The New Biographical Dictionary of Film: Completely Updated and Expanded (377 page)

It is a paranoid film: Travis Bickle believes all the metropolis is turned in against him. He is as furtive as someone who suspects he may be in a movie instead of life. “Are you talking to me? You must be, ’cause I’m the only one here.” It is also the paranoia of a slender man who looks like a Renaissance saint, alarmed at the unkind streets, and carried away by feverish imagination.
Taxi Driver
goes further than that: it invests its own killer with all the damaged sensitivity of the paranoid author, so that the film turns into a warped projection of his triumph overpowering defunct codes of censorship, common sense, and the initial basis of redeemable mankind. Film and dream have no more ominous or transcendent moment than that in
Taxi Driver
when Travis survives his pitched battle, returns as a hero, but still presents a haunted face to his own rearview mirror. Scorsese cherishes his hero and the dream too much to have either perish: the man in the front seat has to live on with his dreadful anxiety. Otherwise, all the occupants of the vehicle might have to reassess the hell they’re filling their heads with.

Growing up may offend Scorsese; he may prefer to die young, frenzied but “immaculate.” In which case,
Mean Streets, Taxi Driver
, and
New York, New York
amount to an extraordinary, youthful tribute to Hollywood modes of the 1940s. No student or teacher of film at New York University, or anywhere else, has been more eloquent in extolling his love. In that sense, though, the films are academic and self-indulgent, abrasive with mannerisms and a Godardian assumption of worldliness. They reexplore the hallucination of film noir, they reclaim the threatened sensibility of Nicholas Ray, and they are comprehensive proof that a film is never all in the script. Scorsese aspires toward the delirium and heat of fever. He might become a deeper artist if he could see the artificiality of this and tease the ponderous weight of torment he has been determined not to lose. He is as dedicated a designer as Minnelli, but he lacks the humility still that lets design run free. The dream alone can ease the terror of sleep and make it graceful.

Scorsese’s pact with Robert De Niro has been vital; it may be that the director was in greater need of it than the actor. Yet, evidently, Scorsese hero-worships De Niro and allows the actor to obscure the nature of the characters he plays. He needs to work with other people, especially with actresses in situations that resist heavy male gloom.
Alice …
was not such a film, and Liza Minnelli was thoroughly upstaged in
New York, New York
—albeit willingly.

The Age of Innocence
had many admirers, but it seemed to me like a story muffled in decor and prestige. Scorsese is not good being respectable, or literary. The attempt showed far more than achievement. His search for new subjects is absorbing and important—for Scorsese still has it in him to be a great director. But he seems weary of not getting large public success and uneasy. Just because he is “the best,” his career dramatizes the question of how an American director develops once youth is past.

Scorsese’s case became increasingly delicate.
Casino
was brilliant, ravishing to the eye; there was no one else who could have made it—or would have thought to do so. And if one had never seen his clannish male groupings before, it would have been riveting. But what was most striking now was Scorsese’s need to repeat those motions once more, without seeming to grasp them. Nothing now could shake the sense that he was hypnotized by the tumultuous talk and attitude of De Niro and Pesci. The best to be said about the film was the real ambiguity as to whether this Las Vegas was heaven or hell. But that’s a question America (as well as Scorsese) needs to explore.

Kundun
seemed to me a desperate attempt to believe in something, and it rang hollow. And nearly everyone seemed to agree that
Bringing Out the Dead
was a minor work, or a misstep, or a marking of time. In which case, that put more pressure than ever on
Gangs of New York
, which was vivid, “cinematic” but incoherent. The documentaries he has made lately are both scholarly and passionate, model contributions from our greatest director. But, again, greatness in America is a cruel privilege that can turn on its recipient and ruin him. Scorsese’s may be the greatest biography in American film since that of Welles. And the most painful.

Finally with
The Departed
, he got his Oscars—and everyone agreed to pretend that it was not one of his least personal films.

George C
. (Campbell)
Scott
(1927–99), b. Wise, Virginia
There was a moment when Scott seemed like the great threat in American acting—he had such drive and bite, such timing and authority. In two films, cast in important supporting parts, he seemed like a marauder, seizing the pictures away from stars. His prosecuting attorney from Lansing in
Anatomy of a Murder
(59, Otto Preminger) was a player in a game, but his manager in
The Hustler
(61, Robert Rossen) was a wicked destroyer of people, a watcher who made Paul Newman seem tender and edible—a loser. This was fearsome promise; maybe other actors began to avoid him, in the way champions do not want to get in the ring with hungry challengers.

