The New Biographical Dictionary of Film: Completely Updated and Expanded (81 page)

In hindsight, a droll bonus comes to many Coburn films—did he only look like George Shultz, or was he father to that deft, impassive, and fatally humorless survivor?

James Coburn
(1928–2002), b. Laurel, Nebraska
Coburn is a modern rarity: an actor who projects lazy, humorous sexuality. It is the lack of neurosis, the impression of an amiable monkey, that makes him seem rather dated: a more perceptive Gable, perhaps, or even a loping Midwest Grant. He has made a variety of flawed, pleasurable films, the merits of which invariably depend on his laconic presence.

After work in TV he established himself as a supporting player in:
Ride Lonesome
(59, Budd Boetticher);
Face of the Fugitive
(59, Paul Wendkos);
The Magnificent Seven
(60, John Sturges);
Hell Is for Heroes
(62, Don Siegel);
Charade
(63, Stanley Donen);
The Great Escape
(63, Sturges);
The Americanization of Emily
(64, Arthur Hiller);
A High Wind in Jamaica
(65, Alexander Mackendrick); and
Major Dundee
(65, Sam Peckinpah). Increasingly, he was the best thing in his movies, smiling privately, seeming to suggest that he was in contact with some profound source of amusement.

He became a star only thanks to the most abstract of the post-Bond agents:
Our Man Flint
(65, Daniel Mann) and
In Like Flint
(67, Gordon Douglas). He then gave his eminence to a series of unusually adventurous movies, most of which drew their character from his playing:
What Did You Do in the War, Daddy?
(66, Blake Edwards);
Dead Heat on a Merry-go-round
(66, Bernard Girard);
Waterhole 3
(67, William Graham), in which he gracefully defines rape as “assault with a friendly weapon”;
The President’s Analyst
(68, Theodore J. Flicker);
Hard Contract
(69, S. Lee Pogostin);
Blood Kin
(69, Sidney Lumet);
The Honkers
(71, Steve Ihnat);
The Carey Treatment
(72, Edwards);
Harry in Your Pocket
(73, Bruce Geller); and
The Last of Sheila
(73, Herbert Ross).
The Honkers
, an engagingly modest rodeo story, was a second feature, suggesting that Coburn’s ease was unduly out of date. The more somber side of the aging man of action, not without the capacity for reflection, was shown in his fine performance as the reluctantly impelled sheriff in
Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid
(73, Peckinpah).

Since then he has fluctuated with the market’s fitful taste for heroes:
Bite the Bullet
(75, Richard Brooks); the promoter in
Hard Times
(75, Walter Hill);
Sky Riders
(76, Douglas Hickox); seeking vengeance in
The Last Hard Men
(76, Andrew V. McLaglen), and grinning despite the title;
Midway
(76, Jack Smight); as the honest soldier in
Cross of Iron
(77, Peckinpah), enduring his own prowess, medals, and the iniquity of others—a sort of laid-back Errol Flynn; on TV, with more irony, the lean, laconic cowboy who asked for “Schlitz Light,” in commercials; and a stylish operative in
The Dain Curse
. He then played in
Firepower
(78, Michael Winner) and
Golden Girl
(79, Joseph Sargent).

In the eighties, he was hampered somewhat by illness:
The Baltimore Bullet
(80, Robert Ellis Miller);
Mr. Patman
(80, John Guillermin);
Loving Couples
(80, Jack Smight);
Jacqueline Susann’s Valley of the Dolls
(81, Walter Grauman) for TV;
High Risk
(81, Stewart Raffill); the mogul in
Looker
(81, Michael Crichton);
Malibu
(83, E. W. Swackhamer) for TV;
Martin’s Day
(84, Alan Gibson);
Draw!
(84, Steven Hilliard Stern);
Sins of the Father
(85, Peter Werner); in Australia for
Death of a Soldier
(86, Philippe Mora);
Walking After Midnight
(88, Jonathon Kay), a documentary about near-death experiences;
Tag till Himlen
(89, Torgny Anderberg);
Young Guns II
(90, Geoff Murphy);
Hudson Hawk
(91, Michael Lehmann);
The Player
(92, Robert Altman);
Sister Act II
(93, Bill Duke); and
Maverick
(94, Richard Donner).

