The New Biographical Dictionary of Film: Completely Updated and Expanded (7 page)

One of the fallacies attached to Altman is how good he is for actors. Evidently he inspires and captures the mood of a group, especially their vague sense of affinity. But individuals can suffer at his hands: Geraldine Chaplin is an actress for Carlos Saura, while Altman makes fun of her; Harvey Keitel has been wasted, just as Keith Carradine has been damagingly indulged; Lily Tomlin offered a poignancy in
Nashville
that Altman was not prepared to explore; Janice Rule postures dreadfully in
3 Women;
and Sterling Hayden is allowed to substitute ham for pathos in
The Long Goodbye;
nonentities are mixed in with talented players. But no one else has made as much of Elliott Gould: the reappraisal of Chandler in
The Long Goodbye
emerges from Gould’s restless, spacey humor; Warren Beatty achieves nobility in
McCabe and Mrs. Miller;
while Shelley Duvall in
3 Women
is a conception and a performance that take one’s breath away as we forget Hollywood figureheads and face a daft, pretty girl whose personality is as unstable and grating as a marble on a hard floor, rolling this way and that.

Perhaps Altman himself hardly knows how far he rejects the wellmade movie (in a spirit of innovation) or cannot reconcile himself to its discipline. He is no more articulate in print than he is coherent onscreen. Like it or not, his method and his nirvana lie beyond meaning. Like Renoir, Warhol, and Rivette, he is a filmmaker clumsily or acutely loyal to the camera’s power of observation, and is bent on a new way of seeing. Drama—as Hollywood understood it—may have no place in the spectacle; the people may degenerate into shadows, reflections, and a hubbub of noise. It could be so aimless as to be antihuman; or it might embody a sense of people being like atoms whirling around to laws no one knows and thus part of a kind of play or hopeful gambling—as in
California Split
, among the most passionate of Altman’s pictures, and one that sees a kind of philosophy in gentle futility.

In the eighties, Altman ran into hard times, obscure pictures, and a reliance on theatrical restagings for the camera that seemed pedestrian after the real movies of the previous decade.
Health
was pretty bad, and
Popeye
was too much the comic book for a large audience.
Come Back …
is worthy and well acted, yet Altman never finds a way of transcending the mediocre, sentimental play. Likewise,
Streamers
and
Secret Honor
meekly and rather leadenly live up to their originals.
Fool for Love
was as bad as Altman has been—how could Sam Shepard act in the film without realizing that Altman was unsuited to the play’s intense, enclosed, and mounting explosiveness? (And Shepard had directed
Fool for Love
on stage.) Thereafter, Altman’s films found little or no release. But
Vincent and Theo
was a return to power and quality, even if it didn’t seem Altmanesque.
The Player
was widely hailed as his comeback, and it is a pleasure—droll and sinuously explorative in its camera style. But that Wellesian opening gave the game away: no one else could have controlled or conceived it; yet the movements were also showy and needless—Altman was copying himself.
The Player
was a return to Altman’s America as a place of frauds and dreamers. But the satire was inoffensive. No one was hurt. There was no damage done in the film:
The Player
came from a game, not life.

Short Cuts
came from a number of Raymond Carver stories—though several Carver enthusiasts disputed the fidelity of the film. It
was
Altman, for good and ill. The movie caught the hazy, slippery looseness of L.A., its casual violence, and its childishness with a precision seldom attempted by mainstream Hollywood. Most of the people were both awkward and interesting, and in many of the transitions there was an inspired sense of incidents interacting, reflecting, and making a kind of helpless, numb philosophy. As in
Nashville
, the cuts, the pans, and the looking sideways overcame the director’s innate cynicism. But there was also a squeamishness about people (except for pretty, undressed women) that curdled the film. The scale of
Short Cuts
made this bitterness obtrusive and as disconcerting as Altman’s irritable superiority. He has so much facility, so little faith. Few people in L.A. liked
Short Cuts
—which suggests how good it is.

The years after
Short Cuts
showed a slackening:
Ready to Wear
and
Dr. T
were terrible. But
Kansas City
—Altman’s hometown, of course—was fascinating, not least in the way it was backed up by a very lively jam-session movie.
The Gingerbread Man
was silly, but very atmospheric. And then
Gosford Park
appeared—a trip to Britain—and the old magic was back.

