The New Biographical Dictionary of Film: Completely Updated and Expanded (98 page)

Can he look forty? He was Hitler’s art dealer in
Max
(02, Menno Meyjes);
Identity
(03, James Mangold);
The Runaway Jury
(03, Gary Fleder); with Diane Lane in
Must Love Dogs
(05, Gary David Goldberg);
The Ice Harvest
(05, Harold Ramis);
The Contract
(06, Bruce Beresford);
Martian Child
(07, Meyjes);
1408
(07, Mikael Hafstrom);
Grace is Gone
(07, James C. Strouse), which he produced;
War, Inc
. (08, Joshua Seftel); a voice in
Igor
(08, Anthony Leondis); very brave in
2012
(09, Roland Emmerich).

D

Willem
(William)
Dafoe
, b. Appleton, Wisconsin, 1955
Dafoe has not been the easiest actor to place or cast. Yet he has appealed to directors as figures of both extreme good and extreme evil. His ideal man, Sergeant Elias, in
Platoon
(86, Oliver Stone) must have been very hard to establish within the context of that film’s thorough horror, but Dafoe seemed to be possessed by a necessary spiritual force. Indeed, the tenderness in Elias, the openness to pleasure, was actually more impressive than the lead role in
The Last Temptation of Christ
(88, Martin Scorsese), where he seemed uneasy with the flawed interpretation of the picture. On the other hand, he has often been cast as lurid villains, and increasingly nowadays he seems to be a supporting player. But Dafoe has the resources to come back at us with a huge surprise still.

He has remained loyal to the theatre and to the Wooster Group, of which he is a longtime member. He made his movie debut in
The Loveless
(83, Kathryn Bigelow);
The Hunger
(83, Tony Scott); the gang leader in
Streets of Fire
(84, Walter Hill);
Roadhouse 66
(84, John Mark Robinson); another nasty in
To Live and Die in L.A
. (85, William Friedkin);
Off Limits
(88, Christopher Crowe); one of the investigators in
Mississippi Burning
(88, Alan Parker);
Born on the Fourth of July
(89, Stone); a boxer in Auschwitz in
Triumph of the Spirit
(89, Robert M. Young); a spot in
Cry-Baby
(90, John Waters); wonderfully exaggerated as Bobby Peru in
Wild at Heart
(90, David Lynch);
Flight of the Intruder
(91, John Milius).

He was the local cop in
White Sands
(92, Roger Donaldson); very good as the connection who has dreams, John LeTour, in
Light Sleeper
(92, Paul Schrader); keeping a straight face and a hard bod with Madonna in
Body of Evidence
(93, Uli Edel); a kind of Elias again in
Clear and Present Danger
(94, Phillip Noyce); as T. S. Eliot, terribly rattled and wasted, in
Tom & Viv
(94, Brian Gilbert); as Axel Heyst in
Victory
(95, Mark Peploe);
Basquiat
(96, Julian Schnabel).

He was Caravaggio, the least felt character in
The English Patient
(96, Anthony Minghella); his worst villain yet in
Speed 2: Cruise Control
(97, Jan de Bont);
Lulu on the Bridge
(98, Paul Auster);
Affliction
(98, Schrader);
eXistenZ
(99, David Cronenberg);
New Rose Hotel
(99, Abel Ferrara);
The Boondock Saints
(99, Troy Duffy);
American Psycho
(00, Mary Harron); the prison boss in
Animal Factory
(00, Steve Buscemi).

Then he found his perfect role, part wronged saint, part repressed monster, that of Max Schreck, playing the vampire from the heart, funny, pathetic, and fearsome, in
Shadow of the Vampire
(00, E. Elias Merhige);
Pavilion of Women
(01, Yim Ho), as a priest struggling with a lot of sex; the Green Goblin in
Spider-Man
(02, Sam Raimi); superbly ingratiating in
Auto Focus
(02, Schrader); a voice in
Finding Nemo
(03, Andrew Stanton and Lee Unkrich);
Once Upon a Time in Mexico
(03, Robert Rodriguez);
The Clearing
(04, Pieter Jan Brugge);
The Reckoning
(Paul McGuigan);
The Aviator
(04, Scorsese);
White on White
(04, Roger Spottiswoode);
The Life Aquatic
(04, Wes Anderson).