He did a lot of voice work in recent years, and he was the grinning host in a series of videos on how to win at the tables in Las Vegas. Luckily, there were worthier tasks:
Eraser
(96, Charles Russell);
The Nutty Professor
(96, Tom Shadyac);
Keys to Tulsa
(97, Leslie Greif); a supporting-actor Oscar for his fearsome father to Nick Nolte in
Affliction
(97, Paul Schrader) … he worked on and ended with
American Gun
(02, Alan Jacobs).

Jean Cocteau
(1889–1963), b. Maisons-Lafitte, France
1930:
Le Sang d’un Poète
. 1945:
La Belle et la Bête/Beauty and the Beast
(assisted by René Clément). 1947:
L’Aigle à Deux Têtes
. 1948:
Les Parents Terribles
. 1950:
Orphée
. 1960:
Le Testament d’Orphée
.

Cocteau’s lyrical self-preoccupation makes it difficult to extract the films from his total poetic autobiography in art. But in retrospect, Cocteau seems to have been most engaged by cinema, despite the relatively brief period that he worked in it. And although its technical and financial web might have seemed too bothersome for his spidery dance, Cocteau responded as eagerly as a Victorian inventor. That self-poeticizing fancy sometimes looks slippery and insubstantial in the other arts. But with film, Cocteau was obliged to define and concentrate his own fey sprightliness, simply to avoid having it smothered by the medium. His egotism made him a solitary, maverick figure. But in stressing playfulness, amateurism, and the disposition to the dream experience of movies, Cocteau is a vital link between the avant-garde and the underground. The curious weightlessness in his work, although it might be thought to conform to his own ideals of lightness, bars him from greatness. Arguably, there are films based on his works by other men that are more searching than his own pictures. But Cocteau serves as a comet, passing over French cinema, throwing a vivid light on the landscape.

Above all, Cocteau found in the
cinématographe
—he liked to retain the pioneering terminology—a useful image of his lifelong dream of the poet’s brave delaying of death, and of the refreshing discovery of the magical in the real. His poetic instinct could seem precious and overtechnical in words, but on film he was able to invest the everyday with fantastic resonance. In that, he was influenced by surrealism, and
Le Sang d’un Poète
was privately financed by the Vicomte de Noailles, who also sponsored Buñuel’s
L’Age d’Or
. Buñuel’s is a greater film, but
Le Sang d’un Poète
inaugurates Cocteau’s overriding image of the poet’s passing through the mirror of dream; and that is a very suggestive metaphor for the way a movie audience can pass into the celluloid domain. In
Le Sang d’un Poète, La Belle et la Bête, Orphée
, and
Le Testament d’Orphée
, the same situation recurs, with a constant emphasis on the poet’s need to believe that he can pass through. For Cocteau, that faith was often a rather vaguely significant principle of the religion of the artist. But in the actual transformation of his films, especially the vat of mercury mirror in
Orphée
, the elision of real and fantasy is marvelously achieved. This passage from
Le Testament
shows how far Cocteau himself restricted that metamorphosis to a self-indulgent portrait of himself as the mischievous fracturer of mundane rules:

P
RINCESS
: Unless I am mistaken, you make a priesthood of disobedience?

P
OET
: Without it, what would become of the children, the artists, the heroes?

H
EURTEBISE
: They would count their lucky stars.

P
RINCESS
: We are not here to listen to oratorical jousts. Put that flower on the table.… Where did you obtain this flower?

P
OET
: It was given me by Cégeste.

H
EURTEBISE
: Cégeste.… If I’m not mistaken that is the name of a Sicilian temple?

P
OET
: It’s also the name of the young poet in my film
Orphée
. First of all it was the name of the angels in my poem
L’Ange Heurtebise
.

P
RINCESS
: What do you understand “film” to mean?

