The New Biographical Dictionary of Film: Completely Updated and Expanded (140 page)

Then
Leaving Las Vegas
—made on Super 16mm for $3.5 million—revealed nothing less than a major director in charge of story, atmosphere, and courageous performances. There may be small errors—a little too much music, perhaps—but the beauty and the severity of the film are things seen, felt, and measured by the director. American film in the nineties has had few triumphs, but
Leaving Las Vegas
was one that shone a baleful light on more costly disasters. It also reveals a true romantic in Figgis, a trait he is bound to trust and pursue. For this movie, nearly too grim to take, was an unrivaled love story, too.

The encouragement of a hit and nominations only made Figgis more independent, and a more deliberate explorer of sexual dreams.
One Night Stand
(inherited from a Joe Eszterhas script, but redone) was an unusual study of interracial romance. But
The End of Sexual Innocence
was a radical departure into fable and therapy-like approach. His low-budget
Miss Julie
showed little more than an obsession with his actress, Saffron Burrows. In addition, Figgis edited
Projection 10
, maybe the most coherent volume in that series. It is, somehow, in his nature to be tidy and untidy against all expectations.
Timecode
got a lot of attention for its split-screen simultaneities. But Figgis’s best preoccupation is people, not machinery.

So what has happened to him?

Gabriel Figueroa
(1907–97), b. Mexico City
Figueroa was a small, macho man with terrific personality and a great reputation. He was “artistic,” a man who had been trained in painting and still photography, and who then went to Hollywood to be Gregg Toland’s student. He had pronounced ideas of beauty and the rather glamorous portrayal of poverty: “His work was full of filtered clouds and peasant madonnas, their heads covered with
rebozos
. There was sure to be a scene in each of his films where fifty of those creatures would be standing in a clump, holding burning candles.” That is Elia Kazan, who was introduced to Figueroa by John Steinbeck prior to working on
Viva Zapata!
and quickly reached the conclusion that he didn’t want the prestigious “Gaby” or his way of sentimentalizing the working class. It’s a fair point, and one notes that Luis Buñuel (who used Figueroa often) had to curb the photographer’s pictorialism—having to prove that he knew as much as Figueroa about classical painting before he could get Gaby to do a decent job of recording images or trust the implicit dream for, say,
Los Olvidados
(50),
El
(52), and
The Exterminating Angel
(62). The florid Figueroa was also too evident in
The Pearl
(48, Emilio Fernández), taken from Steinbeck’s story, and the quite ghastly
The Fugitive
(47, John Ford), for which Ford seems to have been a complacent onlooker.

He began in the late thirties, but became celebrated with
Flor Silvestre
(43, Fernández); the exquisite use of Dolores del Rio in
María Candelaria
(43, Fernández);
Las Abandonadas
(44, Fernández); glorifying María Félix in
Enamorada
(46, Fernández) and
Rio Escondido
(47, Fernández);
Tarzan and the Mermaids
(48, Robert Florey);
Malcovia
(48, Fernández);
Salón México
(48, Fernández);
La Malquerida
(49, Fernández);
Duelo en las Montañas
(49, Fernández); the English-language film
The Torch
(50, Fernández);
Víctimas del Pecado
(50, Fernández);
Nazarin
(59, Buñuel);
La Fièvre Monte à El Pao
(59, Buñuel);
The Young One
(61, Buñuel);
The Night of the Iguana
(64, John Huston);
Simon of the Desert
(65, Buñuel);
The Big Cube
(69, Tito Davison);
Two Mules for Sister Sara
(70, Don Siegel);
Kelly’s Heroes
(70, Brian G. Hutton);
Interval
(73, Daniel Mann);
Under the Volcano
(86, Huston). Sad to say, the American films he shot look very ordinary. As others have observed, the light alters south of the border—but more than the light.

