The New Biographical Dictionary of Film: Completely Updated and Expanded (47 page)

Ernest Borgnine
(Ermes Effron Borgnine), b. Hamden, Connecticut, 1917
There have been three stages in Borgnine’s career—from a bulging-eyed villain, to a ponderous hero of Hollywood’s brief immersion in naturalism, to a dull and increasingly anxious-looking supporting actor. He made his debut in
The Whistle at Eaton Falls
(51, Robert Siodmak) and
The Mob
(51, Robert Parrish) and quickly fell into villainy: most notably as the stockade sergeant in
From Here to Eternity
(53, Fred Zinnemann) and in
Johnny Guitar
(54, Nicholas Ray);
Vera Cruz
(54, Robert Aldrich);
Bad Day at Black Rock
(54, John Sturges);
Run for Cover
(55, Ray); and
Violent Saturday
(55, Richard Fleischer). Then, as TV and Paddy Chayefsky became fashionable, Borgnine’s ugliness was made sentimentally decent as
Marty
(55, Delbert Mann). He won the best actor Oscar, but remained a leading player for only a few more years:
Jubal
(56, Delmer Daves);
The Catered Affair
(56, Richard Brooks);
The Best Things in Life Are Free
(56, Michael Curtiz); and
Three Brave Men
(57, Philip Dunne). He slipped back, although never into such brutality as had once been his style:
The Vikings
(58, Fleischer);
The Rabbit Trap
(59, Philip Leacock); victimized by the Mafia in
Pay or Die
(60, Richard Wilson);
Summer of the 17th Doll
(60, Leslie Norman);
Go Naked in the World
(61, Ranald MacDougall);
Barabbas
(62, Fleischer);
The Flight of the Phoenix
(65, Aldrich);
The Dirty Dozen
(66, Aldrich);
Chuka
(67, Gordon Douglas);
The Legend of Lylah Clare
(68, Aldrich);
The Split
(68, Gordon Flemyng);
Ice Station Zebra
(68, John Sturges); a good deal better in
The Wild Bunch
(69, Sam Peckinpah);
The Adventurers
(69, Lewis Gilbert);
Bunny O’Hare
(70, Gerd Oswald);
Hannie Caulder
(71, Burt Kennedy);
Willard
(71, Daniel Mann);
The Revengers
(72, Mann);
The Poseidon Adventure
(72, Ronald Neame); as the train guard in
The Emperor of the North Pole
(73, Aldrich);
Sunday in the Country
(74, John Trent);
Law and Disorder
(74, Ivan Passer);
Hustle
(75, Aldrich);
The Devil’s Rain
(75, Robert Fuest);
The Prince and the Pauper
(77, Fleischer); as Angelo Dundee in
The Greatest
(77, Tom Gries); and
Convoy
(78, Peckinpah).

He soldiered on, often in TV, not too far from a grotesque sometimes:
The Cops and Robin
(78, Allen Reisner);
Ravagers
(79, Richard Compton);
The Double McGuffin
(79, Joe Camp);
The Black Hole
(79, Gary Nelson); reunited with Delbert Mann for a TV version of
All Quiet on the Western Front
(79);
When Time Ran Out
(80, James Goldstone);
Super Fuzz
(81, Sergio Corbucci);
Deadly Blessing
(81, Wes Craven);
Escape from New York
(81, John Carpenter);
High Risk
(81, Stewart Raffill);
Young Warriors
(83, Lawrence D. Foldes); for TV,
Blood Feud
(83, Mike Newell);
Love Leads the Way
(84, Mann);
The Dirty Dozen: The Next Mission
(85, Andrew V. McLaglen);
Code Name: Wildgeese
(86, Anthony M. Dawson); two more TV “Deadly Dozens”:
The Deadly Mission
(87) and
The Fatal Mission
(both for Lee H. Katzin);
Spike of Bensonhurst
(88, Paul Morrissey);
Any Man’s Death
(90, Tom Clegg); and
Appearances
(90, Win Phelps).

In 1964, he entered into a short-lived marriage with Ethel Merman, which somehow helped his transition from actor to inexplicable celebrity.

