The New Biographical Dictionary of Film: Completely Updated and Expanded (133 page)

The publication, in 2009, of
Farber on Film: The Complete Film Writings of Manny Farber
was a godsend for film enthusiasts, and I think it establishes Farber as among the greatest bad-tempered, chewy Western writers we have. And as a film critic or historian? Well, there I’m not so sure, but only because the abiding grump in Farber is why the hell these halfway decent films should have come along to spoil his day. You can read Farber on film for days at a time (he’s trail-reading, for sure), but it’s like keeping company with a rugged oldtimer (he never seemed young), more Charles Bickford than Walter Brennan, who grumbles about the food, the water, the horses, the heat, and the company. Because he’s so damn determined not to show you the good time he’s having. And truly, there are paragraphs in Farber where you could ride ten miles and not have them worked out properly. But don’t ask him, because he’ll cuss you out for being too talkative. Here he is on
Kane
and its influence, for instance:

The entire physical structure of movies has been slowed down and simplified and brought closer to the front plane of the screen so that eccentric effects can be deeply felt. Hollywood has in effect developed a new medium which plays odd tricks with space and human behavior in order to project a content of popular “insights” beneath a meager surface.

That is June 1952, for
Commentary
, in a piece called “The Gimp,” and it amounts to an attack on the tomfoolery of looking deep at films and finding more meaning than you might pick up at a drive-in screening outside Douglas. Farber wrote for intellectual magazines first (
The New Republic
and
The Nation
) and then later it might be
Film Comment
or
Artforum
, and he is generally regarded as a rascal uncle god by many of the best critics in America now, but all through his work there runs the skepticism about taking films too seriously. So he comes off writing the terse, hardboiled, and Heiddegerian paragraphs that can take a lifetime to crack.

Long before the end of his long life—in San Diego, where he taught from 1970 onwards—he had been semiretired as a film writer and more deeply engaged as a painter. But the fondness for low-budget film noir now reached out to figures like Straub, Fassbinder, Rivette, Antonioni, and Michael Snow. So it’s difficult for the greatest Farber enthusiast to know what his sense of film history and desirable film might be. For instance, he called
To Have and Have Not
“a rather spiritless Bogart movie … that has no more structure or unified effect than a string of familiar but unrelated beads.” He never got it that
The Big Sleep
was a freaky screwball comedy. This is what he says of
Laura:
it is “a movie exposé of society people that is more awed with them than critical.” As for
Double Indemnity
, he thought it “slick, slight, arty and visually synthetic.”

So he wasn’t always right? But he was always readable. There you have the essence of Farber. He had found a voice for addressing the movies—it may have been half-drunk sometimes; it was always truculent and scolding; and it is enchanting and crammed with the very vision he claimed to despise—“insights,” like clefts in the rock of the screen. And from time to time, he leveled the fakery and stupidity of the whole medium. He might have been a very funny writer if he hadn’t been raised with the notion that doing comedy might be effete, like begging for water at three in the afternoon. Here he is on
Clash by Night:

Marilyn Monroe, who is supposed to be burning up the screen with her size-36½ bosom and horizontal walk, has several scenes custom built to her measurements. Someone holds her upside down on the beach—to shake the water from her ears; she gets out of bed in a tricky hip-length shirt designed by Adrian for cannery workers; she walks around in dungarees which must have been broken in by a midget cowboy. Nothing happens because Monroe is still a tight amateur presented as a spectacle. Given four-word sentences and simple actions like eating a candy bar, she seems to break them up into dozens of little unrelated pieces paced in a slow, sing-song fashion.

It’s closer to S. J. Perelman than you might think at first and it speaks for that midcentury American certainty—that the movies are pretty stupid if you’ve ever known the desert and its everyday hostilities.