He had been educated at the University of Missouri, and he served in the Marines. His movie debut was as the villain in
The Hanging Tree
(59, Delmer Daves). But despite the impact of his first few films, the choices he made (or had to make) were not always clear:
The Power and the Glory
(61, Marc Daniels);
The Brazen Bell
(62, James Sheldon); the detective in
The List of Adrian Messenger
(63, John Huston); in the TV series,
East Side/West Side
(63–64); as Abraham in
The Bible
(66, Huston);
Not With My Wife, You Don’t
(66, Norman Panama);
The Flim Flam Man
(67, Irvin Kershner); very good as a man in confusion in
Petulia
(68, Richard Lester)—his vulnerability seemed like his strength.

Patton
(69, Franklin Schaffner) was a part on a plate—whatever Scott thought of the film. He impersonated the General, and let his instinct for megalomania rip. When he won the Oscar, he refused to accept it. Next year, when he won an Emmy for Arthur Miller’s
The Price
, he refused that, too.

He was said to be difficult, hard to cast. He was Rochester in
Jane Eyre
(70, Delbert Mann) and played in
The Last Run
(71, Richard Fleischer). That last was as perfunctory a movie as
Oklahoma Crude
(73, Stanley Kramer) and
The New Centurions
(72, Fleischer). But there, Scott has one magnificent scene, where his retiring cop commits suicide, that completely exceeds Fleischer’s halfhearted approach. The scene comes unexpectedly, in a ramshackle apartment on a hot afternoon as traffic drones along a freeway outside. It is easier to believe that Scott was in charge of the sequence, so totally is it a matter of the way he reveals the desperation of a man retired from a relentless job.

The flavor of that sequence, and a similar enigma of where authorship lies, is sustained throughout
The Hospital
(72, Arthur Hiller) in which Scott plays the near-demented senior doctor in a hospital that is in administrative and ethical chaos. No one could attribute the savage humor of the film to Hiller, and although Paddy Chayefsky must deserve great credit, the film has its heart in Scott’s shaggy, fatigued modern hero, worn out by disbelief, unable to escape his own staggering momentum. Only Scott’s intelligence could make
The Hospital
simultaneously so bleak and heroic a film, so funny and touching. Furthermore, Scott’s ultimate rationality constitutes the tragedy of the film, for the hospital and its benevolence are symbols of intelligent charity overwhelmed by babel and breakdown. Scott moves and breathes with the growing pain of ruined hopes, and his sudden launching himself at Diana Rigg is a most beautiful moment of terrible frustration momentarily allayed.

One should also mention that boxoffice disaster,
They Might Be Giants
(71, Anthony Harvey), in which Scott plays a widower lawyer who believes he is Sherlock Holmes;
The Day of the Dolphin
(73, Mike Nichols); and
Bank Shot
(74, Gower Champion). The failure of
Giants
is a mystery, if only because of the compassion and skill with which it portrays a modern archetype, the decent man driven into delusion. For Scott, this character is directly in line with
The Hospital
and, while neither film smacks of a director, they both glow with his own personality.

Scott’s attitude to life may have been softened by marriage to Trish Van Devere (he had been married to Colleen Dewhurst). Still, his approach to film has seemed hardened and disenchanted by the failure of two films he chose to direct himself:
Rage
(74) and
The Savage Is Loose
(75). It was easy to believe that his deepest allegiance was to the theatre. He was very touching in
Islands in the Stream
(76, Schaffner), catching the sense of loss and the need for honor in a way that bypassed the limits of the picture’s conception. He had fun with two parts in
Movie Movie
(78, Stanley Donen), but he needed no more than technique and panache. Worst of all, in the fine and demanding part of
Hardcore
(79, Paul Schrader), he seemed desolate and uninterested.