Borgnine passed eighty still doing obscure action films, or films for younger viewers in which he was a grandfather figure:
Tides of War
(90, Neil Rossati); as Professor Braun in
Laser Mission
(90, B. J. Davis);
Mountain of Diamonds
(91, Jeannot Szwarc);
Tierärztin Christine
(93, Otto Retzer);
Der Blaue Diamant
(93, Retzer);
Merlin’s Shop of Mystical Wonders
(96, Kenneth J. Berton); as Cobra in
McHale’s Navy
(97, Bryan Spicer);
Gattaca
(97, Andrew Niccol); and then a bizarre but fascinating-sounding one-man show in which he played
Hoover
(97, Rick Pamplin);
Abilene
(99, Joe Camp III);
Mel
(99, Joey Travolta);
The Last Great Ride
(99, Ralph Portillo);
The Long Ride Home
(01, Robert Marcarelli);
Crimebusters
(03, Pamplin).

Walerian Borowczyk
(1923–2006), b. Kwilcz, Poland
1953:
Glowa
(s). 1954:
Photographies Vivantes
(s);
Atelier de Fernand Léger
(s). 1956:
Jesien
(s). 1957:
Byl Sobie Raz/Os
(codirected with Jan Lenica) (s);
Striptease
(codirected with Lenica) (s). 1958:
Dom
(codirected with Lenica) (s);
Szkola
(s). 1959:
Terra Incognita
(s);
Le Magicien
(s);
Les Astronautes
(codirected with Chris Marker) (s). 1960:
Le Dernier Voyage de Gulliver
(uncompleted). 1961:
Boîte à Musique
(codirected with Lenica) (s);
Solitude
(codirected with Lenica) (s). 1962:
Le Concert de Monsieur et Madame Kabal
(s). 1963:
L’Encyclopédie de Grand-maman en 13 Volumes
(s);
Holy Smoke
(s);
Renaissance
(s). 1964:
Les Jeux des Anges
(s). 1965:
Le Dictionnaire de Joachim
(s). 1966:
Rosalie
(s). 1967:
Gavotte
(s);
Le Théâtre de Monsieur et Madame Kabal; Diptyque
(s). 1968:
Goto, L’Ile d’Amour
. 1969:
Le Phonographe
(s). 1971:
Blanche
. 1974:
Contes Immoraux/Immoral Tales
. 1975:
Dzieje Grzechu/The Story of Sin; La Bête/The Beast
. 1976:
La Marge/The Streetwalker
. 1977:
L’Interno di un Convento/Behind Convent Walls
. 1979:
Collections Privées; Les Héroïnes du Mal
. 1980:
Lulu; Docteur Jekyll et les Femmes/The Bloodbath of Doctor Jekyll
. 1981:
Docteur
. 1983:
Ars Amandi
. 1986:
Emmanuelle 5
. 1988:
Cérémonie d’Amour
.

I have not dealt much with animation in this volume—for various reasons. It would have enlarged the book impossibly, and animation is too often conscious of its own playfulness. Only very recently, and in Eastern Europe, has animated cinema escaped the role of an amusing novelty for children. In this respect, Disney’s innovation was crushingly banal. Not only did he invent Mickey, the skeletons, and the first jerking anthropomorphs, but he set them rigidly in a scheme of entertainment that has been one of the most influential factors in shaping modern America. Disneyland was once a marvelous grotto to visit; but today it looks increasingly like a prediction of America to come. The schizoid nature of animation—a childish form shuddering with adult preoccupation—may be seen in one of its finest flowerings,
Tom and Jerry
, the most concentrated cinematic violence, endlessly reinventing its tortured cat so that he will be pierced, shattered, and burned again. Is there a continuing work of art that so ably prepares children for our educated indifference to suffering?

The point that has to be realized about animation is that it is not essentially different from the form that is considered its opposite—live action. All films are a succession of still images, animated by the action of the projector—and by the anticipation and feelings of the audience. By that standard,
Dom
, say, is an animate film, brought to life by imaginative collaboration, and all those worthless live-action films you can think of remain inert and inanimate, despite the flickering effect of actual locomotion.

Borowczyk is included here because there is no crucial gap between his animated and live-action films.
Renaissance
, for instance, is like an essay on animation, in which a series of destroyed objects remake themselves through reversal of their filmed destruction, until a reassembled hand grenade pulls its own pin and reestablishes ruin.

