The New Biographical Dictionary of Film: Completely Updated and Expanded (135 page)

Her career was in decline and she was away for a few years being a mother. Then came
Full Circle
(76, Richard Loncraine);
Death on the Nile
(78, Guillermin);
Avalanche
(78, Corey Allen); virtually silent but very carnal in
A Wedding
(78, Robert Altman)—she looked healthy at last;
Hurricane
(79, Jan Troell); and then along came Woody.

By now, it is a subject for intense argument and legal dispute as to whether Woody did her good or ill. Their living arrangement led to grotesque melodrama, with children—biological and adopted—as front-line soldiers. Farrow was in most of the films Allen made in the eighties, often as his apparently available female, but just as often in fresh roles. She rose to every acting challenge, though she has not recaptured the piercingly tragic figure she had been for Polanski. Her look of childhood had lasted eerily long. Still, looking like a woman, she has been more ordinary.

She has been in
A Midsummer Night’s Sex Comedy
(82);
Zelig
(83); excellent as the gangster’s moll in
Broadway Danny Rose
(84); just as good as the usherette in
The Purple Rose of Cairo
(85); the center of the family, yet actually hard to grasp, in
Hannah and Her Sisters
(86); funny and clever in
Radio Days
(87).

Is it just hindsight, and our enforced knowledge of love running out, or was she indeed less interesting, to us and to Allen, in
September
(87),
Another Woman
(88), “Oepidus Wrecks” from
New York Stories
(89),
Crimes and Misdemeanors
(89),
Alice
(90), and
Shadows and Fog
(91)? As for
Husbands and Wives
(92), was the interest there only a matter of gossip?

She went to Ireland to make
Widow’s Peak
(94, John Irvin);
Miami Rhapsody
(95, David Frankel);
Reckless
(95, Norman Rene);
Angela Mooney
(96, Tommy McArdle);
Private Parts
(97, Betty Thomas);
Redux Riding Hood
(97, Steve Moore);
Miracle at Midnight
(98, Ken Cameron);
Coming Soon
(99, Colette Burson);
Forget Me Never
(99, Robert Allan Ackerman);
A Girl Thing
(01, Lee Rose);
Purpose
(01, Alan Ari Lazar);
Black Irish
(02, Brad Gann);
The Secret Life of Zoey
(02, Robert Mandel);
Samantha: An American Girl Holiday
(04, Nadia Tass);
The Omen
(06, John Moore); in the video game
Arthur and the Invisibles
(07, Luc Besson);
The Ex
(07, Jesse Peretz);
Be Kind Rewind
(09, Michel Gondry).

Rainer Werner Fassbinder
(1946–82), b. Bad Wörrishofen, Germany
1965:
Der Stadtstreicher
(s). 1966:
Das Kleine Chaos
(s). 1969:
Liebe ist Kälter als der Tod/Love Is Colder than Death; Katzelmacher
. 1970:
Götter der Pest; Warum Laüft Herr R. Amok?/Why Does Herr R. Run Amok?; Der Amerikanische Soldat/The American Soldier; Die Niklashauser Fahrt
. 1971:
Rio das Mortes; Pioniere in Ingolstadt; Whity; Warnung vor einer Heiligen Nutte/Beware of a Holy Whore
. 1972:
Handler der Vier Jahreszeiten/The Merchant of Four Seasons; Die Bitteren Tränen der Petra Von Kant/The Bitter Tears of Petra Von Kant; Acht Stunden Sind Kein Tag/Eight Hours Don’t Make a Day
. 1973:
Wildwechsel; Welt am Draht
. 1974:
Angst Essen Seele Auf/Fear Eats the Soul/Ali; Martha; Effi Briest
. 1975:
Faustrecht der Freiheit; Mütter Kusters Farht zum Himmel/Mother Kuster’s Trip to Heaven; Angst vor der Angst/Fear of Fear; Faustrecht der Freiheit/Fox
. 1976:
Satansbraten/Satan’s Brew; Chinesisches Roulette/Chinese Roulette
. 1977:
Bolwieser;
episode from
Deutschland im Herbst/Germany in Autumn; Eine Reise im Licht/Despair
. 1978:
Die Ehe der Maria Braun/The Marriage of Maria Braun; In einem Jahr mit 13 Monden
. 1979:
Die Dritte Generation/The Third Generation
. 1980:
Berlin Alexanderplatz; Lili Marleen
. 1981:
Lola; Theater in Trance; Veronika Voss
. 1982:
Querelle
.

