The New Biographical Dictionary of Film: Completely Updated and Expanded (43 page)

She had a striking comeback a few years later with
Opening Night
(77, John Cassavetes);
Grease
(78, Randal Kleiser);
The Glove
(78, Ross Hagen);
The Champ
(79, Franco Zeffirelli); and
The Woman Inside
(80, Joseph Van Winkle).

Claire Bloom
, b. London, 1931
Educated at Badminton, the Guildhall School, and the Central School of Speech and Drama, she made her London debut in 1947 and appeared at Stratford-upon-Avon the following year. In fact, her first film was
The Blind Goddess
(48, Harold French), but she was effectively “discovered” by Chaplin to play the ballerina in
Limelight
(52). A leading player at the Old Vic, she also appeared in
Innocents in Paris
(52, Gordon Parry) and
The Man Between
(53, Carol Reed). By 1955, she mixed a notable Juliet at the Old Vic with playing opposite Olivier in
Richard III
and with Burton in Robert Rossen’s
Alexander the Great
. She then made films in England and America that seldom seemed worthy of her. She was simultaneously austere and passionate as the most Russian character in
The Brothers Karamazov
(57, Richard Brooks), while in
The Chapman Report
(62, George Cukor)—despite the invading discretion of the censor—she portrayed sexual appetite with an un-English clarity and masochism. As Cukor said, “she did all those ignoble things with a beautiful, sober face.” But such hints of Camille have been ignored and too many movies have seemed content to keep her ladylike:
Look Back in Anger
(59, Tony Richardson);
Three Moves to Freedom
(60, Gerd Oswald);
The Haunting
(63, Robert Wise); to Italy for
Il Maestro di Vigevano
(63, Elio Petri) and the “Peccato nel Pomeriggio” episode from
Alta Infidelta
(64, Petri);
The Outrage
(64, Martin Ritt);
The Spy Who Came In from the Cold
(66, Ritt);
Charly
(68, Ralph Nelson); with her then husband Rod Steiger in
Three Into Two Won’t Go
(69, Peter Hall); an amusing Honor Klein in
A Severed Head
(70, Dick Clement);
The Illustrated Man
(69, Jack Smight); and
A Doll’s House
(72, Patrick Garland), produced by her second husband, Hillard Elkins. She also had a great success on the London stage as Blanche Du Bois in
A Streetcar Named Desire
, and she appeared in
Islands in the Stream
(76, Franklin Schaffner).

Married again (to author Philip Roth), she was in
Clash of the Titans
(81, Desmond Davis); a fabulously controlling Lady Marchmain in
Brideshead Revisited
(81, Charles Sturridge);
Déjà Vu
(84, Anthony Richmond);
Florence Nightingale
(85, Daryl Duke);
Promises to Keep
(85, Noel Black);
Shadowlands
(85, Norman Stone);
Sammy and Rosie Get Laid
(87, Stephen Frears);
Queenie
(87, Larry Pearce);
Shadow on the Sun
(88, Richardson); and
Crimes and Misdemeanors
(89, Woody Allen), in which she had so little to do it was disconcerting to have her doing it.

She works regularly, and she did two years in the nineties on the daytime soap
As the World Turns
. But her opportunities have been few: on TV in
The Mirror Crack’d
(92, Stone);
The Camomile Lawn
(92, Peter Hall);
It’s Nothing Personal
(93, Bradford May);
Remember
(93, John Herzfeld); uncredited in
The Age of Innocence
(93, Martin Scorsese);
A Village Affair
(94, Moira Armstrong);
Mad Dogs and Englishmen
(95, Henry Cole);
Mighty Aphrodite
(95, Allen);
Daylight
(96, Rob Cohen);
Family Money
(97, Renny Rye);
Imogen’s Face
(98, David Wheatley); the lead in
The Lady in Question
(99, Joyce Chopra);
Love and Murder
(00, George Bloomfield);
Yesterday’s Children
(00, Marus Cole);
The Birth of Eve
(02, Claude Fournier);
Imagining Argentina
(03, Christopher Hampton);
The Republic of Love
(03, Deepa Mehta);
The Chatterley Affair
(06, James Hawes).

