The New Biographical Dictionary of Film: Completely Updated and Expanded (56 page)

Tod Browning
(Charles Albert Browning) (1882–1962), b. Louisville, Kentucky
1917:
Jim Bludso; Peggy, the Will o’ the Wisp; The Jury of Fate
. 1918:
Which Woman; The Eyes of Mystery; The Legion of Death; Revenge; The Deciding Kiss; The Brazen Beauty; Set Free
. 1919:
The Wicked Darling; The Exquisite Thief; The Unpainted Woman; A Petal in the Current
. 1920:
Bonnie, Bonnie Lassie; The Virgin of Stamboul
. 1921:
Outside the Law; No Woman Knows
. 1922:
The Wise Kid; The Man Under Cover; Under Two Flags
. 1923:
Drifting; The White Tiger; The Day of Faith
. 1924:
The Dangerous Flirt; Silk Stocking Sal
. 1925:
The Unholy Three; The Mystic; Dollar Down
. 1926:
The Blackbird; The Road to Mandalay
. 1927:
The Show; The Unknown; London After Midnight
. 1928:
West of Zanzibar; The Big City
. 1929:
Where East Is East; The Thirteenth Chair
. 1930:
Outside the Law
. 1931:
Dracula; The Iron Man
. 1932:
Freaks
. 1933:
Fast Workers
. 1935:
Mark of the Vampire
. 1936:
The Devil Doll
. 1939:
Miracles for Sale
.

Browning ran away from school to join a circus, and in the next few years he roamed all over the world with traveling acts—this in the last years of the nineteenth century. It is Boys’ Own romance and Browning emerged from it an actor. From 1913 he was with Biograph and he went on to work for D. W. Griffith on
Intolerance
. Thus inspired, he began directing, generally for Universal. In 1919, he made
The Wicked Darling
, in which Lon Chaney had a small part. They worked together again on
Outside the Law
, a Priscilla Dean vehicle in which Chaney filled two roles. For a few years, Browning made romantic melodramas: Dean again as Cigarette in
Under Two Flags
, and in
Drifting
and
White Tiger;
Eleanor Boardman and Tyrone Power Sr. in
The Day of Faith;
and two Evelyn Brent pictures
—The Dangerous Flirt
and
Silk Stocking Sal
. Then, in 1925, Chaney persuaded MGM to hire Browning. Reunited, they made
The Unholy Three, The Blackbird, The Road to Mandalay, The Unknown, London After Midnight, West of Zanzibar, The Big City
, and
Where East Is East
. It was a fruitful collaboration. Browning wrote many of the original stories, stimulating Chaney’s extraordinary inventiveness at distorting makeup. The result often came close to that poignant conception of deformed creatures that makes
Freaks
so influential a film and that has constantly colored the best films in the horror genre. In
The Unknown
, for instance, Chaney plays a man who has had his arms amputated because Joan Crawford cannot bear to be touched. While in
London After Midnight
, Chaney was a hideous vampire so deformed that the makeup could be worn only for short periods. He also played the detective pursuing the vampire—an interesting reflection on the way horror films engage the two fantasy aspects of ourselves.

Briefly, Browning returned to Universal to make
Outside the Law
, an Edward G. Robinson thriller, and
Dracula
. Chaney was now dead and the title part was taken by Bela Lugosi. Although one of the original sound horror films,
Dracula
owes more to Lugosi than to Browning. James Whale was able to exploit the basic nineteenth-century plots rather better than Browning, and seemed to be more in tune with the two levels on which such films work. The contortions of Chaney had impressed Browning and he returned to MGM to make his masterpiece,
Freaks
, an allegory on the antagonism between the beautiful and the damned, and an inexplicably harrowing insight from the studio of so much glamour. A commercial flop, and widely banned,
Freaks
now seems less a horror picture than an indictment of the cult of attractiveness. Before his retirement, Browning made two more worthwhile pictures:
Mark of the Vampire
, a remake of
London After Midnight
, with Lionel Barrymore and Lugosi splitting Chaney’s original roles; and
The Devil Doll
, scripted with Erich von Stroheim, with Barrymore as an escaped convict selling dolls that are miniaturized humans. But neither of these is as interesting as the Whale films or as suggestive as the silent pictures made with Chaney.