There can be no doubt about the opportunities German cinema offered in the 1970s to politically committed but formally experimental films: Fassbinder had made nearly thirty feature films by his early thirties, and was working at a pace that must have helped kill him.

He came from fringe theatre in Munich. Originally an actor, he set up an antitheatre company, drastically adapted several classics, and wrote plays himself. Strongly influenced by Godard and Straub, he seemed possessed of ample creative vigor to become a leading cinematic figure in the next ten years. Like Straub, he was an exponent of pure film, minus vibrato or expressiveness, so uncompromisingly plain that we rediscover social realism beneath all the petty guises of life’s performance. And like Godard, Fassbinder was in love with cinema, throwing off references and becoming increasingly preoccupied with the process of being in and watching film as his subject. His style was antistyle, and his material invoked the classical imagery of the thriller only to dispel its hardened familiarity. Composed memories of the gangster thriller prove illusory havens for would-be criminals hopelessly alienated from the style of their consumer world. Fassbinder punctures traditional romance, but mocks the new urban dreariness with lavishly roman tic accomplishments. His actors straightfacedly intone platitudes as if they were verse; grubby private disasters are underlined by the Sirk-like, Hollywood captioning that no longer has any relevance.

Above all, Fassbinder attacked the materially contented life of the new Germany, insisting on the unresolved anxieties and dreams that lurk behind it. Thus,
Herr R
. is an apparently successful man who kills his family, goes to the office, and commits suicide.
Katzelmacher
concerns the way a newly arrived immigrant, played by Fassbinder himself, reveals the moribund human and social responses of the inhabitants of a block of flats.
Der Handler der Vier Jahreszeiten
is about a barrow-boy, so oppressed by the mundane details of his life that he kills himself.
Beware of a Holy Whore
is about a film crew that runs out of money and sits around idly until animosity slowly gathers into an extraordinary unordered but theatrical process of self-destruction.

Time and again, Fassbinder’s characters sit around a table, apparently exchanging commonplaces. They are filmed as flatly as possible, denied facial expressiveness, and ordered to stylize flaccid dialogue with crazy rhythm. This is both an alienation effect and a dramatization of Fassbinder’s view of our demoralized lives. It is not popular cinema: the manner is stark, and the implications are outrageously hostile to the bourgeois. Indeed,
Eight Hours Don’t Make a Day
, for TV, is the offensive reworking of a typical family soap opera, dismantled until its innate fractures are horrifying.

It was not possible to keep up with Fassbinder, and there was much in the man that was determined to be unliked. But the rapidity and the cheapness were vital.
Despair
was his most lavish picture and the expense only showed a mind far more trite than that of Nabokov.
Despair
is one of the most dreadful spectacles of bull filmmaking being humiliated by literature’s droll veronicas.

I would guess that the world of film commentary is still somewhat exhausted by Fassbinder—for he was prolific until the end:
Berlin Alexanderplatz
, from the Alfred Doblin novel, was a fourteen-part TV series that ran 931 minutes;
Veronika Voss
was among his most succinct films; and
Querelle
(from Genet) was unrestrainedly gay and rather foolishly gorgeous. Indeed, like Godard, Fassbinder hurled himself at us with such fury that we have retreated. But this astonishing body of work waits to be rediscovered. The bare fact is enough: Fassbinder died well short of forty, the maker of at least half a dozen extraordinary pictures:
The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant
still has no equal in its simultaneous delight in “style” while pouring acid over the image;
Beware of a Holy Whore, Fear Eats the Soul, The Marriage of Maria Braun
, and
Lola
(at least) are outstanding examples of how contemporary history can be focused on the screen in short, tough tales.

