The New Biographical Dictionary of Film: Completely Updated and Expanded (265 page)

In his last years, Malle won a reputation as a smart, shrewd, but discerning “international” director.
Atlantic City
is a droll, noirish picture, and
My Dinner with Andre
was deemed a model of piquant originality in its day. But does anyone want to see it again? In recollection, it seems a meal to avoid, the meeting of two fabricated creatures, caught in a conversation enough to take away one’s appetite. Even
Atlantic City
suffers a little from the cutes—and benefits from its writer, John Guare, from the raffish, aging heroics of Burt Lancaster, and the lemony fragrance of Susan Sarandon (who was Malle’s squeeze at the time).

Elsewhere?
Crackers
and
Alamo Bay
are mistakes, without touch or understanding.
Au Revoir les Enfants
is Malle at his best in its story of children, Jewishness, loyalty, and betrayal during the war.
May Fools
is a sidebar, and
Damage
is a meretricious horror novel dressed up as something momentous. There is something subservient in Malle’s devotion to its very nasty, rigged plot and to its hollow people. As so often, Malle seemed like a minor figure with pretensions to mastery. His eminence spoke to grave shortages of competition.

Dorothy Malone
(Dorothy Eloise Maloney), b. Chicago, 1925
She came into the movies during the war in small roles in
Falcon and the Co-Eds
(43, William Clemens),
One Mysterious Night
(44, Budd Boetticher),
Show Business
(44, Edwin L. Marin), and
Hollywood Canteen
(45, Delmer Daves), but her first impact was in Hawks’s
The Big Sleep
(46), letting down her hair, removing her glasses, and shutting up shop while she entertained Bogart one thundery afternoon. She was always a bonus, never a star, and seldom used to the full, but quickly looking more mature than her age, soulful and lived in, a great lady of the B picture.

She soon outgrew ingenues: Curtiz’s
Night and Day
(46);
Two Guys from Texas
(48, David Butler); Walsh’s
One Sunday Afternoon
(49) and
Colorado Territory
(49); Daves’s
To the Victor
(48);
South of St. Louis
(49, Ray Enright);
The Nevadan
(50, Gordon Douglas); Quine’s
Pushover
(54); Siegel’s
Private Hell 36
(54);
Young at Heart
(55, Douglas);
Battle Cry
(55, Walsh), with one splendid erotic moment when she undresses in an armchair; Corman’s
Five Guns West
(55); especially brazen for Douglas Sirk as the headstrong sister in
Written on the Wind
(56), for which she won a supporting actress Oscar; and
The Tarnished Angels
(57) as a parachutist, wife, mother, and lover. Sirk’s films demand self-belief in players, and Malone steered her wanton women past absurdity by sheer languorous conviction. She was also in
Pillars of the Sky
(56, George Marshall);
Tension at Table Rock
(56, Charles Marquis Warren);
Man of a Thousand Faces
(57, Joseph Pevney);
Tip on a Dead Jockey
(57, Richard Thorpe); as Diana Barrymore in
Too Much, Too Soon
(58, Art Napoleon);
Warlock
(59, Edward Dmytryk); horribly trapped throughout
The Last Voyage
(60, Andrew L. Stone); and
The Last Sunset
(61, Robert Aldrich). She then went into TV for
Peyton Place
, but has been seen in
Gli Insaziabili
(69, Alberto de Martino);
Abduction
(75, Joseph Zito);
The November Plan
(76, Don Medford);
Golden Rendezvous
(77, Ashley Lazarus);
Winter Kills
(79, William Richert);
The Day Time Ended
(80, John Cardos);
Good Luck, Miss Wyckoff
(79, Marvin J. Chomsky);
Condominium
(80, Sidney Hyers);
The Being
(83, Jackie Kong);
He’s Not Your Son
(84, Don Taylor);
Peyton Place: The Next Generation
(85, Larry Elikann); and
Rest in Peace
(86, Joseph Braunstein).

Then, after a few years away, she returned briefly as a sad-eyed but polite veteran of murder in
Basic Instinct
(92, Paul Verhoeven), one of the few understated things in that picture, and thus all the more tempting—if only the movie could have gone off with her.

