The New Biographical Dictionary of Film: Completely Updated and Expanded (290 page)

Molander lasted longer than the two other founding figures of the Swedish industry, Stiller and Sjostrom. When nearly eighty, he returned to direct a Maupassant-based episode from
Stimulantia
starring Ingrid Bergman, his great discovery of the 1930s. He had directed the young Bergman in
Pa Solsidan, Intermezzo, En Enda Natt
, and
En Kvinnnas Ansikte
. When Bergman went to America, Selznick offered an invitation to Molander as well. But the Swede may have recollected the way Stiller was cut adrift so that Garbo should be made the studio’s property, and he elected to remain in Sweden. Little of his work is well known, but
Ordet
, from a play by Kaj Munk, is a moving allegory about the raising from the dead of a young farm girl, starring Victor Sjöström. (A decade later, it was remade by Carl Dreyer.) However, it seems that the majority of Molander’s work is far lighter than this, with an emphasis on romantic comedy. As well as launching Ingrid Bergman, he was married to the actress Karin Molander from 1910 to 1918, and was Garbo’s first teacher at the Royal Dramatic Theatre, Stockholm.

Molander had himself acted in Finland and Sweden, and he entered films originally as a writer:
Millers Dokument
(16, Konrad Tallroth);
Terje Vigen
(17, Sjostrom), from an Ibsen poem;
Thomas Graals Basta Film
(17, Stiller), with Karin Molander in the cast; and then a few years later,
Gunnar Hedes Saga
(23, Stiller).

Marilyn Monroe
(Norma Jean Mortenson) (1926–62), b. Los Angeles
There have been so many extensive postmortems of Marilyn Monroe that we can do without one more. They all err in interpreting a life that was unordered. Norman Mailer’s “novel” about her shows how far her untidiness has preyed upon America’s sense of itself. If her own experience was hopelessly beyond her, it is best to try to collect some of the broken pieces that she was unable to sort into a recognizable shape: 1. Consider the huge social and intellectual journey of an orphan, married at sixteen to a smalltown policeman; in her twenties to Joe DiMaggio, national baseball hero; and in her thirties to Arthur Miller, epitome of American radical intellect. Not that any marriage lasted, or that there were not other liaisons, some entered into with an attempt at the calculated opportunism of Lorelei Lee in
Gentlemen Prefer Blondes
(53, Howard Hawks), and others with the battered romanticism of Sugar in
Some Like It Hot
(59, Billy Wilder).

2. In the late 1940s and early 1950s she had small parts in some dozen undistinguished movies. The clothes of the time were lavish and fussy but could not conceal the alienation of such a body from so blank and pursed a face. No one could see
Ladies of the Chorus
(49, Phil Karlson);
A Ticket to Tomahawk
(50, Richard Sale);
The Fireball
(50, Tay Garnett);
Right Cross
(50, John Sturges);
As Young As You Feel
(51, Harmon Jones);
Love Nest
(51, Joseph M. Newman);
Let’s Make It Legal
(51, Sale); or
We’re Not Married
(52, Edmund Goulding) without recognizing her as the archetypal forlorn starlet.

3. But scattered through these early years there are cameos of unusual impact in which she plays versions of the sexual careerist protected by an older and wiser man, or at least illuminated by the attention of a worldly male. That is true of Groucho’s lascivious hounding of her in
Love Happy
(50, David Miller) and of George Winslow’s solicitousness for her predicament in a porthole in
Gentlemen Prefer Blondes
. But the most interesting instances occur in
The Asphalt Jungle
(50, John Huston) and
All About Eve
(50, Joseph L. Mankiewicz). In the first she is the callow mistress of gangster Louis Calhern, seen spread out on a sofa in the first truly erotic image of her career. She barely comprehends the world about her but, as he faces disgrace, Calhern wryly predicts “a lot of trips” lying ahead of her. In the second, she is the dummy amid all Mankiewicz’s sophisticates, arriving at the party on George Sanders’s arm. The film and Sanders patronize her, seeing sexual connivance as her sole tool. Sanders introduces her as a graduate of the Copacabana School of Dramatic Art and says, “I can see your career rising in the East like the sun.” She has to swallow the mockery—or act dumb.

4. These situations, as well as the attitude toward her of other actors, reflected the knowledge at the Fox studios that she was picked out for higher things. Gossip would not have been slow to provide the means by which she negotiated the executive office. Monroe herself, or her advisors, engineered a whole battery of publicity stunts, the most famous of which were the nude photographs, themselves redolent of a smalltown girl’s imprecise notions of sexual glory.