Alice Faye
(Alice Fay Leppert) (1912–98), b. New York
Plump and wholesome as a Mable Lucy Atwell illustration grown up, Alice Faye was a friendly, sentimental star of musicals from 1935–45 and a big star with a warm singing voice. She was discovered as a chorus girl with
George White’s Scandals
and featured in the film of the show for her debut in 1934. Fox put her under contract, gave her conventional parts
—Now I’ll Tell
(34, Edwin Burke) and
She Learned About Sailors
(34, George Marshall)—and loaned her to Paramount for
Every Night at Eight
(35, Raoul Walsh). She attracted more attention in
Music Is Magic
(35, Marshall), and
King of Burlesque
(36) and
Sing, Baby, Sing
(36), both for Sidney Lanfield, but really came to the fore in
On the Avenue
(37, Roy del Ruth);
Wake Up and Live
(37, Lanfield); and
You Can’t Have Everything
(37, Norman Taurog). Fox now eagerly starred her opposite Tyrone Power in
In Old Chicago
(38, Henry King) and
Alexander’s Ragtime Band
(38, King). She had a few more straight parts:
Tail Spin
(39, del Ruth);
Barricade
(39, Gregory Ratoff);
Little Old New York
(40, King); and
Lillian Russell
(40, Irving Cummings), but was more successful in frivolous wartime musicals, often with John Payne and Jack Oakie:
Sally, Irene and Mary
(38, William A. Seiter); as the Fanny Brice figure in
Rose of Washington Square
(39, Ratoff);
Tin Pan Alley
(40, Walter Lang);
The Great American Broadcast
(41, Archie Mayo);
That Night in Rio
(41, Cummings);
Weekend in Havana
(41, Lang);
Hello, Frisco, Hello
(43, Bruce Humberstone); and
The Gang’s All Here
(43, Busby Berkeley).

Already thinking of retirement (with her second husband, bandleader Phil Harris), she was suddenly very touching as the wife in Preminger’s
Fallen Angel
(45). Still, she left the movies and returned only for the tame remake of
State Fair
(62, José Ferrer) and
The Magic of Lassie
(78, Don Chaffey).

Paul Fejos
(Pál Fejös) (1897–1963), b. Budapest, Hungary
1920:
Pán; Hallucination; The Resurrected
. 1921:
A Fekete Kapitány/The Black Captain; Arsène Lupin Utalsá Kalandia/Arsene Lupin’s Last Adventure
. 1922:
Szenzáció/Sensation/Pique Dame/The Queen of Spades
. 1927:
The Last Moment
. 1928:
Lonesome
. 1929:
Broadway; The Last Performance/Erik the Great
. 1930:
Captain of the Guard
(credited to John S. Robertson);
Révolte dans la Prison/The Big House
(French version of the George Hill film). 1932:
Fantômas
. 1932:
Tavaszi Zápor; Ítél a Balaton
. 1933:
Sonnenstrahl; Fruhlingstimmen
. 1934:
Flugten fra Millionerne/Millions in Flight
. 1935:
Fange nr. 1/ Prisoner No. 1; Det Gyldne Smil/The Golden Smile
. 1936:
Black Horizons
(d). 1939:
Man och Kvinna/A Handful of Rice
(d). 1941:
Yagua
(d).

In just over twenty years (as indicated above), Paul Fejos made films in Hungary, Hollywood, France, Austria, Denmark, Madagascar, Thailand, and Peru—the last three represent the documentaries that closed his career. Yet he lived until 1963, most of the time in New York, where he was research director for the Viking Fund. Surely it is the subject for a biography, or a novel. Yet, the warning legend goes, nobody has heard of Paul Fejos.

His early Hungarian films are all, apparently, lost. Even for those who do know Fejos, a great deal of his reputation depends on
Lonesome
, a romance shot through with urban realism and that profound modern solitude the title addressed.
Broadway
, with Evelyn Brent, furthered his interest in moving camerawork.
The Last Performance
is Conrad Veidt as a crazed illusionist.
Tavaszi Zápor
(back in Hungary) is the dark story of a woman’s fall, with Annabella supposedly at her best.

One day, perhaps, archival and videotape resources might come together, so that a reasonably full account can be offered of Fejos’s career. For the moment, we know just that
Lonesome
is a great achievement, enough to convince anyone that Fejos could hardly use a camera without being eloquent. Scott Eyman has called
Lonesome
a small classic—and so it is. As for Fejos as a whole—one suspects a major neurotic.

Charles K. Feldman
(Gould) (1904–68), b. New York
This is a story that has to be filmed one day: Around 1930, this handsome, very smart fellow, Charlie Feldman, finds himself in Hollywood. He was born an orphan, but he gets himself an education and a law degree, and in the early 1930s he forms an agency in partnership with Ad Schulberg, the wife of philandering B. P. Schulberg. As it happens, Ad—a woman renowned for her intelligence and kindness, but not for her looks—is also having a kind of comforting affair with Louis B. Mayer. Mr. Mayer is temperamentally ready to break out of his marriage and make hay in the fields of young female beauty that he commands. For example, Jean Howard. But he doesn’t dare make the break, so Ad is his quasi mistress. But then Charlie, who has been having a wild fling with the Mexican actress Raquel Torres, takes a fancy to Jean Howard. It is reciprocated.