The New Biographical Dictionary of Film: Completely Updated and Expanded (458 page)

It is difficult in retrospect to believe in the spirit of slapstick adding to Meyerhold’s mechanical analysis of acting, and hard to see any personal development in Yutkevich’s films beyond a cheerful feeling for people, warmer, more playful, and more naturalistic than the work of Eisenstein and Pudovkin. In fact, Yutkevich was part of the group that tended to rebel against Eisenstein in the early 1930s. Above all, Yutkevich wanted to reach the ordinary man, notably in
Vstrechnyi
, and the construction of a gas turbine. The documentary element, persistently adhered to by Yutkevich, does not prevent a deliberate sentimentalization of the workers or blatant underlining of an old message.

If Eisenstein felt that Yutkevich had surrendered once shared ideals, at least Yutkevich survived and continued to work: it is impossible to discuss the artistic achievement in isolation from the harsh political realities. Equally, it is barely possible to judge Yutkevich’s talent or personality because of the contortions imposed on both by the state. In the 1930s, he directed a training program; even so, his own
Shakhtory
was reedited on official orders. During the war, he made both patriotic martial documentaries and a version of the Soldier Schweik story. After Stalin’s death, he emerged as a director of sympathetic but archaic biopics of Russian heroes, supposedly freed from the personality cult but irretrievably marked by prudence. More questionably, he had the distinction of having directed the first feature film made in Albania,
The Great Warrior Skanderbeg
.

Z

Saul Zaentz
, b. Passaic, New Jersey, 1921
Looking like Father Christmas may only enable Saul Zaentz to be a more lucid, and even ruthless, dealer. Equally, we may see in him what is now a rarity—the real idealism of the showman who yearns to bring good things to the masses going hand in hand with the rigorous practicality that determines to get the best in every deal. So I rejoice in Saul Zaentz’s Thalberg Award—maybe the most deserving of modern recipients—but I would urge anyone to keep awake when making contracts with him. Above all, I would suggest, the exactness and the ambition come out of the same genes. Saul Zaentz is the nearest we have to teach ourselves what the great age of Goldwyn, Mayer, Zanuck, and Selznick was like.

He achieved fame first as a producer of jazz and pop records—but he had been a professional gambler before that. It was only in 1975 that he joined forces with the much younger Michael Douglas to make
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
(75, Milos Forman)—and his first best picture. The second came for
Amadeus
(84, Forman) and the third for
The English Patient
(96, Anthony Minghella), only after—at the last minute—Zaentz had lost Paramount’s participation and secured rescuing funds from Miramax. Those three pictures—literary adaptations—are also outstanding examples of challenging modern entertainments. And on every one of them, the filmmakers attested to the vital role of Zaentz’s support, enthusiasm, and friendship.

Not everything has worked as well, but nothing else has been less than uncommon: the animated
The Lord of the Rings
(78, Ralph Bakshi);
The Mosquito Coast
(86, Peter Weir);
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
(88, Philip Kaufman);
At Play in the Fields of the Lord
(91, Hector Babenco);
Goya’s Ghosts
(07, Forman).

Steven Zaillian
, b. Fresno, California, 1953
1993:
Searching for Bobby Fischer
. 1998:
A Civil Action
. 2006:
All the King’s Men
.

The eminence of Steven Zaillian is comforting proof that a quiet, serious, humane intelligence can find a place in American pictures at the end of the twentieth century. That said, his laudable qualities hardly seem to compete with what gets directors hired today. The two films he directed are almost deliberately nonbrilliant accounts of real situations—one domestic, one a civic betrayal—done carefully, slowly, and in a way that television has nearly made its own territory. One wonders how many films such a director can expect.

Before that, Zaillian was—and promises to remain—a distinguished screenwriter, whose powers of adaptation, comprehension, and diligence are most evident in
Schindler’s List
(93, Steven Spielberg), a film that surely owes some of its depth to the screenwriter. It’s an unusual history in that Zaillian was an editor before he was a writer: he edited
Kingdom of the Spiders
(77, John Cardos);
Starhops
(78, Barbara Peeters);
Below the Belt
(80, Robert Fowler). But it was as a screenwriter that he established himself: on the very clever
The Falcon and the Snowman
(86, John Schlesinger);
Awakenings
(90, Penny Marshall), adapted from Oliver Sacks;
Jack the Bear
(93, Marshall Herskovitz);
Clear and Present Danger
(94, Phillip Noyce), which is more slow than careful; the excellent
Primal Fear
(96, Gregory Hoblit); and the overpoweringly decent
Amistad
(97, Spielberg).