Peter Finch
(William Mitchell) (1916–77), b. London
The son of an Australian father, Finch went to Sydney at the age of ten and spent his youth in Australia. Among a variety of jobs he made one film there,
Mr. Chedworth Steps Out
(38, Ken G. Hall), before war service. After that he was acting in the Australian theatre and cinema
—Rats of Tobruk
(44, Charles Chaurel) and
Eureka Stockade
(47, Harry Watt)—before Laurence Olivier, on tour, recommended that he go to England, and in time Finch had a melodramatic affair with Vivien Leigh. He appeared on the London stage (Iago once to Welles’s
Othello
), but soon settled for films, at first in small parts, then with a mixture of heavies and romantic leads, with an early involvement in American films:
Train of Events
(49, Charles Crichton and Basil Dearden);
The Miniver Story
(50, H. C. Potter);
The Wooden Horse
(50, Jack Lee);
The Story of Robin Hood
(52, Ken Annakin);
The Heart of the Matter
(53, George More O’Ferrall);
The Story of Gilbert and Sullivan
(54, Sidney Gilliat);
Elephant Walk
(54, William Dieterle);
Father Brown
(54, Robert Hamer);
Make Me an Offer
(54, Cyril Frankel);
Dark Avenger
(55, Henry Levin);
Josephine and Men
(55, Roy Boulting);
Passage Home
(55, Roy Baker); and
Simon and Laura
(55, Muriel Box).

He was nearly forty now, and with a breath of accent and a face weathered by sun he was more masculine than most men in the British cinema. As his parts improved, so he showed himself increasingly subtle and capable. Unlike many other British actors, he seemed to leave reserves untapped that implied a full character of which we were seeing only a part. In essence it comes from the ability to discover a part of yourself in whatever character you are playing. Because no effort seems to have been made, the effect of authority is all the more compelling: as the German commander in
The Battle of the River Plate
(56, Michael Powell); as an Australian soldier in
A Town Like Alice
(56, Lee);
Robbery Under Arms
(57, Lee);
Windom’s Way
(58, Ronald Neame);
The Nun’s Story
(59, Fred Zinnemann);
Operation Amsterdam
(59, Michael McCarthy); stylish and touching in
The Trials of Oscar Wilde
(60, Ken Hughes);
Kidnapped
(60, Robert Stevenson);
Rachel Cade
(60, Gordon Douglas);
No Love for Johnnie
(61, Ralph Thomas);
I Thank a Fool
(62, Robert Stevens);
In the Cool of the Day
(63, Stevens);
The Girl With Green Eyes
(64, Desmond Davis); as the husband in
The Pumpkin Eater
(64, Jack Clayton);
Judith
(65, Daniel Mann);
The Flight of the Phoenix
(65, Robert Aldrich);
10:30 P.M. Summer
(66, Jules Dassin);
Far From the Madding Crowd
(67, John Schlesinger); as the von Sternberg figure in
The Legend of Lylah Clare
(68, Aldrich);
The Red Tent
(71, Mikhail Kalatazov); as the only truly believable character, the homosexual doctor, in
Sunday, Bloody Sunday
(71, Schlesinger);
Something to Hide
(71, Alastair Reid); as Nelson in
Bequest to the Nation
(72, James Cellan Jones);
England Made Me
(72, Peter Duffell); bearing up manfully in the Ronald Colman part in the musical
Lost Horizon
(72, Charles Jarrott); and
The Abdication
(74, Anthony Harvey).

He played Yitzhak Rabin in
Raid on Entebbe
(76, Irvin Kershner). But he will be treasured for his last part, as Howard Beale in
Network
(76, Sidney Lumet), because it won him the best actor Oscar, posthumously, and because it seemed, with hindsight, a prediction of his own dropping dead. Beale is less a role than a balloon inflated by Chayefsky’s sermon, but Finch gave the ranting warnings a bloodshot desperation, and he made one line famous—“I’m as mad as hell and I’m not going to take this anymore.”

David Fincher
, b. Denver, Colorado, 1962
1992:
Alien
³
. 1995:
Se7en
. 1997:
The Game
. 1999:
The Fight Club
. 2002:
The Panic Room
. 2007:
Zodiac
. 2008:
The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
. 2010:
The Social Network
.

It’s to David Fincher’s credit that his films take place somewhere beyond our edge—yet in a recognizable extension of our nightmares. As such, he has an interest in film noir, science fiction, and a kind of sardonic speculation, plus the ability to cross over from one to another. Grant, too, that he has not yet made a film that is either dull or less than the work of a fevered filmmaker. Still, neither is there a picture in which the self-satisfied horrifics avoid some sense of pretension and absurdity. Thus, so far, Fincher’s pessimism is too decorative, too much worn on his flounced sleeve. This is especially the case with his most impressive film—
Se7en
—where the macabre exhilaration of the enterprise (the malignant delight in cleverness) comes close to worshiping Kevin Spacey’s scholar killer. Yes, there are heroes in
Se7en
, and Morgan Freeman finds a real nobility, but the film cannot separate itself from the meticulous madness. It cannot spare us anything—yet it cannot grasp real pain.

