The New Biographical Dictionary of Film: Completely Updated and Expanded (3 page)

Since then, Adlon has moved toward a whimsical view of comedy that has won some international art-house following.
Sugarbaby
told the love story between a subway driver and a large woman who works in a funeral home. The woman was played by Marianne Sagebrecht, who went on to star in
Bagdad Cafe
and
Rosalie Goes Shopping
. These films are entertaining and serene screwball comedies, if not as challenging as
Céleste
or
The Guardian and His Poet
.

Ben
(Benjamin Geza)
Affleck
, b. Berkeley, California, 1972
Here is a test of critical responsibility. On the one hand, I have a soft spot for Mr. Affleck in that he is the only actor who has played, or is ever likely to play, the man who founded the school I attended. I refer to Edward (or Ned) Alleyne, the Shakespearian actor-manager and founder of Dulwich College, as offered in
Shakespeare in Love
(98, John Madden). I daresay I would be joined in this sentiment by other Old Alleynians—Michael Powell, Clive Brook, Leslie Howard, Raymond Chandler, P. G. Wodehouse, Michael Ondaatje, and Paul Mayersberg, among others. But I heard not one word from any of them, or from anyone, come to that, to dispute my other view that Mr. Affleck was boring, complacent, and criminally lucky to have got away with everything so far. If there was any doubt in my mind it was settled by the mere presence—and it wasn’t anything more than mere—of Affleck in the travesty called
Pearl Harbor
(01, Michael Bay).

Yet look what he has gotten away with:
The Dark End of the Street
(81, Jan Egleson); playing basketball in
Buffy the Vampire Slayer
(92, Fran Rubel Kuzui);
School Ties
(92, Robert Mandel);
Dazed and Confused
(93, Richard Linklater);
Mallrats
(95, Kevin Smith); the lead in
Chasing Amy
(97, Smith);
Going All the Way
(97, Mark Pellington); sharing in the script, and an Oscar, for
Good Will Hunting
(97, Gus Van Sant);
Phantoms
(98, Joe Chappelle);
Armageddon
(98, Michael Bay);
200 Cigarettes
(99, Risa Bramon Garcia);
Forces of Nature
(99, Bronwen Hughes);
Dogma
(99, Smith);
Boiler Room
(00, Ben Younger);
Reindeer Games
(00, John Frankenheimer);
Bounce
(00, Don Roos);
Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back
(00, Smith);
Changing Lanes
(02, Roger Michell); taking over as Jack Ryan in
The Sum of All Fears
(02, Phil Alden Robinson).

I note that, into his early thirties, he is still playing one of the lads, just as in
Pearl Harbor
he was too old to be the boyhood pal of Josh Hartnett. He then made
The Third Wheel
(02, Jordan Brady) and
Daredevil
(03, Mark Steven Johnson).
Gigli
(03, Martin Brest), a famous celebration of his love for Jennifer Lopez, is already a legendary disaster. He followed with
Paycheck
(03, John Woo) and
Jersey Girl
(04, Kevin Smith).

And then the ghost of Edward Alleyne struck? After
Clerks II
(06, Smith), he was very good as George Reeves in
Hollywoodland
(06, Allen Coulter)—not a good film, but a sign of acting. He was good again in
Man About Town
(06, Mike Binder)—playing a Hollywood agent. And, at that point he wrote and directed the excellent thriller
Gone Baby Gone
, taken from a Dennis Lehane novel. Since then, he has done
He’s Just Not That Into You
(09, Ken Kwapis);
State of Play
(09, Kevin Macdonald);
Extract
(09, Mike Judge).

James Agee
(1909–55), b. Knoxville, Tennessee
James Agee looked a lot like a young Robert Ryan; he behaved as self-destructively as Nicholas Ray; but he was only himself as a writer on film. As one of his biographers, Laurence Bergreen, has written, “To Agee movies were not primarily a form of entertainment … they were … the indigenous art form. Good or bad, vulgar or exquisite, they were, more than any literary form, the mirror of American life. They were cheap, rude, hypocritical, democratic, occasionally inspired, usually humdrum—in short, they were American. For this reason he longed to find his way, however roundabout, into them.”

