The New Biographical Dictionary of Film: Completely Updated and Expanded (121 page)

In the 1980s, Douglas had two more big successes as a producer. He acted in these films—
Romancing the Stone
(84, Robert Zemeckis) and
Jewel of the Nile
(85, Lewis Teague)—and enjoyed himself as the adventurer. But he was preoccupied with two difficult locations and readily conceded the pictures to Kathleen Turner and Danny DeVito.

As if there had been a campaign, he moved toward better roles and more responsibility, even if he never quite dominated a film. He is the motor of
Fatal Attraction
, but the film concerns a crazy driver (Glenn Close). And though he won the Oscar for best actor as Gordon Gekko in
Wall Street
(87, Oliver Stone), that is actually a film about the Charlie Sheen character. It was just that Gekko’s power felt greater, and his ambiguity came across as more intriguing than Sheen’s dollar-book dilemma. Douglas’s view of Gekko is a fascinating sign of how a producer-actor thinks: “I don’t think Gekko’s a villain. Doesn’t beat his wife or his kid. He’s just taking care of business. And he gives a lot of people chances.”

Douglas has not finished his journey. He produced
Starman
(84, John Carpenter) and
Black Rain
(89, Ridley Scott) in which he also acted, making a lot of the role of a shabby, corrupt cop. He also acted in and encouraged the bold, unruly
The War of the Roses
(89, DeVito), and he acted in
Shining Through
(92, David Seltzer).

Douglas has his own production company, Stonebridge, which has made
Flatliners
(90, Joel Schumacher) and
Radio Flyer
(92, Richard Donner). But Douglas split from his partner, Rick Bieber, and scaled down the new company after several failures.

In 1993, he played the ordinary man who goes over the edge in
Falling Down
(Schumacher). This could have been another exploitation of urban resentment in the mass psyche—but only if Douglas’s character had been other than crazy—or more comic?

If this length begins to seem excessive, I would say two things: Michael Douglas is very characteristic of modern Hollywood; and I like him. For those of us in that boat, the nineties were hard times. Douglas’s often uncertain marriage ended. There was talk—from him, not just others—that he was addicted to sex. It made him Clintonian—but don’t we all feel we’re addicted to sex? Well, not many of us can expect rescue in the form of Catherine Zeta-Jones—his new bride and mother of his child. They seem happy—and Douglas, like Kirk, enjoys happiness.

He made some poor films, and some that were just silly, but he never lost his following:
Disclosure
(94, Barry Levinson), where he was the man of the moment to be sexually harassed—he does know pulse issues;
The American President
(95, Rob Reiner)—a daft picture, but close to the “Look, I can fly” surprise of Bill Clinton;
The Ghost and the Darkness
(96, Stephen Hopkins)—which was nearly good.
The Game
(97, David Fincher), too, was halfway fascinating. Only
A Perfect Murder
(98, Andrew Davis) was unforgivable.

And then he rewarded all those who like him with the beautiful shabbiness of
Wonder Boys
(00, Curtis Hanson). In truth, he was pretty perfunctory in
Traffic
(00, Steven Soderbergh)—but our modern problem czars are like that. On
Don’t Say a Word
(01, Gary Fleder), I won’t. Then came
One Night at McCool’s
(01, Harald Zwart);
It Runs in the Family
(03, Fred Schepisi);
The In-Laws
(03, Andrew Fleming).

He acted in
You, Me and Dupree
(06, Anthony and Joe Russo); he acted in and produced
The Sentinel
(06, Clark Johnson). The next few films did very little:
King of California
(07, Mike Cahill);
Ghosts of Girlfriends Past
(09, Mark Waters);
Beyond a Reasonable Doubt
(09, Peter Hyams);
Solitary Man
(09, Brian Koppelman). But he has two biggies ahead—
Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps
(10, Stone);
Knockout
(10, Soderbergh); and a Liberace project.

