The New Biographical Dictionary of Film: Completely Updated and Expanded (398 page)

He stayed busy, having overcome illness:
The Specialist
(94, Luis Llosa);
Tous les Jours Dimanche
(95, Jean Charles Tacchella);
In Pursuit of Honor
(95, Ken Olin);
Captain Nuke and the Bomber Boys
(95, Charles Gale);
Dalva
(96, Ken Cameron);
Mars Attacks!
(96, Tim Burton);
Truth or Consequences, N.M
. (97, Kiefer Sutherland);
Modern Vampires
(98, Richard Elfman);
Legacy
(98, T. J. Scott);
Body and Soul
(98, Sam Henry Kass);
Crazy in Alabama
(99, Antonio Banderas); as the judge who frees the
Hurricane
(99, Jewison);
End of Days
(99, Peter Hyams);
The Last Producer
(00, Burt Reynolds);
The Flying Dutchman
(00, Robin P. Murray).

Max
(Maximilian)
Steiner
(1888–1971), b. Vienna
Where did it come from, and where is it going? This locomotive, polar express, and runaway train. You can propose that “movie” (no article please—think of it as current) is quite simply a development in storytelling (allied to theatre or fiction). Or you can say that it is a crucial genus of performance that settles a new cloak of audience on us. You can argue, instead, that the whole thing is a variant on reality in which the séance has mixed reports on our validity—are we a part of reality, or are we just a dumb model of the thing called time that is unfolded in its scan? Or you might say that, just as in its throat-clearing thirty years or so film had no music (at least not married music), there is every reason to see film now as a kind of music: it is immense emotion going in one eye and out the other ear.

In which case Max Steiner is Shakespeare, Gandalf, and Freud, and the staves of music are the grid of storyboard. Plus this: in a second of film there are twenty-four separate, locked boxcars but music is the great continuity, the flood mark a sound leaves in the air.

Or, you can take another tack and say the music on film is quite simply hype and hucksterism, it is the old one-two (like pundits telling you what to think). In which case Max Steiner is more important than important. Put it this way: David O. Selznick needed Max Steiner the way Josef von Sternberg needed Marlene Dietrich.

Max Steiner is all of those things, the student of Brahms and Mahler and the inadvertent teacher of that thing called “mood” that used music for wings. People have always remarked on how in 222 minutes of
Gone With the Wind
, Steiner left little more than 25 minutes for silence. I’m surprised he was that generous, or that empty. Today with multitrack possibilities, Steiner would have different orchestras sallying forth from different quarters of the room. He would have been a pathfinder in polyphony and would have had to hurry after the mixed music with its battery of realities. (There are American films that only reach their full life and liveliness if you run them to Charles Ives—just try it.) So Steiner was a huckster who said three things with every fragment of music: you are about to see
x
, you are seeing
x
, you just saw
x
. Yes, he might have been more complicated, and he might have grabbed Selznick by his ears and said, “Look, listen to the music that says here it comes—that is always the best. Every movie should be called ‘Here it comes’—but it never comes. It’s just like you, David!”

It is widely claimed that
King Kong
was the first film for which Steiner did wall-to-wall music. Fair enough, and
Kong
is so full of dramatic elements that need throbbing music (which would be betrayed without it). All Max intuited was to lay on the music so that the public think they are seeing the greatest thing ever. The movies have not yet recovered or shown serious threats of being reduced to growing up. It’s not just that Steiner discovered a kind of music that was like movies—he guessed that the movies were a self-fucking animal, like music.

He won three Oscars
—The Informer; Now, Voyager;
and
Since You Went Away
. In addition, he wrote the scores for
The Charge of the Light Brigade, The Letter, Casablanca, The Big Sleep, The Fountainhead
. You can hardly do better than have Max Steiner score your dreams—if you can’t score yourself.

James Stephenson
(1889–1941), b. Selby, Yorkshire, England
Bette Davis never mentions James Stephenson in her book
The Lonely Life
, which is odd. After all, Davis was a very perceptive actress, well aware that
The Letter
(40, William Wyler) was among the best, and least impeded, things she would ever do. She had been in love with Wyler during the film’s making, and she surely saw and felt how far Stephenson was used in that film as a man torn between love and loathing for Leslie Crosbie … or Bette Davis.

