The New Biographical Dictionary of Film: Completely Updated and Expanded (33 page)

Still, Belafonte is really a more exemplary show-business figure—and one with every bit as blighted a career as Dandridge’s. From an early life of real poverty in New York and Jamaica, he became a very popular singer of folk music and especially calypso. It was Belafonte who made “Banana Boat” so popular, and who seemed a very “nice” light-skinned, handsome, polite black in the fifties. However, he was a radical and an activist, and a man with a great deal of justified anger—not least at the way he was used in pictures:
Bright Road
(53, Gerald Mayer), in which he played with Dandridge;
Island in the Sun
(57, Robert Rossen), in which he was allowed to kiss Joan Fontaine; as a survivor of nuclear disaster, with Inger Stevens, in
The World, the Flesh and the Devil
(59, Ranald MacDougall).

His own production company was the driving force behind the exceptionally tough and bleak
Odds Against Tomorrow
(59, Robert Wise), after which some kind of blackballing seems to have set in. It broke his promising career, and it was ten years before Belafonte began doing films again:
The Angel Levine
(70, Jan Kadar), with Zero Mostel;
Buck and the Preacher
(72, Sidney Poitier); very funny in
Uptown Saturday Night
(74, Poitier); he then coproduced
Beat Street
(84, Stan Latham); and then after bits in
The Player
(92, Robert Altman) and
Ready to Wear
(94, Altman), he did his best film work, as the sardonic gangster in
Kansas City
(96, Altman). He also appeared in
White Man’s Burden
(95, Desmond Nakano);
Swing Vote
(99, David Anspaugh);
Bobby
(06, Emilio Estevez).

Ralph Bellamy
(1904–91), b. Chicago
How can we thank Ralph Bellamy properly, unless it is by wearing galoshes and carrying an umbrella in honor of Bruce Baldwin from
His Girl Friday
(40, Howard Hawks)? That great film relies upon a noble stooge—not just Bruce, but Ralph, too, for in the course of the film the honorable dullard Baldwin will be referred to as looking like Ralph Bellamy. You will not find a purer example of good humor, or loyalty to the work in hand. Of course, when the Academy determined to give Bellamy an honorary Oscar in 1986, it was not just for his “unique artistry” but for “his distinguished service to the profession of acting.” What that covered was his role in the formation of the Screen Actors Guild, his service as president of Actors’ Equity from 1952 to 1964, and his insistence that Equity (and thus New York theater) resist the blacklist. There was also Bellamy’s lifelong impersonation of FDR, on both stage and screen in
Sunrise at Campobello
, but also later on television in the two miniseries
The Winds of War
(83) and
War and Remembrance
(88). But beyond even that there is the abiding ability of Ralph Bellamy to be the friend or the fall guy. His only significant peer is Ronald Reagan.

From New Trier High School, Bellamy went onto the stage and then to Hollywood: with Jean Harlow in
The Secret Six
(31, George Hill);
The Magnificent Lie
(31, Berthold Viertel);
Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm
(32, Alfred Santell);
Air Mail
(32, John Ford);
Second Hand Wife
(33, Hamilton MacFadden);
The Picture Snatcher
(33, Lloyd Bacon); with Katharine Hepburn in
Spitfire
(34, John Cromwell);
This Land Is Mine
(34, Cromwell);
Helldorado
(35, James Cruze);
Hands Across the Table
(35, Mitchell Leisen);
The Man Who Lived Twice
(36, Harry Lachman); getting a supporting actor nomination as Dan Leeson in
The Awful Truth
(37, Leo McCarey);
Carefree
(38, Mark Sandrich);
Trade Winds
(38, Tay Garnett);
Let Us Live
(38, John Brahm);
Brother Orchid
(40, Bacon);
Dance, Girl, Dance
(40, Dorothy Arzner).

He then played Ellery Queen in a series of films; as well as
Footsteps in the Dark
(41, Bacon);
Dive Bomber
(41, Michael Curtiz);
The Wolf Man
(41, George Waggner);
The Ghost of Frankenstein
(42, Erle C. Kenton);
Lady in a Jam
(42, Gregory La Cava);
Guest in the House
(44, Brahm);
Delightfully Dangerous
(45, Arthur Lubin); with Deanna Durbin in
Lady on a Train
(45, Charles David).

