The New Biographical Dictionary of Film: Completely Updated and Expanded (75 page)

Exceptionally tall, austere in features but elegant in the legs, she is perhaps the greatest female movie dancer. Her acting is like the songs in Marx Brothers films, though there were attempts to make the public accept her in straight parts:
The Unfinished Dance
(47, Henry Koster);
Tension
(49, John Berry);
East Side, West Side
(49, Mervyn Le Roy);
Mark of the Renegade
(51, Hugo Fregonese);
The Wild North
(52, Andrew Marton). But in the nightclub dance in
Party Girl
and all her dancing in
Silk Stockings
she is as sensual and moving as most actresses have managed to be with words. In
Silk Stockings
, her rapturous introduction to expensive lingerie conveys emotions denied to her as an actress; while in
Party Girl
her dancing discloses the scarlet woman invisible in the ostensibly dramatic moments.

In the last thirty years, she was in
Warlords of Atlantis
(78, Kevin Conner);
Portrait of an Escort
(80, Steven Hilliard Stern); and
Swimsuit
(89, Chris Thomson), while remaining an icon of old-fashioned glamour. And when she died, the astonishing elegance of her horizontal movements eclipsed her numbness.

Ruth Chatterton
(1893–1961), b. New York
“Miss Ruth Chatterton” was a stage actress of lofty reputation and pedigree. Even in her brief movie heyday at Paramount, she was likely to be asked to drop in on Clara Bow to give the “It” girl lessons in diction. Onstage, Chatterton had had her greatest success in
Daddy Long Legs
. But by the time she accompanied her first husband, Ralph Forbes (1902–51), to Hollywood, she was marked as a “mature” woman. And in Hollywood “maturity” is warning of the kiss of death. Emil Jannings got her a part in
Sins of the Fathers
(28, Ludwig Berger), and Paramount put her under contract as a worldly, often tragic figure in melodramas:
The Doctor’s Secret
(29, William C. De Mille) and
The Dummy
(29, Robert Milton). Her first movie hit was at MGM as
Madame X
(29, Lionel Barrymore), where a teary courtroom scene led to an Oscar nomination.

Paramount then cast her in
Charming Sinners
(29, Milton);
The Laughing Lady
(29, Harry Beaumont);
Sarah and Son
(30, Dorothy Arzner), in which she is an impoverished, downbeaten housewife one minute and an international opera star the next—and for which she was nominated again for best actress; and
Anybody’s Woman
(30, Arzner). For a moment, she was a movie star, and MGM borrowed her again for
Lady of Scandal
(30, Sidney Franklin). In
The Right to Love
(31, Richard Wallace), she excelled as both mother and daughter. She also made
Unfaithful
(31, John Cromwell);
The Magnificent Lie
(31, Berthold Viertel);
Once a Lady
(31, Guthrie McClintic); and
Tomorrow and Tomorrow
(32, Wallace).

The moment had passed. She was taken on at Warners, and she married again—to actor George Brent (1904–79), another younger man. They played together in some second-string pictures of unusual plot novelty:
The Crash
(32, William Dieterle) is only fifty-eight minutes, but Chatterton plays a tough, money-minded woman with a philandering husband; in
Frisco Jenny
(33, William Wellman), she survives the earthquake;
Lilly Turner
(33, Wellman); in
Female
(33, Michael Curtiz) she is the Don Juanish boss of an automobile company; and
Journal of a Crime
(34, William Keighley).

For two years she was out of work, and then Columbia put her in
Lady of Secrets
(36, Marion Gering) and Fox cast her in
Girls’ Dormitory
(36, Irving Cummings). Her last great role was as the wife in
Dodsworth
(36, William Wyler): she and Wyler fought because Chatterton saw the woman as a bitch and had to be persuaded to Wyler’s richer, gentler view. She was also aware that Mrs. Dodsworth—like Miss Chatterton—was someone trying hard to deny age.

Her screen career ended with two films in Britain:
The Rat
(37, Jack Raymond) and
The Royal Divorce
(38, Raymond). Subsequently, she returned to the theatre and wrote several novels.