David Mamet
, b. Chicago, 1947
1987:
House of Games
. 1988:
Things Change
. 1991:
Homicide
. 1994:
Oleanna
. 1997:
The Spanish Prisoner
. 1999:
The Winslow Boy
. 2000:
State and Main; Catastrophe
(s). 2001:
Heist
. 2004:
Spartan
. 2005:
Edmond
. 2008:
Redbelt
.

Prolific, hooked on the Ping-Pong of idiomatic dialogue that sometimes rules entire plays, Mamet has not established a character in movies as more than a cold, skilled mechanic. The films he has directed are games, or intrigues, but neither playful nor absorbing: the flamboyantly shallow Joe Mantegna seems like Mamet’s ideal actor, grabbing attention but warding off scrutiny. Mamet’s work has more power in the theatre—
American Buffalo
, especially—where he seems more comfortable trapped in time and space.
Speed-the-Plow
was overpraised as a play, for it does little more than run with the grisly riffs of two Hollywood men. But Mamet is altogether too beguiled by the staccato boasting of showoff guys.
Speed-the-Plow
had some satirical cutes, but it had nothing to wound the objects of the satire. Indeed, they loved it.

Mamet has done screenplays for
The Postman Always Rings Twice
(81, Bob Rafelson);
The Verdict
(82, Sidney Lumet);
The Untouchables
(87, Brian De Palma);
Lip Service
(88, W. H. Macy—for TV);
We’re No Angels
(89, Neil Jordan); and
Glengarry Glen Ross
(92, James Foley), from his own Pulitzer Prize–winning play. But only
The Untouchables
caught the rattling tone of his plays, and only
The Verdict
(from a Barry Reed novel) had the smell of reality and place or the ruined lives and comical subterfuge of his plays.

One of the best things about
The Verdict
is the playing of Lindsay Crouse, Mamet’s wife from 1977 to 1989. She is also the central figure in
House of Games
, so grimly controlling that the film closes around her enigma. Women are not quite Mamet’s subject—as witness the nonevent of Madonna in
Speed-the-Plow
.

It seems to me that movie exposes the limits of a Mamet, just as it teaches us the self-satisfied tricks in a Pinter. To see Foley’s
Glengarry Glen Ross
and the TV movie of Pinter’s
Old Times
(90, Simon Curtis) was to discover the time-killing aridness in brilliant situations, crackling talk, and magnificent acting. How could such great actors be such wretched salesmen? It’s a question that slowly collapses the movie as it proceeds, and leaves one aware of Mamet’s imprisoned cruelty, the sadism that dots every “i.”

In the nineties, Mamet has concentrated increasingly on movies—at the expense of play-writing. In hindsight, his very creative script for
Hoffa
(92, Danny DeVito) looks a vital step in that progress, and a welcome sign of human and social character. On the whole, however, the enclosed aridity remains—even with Mamet’s new wife, Rebecca Pidgeon, in it,
The Winslow Boy
seemed a very odd choice, and the movie of
Oleanna
rang more false than the stage show. But
The Spanish Prisoner
was an intriguing puzzle, and
State and Main
even had hints of relaxation.

Mamet has remained active as a screenwriter, though I can’t say that the films made by others are any worse than, or distinct from, those he has done himself:
A Life in the Theater
(93, Gregory Mosher);
Vanya on 42nd Street
(94, Louis Malle);
Texan
(94, Treat Williams);
American Buffalo
(96, Michael Corrente);
The Edge
(97, Lee Tamahori);
Wag the Dog
(97, Barry Levinson);
Ronin
(98, John Frankenheimer);
Lansky
(99, John McNaughton);
Hannibal
(01, Ridley Scott), written with Steven Zaillian;
Lakeboat
(01, Mantegna).

He made a big departure in 2008 with the martial arts film
Redbelt
, which did no worse than many other films in the same genre.

Rouben Mamoulian
(1897–1987), b. Tiflis, Russia
1929:
Applause
. 1931:
City Streets
. 1932:
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde; Love Me Tonight
. 1933:
Song of Songs
. 1934:
Queen Christina; We Live Again
. 1935:
Becky Sharp
. 1936:
The Gay Desperado
. 1937:
High, Wide and Handsome
. 1939:
Golden Boy
. 1940:
The Mark of Zorro
. 1941:
Blood and Sand
. 1942:
Rings on Her Fingers
. 1947:
Summer Holiday
. 1952:
The Wild Heart
(U.S. version of Michael Powell’s
Gone to Earth
, with extensive fresh material by Mamoulian). 1957:
Silk Stockings
.