His work is an extreme proof of the hypothesis that film suffers to the extent that it is realistic, and flourishes in accordance with its capacity for fantasy, poetry, and the surreal. What distinguishes it is the succession of images (motion) that prompts emotion. It is of secondary importance, which is to say, none at all, whether these images are records of reality or records of invention. The camera cannot lie, but such literalness makes it dull and helpless unless liberated by an artist. Borowczyk is one of the major artists of modern cinema, arguably the finest talent that East Europe has provided. He is the poet of destructive passions who never tolerates the glib pathos of extinction. The objects and people who suffer in his films are broken down and remade into new versions of themselves, sometimes identical, sometimes unrecognizable. This is innately cinematic: the explosion that kills produces gorgeous smoke and a rearrangement of limbs; execution is as Dada as any nude descending a staircase; wounds allow blood to escape; hair consumes plaster heads; and in
Rosalie
, the very items of evidence that involved us with the beautiful Ligia Branice are finally smoothed away to demonstrate the means of our emotion.
Rosalie
is a study of suffering on its first level; but beneath that, and more important, it is an elegy on our way of responding to suffering. Equally,
Goto
, a barbarous, lyrical fairy story, reduces the world to love and cruelty in the way of
L’Age d’Or
and, like Buñuel’s film, ends with a touch—the heroine brought back to life—that is a commentary on our watching selves as critical and tender as the last tracking shot of
Lola Montes
.

Borowczyk has always mingled forms, “animating” real objects and still photographs as much as drawings, so that it was no surprise when he entered into full-length live action with
Goto
and
Blanche
. His partnership with Lenica was close, while that with Marker seems to have been the swapping of very different personalities. Borowczyk’s feeling for suffering, and for the mysterious affirmation of reality in pain, destruction, and regeneration, places him with the great poets. Less a Pole perhaps—so much graver than Wajda—than a refugee with Buñuel.

As far as can be ascertained, the more recent Borowczyk has settled for sex and exploitation—yet it is hard to believe he could ever suppress his genius. And why not sex?

Frank Borzage
(1893–1962), b. Salt Lake City, Utah
1916:
Life’s Harmony; Land o’ Lizards; The Silken Spider; The Code of Honor; Nell Dale’s Men Folks; That Gal of Burke’s; The Forgotten Prayer; The Courtin’ of Calliope Clew; Nugget Jim’s Pardner; The Demon of Fear
. 1918:
Flying Colors; Until They Get Me; The Gun Woman; Shoes That Danced; Innocents’ Progress; Society for Sale; An Honest Man; Who Is to Blame?; The Ghost Flower; The Curse of Iku
. 1919:
Toton; Prudence of Broadway; Whom the Gods Destroy
. 1920:
Humoresque
. 1921:
The Duke of Chimney Butte; Get-Rich-Quick Wallingford
. 1922:
Back Pay; Billy Jim; Silent Shelby
(reissue of
Land o’ Lizards); The Good Provider; Hair Trigger Casey; The Pride of Palomar; The Valley of Silent Men
. 1923:
The Age of Desire; Children of Dust; The Nth Commandment
. 1924:
Secrets
. 1925:
The Circle; Daddy’s Gone a’Hunting; The Lady; Lazybones; Wages for Wives
. 1926:
The Dixie Merchant; Early to Wed; The First Year; Marriage License?
. 1927:
Seventh Heaven
. 1928:
The River; Street Angel
. 1929:
Lucky Star; They Had to See Paris
. 1930:
Song o’ My Heart; Liliom
. 1931:
Doctors’ Wives; Bad Girl; Young as You Feel
. 1932:
Young America; After Tomorrow
. 1933:
A Farewell to Arms; Secrets; Man’s Castle
. 1934:
No Greater Glory; Little Man, What Now?; Flirtation Walk
. 1935:
Living on Velvet; Stranded; Shipmates Forever
. 1936:
Desire; Hearts Divided
. 1937:
Green Light; History Is Made at Night; Big City
. 1938:
Mannequin; Three Comrades; The Shining Hour
. 1939:
Disputed Passage
. 1940:
Strange Cargo; The Mortal Storm; Flight Command
. 1941:
Smilin’ Through
. 1942:
The Vanishing Virginian; Seven Sweethearts
. 1943:
Stage Door Canteen; His Butler’s Sister
. 1944:
Till We Meet Again
. 1945:
The Spanish Main
. 1946:
I’ve Always Loved You; Magnificent Doll
. 1947:
That’s My Man
. 1948:
Moonrise
. 1958:
China Doll; The Big Fisherman
. 1961:
Antinea, l’Amante della Citta Sepolta
(codirected with Edgar G. Ulmer and Giuseppe Masini).