I take that last remark at face value: I think it was Agee’s wish, not just to be involved with film people, in the making of the work, but—literally—to be in movies. That doesn’t refer to some masked urge to act. It’s something far more extensive: Agee wished to be perceived like a character from the best movies—intensely romantic, darkly handsome, and desirable, yet aloof, tough, moody, and doomed. Plainly, even if you know, intellectually, that some films are foolish, still, it follows that anyone wanting to live on the screen has to have faith in the grandeur and gravity of film. And so it follows that Agee’s adult life coincides with the great age of self-belief in American cinema. Indeed, in 1945, he could write, in candor, “I can think of very few contemporary books that are worth the jackets they are wrapped in; I can think of very few movies, contemporary or otherwise, which fail to show that somebody who has worked on them … has real life or energy or intensity or intelligence or talent.”

Happy days—even if from this moment in time it is easier to have more respect for books.

Agee went to Harvard, edited the
Advocate
, and took up booze and poetry in quantity. He was always a womanizer, and a mess personally, but he found a journalistic voice that lasted for about twenty years. It extended to the text for
Let Us Now Praise Famous Men
(1941), that classic of the rural Depression and hard lives, where Agee’s text went with the photographs of Walker Evans—and in which Evans’s photography shines with a sensuality that Agee delivered personally to some of the poor women. It also equipped him to be a film critic at
Time
and
The Nation
for much of the forties.

He was far from reliable—he could write off
Kane
as a reservoir of hackneyed tricks, and he was of the opinion that Chaplin and Huston were without equal in America. But he wrote like someone who had not just viewed the movie but been in it—out with it, as if it were a girl; drinking with it; driving in the night with it. That direct physical response was new, it was done with terrific dash and insight, and it surely intuited the way people responded to movies in the forties. It was also, it seems to me, a powerful influence on Pauline Kael—I have a fond dream of the two of them snarling at each other, like the characters in
The African Queen
.

Which brings us to the vexed matter of Agee’s scripts. From the mid forties on, Agee made a set at Huston—it was authentic admiration, or hero worship, but it was also a pioneering case of the movie critic lusting to sit at the all-night dinner with the big guys and walk away with a writing job. Agee worked on the script and commentary of
The Quiet One
(49, Sidney Meyers); he did a script for
The African Queen
(51, Huston), which was substantially redone by others; he did the “Bride Comes to Yellow Sky” episode from
Face to Face
(52, John Brahm and Bretaigne Windust), and he wrote the first screenplay for
The Night of the Hunter
(55, Charles Laughton).

The last was undoubtedly his most valuable work, and while Agee’s script was painfully long and literary (nearly three hundred pages), I suspect that Agee’s vision and his Tennessee roots meant a lot to Laughton as he rewrote the script and made the picture. So it comes to this: that good writing about film should be very wary of trying to get inside the business, let alone inside the screen. But how are we poor devils to be prevented once we’ve sniffed that wild air?

As if to show what might have been, three years after his death he won a Pulitzer for his novel
A Death in the Family
.

Danny
(Daniel Louis)
Aiello
, b. Brooklyn, New York, 1936
In
Once Upon a Time in America
(84, Sergio Leone), Danny Aiello plays a bullying police chief liked and trusted by no one. He has just had a baby son, but the gangsters play a trick on him by removing identifying tags and putting the baby in a room full of look-alike infants. Primogeniture gone with the wind, and all the puff and bulk of Aiello the actor seething and weeping. The name of the chief is Aiello. Draw your own conclusion.

Some students have marveled that Aiello, credited with over seventy movies in the years from 1973 till now, did nothing until the ripe old age of thirty-seven. In fact, he was for years an official in the Teamsters Union who talked his way into acting jobs. He is a natural comic, a rather good singer, and a big soft showoff who likes to be the heavy. When well cast he is a treat—but trusted with too much he can inspire that practical jokester in all film units.

I won’t give a complete list, but here are the highlights:
Bang the Drum Slowly
(73, John Hancock); Tony Rosato in
The Godfather, Part II
(74, Francis Ford Coppola);
The Front
(76, Martin Ritt);
Fingers
(78, James Toback);
Bloodbrothers
(78, Robert Mulligan);
Hide in Plain Sight
(80, James Caan);
Fort Apache, the Bronx
(81, Daniel Petrie);
Broadway Danny Rose
(84, Woody Allen); a bigger part in
The Purple Rose of Cairo
(85, Allen);
Radio Days
(87, Allen);
Man on Fire
(87, Elie Chouraqui).