Paddy Chayefsky
(Sidney Aaron Chayefsky) (1923–81), b. Bronx, New York
At two distinct periods of a brief career, Chayefsky the writer put a personal stamp on groups of movies. They were well acted and well directed, but few could argue that the energy or tone of the films came from anyone but the writer. That is wonder enough in the history of American film. What is more astonishing, the two periods seem to belong to different men. Indeed, the careful and care-heavy realist dramas of the fifties are not that far from a stale, sitcom genre that might have been cheerfully scorned in
Network
. What is so bracing about Chayefsky in the seventies is his throwing aside the dull baggage of earlier attitudes. But was this a crucial change, or was Chayefsky a mix of rebellion and ambition that would have had to change again if he had lived longer? Whatever the answer (or attempt at answer), Chayefsky was a very skilled constructionist, brilliant in diatribe and dialogue, and a three-time winner of the best screenplay Oscar.

Wounded in the war, and convalescing in England, he turned to writing and became a novelist, a playwright, and a scenarist. He did the story for
As Young as You Feel
(51, Harmon Jones), and then, in the mid-fifties, he wrote a series of TV dramas that brought common lives and humble settings to the new medium. Many of the plays went on to make films (e.g., Rod Steiger played
Marty
on TV before Ernest Borgnine in the movie):
Marty
(55, Delbert Mann), which won Oscars for best picture, best director, best actor, and best screenplay;
The Catered Affair
(56, Richard Brooks);
The Bachelor Party
(57, Mann);
The Goddess
(58, John Cromwell); and
Middle of the Night
(59, Mann).

Then came a gap before Chayefsky wrote
The Americanization of Emily
(64, Arthur Hiller) and
Paint Your Wagon
(69, Joshua Logan)—Logan had produced
Middle of the Night
onstage, and he found Chayefsky to be close to a genius, but too close to stubborn.

The Hospital
(71, Hiller) has the best of Chayefsky, a piece of institutional gallows humor, years ahead of its time, in which desperate eloquence (George C. Scott’s doctor) tries to beat back the forces of entropy. Few films capture the disaster of America’s self-destructive idealism so well. The film did poorly, but Chayefsky got another Oscar.
Network
(76, Sidney Lumet) does for television what
The Hospital
did for medicine. It is superb entertainment, a fantasy set firmly in a knowledge of TV—daring, uninhibited, and prophetic. No one else would have dreamed of doing it.

All that remained was
Altered States
(79, Ken Russell), so botched a job that Chayefsky took his professional name off the picture and went as “Sidney Aaron”—no matter that the project came from his own novel.

Don Cheadle
, b. Kansas City, Missouri, 1964
Don Cheadle has directed for the stage. He is a good musician—as witness his Sammy Davis Jr. And he is a mercurial actor—by turns comic, nasty, frightening, or pathetic. He can go from a growl to a lament as fast as Sidney Bechet, and his tone is just as stinging. More often than not, he’s cast in support, but he has the capacity to take fire in lead roles. He graduated from Cal Arts in Valencia and went into television—he had recurring roles in both
The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air
and
Picket Fences
. He made his movie debut in
Moving Violations
(85, Neil Israel);
Hamburger Hill
(87, John Irvin);
Colors
(88, Dennis Hopper);
Roadside Prophets
(92, Abbe Wool);
The Meteor Man
(93, Robert Townsend);
Lush Life
(94, Michael Elias); Mouse in
Devil in a Blue Dress
(95, Carl Franklin); Rooster in
Things to Do in Denver When You’re Dead
(95, Gary Fleder);
Rosewood
(97, John Singleton);
Volcano
(97, Mick Jackson);
Boogie Nights
(98, Paul Thomas Anderson);
Bulworth
(98, Warren Beatty);
Out of Sight
(98, Steven Soderbergh); winning awards as Sammy Davis Jr. in
The Rat Pack
(98, Rob Cohen);
Mission to Mars
(00, Brian De Palma);
Fail Safe
(00, Stephen Frears);
The Family Man
(00, Brett Ratner);
Traffic
(00, Soderbergh);
Swordfish
(01, Dominic Sena); Cockney in
Ocean’s Eleven
(01, Soderbergh);
The Hire: Ticker
(02, John Carnahan);
The United States of Leland
(03, Matthew Ryan Hoge);
The Assassination of Richard Nixon
(04, Niels Mueller);
After the Sunset
(04, Brett Ratner).

