The New Biographical Dictionary of Film: Completely Updated and Expanded (142 page)

When
Postcards from the Edge
(90, Mike Nichols) came to be filmed, Shirley MacLaine and Meryl Streep were given Debbie and Carrie, but Fisher kept her hand on the script. That the roles were not entrusted to the originals is clinching proof of the fatal weakness for taste in Mike Nichols. Since then, she has appeared in
Sibling Rivalry
(90, Carl Reiner);
Sweet Revenge
(90, Charlotte Brandstrom);
Drop Dead Fred
(91, Ate de Jong);
Soapdish
(91, Michael Hoffman);
This Is My Life
(92, Nora Ephron); and doing a writing polish on
Sister Act
(92, Emile Ardolino).

More recently, she was in
Scream 3
(00, Wes Craven) and
Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back
(01, Kevin Smith), and she apparently did some uncredited writing on
Star Wars: Episode I—The Phantom Menace
(99, Lucas); credited writing, and uncredited acting, on the TV movie
These Old Broads
(01, Matthew Diamond)—her idea—which gathered together Elizabeth Taylor, Debbie Reynolds, Joan Collins, and Shirley MacLaine. That’s surviving.

Terence Fisher
(1904–80), b. London
1948:
Colonel Bogey; To the Public Danger; Portrait from Life; Song for Tomorrow
. 1949:
Marry Me
. 1950:
The Astonished Heart
(codirected with Anthony Darnborough);
So Long at the Fair
(codirected with Darnborough). 1951:
Home to Danger
. 1952:
The Last Page; Stolen Face; Wings of Danger
. 1953:
Four-Sided Triangle; Mantrap; Spaceways; Blood Orange
. 1954:
Final Appointment; Mask of Dust; Face the Music; Children Galore; The Stranger Came Home
. 1955:
Murder by Proxy; Stolen Assignment; The Flaw
. 1956:
The Last Man to Hang
. 1957:
The Curse of Frankenstein; Kill Me Tomorrow
. 1958:
Dracula; The Revenge of Frankenstein
. 1959:
The Mummy; The Hound of the Baskervilles; The Stranglers of Bombay; The Man Who Could Cheat Death
. 1960:
The Brides of Dracula; Sword of Sherwood Forest; The Two Faces of Dr. Jekyll
. 1961:
The Curse of the Werewolf
. 1962:
The Phantom of the Opera
. 1963:
Sherlock Holmes
. 1964:
The Earth Dies Screaming; The Horror of It All; The Gorgon
. 1965:
Dracula, Prince of Darkness
. 1966:
Island of Terror; Frankenstein Created Woman
. 1967:
Night of the Big Heat
. 1968:
The Devil Rides Out
. 1969:
Frankenstein Must Be Destroyed
. 1973:
Frankenstein and the Monster from Hell
.

The English are proud of Hammer Films: it appeals to their need for the ridiculous made respectable that the company devoted to horror films should have won a Queen’s Award for Industry and commendations for their export record. But Hammer’s prosperity only supports the theory that, artistically, horror requires conviction. No matter how assiduously a company concocts Gothic atmosphere, still commercial bias withers the proper sense of awe. Hammer horrors have always seemed the work of decent men who tended the garden on weekends. This is sadly true of Terence Fisher, the man responsible for most of them. Middle-aged before he began to direct, he was in his fifties when Hammer committed itself to
Dracula
and
Frankenstein
. A merchant seaman first, he worked as an editor before and after the war:
Tudor Rose
(36, Robert Stevenson);
On the Night of the Fire
(39, Brian Desmond Hurst);
The Wicked Lady
(45, Leslie Arliss); and
Master of Bankdam
(47, Walter Forde). His first features were light and romantic, including Noel Coward in
The Astonished Heart
. But in
So Long at the Fair
he made no mistake over the first frisson that greets the discovery that the hotel has disclaimed one of its guests and lost a room.

