The New Biographical Dictionary of Film: Completely Updated and Expanded (154 page)

In 1977, he was honored by Wim Wenders by being cast as the ultimate cigar-chewing gangster in
The American Friend
, and by being given a magnificent death roll down a flight of steps. At the same time, he had the go-ahead to make a long-cherished project,
The Big Red One
, which proved to be an immaculate study of frailties and courage in the infantry, a film made as if the Second World War had ended ten minutes ago.

White Dog
was banned for a while, and consequently defended and overpraised—in fact, it shows some decline in Fuller. His subsequent films had a very limited release. But Fuller kept active, his cigar erect, acting in a few films:
Scotch Myths
(82, Murray Grigor);
Red Dawn
(84, John Milius);
Slapstick of Another Kind
(84, Steven Paul); and
La Vie de Bohème
(92, Aki Kaurismaki). He also supplied the story for
Let’s Get Harry
(86, Alan Smithee).

Jules Furthman
(1888–1960), b. Chicago
Here is a character to dream over. Jules Furthman was often regarded as a sharp-tongued, nasty son-of-a-bitch—and this from friends, like Howard Hawks, who depended upon him. It was only a modest exaggeration from Pauline Kael when she opined that Furthman had his name on about half of the most entertaining films Hollywood ever produced. At the same time, he is clearly the secret sharer with both von Sternberg and Howard Hawks, and even the connection that allowed Hawks to pick up so much of Sternberg’s sophistication. The claim is clear, I think, that going from Dietrich to Angie Dickinson, by way of Frances Farmer and Lauren Bacall, Furthman created the paper outline of the most challenging woman in American pictures.

Yet Furthman was a recluse. He lived in Culver City, did not socialize, looking after a retarded son and growing prize orchids. He did not give interviews, and he was sufficiently well off to endure scandalous unemployment at a time when his unsociability had deterred so many people. What a tragedy, when pious dullards in their self-importance have laid down miles and years of flatulent interview. I have the feeling that an hour with Furthman could have amounted to a lifetime of education.

He was the son of a judge, educated at Northwestern and then a journalist. But he was in movies, as a writer, by 1915, working those first few years as “Stephen Fox,” because his real name might seem Germanic—there’s a first hint of his endearing sarcasm.

The list is long, but there’s a lot worth mentioning: from 1915–18, he contributed just stories, but thereafter he was a screenwriter:
A Camouflage Kiss
(18, Harry Millarde);
A Japanese Nightingale
(18, George Fitzmaurice);
All the World to Nothing
(18, Henry King);
When a Man Rides Alone
(18, King). There were several other pictures for King in 1919 before a work one longs to see—or done ten years later by von Sternberg: Conrad’s
Victory
(19, Maurice Tourneur).

The Valley of Tomorrow
(20, Emmett J. Flynn);
Treasure Island
(20, Tourneur), with Lon Chaney as Silver;
The Great Redeemer
(20, Clarence Brown), which Furthman apparently wrote with John Gilbert;
Land of Jazz
(20), which he directed himself;
The Big Punch
(21, John Ford);
The Blushing Bride
(21, Furthman);
Colorado Pluck
(21, Furthman);
The Last Trail
(21, Flynn);
Arabian Love
(22, Jerome Storm);
Pawn Ticket 210
(22, Scott Dunlap);
Lovebound
(23, Henry Otto);
North of the Hudson Bay
(23, Ford), a Tom Mix film;
The Aquittal
(23, Brown);
Call of the Mate
(24, Alvin J. Neitz).

He was back with Henry King for
Sackcloth and Scarlet
(25) and
Any Woman
(25), both Alice Terry films;
Before Midnight
(25, John Adolfi);
The Wise Guy
(26, Frank Lloyd). He did
Hotel Imperial
(27, Mauritz Stiller); the crucial
Underworld
(27, von Sternberg);
Fashions for Women
(27, Dorothy Arzner);
Barbed Wire
(27, Rowland V. Lee);
The Way of All Flesh
(27, Victor Fleming);
The Dragnet
(28, von Sternberg);
The Docks of New York
(28, von Sternberg);
Abie’s Irish Rose
(28, Fleming);
The Case of Lena Smith
(29, von Sternberg);
Thunderbolt
(29, von Sternberg);
New York Nights
(29, Lewis Milestone);
Common Clay
(30, Fleming);
Renegades
(30, Fleming);
Morocco
(30, von Sternberg) on which he did the script and the dialogue and helped shift the Sternbergian “glance” into laconic talk. A masterpiece, on the one hand,
Morocco
is also a landmark influence on a grownup way of looking at men and women so needy for one another they are shy of admitting it.