He died in 2006, and is now regularly regarded as an American classic. The truth is far more complicated. He was a difficult man, evasive, less than honest, very lonely. His films are established—or the best of them—but it is unlikely that we will adopt a settled, sedate view of them.

John Alton
(Janos or Jacob Altman) (1901–96), b. Sopron, Hungary
In the early 1990s, nothing had been reported to say that John Alton was dead, but no one seemed to know where he was. And so his strange and often unaccountable career became the more mysterious and romantic. How easy it was to suppose that one of the great creators of shadow had simply opted for some rare obscurity. It was nearly thirty years since Alton had worked: he was the initial cinematographer on
Birdman of Alcatraz
(62), but he and director Charles Crichton were replaced by John Frankenheimer and Burnett Guffey. After that …?

Was Alton disgusted or disappointed? Did he feel there was no more point in wasting his time on Hollywood? Or did he reckon that being sixty was enough? Did he resume some Hungarian name or identity—for surely he was not born “John Alton”? If this was hard enough to explain, there was a greater enigma. For years, Alton worked on the lowliest of movies, B pictures and quickies. Then in the space of a few years he helped create the look of film noir. And then … he went under contract to MGM, where he photographed a mixed bag of pictures but never really went back to noir.

Then movie buffs “rediscovered” Alton. Of course,
he
had known where he was all along—and he had been in Los Angeles much of the time, the most obvious place and for that very reason, perhaps, the best hiding place. And so the legend gave way to some verifiable facts.

Alton had come to America from Hungary in 1919–20. He had worked in the labs for MGM and then he had become an assistant to Clyde De Vinna and Woody Van Dyke. As such, he worked on
Spoilers of the West
(28, Van Dyke) and
Wyoming
(28, Van Dyke), David Selznick’s first efforts at Metro. Alton was also traveling, and he did some location shooting in Germany for
The Student Prince
(27, Ernst Lubitsch). He did some shooting in Paris on
Song of the Flame
(30, Alan Crosland),
Better to Laugh
(31, E. W. Erno), and in Constantinople for
Der Mann, der Den Mord Beging
(31, Curtis Bernhardt).

At that point, Alton chose to go to Argentina to help develop that country’s film industry. He shot over twenty films, and even directed:
El Hijo de Papa
(32, Alton);
Los Tres Berretines
(32, Enrique T. Susini);
La Vida Bohemia
(38, Joseph Berne); and
Puerta Cerrada
(39, Luis Saslavsky).

His American credits begin in 1940 on films that are hard to see, and which in some cases are likely lost:
The Courageous Dr. Christian
(40, Bernhard Vorhaus);
The Refugee
(40, Vorhaus);
Three Faces West
(40, Vorhaus);
Forced Landing
(41, Gordon Wiles);
The Devil Pays Off
(41, John H. Auer);
Mr. District Attorney in the Carter Case
(42, Vorhaus);
Moonlight Masquerade
(42, Auer);
The Sultan’s Daughter
(43, Arthur Dreifuss);
Atlantic City
(44, Ray McCarey);
Lake Placid Serenade
(44, Steve Sekely);
Girls of the Big House
(45, George Archainbaud);
A Guy Could Change
(45, William K. Howard);
Affairs of Geraldine
(46, George Blair);
The Madonna’s Secret
(46, William Thiel); and
The Ghost Goes Wild
(47, Blair).

Driftwood
(47, Allan Dwan) was a step up, and it has some fine, atmospheric coverage of the young Natalie Wood. But the films Alton would be known for lay just ahead (and they were all small films in their day):
He Walked by Night
(48, Alfred L. Werker—and with some uncredited work by Anthony Mann);
Raw Deal
(48, Mann);
Hollow Triumph
(48, Sekely);
T-Men
(48, Mann);
Reign of Terror
(49, Mann);
Border Incident
(49, Mann); and
Devil’s Doorway
(49, Mann).

Alton’s vision was ideally suited to low-budget work: he used few lamps, and he abandoned standard setups; he was also ready to anger union electricians by bypassing their preferred procedures. He was as much at ease in the French Revolution setting of
Reign of Terror
as in the modern, urban noir of
T-Men
. This was very arty lighting, despite its harsh mood: in 1945, Alton published a book called
Painting With Light
, which helped draw attention to his very mannered photography and to the influence of Rembrandt.

