The New Biographical Dictionary of Film: Completely Updated and Expanded (84 page)

She worked hard as a teenager:
Phenomena
(85, Dario Argento);
Seven Minutes in Heaven
(85, Linda Feferman);
Labyrinth
(86, Jim Henson);
Some Girls
(88, Michael Hoffman);
Étoile
(88, Peter Del Monte).

There was a gap, during which she attended Yale and Stanford, and then she began again:
Hot Spot
(90, Dennis Hopper);
Career Opportunities
(91, Bryan Gordon);
The Rocketeer
(91, Joe Johnston);
Of Love and Shadows
(94, Betty Kaplan);
Higher Learning
(95, John Singleton);
Far Harbor
(96, John Huddles);
Inventing the Abbotts
(97, Pat O’Connor);
Dark City
(98, Alex Proyas);
Waking the Dead
(00, Keith Gordon);
Requiem for a Dream
(00, Darren Aronofsky);
Pollock
(00, Ed Harris); and on the TV series
The $treet
(00).

She was under threat in
Dark Water
(05, Walter Salles);
Little Children
(06, Todd Field);
Blood Diamond
(06, Edward Zwick);
Reservation Road
(07, Terry George);
The Day the Earth Stood Still
(08, Scott Derrickson);
Inkheart
(08, Iain Softley);
He’s Just Not That Into You
(09, Ken Kwapis);
9
(09, Shane Acker); and with her husband, Paul Bettany, as the Darwins in
Creation
(09, Jon Amiel).

Sir Sean Connery
(Thomas Sean Connery), b. Edinburgh, Scotland, 1930
In his first movie kingdom, Connery had an immaculate, but enclosing, image as 007. He was glossy, supercilious, rather cruel, close to absurdly attractive, and as hard and abstract as the wig he wore. He played James Bond six times
—Dr. No
(62, Terence Young);
From Russia With Love
(63, Young);
Goldfinger
(64, Guy Hamilton);
Thunderball
(65, Young);
You Only Live Twice
(67, Lewis Gilbert); and
Diamonds Are Forever
(71, Hamilton). But those films grew tamer with habit and excess special effects. Producers Saltzmann and Broccoli had no urge to explore Connery’s potential. Bondism was more fully treated—to the point of sadism—in Connery’s Mark Rutland in
Marnie
(64, Alfred Hitchcock). Still, the first edition of this book was rash in supposing that Connery would never escape, or transcend, Bond.

Connery had been around a while without getting anywhere—Sidney Lumet was the one director who saw promise, but Lumet did not really transplant Connery to an American setting:
No Road Back
(56, Montgomery Tully);
Action of the Tiger
(57, Young);
Hell Drivers
(57, Cy Endfield);
Time Lock
(57, Gerald Thomas);
Another Time, Another Place
(58, Lewis Allen);
Tarzan’s Greatest Adventure
(59, John Guillermin);
Darby O’Gill and the Little People
(59, Robert Stevenson);
The Frightened City
(60, John Lemont);
On the Fiddle
(61, Cyril Frankel);
Woman of Straw
(63, Basil Dearden);
The Hill
(65, Sidney Lumet);
A Fine Madness
(66, Irvin Kershner);
Shalako
(68, Edward Dmytryk);
The Molly Maguires
(68, Martin Ritt);
The Anderson Tapes
(71, Lumet);
The Offence
(72, Lumet);
Zardoz
(73, John Boorman);
Ransom
(74, Caspar Wrede); and
Murder on the Orient Express
(74, Lumet).

The turning point came in 1975 and 1976 with a trio of flamboyant, romantic roles that needed costume and epic perspectives. In the process, Connery picked up humor, flourish, and a depth of humanity not much evident before. He had come from lowly stock, and in England he may have been advised to mask his Scottishness. Now he let the accent roar, he showed how little hair he owned, and he grasped nobility: as a very Scots Arab in
The Wind and the Lion
(75, John Milius); with Michael Caine as Kipling opportunists in
The Man Who Would Be King
(75, John Huston); as the aging ex-outlaw in
Robin and Marian
(76, Richard Lester).

The magic wasn’t complete; Connery makes strange choices still. But he has become a versatile movie star, an old-fashioned man who commands the love of the public. The closest comparison may be Gable, who had the same mix of mustache and twinkle and a similar hint of uncompromising force. Happily battered and world weary, he is past seventy and capable of becoming one of the great old men of movies.

