The New Biographical Dictionary of Film: Completely Updated and Expanded (359 page)

His success may even have surprised Rohmer, in exactly the way that spontaneity sometimes disarms the poised young men in his
contes moraux
. Rohmer has confessed the strategy that made him announce these six contes in advance:
La Boulangère de Monceau; La Carrière de Suzanne; Ma Nuit Chez Maud
(number 3 was made after number 4);
La Collectionneuse; Le Genou de Claire;
and
L’Amour, L’Après-Midi:

I thought audiences and producers would be more likely to accept my idea in this form than in another. Instead of asking myself what subjects were most likely to appeal to audiences, I persuaded myself that the best thing would be to treat the same subject six times over. In the hope that by the sixth time the audience would come to me! … I was determined to be inflexible and intractable, because if you persist in an idea it seems to me that in the end you do secure a following. Even with a distributor … it’smuch more difficult for him to put up arguments and criticisms about a scenario which is part of a group of six than about an isolated script.

There speaks the young outsider of the 1950s plotting his way into an unsympathetic industry, the friend and companion critic of Rivette, Godard, and Chabrol. It is easy to forget, because of the direction their work has taken, that Rohmer was not just coauthor with Chabrol (in 1957) of the first study of Hitchcock, but author of the bulk of it.
Le Signe du Lion
speaks much more directly of Rohmer the Parisian scraping money together to buy film stock. It has a stark view of penury and urban unfriendliness that was put aside with the
contes moraux
.

Today, one would not readily guess that Rohmer had done so much to explain Hitchcock, despite his own interest in psychological ploys, and in knowing why people act. In fact, his hindsight confession of strategy is very close to the way some of his characters dissect their predicaments and then select a course of action to which they must conform. For instance, the two young men “bargaining” over Haydée in
La Collectionneuse
, Trintignant in
Maud
determining to marry the blonde girl on the bicycle, and Brialy seeing the world in a hand’s brief delay on a knee.

The films have a subtle and absorbing tension between the intellectual inflexibility (or resolve) of the characters and the evanescence of the situations in which they act. Thus Rohmer often presents surrogate artists—an antique dealer, a painter, a philosopher, an engineer, a novelist—with emotional scenarios that break down their elegant detachment, educate them in the interwoven complex of feelings and thoughts, and leave them doubtful at the realization that life is as shifting and indefinite as water in the sun. Very often, Rohmer so clearly outlines the range of action open to his central characters that the clarity takes precedence. There are several occasions on which characters draw back from daring or possibly harmful actions.

Indeed, there is the underlying hint in Rohmer’s work that freedom is a dangerous state from which most men flee—into demanding jobs, marriage, and a framework of intellectual self-justification. But few directors have given us as many self-possessed, articulate women as Rohmer. Still, Rohmer has just as much interest in instinctive and unknowable women: Haydée in
La Collectionneuse
, Claire, and Chloe in
L’Amour, L’Après-Midi
are such figures, while the men are always as rational and lucid as Rohmer himself.

The director’s own definition of the
contes moraux
is worth quoting, because as criticism it could not be improved, and because it might be a speech from one of his films—a seventh
conte
in which the man is a filmmaker:

What I call a
conte moral
is not a tale with a moral, but a story which deals less with what people do than with what is going on in their minds while they are doing it.… The people in my films are not expressing abstract ideas—there is no “ideology” in them, or very little—but revealing what they think about relationships between men and women, about friendship, love, desire, their conception of life, happiness … boredom, work, leisure.… Things which have of course been spoken about previously in the cinema, but usually indirectly, in the context of a dramatic plot. Whereas in the
contes moraux
this just doesn’t exist, and in particular there’s no clear-cut line of tragedy or comedy. You can say that my work is closer to the novel—to a certain classic style of novel which the cinema is now taking over—than to other forms of entertainment, like the theatre.

Literary influences and strands do abound: not simply the willingness to have characters talk seriously at length, but the frequent use of narration and, especially in
Claire
, the fluctuating attempt to make a novel of the action. Partly because of the presence of Aurora Cornu, a novelist, playing a novelist, partly because of the deliberate filming of pages of a journal,
Claire
has an extra ingenuity and resonance in the way it moves between events and a fictional account of them.

