The New Biographical Dictionary of Film: Completely Updated and Expanded (218 page)

It is not easy to chart purpose in a career in horror: the genre is subject to fashion, the reckless cheapness of many productions, and the wild variation of directors. Karloff’s work rises and falls in response to all these. He made trite, rushed movies that must have offended him. He had the obligatory encounters with
Abbott and Costello
and
The Ghost in the Invisible Bikini
(66). But most of the great horror directors appreciated him and the successive revivals of the genre renewed his enthusiasm. Say first that he made a few straight films—
Scarface
(32, Hawks);
The Lost Patrol
(34, John Ford);
The House of Rothschild
(34, Alfred Werker);
The Secret Life of Walter Mitty
(47, Norman Z. McLeod);
Unconquered
(47, Cecil B. De Mille)—and then remember his best films:
The Mummy
(32, Karl Freund);
The Mask of Fu Manchu
(32, Charles Vidor and Charles Brabin);
The Old Dark House
(32, Whale);
The Miracle Man
(32, McLeod);
The Ghoul
(33, T. Hayes Hunter);
The Black Cat
(34, Edgar G. Ulmer);
The Bride of Frankenstein
(35, Whale);
The Raven
(35, Lew Landers);
The Invisible Ray
(36, Hillyer);
The Walking Dead
(36, Curtiz);
The Man They Could Not Hang
(39, Nick Grinde);
Son of Frankenstein
(39, Rowland V. Lee);
The Tower of London
(39, Lee);
Before I Hang
(40, Grinde);
The Devil Commands
(41, Edward Dmytryk);
The House of Frankenstein
(45, Erle C. Kenton);
The Body Snatcher
(45, Robert Wise);
Isle of the Dead
(45, Mark Robson);
Bedlam
(46, Robson);
Tap Roots
(48, George Marshall);
The Strange Door
(51, Joseph Pevney);
The Raven
(62, Corman);
The Terror
(62, Corman);
Black Sabbath
(63, Mario Bava);
Comedy of Terrors
(64, Jacques Tourneur); and
Die, Monster, Die
(65, Daniel Haller).

Phil Karlson
(Philip N. Karlstein) (1908–85), b. Chicago
1944:
A Wave, a Wac and a Marine
. 1945:
There Goes Kelly; G.I. Honeymoon; The Shanghai Cobra
. 1946:
Live Wires; Swing Parade of 1946; Dark Alibi; Behind the Mask; Bowery Bombshell; The Missing Lady; Wife Wanted
. 1947:
Black Gold; Louisiana; Kilroy Was Here
. 1948:
Rocky; Adventures in Silverado; Thunderhoof
. 1949:
The Big Cat; Ladies of the Chorus; Down Memory Lane
. 1950:
The Iroquois Trail
. 1951:
Lorna Doone; The Texas Rangers; Mask of the Avenger
. 1952:
Scandal Sheet; The Brigand; Kansas City Confidential
. 1953:
99 River Street
. 1954:
They Rode West
. 1955:
Hell’s Island; Tight Spot; Five Against the House; The Phenix City Story
. 1957:
The Brothers Rico
. 1958:
Gunman’s Walk
. 1959:
The Scarface Mob
. 1960:
Hell to Eternity; Key Witness
. 1961:
The Secret Ways; The Young Doctors
. 1962:
Kid Galahad
. 1963:
Rampage
. 1966:
The Silencers
. 1967:
A Time for Killing/The Long Ride Home
. 1968:
The Wrecking Crew
. 1970:
Hornets’ Nest
. 1972:
Ben
. 1973:
Walking Tall
. 1974:
Framed
.

Karlson has a modest but secure place in the history of crime movies with
Scandal Sheet, The Phenix City Story, The Brothers Rico
, and
The Scarface Mob
. It took some fifteen years of odd jobs around the industry before he directed. Karlson had a long duty as assistant director:
The Countess of Monte Cristo
(34, Karl Freund);
Manhattan Moon
(35, Stuart Walker);
Rio
(39, John Brahm); and
Seven Sinners
(40, Tay Garnett). He soon showed himself a competent director of adventure pictures, but had an especially fertile period with violent, urban thrillers. The acute sense of corruption in
Phenix City Story
is several years ahead of a general acknowledgment of sordid city life in America. While in
Five Against the House
he made one of the most exciting planned-crime movies, aided by the sultry presence of a young Kim Novak. Also notable are the character studies in his Western,
Gunman’s Walk
, and the uninhibited brutality of an early European espionage movie,
The Secret Ways
. His final work lacked the impact of the pictures made in the middle and late 1950s.

