The New Biographical Dictionary of Film: Completely Updated and Expanded (51 page)

Brent was typed as a romantic lead despite his somewhat porcine face and his sticklike acting—his performances divide neatly between those in which he’s wearing a mustache and those in which he isn’t; not much else distinguishes them. That he was borrowed by other studios for
their
female stars—most bizarrely by MGM for Garbo in
The Painted Veil
(34, Richard Boleslavsky) and Myrna Loy in
Stamboul Quest
(34, Sam Wood)—would seem impenetrably mysterious if we didn’t know that Garbo, too, had responded to that offscreen “excitement” noted by Bette Davis.

Born in Ireland in 1904, the young Brent got mixed up with the Abbey Theatre and The Troubles, from the latter of which he soon fled to America and Broadway (once arrested by the Black and Tans, he hid documents in his hair). In 1931, he went to Hollywood and made six insignificant films—one, a serial (The
Lightning Warrior);
four for Fox:
Under Suspicion
(A. F. Erickson);
Once a Sinner
(Guthrie McClintic);
Fair Warning
(Alfred L. Werker); and
Charlie Chan Carries On
(Hamilton McFadden); and two for Universal:
Ex-Bad Boy
(Vin Moore) and
Homicide Squad
(George Melford), before moving on to Warners. There—when he wasn’t playing first or second fiddle to important ladies—he was expected to carry minor films with the help of equally minor actresses, such as Margaret Lindsay
—From Headquarters
(34, Dieterle); Jean Muir
—Desirable
(34, Mayo); Josephine Hutchinson
—The Right to Live
(35, Keighley) and
Mountain Justice
(37, Curtiz); Beverly Roberts
—God’s Country and the Woman
(37, Keighley); Anita Louise
—The Go-Getter
(37, Busby Berkeley, his first nonmusical); Doris Weston—
Submarine D-1
(37, Lloyd Bacon); Virginia Bruce
—The Man Who Talked Too Much
(40, Vincent Sherman); Brenda Marshall—
South of Suez
(40, Lewis Seiler) and
You Can’t Escape Forever
(42, Jo Graham). During this period he played in several highly respectable films—
42nd Street
(33, Bacon),
The Rains Came
(39, Clarence Brown), and, with Merle Oberon in the roles originally taken by William Powell and Kay Francis, in
’Til We Meet Again
, Edmund Goulding’s effective 1940 remake of his memorable tearjerker,
One Way Passage
. He also appeared in
They Call it Sin
(32, Thornton Freeland);
Miss Pinkerton
(32, Bacon);
Weekend Marriage
(32, Freeland);
Luxury Liner
(33, Lothar Mendes—not the one with Jane Powell);
Private Detective 62
(33, Curtiz);
In Person
(35, William Seiter);
Snowed Under
(36, Ray Enright);
The Case Against Mrs. Ames
(36, Seiter);
More Than a Secretary
(36, Green)
Gold Is Where You Find It
(38, Curtiz);
Racket Busters
(38, Bacon);
Wings of the Navy
(39, Bacon);
The Fighting 69th
(40, Keighley);
Adventures with Diamonds
(40, George Fitzmaurice);
Honeymoon for Three
(41, Bacon);
They Dare Not Live
(41, James Whale);
International Lady
(41, Tim Whelan);
Twin Beds
(42, Whelan); and
Silver Queen
(42, Bacon).

After a short break during the war, he came back for a few major pictures: with Hedy Lamarr in
Experiment Perilous
(44, Jacques Tourneur); with Joan Fontaine in
The Affairs of Susan
(45, Seiter); with Stanwyck in
My Reputation
(46, Curtis Bernhardt); a mad killer, for once, threatening Dorothy McGuire in
The Spiral Staircase
(46, Robert Siodmak); with Claudette Colbert and Orson Welles in
Tomorrow Is Forever
(46, Irving Pichel).

Then the slide began. In 1946,
Lover Come Back
(Seiter) and
Temptation
(Pichel). In 1947,
Slave Girl
, with Yvonne de Carlo and a talking camel named Lumpy (Charles Lamont);
The Corpse Came C.O.D
. (Henry Levin);
Out of the Blue
(Leigh Jason); and
Christmas Eve/Sinners’ Holiday
(Edwin L. Marin). In 1948, the Jane Powell
Luxury Liner
and
Angel on the Amazon
(John H. Auer). In 1949,
Red Canyon
(George Sherman);
Illegal Entry
(Frederick de Cordova);
The Kid from Cleveland
(Herbert Kline); and
Bride for Sale
(William D. Russell). Nothing in 1950. In 1951, he was second-billed to Cesar Romero in
F.B.I. Girl
(William Berke). In 1952,
Man Bait
(Terence Fisher) and
Montana Belle
(Allan Dwan). In 1953,
Tangier Incident
(Lex Landers) and
Mexican Manhunt
(Rex Bailey). Three years later, a cameo in
Death of a Scoundrel
(56, Charles Martin). The rest was silence, except, amazingly, a brief appearance twenty-two years later as Judge Gesell in a Watergate recap,
Born Again
(78, Irving Rapper).