Emily Blunt
, b. London, 1983
She won a Golden Globe for support work on TV in
Gideon’s Daughter
(06, Stephen Poliakoff), and managed to steal enough of
The Devil Wears Prada
(06, David Frankel) to prompt Meryl Streep to describe her as the best young actress she’d seen—not the kindest tribute to Anne Hathaway, who supposedly had the richer part in that dissection of the fashion world. But we usually know what Ms. Streep means, and Emily Blunt has not yet given a poor performance or failed to take advantage of limited opportunities. The fact is that movie cameras tend to concentrate on people like Anne Hathaway, and Ms. Blunt’s acid intelligence requires more wit and sharpness than are likely in
The Young Victoria
(09, Jean-Marc Vallé). A Hathaway can look appealingly helpless; but a Blunt was born minus that recessive gene. It’s been a long time since an actress made a career for herself because she was smart and funny and so mocking of second-rate material.

On TV, Emily Blunt was Catherine Howard to Ray Winstone’s
Henry VIII
(03, Pete Travis), a situation where you wanted to hear her tart, modern observations. She took a big step forward in
My Summer of Love
(04, Pawel Pawlikowski) and she was very good in the conventional horror film
Wind Chill
(07, Gregory Jacobs). But she has seemed content to take her share of modest parts—as in
Prada
and
Charlie Wilson’s War
(07, Mike Nichols), and with her sweeter mirror image, Amy Adams, in
Sunshine Cleaning
(08, Christine Jeffs). She did good work in
The Jane Austen Book Club
(07, Robin Swicord) and she was worth watching in such minor things as
Irresistible
(06, Ann Turner) and
Dan in Real Life
(07, Peter Hedges). But she needs a vehicle with an engine, and
Young Victoria
was a horseless carriage and
The Wolfman
(10, Joe Johnston) was dumb.

Budd Boetticher
(Oscar Boetticher Jr.) (1916–2001), b. Chicago
1944:
One Mysterious Night
. 1945:
The Missing Juror; A Guy, A Gal and a Pal; Escape in the Fog; Youth on Trial
. 1946:
The Fleet That Came to Stay
. 1948:
Assigned to Danger; Behind Locked Doors
. 1949:
Wolf Hunter; Black Midnight
. 1950:
Killer Shark
. 1951:
The Bullfighter and the Lady; The Sword of D’Artagnan; The Cimarron Kid
. 1952:
Red Ball Express; Bronco Buster; Horizons West
. 1953:
City Beneath the Sea; Seminole; The Man from the Alamo; Wings of the Hawk; East of Sumatra
. 1955:
The Magnificent Matador
. 1956:
The Killer Is Loose; Seven Men from Now
. 1957:
The Tall T; Decision at Sundown
. 1958:
Buchanan Rides Alone
. 1959:
Ride Lonesome; Westbound
. 1960:
The Rise and Fall of Legs Diamond; Comanche Station
. 1968:
Arruza
. 1969:
A Time for Dying
. 1985:
My Kingdom for …
(d).

The career of Boetticher is one of the most interesting ever confined to B pictures. After periods at Culver Military Academy and Ohio State University, he became a notable football and basketball player. A trip to Mexico introduced him to bullfighting and a career in the ring led to his being hired as advisor by Fox for
Blood and Sand
(41, Rouben Mamoulian). He stayed in films, served in the Marines, and after the war, began directing low-budget second features. Neither his first bullfighting film,
The Bullfighter and the Lady
, nor his films up to 1953 suggested that he was more or less than a competent director of adventure films, an excellent storyteller with a very simple style. But
The Bullfighter
was Robert Stack as an American trying to become a matador, resulting in awkwardness and tragedy. With hindsight, one can see how far that was autobiographical.
The Magnificent Matador
was a failure, but it showed that Boetticher was intent on greater significance. In fact, Anthony Quinn’s grandiloquence was at odds with Boetticher’s own restraint.
The Killer Is Loose
was his first important modern-dress film, a very tense thriller about a psychotic, played by Wendell Corey, threatening the staked-out Rhonda Fleming.