Cheadle had a big year in 2004 with the personal success of
Hotel Rwanda
(Terry George) and
Crash
(Paul Haggis). Thereafter, he did
Reign Over Me
(07, Mike Binder);
Talk to Me
(07, Kasi Lemmons);
Ocean’s Thirteen
(07, Soderbergh); the documentary
Darfur Now
(07, Ted Braun);
Traitor
(08, Jeffrey Nachmanoff);
Hotel for Dogs
(09, Thor Freudenthal);
Brooklyn’s Finest
(09, Antoine Fuqua);
Iron Man 2
(10, Jon Favreau).

Chen Kaige
, b. Beijing, China, 1952
1984:
Huang Tu Di/Yellow Earth
. 1986:
Da Yue Bing/The Big Parade
. 1988:
Hai Zi Wang/King of the Children
. 1991:
Bian Zou Bian Chang
. 1993:
Ba Wang Bie Ji/Farewell My Concubine
. 1996:
Feng Yue/Temptress Moon
. 1999:
Jing Ke Ci Qin Wang/The Emperor and the Assassin
. 2002:
He Ni Zai Yi Qi/Together
. 2005:
Wu Ji/The Promise
. 2007: “Zhanxiou Village,” an episode from
To Each His Own Cinema
. 2008:
Mei Lanfang/Forever Enthralled
.

At the 1993 Cannes Film Festival, the Palme d’Or was shared between Jane Campion’s
The Piano
and Chen Kaige’s
Farewell My Concubine
. One understood the urge to pay attention to Chen. China in the time of his first films as a director had seen one more movement in the symphony of turmoil. Chen’s movies had faced censorship and graver threats to the director’s liberty. Further, he was a central figure in the very promising new wave of Chinese films, along with Zhang Yimou, who photographed
Yellow Earth
and
The Big Parade
. In addition, Chen Kaige had set out to make movies that address the periodic assaults on its own culture and hope, the convulsion of modern China. He has never lacked courage, and in
Farewell My Concubine
he had mounted an epic picture, a Chinese response to
The Last Emperor
, if you will. (Chen acted in that picture and he seems impressed not just by its scale, but by the theme of refined spirits who are battered by history or fate.) That said, the Palme d’Or to
Farewell
seemed to me a gesture of generosity. It has a fine eye, a vivid way with actors (Leslie Cheung, Zhang Fengyi, and Gong Li), and that dramatic sense of color that is most striking now in China. But, for its length, the picture is monotonous and evasive. The characters are not truly revealed (compared with
The Piano
) and the pattern of history’s unkindness is eventually simpleminded. We do not learn enough about the inner life—as if that vital territory was still unfamiliar in China.

Temptress Moon
and
The Emperor and the Assassin
seem to me further assertions of the same talent—spectacular, genuinely energetic films, still full of excitement for the medium—yet overlong, unduly complicated (or even incoherent) and not really anxious to go beyond the limits of genre.
The Emperor and the Assassin
was said to be the most lavish film ever made in China, set in the fourth century B.C., with Gong Li again (no one’s complaining) as the concubine who links the worlds of court and crime.
Temptress Moon
, set in Shanghai in the twenties, seemed better and more urgent just because it was an attempt to see the roots of China’s modern history. Chen does the epic style too easily. He is better on character when taking on modern times. But, plainly, the epic is more comfortable and likely more profitable for the Chinese film authorities.

Cher
(Cherilyn Sarkisian), b. El Centro, California, 1946
First,
Moonstruck
(87, Norman Jewison): it is a pleasant, enjoyable sitcom movie that plays off a series of conventions and clichés. Examined closely, it is not just impossible but fatuous, that this Medusa-like Italian woman is leading a humdrum life with Danny Aiello as her only likely man. It would have been no sillier if the younger Sophia Loren had been cast in the part. For the woman is Cher, the nominal monosyllable, tattoo woman, Cher of Sonny-and-, “I’ve Got You, Babe,” and I can do without you, perennial cover girl and outrageous clothes horse. Face it, Cher is a celebrity, and making her a wallflower is addled. So she got the Oscar, as if playing a handicapped person.

Sonny and Cher were a great act: the horny little guy amazed that he had this languid statue. Their timing was drugged and dead on. When they sang together it was absurd and delicious. Sonny was over his head and under her chin, and Cher was plainly so tender that she had learned to act tough. Like most showbiz marriages, it was a contractual hell. But do not forget it. They were a lively piece of the sixties.