental bogeymen, but hardly doing well enough to make up for missing English summers of Jack Hobbs and Maurice Tate. Between pictures, he often had to work as a laborer—one reason perhaps why he remained physically striking into old age:
The Last of the Mohicans
(20, Maurice Tourneur);
Cheated Hearts
(21, Hobart Henley);
The Infidel
(22, James Young);
The Altar Stairs
(22, Lambert Hillyer);
Omar the Tentmaker
(22, Young);
The Prisoner
(23, Jack Conway);
Dynamite Dan
(24, Bruce Mitchell);
Lady Robin-hood
(25, Ralph Ince);
The Golden Web
(26, Walter Lang); with Lionel Barrymore in
The Bells
(26, Young);
Old Ironsides
(26, James Cruze);
Tarzan and the Golden Lion
(27, J. P. McGowan);
The Meddlin’ Stranger
(27, Richard Thorpe);
Two Arabian Knights
(27, Lewis Milestone);
The Love Mart
(28, George Fitzmaurice);
Phantom of the North
(29, Harry Webb);
The Unholy Night
(29, Barrymore);
Behind that Curtain
(29, Irving Cummings); and
The Sea Bat
(30, Wesley Ruggles).

In 1931, Hawks cast Karloff as the prisoner who works as the governor’s butler in
The Criminal Code
. Karloff had already played the part on the stage, but the film established him. Hawks recognized the way violence in Karloff was related to gravity. His butler is aloof, disapproving, a man hurt by vulgarity, a noble savage scornful of civilization. But his moment comes when he is able to kill the stool pigeon in the prison. The butler’s white coat then becomes the uniform of a vengeful angel, and the superb slow advance on the cowering victim is the first sign of the sleepy rhythm that Karloff was to bring to horror. In the same year, he had good parts in
The Public Defender
(31, J. Walter Ruben), as the Professor,
Five Star Final
(31, Mervyn Le Roy),
The Mad Genius
(31, Michael Curtiz), and
The Yellow Ticket
(31, Raoul Walsh). But he became a household name when James Whale took over the Frankenstein project and preferred Karloff to Lugosi for the monster. That part was a crucial innovation: his makeup and interpretation have remained essential to the monster ever since; above all, Karloff presented a feeling creature, a vulnerable colossus, capable of destruction but touched by beauty. As such, Karloff’s monster is an important forerunner of the madman hero, and the scene in which he and the little girl float flowers on a pond, before he kills her, has become more moving and suggestive with the years.