Fisher worked for Hammer as early as 1953 on its two modest science fiction ventures,
Four-Sided Triangle
and
Spaceways
. From 1957 onward, he was effectively incarcerated in the neo-Gothic product. There are some who rate his achievement there very highly. Paul Willemen has referred to Fisher’s films as “a major example of what a truly creative artist can achieve within the limits of an ostensibly sensational and popular genre.” My own feeling is that anyone with a studio’s resources and some twenty films ought to have established his talent more clearly. We celebrate Val Lewton for less, Tod Browning on much less evidence. Fisher’s films are rich in color and setting, but not as vividly imaginative as Roger Corman’s pictures. Too often one has to wait for odd, piercing moments, like the ending of
Brides of Dracula
, a dull film suddenly brilliant as Dracula dies in the cruciform shadow of a windmill’s sails. Again, the conception of
Two Faces of Dr. Jekyll
—that Hyde is a sexual charmer—is bereft of any proper development. Overall, the invention in the films seems fitful, desperate, and cynically detached from the genre. Revealingly, Hammer tamely remade earlier films and resurrected hardly any of the worthwhile subjects in English Gothic literature. The studio’s originality may rest more on the English aristocracy of Christopher Lee’s Dracula than on Fisher’s invention.

Barry Fitzgerald
(William Shields) (1888–1961), b. Dublin, Ireland
Years before Hollywood was challenged for not allowing black actors to play anything other than “Negro” characters, Irishness had been forced into a similar straitjacket. Thus Barry Fitzgerald’s accent could only become a more extreme version of itself. When we laugh at him or warm to his cozy sentimentality, we make as serious a distortion of ethnic character as ever the Negro suffered. And, appropriately, it was the Irish-inclined John Ford who first called Fitzgerald before the cameras to play the tourist’s Irishman.

Previously, Fitzgerald had been a stage actor at the Abbey Theatre. But he could hardly be blamed for abandoning that in favor of the rewards lavished on his movie Irishman:
The Plough and the Stars
(36, Ford);
Ebb Tide
(37, Arthur Rossen); gloriously double-taking at the drunken realization that he is sitting beside a leopard in
Bringing Up Baby
(38, Howard Hawks);
Four Men and a Prayer
(38, Ford);
The Long Voyage Home
(40, Ford);
The Sea Wolf
(41, Michael Curtiz);
How Green Was My Valley
(41, Ford);
The Amazing Mrs. Holiday
(43, Bruce Manning);
None But the Lonely Heart
(44, Clifford Odets); winning a supporting actor Oscar as the senior priest in
Going My Way
(44, Leo McCarey);
Incendiary Blonde
(45, George Marshall);
And Then There Were None
(45, René Clair);
Two Years Before the Mast
(46, John Farrow);
Welcome Stranger
(46, Elliott Nugent);
California
(47, Farrow);
Easy Come, Easy Go
(47, Farrow);
Miss Tatlock’s Millions
(48, Richard Haydn); as Lieutenant Muldoon, the goblin cop in
The Naked City
(48, Jules Dassin);
Top o’ the Morning
(49, David Miller);
The Story of Seabiscuit
(49, David Butler);
Union Station
(50, Rudolph Maté);
Silver City
(51, Byron Haskin);
The Quiet Man
(52, Ford);
Happy Ever After
(54, Mario Zampi);
The Catered Affair
(56, Richard Brooks);
Rooney
(57, George Pollock); and
Broth of a Boy
(58, Pollock).

Robert J. Flaherty
(1884–1951), b. Iron Mountain, Michigan
1922:
Nanook of the North
(d). 1925:
Story of a Potter
(d). 1926:
Moana
(d);
The 24 Dollar Island
(uncompleted) (d). 1928:
White Shadows in the South Seas
(completed by and credited to W. S. Van Dyke);
Acoma, the Sky City
(unreleased) (d). 1931:
Tabu
(codirected with F. W. Murnau);
Industrial Britain
(d). 1934:
Man of Aran
(d). 1936:
Elephant Boy
(codirected with Zoltan Korda). 1942:
The Land
(d). 1948:
Louisiana Story
(d).

Flaherty’s troubled career is perversely worthier of study than the films themselves. Because he pioneered the documentary form, and drew up lines of battle between conviction and commercialism, so Flaherty remains relevant in any study of nonfiction filmmaking. While he was alive, his warmth and visionary purity loaded opinion about him with emotion. Now that he has been dead more than forty years, it is easier to look at the films with objectivity and to put Flaherty in perspective. But that solves very little. The films are turbulent with self-contradiction and with all the doctrinal issues that still confront documentarists. Flaherty moved sometimes with the witheringly obdurate confidence of a Victorian explorer. He had the defects of a romantic faith in the noble savage and an eye for the picturesque—in both respects he was nearer to the nineteenth century than to this, possessed of that curious liberalism that enabled Ruskin to advocate Communism and support the South in the Civil War. But Flaherty’s films ask all the intriguing questions about documentary. Is it enough to film actuality? Or is actuality modified by the filming process? If so, can the camera become secret, unseen, or do events have to be reconceived to convey their original essence? The question that remains unsolved is whether Flaherty himself appreciated those mysteries.