Fincher was raised in Ashland, Oregon, and Marin, California. He worked for a while for John Korty and then joined the Lucas organization and got credits for matte and effects photography on
Return of the Jedi
(83, Richard Marquand) and
Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom
(84, Steven Spielberg). Since then, along the way, he has become a very proficient director of commercials and music videos. Few young directors have such command of streamlined imagery. And it is his assurance that leaves his aim more questionable.

Alien
³
was, in some ways, the most thematically interesting of the series, yet it was also the film that tried to kill its own franchise.
The Game
has astonishing initial bravura before it turns playfulness into a grind. And
The Fight Club
made the fatal mistake of settling for its own split-identity scheme. The failures are real—and everywhere so far—and it’s all too easy to see Fincher as a key instance of technical proficiency succumbing to morbid mannerism. He does not much like or trust the world, but there’s no evidence yet to suggest that the dismay has been earned. He is capable of great work, but he could become an ordeal.

Panic Room
was brilliant, very suspenseful, very smart in how to use Jodie Foster, yet incapable of finding depth or meaning. Put that next to the interminable pretensions of
Benjamin Button
, and Fincher seems like a fallen angel horribly expressive of the new Los Angeles. But something came between—the gradual, very creepy
Zodiac
, less a film about a serial killer than a study in those who obsess over such creatures. Indeed,
Zodiac
is one of the great films about paranoia—so Fincher might be wise to steer clear of philosophy.

Albert Finney
, b. Salford, England, 1936
After RADA, he worked at Birmingham Rep. and the Old Vic. On the stage, he created the roles of
Billy Liar, Luther
, and
Armstrong’s Last Goodnight
, without ever fulfilling promise. His screen career is equally incomplete. At first, he was barely noticed in
The Entertainer
(60, Tony Richardson); merely naturalistic in Reisz’s
Saturday Night and Sunday Morning
(60); helpless amid the technical riot of
Tom Jones
(63, Richardson); and at best an interesting failure in Reisz’s
Night Must Fall
(64). Unhappily, he was next cast in a purely personality role—in Donen’s
Two for the Road
(67)—for which he had little instinct. Then came
Charlie Bubbles
(67), which he directed for his own company, Memorial Enterprises, and in which he acted. His playing was as plain as always, but the film abounded in fresh, humorous views of an England rarely seen in the movies—one of the most auspicious of British directorial debuts. Not that it has been capitalized on. Instead, Finney appeared in the unreleased
Picasso Summer
(69, Serge Bourguignon and Robert Sallin) and in Ronald Neame’s
Scrooge
(70), in which he managed to look more misanthropic as his young self than as Dickens’s miser. But in
Gumshoe
(71, Stephen Frears), as the bingo-caller swept into Hammett intrigue, he at last found a part that seemed to strike into his own imagination. The result was a very funny performance and the revelation of an actor with a real love of movies. But he hesitated again before dressing up as a much more dilute detective, Hercule Poirot, in
Murder on the Orient Express
(74, Sidney Lumet). He had a small part in
The Duellists
(77, Ridley Scott).

He put on weight with the years, he married and was divorced from Anouk Aimée and made a specialty of large, boozy, blustery men. Is he ready to play Victor McLaglen? Still, Finney is an actor of great charge and courage, and one never knows when he is coasting or when he will strike a vein of lovely savagery. It leaves him always worth watching:
Loophole
(80, John Quested); the plastic surgeon in
Looker
(81, Michael Crichton); the detective in
Wolfen
(81, Mike Wadleigh); the husband in
Shoot the Moon
(82, Alan Parker), a performance of discomforting pain; as Daddy Warbucks in
Annie
(82, John Huston); as theatrical as Donald Wolfit in
The Dresser
(83, Peter Yates); gruelingly drunk and despairing, but wonderful, as the consul in
Under the Volcano
(84, Huston), despite the hapless state of the rest of the film; very good in
Orphans
(87, Alan J. Pakula); a TV anchorman in
The Image
(90, Peter Werner);
The Endless Game
(90, Bryan Forbes); the gangster chief in
Miller’s Crossing
(90, Joel Coen), a formidable man; on television in Britain, alcoholic and hallucinating, in
The Green Man
(90, Elijah Moshinsky); convincingly tragic as the policeman in
The Playboys
(92, Gillies MacKinnon);
Rich in Love
(93, Bruce Beresford); and
The Browning Version
(94, Mike Figgis).