The New Biographical Dictionary of Film: Completely Updated and Expanded (391 page)

His early Polish films were antiheroic and aggressively personal: they concern idiosyncratic outsiders played by himself. In
Rysopis
he is a student who suddenly decides to enlist in the army, and in
Walkover
a seasoned boxer who enters contests for novices. There is an odd mixture here of national anguish, wistful optimism about sex, and self-indulgent stylistic devices. But the films bristle with invention and Skolimowski’s own bitter romanticism.
Barrier
was the most directly contrary to the 1950s view of Poland’s recent history, and the most assured in the way it turned Warsaw into a mysterious, alien city.

But Skolimowski was plainly near to breaking the local rules. His films were both pungent and formally indulgent.
Hands Up!
was banned and
Le Départ
was filmed in Brussels from a story Godard might have had no time to make. With Jean-Pierre Léaud and Catherine Duport it was a dazzling comedy, but without roots and a sign of how quickly Skolimowski’s art and thrust might seem mannered. After that,
The Adventures of Gerard
was a funny and accomplished lampoon of Napoleonic glory,
Deep End
his most intense venture into fantasy, and
King, Queen, Knave
, the best film of a Nabokov original. The odd circumstances of his later work may indicate the problem Skolimowski faces in finding an environment in which he can work fruitfully.

Living in London and Los Angeles much of the time, Skolimowski has not had an easy ride, despite the considerable success of
Moonlighting
, a droll, sad comedy about Polish building workers in London.
Success
is a parable of the eighties, very little seen, and
The Lightship
is a tense power struggle between Klaus Maria Brandauer and an inspired Robert Duvall.
Torrents of Spring
is Turgenev, shot in Europe, with Timothy Hutton and Nastassja Kinski.

Skolimowski has also acted in a few films, and done it well:
Circle of Deceit
(81, Volker Schlöndörff);
White Nights
(85, Taylor Hackford);
Big Shots
(87, Robert Mandel);
Torrents of Spring
(89, Skolimowski);
Mars Attacks!
(96, Tim Burton);
L.A. Without a Map
(98, Mika Kaurismäki);
Before Night Falls
(00, Julian Schnabel).

It is said that he means to direct again—there was talk of a Susan Sontag novel—but he has just finished a political thriller, starring Vincent Gallo.

Everett Sloane
(1909–65), b. New York
The more times you see
Citizen Kane
, the more strands it has. One such mode is old age: of course, Kane and all his associates grow old; the entire film might be the recollection of Kane on hearing chimes at midnight. But, more than that, its sense of time past, of a life withered away, is the grave looking forward of a young man. Dressing up as the elderly Kane, Welles was inventing an old age that he would inevitably come to fill. Falstaff and Clay in
The Immortal Story
are men obsessed with the contrast of physical decline and imaginative vibrancy. Even Hank Quinlan, in
Touch of Evil
, is the wreck of a younger man who might once have been Marlene Dietrich’s lover.

What does that mean for Everett Sloane? Simply, that within that strand of old age, Sloane seems to be central to the film. He is the brash, vulgar manager: the man who arrives in a clatter of junky furniture; who joins in the yelling repartee with his master at the party; and who stands, moved and naïve, without a trace of cynicism, over the two headlines on election night; he is the man who could never pronounce the name of the opera in which Susan Alexander Kane wails so desperately. It is hard to believe that there was not as much of Sloane in Bernstein as there was of Welles and Cotten in Kane and Leland. The trio in charge of the
Inquirer
so beautifully reflect the volatile companionship of the Mercury Theater. But Sloane has one immense scene as an old man, all in one very simple take, that is curiously relaxed in a film where most scenes are rigorously tied in to brilliant organization. Like an old man, Bernstein meanders. Sitting in a large office, reflected in the tabletop, chairman of the board and redundant. He tells a story—the first story within stories in Welles’s work—about a day in 1896 on the ferry over to Jersey when he saw a girl carrying a white parasol, a girl he has never forgotten: that clinging moment is a clue to Rosebud, and a gorgeous, affectionate flourish from Welles, embracing Sloane’s perky sentimentality, and going to the heart of experience. The incident imprints itself just as that girl did on Bernstein: like Welles/Kane, we are persuaded of momentary epiphanies. The world is changed as we are offered a way of experiencing it: “A fellow will remember a lot of things you wouldn’t think he’d remember.”