All the literary content is peripheral to Rohmer’s eye. It is in the quality of his imagery that we feel the intellectual appeal of experience. The camera style is classically simple, but Rohmer adores the effects of natural light, whether the reflections from snow in
Maud
, the rainy day in
Claire
, or the Côte d’Azur interiors in
La Collectionneuse
. The breathtaking coda to
Maud
, for instance, owes a lot to the sudden resort to a warmer light. The effect of time passing and feelings altering has seldom been conveyed so well. Again, Rohmer chooses and films his setting with great imaginative care: the lakeside house in
Claire
and the snowscapes of Clermont Ferrand in
Maud
are integral to the effect of the film, as is the choice of precise locations for key moments.

But it is the way he films people that is most characteristic, and most reflective of his sense of the limits to intelligence. Beauty, its nature, and contrary opinions of it are recurring themes. And Rohmer gives us time to consider whether and how people are beautiful. In one of the prologues to
La Collectionneuse
, the camera takes semiabstract but very sensual pictures of the indifferent Haydée Politoff. And in the next prologue several characters argue about beauty: is it, as one claims, an effect of appearance that reflects moral nature? Do people look as they are? Cinema has always nagged at that question, few directors more enchantingly than Rohmer with his gallery of women: Politoff, Françoise Fabian, Marie-Christine Barrault, Aurora Cornu, Beatrice Romand, Lawrence de Monaghan, Zouzou, and Françoise Verley.

L’Amour, L’Après-Midi
brings that entire gallery to life and ends with the married man eschewing adultery when he sees himself in a mirror before the act.

With the
contes moraux
complete, Rohmer turned to the eighteenth century and a novella by Kleist. Its visual elegance and its ambiguity as to what has happened were a shade too prolonged and pious. The setting, for the first time in Rohmer, was classical and cold, and the woman in this case, Edith Clever, lacked the animation of his other heroines.

Sometimes I wonder if, after the destruction of the rest of the world, Rohmer might not still be making his fourth six-part series, on love at different times of day, with holograms of yet more slender, lovely girls, torrents of witty dialogue, and contrivances of misunderstanding. This seems ungrateful: Rohmer’s exquisite industry is genuine; his intelligence is beyond dispute. It is only his seemingly isolated momentum that I find incredible and … inhuman. A few years after any film, it has been folded into the mix of the others, like an extra egg going into batter. The later series are not as compelling as the
contes moraux
. But Rohmer is so steadily active he may lull us into feeling that everything has become habitual.

At eighty, having completed his seasonal
contes
, Rohmer delivered
L’Anglaise et le Duc
, a ravishing period recreation, and a lovely, small film. I remain with my reservations (or maybe it is just diminished patience), but how can one admire a painter like Chardin and not see that Rohmer is a similar kind of artist, serenely attached to ideals of spiritual and historical permanence? Indeed, it is as if—in fact—he was a moviemaker from the eighteenth century come to visit.

George A. Romero
, b. New York, 1940
1968:
Night of the Living Dead
. 1972:
There’s Always Vanilla/The Affair
. 1973:
The Crazies/ Code Name Trixie; Hungry Wives
. 1978:
Martin
. 1979:
Dawn of the Dead
. 1981:
Knightriders
. 1982:
Creepshow
. 1985:
Day of the Dead
. 1988:
Monkey Shines
. 1990: “The Truth About the Valdemar Case,” an episode from
Two Evil Eyes
. 1993:
The Dark Half
. 2000:
Bruiser
. 2005:
Land of the Dead
. 2008:
Diary of the Dead
. 2009:
Survival of the Dead
.

I am far from an enthusiast of horror—ordinary life is alarming enough. But I often prefer the cheap brand to the expensive, and the homemade and obsessive to the realm of special effects. Thus my soft spot for George Romero, and the matter-of-fact nightmares that he has delivered from Pittsburgh. His concept of the living dead was brilliant and poetic (as well as recognizably lifelike). It was heaven for nonprofessionals. And it brought a real beauty to horror, a slightly slow-mo, lyrical desperation.
Night of the Living Dead
and
Dawn of the Dead
(the one set in a shopping mall) are unforgettable and seminal works of modern America. They are also correctives to the terrible hollowness of the
Scream
movies. Romero has a deep, tender belief in crippled, blighted states, and there is a haunting ambiguity in his best passages—for, just as we yearn to obliterate these living dead, so we long for their triumph and their banquet.

