The New Biographical Dictionary of Film: Completely Updated and Expanded (347 page)

Of the three directors involved in the movement, Lindsay Anderson was the most talented, Tony Richardson the most dispensable, and Reisz the most unresolved. He directed, with Richardson,
Momma Don’t Allow
(55), produced Anderson’s
Every Day Except Christmas
(57), and made
We Are the Lambeth Boys
, arguably one of the most dated “innovations” in all cinema. He did seem impressed by the obscure glory of Vanessa Redgrave in
Morgan
, where she was meant to be a trivial person beside the looming self-pretension disguised as pathetic Idiot of the David Mercer/David Warner/Morgan.
Isadora
is a clumsy failure, confused in chronology, hampered by a gangling actress playing a natural mover, and uncertain how seriously to deal with the earnest vulgarity of its heroine. His other films are woefully ideological:
Saturday Night and Sunday Morning
could now pass for parody;
Night Must Fall
helped set back the career of Albert Finney by several years.

It was at least enterprising of Reisz to make a move to America. On
The Gambler
, Reisz neither caught nor tamed the pretentious but authentic existentialism of James Toback’s script, and finished with a strangely inert movie.
Who’ll Stop the Rain?
proved his most interesting film, reasonably true to Robert Stone’s novel and digging fine performances out of Nick Nolte and Tuesday Weld.
Who’ll Stop the Rain?
was a failure in its time, but it has survived very well, and it has an uncommonly truthful eye for compromised lives and sudden danger.

Back in England, Reisz could not conceal the strangeness of
French Lieutenant’s Woman
(a work torn between being genteel and crazy), and he could not make useful sense of the modern, mirroring part of the story. Startling once, it is unwatchable now.
Sweet Dreams
was a decent, small picture, reliant on Jessica Lange.
Everybody Wins
, however, needed patience in (or restraints for) its very sparse audiences if it was to complete a single showing. The film has credentials—Arthur Miller’s script; Nick Nolte trying to ignore the chaos; Debra Winger hoping to change identities as she changes clothes. It is so dire it may have a life as a midnight movie in ages yet to come.

Jason Reitman
, b. Montreal, Canada, 1977
1998:
Operation
(s). 1999:
H@
(s). 2000:
In God We Trust
(s). 2001:
Gulp
(s). 2002:
Uncle Sam
(s). 2004:
Consent
(s). 2006:
Thank You for Smoking
. 2007: “Local Ad,” an episode from
The Office; Juno
. 2008: “Frame Toby,” an episode from
The Office
. 2009:
Up in the Air
.

Jason Reitman is the son of director Ivan Reitman and actress Genevieve Robert. He worked as an assistant to his father. He attended USC as an English and creative writing major. And he made several short films before stepping out as a feature-film director. But in a short space of time, he established himself with three very personal satires that appealed to smart, young audiences:
Thank You for Smoking
(from a book by Christopher Buckley);
Juno
(from a screenplay by Diablo Cody); and
Up in the Air
(from a novel by Walter Kirn).

There’s no doubting the merit of these films, the sense of odd human behavior and the reaching for some larger perspective where America is revealed as a battleground between uniformity and anarchy. Above all it’s in the seriously ambitious
Up in the Air
that we can consider whether Reitman is simply a comic talent or something larger and more searching. Above all,
Up in the Air
elects to challenge a star personality—the very rubbery armor called “George Clooney.” It is a subtle film, as poignant as it is funny, and it may do very little to deflect Clooney from his prosperous and complacent path—but it is a portrait of a kind of star that is as devastating as the original
The Nutty Professor
or even
Notorious
. There are those who wish
Up in the Air
had gone farther—I am one of them—but that’s no reason to lose sight of its great achievement, or its naggy feeling (in late 2009 amid fatuous talk of recovery) that the real troubles lie ahead.

Lee Remick
(1935–91), b. Quincy, Massachusetts
Lee Remick had a fine entry in movies: as titbouncing Southern drum majorette advancing on a low-angle camera in
A Face in the Crowd
(57, Elia Kazan). And despite a Bostonian upbringing, she was for several years a Hollywood Southerner, forever fretting at the heat. It was interesting to see how far she excelled in parts of modest literary origin, but seemed vapid as Faulkner’s women. She could do nothing to overcome the addled conception of
The Long Hot Summer
(58, Martin Ritt), in which she played Eula Varner, or the monstrous waste of
Sanctuary
(61, Tony Richardson), where she took on Temple Drake.