It’s striking now to see how Furthman’s output diminished with him at a peak:
Body and Soul
(31, Alfred Santell);
Merely Mary Ann
(31, King);
The Yellow Ticket
(31, Raoul Walsh);
Over the Hill
(31, King);
Shanghai Express
(32, von Sternberg)—is there a better-written movie in the early years of sound?;
Bombshell
(33, Fleming);
China Seas
(35, Tay Garnett); one of several hands on
Mutiny on the Bounty
(35, Lloyd);
Come and Get It!
(36, Hawks and William Wyler), where his chief responsibility was the Frances Farmer character;
Spawn of the North
(38, Henry Hathaway);
Only Angels Have Wings
(39, Hawks);
The Shanghai Gesture
(41, von Sternberg);
The Outlaw
(43, Howard Hughes).

Then, with William Faulkner in the first instance and with Faulkner and Leigh Brackett in the second, he wrote
To Have and Have Not
(44, Hawks) and
The Big Sleep
(46, Hawks), which are not just masterworks and the creation of Bacall, but a new genre—the screwball noir;
Moss Rose
(47, Gregory Ratoff);
Nightmare Alley
(47, Edmund Goulding), one of the most misanthropic Hollywood pictures ever made;
Pretty Baby
(50, Bretaigne Windust);
Peking Express
(51, William Dieterle), a remake of
Shanghai Express; Jet Pilot
(51, von Sternberg);
Rio Bravo
(59, Hawks), where the Angie Dickinson girl has the same name as the Evelyn Brent figure in
Underworld
—“Feathers.”

G

Jean Gabin
(Jean-Alexis Gabin Moncorgé) (1904–76), b. Paris
No other French screen actor seemed to the French to embody so many of their admirable characteristics. Like the best American actors, Gabin was subdued out of strength, a knowing listener more than a speaker, anticipatory rather than active. Although in his last years he represented the enduring appeal of a rather stolid bourgeois, in the late 1930s Gabin was the perfect expression of a working-class figure, hating his squalid environment—in factory or lodgings—but drawn toward a dangerously innocent woman and consequent fatal violence as the only means to dignity.

It is a theme returned to in
Pierrot le Fou
, and that is what André Bazin saw in Gabin’s alleged insistence on a death scene in his films: “So Gabin was quite right in demanding of his scriptwriters a crisis scene of homicidal fury. It constitutes the significant moment in a rigid destiny where the spectator recognizes the same hero in film after film—a hero of the sprawling metropolis, a suburban, working-class Thebes where the gods take the form of the blind but equally transcendent imperatives of society.” The best exponents of this mood are his deserter in
Quai des Brumes
(38, Marcel Carné) and François in
Le Jour se Lève
(39, Carné), a becapped factory worker, unlucky but romantically undaunted: “You know when you’re waiting for a tram and it’s pouring with rain—the tram doesn’t stop … Ding! Full up. So you wait for the next one … Ding, ding! Full up, full up. The trams all go by … Ding! And you stay there, you wait … But now you’re with me, everything’s going to be different …” That dream muffled by fog and shabbiness is the essence of the Carné/Prévert poetry, but it is a restricted achievement compared with Gabin’s work for Renoir: the doomed hero in
Les Bas-Fonds
(36), the homicidal engine-driver in
La Bête Humaine
, and above all, the common-man escapee in
La Grande Illusion
(37), a man of uncontrived kindness and unconscious nobility.

Gabin was in music hall before his movie debut:
Paris Béguin
(31, Augusto Gerina) and
Les Gaietés de l’Escadron
(32, Maurice Tourneur). By the mid-1930s he was well established:
Maria Chapdelaine
(34, Julien Duvivier);
Zouzou
(34, Marc Allégret), with Josephine Baker;
Variétés
(35, Nikolas Farkas);
Golgotha
(35, Duvivier);
La Bandéra
(36, Duvivier);
La Belle Équipe
(36, Duvivier);
Pépé le Moko
(37, Duvivier); outstanding with Mireille Balin in
Gueule d’Amour
(37, Jean Grémillon); the tugboat skipper in
Remorques
(41, Grémillon).

