The New Biographical Dictionary of Film: Completely Updated and Expanded (40 page)

The breathtaking control of imagery at the end of
The Conformist
was near to being a disguise of the action: in which the hero watches a man being assassinated and then consents to the very bloody slaughter of a woman he loves. The filming of that sequence, with the view of Trintignant hunched in his shadowy car and the desperate hand-held tracking shots of Dominique Sanda fleeing through the woods, was a perfect climax to the physical contrast between cramped stealth and graceful, unwinding movement. It imprinted the tragedy, but not without a saving gloss of romantic melodrama. The finale is passionate, whereas the logic of the film is to show that the man without passion is symptomatic of the modern world. In part, this may be because Bertolucci’s sympathy for the coldhearted, isolated fascist hero was too great to deny his crucial action the elements of performance. The killing was, therefore, the crab’s dance, in response to the serpentine feminine dance earlier in the film that obliquely humiliates him. The idea of
The Conformist
, of this natural, unevil, but detached man, was graver and more penetrating than Bertolucci’s pleasure at cinematic expression. Perhaps the images only struck him later, revealing the silent gap between substance and style. For that reason alone, one thinks of
The Conformist
initially as a very stylish movie.

If one can look at
Last Tango
unhindered by its own reputation, the impression is of antistyle.
The Conformist
is a pursuit thriller, as witness the sinister recurring musical motifs and the several motor-car sequences—memories, perhaps, of the opening car journey in Rossellini’s
Viaggio in Italia
. But
Last Tango
constantly undercuts fluency: the characters live in the present tense, kept there by Brando’s neurotic insistence on no names, explanations, or stories. The two plots—Brando and Léaud—interact only finally and at cross-purposes. (Few people can be expected to enjoy the “hidden” meaning of the clash of classical American cinema and Godard’s doctrinaire frenzy.) And even the sexual progress of the film is brutal, separating, and uncommunicative. Indeed, that is the very essence of it. The first animal-like coupling is the only one that is at all human or touching, and it ends with two monsters rolling apart across a vast, empty floor. It shows Bertolucci’s feeling for the image that this spatial dislocation is so telling throughout the film: in the crosscutting between Brando and Schneider, the desert spaces of this gaunt flat where their paths have crossed, and the intrusion of doors, furniture, and screens. But this has been signaled by the two Francis Bacon paintings in the credits—of imprisoned sexual meat—and is not taken any deeper.

In part this is because the Léaud subplot is lightweight by comparison, and because the girl is never a very sentient or interesting character. Brando seems like the old man of the fuck, always on the point of breathing life into the confrontation. But the girl is trite, a little stupid, and nothing like the probing company that Dominique Sanda was for Trintignant. Against her pettiness, Brando inevitably seems to be playing a poet, madman, or brute. A more compelling companion could have illuminated him much more testingly. As it is, the film is thoroughly ambivalent: is Brando a tragic hero, or is he meant to represent the perversion of self-centered and self-disgusted sexuality? Brando himself is plainly ready for the former. But if the film seeks the latter course, then I think its sex is too coy.

Warhol’s cinema has shown how implacably sexuality on film is noncommunicative the more comprehensively it is expressed.
Last Tango
has given up the nuances of sexual antagonism in
The Conformist
—still a greater achievement, I think—and replaced it with an uneasy anthropological withdrawal. The more totally animal the sex, the less expressive it becomes: instead, it is like looking at ants and being told, “Now, they are in ecstasy … now misery.” The states of mind are almost captioned, which is itself an ingredient of Bertolucci’s vision—that emotions are not mutual and have to be signaled—but the approach seems a dead end.

