The New Biographical Dictionary of Film: Completely Updated and Expanded (433 page)

What do I mean by that? Well, after I had seen this second film on DVD and had felt through the story of four people—Leonard Schiller, a midlist novelist who surprises people by being still alive; his daughter; a student, Heather Wolfe, who seeks to rebuild Leonard’s reputation; and the daughter’s boyfriend—I did something I seldom do: I played the film again, this time with the director’s commentary. I miss most of those extras because it has been my experience that, even with a good or great film, the director runs the risk of sounding self-serving instead of useful. In this case, Wagner sounds like the novelist who might have written the book on which the film is based. He isn’t that man—that is Brian Morton.

Never mind.
Starting Out in the Evening
is a great film that slipped by in a time when so many of us were properly complaining that there were no good films. It is about the writing life, but it is about life, too, and it is about the astonishing degrees of boldness or reticence in real life—as opposed to the drab level of sensationalism in so many films. This is like a Henry James novella; and like a James novel when you hear the commentary. To watch Frank Langella listening to Wagner’s delicate wondering is nothing less than joy.

This is a talent that makes Wes Anderson look like a flashin-the-pan. Watch this space.

Mark Wahlberg
, b. Dorchester, Massachusetts, 1971
Nothing seems to fit about this pugnacious actor. A Boston kid, he got involved in violence and drugs and served a brief prison term at Deer Island before going on to a notable career in pop music (he was a rapper—Marky Mark). Now he also has a business career (and a considerable income) as executive producer on two hit series for HBO
—Entourage
and
In Treatment
(which was adapted from an Israeli television program). How long can it be before the members of one show are the patrons on the other?

He made a movie debut in
The Substitute
(93, Martin Donovan);
Renaissance Man
(94, Penny Marshall);
The Basketball Diaries
(95, Scott Kalvert); threatening Reese Witherspoon in
Fear
(96, James Foley);
Traveller
(96, Jack N. Green); and then a breakthrough with immense attributes as Dirk Diggler in
Boogie Nights
(97, Paul Thomas Anderson); going into martial arts in
The Big Hit
(98, Che-Kirk Wong);
The Corruptor
(99, Foley);
Three Kings
(99, David O. Russell);
The Yards
(00, James Gray);
The Perfect Storm
(00, Wolfgang Peterson);
Planet of the Apes
(01, Tim Burton);
Rock Star
(01, Stephen Herek);
The Truth About Charlie
(02, Jonathan Demme)—in which, I suppose, he had the Cary Grant role.

He was more at ease driving Minis in
The Italian Job
(03, F. Gary Gray);
I Heart Huckabees
(04, Russell);
Four Brothers
(05, John Singleton);
Invincible
(06, Ericson Core); the best thing in
The Departed
(06, Martin Scorsese);
Shooter
(07, Antoine Fuqua);
We Own the Night
(07, Gray);
The Happening
(08, M. Night Shyamalan);
Max Payne
(08, John Moore)—adapted from a video game; the father in
The Lovely Bones
(09, Peter Jackson).

Andrzej Wajda
, b. Suwalki, Poland, 1927
1951:
Ceramika Ilzecka
(s). 1953:
Kiedy ty Spisz
(s). 1954:
Pokolenie/A Generation
. 1955:
Ide do Slonca
(s). 1956:
Kanal
. 1958:
Popiol i Diament/Ashes and Diamonds
. 1959:
Lotna
. 1960:
Niewinni Czarodzieje/Innocent Sorcerers
. 1961:
Samson
. 1962:
Sibirska Ledi Magbet/Siberian Lady Macbeth;
“Warsaw,” episode from
L’Amour à Vingt Ans
(codirected with Andrej Zulawski). 1965:
Popioly/Ashes
. 1967:
Gates to Paradise
. 1968:
Wszystko na Sprzedaz/Everything for Sale; Roly-Poly
. 1969:
Polowanie na Muchy/Hunting Flies
. 1970:
Krajobraz po Bitwie/Landscape After Battle
. 1971:
The Birch Wood
. 1972:
Wesele/The Wedding
. 1974:
Ziemia Obiecana/Land of Promise
. 1976:
Czlowiek z Marmuru/A Man of Marble
. 1978:
Bez Znieczulenia/Without Anesthesia
. 1979:
Panny z Wilko/The Young Girls of Wilko
. 1980:
Cziowiek z Zelaza/Man of Iron; Dyrygent/The Conductor
. 1983:
Eine Liebe in Deutschland/A Love in Germany; Danton
. 1986:
Kronika Wypadkow Milosnych/Chronicle of a Love Affair
. 1987:
Les Possédés/The Possessed
. 1990:
Dr. Korczak
. 1993:
Pierscionek z Orlem w Koronie
. 1994:
Nastasja
. 1995:
Wielki Tydzien
. 1996:
Panna Nikt
. 1999:
Pan Tadeusz
. 2000:
Wyrok na Franciszka Klosa
(TV). 2002:
Zemsta; Lekeja Polskiego Kina
. 2005: “Man of Hope” episode from
Solidarnosc, Solidarnosc …
2007:
Katyn
. 2009:
Tatarck/Sweet Rush
.