The life of the man is vital. The son of a miner, he went with his father on expeditions in northern Canada before 1900. Here are the roots of Flaherty’s authenticity and of his insistence on living with his subject. It should also be said that he was trained in a spirit of Victorian commercial zeal; his fondness for natives grew out of an initial, full-blooded imperialism. From mining, he took to exploring and map-making on behalf of the Canadian Northern Railway. As he moved farther north, he had more to do with Eskimos and made a private film of a trip to Baffin Island. The Revillon Fur Company then financed
Nanook
, a film eventually distributed by Pathé.

It is not hard to feel the impact
Nanook
made. Until then, relatively little had been done to reveal the corners of the earth on film. The actuality of the filming and the terrible rigor of the Eskimo life still strike home. The imperative of hunger, the extent of snow and ice, and the pitted faces of Nanook and his family were the first widely received images of peasant life on the screen.
Nanook
is moving for several reasons: Flaherty shot it virtually alone, and was thus compelled to be simple—the seal-catching episode is in one long setup because of this tension. It also utilizes depth in the way we see help coming to Nanook from the distance. In addition, the Eskimo life was so stark as to be almost stylized. In the obvious sense black and white, the search for food overrode all other considerations. Thus, if Flaherty himself was a naïve man, this subject exposed none of his limits. Indeed, the most charming thing about it is the sympathy between Nanook and Flaherty, the way in which the Eskimo smiles cheerfully at the Great White Father and draws the camera effortlessly into his life.

Jesse Lasky thereupon hired Flaherty to make
Moana
. Flaherty lived in Samoa for a year before filming and pioneered panchromatic stock to capture the skin tones of the islanders. The film centered on initiation rites, and was exotically beautiful in a way
Nanook
had never hinted at. But the more complex social system in Samoa was simplified by Flaherty’s view of a paradise existence. The South Sea of Captain Cook’s discovery, or of
Typee
, is hardly imagined by Flaherty. For the first time, his private mythology of native life obtruded.

The legend says that in essence Flaherty diverged from Hollywood story-manufacturing. But, in truth, he was disposed to a heroic view of his materials; it was his painstaking preparation and reluctance to collaborate that led to most of his troubles. And those troubles were, to some extent, courted as a proof of nobility.
Story of a Potter
was made for the Metropolitan Museum;
The Twenty-Four Dollar Island
was a fanciful project inevitably abandoned. The first serious clash was over
White Shadows in the South Seas
, the story of a white man, Monte Blue, in the Marquesas Islands, and of eventual exploitation of the natives. An MGM project, it was shot on location and with studio pressure to hurry and to glamorize. Flaherty quit and was replaced by W. S. Van Dyke. He went to Fox to make
Acoma
, about Pueblo Indians, but the film was destroyed by fire.

Then came the most notorious incident of his career. He joined with F. W. Murnau to make
Tabu
, again shot in the South Seas. They were no match, even if the film was made without studio finance. Flaherty was an original, a pathfinder, and a seer, but Murnau was a profound artist. He bewildered Flaherty by making a film that could as easily have been shot in the studio.
Tabu
is nearer to
The Saga of Anatahan
than to anthropological cinema. The incompatibility is sad, but it shows Flaherty’s limits.

Disappointed over
White Shadows
and
Tabu
, he went to Britain and joined Grierson for
Industrial Britain
and
Man of Aran
, which was financed by Gaumont British. The latter is an extraordinary work, epic in its visual style, like a parody in its treatment of the remoteness of Aran. If nothing else, Flaherty was restored to a world of primitive people and himself—and no one else. The film is splendidly silly, rather like the extremist life on Aran itself. Here, at last, Flaherty was exposed as a man who explored to escape. Even Grierson was forced to qualify this lonely eminence: “A succeeding documentary exponent is in no way obliged to chase off to the ends of the earth in search of oldtime simplicity, and the ancient dignities of man against the sky. Indeed, if I may for the moment represent the opposition, I hope the Neo-Rousseauism implicit in Flaherty’s work dies with his own exceptional self. Theory of naturals apart, it represents an escapism, a wan and distant eye, which tends in lesser hands to sentimentalism.”