Sloane did more than that. He enjoyed himself in
Journey Into Fear
(43, Norman Foster) and was brilliant as the crippled lawyer in
The Lady from Shanghai
(48, Welles). Who can forget him lurching through the courtroom, the reptile stare at Rita Hayworth, and the way his arm goes up involuntarily—part to ward off the image, part a gesture of languor—when Welles tells the story of the sharks devouring one another? What else?
Prince of Foxes
(49, Henry King);
The Men
(50, Fred Zinnemann);
The Enforcer
(51, Raoul Walsh and Bretaigne Windust);
Bird of Paradise
(51, Delmer Daves);
Sirocco
(51, Curtis Bernhardt);
Rommel, Desert Fox
(51, Henry Hathaway);
Way of a Gaucho
(52, Jacques Tourneur);
The Big Knife
(55, Robert Aldrich);
Lust for Life
(56, Vincente Minnelli);
Somebody Up There Likes Me
(56, Robert Wise);
Patterns
(57, Fielder Cook);
Marjorie Morningstar
(57, Irving Rapper);
The Gun Runners
(58, Don Siegel);
Home from the Hill
(60, Minnelli);
The Patsy
(64, Jerry Lewis); and
The Disorderly Orderly
(65, Frank Tashlin).

Kevin Smith
, b. Red Bank, New Jersey, 1970
1992:
Mae Day: The Crumbling of a Documentary
(d). 1994:
Clerks
. 1995:
Mallrats
. 1997:
Chasing Amy
. 1999:
Dogma
. 2001:
Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back
. 2002:
The Flying Car
(TV). 2004:
Jersey Girl
. 2006:
Clerks II
. 2008:
Zach and Miri Make a Porno
.

Kevin Smith was the favorite filmmaker of my son, Nicholas (when he was fourteen), and while I prefer Nicholas to Smith, still I am an enthusiast for his kind of gutter-level language, attitudes, and price levels. Above all, there is a young attitude at liberty in America that scorns old movies for their grandeur, their glamour, and their price tag. Of course, even the most subversive young people can turn out susceptible to glamour and money. And what would happen as and when someone like Kevin Smith hits the big time could be a profound if depressing subject. But Smith shows no sign of caving in. His work is usually rushed, clumsy, and rude—and those minor virtues can conceal a great many big questions being dodged.

On the other hand,
Clerks
is still raw, rank, and very funny.
Chasing Amy
is an excellent modern romance. And
Dogma
, it seems to me, covers most contemporary young ideas about religious faith. Where such a talent goes is always going to be a troubling matter, for it was ghastly to see Smith turn polite (
Jersey Girl
). But is it likely? This is the authentic voice of a generation still in love with movies, but certain that—so far—they have been prettified junk. What it means, I think, is that Smith’s biggest peril is seeing something that isn’t junk, getting the message, and trying to grow up. There have always been Americans—from Henry Miller to Louis Armstrong—in whom maturity was never going to take, or match the ripping voice of youth.

Dame Maggie Smith
, b. Ilford, England, 1934
One of the great stage comediennes of recent years, Maggie Smith still looks unsure of how to behave in the movies. One cause of irresolution may be that she was never the most beautiful woman in the world. Has she been tempted to hide rather sharp, sensible features beneath various disguises? Certainly, her central part in
Travels with My Aunt
(72, George Cukor) is a fussy, insecure piece of impersonation that tends to play to the audience rather than to the camera.

Her dilemma is understandable. On the stage, in
Much Ado About Nothing, The Country Wife, Private Lives
, and many substantial plays, she has achieved an enormously happy rapport with audiences and taught them to laugh in time with her heartfelt tricks. She
is
tricky. Her timing is so wicked, one can forget the play. It is not easy to know who she is, or to believe she trusts mere feelings. On screen, a succession of inconsequential cameos led suddenly to the best actress Oscar for
The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie
(68, Ronald Neame). The elitist Edinburgh schoolteacher, talking of the life force but actually frigid and authoritarian, is a meal of a part based on the theatrical division of unhappy woman and actress relishing flamboyance. In fact, the part is more touching than she made it; sheer comic technique made Smith’s Brodie seem a calculating phony, whereas she could be a true, hysterical virgin.