Paul Douglas
(1907–59), b. Philadelphia
If he ever had doubts, Douglas settled on being grouchy and bad-tempered when, having played Harry Brock in over one thousand performances of
Born Yesterday
on Broadway, he turned down the movie and let Broderick Crawford make a meal of it. A few years later, Douglas and Judy Holliday were brought together in that obvious but appealing imitation,
The Solid Gold Cadillac
(56, Richard Quine). But the stage Harry Brock had carried Douglas to Fox where he made his debut in
A Letter to Three Wives
(49, Joseph L. Mankiewicz). That first part showed some vulnerability beneath the bluster, but Douglas quickly became typed as a bulldozer, either a comic butt or a cantankerous figure of authority:
It Happens Every Spring
(49, Lloyd Bacon);
Everybody Does It
(49, Edmund Goulding);
Panic in the Streets
(50, Elia Kazan);
Love that Brute
(50, Alexander Hall);
Fourteen Hours
(51, Henry Hathaway);
The Guy Who Came Back
(51, Joseph Newman);
Angels in the Outfield
(51, Clarence Brown);
When in Rome
(52, Brown). He was much more touching as the naïve fisherman husband of Barbara Stanwyck in
Clash by Night
(52, Fritz Lang), a sign that once his energies were modified he became more interesting. Too often he got away with a slightly nerve-racking performance of boorishness:
We’re Not Married
(52, Goulding);
Forever Female
(53, Irving Rapper); and
Executive Suite
(54, Robert Wise). Because his huffing and puffing was so automatic, it was amusingly deflated in
The Maggie
(54, Alexander Mackendrick), in which he played an American tycoon remorselessly sapped by Scots prevarication. In the years before he finally wore himself out he was in
Green Fire
(54, Andrew Marton);
Joe Macbeth
(56, Ken Hughes);
The Leather Saint
(56, Alvin Ganzer);
This Could Be the Night
(57, Wise);
Beau James
(57, Melville Shavelson);
Fortunella
(58, Eduardo de Filippo); and
The Mating Game
(59, George Marshall), in which he played an Americanized version of H. E. Bates’s Pa Larkin.

Alexander Dovzhenko
(1894–1956), b. Sosnitsa, Ukraine
1926:
Vasya Reformator
(codirected with F. Lokatinsky and Iosif Rona);
Yagodka Lyubvi
. 1927:
Sumka Dipkurera
. 1928:
Zvenigora
. 1929:
Arsenal
. 1930:
Zemlya/Earth
. 1932:
Ivan
. 1935:
Aerograd
. 1939:
Shchors
(codirected with Yulia Solntseva). 1940:
Osvobozhdenie
(codirected with Solntseva). 1945:
Pobeda na Pravoberezhnoi Ukrainye i Izgnanie Nemetsikh Zakhvatchikov za Predeli Ukrainskikh Sovetskikh Zemel
(codirected with Solntseva). 1948:
Michurin
.

Of all the first generation of Russian directors—Pudovkin, Dziga Vertov, and Eisenstein—Dovzhenko needs the least allowance and the least explanation of political context. Whereas other directors seem aggressively theoretical or populist, Dovzhenko is the first intensely personal artist in the Russian cinema. Although his career was subject to the problems that faced any filmmaker in Soviet Russia, the films themselves are free from them.
Earth
is a stirring symphony of pastoral life and the calm acceptance of death, deriving from the clash between peasants and kulaks, but essentially indifferent to local origins.

Dovzhenko’s cinema is poetic, lyrical, possessed of a Blake-like somber innocence and a burning passion for existence. It is important to note that
Earth
has the barest of stories, and that its real subject is the moving image of a Ukrainian village. In feeling and purpose it is far away from the busy self-conscious city of
Man With a Movie Camera
(28, Vertov), where the workers are encouraged by the technological ardor of the cameraman; from the editing table blueprints that Pudovkin carried over to celluloid; and from Eisenstein’s eventually self-destructive attempt to sympathize with the Revolution. Dovzhenko loves his subject, making the camera the means of transmitting his emotion. The natural vitality of faces, sunlight on hay, animals in a meadow—these are Dovzhenko’s bases for hope. Today they look subtler and more credible than all of Eisenstein’s violent juxtapositions of the crowd and outrage, or Vertov’s exultant comparison of machines and happiness. Dovzhenko emerges as a filmmaker who might have grown up on Tolstoy’s estate.

In reality, he was from a farm in the Ukraine. He studied to be a teacher and moved inquisitively from economics to biology to physics. But after the war, he worked for the education service and then went to Poland and Germany as a clerk in the diplomatic service. On his return, he studied painting and he contributed to magazines. But in 1926 he went to Odessa for his first films.
Sumka Dipkurera
was a naïve spy story; but
Zvenigora
initiated the vein of peasant stories in which Dovzhenko was to excel and that—in his own words—amounted to “a catalogue of all my creative possibilities.”