Mikhail Romm
(1901–71), b. Irkutsk, Russia
1934:
Pushka/Boule de Suif
. 1937:
Trinadtsat; Lenin v Oktyabre
(codirected with Dimitri Vasiliev). 1939:
Lenin v 1918 Godu
. 1943:
Mechta
. 1945:
Chelovek 217
. 1948:
Russkii Vopros; Vladimir Ilyich Lenin
(codirected with V. Belyaev);
Zhivoi Lenin
(codirected with Marcia Slavinskaya) (d). 1950:
Sekretnaya Missiya
. 1953:
Admiral Ushakov; Korabli Shturmuyut Bastiony
. 1956:
Ubiistvo na Ulitsye Dante/Murder on Dante Street
. 1961:
Devyat dni Odnovo Goda/Nine Days of One Year
. 1965:
Obyknovennie Fashizm/ Ordinary Fascism
(d).

Romm worked with decent tact and skill in several types of film, well enough to come through without suffering any substantial authoritarian disapproval. He entered films rather late and was assistant on
Dela i Lyudi
(32, Alexander Macheret) before directing himself.
Boule de Suif
was of some historical importance: though still a silent picture, it was the first film made on entirely Russian stock. Ironically, its basis in Maupassant was artfully turned into a faithful work of French nineteenth-century realism, a worthy film but vastly inferior to
Partie de Campagne, Le Plaisir
, or
Une Vie
. When Stalin ordered a tribute to Lenin in 1937, it was Romm who hurried the epic through and went on to a sequel, both with Boris Shehukin as the Bolshevik hero. He returned to the same subject in 1948, and at the deep-freeze moment of the Cold War made a somber study of the possible effects of radiation,
Nine Days of One Year
.

Mickey Rooney
(Joe Yule Jr.), b. Brooklyn, New York, 1920
Do we laugh or cry for Rooney? Is it possible within a brief entry to convey the dementia of his life and career, and yet suggest his spasmodic ability to transcend vulgarity and make it into an astonishing portrait of the all-American boy-hero in which the motor is accelerating by some geometric progression? Mickey Rooney is important, and yet he is ridiculous; it is in the pitch of his absurdity that he is significant. One feels like a coroner presented with a cadaver shot through the head, poisoned, thrown off a cliff, and with a bad heart. Rooney could have died long ago from sheer disbelief; he lives on. It is all very well for Yeats to say “the center cannot hold” and believe that such a verdict is sufficient. Rooney has been an exploding galaxy all his life, endlessly fragmenting, but against all laws he still holds together. Let us try to pick out some of the principles of survival.

1. In at least three films, Rooney is not just an actor of genius, but an artist able to maintain a stylized commentary on the demon impulse of the small, belligerent man. His Puck in
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
(35, Max Reinhardt and William Dieterle) is a masterpiece amid that weirdly isolated evocation of the fairy spirit. Rooney seems inhuman, he moves like mist or water, his body is burnished by the extraordinary light, and his gurgling laugh is ghostly and enchanting.

Could such a performance have been directed? Could the brash kid he has always insisted on being have made such an imaginative leap? Or is there some primal instinct in Rooney that draws his vitality from psychic identification with fantasy? Such a man might live on make-believe, and Rooney’s Puck is truly inhuman, one of cinema’s most arresting pieces of magic.

The second sensation is his toughie in
Boys Town
(38, Norman Taurog), seeming ten rather than sixteen years old, who struts and bullies like something out of a nightmare and then comes clean in a grotesque but utterly frank outburst of sentimentality in which he aspires to the boy community. Easy to mock the hysteria of
Boys Town
, but look only a little beyond such bad taste and it becomes a vivid study of American simplemindedness, with Rooney expressing all the impossible, brutal simplicity of American ideals.