He did work on the screenplays for
Hannibal
(01, Ridley Scott),
Gangs of New York
(02, Martin Scorsese);
The Interpreter
(05, Sydney Pollack) and
American Gangster
(07, Scott)—and very little of Zaillian’s care shows in those. Alas, what did show was the glaring and studied pretense of
All the King’s Men
, a very bad film and so much less pungent than the original.

Darryl F. Zanuck
(1902–79), b. Wahoo, Nebraska
Zanuck had a small, anxious mouth, but he used it to grip the giant cigar longer than any of his mogul rivals. He was one of the last production executives left alive. And of those, he was the only one to have founded and chaired one of the major companies. But it was a Pyrrhic victory when, in 1962, he returned from European exile to scoop up the wreckage of Twentieth Century—Fox and to give the last, rough push that launched the monstrous
Cleopatra
. By then, Zanuck’s Hollywood was in grotesque disarray, less a Xanadu than the warehouses bulging with Kane’s junk, ready for the furnaces. Hard to believe that Zanuck’s cigar had burned for many years. It must have been shut off from air as the little man stared aghast at his empire regressed into witless fantasy. To match that new shift, in 1969 Twentieth Century-Fox amended its name to Twenty-First Century Fox. Then, and only then, they dispensed with Zanuck.

He had fought in France with the Nebraska National Guard and returned, still only in his teens, to a variety of ignominious jobs that seem an obligatory prelude to success only to those people who have not dreamed up stories while working in rivet factories or selling shirts door to door. He was intent on getting into movies and, to establish his status as a writer—for such reputation is only assertive—he persuaded a hair oil company to publish some of his stories. Warners scented the sly mixture of brilliantine and ambition and gave him Rin Tin Tin to compose for. In 1924, he became a Warners writer, and when he had walked the studio dog long enough, he got on to humans.

Perhaps he worked harder than other writers and felt it necessary to make his fecundity tactful with pseudonyms—Mark Canfield, Melville Crossman, or Gregory Rogers (a resounding trio). From 1924–29, he was story supplier, adaptor, or scenarist on at least forty pictures, including
The Lighthouse by the Sea
(24, Malcolm St. Clair);
Find Your Man
(24, St. Clair);
Red Hot Tires
(25, Erle C. Kenton);
Three Weeks in Paris
(25, Roy Del Ruth);
Seven Sinners
(25, Lewis Milestone);
Eve’s Lover
(25, Del Ruth);
On Thin Ice
(25, St. Clair);
Footloose Widows
(26, Del Ruth);
The Better ’Ole
(26, Charles Reisner);
The Caveman
(26, Milestone);
Oh, What a Nurse!
(26, Reisner);
The Desired Woman
(27, Michael Curtiz);
Jaws of Steel
(27, Ray Enright);
Tracked by the Police
(27, Enright);
Irish Hearts
(27, Byron Haskin);
Slightly Used
(27, Archie Mayo);
Good Time Charley
(27, Curtiz);
Ham and Eggs at the Front
(27, Del Ruth);
Old San Francisco
(27, Alan Crosland);
Noah’s Ark
(28, Curtiz);
My Man
(28, Mayo);
Tenderloin
(28, Curtiz);
State Street Sadie
(28, Mayo);
Pay as You Enter
(28, Lloyd Bacon);
The Madonna of Avenue A
(29, Curtiz);
Maybe It’s Love
(30, William Wellman).

Zanuck does not appear to have had a special part in Warners’ saving venture into sound. Nor did his writing hint at a personal predilection for the thriller. But late in 1929 he became an executive at Warners and in 1931 he was put in charge of production. Zanuck’s name disappeared from the screen in these years, the period in which Warners embraced the gangster. Much credit must go to him, even if Hal Wallis may have been directly responsible for those first crime films. But Zanuck and the Warner Brothers were not happy with one another, and in 1933 Zanuck took the crucial step of his career.