Like every American writer on film, Farber had a terrible sinking feeling if asked where cinema was going and where it ought to go. He was of an age (just like Pauline Kael) that knew the virtues of terrific non-pretentious entertainment and he was mad enough to get a lot of the post-1960s innovations. But he could never be sure how far he should let artiness go, or even art—and at dusk, were they any different? So even when you know he was touched by something like
The Wild
Bunch
(which is kind of Douglasy), he was ready to crush it:

The Wild Bunch
has a vivid ribbon image, often an aerial view, of border life in 1914 Texas, stretched across a mottled wide screen in which there are so many intense, frontal details—five kids marching in a parade with their arms linked, a line of bounty-hunters riding straight at the camera—that the spectator’s store chest of visual information is constantly widened. Someone seems to have studied all the frontal postures and somber-sharp detailing in Civil War photographs, as well as the snap-the-whip, across-the-page compositions that Homer often used as a perfect substructure for the spread-out, pastoral, early 1900s. There is a lunatic intensity in exploiting this archaic photography, getting the inside effect of life on movement, having people in rows, the pride and uprightness of a posse, emphasizing dishevelment in peasant huts or the dry-dusty exit from a Mexican walled city.

From this pulverizing attempt at photographic beauty (wonderful—yet hopeless, too), the movie becomes a bloated composition. There is an unpleasant feeling of expense, of enormous amounts of money being spent, tons of footage being shot in order to get one slow-motion instant that will stamp home Peckinpah’s obsessive theme: that man’s propensity for cruelty and self-destruction is endless. This expanding and slowing gets unbelievable effects: a bridge blowing up with nine men on it, all sinking in a row, facing the camera. They drop at the same time and rise up again out of the water in unison, only to sink again, and, with ebbing force, bob gently up and down while floating downstream. Probably the best second ever filmed showing fumbling ineptitude in the face of ungraspable horror: a young sergeant’s instant realization that a quarter of his troops are going to be crushed to death.

“The best second ever filmed”? Well, let’s see if we can’t do better. But that’s an odd giveaway, a sign of how reluctant Farber was to be moved at the movies. He got it, a lot of the time, and he could track the movement and the space as well as anyone. But he did not like to let it show that he had been had. So he put on this rough temper—it’s a John Wayne trick. But you can and should read Farber all your life (and you really can), sorting out the good from the mean.

Frances Farmer
(1914–70), b. Seattle, Washington, and
Sharon Stone
, b. Meadville, Pennsylvania, 1958
Why put these two together? They never met, and there is only the faintest possibility that they could have been mother and daughter. Nor am I proposing that Stone play Farmer. There have already been three Frances Farmer biopics, so that the actress who had her moment of wonder in the late 1930s is now chiefly known as a Jessica Lange role. No, the pairing owes itself to some caprice of untidiness. The desk, the floor, the rooms that have made this book are a sea of untidiness on which the author makes a Columbus-like assertion of knowing where everything is. Of course, he does not. Notes, reports, articles, and pictures ebb and flow, and one morning in that flux it happened that pictures of Frances Farmer and Sharon Stone were briefly side by side. Anyone could have seen the sisterhood of blondeness, wide intelligent brows, and a gaze so frank and unshakable that it left one wondering where looker and self-destruction met.

Then, on reflection, I thought I saw some useful pattern that concerns the muddle and peril of wanting to be a beautiful blonde in pictures.

Farmer’s life is “known” now—or understood; but there is a special mystery that clings to established history, the paranoia that knows we may be wrong. So Frances Farmer is celebrated as a victim: she was too intelligent, supposedly, too radical, too difficult, too determined to be an artist, an actress, a woman, a free spirit. You can hardly have a Jessica Lange play a Frances Farmer without that sense of victimization and lost greatness. And there has never been a problem in rounding up a crowd that wants to think badly of Hollywood and the show business system.

So Frances Farmer went from the University of Washington on a trip to Soviet Russia, to the Group Theater and Hollywood, to an affair with Clifford Odets, and got the female role in the stage debut of
Golden Boy
, the cast of which included Elia Kazan, who saw “a special glow, a skin without flaw, lustrous eyes—a blonde you’d dream about. She also had a wry and, at times, rather disappointed manner, a twist of the mouth, which suited the part.”