Lawrence Kasdan
, b. Miami Beach, Florida, 1949
1981:
Body Heat
. 1983:
The Big Chill
. 1985:
Silverado
. 1988:
The Accidental Tourist
. 1990:
I Love You to Death
. 1991:
Grand Canyon
. 1994:
Wyatt Earp
. 1995:
French Kiss
. 1999:
Mumford
. 2003:
Dreamcatcher
.

After receiving a B.A. and then an M.A. from the University of Michigan, Kasdan became an advertising copywriter in Detroit and then in Los Angeles. By the late seventies he was trying his hand as a screenwriter. This led to a cowriting credit on
The Empire Strikes Back
(80, Irvin Kershner), and then to the start of his own directing career.

Body Heat
was a brilliant thriller: it captured place and weather as well as a real feeling for erotic moment. It used William Hurt cleverly; it made Kathleen Turner’s career, so that several other less focused roles hardly shook her from her place.
Body Heat
was old-fashioned, and as simpleminded as it was complicated. But it works better than Kasdan’s later efforts to give us people truer to ordinary life.

The Big Chill
seems to me like a smart gloss rather than a real portrait; so much is going on nothing searching is expected.
Silverado
felt relentlessly wooden.
The Accidental Tourist
underlined the fact that Anne Tyler could be a TV dramatist as well as a novelist if she had lived in Britain, whereas in America she has no reason to go beyond the page. On
I Love You to Death
, Kasdan later believed he had erred in rejecting awkward, ugly elements in favor of smoothness.

Grand Canyon
was something more. It has large faults—too much tidiness, an overly benevolent view of blacks, an inescapable but hollow ending, and the insistent unreality of Steve Martin in a cast striving for the mundane. But
Grand Canyon
caught the mood of L.A. in the age of Rodney King, and it is an unconscious record of Hollywood’s pious liberalism. Very few American films outside Altman have had so interesting a sense of the crowded context in which we live. The film gave a hint of a Kasdan who was not happy with his own narrative choices, and had found a reason to put them aside. But if he developed and improved along that resolute line, could he be employed? His next picture proved to be not an advance into danger, but a throwback—
Wyatt Earp
, with Kevin Costner seeking to rekindle memories of
My Darling Clementine
.

What had happened to Kasdan?
Wyatt Earp
was 195 minutes, and not just the dullest Earp film but one exposed by
Tombstone
, made in the same year. Not that Kasdan’s picture was bursting with new ambitions, or a fresh vision of the frontier. But
French Kiss
was the real disaster, far too charming for its own good. As for
Mumford
, it was decent, observant, and benign, but somehow there seemed to be a pall of solemnity, drawn up above the head, by a talent that had begun to flinch from film’s essential energy or force. It’s a progress that leaves one more aware of the deep disquiet
Grand Canyon
represented.

Kasdan has also written or helped to write films for others:
Continental Divide
(81, Michael Apted);
Raiders of the Lost Ark
(81, Steven Spielberg);
The Return of the Jedi
(83, Richard Marquand)—it might be fascinating to see Kasdan try a movie about a figure like Steven Spielberg. Though it is more likely that Anne Tyler would do a better job in a novel.

His years-on-the-shelf script led to
The Bodyguard
(92, Mick Jackson), which Kasdan coproduced. It is now close to ten years since his last credit.

Philip Kaufman
, b. Chicago, 1936
1965:
Goldstein
. 1969:
Fearless Frank
. 1972:
The Great Northfield Minnesota Raid
. 1974:
The White Dawn
. 1978: I
nvasion of the Body Snatchers
. 1979:
The Wanderers
. 1983:
The Right Stuff
. 1988:
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
. 1990:
Henry & June
. 1993:
Rising Sun
. 2000:
Quills
. 2004:
Twisted
.