P
OET
: A film is a petrifying source of thought. A film resuscitates dead actions. A film permits one to give the appearance of reality to the irreal.

P
RINCESS
: What do you call the irreal?

P
OET
: That which projects beyond our poor limits.

H
EURTEBISE
: In sum, according to you, there would exist individuals like a sleeping invalid, with neither arms nor legs, who dreams that he runs and gestures.

P
OET
: You have given there an excellent definition of the poet.

P
RINCESS
: What do you mean by “poet”?

P
OET
: The poet, in composing poems, makes use of a language, neither living nor dead, which few people speak and few understand.

P
RINCESS
: And why do these persons speak this language?

P
OET
: In order to meet their compatriots in a world where too often that exhibitionism which consists in displaying one’s soul utterly naked is practiced only by blind men.

That is the worst and best of Cocteau. It has the shrill cheerfulness of his aestheticism, as well as the hollow elegance of glib definitions. It was Cocteau’s shortcoming that, when he came to treat a subject to this poetic pressure, he fell back on either mythology or melodrama. His overwrought cult of the self, as well as the homosexual cluster that attended him, served to cut him off from mundane material. By comparison, Orson Welles—a man Cocteau admired—though as much an egotist, was able to direct his creative impulse into the invention of credible human situations that subtly dramatize his sense of self. Welles was a man of the theatre, Cocteau of theatricality. Thus even
Les Parents Terribles
, a play made into a film, is a piece of barnstorming melodrama, overplayed by unstable actors. Its use of a voyeuristic camera is intense and original, but not sufficient to make up for the bloated state of the play. Not unlike
The Magnificent Ambersons
, all its drama is in the words and facial expressions, whereas
Ambersons
can only be described in terms of the way it is filmed. The virtuoso claustrophobia of
Les Parents Terribles
—what Cocteau called the attempt “to catch my wild beasts unawares with my tele-lens”—is heartless and artificial. It is worth noting that in four crucial cases, it needed other directors to bring human gravity to Cocteau’s material: thus Jean-Pierre Melville directed the film of
Les Enfants Terribles
, Bresson his dialogue for
Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne
, Franju his novel
Thomas l’Imposteur
, while Rossellini directed Anna Magnani in the “La Voix Humaine” episode from
L’Amore
.

I would rather have those films than all of Cocteau’s, if forced to choose by Maria Casares’s Princess of Death. They all contain a poignant sense of the reality of death and of the wounding strength of passion. Whereas Cocteau’s death and love are cold things, always pretty but seldom moving.

But his mythical films do have one great asset: despite his mannered literary style, Cocteau quickly grasped the nature of filmic expression. Far from welcoming visual mystification, sensuous fantasy, and expressive imagery, he preferred concrete, plain images, knowing that the medium itself was fantastic. On
La Belle et la Bête
, he tried to discourage his photographer, Alekan, from technical virtuosity. Thus the magic of the fairy story is charmingly literal, the more beautiful for being innocent and offhand. Even so,
La Belle et la Bête
does suffer from too deliberate and successful an attempt to make the farmhouse scenes look like Vermeers, a pointless attractiveness that happily does not distract from the factual wondrousness of the beast’s home. And the beast himself is a tender monster, all the better for seeming kin to Kong and Karloff’s Frankenstein.
La Belle et la Bête
has a postwar sunniness and a childlike pleasure in transformation that makes up for the barely characterized love story. But for Cocteau’s poet, the notion of love always exceeds its realization.

Best of all is the physically exact myth in
Orphée
. The dusty French provincial town, the prop-box menace of the motorcyclists, the car radio that crackles with spirit poetry, and Heurtebise in a white shirt and slacks are immensely thrilling. Cocteau always worked
en famille
—as is clear from the book on the making of
La Belle et la Bête
—but
Orphée
is richly based in the amateur gathering of imaginative people. So splendidly free from the picturesque, it is a stepping-stone from Méliès and Feuillade to the Godard of
Les Carabiniers
and
Alphaville
. Indeed,
Orphée
may prove Cocteau’s greatest achievement, in which the poet at last transcended himself.