At this stage, Boetticher fell in with Randolph Scott. After
Seven Men From Now
, they were joined by producer Harry Joe Brown for a remarkable series of Westerns, all made cheaply and quickly in desert or barren locations. They have a consistent and bleak preoccupation with life and death, sun and shade, and encompass treachery, cruelty, courage, and bluff with barely a trace of sentimentality or portentousness. The series added the austere image of a veteran Randolph Scott to the essential iconography of the Western and proved that Boetticher was a masterly observer of primitive man. His style remained without any flourish or easy touch and the series brought him some critical attention. Two films at least
—The Tall T
and
Ride Lonesome
—must be in contention for the most impressive and least handicapped B films ever made. Above all, Boetticher had stressed the character and mythic value in visual narrative, and he has a more secure place in the history of the Western than several more self-conscious narrators of its breakdown.

In 1960, Boetticher added a fine gangster film to his oeuvre,
The Rise and Fall of Legs Diamond
, which only proved the range of his talent. He then returned to Mexico and labored eight years over
Arruza
, his third bullfighting film. But probably he is better tested by an eight-day schedule, compelled into vigorous, long action setups.

After a long absence, he appeared very nicely as a rich oilman in
Tequila Sunrise
(88, Robert Towne).

Sir Dirk Bogarde
(Derek Niven van den Bogaerde) (1921–99), b. London
He began as a commercial artist before going on the stage. After war service, he continued in the theatre and then made his film debut in
Esther Waters
(48, Ian Dalrymple). Next year, he had a big success as the killer in Basil Dearden’s
The Blue Lamp
. Thereafter, he quickly became one of the leading men of British cinema: the worst fate that could have befallen him and which marked him for life, no matter how much he strove to overcome it. Suffice it to say that from 1950 until
The Servant
(63), Bogarde made some thirty British films, a smooth, urbane hero in comedy and adventure alike. Often a war hero
—Appointment in London
(52, Philip Leacock);
They Who Dare
(54, Lewis Milestone);
The Sea Shall Not Have Them
(54, Lewis Gilbert); the rather better
Ill Met by Moonlight
(57, Michael Powell)—he was also Simon Sparrow in four “Doctor” films as well as Dubedat in Asquith’s
The Doctor’s Dilemma
(59). But his real performances were very few and never without defects: in Charles Crichton’s
Hunted
(52); as a brittle hoodlum in Losey’s
The Sleeping Tiger
(54); as Liszt in the Charles Vidor/Cukor
Song Without End
(60)—a silly film, but a genuinely romantic performance compared with the English
Tale of Two Cities
(58, Ralph Thomas); and as the homosexual in
Victim
(61, Dearden).

In 1962, he was very funny in Andrew Stone’s unexpected
The Password Is Courage
and in 1963 he gave a tactful performance in support of Judy Garland in
I Could Go On Singing
(Ronald Neame). Then, in 1963, he played
The Servant
for Losey: a portrait of malice more psychologically complex than Bogarde or the British cinema had ever attempted. It seemed to convince Bogarde that he was not just handsome but intelligent and talented, and that he had missed out on his real vocation. After that, he chose much more worthwhile parts:
King and Country
(64) for Losey;
Darling
(66) for Schlesinger; a delicious camp villain in
Modesty Blaise
(66) for Losey;
Accident
(67) for Losey;
Our Mother’s House
(67, Jack Clayton);
Sebastian
(67, David Greene);
The Fixer
(68, John Frankenheimer);
Justine
(69, Cukor);
The Damned
(69, Luchino Visconti);
Death in Venice
(71, Visconti);
Le Serpent
(73, Henri Verneuil); and
The Night Porter
(73, Liliana Cavani). He became an international star, living in France, the more praiseworthy because he was best in nonassertive, observing, and rather
piano
roles. To that extent,
The Servant
was outstanding, and
Accident, Darling
, and
The Fixer
speak out for his basic personality, just as
Modesty Blaise
and
Sebastian
show his skill at comedy.
Death in Venice
is a tour de force, but one imposed upon the actor by the arty narrowness of the film. While proving just how inventive and controlled a camera actor Bogarde is, it also shows the extent to which his very reserved character hovers at the point of mannerism. And in
The Night Porter
, Bogarde’s own gentility did help to evade the sentimental cruelty of the picture.