In the mid-eighties, in his book
Double Vision
, Andrzej Wajda regretted that “Films made in Eastern Europe seem of little or no interest to people in the West. The audience in Western countries find them as antediluvian as the battle for workers’ rights in England in the time of Marx.”

Wajda has remained committed to Poland, the country on whose behalf so much began in September 1939. His recent participation in the era of Solidarity should not eclipse the dramatic influence of his earlier “trilogy”: films about Poland during and just after the Second World War. It was with
A Generation, Kanal
, and
Ashes and Diamonds
that Wajda secured his place in film history. Those films are brought to mind by the recent opening of Steven Spielberg’s
Schindler’s List
—a Polish subject? Much more, of course. But still, it is a story set largely in the Poland of Wajda’s youth. It is also a picture enriched by the design of Allan Starski, someone trained by Wajda during the seventies and eighties. I deeply admire the Spielberg film; I recognize how hard it must have been to mount, even with the world’s most bankable director. Yet isn’t there an irony in Poland continuing to serve the imagination of other countries?

Immediately after the war, Wajda went from Cracow Academy of Fine Arts to the film school at Lodz. Having assisted the distinguished veteran, Aleksander Ford, on
Five Boys from Barska Street
(53), Wajda thrust Polish cinema at the rest of the world and dramatized the tragedy of his generation, of teenagers who waited for Warsaw’s fate to be decided.

His war trilogy remains an intense study of Polish nationality, Communist idealism, and a more basic youthful romanticism in one of this century’s cruelest melting pots.
Kanal
, at least, conveys the horrors of Poland’s wartime experience. But, more generally, Wajda seemed literary, intelligent, and speculative, uneasily attempting to balance Polish themes and the feeling for modern compulsiveness in Polanski and Skolimowski. Polanski may run dangerously close to modishness and exploitation, but there is no question of the pain in his films. Skolimowski is perhaps rootless, but he goes deeper into the origins of behavior. Wajda, by contrast, seems too comfortable.

There is a scene in
Ashes and Diamonds
in which Zbigniew Cybulski, playing a young resistance fighter stranded by a sellout peace, sets fire to glasses of spirit in requiem for lost comrades. It captured the curious fusion in that film of Wajda’s honest account of Poland’s ordeal in the Second World War, and of a new consciousness—contemporary with the making of the film—in which Cybulski reached out for the rhetoric and broodiness of an existential screen hero. Cybulski’s manner seemed to mourn James Dean as much as the people in
Kanal
. Where
A Generation
had been a touching, naturalistic recollection of young people suddenly aged by the war,
Kanal
was a claustrophobic account of an historical action hardly separable from nightmare. Rather than extend that hallucinatory insight,
Ashes and Diamonds
was baroque, partly because it was made thirteen years after the last days of the war, partly because Cybulski’s gloating animation hustled Wajda forward into a view of existential dilemmas, but also because of Wajda’s taste for symbolism and allegory.

The burning alcohol was repeated in
Everything for Sale
, where it represented the loss of Cybulski himself. Indeed, the actor appeared to have shown Wajda directions and a sense of excitement only equaled by the war. The autobiographical enquiry in
Everything for Sale
was as centered on the nature of film as, say,
8½ Blow-Up
, or
Persona
. Wajda was not at that level as an artist, but the journey that that film had made toward introspection was hopeful, and
Everything for Sale
was his most interesting picture. His other work veered from further attempts to illuminate Poland’s past
—Lotna
and
Ashes
—to less explicable historical films—
Siberian Lady Macbeth
and
Gates to Paradise
—to the deliberate and rather academic exploration of “aesthetic, psychological, introspective experiences”:
Samson, Innocent Sorcerers
(coscripted by Skolimowski), and
Hunting Flies
.