Mamoulian’s is a fascinating career—like one of his own movies, a garland of pretty blooms held together without obvious support. Few other directors of his facility worked so spasmodically in movies, or made such disparate material unmistakably their own. What seems at first sight a disordered involvement in cinema is based on the most profound and fruitful integrity: Mamoulian, despite a distinguished career in the theatre, recognized that films were a matter of light and sound gracefully rendered on celluloid. At times, his ingenuity led him into preciousness, but much more often he succeeded on his own terms—the wish to blend movement, dancing, action, music, singing, decor, and lighting into one seething entity. His films rustle with sound and shimmer with the movement of light on faces, color, and decoration. More than any other director—more than Lubitsch, even—he should be known for his touch.

Educated at the universities of Moscow and London, Mamoulian also studied at the Moscow Arts Theatre. He first directed for the stage in London in 1922 and the next year joined the American Opera Company. That began a career as a stage director that ran concurrently with his work in the cinema. His first five films were made at Paramount and are notable for their exploration of sound and for their ranging between emotional intensity and satire on forced feelings.
Applause
is one of the best early sound films, with fascinating location work in New York. In
Applause
and
City Streets
, based on a story by Dashiell Hammett, Mamoulian evolved a highly wrought imagery, with shadow effects and camera movements, that comes to a climax in the magnificent
Jekyll and Hyde
. Just as Mamoulian had brought out the tragedy in a musical (
Applause
) and comedy in a gangster film (
City Streets
), so his
Jekyll and Hyde
is a horror film that barely seems frightening because of its emotional basis and because of the conviction Mamoulian brings to his Paramount London and to the idea of transformation. Given the swashbuckling
Mark of Zorro
, he managed to convey the impression of Tyrone Power and Basil Rathbone dancing to an unheard score.

Love Me Tonight
is an hour of originality, a little too unrelenting to be appealing: a weirdly clever opening montage of street sound effects; rhyming dialogue; immense tracking shots; a parody of
Congress Dances;
suspended dissolves; and Chevalier doing the Apache song with his own shadow huge on the wall behind him. Each detail is fetching, but it is Mamoulian’s failing that they do not add up and that the invention is glitteringly ostentatious. This stylistic precociousness did not improve Mamoulian’s relations with the studios and few of his films were commercial successes. He is known, too, for the first Technicolor movie,
Becky Sharp
, even though the color is bitter and its use far too schematic, despite the miracle of pique flushing Miriam Hopkins’s avid face.

Mamoulian’s best films are often the least known or admired.
Queen Christina
is not as good as its famous set pieces, the bedroom scene, and the last close-up for which Mamoulian instructed Garbo: “I want your face to be a blank sheet of paper. I want the writing to be done by every member of the audience.” Much better are
High, Wide and Handsome, Summer Holiday
, and
Silk Stockings
, three musicals outside the general pattern of the form and all critically neglected. The first is a period musical, with Jerome Kern songs and extraordinary set pieces; the second is an adaptation of Eugene O’Neill’s
Ah, Wilderness!
with enchanting smalltown atmosphere and open-air routines (Mamoulian later did
Oklahoma!
on stage); the last, a remake of
Ninotchka
, with Astaire and Cyd Charisse, has some of the best intimate dances in the history of the musical, subduing the expanses of CinemaScope screen and, in its amused but insistent preference for American glamour to Soviet rationality, reminding us that Mamoulian was an exile.

There is an interesting sidelight to Mamoulian’s career of credits narrowly won and lost. He directed
Becky Sharp
only when the original director, Lowell Sherman, died. Against that, he worked on the script and rehearsed
Laura
before being replaced by Otto Preminger. As if that was not loss enough, he was intended to direct
Porgy and Bess
—he had directed the original stage production—but once again Preminger intervened. Last, Mamoulian began
Cleopatra
before the journeymen hacks, Mankiewicz and Darryl F. Zanuck, squandered its potential.