The New Biographical Dictionary of Film: Completely Updated and Expanded (46 page)

She got a second chance at Ma Joad as Grandma in
The Southerner
(45, Jean Renoir);
Back to Bataan
(45, Edward Dmytryk);
Sister Kenny
(46, Dudley Nichols); and Mrs. Bailey in
It’s a Wonderful Life
(46, Capra)—“Help my son George tonight”;
The Snake Pit
(48, Litvak);
So Dear to My Heart
(48, Harold Schuster and Hamilton Luske).

Past fifty, she worked less—but Hollywood was losing its faith in old ladies and prayerful mothers. Mrs. Bates was coming:
Mr. Soft Touch
(49, Gordon Douglas and Henry Levin);
Reign of Terror
(49, Anthony Mann);
The Furies
(50, Mann);
Lone Star
(52, Vincent Sherman);
Latin Lovers
(53, Mervyn LeRoy); very forbidding in
Track of the Cat
(54, William Wellman);
Back from Eternity
(56, John Farrow);
The Unholy Wife
(57, Farrow);
The Big Fisherman
(59, Borzage);
A Summer Place
(59, Daves);
Tammy and the Doctor
(61, Harry Keller). And then, much later, in 1977, she won an Emmy for an episode of
The Waltons
.

And the four runs with Stewart are
Of Human Hearts, Vivacious Lady, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington
, and
It’s a Wonderful Life
.

Sandrine Bonnaire
, b. Clermont-Ferrand, France, 1967
Has any actress made a debut of such force—and such youth—as Sandrine Bonnaire managed in
À Nos Amours
(83, Maurice Pialat), made when she was fifteen? The part was in many ways a slice of life: a teenage girl, tossed about in the storms of growing life, experimenting with love, in turmoil over her family. It sounds like James Dean in
East of Eden
, but Dean was twenty-four when he played the teenager, Cal Trask. If you wonder about other actresses who were fifteen, think of Elizabeth Taylor in
A Date with Judy
, Shirley Temple in
Since You Went Away
, Judy Garland in
Love Finds Andy Hardy
, Tuesday Weld in
Rally Round the Flag Boys!
, and Sue Lyon in
Lolita
.

When Kubrick made
Lolita
, of course, censorship would not permit what the book ordained—reason, in some eyes, for not making the film. Bonnaire’s character in
À Nos Amours
was no Lolita but truly a young woman, excited, afraid, daring, sensual, and innocent. Everything was there, without coyness or boasting. From shot to shot, nearly, she seemed to be shifting in mood and age, and what was most uncanny of all—she had already one of the great watching, waiting, listening, attending faces. Here was a phenomenon of acting.

There were times when even the deliberately tough, worldly Pialat seemed enchanted by her, and was persuaded to do little but observe her—or attend her. And he was playing her father in the film, caressing her performance with direct attention. The father seemed daunted by the beauty of his daughter—and the director/actor became resigned to his mortality in her presence. They have a late-night conversation scene that may be the best father–teenage daughter scene in movies.

In other movies, too, directors seemed drawn into the simple and sufficient photography of her existence. In her bearing, her gestures, her resentful passivity, and especially in her movement, she dominates the excellent
Vagabond
(85, Agnes Varda) as well as the rather fatuous
La Captive du Désert
(89, Raymond Depardon), and she is the woman across the way in that exceptional voyeuristic movie,
Monsieur Hire
(89, Patrice Leconte).

Her other work includes:
Le Meilleur de la Vie
(84, Renaud Victor);
Tir à Vue
(84, Marc Angello);
Blanche et Marie
(84, Jacques Renard);
Police
(85, Pialat);
Jaune Revolver
(87, Oliver Langlois);
Sous le Soleil du Satan
(87, Pialat);
Peaux de Vachés
(88, Patricia Mazuy);
A Few Days with Me
(88, Claude Sautet);
La Révolution Française
(89, Robert Enrico and Richard Heffron);
Verso Sera
(90, Francesca Archibugi);
La Peste
(92, Luis Puenzo); and
Jeanne la Pucelle
(94, Jacques Rivette), worthy of Falconetti.