It was then that he did
Sunrise at Campobello
onstage—winning a Tony. He started to do a great deal of television and only returned to movies in the film of
Sunrise at Campobello
(60, Vincent J. Donehue); as the husband to Claudia Cardinale in
The Professionals
(66, Richard Brooks);
Rosemary’s Baby
(68, Roman Polanski);
Doctors’ Wives
(71, George Schaefer);
Cancel My Reservation
(72, Paul Bogart);
Oh, God!
(77, Carl Reiner);
Trading Places
(83, John Landis);
Disorderlies
(87, Michael Schultz);
Coming to America
(88, Landis);
The Good Mother
(88, Leonard Nimoy); and finally in
Pretty Woman
(90, Garry Marshall).

One more reason for gratitude? He declined the role of Noah Cross in
Chinatown
. Another? The trivia question: who worked with both Jean Harlow and Julia Roberts?

Marco Bellocchio
, b. Piacenza, Italy, 1939
1961:
La Colpa e le Pena
(s);
Abasso lo Zio
(s). 1962:
Ginepro Fatto Uomo
(s). 1965:
I Pugni in Tasca/Fists in the Pocket
. 1967:
La Cina è Vicina/China Is Near;
“Discutiamo, Discutiamo,” episode from
Amore e Rabbia
. 1971:
Nel Nome del Padre/In the Name of the Father
. 1973:
Slap the Monster on Page One
. 1977:
Il Gabbiano/The Seagull
. 1978:
La Macchina Cinema
(codirected). 1980:
Salto Nel Vuoto; Vacanze in Val Trebbia
. 1982:
Gli Occhi, la Bocca/The Eyes, the Mouth
. 1984:
Enrico IV/Henry IV
. 1986:
Il Diavolo in Corpo/The Devil in the Flesh
. 1987:
La Visione del Sabba/The Visions of Sabbah
. 1992:
Autour du Désir
. 1994:
Il Sogno della Farfala
. 1995:
Sogni Infranti
. 1997:
Il Principe di Homburg
. 1998:
La Religione della Storia
. 1999:
La Balia
. 2001:
Un Altro Mondo È Possible
(with others) (d). 2002:
Ora di Religione/My Mother’s Smile
. 2003:
Buongiorno, Notte
. 2009:
Vincere
.

Fists in the Pocket
was one of the most striking debuts of the 1960s: a study of the incestuous mesh of a family of epileptics—passionate, neurotic, barbed, and destructive. Epilepsy served Bellocchio, as it had Dostoyevsky, as a sign of social decadence and family claustrophobia, and as the symptom of a distorted psychological nature. The central figure—played brilliantly by Lou Castel—is victim, hero, and destroyer, the life force running riot. How autobiographical is
Fists in the Pocket?
Bellocchio has confessed that the film was made to resolve many doubts about himself and his future. Furthermore, its intensity may have grown out of its necessary economy:

If I hadn’t had such a tight budget,
Fists in the Pocket
would have been a naturalistic film, with a more accurate sociological—that is, social—background.…

It would maybe have been after the style of a Renoir or a Becker film, in other words close to the French novelistic tradition which has always fascinated me. They say that hunger sharpens the mind. Since I had to work in a family context, the family became my dramatic space; I found myself probing the relationship between the members of a nuclear cell.

There is no question but that the mood of pathology justified and sustained the trembling, surrealist pitch of the imagery and forced Bellocchio to obtain wounded performances from his cast. The difficulties of a first feature seemed to merge creatively with the pain of a young person.

Bellocchio had studied at the Centro Sperimentale and at the Slade School in London, and made a few shorts before
Fists in the Pocket
. Unfortunately, his subsequent films have hardly emerged from Italy. Reports of them suggest that they lack the quivering intensity of his first feature.
China Is Near
was made at a time when Bellocchio had joined the Italian Communist party.
In the Name of the Father
has a more comic edge to its study of a cheap Italian boarding school—such as the director himself once attended—that has aroused comparisons with Vigo.
Slap the Monster on Page One
fell to Bellocchio when Sergio Donati fell ill: a newspaper exposé, about victimized hippies, set at a time of election.

The Eyes, the Mouth
(one of the finest films of the eighties), is an enlargement on
Fists in the Pocket
, with some scenes from the earlier film, with Lou Castel again as well as a terrific performance from Angela Molina.
Henry IV
is Marcello Mastroianni in a version of Pirandello. And in
The Devil in the Flesh
there was an explicit sexuality involving a blow job by Maruschka Detmers.
Vincere
, a few years later, was an outstanding return to form and a great film until Benito went away.