The list is
The Next Man
(76, Richard Sarafian);
A Bridge Too Far
(77, Richard Attenborough);
The Great Train Robbery
(78, Michael Crichton);
Meteor
(79, Ronald Neame);
Cuba
(79, Lester);
Time Bandits
(81, Terry Gilliam);
Outland
(81, Peter Hyams);
Wrong Is Right
(82, Richard Brooks); the mountaineer in
Five Days One Summer
(82, Fred Zinnemann);
Never Say Never Again
(83, Kershner)—Bond again, after twelve years, suggesting the vulnerability to big offers;
Sword of the Valiant
(85, Stephen Weeks);
Highlander
(86, Russell Mulcahy);
The Name of the Rose
(86, Jean-Jacques Annaud); winning the supporting actor Oscar for his beat cop who dies a samurai death in
The Untouchables
(87, Brian De Palma);
The Presidio
(88, Hyams); as Indy’s dad in
Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade
(89, Steven Spielberg); walking away with
Family Business
(89, Lumet); the Russian officer in
The Hunt for Red October
(90, John McTiernan); a credible man in love and a boozy, jazz-mad publisher in
The Russia House
(90, Fred Schepisi); briefly as Robin’s father in
Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves
(90, Kevin Reynolds);
Highlander II—The Quickening
(91, Mulcahy); the awful
Medicine Man
(92, McTiernan) and a smart cop in
Rising Sun
(93, Philip Kaufman), on both of which he was also executive producer.

If one agrees that it’s too long since Connery has made a decent film, one should add that he has helped produce many of them
—Just Cause
(95, Arne Glimcher);
The Rock
(96, Michael Bay);
Entrapment
(99, Jon Amiel);
Finding Forrester
(00, Gus Van Sant). It’s a waste, because he owns the screen still, even if he looks a little silly leering at Catherine Zeta-Jones. If only he’d do a serious film about an older man and a younger woman. But he seems locked into the mocking, mercenary mode:
A Good Man in Africa
(94, Bruce Beresford); as Arthur in
First Knight
(95, Jerry Zucker);
The Avengers
(98, Jeremiah S. Chechik);
Playing by Heart
(98, Willard Carroll).

He is knighted now, and he devotes a lot of time to promoting his Scotland. The films come more rarely and they are not testing:
The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen
(03, Stephen Norrington).

Elisha Cook Jr
. (1906–99), b. San Francisco
There are big stars in the movies who pass by, leaving us uninterested. And there are supporting actors whose faces will stop you dead as you flip through an album history. Who really wants to know more about Robert Taylor, say? But who wouldn’t want to read a good biography of Elisha Cook Jr.? He was small, scrawny; he was losing his hair, and he had a high-pitched voice; he had eyes screwed into his head with all the desperate resolve of wanting to be taken seriously. He could be a loudmouth bullying the air around him, like Wilmer in
The Maltese Falcon
(41, John Huston), and he could be a quiet, gutsy squirt, like Henry Jones in
The Big Sleep
(46, Howard Hawks). It wasn’t a big adjustment, going from one to the other; and maybe it wasn’t a huge range. But Elisha Cook was guaranteed. Put him in a bad picture, and he made it watchable for ten minutes. Put him in something good and he was a metaphor for glue, or the medium itself. He could make you trust a film.

The list is longer than this, because he kept working:
Her Unborn Child
(29, Charles McGrath and Albert Ray);
Pigskin Parade
(36, David Butler), as a campus radical;
Two in a Crowd
(36, Alfred E. Green);
Love Is News
(37, Tay Garnett);
They Won’t Forget
(37, Mervyn LeRoy);
Submarine Patrol
(38, John Ford);
The Stranger on the Third Floor
(40, Boris Ingster);
Tin Pan Alley
(40, Walter Lang);
Love Crazy
(41, Jack Conway);
I Wake Up Screaming
(41, H. Bruce Humberstone); with Laurel and Hardy in
A-Haunting We Will Go
(42, Alfred Werker); as the hopped-up drummer who notices Ella Raines in
Phantom Lady
(44, Robert Siodmak);
Up in Arms
(44, Elliott Nugent);
Dark Waters
(44, André de Toth);
Dillinger
(45, Max Nosseck).