She played with William Hurt in
Secrets Shared with a Stranger
(94, Georges Bardawil); with Isabelle Huppert in
La Cérémonie
(95, Claude Chabrol);
Never Ever
(96, Charles Finch);
Die Schuld der Liebe
(96, Andreas Gruber); for French TV in
La Lettre
(97, Bertrand Tavernier); as a surgeon in
Une Femme en Blanc
(97, Aline Issermann);
Secret Défense
(98, Rivette);
Voleur de Vie
(98, Yves Angelo);
Au Coeur de Mensonge
(99, Chabrol);
Est-Ouest
(99, Regis Wargnier);
Mademoiselle
(00, Philippe Lioret);
C’est la Vie
(01, Jean-Pierre Améris);
Femme Fatale
(02, Brian de Palma);
Resistance
(03, Todd Komarnicki);
La Maison des Enfants
(03, Issermann);
Confidences Trop Intimes
(04, Patrice Leconte);
L’Équipier
(04, Philippe Lioret);
Le Cou de la Girafe
(04, Safy Nebbou).

She has been in
La Procès de Bobigny
(06, François Luciani);
Je Crois que Je L’Aime
(06, Pierre Jolivet);
Mark of an Angel
(08, Nebbou);
Joueuse
(09, Caroline Bottaro)—and she has directed a film,
Elle S’Appelle Sabine
.

John Boorman
, b. Shepperton, England, 1933
1965:
Catch Us If You Can
. 1967:
Point Blank
. 1968:
Hell in the Pacific
. 1970:
Leo the Last
. 1972:
Deliverance
. 1973:
Zardoz
. 1977:
Exorcist II: The Heretic
. 1981:
Excalibur
. 1985:
The Emerald Forest
. 1987:
Hope and Glory
. 1990:
Where the Heart Is
. 1991:
I Dreamt I Woke Up
. 1995:
Beyond Rangoon
. 1998:
The General
. 2001:
The Tailor of Panama
. 2004:
Country of My Skull/In My Country
. 2006:
The Tiger’s Tail
.

The embattled mentality of anyone who has tried to make films in Britain shows through in most of John Boorman’s work. Thus,
Point Blank
is the most authentic film made by an Englishman in America, almost as a challenge to the cramping attitudes of the British industry. Yet Boorman never
became
American, or settled into fixed genres. He is as commercially unreliable as he is artistically unpredictable.

The commercial success of
Point Blank
and
Deliverance
brought him to a position of eminence. That both films were intensely American shows how far the cinematic instincts of a young British filmmaker could fit into American subjects and idioms. The brilliant atmospheric eye that distinguished Boorman from most of his British contemporaries was itself an attribute of the American emphasis on violent action growing out of environment. And the fact that
Point Blank
was so urban and
Deliverance
such a unique portrait of wilderness showed, once again, Boorman’s will to stretch the range of his own talent. The serious boxoffice failures in his list—
Hell in the Pacific, Leo the Last, Zardoz
, and
The Heretic
—bear witness to the strain of guessing where the next film is coming from. For there is a tension in his work between full-blooded entertainment and allegorical significance.
Hell in the Pacific
may have incurred the interference of distributors because it fell uneasily between a war film and a sort of
Robinson Crusoe/Territorial Imperative
in which Lee Marvin and Toshiro Mifune could not dispense with the enmity thrust upon them by war. Boorman tends to see subdivisions within the species of man.
Leo the Last
is a Brechtian parable of the rich man and his relations with the poor. Made in Britain, it is the most commercially fanciful of Boorman’s films, the one most directed at the art houses.

In the same way, the superb physical realization of
Deliverance
is marred by the underdeveloped stereotypes of the characters and the way its message is hammered home without variation or subtlety. The wishful return to nature of four city men canoeing down an Appalachian river relates Thoreau and the world of ecological Cassandras. The visual account of the journey and the irrational hostility of the hill people are stunning. But the idea of the movie—that modern man is already so far from the wilderness that he is unsuited to its rigors—is so clear as to seem shallow as the film progresses. The characters of the four men are almost irrelevant to the visual grandeur—indeed, Boorman has not yet shown in any of his films the ability to develop complex character studies.