That was 1937. The year before, Farmer had been in Hollywood. She had made
Too Many Parents
(36, Robert McGowan) and
Border Flight
(36, Otho Lovering). Then she met Howard Hawks, who cast her in the challenging dual role of mother and daughter in
Come and Get It
(36, Hawks and William Wyler, after Hawks was fired). Hawks believed she was the best actress he ever worked with. He recalled her playing a scene with the experienced Edward Arnold, and giving the pro some quiet help on timing. “Hey, look,” said Arnold to Hawks, “she’s pretty good.”

“She’s so good,” Hawks replied, “that you’d better get right to work or she’s going to take it and walk off with it.”

She is so good in
Come and Get It
, you marvel that that’s the only good film she ever made. What happened? She was difficult, some say—though not Hawks. She was marked as a leftist, she would talk back, she intimidated too many people, and she reckoned that the film work she was offered was lousy:
Rhythm on the Range
(36, Norman Taurog);
The Toast of New York
(37, Rowland V. Lee);
Ebb Tide
(37, James P. Hogan);
Exclusive
(37, Alexander Hall);
Ride a Crooked Mile
(38, Alfred E. Green);
South of Pago Pago
(40, Green);
Flowing Gold
(40, Green);
World Premiere
(41, Ted Tetzlaff);
Badlands of Dakota
(41, Green);
Among the Living
(41, Stuart Heisler); and
Son of Fury
(41, John Cromwell).

Hawks said “she went to pieces.” There was trouble with the law, with alcohol, with … too many men as strong, alluring, and careerist as Odets, Hawks, Kazan, and her husband, actor Leif Erickson (they were married from 1934 to 1942). And perhaps it was too much for her to seem that lovely or poised on the brink of fame and greatness. Perhaps she was disturbed, or self-destructive—perhaps she was out of control. One of the screen’s great lies is the way it sanctifies control and seems to make a unified image of passion and intelligence. Whatever, she was treated as if she were crazy. She was institutionalized and she had operations, a lobotomy. She was years in the state hospital at Steilacoom, Washington. She came to the surface again in the late fifties, on television, and she made a couple of TV movies, including
The Party Crashers
(58, Bernard Girard). Admirers regretted that she was not the same person—but on the screen forty-four is never the same as twenty-two. This is barely a career, yet it is one of the most poignant Hollywood lives, heavy with meanings.

Sharon Stone does have Farmer’s looks. She enjoys the chance to be dangerous on screen, and she is one of the best interviews Hollywood has ever had. Talking smart, tough, and funny for an interview isn’t necessarily intelligence, yet it makes a threat out of the actress’s loveliness.

Not that Stone is anyone’s victim. She only came to success at an age when Farmer was finished. While waiting to click, Stone had been a model, an actress in wretched films, and possibly several things that are still beyond even her candor. Just as people wonder where Frances Farmer went after 1936–37, so we can ask now why the world didn’t seize on Sharon Stone before
Basic Instinct
(92, Paul Verhoeven).

She had been around most of a decade, and she actually had better scenes to show than Frances Farmer: the dream girl in
Stardust Memories
(80, Woody Allen), kissing the window;
Deadly Blessing
(81, Wes Craven); a role in the short-lived TV series
Bay City Blues
(83); very funny in
Irreconcilable Differences
(84, Charles Shyer);
The Vegas Strip Wars
(84, George Englund);
King Solomon’s Mines
(85, J. Lee Thompson); a role in the miniseries
War and Remembrance
(85);
Allan Quatermain and the Lost City of Gold
(87, Gary Nelson);
Police Academy 4
(87, Jim Drake);
Action Jackson
(88, Craig R. Baxley);
Above the Law
(88, Andrew Davis);
Tears in the Rain
(88, Don Sharp);
Personal Choice
(89, David Saperstein);
Blood and Sand
(89, Javier Elorrieta);
Total Recall
(90, Verhoeven);
He Said, She Said
(91, Ken Kwapis and Marisa Silver);
Scissors
(91, Frank De Felitta); and
Year of the Gun
(91, John Frankenheimer).

No one is funnier about this journey than Ms. Stone herself—as if she was determined to trump the bad jokes preemptively. And being in bad movies has by now become not just a personal disaster, but a camp routine. The once-upon-a-time victim has to learn rueful humor, and hope that her own ridiculous urge to be creative has not been darkened.