Phil Kaufman has sometimes been described as a “maverick” filmmaker, someone who has deliberately set himself apart from the Hollywood stream. He lives just a few blocks away from where I am writing, in San Francisco, and for going on twenty-five years now, we have been friendly. Phil has striven to keep his base in the Bay Area, without ever becoming an identified part of the Lucas or Coppola groups. Wherever he has filmed, he brings his movies back here for postproduction. When he prepared, he worked closely with his wife, Rose (cowriter on
The Wanderers
and
Henry & June
), and his son, Peter (who produced
Rising Sun
). And while he has eschewed Los Angeles, he has built his allure as a top director in that city. That is more than steadfast northern Californian; it is downright adroit.

He does have to be an American filmmaker, and I’m sure he hopes for American success. The sharpest moment in that life of hope was
The Right Stuff
, his best film (I believe) and the most painful commercial failure. That adaptation of Tom Wolfe’s book draws on two of Phil’s great strengths, even if it discovered a conflict between them: he is romantic about American heroes, and thus he loved Sam Shepard’s presence as a Gary Cooper-like Yeager, as phlegmatic and unaffected as chewing gum at Mach 1. But Kaufman has an ironic cast of mind and a wary, critical (if not satirical) view of American pomp, cant, and circumstance. And so in
The Right Stuff
he reveled in the hype and crazy self-deception of the Moon program. He made a movie that was classical and subversive at the same time.

It remains a model for anyone who cares to look at it, a bold, dangerous, and uncategorizable picture (maybe the last movie of the heroic 1970s). Kaufman’s script was publishable—he had wanted to be a novelist once. His delight in gangs of good actors was proven in what is a monument to supporting players. The picture was comic and inspiring; it was as if someone had managed to make a mix of Preston Sturges, Capra, and Anthony Mann.
The Right Stuff
got flying, the sky, the desert, flimflam, team spirit, cartoon, and an Ivesian noise or tumult. Moreover, Phil managed to film great chunks of it in disguised and ingeniously reinvented parts of the Bay Area.

The film failed. Audiences, I think, didn’t quite want it. The project’s original writer, William Goldman, made an interesting case for commercial confusion in Kaufman’s approach (Goldman dropped out after they attempted collaboration) as the Yeager spirit battled the NASA ale-and-quail club. This is possible, yet it may only be a way of defining Kaufman’s originality. As time passes, only the achievement survives.

But the boxoffice failure urged Kaufman into trying to make American European films. He seemed to agree with the numbers: he must be too intelligent, too artistic, too much the outsider. So Paris became his setting for much of two films, the adaptation of Milan Kundera and Anaïs Nin.

The Unbearable Lightness
did not, could not, convey Kundera’s spiral of thought or expression. It also refashioned his hero and, in Daniel Day-Lewis, found an actor too young, too pretty. The weary fatalism of the book was sacrificed. But in its place Kaufman did justice to Prague of 1968, to the politics, and to the women. It was a far better study of sex, love, and jealousy than
Henry & June
would prove, and it drew a brilliant performance from Lena Olin and a great one from Juliette Binoche.

Henry & June
had to live under the spurious clamor of being the first NC-17 film. In addition, it showed how hard it is for anyone to like Nin as much as she liked herself. And as she became a pain in the neck, so it was easier to see that Henry Miller was monotonous and self-centered. I found the film arty and showy, and too obviously the work of an American infatuated with bohemianism.

Commercially, the two films were failures, and Kaufman sought return to the mainstream with
Rising Sun
. In hindsight, I wish that his European films had had American characters. For while Kaufman is plainly open to Europe and the whole world in ways not common in Hollywood (his family lived in Europe in the early sixties), his strength may be in seeing the outside through American eyes. After all, in his early pictures, Kaufman was often intent on Americana: the James gang; the frozen north as experienced by a variety of Americans; empty bodies in San Francisco.

Rising Sun
was probably too deft, too wry, and quick, to be a big hit. In the end, it was just a police story shadowboxing with the question of Japanese character and intent. Sean Connery’s hero was a little too independent to be true, and finally the picture lacked pain or shock.