But that is to amass his failings. Though limited,
Deliverance
is a frightening and beautiful film. If mildly pretentious,
Leo the Last
does create its own spatial and social world. And if
Hell in the Pacific
was broken by timid handlers, its scenes of animal against animal on a desert island show off Boorman’s eye for terrain. Beyond that,
Point Blank
is a masterpiece. Given the firm iconographic basis of the urban thriller, Boorman’s view of man in his own jungles becomes much more compelling. It is a crucial film in the development of the cinema’s portrait of America as a complex of organized crime. It uses the city as a structural model for society so that all the sites of the city—the prison, the sewers, the apartment block, the used-car lot—take on a natural metaphysical significance. The actual and the imaginary are perfectly joined in
Point Blank
. For it is not only an account of Lee Marvin’s remorseless and romantic hacking away at the syndicate, but his dream in the instant that he dies. Because the thriller is so strong and vivid a genre, Boorman was able to exploit its potential for fantasy and make the Marvin character a spectator of his own story. His expressive somnambulism is not just a search for vengeance and satisfaction, but the signs of sleep and inertia in a man actually slipping away from the world, defeated by it but inventing a story in which he triumphs as he dies.

Point Blank’s
two levels showed the artistic ambition of Boorman. And even if the time cuts and the cuts from one body to another in the bed sequence are obviously derivative, they were nonetheless right for the fusion of action and fantasy. The total effect is the justification. For in addition to the incisive portrait of violence and businesslike crime, of lives harrowed by anxiety—especially the women
—Point Blank
ends on a note of mystery. When Marvin does not come forward to claim his money, he has both abandoned violence and finally died. The implication is marvelously sinister and the expression of modern man’s dilemma in dealing with all organizations is set in terms of myth.

Boorman’s talent may never be resolved. The genre basis of
Point Blank
is harder to come by now that the commercial rules are dissolving.
Zardoz
plunges into myth without creating a satisfactory context for it, no matter that it was shot amid the wild beauty of Wicklow, in Ireland, where Boorman now lives. It is too earnestly trying to be intelligent. Boorman must take on the mass audience or let his real aspirations lead him toward more deliberately intellectual cinema. His sequel to
The Exorcist
only proved the dilemma. Very long in the making, and apparently beset with occult hazards (including a strange illness that nearly killed Boorman), it was laughed at by audiences, recut, and withdrawn. Neither Warners nor the box office wanted it, and it is scarcely coherent, but it has extraordinary moments of a metaphysical scope that reminded us of the director’s lasting wish to film
Lord of the Rings
and the Arthurian legends.

That wish was satisfied with
Excalibur
, which had a true sense of legendary past and pagan vitality, but which suffered from Boorman’s difficulties in sustaining line and momentum. Equally,
The Emerald Forest
was a wondrous, original concept, full of breathtaking imagery, yet finally weak as a story.
Hope and Glory
was a great success: it explored the director’s own childhood in suburban London, and it captured the child’s innocent delight at the beautiful disruption of the Blitz. The reality of the situation seemed to give Boorman confidence. He is a unique, visionary filmmaker, but his yearning for new types of material does not quite hide a record more at ease with reliable genres. His most conventional pictures, the most accessible in their situation, have been the best.

If this suggests that Boorman is not at his best as a writer, or in dealing with writers, he has begun to publish diary materials on his working life—on the making of
The Emerald Forest
and on the period of 1991 (as projects came and vanished) that are lucid and compelling. He is also the founding editor of the annual magazine
Projections
, the first issue of which included a fascinating, candid account of his own difficulties in getting a film to make.

Projections
is by now at a dozen volumes (Tom Luddy and I helped with one of them), and I am happy to have John Boorman as a friend who can at least tolerate my awe at the ups and downs of his own career: the disappointment of both
Beyond Rangoon
and
The Tailor of Panama
, with that peak of splendor,
The General
(one of the greatest Irish films), between them.