With Joseph Schenck, and a substantial loan from Nick Schenck, he formed Twentieth Century, releasing through United Artists. Two years later, they absorbed Fox, and Zanuck became vice-president in charge of Twentieth Century—Fox. That studio’s output—in terms of individual quality and house style—is far short of Paramount, Warners, or RKO. But it survived and prospered and is the source of many famous films. Its keynotes are, too often, pretentious gravity (especially after 1945), spurious social responsibility (most evident in the John Ford pictures), listless biopics, middlebrow directors (like Henry King and Joseph Mankiewicz), and polite ladies (Grable, Loretta Young, Sonja Henie, Alice Faye, Jeanne Crain, Shirley Temple). Zanuck seems shy of unrestrained melodrama, of intelligence, sexuality, and violence—all cockeyed ingredients of Selznick’s character.

Let it be noted that Zanuck’s name is on none of the films Otto Preminger made at Twentieth after the war, arguably the pictures most worthy of their searchlights. Zanuck’s known tastes were for Tyrone Power and a string of continental ladies who seldom flourished in America. The strident social seriousness of the postwar thrillers and of Kazan’s “problem” pictures is the height of his ambition. Yet
Pinky
is as cozy as
Grapes of Wrath
had been a decade earlier. It is revealing that Zanuck himself wrote the humbug ending to
The Grapes of Wrath
—Ma Joad’s “We are the people and we go on forever,” a mixture of demagoguery and flattery of the helpless, ordinary man. Zanuck made dull, pious movies, but he made a lot of them:
The Bowery
(33, Raoul Walsh), Twentieth’s first picture;
House of Rothschild
(34, Alfred Werker);
The Mighty Barnum
(34, Walter Lang);
Cardinal Richelieu
(35, Rowland V. Lee);
Clive of India
(35, Richard Boleslavsky);
Les Miserables
(35, Boleslavsky);
The Prisoner of Shark Island
(36, John Ford);
A Message to Garcia
(36, George Marshall);
Lloyds of London
(36, King);
Seventh Heaven
(37, King);
Heidi
(37, Allan Dwan);
In Old Chicago
(38, King);
Suez
(38, Dwan);
Kentucky
(38, David Butler);
Alexander’s Ragtime Band
(38, King);
The Story of Alexander Graham Bell
(39, Irving Cummings);
The Three Musketeers
(39, Dwan);
Jesse James
(39, King);
Stanley and Livingstone
(39, King);
The Rains Came
(39, Clarence Brown);
Young Mr. Lincoln
(39, Ford);
Drums Along the Mohawk
(39, Ford);
The Grapes of Wrath
(40, Ford);
The Return of Frank James
(40, Fritz Lang);
The Mark of Zorro
(40, Rouben Mamoulian);
Tobacco Road
(41, Ford);
Western Union
(41, Lang);
How Green Was My Valley
(41, Ford); and
Blood and Sand
(41, Mamoulian).

Zanuck worked for the army during the war years and only a few studio films carried his name:
Son of Fury
(42, John Cromwell),
Winged Victory
(44, George Cukor),
The Purple Heart
(44, Milestone), and the curiously devoted
Wilson
(44, King), epitome of the studio’s period props. In peace, Zanuck endorsed realistic thrillers and himself produced
Anna and the King of Siam
(46, Cromwell);
The Razor’s Edge
(46, Ed mund Goulding);
Dragonwyck
(46, Joseph L. Mankiewicz);
Gentleman’s Agreement
(47, Elia Kazan);
Twelve O’Clock High
(49, King);
Pinky
(49, Kazan);
No Way Out
(50, Mankiewicz);
All About Eve
(50, Mankiewicz)—that rarity, a Zanuck comedy;
David and Bathsheba
(51, King);
People Will Talk
(51, Mankiewicz);
The Snows of Kilimanjaro
(51, King); and
Viva Zapata!
(52, Kazan).

It was a long spell, and when Fox fell in love with Spyros Skouras and CinemaScope, Zanuck went to Europe, to be independent. The films he made there are all very poor despite the inspiring company he kept with Juliette Greco and the recurring presence in them of Orson Welles. It is further proof of the frailty of moguls alone with their cigar:
The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit
(56, Nunnally Johnson);
Island in the Sun
(57, Robert Rossen);
The Sun Also Rises
(57, King); and
The Roots of Heaven
(58, John Huston). All of these were based on “major novels,” but Mark Canfield reemerged to write
Crack in the Mirror
(60, Richard Fleischer) with no more success.
The Big Gamble
(61, Fleischer) made six duds in a row. But Zanuck then carried out the last great executive assault on a project:
The Longest Day
(62), with the producer as a five-star general. The account of D-Day had directors—Andrew Marton, Ken Annakin, and Bernhard Wicki included—but its drive was that of a producer desperate to make a landing.