His own frequent suggestion that he was worthy of bigger things was matched with larger roles:
The Pick-Up Artist
(87, Toback); the betrothed in
Moonstruck
(87, Norman Jewison);
The January Man
(89, Pat O’Connor); Sal in
Do the Right Thing
(89, Spike Lee)—for which he got a supporting-actor nomination;
Harlem Nights
(89, Eddie Murphy);
Jacob’s Ladder
(90, Adrian Lyne);
Hudson Hawk
(91, Michael Lehmann);
Mistress
(92, Barry Primus).

He had his great chance being cast—beautifully—as
Ruby
(92, John Mackenzie). He was very good, but nobody wanted to know. He had another lead in
Me and the Kid
(93, Dan Curtis). But then he tripped up completely, being cast in the lead of the sour
The Pickle
(93, Mazursky). Nothing has been quite the same since that.

But he was very good in
City Hall
(96, Harold Becker);
Two Much
(96, Fernando Trueba);
2 Days in the Valley
(96, John Herzfeld); on TV in the lead in the dreadful
The Last Don
(97–98, Graeme Clifford);
Dinner Rush
(01, Bob Giraldi);
Prince of Central Park
(00, John Leekley); a singer in
Off Key
(01, Manuel Gómez Pereira);
The Last Request
(02, John DeBellis);
Mail Order Bride
(03, Robert Capelli Jr. and Jeffrey Wolf);
Zeyda and the Hitman
(04, Melanie Mayron);
Brooklyn Lobster
(05, Kevin Jordan);
Lucky Number Slevin
(06, Paul McGuigan).

Anouk Aimée
(Françoise Sorya Dreyfus), b. Paris, 1932
Anouk—as she was originally known—is a princess of the French cinema, but a princess whose heart has been touched by Grimm cold. Those wide eyes and the grave face appeared to see a tragic destiny that could not be avoided, and that at times even held enchantment for her. She began in her teens in
La Maison Sous la Mer
(47, Henri Calef); in Carné’s unfinished
La Fleur de l’Age
(47); as a young lover on the outskirts of moviemaking in
Les Amants de Vérone
(48, André Cayatte); to England for
The Golden Salamander
(49, Ronald Neame). The part that best captured her fragile pessimism was in a short,
The Crimson Curtain
(52, Alexandre Astruc), as the girl who has a weak heart but submits nevertheless to her lover and dies. That soulful contemplation of self-destruction was borne out in
Les Mauvaises Rencontres
(55, Astruc); as one of Modigliani’s suffering women in
Montparnasse 19
(57, Jacques Becker); and as the helpless girlfriend in
La Tête Contre les Murs
(58, Georges Franju). At this time, she moved vaguely between the new French cinema—
Les Dragueurs
(59, Jean-Pierre Mocky);
Le Farceur
(60, Philippe de Broca)—“international” parts, like the nymphomaniac in
La Dolce Vita
(60, Federico Fellini); and small parts in the Resistance in
Carve Her Name with Pride
(58, Lewis Gilbert) and
The Journey
(58, Anatole Litvak).

Lola
(60, Jacques Demy) came as a surprise and a relief: at last she was allowed to giggle, flutter, to be animated, and to breathe a cryptic song into the camera—“C’est moi. C’est Lola.” The most magical of the New Wave films,
Lola
freed Princess Anouk and allowed her the flighty, romantic self-absorption of a chambermaid. However, Anouk’s newfound freedom did not result in an organized career, although she may not have cared too much, then or now. It must be said that serious roles have sometimes found her wanting. Perhaps so handsome and commanding a woman is really frivolous; certainly
Lola
has that effortless beauty that comes from relaxation.

After that, Anouk worked rather haphazardly:
L’Imprevisto
(61, Alberto Lattuada);
Il Giudizio Universale
(61, Vittorio de Sica); as one of Aldrich’s first lesbians in
Sodom and Gomorrah
(62);
Les Grands Chemins
(63, Christian Marquand); looking severe in spectacles in
8½
(63, Fellini);
Il Terrorista
(63, Gianfranco De Bosio);
A Man and a Woman
(66, Claude Lelouch), which harked back to her capacity for being hurt;
Un Soir un Train
(69, André Delvaux);
The Appointment
(69, Sidney Lumet); as Lola again, stranded in America, in
Model Shop
(69, Demy)—a resigned woman now who sells herself to the fantasies of amateur photographers.