Stephenson lacks a body of work that insists on being dealt with here. Yet I welcome him into the book, because his Howard Joyce in
The Letter
is one of the great performances in film history. And that was noted at the time: after a string of minor roles, Stephenson was nominated as best supporting actor in the film (he lost to Walter Brennan in
The Westerner
—a comic reversal of justice). Except that Stephenson is hardly a supporting actor in the film. He is actually credited as a star, and I’m sure he’s on screen more than Herbert Marshall as the husband. Indeed, I think of
The Letter
as a series of terrible examinations in which Stephenson gradually exposes Davis’s guilt, and his own distress.

He was an English stage actor (as far as I can tell) who arrived in Hollywood (at Warners) only in the mid-1930s. He worked hard for the next few years, but so many of his parts were far smaller than his capacity:
King of the Underworld
(37, Lewis Seiler);
The Cowboy from Brooklyn
(38, Lloyd Bacon);
Boy Meets Girl
(38, Bacon);
Nancy Drew, Detective
(38, William Clemens);
Devil’s Island
(39, Clemens), with Boris Karloff;
Torchy Blane in Chinatown
(39, William Beaudine);
Secret Service of the Air
(39, Noel Smith), a Ronald Reagan picture;
Confessions of a Nazi Spy
(39, Anatole Litvak);
The Old Maid
(39, Edmund Goulding), with Bette Davis; as Major de Beaujolais in
Beau Geste
(39, William Wellman); as Egerton in
The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex
(39, Michael Curtiz);
We Are Not Alone
(39, Goulding); the lead in
Calling Philo Vance
(40, Clemens);
The Sea Hawk
(40, Curtiz);
Murder in the Air
(40, Seiler);
A Dispatch from Reuters
(40, William Dieterle); as a shrink who hardly realizes Geraldine Fitzgerald loves him in
Shining Victory
(41, Irving Rapper); teaching Reagan in
International Squadron
(41, Lothar Mendes);
Flight from Destiny
(41, Vincent Sherman).

He died, of a heart attack, in Los Angeles in 1941. Of course, he didn’t look well in
The Letter
, but one reads that as the impact of Leslie Crosbie.

George Stevens
(1904–75), b. Oakland, California
1933:
Cohens and Kellys in Trouble
. 1934:
Bachelor Bait; Kentucky Kernels
. 1935:
Alice Adams; Laddie; The Nitwits; Annie Oakley
. 1936:
Swing Time
. 1937:
Quality Street; A Damsel in Distress
. 1938:
Vivacious Lady
. 1939:
Gunga Din
. 1940:
Vigil in the Night
. 1941:
Penny Serenade
. 1942:
Woman of the Year; The Talk of the Town
. 1943:
The More the Merrier
. 1948:
I Remember Mama
. 1951:
A Place in the Sun
. 1952:
Something to Live For
. 1953:
Shane
. 1956:
Giant
. 1959:
The Diary of Anne Frank
. 1965:
The Greatest Story Ever Told
. 1969:
The Only Game in Town
.

There is a George Stevens film not in the filmography, seldom seen, and not even shaped into a “movie.” It is the 16mm color footage he shot himself in Europe as head of the Signal Corps Special Motion Picture Unit. It includes scenes of death and ruin, as well as coverage of Dachau taken shortly after its liberation. I mention this because it is often said that the war changed Stevens, and made it less easy for him to believe in entertainment. Was he a Sullivan who went too far to be comfortable again in Hollywood? There is no biography as yet, so the question is hard to answer. But something seems to have afflicted Stevens. He was never a great director. But in the thirties he had a feeling for fun, grace, and story. Thereafter, he was always somber—and sometimes heavier than that.