Much of
Last Tango
is intriguingly abstract. Few Parisian films have less sense of the actual city. Bertolucci’s one recognizable location, the Bir-Hakim Bridge, is itself an oddity, made to express Brando’s vulnerability to pain, more emblematic than actual. Which leads one to ask how many references there are in
Last Tango
to other films: a legitimate question, if only because of the way
Before the Revolution
contains a discussion on cinema with the teasing promise of quotes.
Last Tango
has Jean-Pierre Léaud as a near hysterical, Godardian cinema verité director making another reference to Vigo’s
L’Atalante
. That may be more than a passing joke. Vigo was a surrealist and
L’Atalante
has Parisian scenes that have more to do with the subconscious than with urban reality. More than that, the ill-fitting contrast between Léaud/marriage and Brando/mysteriously depraved sexuality is matched in
L’Atalante
by the way that Dita Parlo responds to her young husband, Jean Daste, and to the aging, but infinitely more experienced, Michel Simon. And is it too fanciful to hear Buñuel in the tango sequence, when human sexual communion is scathingly mocked? Remember that the first tango in Paris could be the music Buñuel chose to be played with
Un Chien Andalou
.

Bertolucci has not been surefooted in the years since.
Luna
and
Tragedy of a Ridiculous Man
were failures in most respects; and though
The Sheltering Sky
was well cast and had desert scenes as good as Antonioni, still the final result was so much softer than the Paul Bowles novel. That book had fascinated so many filmmakers over the years, it was something of a tragedy to see Bertolucci subtly betray it. But
The Last Emperor
was a masterpiece about a reticent man pushed in so many directions beyond his simple needs. The use of color and space, of Peking and history, of John Lone and Peter O’Toole were all masterly.
The Last Emperor
is a true epic but with an alertness to feelings as small and humble as a grasshopper. Still, it is hard to escape the feeling that Bertolucci has relaxed after the danger of
The Conformist
and
Last Tango
. Thus, he hardly seemed to notice the terrible darkness waiting beyond Paul Bowles’s bright sky.

For Bertolucci,
Stealing Beauty
was a trifle, but
Besieged
is a glorious meditation on perversity and order.
The Dreamers
is pretty, sexy, and disappointing.

Luc Besson
, b. Paris, 1959
1981:
L’Avant-Dernier
(s). 1984:
Le Dernier Combat
. 1985:
Subway
. 1988:
Le Grand Bleu/The Big Blue
. 1990:
Nikita/La Femme Nikita
. 1991:
Atlantis
. 1994:
Léon/The Professional
. 1997:
The Fifth Element/La Cinquième Elément
. 1999:
Jeanne d’Arc/The Messenger: Joan of Arc
. 2005:
Angel-A
. 2007:
Arthur and the Invisibles
.

From time to time, Besson has nursed a small following outside France—and he certainly shows every sign of wanting to go “international.”
The Professional
was shot in New York City, and it had Jean Reno trying to pretend he was Robert De Niro. But, despite his considerable humor, Besson cannot see a way past very arty visuals that seem unaware of how much they derive from fashion photography and comic books. Indeed, he is what a very intelligent French approach can sometimes persuade itself is “American.” There’s that attitudinizing in plot and heroics that works in Godard only because the structure of the stories is in constant upheaval and revision. Structure for Besson is like statuary—portentous and pedestrian. It’s notable that
The Big Blue
was huge in France, and negligible elsewhere.
Subway
is probably his most interesting film, with the stunning visuals and the bored stare of Isabelle Adjani alike in leading nowhere.

The Fifth Element
was a fair entertainment, and it did well in America, which was no preparation for the unmitigated disaster and polished-armor look of
Joan of Arc
—after Besson had seemed ready to produce Kathryn Bigelow’s version of the same subject. And Besson has served as producer for others:
Point of No Return
(93, John Badham), drawn from
Nikita; Les Truffes
(94, Bernaud Nauer);
Tonka
(97, Jean-Hugues Anglade);
Nil by Mouth
(97, Gary Oldman)—a mercifully far cry from Besson’s own style;
Taxi
(98, Gérard Pirès).

In recent years, he has worked much harder—far too hard?—as a producer:
Kiss of the Dragon
(01, Chris Nation);
Wasabi
(01, Gérard Krawczyk);
The Transporter
(02, Corey Yuen);
Fanfan la Tulipe
(03, Krawczyk);
Les Côtelettes
(03, Bertrand Blier);
District 13
(04, Pierre Morel);
Color Me Kubrick
(05, Brian W. Cook);
Revolver
(05, Guy Ritchie);
The Three Burials of Melquiaden Estrada
(05, Tommy Lee Jones);
Transporter 2
(05, Louis Leterrier);
Unleashed
(05, Leterrier);
Love and Other Disasters
(06, Alek Keshishian);
Tell No One
(06, Guillaume Canet);
The Secret
(07, Vincent Perez);
Frontier
(s) (07, Gens);
Taken
(08, Morel).

