The New Biographical Dictionary of Film: Completely Updated and Expanded (76 page)

They were together in
Good Times
(67, William Friedkin) and Cher did her best in
Chastity
(69, Alesso de Paola), which Sonny wrote—in ketchup or lipstick.

The partnership broke apart, and Cher had wild times—a wild decade, nearly—singing, wearing very little, and adhering to fabricated men. She decided that she might act and Robert Altman cast her, on Broadway, in
Come Back to the 5 & Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean
in 1982. He put her in the movie and she was okay—no more. But in 1983, she got the role of the lesbian friend in
Silkwood
(Mike Nichols). Suddenly she was an actress—dowdy, louche, working class, bitter, and reckless. It is a performance that so far exceeds
Moonstruck
as to make Oscar melt with embarrassment.

She made a handsome, piratical hippie mother in
Mask
(85, Peter Bogdanovich), but it was evident that she was not easily cast. Anyone photographed so much for stills is surrounded by her armory of attitude and looks: this is what happened to Monroe. There was evidently a hoodlum in Cher, a capacity for wickedness and intrigue. Think of her as Mae Rose in
Prizzi’s Honor
or as a Connie Corleone trying to take over the family.

In 1987, she had three films released:
The Witches of Eastwick
(87, George Miller), where she seemed the actress least comfortable with either the comedy or Jack Nicholson’s Satanic charm;
Suspect
(87, Peter Yates), where she was said to be a lawyer; and
Moonstruck
. Showtime.

Three years passed, for reasons only Cher has a hope of understanding. What were we waiting for? Her
Hedda Gabler?
Her Elektra? Her Lady Macbeth? Her lady road warrior? No, it was
Mermaids
(90, Richard Benjamin), another nice little movie. Since then, she has spent more time singing and doing specials and fitness videos—
A New Attitude
and
Body Confidence
—than movies. But she was in
Ready to Wear
(94, Altman);
Faithful
(96, Mazursky); acting in and directing an episode of
If These Walls Could Talk
(96); and
Tea with Mussolini
(99, Franco Zeffirelli).

Maurice Chevalier
(1888–1972), b. Paris
Despite longevity and the sort of reputation that passes off full-frontal charm as the very spirit of France, Chevalier did not make many films. Still, too many, as anyone who had to sit through his second American period will attest. That he brought to Paramount in the first adventure of sound a restrained lewdness is beyond question. But it seems equally clear that his act was artificial and limited. “I’ll admit you’re very funny,” Jeanette MacDonald says to him in
The Merry Widow
, “but not terrific … not colossal.” Smiling innuendo in youth lasted only a few years; it got rather more mileage in old age, perhaps because audiences were tickled by the Humbert Humbert–like double entendre of “Thank Heaven for Little Girls.”

Chevalier was a café singer in the early years of this century and became partner and lover to Mistinguett at the Folies Bergère. All the more pity, therefore, that his experience of uninhibited, erotic entertainment was abandoned in favor of a grinning and not very convincing sexual knowingness. In his defense, it should be said that Chevalier was irked by the ineffable gay Parisian Paramount thrust upon him. But what he wanted to put in its place is not clear. He was a vast, popular success in Paris in the 1920s and went on to England and America. MGM tested but declined him; Paramount saw the test and signed him. His first film was
Innocents of Paris
(29, Richard Wallace). In his next,
The Love Parade
(29, Ernst Lubitsch), the presence of Jeanette MacDonald—a very smart lady—helped to emphasize his bawdiness, which was well suited to Lubitsch’s coy humor. After that, he made
The Big Pond
(30, Hobart Henley),
The Playboy of Paris
(30, Ludwig Berger),
The Smiling Lieutenant
(31, Lubitsch), and with MacDonald once more,
One Hour with You
(32, George Cukor). He was most at home in that crazy concoction
Love Me Tonight
(32, Rouben Mamoulian), wooing MacDonald in rhyming dialogue and excelling in the “Poor Apache” routine. But after two dull Norman Taurog films—
A Bedtime Story
(33) and
The Way To Love
(33)—Paramount let him go to MGM. There he made
The Merry Widow
(34, Lubitsch), still an attendant to MacDonald, and
Folies Bergère
(35, Roy del Ruth).