Jean-Paul Belmondo
, b. Neuilly-sur-Seine, France, 1933
The first period of Godard’s work is marked off by the presence of Belmondo in
Breathless
(59) and
Pierrot le Fou
(65). Apart from these two films, Belmondo had been in Godard’s short,
Charlotte et Son Jules
(59), and was to appear as one of the two men in
Une Femme Est une Femme
(61). But in
Breathless
and
Pierrot le Fou
, Godard used Belmondo to give dramatic form to his own shy fantasy involvement with cinema, life, and art. The paradoxical brusqueness and sensitivity in Godard’s early films, the juxtaposition of desperate bouts of action and long, philosophical discussions, the desire to provide a constant commentary on action, all found a proper exponent in Belmondo. The connotations of the name “Pierrot le Fou” may all be found in the actor: he does embody the haphazard, arbitrary, antisocial behavior of the madman; but that rather beaten-up face does not conceal eyes hurt from seeing so much pain and settled in sad resignation at the inadequacy of his own pose as an abrasive primitive. Thus, in
Breathless
Belmondo plausibly connects the potentially dangerous and heartless layabout with the romantic moved by the memory of Humphrey Bogart. And in
Pierrot le Fou
he as easily carries off the role of novelist making a story of his own tragedy, as that of the instinctual, native man who moves helplessly through the action and paints himself like a savage clown before self-destruction. And just as Belmondo is the screen incarnation of Godard’s pained conception of the artist exposed to life, so his ability to suggest a high romantic sensibility and the scorpionlike hostility of alienated and degraded man is reminiscent of Gaston Modot’s man in
L’Age d’Or
who kicks dogs and knocks blind men on their backs but pursues his love forever. The other vivid instance of the balance of sensibility and instinct is Michel Simon—as
Boudu
for Renoir and as the bargeman Caliban in
L’Atalante
. At one moment in
Pierrot
, Belmondo does a tender impersonation of Simon’s grotesque speech, and it is easy to see him playing a latter-day Boudu or revealing a hand preserved in a jar to a credulous girl. Belmondo was vital to Godard for the way he brought to life the director’s view of “the poor, base, forked animal” within the prickly, pale-faced, and dark-shaded habitué of cinemas.

Although Belmondo has been hailed as an archetypal new French actor, he has too often been conventional and listless. The whole man revealed by Godard has appeared elsewhere only as the priest, disturbed by Emmanuelle Riva’s emotionalism in
Leon Morin, Prêtre
(61, Jean-Pierre Melville); as the mordant, chronic thief in
Le Voleur
(67, Louis Malle); and as the man in
Mississippi Mermaid
(69, François Truffaut). There again, Truffaut seemed driven to insight by reclaiming Buñuel’s view of the willing self-destruction of the man of passion.

Elsewhere, Belmondo has sometimes been rather lazily insolent in poor films, or content to ape the Bogart hero. For instance, his work for Melville as a raincoated betrayer amid the underworld of
Le Doulos
(62) has rather less mythological resonance than Alain Delon in
Le Samourai
. He made his debut in 1958 in
Sois Belle et Tais-Toi
(58, Marc Allégret) and
Les Tricheurs
(58, Marcel Carné). His other films since then have included
Web of Passion
(59, Claude Chabrol), excellent again as the disrupter of a bourgeois household;
Classe Tous Risques
(59, Claude Sautet); a little bemused by the sparse action of
Moderato Cantabile
(60, Peter Brook);
Un Nommé la Rocca
(61, Jean Becker);
La Viaccia
(61, Mauro Bolognini);
Two Women
(61, Vittorio de Sica);
Un Singe en Hiver
(62, Henri Verneuil);
Cartouche
(62, Philippe de Broca); as a boxer in
L’Ame des Ferchaux
(63, Melville);
Dragées au Poivre
(63, Jacques Baratier);
Peau de Banane
(63, Marcel Ophuls);
That Man from Rio
(63, de Broca);
Weekend à Zuydcoote
(64, Verneuil);
La Chasse à l’Homme
(64, Edouard Molinaro);
Par un Beau Matin d’Eté
(64, Jacques Deray);
Les Tribulations d’un Chinois en Chine
(65, de Broca);
Is Paris Burning?
(66, René Clément);
Tendre Voyou
(67, Becker);
Ho!
(68, Robert Enrico);
Le Cerveau
(68, Gérard Oury);
Un Homme Qui Me Plaît
(69, Claude Lelouch);
Borsalino
(70, Deray);
Les Mariés de l’An Deux
(71, Jean-Paul Rappeneau);
Le Casse
(71, Verneuil);
L’Héritier
(72, Philippe Labro);
La Scoumoune
(72, José Giovanni);
Docteur Popaul
(72, Chabrol);
How to Destroy the Reputation of the Greatest Secret Agent
(73, de Broca);
Stavisky
(74, Alain Resnais);
Peur sur la Ville
(75, Verneuil);
L’Incorrigible
(75, de Broca); and
L’Animal
(77, Claude Zidi).