Jerry Bruckheimer
, b. Detroit, 1945
When Don Simpson died in 1996 it was commonly assumed that his dynamic partnership with Jerry Bruckheimer would slip out of top gear or full speed.

No such thing happened. Indeed, you could argue that the vehicle began to move ahead with less fuss and far more streamlined effect. Why not? Who could really handle co-driving with Simpson? All this stress on vehicles is not casual. For Bruckheimer is the candid, if not self-satisfied, writer of his own label: “We are in the transport business. We transport audiences from one place to another.”

He studied psychology at the University of Arizona and went into advertising. But then he moved into the picture business and (before Simpson) made a few very interesting but not especially profitable films: associate producer on
The Culpepper Cattle Company
(72, Dick Richards); then producer on
Farewell, My Lovely
(75, Richards);
March or Die
(77, Richards);
American Gigolo
(80, Paul Schrader);
Defiance
(80, John Flynn);
Thief
(81, Michael Mann);
Cat People
(82, Schrader);
Young Doctors in Love
(82, Garry Marshall).

The partnership with Simpson lasted from 1983 to 1996, initially at Paramount and then at Disney. Bruckheimer was happy to play second fiddle in public events, but it’s likely that he kept a closer hand on the moviemaking itself:
Flashdance
(83, Adrian Lyne);
Beverly Hills Cop
(84, Martin Brest);
Thief of Hearts
(84, Douglas Day Stewart);
Top Gun
(86, Tony Scott);
Beverly Hills Cop II
(87, Scott);
Days of Thunder
(90, Scott);
The Ref
(94, Ted Demme);
Bad Boys
(95, Michael Bay);
Crimson Tide
(95, Scott);
Dangerous Minds
(95, John N. Smith);
The Rock
(96, Bay).

Alas, the school of Tony Scott and Michael Bay seems to me noisy and flashy compared with the early works of Schrader and Mann. But the numbers spoke very clearly, and if Bruckheimer needed anyone to help him get through the loss of Don Simpson it was Michael Bay.

Bruckheimer’s energies have intensified since 1996, as witness his largely successful movement into television: he is the foot on the peddle for
CSI
(00),
CSI: Miami
(02),
Without a Trace
(02),
Cold Case
(03),
Skin
(03) and
Fearless
(04), and so far only
Skin
has been an outright failure.

In the meantime, on the big screen, Bruckheimer has done little to inspire attention or dispel the wisdom that he is one of the most powerful people in Hollywood:
Con Air
(97, Simon West), the last of the Simpson films and a first sign of humor;
Armageddon
(98, Bay), the most boring;
Enemy of the State
(98, Scott);
Gone in Sixty Seconds
(00, Dominic Sena); the weird
Coyote Ugly
(00, David McNally);
Remember the Titans
(00, Boaz Yakin); the dreadful
Pearl Harbor
(01, Bay); the terrific
Black Hawk Down
(01, Ridley Scott); the thoroughly flimsy yet entertaining
Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl
(03, Gore Verbinski); out of nowhere,
Veronica Guerin
(03, Joel Schumacher);
Bad Boys II
(03, Bay);
King Arthur
(04, Antoine Fuqua);
National Treasure
(04, Jon Turteltaub);
Glory Road
(06, James Gartner);
Deja Vu
(06, Tony Scott); two more
Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest
(06, Verbinski) and
At World’s End
(07, Verbinski);
National Treasure: Book of Secrets
(07, Turteltaub);
Confessions of a Shopaholic
(09, P. J. Hogan);
Prince of Persia
(10, Mike Newell).

Yul Brynner
(Youl Bryner) (1915–1985), b. Sakhalin, Russia
The only bald, ex–trapeze artist, philosophy graduate of the Sorbonne to star in films, Yul Brynner had so much originality, so little interest. The son of Swiss and Mongolian parents, Brynner always carried himself with an air of enjoyable implausibility. But all too often the film world accepted him as a true exotic rather than an amused sham. Briefly, in
Once More With Feeling
(59, Stanley Donen), he was permitted to make fun of his own mysterious glamour; and in
Le Testament d’Orphée
(60, Jean Cocteau) he had a moment of studied inscrutability. But set down in any of the naturalistic environs of American genres he looked like a man from nowhere, relying on the dubious notion that bald men appeal to women. The record of his career suggests that the novelty soon wore off, but that baldness was an extreme gesture that could not be abandoned. Imagine the humiliation of a Brynner in hair; picture the ordeal of forever shaving his head for increasingly mediocre films.