Eighty-eight films—the wonders of withheld interest!

Robert Bresson
(1907–99), b. Bromont-Lamothe, France
1934:
Les Affaires Publiques
. 1943:
Les Anges du Péché
. 1945:
Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne
. 1950:
Le Journal d’un Curé de Campagne/Diary of a Country Priest
. 1956:
Un Condamné à Mort S’Est Échappé/A Man Escaped
. 1959:
Pickpocket
. 1961:
Le Procès de Jeanne d’Arc
. 1966:
Au Hasard, Balthazar
. 1967:
Mouchette
. 1969:
Une Femme Douce/A Gentle Creature
. 1971:
Quatre Nuits d’un Rêveur
. 1974:
Lancelot du Lac
. 1977:
Le Diable Probablement/The Devil, Probably
. 1982:
L’Argent
.

Probably Bresson’s gravity is so natural, his austerity so tranquil, that it is improper to attribute his slow productivity to the commercial shyness of such difficulty. The films themselves seem unaware of economy or complexity. They transcend any possible circumstances within which they might have been made, just as they are indifferent to contemporaneity. Bresson’s world is one of faces, hands, detached views of human activity. They surpass beauty, in both intention and effect, and stress necessity. As if to prove the spiritual expressiveness of the blank face, Bresson has generally avoided professional actors and restrained “acting.” The faces in his films are like those of spectators, stilled by contemplation. The director has also disliked the complicity of his actors; he often directs them minutely, insisting on a curiously placid intensity, but seldom informing them of the context or significance of a shot. Such a method stresses the privacy of minds, and Bresson has a unique gallery of proud, intractable, inaccessible creatures—some monsters of evil, some saints, one a donkey. And yet, his films unmistakably impress upon the viewer the universality that overwhelms privacy. Bresson is a Catholic filmmaker, so much so that no one could easily think of Hitchcock as a spiritual director in comparison. Hitchcock’s films do not readily warm to people. Bresson possesses a charity so great that liking is made to seem unnecessary. He is an example of pure cinema in the sense that he photographs reserved faces to evoke all the wildest emotions of the spirit. To see his films is to marvel that other directors have had the ingenuity to evolve such elaborate styles and yet restrict them to superficial messages. It might be said that watching Bresson is to risk conversion away from the cinema. His meaning is so clearly inspirational, and his treatment so remorselessly interior, that he seems to shame the extrinsic glamour and extravagance of movies. For that reason alone, he is not an easy director to digest. To go beyond admiration might be too near surrender. Although there is a matter-of-fact quality to his work, concentrated viewing brings out an extraordinary sense of passion. It is as if his characters are straightfaced for fear of exploding. Their human feelings are in turmoil with spiritual imperatives, and the struggle is as great as that in Dostoyevsky—one of Bresson’s models.

As a young man, Bresson studied philosophy and painting. But in the mid-1930s, he worked as a scriptwriter and made
Les Affaires Publiques
, a comedy, for which he wrote the screenplay. He had writer credits also on
C’Etait un Musicien
(33, Frederic Zelnick),
Les Jumeaux de Brighton
(36, Claude Heymann), and
Courier Sud
(37, Pierre Billon), and was assistant to René Clair on the uncompleted
Air Pur
in 1939. After a year in a prisoner-of-war camp, he began his work as a director.
Les Anges du Péché
, set within a nunnery, had dialogue by Jean Giraudoux. Its radiance—photographed by Philippe Agostini—and its intramural concern with the worldly regrets of the nun may have seemed a part of wartime escapism. But there was no doubt about
Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne
being a landmark in cinema history. Taken from Diderot’s
Jacques le Fataliste
, with dialogue by Jean Cocteau and a dreamy modern setting, the literary transposition was less important to Bresson than the first, triumphant use of abstraction in photographing people. Here, plainly, outward appearance was a formal shell for emotional and intellectual identity. The setting, though factual, was unreal; the emotional drama was not a symbol for deeper meanings, but an abstraction of them.
Les Dames
is still a modern film, and its influence on subsequent French cinema is far from exhausted.