He works on, but the roles grow smaller and stranger:
Control
(04, Tim Hunter);
XXX State of the Union
(05, Lee Tamahori);
Manderlay
(05, Lars Von Trier);
Ripley Under Ground
(05, Roger Spottiswoode);
American Dreamz
(06, Paul Weitz);
Inside Man
(06, Spike Lee);
Tales from Earthsea
(06, Goro Miyazaki); Nobuhiro Suwa’s “Place des Victoires” from
Paris Je T’Aime
(06);
The Walker
(07, Schrader);
Mr. Bean’s Holiday
(07, Steve Bendelach);
Spider-Man 3
(07, Raimi);
Anamorph
(07, Henry S. Miller);
Fireflies in the Garden
(08, Dennis Lee);
Adam Resurrected
(08, Schrader);
The Dust of Time
(08, Theo Angelopoulos); still valiant for
Antichrist
(09, Von Trier).

John Dahl
, b. Billings, Montana, 1956
1989:
Kill Me Again
. 1993:
Red Rock West
. 1994:
The Last Seduction
. 1996:
Unforgettable
. 1998:
Rounders
. 2001:
Joy Ride
. 2005:
The Great Raid
. 2007:
You Kill Me
.

The transition from
The Last Seduction
to
Unforgettable
was one of the most embarrassed gulps in modern film. Despite the presence of Linda Fiorentino,
Unforgettable
was in title denial from its first few minutes. Again, despite the radiant gloom of Ms. Fiorentino in
Last Seduction
, the film was more than just her—it had a bunch of nicely weak men, a terrific feeling for money, and real guile in the filming. It could have been better: the woman might have been more steadily aggressive, instead of content to be in hiding. But
The Last Seduction
makes everything else by Dahl look limp.

Dahl was at the AFI and then he worked as an assistant director and storyboard artist on
The Dungeonmaster
(85, too many directors to name);
Something Wild
(86, Jonathan Demme); and
Married to the Mob
(88, Demme), and made his debut on
Kill Me Again
, which he also wrote, with Val Kilmer and his then-wife, Joanne Whalley-Kilmer. He wrote
Red Rock West
, too, which won high praise, though it seemed to me predictable and very derivative. Still, it had a humor that bloomed in
Last Seduction
(which was written by Steve Barancik). The later films, however, are those of a talent that has lost its way, and its momentum.
Rounders
was especially regrettable in that it seemed so promising in its lineup.

In recent years, Dahl has spent most of his time in TV series (
Californication; True Blood; Dexter; Battlestar Galactica
, et al.), but
You Kill Me
—with Ben Kingsley—was as tart and unusual as
The Last Seduction
.

Dan Dailey
(1915–78), b. New York
Dan Dailey began with dancing school, then was in a minstrel show as a boy, in vaudeville in his teens, and then Minsky’s, Broadway, and his first film,
The Mortal Storm
(40, Frank Borzage). Even before he went into the army in 1942, he had smiled his way into a place as an honest hoofer:
Susan and God
(40, George Cukor);
Ziegfeld Girl
(41, Robert Z. Leonard);
Moon Over Her Shoulder
(41, Alfred Werker);
Lady Be Good
(41, Norman Z. McLeod);
Panama Hattie
(42, McLeod);
Give Out, Sisters
(42, Eddie Cline); and
Sunday Punch
(42, David Miller). After the war, he became a mainstay of dull Fox musicals:
Mother Wore Tights
(47, Walter Lang);
You Were Meant for Me
(48, Lloyd Bacon);
Give My Regards to Broadway
(48, Bacon);
When My Baby Smiles at Me
(48, Lang);
Chicken Every Sunday
(49, George Seaton); and
My Blue Heaven
(50, Henry Koster). Not even such cheerfulness could wipe the grin off his face. He tried to branch out into straight acting and made three films for John Ford:
When Willie Comes Marching Home
(50),
What Price Glory?
(52), and
The Wings of Eagles
(57). Though musicals were his homeground, he had a few dramatic roles:
I Can Get It for You Wholesale
(51, Michael Gordon);
Call Me Mister
(51, Bacon); as baseball pitcher Dizzy Dean in
The Pride of St. Louis
(52, Harmon Jones);
Meet Me at the Fair
(52, Douglas Sirk);
Taxi
(53, Gregory Ratoff);
There’s No Business Like Show Business
(54, Lang);
It’s Always Fair Weather
(55, Stanley Donen and Gene Kelly);
Meet Me in Las Vegas
(56, Roy Rowland); and
The Best Things in Life Are Free
(56, Michael Curtiz). His decline was swift, albeit cushioned by TV:
Oh, Men! Oh, Women!
(57, Nunnally Johnson);
The Wayward Bus
(57, Victor Vicas);
Underwater Warrior
(58, Andrew Marton);
Hemingway’s Adventures of a Young Man
(62, Martin Ritt); and as Clyde Tolson in
The Private Files of J. Edgar Hoover
(77, Larry Cohen).