However, she gave a deeply suggestive performance as the (raped?) wife in
Anatomy of a Murder
(59, Otto Preminger). That has a wonderful moment in court when she shakes down her hair and takes off her spectacles at which the jury audience wavers like chaff in the sensual breeze. The next year, she was very touching as the anxious Tennessee girl warmed back to life by Montgomery Clift in
Wild River
(60, Kazan). That admirably exploited the rather tense expression on her face whenever it was not smiling hard.

Such promise was never properly gathered together. Too many dull films allowed her to slip toward obscurity: rather monotonous in
Experiment in Terror
(62, Blake Edwards); again deeply pathetic as the alcoholic in
The Days of Wine and Roses
(63, Edwards);
The Running Man
(63, Carol Reed);
The Wheeler Dealers
(63, Arthur Hiller); good in
Baby, The Rain Must Fall
(65, Robert Mulligan);
The Hallelujah Trail
(65, John Sturges). Then, after she had played the blind girl in Arthur Penn’s Broadway production of
Wait Until Dark
in 1966,
No Way to Treat a Lady
(68, Jack Smight), and
Hard Contract
(69, S. Lee Pogostin). She went to Britain, but was uncomfortable in the demanding worlds of Iris Murdoch and Joe Orton:
A Severed Head
(70, Dick Clement) and
Loot
(70, Silvio Narizzano). After that, she played in
Sometimes a Great Notion
(71, Paul Newman);
The Blue Knight
(73, Robert Butler); and
A Delicate Balance
(74, Tony Richardson).

She had a popular success as Jennie Jerome/ Churchill for TV, a graceful enough bearer of costume to sustain the small screen’s old-fashioned reverence for “real” people in hackneyed fiction. Again for TV, she was a rather too attractive Maria Gostrey opposite Paul Scofield in
The Ambassadors
. In the cinema, she was not more than a bystander in
Hennessy
(75, Don Sharp), the register of horror in
The Omen
(76, Richard Donner), helpless in both
Telefon
(77, Don Siegel) and
The Medusa Touch
(78, Jack Gold). She passed honorably for English, opposite Robert Duvall, in the TV drama
Ike
(78, Melville Shavelson) and appeared in
The Europeans
(79, James Ivory).

She was in
Tribute
(80, Bob Clark); she made a very good shot at being Margaret Sullavan in
Haywire
(80, Michael Tuchner);
The Competition
(80, Joel Oliansky);
The Women’s Room
(80, Glenn Jordan); in the Bette Davis role for TV in
The Letter
(82, John Erman);
The Gift of Love: A Christmas Story
(83, Delbert Mann);
A Good Sport
(84, Lou Antonio);
Rearview Mirror
(84, Antonio);
Toughlove
(85, Jordan);
Of Pure Blood
(86, Joseph Sargent);
The Vision
(87, Norman Stone);
Jessie
(88, Jordan);
Bridge to Silence
(89, Karen Arthur); and
Dark Holiday
(89, Antonio).

Jean Renoir
(1894–1979), b. Paris
1925:
La Fille de l’Eau
. 1926:
Nana
. 1927:
Charleston; Marquitta
. 1928:
La Petite Marchande d’Allumettes
(codirected with Jean Tedesco);
Tire-au-Flanc
. 1929:
Le Tournoi dans la Cité; Le Bled
. 1931:
On Purge Bébé; La Chienne
. 1932:
La Nuit de Carrefour; Boudu Sauvé des Eaux
. 1933:
Chotard et Compagnie
. 1934:
Madame Bovary; Toni
. 1935:
Le Crime de Monsieur Lange; La Vie Est à Nous
(codirected with Jean-Paul le Chanois, Jacques Becker, André Zwoboda, Pierre Unik, and Henri Cartier-Bresson). 1936:
Une Partie de Campagne
(s);
Les Bas-Fonds
. 1937:
La Grande Illusion
. 1938:
La Marseillaise; La Bête Humaine
. 1939:
La Règle du Jeu
. 1940:
La Tosca
(begun by Renoir, but completed by and credited to Karl Koch). 1941:
Swamp Water
. 1943:
This Land Is Mine
. 1944:
Salut à la France
(codirected with Garson Kanin) (d). 1945:
The Southerner
. 1946:
The Diary of a Chambermaid
. 1947:
The Woman on the Beach
. 1951:
The River
. 1952:
La Carrozza d’Oro/The Golden Coach
. 1955:
French Cancan
. 1956:
Eléna et les Hommes
. 1959:
Le Déjeuner sur l’Herbe
. 1961:
Le Testament du Dr. Cordelier
. 1962:
Le Caporal Épingle
. 1971:
Le Petit Théâtre de Jean Renoir
.