The four years that followed saw his greatest work
—Arsenal, Earth
, and
Ivan. Arsenal
was a tribute to the Ukraine, moving from the last year of the war to the suppression of a workers’ revolt in Kiev. But it lacks the strident, doctrinaire dialectic of
Strike
(24, Eisenstein), and the hysterical images of slaughter. Instead, it subordinates its revolutionary conviction to the poignant poetry of failure.
Earth
was so great a success that Dovzhenko visited Berlin and Paris with the film. When he returned, it was to make
Ivan
, his first and still little-known sound film. Again it is richly beautiful, and turning on the relations between the individual and nature. But almost alone among the Russians, Dovzhenko the provincial and rural director grasped the freedom of sound and made
Ivan
an intriguing mixture of moods.

He left the Ukraine to make
Aerograd
and was then commissioned by Stalin to make
Shchors
—“a Ukrainian Chapayev.” It was a fine film, but one hampered by bureaucracy, and also markedly more propagandist. As a result, Dovzhenko was made head of the Kiev studios. During the war, he served at the front and wrote a great deal. His film work was confined to newsreels, especially the portentously titled account of the war in the Ukraine. His last film,
Michurin
, was based on one of the plays he wrote during the war.

In his last years, he prepared a Ukrainian trilogy and, when he died, on the point of filming, his wife, Yulia Solntseva, directed them—
Poema o Morye
(58);
Povest Plamennykh Let
(61); and
Zacharovanaya Desna
(65).

Robert Downey Jr.
, b. New York, 1965
Not long ago, Robert Downey Jr. was in the California prison system on drug-related convictions. The events leading up to that disaster had revealed his chronic need for drugs, and the failure of so much good advice and hopeful therapy. At the same time, he was one of the most fascinating, mercurial actors around—if one cherishes the notion of the actor as jazz improviser: sudden, lyrical, absurd, tragic, comic, and ready to destroy himself for truth. Of course, some people—especially those who have to love, care for, and rescue such a person—are wearied and appalled by any romance applied to his sociopathy. The horrible feeling dawns that a stable, calm, “well” Downey might be a lot less compelling as an actor. Perhaps that is the fear that prompts his use of drugs.

He is the son of Robert Downey (b. 1936), the experimental filmmaker, and he made his first appearances in his father’s films:
Pound
(70);
Greaser’s Palace
(72);
Up the Academy
(80). Then came
Baby It’s You
(83, John Sayles);
Firstborn
(84, Michael Apted);
Tuff Turf
(85, Fritz Kiersch);
Weird Science
(85, John Hughes);
To Live and Die in L.A
. (85, William Friedkin).

By then, he was a regular on
Saturday Night Live
as well as making
Back to School
(86, Alan Metter) and
America
(86, Downey). He had the lead role in
The Pick-Up Artist
(87, James Toback); a junkie in
Less Than Zero
(87, Marek Kanievska); Johnny
Be Good
(88, Bud Smith);
Rented Lips
(88, Downey);
1969
(88, Ernest Thompson); law clerk to James Woods in
True Believer
(89, Joseph Ruben);
Chances Are
(89, Emile Ardolino); with Mel Gibson in
Air America
(90, Roger Spottiswoode);
Too Much Sun
(91, Downey);
Soapdish
(91, Michael Hoffman).

In 1992, he was nominated as best actor for
Chaplin
(Richard Attenborough)—it was an ingenious performance, if very uneasy with the older man. But Downey was not easily cast in mainstream films:
Heart and Souls
(93, Ron Underwood);
Short Cuts
(93, Robert Altman);
Hail Caesar
(94, Anthony Michael Hall);
Natural Born Killers
(94, Oliver Stone);
Only You
(94, Norman Jewison);
Home for the Holidays
(95, Jodie Foster);
Restoration
(95, Hoffman);
Richard III
(95, Richard Loncraine);
Danger Zone
(96, Allan Eastman);
One Night Stand
(97, Mike Figgis);
Hugo Pool
(97, Downey);
U.S. Marshals
(98, Stuart Baird).