He went to America in 1941 and entered the theatre. It was the part of the king in
The King and I
that brought him fame and, incredibly, the Oscar for best actor in the film made of it in 1956, directed by Walter Lang. That was his second film. In 1949 he had appeared in
Port of New York
(Laslo Benedek), amid a career in TV as performer and producer. His King of Siam was an inconsequential performance, full of brooding stares that already suggested a sense of the ridiculous.

But domed sex was not to be denied, and for a few years Brynner tried to live up to a public relations picture of domineering, sensual cruelty: as Pharaoh in
The Ten Commandments
(56, Cecil B. De Mille);
Anastasia
(56, Anatole Litvak); helplessly trying to be passionate as Dmitri in
The Brothers Karamazov
(57, Richard Brooks);
The Journey
(58, Litvak); escaping into hair as Jason in
The Sound and the Fury
(59, Martin Ritt) and in
The Buccaneer
(58, Anthony Quinn); stepping into Tyrone Power’s sandals and armor for
Solomon and Sheba
(59, King Vidor); and then playing the lead in
The Magnificent Seven
(60, John Sturges). That film was a great success, but it was the beginning of Brynner’s decline into European-based thrillers and Spanish Westerns, with the occasional return to an Oriental period piece:
Taras Bulba
(62, J. Lee Thompson);
Escape to Zahrain
(62, Ronald Neame);
Kings of the Sun
(63, Thompson);
Invitation to a Gunfighter
(64, Richard Wilson);
Flight from Ashiya
(64, Michael Anderson);
The Saboteur
(65, Bernhard Wicki);
The Return of the Seven
(66, Burt Kennedy);
Triple Cross
(66, Terence Young);
The Double Man
(67, Franklin Schaffner);
The Long Duel
(67, Ken Annakin);
Villa Rides!
(68, Buzz Kulik);
The Madwoman of Chaillot
(69, Bryan Forbes);
The File of the Golden Goose
(69, Sam Wanamaker);
Catlow
(71, Wanamaker);
The Light at the Edge of the World
(71, Kevin Billington);
Romance of a Horse Thief
(71, Abraham Polonsky); and
Le Serpent
(73, Henri Verneuil). He regressed to a short-lived TV series based on
The King and I
, in which he looked no older than in 1956—the first, eerie vindication of baldness. But then, in
Westworld
(73, Michael Crichton), he confirmed suspicions of hollowness: baldness seemed a simple disguise when the face itself unscrewed, leaving the dour smirk intact.

He was in
The Ultimate Warrior
(75, Robert Clouse);
Death Rage
(76, Anthony M. Dawson); and
Futureworld
(76, Richard T. Heffron). But in his last years, as long as he was strong enough, he was back onstage, touring
The King and I
.

Geneviève Bujold
, b. Montreal, Canada, 1942
Coma
(78, Michael Crichton) is only a thriller with an unusually real setting and a crazy plot. It is made decently, without ulterior ambition. But Geneviève Bujold is so remarkable in it that she makes one conscious of how a steady career has neglected her real virtues. She is past that hard sexual radiance so arresting in
La Guerre Est Finie
(66, Alain Resnais). But her face is as sharp and watchful as ever, more drawn than ripe now. She ignored the silliness of
Coma
and went about her job like a young mother with too much to do. A gritty actuality lies within her dramatic vulnerability, and in
Coma
it amounts to heroic courage and persistence.

Legend has it that she played a small part in
French Cancan
(55, Jean Renoir). But she grew up in French Canada and studied at the Montreal Conservatory of Acting before making
Amanita Pestilens
(63, Rene Bonniere);
La Terre à Boire
(64, Jean-Paul Bernier); and an episode from
La Fleur de l’Age, ou Les Adolescentes
(64, Michel Brault). As well as working for Resnais in France, she appeared in
Le Voleur
(66, Louis Malle) and played the porcelain waif in
King of Hearts
(66, Philippe de Broca).