Maggie Smith is a very mannered actress, but no more so than the young Katharine Hepburn. As with Hepburn, the mannerism is not coy but an audacious sign of spirit and personality. The difference is that Hepburn committed herself to films, and had the confidence to take risks. As it is, Maggie Smith’s beginnings have taught her to feel that she looked plain and uninteresting in movies. Thus the resort to exaggeration and the rattle of staginess. The early films are
Nowhere to Go
(58, Seth Holt);
The V.I.P.s
(63, Anthony Asquith);
The Pumpkin Eater
(64, Jack Clayton);
Young Cassidy
(66, Jack Cardiff and John Ford);
Othello
(66, Stuart Burge);
The Honey Pot
(67, Joseph L. Mankiewicz);
Hot Millions
(68, Eric Till); by turns genteel and depraved as the music-hall singer offering to make a man of you in
Oh! What a Lovely War
(69, Richard Attenborough).

Graham Greene’s aunt, guided home by Cukor, seemed in prospect another natural. But Katharine Hepburn was denied the role she wanted by the studio. Perhaps there was an impossible balance in the novel between age and vitality, an idea rather than a woman who could be made real. Nevertheless, it exposed Maggie Smith’s failings as did the many discordant moods in
Love and Pain (and the Whole Damn Thing
) (72, Alan J. Pakula). Her film career dematerialized as quickly as it began, and she was lost in the crowd in
Murder by Death
(76, Robert Moore). But she treated
California Suite
(78, Herbert Ross) to a funny but slick cameo and—to her evident surprise—picked up the supporting actress Oscar.

Her movie career remains blithely indifferent to reason or line. She does a little bit of anything, so consistently over the top in lighter material that no one notices. But she has more recently offered some harrowing portraits of loss, loneliness, and incipient madness:
Clash of the Titans
(81, Desmond Davis);
Quartet
(81, James Ivory);
Evil Under the Sun
(82, Guy Hamilton);
Better Late Than Never
(82, Bryan Forbes);
The Missionary
(82, James Loncraine);
Double Play
(84, Karoly Maak);
A Private Function
(84, Malcolm Mowbray);
A Room With a View
(85, Ivory);
The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne
(87, Jack Clayton); brilliant in the extended monologue of
Bed Among the Lentils
(88, Alan Bennett);
Memento Mori
(91, Clayton);
Hook
(91, Steven Spielberg);
Sister Act
(92, Emile Ardolino); the housekeeper in
The Secret Garden
(93, Agnieszka Holland); and
Sister Act II
(93, Bill Duke).

It’s a sign of timidity, I suppose, that she is regarded as unsexy or too old for lead roles:
Richard III
(95, Richard Loncraine);
The First Wives Club
(96, Hugh Wilson);
Washington Square
(97, Holland);
Tea with Mussolini
(99, Franco Zeffirelli);
The Last September
(99, Deborah Warner);
Curtain Call
(99, Peter Yates); Queen Alexandra in
All the King’s Men
(99, Julian Jarrold); Betsey Trotwood in
David Copperfield
(99, Simon Curtis);
Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone
(01, Chris Columbus);
Gosford Park
(01, Robert Altman);
Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood
(02, Callie Khouri);
Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets
(02, Chris Columbus);
My House in Umbria
(03, Richard Loncraine);
Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban
(04, Alfonso Cuarón); with Judi Dench in
Ladies in Lavender
(04, Charles Dance);
Keeping Mum
(05, Niall Johnson);
Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire
(05, Mike Newell);
Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix
(07, David Yates);
Becoming Jane
(07, Julian Jarrold);
Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince
(09, Yates);
From Time to Time
(09, Julian Fellowes).

Will Smith
(Willard Christopher Smith Jr.), b. Philadelphia, 1968
Will Smith is the first black actor to capitalize on the widespread white realization that you don’t have to act to be in pictures. Far more fundamentally, just be in them and let it show that you’re not overly impressed or intimidated. In addition, Smith has applied the same easygoing indifference to hit records and being cool. It’s a policy that could easily sweep the heights of business and the pinnacles of politics. For what Smith really embodies is the other side of the coin named in
Network
(“Because you’re on television, dummy”), which is, approximately, “Hey, dude, I’m on TV.”