By 1950, he had been signed up by Metro, and he was at work on
Father of the Bride
(Vincente Minnelli)! A year later he shared an Oscar for color cinematography on
An American in Paris
(51, Minnelli)—his first ever color film. This was more prestigious work, and it paid better. For ten years, Alton was a studio cameraman, though Allan Dwan observed that he fought the unions with increasing zeal:
Grounds for Marriage
(50, Robert Z. Leonard);
Mystery Street
(50, John Sturges);
Father’s Little Dividend
(51, Minnelli);
The People Against O’Hara
(52, Don Siegel);
Battle Circus
(52, Richard Brooks);
Count the Hours
(52, Don Siegel);
I, the Jury
(53, Henry Essex);
Take the High Ground
(53, Brooks);
Cattle Queen of Montana
(54, Dwan);
Passion
(54, Dwan);
Silver Lode
(54, Dwan);
The Big Combo
(55, Joseph H. Lewis)—perhaps the best noir he worked on;
Escape to Burma
(55, Dwan);
Pearl of the South Pacific
(55, Dwan);
Tennessee’s Partner
(55, Dwan);
The Catered Affair
(56, Brooks);
Slightly Scarlet
(56, Dwan)—magnificent late Technicolor;
Tea and Sympathy
(56, Minnelli)—dismal early Metrocolor;
The Teahouse of the August Moon
(56, Daniel Mann);
Designing Woman
(57, Minnelli);
The Brothers Karamazov
(58, Brooks);
Lonelyhearts
(58, Vincent J. Donahue);
Twelve to the Moon
(60, David Bradley); and
Elmer Gantry
(60, Brooks).

Don Ameche
(Dominic Felix Amici) (1908–1993), b. Kenosha, Wisconsin
Born in the birthplace of Orson Welles, but seven years ahead of George Orson, Ameche had two distinct movie careers. For something over ten years, he was a Fox stalwart, refusing to notice the secret rhyme of his mustache and the bowtie he wore so often in romances and musicals. Then he faded away in his forties, came back for a while in his fifties, but waited until he was past seventy for an unequivocal return that brought him a supporting actor Oscar and public affection.

He was in
Ladies in Love
(36, Edward Griffith);
One in a Million
(36, Sidney Lanfield); with Loretta Young in
Ramona
(36, Henry King);
Love Is News
(37, Tay Garnett);
Fifty Roads to Town
(37, Norman Taurog); with Alice Faye, a frequent screen partner, in
You Can’t Have Everything
(37, Taurog);
Love Under Fire
(37, George Marshall);
In Old Chicago
(38, King);
Happy Landing
(38, Roy del Ruth);
Josette
(38, Allan Dwan);
Alexander’s Ragtime Band
(38, King); as D’Artagnan in
The Three Musketeers
(39, Dwan); excellent in
Midnight
(39, Mitchell Leisen) as a Hungarian count and cabbie; inventing like crazy in
The Story of Alexander Graham Bell
(39, Irving Cummings) and forever associated with the telephone; as Stephen Foster in
Swanee River
(39, Lanfield);
Lillian Russell
(40, Cummings);
Four Sons
(40, Archie Mayo); as an Argentinian with Betty Grable in
Down Argentine Way
(40, Cummings);
That Night in Rio
(41, Cummings);
Moon Over Miami
(41, Walter Lang);
Kiss the Boys Goodbye
(41, Victor Schertzinger);
The Feminine Touch
(41, W. S. Van Dyke II);
Confirm or Deny
(41, Mayo);
The Magnificent Dope
(42, Lang);
Girl Trouble
(42, Harold Schuster);
Heaven Can Wait
(43, Ernst Lubitsch);
Happy Land
(43, Irving Pichel);
Something to Shout About
(43, Gregory Ratoff); in the war film
Wing and a Prayer
(44, Henry Hathaway);
Greenwich Village
(44, Lang);
It’s in the Bag
(45, Richard Wallace);
Guest Wife
(45, Sam Wood);
So Goes My Love
(46, Frank Ryan); as the villainous husband in
Sleep My Love
(48, Douglas Sirk); and
Slightly French
(49, Sirk).