5. In 1952, she ventured outside her plastic personality to play the young, fishpacking wife in
Clash by Night
(52, Fritz Lang). Lang had trouble with her reliance on dialogue coaches and with her already fazed memory for lines and action. He saw a contradiction within her: “She was a very peculiar mixture of shyness and uncertainty and—I wouldn’t say ‘star allure’—but … she knew exactly her impact on men.” Knowingness and uncertainty or, as Ginger Rogers and Cary Grant say of her in
Monkey Business
(52, Hawks), half child, but not the half that shows.

6. By 1952–53, Fox began to thrust her out at the public in salacious publicity and a mixed bag of films:
Don’t Bother to Knock
(52, Roy Baker);
Niagara
(53, Henry Hathaway);
How to Marry a Millionaire
(53, Jean Negulesco);
River of No Return
(54, Otto Preminger); and
There’s No Business Like Show Business
(54, Walter Lang). These were leading parts, and it must be said that she seldom escapes ordinariness and is often jittery. The long takes of a Preminger were more than she could survive. Badly dressed, as in
Show Business
and
Niagara
, she looked a mess. Called on to play an unbalanced girl in
Don’t Bother to Knock
, her own immature personality disabled her. However, her looks did improve during this period: her hair abandoned curl for swathes; she was taught to widen her eyes, and her mouth slipped open—as it is in Andy Warhol’s painting. To control shyness, she moved with a fanciful, comic lethargy. If she sometimes resembled a sleepwalker, perhaps that showed how many dreams impelled her.

7. As the contrast between her image of voluptuousness and the reality of near-breakdown became more extreme, so her films became wondering, and even sniggering, comments on the paradox. George Axelrod’s play
The Seven Year Itch
(55, Billy Wilder) emphasized Monroe’s ignorance of the effect she was making and used Tom Ewell as a surrogate dirty old man tormented by such stupid opportunity.
Bus Stop
(56, Joshua Logan) was her most touching film and the nearest she came to recognizable character. But
The Prince and the Showgirl
(57, Laurence Olivier) was condescending to her, and
Some Like It Hot
(59, Wilder) had her as the yielding instrument of a funny but dirty joke, made to ply Tony Curtis with herself to restore his virility, but also coarsened by the two exquisite studies in drag. Crackup was signaled portentously in
The Misfits
(60, Huston), from an Arthur Miller script, in which she postured vaguely as the spirit of kind nature.

8. If she rarely seemed at ease or comprehending in dialogue scenes, her musical numbers are delightful: “Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend” from
Blondes;
“That Old Black Magic” from
Bus Stop;
“One Silver Dollar” and “I Gotta File My Claim” in
River of No Return;
“I Want to Be Loved by You” in
Some Like It Hot
, and above all, “My Heart Belongs to Daddy” from
Let’s Make Love
(60, George Cukor). Cukor was the director of her last project—
Something’s Got to Give
, at Fox. She was fired from it for persistent lateness, and committed suicide shortly thereafter. But not before Fox had filmed tests in which she is radiant and calmer than she ever managed in a film. In addition, she did a nude scene beside a pool—hopelessly coy with her rawness, like a waitress who has seen a Rubens.

9. The viewer must decide when or whether she had talent, whether she was a comedienne or a voluptuous ideal laughed at by her films. It seems to me difficult to accept her as a tragic figure, because she was hardly able to grasp what was happening to her. But one substantial realization came out of her career: even if morbidly, the public was made aware of the special destruction that may attend a star.

10. The wisdom of hindsight. She is like the Kennedys. Mailer noticed how she edged into their look. Gossip has ensured that we can hardly now detach her life and death from the rumor of links to Jack and Bobby. As with the Kennedys, there is no fatigue in her legend. Her fame increases, and as it does so we see how far she depended on, and excelled in, photographs—not movies. She gave great still. She is funnier in stills, sexier, more mysterious, and protected against being. And still pictures may yet triumph over movies in the history of media. For stills are more available to the imagination.

Yves Montand
(Ivo Livi) (1921–91), b. Monsummano Alto, Italy
So the perfect Frenchman was Italian. How authentic, then, is that spirit of black-coffee worldliness that Montand seemed to generate so effortlessly? In a way, one feels guilty of mistrusting him. In two films for Costa-Gavras—
Z
(68) and
L’Aveu
(70)—he acted out the left-wing principles that he was known for in his public life. And yet, I cannot forget how easily he slid into the odiously fake world of Claude Lelouch in
Vivre pour Vivre
(67). His face seemed made for the glib revelation of Lelouch’s hurried emotional journalism, and the unprincipled mixture of cheap romantic melodrama and supposed commitment to the world’s travails seemed to fit Montand’s professional shrug to the inch. Although an actor who relied on mature appeal, he seemed always a little shifty. His face in repose was sulky and calculating, and the smile that appeared when he knew he was being observed could have been pulled open by strings.