He was in
Cinderella Jones
(46, Busby Berkeley);
Two Smart People
(46, Jules Dassin);
The Falcon’s Alibi
(46, Ray McCarey);
Born to Kill
(47, Robert Wise);
The Long Night
(47, Anatole Litvak);
The Gangster
(47, Gordon Wiles);
Flaxy Martin
(49, Richard Bare);
The Great Gatsby
(49, Nugent);
Behave Yourself
(51, George Beck);
Don’t Bother to Knock
(52, Roy Baker); lifted off his feet by Jack Palance’s gunfire in
Shane
(53, George Stevens);
I, the Jury
(53, Harry Essex);
Thunder Over the Plains
(53, de Toth);
Drum Beat
(54, Delmer Daves);
The Indian Fighter
(55, de Toth); never better than as the henpecked teller, George Peatty, in
The Killing
(56, Stanley Kubrick).

He did
The Lonely Man
(57, Henry Levin);
Chicago Confidential
(57, Sidney Salkow);
Voodoo Island
(57, Reginald Le Borg);
Baby Face Nelson
(57, Don Siegel);
Plunder Road
(57, Hubert Cornfield);
House on Haunted Hill
(58, William Castle);
Day of the Outlaw
(59, de Toth);
Platinum High School
(60, Charles Haas);
College Confidential
(60, Albert Zugsmith);
One-Eyed Jacks
(61, Marlon Brando);
Black Zoo
(63, Robert Gordon),
The Haunted Palace
(63, Roger Corman);
Johnny Cool
(63, William Asher);
Blood on the Arrow
(64, Salkow);
Welcome to Hard Times
(67, Burt Kennedy);
Rosemary’s Baby
(68, Roman Polanski);
The Great Bank Robbery
(69, Hy Averback);
El Condor
(70, John Guillermin);
The Great Northfield Minnesota Raid
(72, Philip Kaufman).

He is beaten senseless in
Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid
(73, Sam Peckinpah);
Emperor of the North
(73, Robert Aldrich);
Electra Glide in Blue
(73, James William Guercio);
The Outfit
(74, John Flynn);
Winterhawks
(76, Charles B. Pierce); after the falcon again in
The Black Bird
(76, David Giler);
St. Ives
(76, J. Lee Thompson);
The Champ
(79, Franco Zeffirelli);
1941
(79, Steven Spielberg);
Carny
(80, Robert Kaylor);
Tom Horn
(80, William Wiard);
Harry’s War
(81, Keith Merrill);
Hammett
(82, Wim Wenders).

Alistair Cooke
(1908–2004), b. Salford, Lancashire
Yes, Alistair Cooke was a radio man and nearly anyone alive can summon his voice as easily as they can hear Churchill or Gary Cooper. But he loved movies. He never acted in the
Letters from America
. Neither was he a mere “correspondent” just bringing you the news. He was a storyteller who would lead you up his garden path, and leave you with the twilight beauty (as if the garden were Giverny) or an imminent tragedy (where it turned into
On the Beach
).

He was there when Bobby Kennedy was shot and he had known Charlie Chaplin. He spent an evening with Garbo, lighting her cigarettes as they watched a movie. Only when it was over would she talk—about the price of vegetables. He was a film critic in his early days, and nearer the end he was the suave uncle who led American audiences through shelves of classic literature for a Sunday-night show called
Masterpiece Theater
. Even then, you felt Cooke’s mild irritation over the vulgarity of “masterpieces.”

The oddest thing of all may be why Alistair Cooke wasn’t
in
the movies. He was for decades a handsome man with the face of a hawk—not quite a star, but as attractive and droll as those English actors who played supporting roles in American pictures and who did so much to guide the social life of Hollywood when it came into money and was anxious to acquire class. If William Powell and Myrna Loy were to have had a pal in their
Thin Man
pictures—a dapper fellow, hard to place (was he English or American?), who never seemed to get drunk—it could have been Cooke.

Maybe it nearly happened that way. Educated at Cambridge, he was bold, cheeky, and he had nerve. He conned the
Observer
, in 1933, to fund his trip to the Wild West. He’d go to the Pacific shore and interview these movie people—he’d talk to them!