Le Journal d’un Curé de Campagne
, scripted by Bresson from the Bernanos novel, was made after a five-year interval. Ostensibly more religious in its following of the life and death of a young priest, it was Bresson’s first serious use of “unknown” actors and the first sign of the emotional undertones in his work. Few films so well suggest the balance of self-determination and omniscience; the pity and splendor of selfishness and sacrifice. In that film, too, Bresson used a far more particularized sense of the French countryside, even if images and sounds were never merely naturalistic. Thus, the raking of leaves—one of Bresson’s finest sound effects—is also a scathing of the soul.
Un Condamné
is his most jubilant film, the successful escape of a Frenchman from a Nazi prison, amazingly concentrated on the face in the cell and the growth of faith there. The ritual of prison life fades subtly into religious ceremony, while the use of Mozart’s C Minor Mass shows the extra spiritual power of the escape, fulfilling the earlier litany of spoons scraping at woodwork and of distant firing squads.

Pickpocket
was the first obvious resort to Dostoyevsky. It is near to the situation of
Crime and Punishment
, using crime as a metaphor for pride, and prison as a model of the soul. In all these films, it was Bresson’s ability to make his own world that was most impressive. The Joan of Arc film seemed something of a recession in that its familiarity dissipated the searching attention that Bresson demands.

Balthazar
and
Mouchette
were great advances, returning to a rural or provincial world, strangely invaded by fragments of modernity, but really the settings for elegies to resignation. The destruction of the donkey, Balthazar, and the eventual suicide of Mouchette are among the most distilled and moving events in cinema. For the first time, Bresson seemed to have gone beyond Catholic dogma. It is from this period that it becomes possible to see an Eastern, mystical calm in his work. In their account of suffering and of human reaction to it,
Balthazar
and
Mouchette
appear now as his greatest works.

After that, Bresson used color, something that once would have been unimaginable. He made two films from Dostoyevsky and both show a special interest in femininity—Dominique Sanda’s in
Une Femme Douce
is arguably the first performance in Bresson’s work, and none the worse for that. Once again the subject for analysis is the way distress and anguish in life have been clarified and betrayed by suicide.

His work never slackened:
Lancelot
and
L’Argent
are magnificent studies of two human codes, honor and greed, centuries apart, yet fraternal.

A short commentary on Bresson is a hopeless task. He is a great director, even if no other great director seems less intrigued by cinema itself. The simplicity of his work, the sense in which he is cinema, comes in this runic motto—“there is only one way of shooting people: from near and in front of them, when you want to know what is happening inside.” Is that a true description of his method? Or is Bresson perhaps rigorously divided on what happens inside and on how much of it interests him? His films are less predesigned than ordered in advance: the conflict of faces in his films is the montage of a parable in which every measured item is part of the formal organization. Bresson’s is a cinema of demonstration, so broad in its consequences that its worldly narrowness is made irrelevant. The method is luminous and utterly methodical—a perfect example of interior meaning and exterior behavior.

Martin Brest
, b. New York, 1951
1978:
Hot Tomorrow
. 1979:
Going in Style
. 1984:
Beverly Hills Cop
. 1988:
Midnight Run
. 1992:
Scent of a Woman
. 1998:
Meet Joe Black
. 2003:
Gigli
.

Martin Brest has now lapsed into Bressonian intervals between pictures—and creeping running time in the films themselves.
Scent of a Woman
, for instance, was 157 minutes long, which only drew attention to its many implausibilities. God knows how the project evolved out of the 1974 Italian film, with script by the admirable Bo Goldman. But the suggestion that any army on earth would ever have made Al Pacino a colonel still seems to me the greatest comic coup in the picture. Maybe that’s one reason why he won the Oscar. The film is not without fun—and Brest can handle set pieces quite well, as witness the amiable
Midnight Run
(a mere 122 minutes). Of course,
Beverly Hills Cop
was his breakthrough, and the keystone of Brest’s taste for warped buddy pictures—a couple of guys who have to learn to get on. He’s certainly a Hollywood figure by now, and—in the present climate for length—he may be planning on three, or four, pictures. One harks back to the old-man panache of
Going in Style
(96 minutes) fondly, for in truth Brest makes modest entertainments that should stay modest.
Meet Joe Black
was 178 minutes—not that many people waited that long.
Gigli
was only 121 minutes, but try finding anyone who knows how it ended. And after
Gigli
he rested.