Past fifty, Scott should have been in his prime. But too much of his work was on TV, and nothing shook his reputation for being difficult and his admitted weakness for drink:
The Changeling
(79, Peter Medak);
The Formula
(80, John G. Avildsen);
Taps
(81, Harold Becker); Fagin in a TV
Oliver Twist
(82, Clive Donner);
China Rose
(83, Robert Day);
Firestarter
(84, Mark L. Lester); Scrooge in
A Christmas Carol
(84, Donner); for TV,
Mussolini: The Untold Story
(85, Hal Polaire) and
The Last Days of Patton
(86, Delbert Mann);
Murders in the Rue Morgue
(86, Jeannot Szwarc);
Pals
(87, Lou Antonio);
The Ryan White Story
(89, John Herzfeld);
Descending Angel
(90, Jeremy Kagan); and
The Exorcist III
(90, William Peter Blatty). He worked on, despite uncertain health:
Finding the Way Home
(91, Rod Holcomb);
Malice
(93, Harold Becker);
Curacao
(93, Carl Schultz);
The Whipping Boy
(94, Sydney Macartney); as Cus D’Amato in
Tyson
(95, Ulrich Edel);
Angus
(95, Patrick Read Johnson); the captain in a TV
Titanic
(96, Robert Lieberman);
12 Angry Men
(97, William Friedkin);
Country Justice
(97, Graeme Campbell);
Gloria
(99, Sidney Lumet); and with Jack Lemmon in the TV
Inherit the Wind
(99, Daniel Petrie).

When he died, the obituaries knew that a great actor had passed. He was two years younger than Brando—yet think of Scott’s extraordinary record onstage, his great films, and his determination to keep working. Which would you have as the actor of their age?

Randolph Scott
(Randolph Crane) (1898–1987), b. Orange, Virginia
For twenty years, Scott was a reliable, uninspired actor. Having begun as a romantic lead, he moved into action films and increasingly noir Westerns. It might have been expected that he would slip into oblivion during the 1950s. Instead, he seemed to realize that, at fifty, he looked a more convincing cowboy than anyone else around. He formed his own production company, Ranown, with Harry Joe Brown and, largely through Budd Boetticher, he produced a series of second-feature Westerns built around his own harsh sense of morality and an absolute concentration on a man alone against great odds.

Scott attended the University of North Carolina and then went on the stage before a screen debut in
The Far Call
(29, Allan Dwan). He had small parts in
Women Men Marry
(31, Charles Hutchison);
The Lone Cowboy
(31, Paul Sloane);
Sky Bride
(31, Stephen Roberts);
Wild Horse Mesa
(32, Henry Hathaway);
Island of Lost Souls
(32, Erle C. Kenton);
Supernatural
(33, Victor Halperin);
Heritage of the Desert
(33, Hathaway); and
To the Last Man
(33, Hathaway) before coming to larger parts, often as the nonsinging guy in musicals:
Roberta
(35, William A. Seiter) where his innate, husky appeal is summed up by Ginger Rogers—“you big beautiful American”;
She
(35, Irving Pichel and Lansing C. Holden);
So Red the Rose
(35, King Vidor);
A Village Tale
(35, John Cromwell);
Follow the Fleet
(36, Mark Sandrich);
Go West, Young Man
(36, Hathaway);
Last of the Mohicans
(36, George Seitz);
High, Wide and Handsome
(37, Rouben Mamoulian); with Shirley Temple in
Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm
(38, Dwan) and
Susannah of the Mounties
(39, Seiter); Wyatt Earp in
Frontier Marshall
(39, Dwan);
Jesse
James
(39, Henry King); and second fiddle to Cary Grant in
My Favorite Wife
(40, Garson Kanin)—they were once famous pals.

In the 1940s, he abandoned romance for war films and then exclusively Westerns:
Virginia City
(40, Michael Curtiz);
When the Daltons Rode
(40, George Marshall);
Belle Starr
(41, Irving Cummings);
Paris Calling
(41, Edwin L. Marin);
Western Union
(41, Fritz Lang);
To the Shores of Tripoli
(42, Bruce Humberstone);
The Spoilers
(42, Ray Enright);
Corvette K-225
(43, Richard Rossen);
Gung Ho!
(43, Enright);
The Desperadoes
(43, Charles Vidor);
Belle of the Yukon
(44, Seiter);
Captain Kidd
(45, Rowland V. Lee);
China Sky
(45, Enright);
Abilene Town
(46, Marin);
Badman’s Territory
(46, Tim Whelan);
Albuquerque
(47, Enright);
Trail Street
(47, Enright);
Coroner Creek
(48, Enright);
Return of the Bad Men
(48, Enright);
Colt 45
(50, Marin); and
Santa Fe
(51, Pichel).