It is easy to take a sentimental view of Jean Renoir, to settle for the conclusion that he was an admirable man, despite the implication of his films that good men are as inconsistent as bad. We are readily charmed by his Octave in
La Règle du Jeu
, as glad to be urged this way and that as the household guests who respond to his boisterous direction by participation. But Octave is as much a muddler as any of the other characters, and we do the film an injustice if we miss Octave’s heartbreak or his inadvertent instigation of the fatal accident.

The extraordinary interweaving of laughter and tears is not so much warming as a warning to tread warily in life. Recollect the title, and it becomes clearer that Renoir is reproducing the fraught indecisiveness of the game.
La Règle
is thus the first great realization that the openness of cinema lends itself to the chaos of experience. The “rule” is that there are no rules. That may be why the film alarmed the French bourgeoisie as war drew nearer.

Again, his jolly country restaurateur in
Partie de Campagne
easily seems like a sign of Renoir’s fatherly care of a film crew in the country. In fact,
Partie
was dogged by miserable weather and bitter quarrels among its makers. I make these points not to suggest that Renoir is anything but the greatest of directors, only to free his greatness from the cloak of charm that could settle on it as fatally as Octave’s coat fell on André Jurieu’s back in the frenzy of garment changing at the end of
La Règle
.

Of course, Renoir was a humanist, but how could an audience, or the artist himself, relax in that knowledge? Self-conscious humanism is inflationary—it is the ersatz integrity of John Ford, Stanley Kramer, and Capra—and we should insist that Renoir is an intelligent, feeling man. Only that hard fact properly establishes the artistic achievement of charity and tolerance in his films. Renoir would be a trite director if the beauty of his films did not grow naturally out of sadness, anger, disappointment, and failure. Now that he is dead, it is increasingly necessary to describe his dark side, to remember his hesitations, and to be clear about the creative dangers in his way of making films. For Renoir’s greatness lies in his repeated desire to take risks, to make new sorts of film, to be experimental.

We know how Renoir grew up in the midst of a creative household. There are enough portraits, shining with affection, of the child Jean by the father Auguste for us to think of Jean as an extraordinary fruit of French culture, carrying the rich Romantic impetus on to the new form of popular theatre. Auguste painted his son like a peach, and we can sense from those portraits the large curve of maturation, ripeness, and decline that comprises Jean’s tender acknowledgment of time rupturing stability. And the essentially nonintellectual character of the Renoir family, with its emphasis on manual crafts, self-made entertainment, the pleasures of the table,
la campagne
as opposed to Paris, has a lot to do with Renoir’s happy acceptance of the
conte
as his basis for films. Thus, he liked simple incidents and their fusion with popular theatre and never chose to go beyond elementary narrative forms. The depth in his films is all a matter of the exact way of looking at people. There was never, for instance, the supposedly “original” narrative flavor of a Carné in Renoir’s films, and that is why for so many years Renoir was neglected.

But it is important to note the ways in which Jean departed from Auguste, and to allow for the strains that may have existed in their relationship, and that are to be felt beneath the surface of
Renoir, My Father
, the biography Jean wrote in 1958, at about the time his own career as a director ended. That coincidence is instructive, for
Renoir, My Father
is about an aging artist and father. Auguste was fifty-three when Jean was born, and it was Jean who attended him during his last years when the father was crippled by arthritis. Auguste was not a saint, and we should try to imagine the sharp-faced old man of photographs in old age, rather than some vague, benevolent soul. Auguste painted beauty, despite his own pain. But he is not a great artist because the suffering is not felt in his work. Moreover, Jean must have seen the antagonism between his father’s art and life. Not only his father’s habitual disrobing of the family servants to act as models—but the early sense that he was himself both a real child in a real family, and an imaginary figure in the art of a painter. When we note the interplay of life and theatre in Renoir’s later films, it should be referred back to that experience of being an artist’s son (and model).