With the flowering of Polanski and Skolimowski away from Poland, Wajda may have felt stranded. He came to Britain to make
Gates to Paradise
, but the film was never properly released. Indeed, his films of the late sixties and early seventies had only a very sparse showing outside Poland. Best known was
The Wedding
, from a famous Polish play, indulging his taste for allegory and advancing on mystification and complexity only as means to evasion.

Wajda rose to the challenge of Solidarity with a group of political chronicles, notably
Man of Marble
and
Man of Iron
, in which Krystyna Janda played a documentary filmmaker researching the life of a workers’ hero. Wajda left Poland because of political repression and he made
Danton
as an international art-house film, and as an allegory on Poland.
A Love in Germany
examines, in flashback, the story of an affair between a German woman and a Polish prisoner of war.

Since then, Wajda has been elected to the Polish parliament. His most recent film,
Dr. Korczak
, is the story of a Jewish teacher who died in a concentration camp.
Nastasja
was taken from Dostoyevsky, and in general Wajda remains a craftsman, still determined to remind Poland of awkward home truths. In 2000, he received an honorary Oscar for the integrity of his career in changing times.

Anton Walbrook
(Adolf Wohlbruck) (1900–67), b. Vienna
A foggy evening or a haze of lights? A deserted street or a stage set? A dark man appears in a belted raincoat, the collar turned up. He speaks: “La Ronde? … And me, what am I in this little story? … The author? … The master of ceremonies? … A passerby? … Let us say I am one of you. I am the incarnation of your desire … your desire to know everything.” Thus spake Anton Walbrook, “le meneur de jeu,” at the beginning of Max Ophüls’s
La Ronde
(50).

It is possible for one role to earn an actor a permanent place in the history of moving images. For Walbrook, it was this tender and ironic strolling master of affairs in Ophuls’s great film—a role filled less happily by Peter Ustinov in
Lola Montès
(55), in which Walbrook is the deaf Ludwig of Bavaria, an elderly man who rediscovers his feelings only to be trapped by duty into denying them. These two parts have all the sad grace of an actor who seemed never to recover from being driven out of Europe, and who changed his name because another man with a mustache had the same Christian name. Despite his succinct, dry talent, Walbrook’s career drifted from England to America to France. He died ten years after his last film, possibly forgotten by cinema audiences.

He was born into a family of clowns, and may have always moved gingerly in case his dignity shattered. He trained at Max Reinhardt’s school and went on the German stage. By the mid-1920s he was working in movie serials, and in
Mater Dolorosa
(22, Geza von Bolvary) and
Das Geheimnis auf Schloss Elmshoh
(25, Max Obal). But his fame grew with sound:
Der Stolz der 3. Kompagnie
(31, Fred Sauer);
Salto Mortale
(31, E. A. Dupont);
Cinq Gentilshommes Maudits;
(31, Julien Duvivier);
Baby
(32, Carl Lamac);
Melodie der Liebe
(32, Georg Jacoby);
Regine
(33, Erich Waschnech);
Keine Angst vor Liebe
(33, Hans Steinhoff);
Viktor und Viktoria
(33, Reinhold Schunzel);
Maskerade
(34, Willi Forst);
Die Englische Heirat
(34, Schunzel);
Zigeuner-baron
(35, Karl Harth);
Der Student von Prag
(35, Arthur Robison);
Ich War Jack Mortimer
(35, Carl Froelich); and
Allotria
(36, Forst). He then made two films in German, French, and English versions—
Michael Strogoff
(36, Richard Eichberg) and
Port Arthur
(36, Nikolaus Farkas)—and Herbert Wilcox hired him as consort to Anna Neagle in
Victoria the Great
(37) and
Sixty Glorious Years
(38).

He remained in England for
The Rat
(37, Jack Raymond); hateful as the husband in
Gaslight
(40, Thorold Dickinson);
Dangerous Moonlight
(41, Brian Desmond Hurst); leader of the religious community in
49th Parallel
(41, Michael Powell/Emeric Pressburger);
The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp
(43, Powell/Pressburger);
The Man from Morocco
(44, Max Greene); and
The Red Shoes
(48, Powell/Pressburger). His Lermontov in that last film was variously austere and shrill, solitary but a master of collaboration. The strangely hot-and-chilly impresario is also a thinly disguised portrait of Michael Powell—or of his dream of himself. Walbrook’s playing leaves little doubt of his awareness of the connection. Lermontov is the actor’s second great claim on posterity.