Discarded again, he went back to France and made
L’Homme du Jour
(35, Julien Duvivier) and
Avec le Sourire
(36, Maurice Tourneur). In England, he was in
The Beloved Vagabond
(36, Curtis Bernhardt) and
Break the News
(37, René Clair). Just before the war, in France, he made
Pièges
(39, Robert Siodmak). He made no films during the war, and when there were suggestions that he had collaborated Chevalier appeared in a newsreel to clear himself. His next film was his best piece of acting, a rare hint of depth as the film director in
Le Silence est d’Or
(47, Clair). He made another three films in France over the next eight years, but was recalled to screen fame by Hollywood as a sort of male duenna with a leer face-lifted into a smile:
Love in the Afternoon
(57, Billy Wilder);
Gigi
(58, Vincente Minnelli);
Count
Your Blessings
(59, Jean Negulesco);
Pepe
(59, George Sidney);
Can-Can
(60, Walter Lang);
A Breath of Scandal
(60, Michael Curtiz);
Fanny
(61, Joshua Logan);
Jessica
(62, Negulesco);
In Search of the Castaways
(62, Robert Stevenson);
A New Kind of Love
(63, Melville Shavelson);
I’d Rather Be Rich
(64, Jack Smight);
Panic Button
(64, George Sherman); and
Monkeys Go Home
(66, Andrew V. McLaglen).

Christian-Jaque
(Christian Maudet) (1904–94), b. Paris
1933:
Adémar Lampiot
(codirected with Paul Mesnier);
Le Tendron d’Achille
. 1936:
François 1er
. 1937:
Les Perles de la Couronne
(codirected with Sacha Guitry). 1938:
Les Disparus de Saint-Agil
. 1941:
L’Assassinat du Père Noël
. 1942:
La Symphonie Fantastique; Carmen
. 1944:
Sortilèges; Voyage sans Espoir
. 1945:
Boule de Suif
. 1946:
Revenant
. 1947:
La Chartreuse de Parme
. 1948:
D’Homme à Hommes
. 1949:
Souvenirs Perdus
. 1951:
Fanfan la Tulipe
. 1952:
Adorables Créatures; Lucrezia Borgia
. 1954:
Madame Du Barry
. 1955:
Si Tous les Gars du Monde; Nana
. 1957:
La Loi c’est la Loi
. 1959:
Babette s’en Va-ten Guerre
. 1960: “Le Divorce,” episode from
La Française et l’Amour
. 1961:
Madame Sans-Gêne
. 1963:
Les Bonnes Causes; La Tulipe Noire
. 1964:
La Fabuleuse Aventure de Marco Polo
(codirected with Denys de la Patellière and Noel Haoward);
Le Repas des Fauves
. 1965:
La Guerra Segrèta/The Dirty Game
(codirected with Terence Young and Carlo Lizzani). 1968:
Lady Hamilton Zwischen Schmach und Liebe/Lady Hamilton
. 1969:
Qui Veut Tuer Carlos?
. 1971:
Les Pétroleuses/The Legend of Frenchie King
. 1977:
La Vie Parisienne
.

An unabashed exponent of ooh-la-la, Christian-Jaque is the sort of director of French films imagined by English audiences, who always thought Margaret Lockwood was rather racy. He makes costume romances, full of curtains, candlesticks, and cleavage. Martine Carol was one of the several actresses he married and sedately disrobed in films like
Adorables Créatures, Lucrezia Borgia
, and
Nana
. They were cheerfully prim sexy films, with the subtitles buzzing around the nipples. He seemed somewhat stranded, but from 1945 to 1955 he was very successful and remorselessly trite. He had studied architecture and music, and his films lacked little in production lushness. Before directing, he was assistant and art director to Julien Duvivier.