Marcel Dalio
(Israel Mosche Blauschild) (1900–83), b. Paris
“Gentlemen, tomorrow we shall leave the château weeping for this wonderful friend, this excellent companion who knew so well how to make us forget that he was a famous man.… And now, my dear friends … it is cold, you are running the risk of catching a chill and I suggest that you go inside.” It is night, on the steps outside a French country house, and a slight, dark man in evening dress is speaking to his guests after one of them has been shot. The year, 1939, when the danger of chill was a metaphor for a much greater threat coming from Germany. For both the character—a French aristocrat of Jewish descent—and the Jewish actor, Marcel Dalio, that speech was to prove a farewell to France. Within two years Dalio was in America playing small parts with the same aptitude for the skills of a butler that underlies his delicately insecure Marquis de la Chesnaye in
La Règle du feu
(39, Jean Renoir).

Dalio had been in revue and music hall since the end of the First World War: a bright, dapper, and knowing Parisian. From the early 1930s he worked in French films, chiefly as a poker-faced crook, a harbinger of Melville’s fatalistic world:
Mon Chapeau
(33);
Un Grand Amour de Beethoven
(36, Abel Gance);
Pépé le Moko
(37, Julien Duvivier);
Cargaisons Blanches
(37, Robert Siodmak);
Les Perles de la Couronne
(37, Sacha Guitry and Christian-Jaque);
Marthe Richard
(37, Raymond Bernard);
Mollenard
(38, Siodmak);
Entrée des Artistes
(38, Marc Allégret); and
La Maison du Maltais
(38, Pierre Chenal).

In 1937, he played Rosenthal, one of the escaping prisoners of war in Renoir’s
La Grande Illusion
, and two years later Renoir asked Dalio to play la Chesnaye. Why? asked Dalio, “when I had always played burlesque parts or traitors?” First, said Renoir, to break the cliché, to create an aristocrat by casting against type. Second, because real aristocrats are sometimes as unconvincing as Dalio, whereas only stage nobility feel no discomfort. “There is another thing, too,” said Renoir. “It is that I believe that you were the only actor who could express a certain feeling of insecurity which is the basis of the character.” Thus, Dalio’s marquis is invaded by doubts: that he is not a satisfactory aristocrat, that his wife is unfaithful, that the assembly may not applaud his new fairground organ. Brisk, incisive, and commanding, he can quickly grow as fussy as a stage magician uncertain whether a trick will work. Wandering round his own estate, he frets about rabbits but refuses to tolerate fences. In the equally unsegregated house, he murmurs about the pain that comes from hurting people. And although Renoir’s own presence in the film obscures the fact, Dalio’s la Chesnaye is one of Renoir’s first “producers” of life. Nothing will reassure him better than that life’s show—the house party—goes with a bang. He loves organized human activity as much as the precise performance of the figures in the organ. When he announces the sudden conclusion of affairs he is like an actor-manager who has hurried onto the stage with news that the star has really died, blanks replaced by bullets. The show must be put away. La Chesnaye was a lead part, but still a character part. It was clear that Dalio would never be a star. When he fled to America he was cast in supporting roles, as café owners or servants, just as real European nobility were forced to imitate their own valets when the great German pressure forced them westward (some of Dalio’s family died in concentration camps). Nothing to be depressed by, however, in his marvelous cameos in the American cinema: exactly the same impulsive courage and dandyish shyness that la Chesnaye had lived by. The massive alteration of circumstances did not affect artistic continuity: a croupier in
The Shanghai Gesture
(41, Josef von Sternberg);
Unholy Partners
(41, Mervyn Le Roy);
The Constant Nymph
(43, Edmund Goulding); as another croupier, with the happy knack of bringing up 22 on the roulette wheel, in
Casablanca
(43, Michael Curtiz); as the perplexed gendarme in
The Song of Bernadette
(43, Henry King);
Wilson
(44, King);
A Bell for Adano
(45, King); as Gerard, worthy companion of Bogart in another neutral cockpit, in
To Have and Have Not
(44, Howard Hawks).