He went to America during the war—he was having a passionate affair with Marlene Dietrich—and appeared in
Moontide
(42, Archie Mayo) and
The Imposter
(44, Duvivier), but he returned to join the Free French and never again ventured on an international career:
Martin Roumagnac
(46, Georges Lacombe), with Dietrich;
Au-Delà des Grilles
(48, René Clément); excellent as a Normandy restaurateur enmeshed by a waitress in
La Marie de Port
(50, Carné);
La Vérité sur Bébé Donge
(51, Henri Decoin);
Le Plaisir
(52, Max Ophuls);
La Minute de Vérité
(52, Jean Delannoy);
Touchez-pas au Grisbi
(54, Jacques Becker);
L’Air du Paris
(54, Carné); and as the impresario Danglars in
French Can Can
(55, Renoir) sat backstage in a huge chair as his cancan erupts, too nervous to watch, but unable to stop his foot stamping to the rhythm.

After that, Gabin worked with dull directors and with decreasing zest. He and the New Wave were not on good terms and it is especially regrettable that he never worked for Melville:
Razzia sur la Chnouf
(54, Decoin);
La Traversée de Paris
(56, Claude Autant-Lara);
Crime et Châtiment
(56, Georges Lampin);
Voici le Temps des Assassins
(56, Duvivier);
Maigret Tend un Piège
(57, Delannoy);
Les Misérables
(57, Jean-Paul le Chanois); amusedly contemplating the bare Bardot in
Love Is My Profession
(58, Autant-Lara);
Archimède le Clochard
(58, Gilles Grangier), from an idea by Gabin;
Le Baron de l’Ecluse
(59, Delannoy);
Le Président
(61, Henri Verneuil);
Un Singe en Hiver
(62, Verneuil);
Monsieur
(64, le Chanois);
L’Age Ingrat
(64, Grangier);
Du Rififi à Paname
(65, de la Patellière);
Le Tonnerre de Dieu
(65, de la Patellière);
Le Pacha
(67, Georges Lautner);
Le Clan des Siciliens
(69, Verneuil);
Le Chat
(71, Pierre Granier-Deferre); as the farmer in
L’Affaire Dominici
(73, Claude Bernard-Aubert); and
Verdict
(74, André Cayatte).

Clark Gable
(William Clark Gable) (1901–60), b. Cadiz, Ohio
Gable succeeded onscreen because of the promise of force behind the smile—that’s what made the smile knowing. As a young man, especially without the “wink” of his mustache, he had a hard, menacing quality. He was like Jack Dempsey in a tuxedo. He was sexy for his time (the only time for that trick), and Joan Crawford was just one of those who fell for his confidence. She said that being near him gave her “twinges of a sexual urge beyond belief.” It
is
believable: you can feel their desire onscreen (it is the getting together of two lower-class animals in Metro’s grand hotel) and her wide-eyed lust for him. They helped each other to stardom and their affair flew in the face of real marriages (Gable was married to Josephine Dillon and Ria Langhan, older, wealthy women who had helped his career). Gable and Crawford were greedy for each other, and Louis B. Mayer was such a sanctimonious enemy to (and profiteer from) their affair, it’s a wonder more hasn’t been made of it.

Gable had a variety of jobs, including laborer, movie extra, and stage actor (in
The Last Mile
) before Lionel Barrymore got him a screen test at MGM. It failed, but when Gable made a debut as a Western villain in
The Painted Desert
(31, Howard Higgins), MGM changed their mind. He would be under contract to them for twenty-three years, a major earner most of the time, but a hireling who felt exploited and underpaid.

He was a star within a year, and in 1931 he made more movies than in any other year:
The Easiest Way
(Jack Conway); a gangster in
A Free Soul
(Clarence Brown);
The Secret Six
(George Hill); very good in
Night Nurse
(William Wellman);
Sporting Blood
(Charles Brabin);
Dance, Fools, Dance
(Harry Beaumont), with Crawford; a Salvation Army preacher with Crawford again in
Laughing Sinners
(Beaumont), in a reshoot after Johnny Mack Brown had done the part; in his best Crawford teaming,
Possessed
(Brown); with Garbo in
Susan Lenox: Her Fall and Rise
(Robert Z. Leonard); and
Hell Drivers
(32, Hill).