He went to France while very young and lived in Marseilles. From music hall, he went into movies and had a striking postwar debut:
Etoile sans Lumière
(45, Marcel Blistène);
Les Portes de la Nuit
(46, Marcel Carné);
Souvenirs Perdus
(49, Christian-Jaque); the international success of
The Wages of Fear
(53, H.-G. Clouzot);
Napoleon
(55, Sacha Guitry);
Les Héros Sont Fatigués
(55, Yves Ciampi);
Marguerite de la Nuit
(55, Claude Autant-Lara);
Uomini e Lupi
(56, Giuseppe de Santis); in an episode from
Die Vind Rose
(56, Yannik Bellon);
Les Sorcières de Salem
(57, Raymond Rouleau), the latter with his wife, Simone Signoret; and
La Grande Strada Azzurra
(57, Gillo Pontecorvo). After
La Loi
(58, Jules Dassin), he went to Hollywood, but failed as an “international” star; as the essentially unmalleable material in
Let’s Make Love
(60, George Cukor), famously involved with Monroe; as a bowdlerized Popeye in
Sanctuary
(61, Tony Richardson); as the philanderer in
Goodbye Again
(61, Anatole Litvak); and in
My Geisha
(62, Jack Cardiff).

After that, he was based in Europe with occasional forays to America:
The Sleeping Car Murders
(65, Costa-Gavras); very good in
La Guerre Est Finie
(66, Alain Resnais);
Grand Prix
(66, John Frankenheimer);
Mr. Freedom
(68, William Klein);
Un Soir … un Train
(69, André Delvaux);
Le Diable par la Queue
(69, Philippe de Broca);
On a Clear Day You Can See Forever
(70, Vincente Minnelli);
Le Cercle Rouge
(70, Jean-Pierre Melville);
La Folie des Grandeurs
(71, Gerard Oury);
Tout Va Bien
(72, Jean-Luc Godard and Jean-Pierre Gorin);
Etat de Siège
(73, Costa-Gavras);
Le Sauvage
(75, Jean-Paul Rappeneau);
Vincent, François, Paul et les Autres
(75, Claude Sautet);
Flashback
(77, Alain Corneau);
La Menace
(77, Corneau); and
The Roads to the South
(78, Joseph Losey).

In his final decade, Montand did maybe his best and most challenging work:
Clair de Femme
(79, Costa-Gavras);
I Comme Icare
(80, Henri Verneuil); as a veteran crook in
Le Choix des Armes
(81, Corneau), playing with Deneuve and Depardieu;
Tout Feu, Tout Flamme
(82, Jean-Paul Rappenau);
Garçon!
(83, Sautet); superb in
Jean de Florette
(86, Claude Berri) and
Manon des Sources
(86, Berri); as an artful projection of himself in
Trois Places pour le 26
(88, Jacques Demy); and
IP5
(92, Jean-Jacques Beneix).

Robert Montgomery
(Henry Montgomery Jr.) (1904–81), b. Fishkill Landing, New York
For more than a decade, Montgomery was an elegant leading man in romantic confections at MGM, rarely boosted, more often treated as an arm for the studio’s star actresses. He had worked in the New York theatre before a debut in
So This Is College
(29, Sam Wood) and a contract with MGM. For the next seven or eight years, his work hardly altered: with Joan Crawford in
Untamed
(29, Jack Conway); better in
The Big House
(30, George Hill); with Norma Shearer in
The Divorcee
(30, Robert Z. Leonard);
Sins of the Children
(30, Wood); with Garbo in
Inspiration
(31, Clarence Brown); Constance Bennett in
The Easiest Way
(31, Conway); Shearer in
Private Lives
(31, Sidney Franklin); with Crawford in
Letty Lynton
(32, Brown); opposite Marion Davies in
Blondie of the Follies
(32, Edmund Goulding);
Night Flight
(33, Brown); with Shearer in
Riptide
(34, Goulding); in
Hide-Out
(34) and
Forsaking All Others
(34), both for W. S. Van Dyke; with Helen Hayes in
Vanessa
(35, William K. Howard); with Crawford in
No More Ladies
(35, Edward H. Griffith);
Piccadilly Jim
(36, Leonard); and with Crawford again in
The Last of Mrs. Cheyney
(37, Richard Boleslavsky).