Charles Bickford
(1891–1967), b. Cambridge, Massachusetts
Bickford usually had the taciturn ruggedness of an open-air man, drawn grudgingly into a film studio. He played a few villains, but it is a tribute to the feelings he conveyed of decency and reliability that for over thirty years he personified men ill at ease in the dramatic cockpit of a film: in one of his first films,
Anna Christie
(30, Clarence Brown), he was an uncomplicated seaman who eventually asks the prostitute Garbo to marry him. In terms of self-sufficiency, stern moral conventions, and the flavor of a tough life, Bickford carried a breath of the outside world. He was not glamorous, and that itself was the basis of his Hollywood appeal, so skillfully offered that it became a beautiful portrait in diffident straightforwardness—being polite to shams.

Bickford was an engineer by training who had fought in the First World War. But throughout the 1920s, he had a successful stage career that carried him to Hollywood when sound arrived. His movie debut was in
Dynamite
(29, Cecil B. De Mille). In his first years in films he was a lead actor, young enough to be a rough, romantic star: in
Hell’s Heroes
(29, William Wyler); as a sea captain with a new young bride, Leonore Ulric, in
South Sea Rose
(29, Allan Dwan);
Passion Flower
(30, William De Mille);
River’s End
(30, Michael Curtiz);
The Sea Bat
(30, Wesley Ruggles);
The Squaw Man
(31, C. B. De Mille); fighting with Paul Lukas for Tallulah Bankhead in
Thunder Below
(32, Richard Wallace);
No Other Woman
(32, J. Walter Ruben);
Vanity Street
(32, Nicholas Grinde);
This Day and Age
(33, C. B. De Mille);
Under Pressure
(35, Raoul Walsh); as the gunrunner Latigo in
The Plainsman
(37, C. B. De Mille); and
High, Wide and Handsome
(37, Rouben Mamoulian).

By now he was securely playing supporting parts, as he did for another twenty-five years, without real alteration:
Daughter of Shanghai
(37, Robert Florey);
Gangs of New York
(38, James Cruze);
Stand Up and Fight
(39, W. S. Van Dyke);
Mutiny in the Big House
(39, William Nigh); as the friendly foreman in
Of Mice and Men
(39, Lewis Milestone);
Reap the Wild Wind
(42, C. B. De Mille); the priest in
The Song of Bernadette
(43, Henry King);
Mr. Lucky
(43, H. C. Potter);
Wing and a Prayer
(44, Henry Hathaway);
Fallen Angel
(45, Otto Preminger);
Captain Eddie
(45, Lloyd Bacon); excellent as the shy suitor to Jennifer Jones in
Duel in the Sun
(46, King Vidor);
The Farmer’s Daughter
(47, Potter); as the blind painter in
The Woman on the Beach
(47, Jean Renoir); as the priest in
Brute Force
(47, Jules Dassin);
Johnny Belinda
(48, Jean Negulesco);
Four Faces West
(48, Alfred E. Green);
Command Decision
(49, Sam Wood);
Roseanna McCoy
(49, Irving Reis);
Whirlpool
(49, Preminger);
Riding High
(50, Frank Capra);
Branded
(51, Rudolph Maté);
Man of Bronze
(52, Curtiz); so sensitive as the studio boss in
A Star is Born
(54, George Cukor) it is hard to know why anyone ever had trouble;
The Prince of Players
(55, Philip Dunne);
Not as a Stranger
(55, Stanley Kramer);
The Court Martial of Billy Mitchell
(55, Preminger);
You Can’t Run Away From It
(56, Dick Powell);
Mister Cory
(57, Blake Edwards);
The Big Country
(58, Wyler);
The Unforgiven
(59, John Huston); very touching as the uncomprehending father in
Days of Wine and Roses
(63, Edwards); and
A Big Hand for the Little Lady
(66, Fielder Cook).

As if to prove Bickford’s actual appeal, when his death was announced, Jennifer Jones attempted suicide with sleeping pills.