Julie Christie
, b. Assam, India, 1941
Educated at the Central School of Drama, she first came to attention in the TV serial
A for Andromeda
, in 1962. After a bright debut in an otherwise crushing comedy,
The Fast Lady
(62, Ken Annakin), she was ostentatiously introduced as the spirit of swinging, libertarian youth in John Schlesinger’s
Billy Liar
(63). The acclaim that greeted that performance is bewildering, for Christie lacked exactly the qualities of grace, spontaneity, and humor that the part required. She is, sadly, obvious in her efforts, lacking in either gaiety or insight and, most serious of all, gawky, self-conscious, and lantern-jawed. She grins rather than smiles, and her movements are either nervously darting or ponderous. Nonetheless, she has had a career of dramatically sudden success. After the mishmash of
Young Cassidy
(65, Jack Cardiff and John Ford), she won an Oscar for her callow work in Schlesinger’s
Darling
(65) and then gazed plaintively out of David Lean’s
Dr. Zhivago
(66). She is plainly numb in Truffaut’s
Fahrenheit 451
and becalmed by Hardy’s classic status in
Far From the Madding Crowd
(67, Schlesinger). Attempts to extend her range have confirmed her limitations:
Petulia
(68, Dick Lester);
In Search of Gregory
(69, Peter Wood). But she is tough, world weary, and a real actress with her then lover, Warren Beatty, in
McCabe and Mrs. Miller
(71, Robert Altman). She attempted the selfish aristocrat in Losey’s
The GoBetween
(71) and still seemed gauche, limited, and overextended. After that she played the wife in a rapt, consuming love scene with Donald Sutherland in
Don’t Look Now
(73, Nicolas Roeg);
Shampoo
(75, Hal Ashby); a walk-on as herself in
Nashville
(75, Robert Altman); very harassed in
Demon Seed
(77, Donald Cammell); and the token love interest in
Heaven Can Wait
(78, Warren Beatty and Buck Henry).

That was a kind of Hollywood farewell. In the years since, she has been unpredictable, giving herself to adventurous and politically radical ventures, yet still beautiful if the story needed it: she narrated
The Animals’ Film
(81, Victor Schonfeld), an animal-rights documentary; she played in the Doris Lessing adaptation
Memoirs of a Survivor
(81, David Gladwell);
The Return of the Soldier
(81, Alan Bridges);
The Gold Diggers
(83, Sally Potter);
Heat and Dust
(83, James Ivory);
Separate Tables
(84, Schlesinger) for TV;
Power
(86, Sidney Lumet);
Miss Mary
(86, Maria Luisa Bemberg);
Fools of Fortune
(90, Pat O’Connor); and was reunited with Donald Sutherland in
The Railway Station Man
(91, Michael Whyte).

Since then, she has had a part in
Karaoke
(96, Renny Rye); she played Gertrude in
Hamlet
(96, Kenneth Branagh); she had a fond, generous role in
Afterglow
(97, Alan Rudolph);
Belphégor—Le Fantôme du Louvre
(01, Jean-Paul Salome);
No Such Thing
(01, Hal Hartley);
Snapshots
(02, Rudolf van den Berg);
I’m with Lucy
(02, Jon Sherman); as Thetis in
Troy
(04, Wolfgang Petersen);
Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban
(04, Alfonso Cuarón);
J. M. Barrie’s Neverland
(04, Marc Forster).

All of a sudden, her work seemed to lift: acting in
The Secret Life of Words
(05, Isabel Coixet), with Sarah Polley; and then, extraordinary as the woman whose memory has abandoned her in
Away from Her
(06, Polley). That got her her fourth nomination for best actress (
Darling, Mrs. Miller
, and
Afterglow
). She was in Shekhar Kapur’s episode “Hotel Suite” for
New York I Love You
(09) and
Glorious 39
(09, Stephen Poliakoff).

Michael Cimino
, b. New York, 1943
1974:
Thunderbolt and Lightfoot
. 1978:
The Deer Hunter
. 1980:
Heaven’s Gate
. 1985:
The Year of the Dragon
. 1987:
The Sicilian
. 1990:
Desperate Hours
. 1996:
The Sunchaser
.

The flimsy nastiness of his last four pictures is no reason to suppose we have seen the last of Michael Cimino. We should recollect that when United Artists first sat down to consider projects with Cimino, his love script was a new
The Fountainhead
. The studio recalled King Vidor’s earlier commercial failure with the Ayn Rand novel; they wondered if the “model” buildings Cimino talked about might not grow into real edifices. They might have settled there and then for a modest city in the San Gabriel mountains, a retreat for jobless studio folks to go to. And moviegoers should treasure the detail that, in
The Fountainhead
, the rogue genius Howard Roark, the uncompromiser, thinks little of a decade here or there in the wilderness. But these days it takes a visionary to tell wilderness from sainted city. Meanwhile, Cimino is proverbial—a warning, to be sure, but a sultry beacon, too. If he ever reemerges at full budgetary throttle, his own career should be his subject.