This falling off is all the sadder in view of Stevens’s origins. Hal Roach hired him as gagman and, eventually, director for Laurel and Hardy. Once established, he made a string of pleasant pictures, usually with a comic emphasis and allowing special opportunities to actors.
Alice Adams
is still a major Katharine Hepburn film;
Swing Time
is classic Astaire and Rogers with Astaire’s virtuoso “Bojangles” dance and one of the most mercurial of the intimate dance routines with Ginger, “Pick Yourself Up”;
Quality Street, Vivacious Lady, Gunga Din, Penny Serenade, Woman of the Year, The Talk of the Town
, and
The More the Merrier
all seem scarcely to belong to the laborious director of later years, dulled by overcraft.
Woman of the Year
, especially, is an excellent emotional comedy that introduced Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn and never lost the charge of feeling between them, even if it settles for a male chauvinist attitude.
Talk of the Town
has unresolved echoes of Capra and
Fury
, too much piety toward the Supreme Court, and too great a willingness to keep Cary Grant in hiding while Jean Arthur and Ronald Colman talk.

The theory outlined above doesn’t quite hold.
I Remember Mama
is decent and very fond of the Bay Area, and
A Place in the Sun
is a beautifully pessimistic love story, nearly rapturous in its treatment of Clift and Elizabeth Taylor and in its observation of their feelings for each other. Indeed, there is a gravitational pull toward death in the love scenes that is unashamed and subversive.

Of the rest,
Shane
works because of a simple fable, the jeweled grandeur of the landscape, and the rapport between Alan Ladd and Brandon de Wilde.
Giant
is bloated, seldom plausible, with actors who never settle into the story or the idea of Texas. The three films after that are strenuous disasters. Maybe Stevens was miscast as a maker of big pictures, and rather exposed when he had to take up the load of theme or ideas.

After all, in the thirties, he directed scripts, stories, projects, and stars that had built-in virtues. There have always been directors who were most generously used if asked to do no more. But maybe war and its horrors compelled Stevens into authorship and philosophy, things beyond his craft.

Mark
(Richard)
Stevens
(1915–94), b. Cleveland, Ohio
1954:
Cry Vengeance
. 1956:
Timetable
. 1965:
Sunscorched
.

Mark Stevens was an actor principally, but in the mid-fifties he turned out two deft thrillers that are worth pursuing. In
Cry Vengeance
he is a man trying to find those who sent him to prison; in
Timetable
, he is an insurance investigator on the track of a robbery he has organized himself.
Sunscorched
I’ve never seen, or really heard of—it also goes by the title
Tierra del Fuego
.

Before that, Stevens went from radio to the movies in the early forties:
Passage to Marseille
(44, Michael Curtiz);
Objective Burma
(45, Raoul Walsh);
Within These Walls
(45, Bruce Humberstone);
Pride of the Marines
(45, Delmer Daves);
I Wonder Who’s Kissing Her Now
(47, Lloyd Bacon);
The Street with No Name
(48, William Keighley);
The Snake Pit
(48, Anatole Litvak);
Sand
(49, Louis King);
Oh, You Beautiful Doll
(49, John M. Stahl);
Dancing in the Dark
(49, Irving Reis);
Reunion in Reno
(51, Kurt Neumann);
Little Egypt
(51, Frederick de Cordova);
Mutiny
(52, Edward Dmytryk);
Torpedo Alley
(53, Lew Landers);
Jack Slade
(53, Harold Schuster);
Gunsmoke in Tucson
(58, Thomas Carr);
September Storm
(60, Byron Haskin);
Fate Is the Hunter
(64, Ralph Nelson).

From 1954–56, he was producer, director, and star of the TV series
Big Town
, in which he was a newspaper editor.

James Stewart
(1908–97), b. Indiana, Pennsylvania
Stewart is one of the most trusted and beloved of American actors, an icon arousing great public affection chiefly because of his comedies,
It’s a Wonderful Life
, and his artful portrait of simplicity. His body of mature films, made during the 1950s for Hitchcock and Anthony Mann, while generally presenting him as a troubled, querulous, or lonely personality, clearly play on the immense reputation for charm that his early films had won. Thus Stewart is one of the most intriguing examples of a star cast increasingly against his accepted character. The emotional subtlety of films like
The Naked Spur, Rear Window, The Far Country, The Man from Laramie
, and
Vertigo
derives from the way in which we are intrigued by the contradictions in Stewart himself, between hardness and vulnerability. Who can forget his nightmare in
The Naked Spur
, or his cries of distress?