The New Biographical Dictionary of Film: Completely Updated and Expanded (163 page)

With two very costly boxoffice failures to his credit (
Brazil
and
Munchausen
), it remains to be seen how much license will be given to Gilliam’s unquestioned visual imagination. Those last two words might seem essential to moviemaking, yet there are times when this viewer would sooner settle for the visual simplicity of, say, Joseph Mankiewicz, Billy Wilder, Ozu, or even Hawks, than suffer the visual battering of Abel Gance, David Lean, Stanley Kubrick, or Terry Gilliam. There are times when “visual imagination” is a diversion from failures of content or sensibility.

Brazil is
Orwellian—yet, isn’t it also art direction run amok at the expense of any scrutiny?
Munchausen
has far fewer defenders—it is a lavish, unholy bore of the spectacular. For, as Alexandre Astruc realized more than forty years ago, there is a tyranny in the visual if it is indulged for its own sake. Gilliam began as a contributor of effects, sequences,
etc.
for
Monty Python
, a TV show crammed with wordsmiths. This may have urged him deeper into visual excess. But, to these eyes, he has not yet appreciated the dramatic coherence necessary in film direction.

Gilliam was a cartoonist who met John Cleese (touring America) and became a part of the
Monty Python Flying Circus
team. He was also active on most of the Python films, as animator, writer, and sometimes as actor. He was nominated for the best screenplay Oscar on
Brazil
, a film that he defended vigorously against understandable studio disquiet.

It happens that Gilliam then took on two projects to which I am devoted, and I have to say that, with
Twelve Monkeys
, I would far rather address the runic calm of Chris Marker’s
La Jetée
(62), instead; as for
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
—the original (by Hunter Thompson and Ralph Steadman) is scarier, more visual and so much more fun.

What will happen on
The Brothers Grimm?
The question is unavoidable after
Lost in La Mancha
(02, Keith Fulton and Louis Pepe), the tender yet remorseless documentary on how Gilliam’s Don Quixote picture fell apart. What is it with Gilliam? His own “piling on” of detail? A certain cavalier way with scripts? Or the innate good nature that let the damning documentary be made? I suppose it is how Quixote himself would approach the picture business.

Dorothy Gish
(1898–1968) b. Dayton, Ohio
From the start, Lillian Gish, the older of the sisters, insisted that it was Dorothy who had the real talent, because Dorothy could do comedy. (“I’m as funny as a barrel of dead babies,” said Lillian.) And it’s true that from the start they were cast that way: Lillian in tragedy, drama, melodrama; Dorothy as the cutup and charmer she was in real life. Of course, there were exceptions—Lillian played sophisticates (
Diane of the Follies
, 1916) and Dorothy could be Serious (as a nun, for instance, in the 1915
Her Mother’s Daughter
). But on the whole, their film personas matched their real-life temperaments.

Actually, it was Dorothy who first set foot on stage, as Little Willie in
East Lynne;
she was four years old. Both sisters were to barnstorm in melodrama throughout their childhoods, until in 1912 they went down to the Biograph studio to look up their old pal Gladys Smith, who turned out to be Mary Pickford. Griffith instantly put them in a one-reeler,
An Unseen Enemy
, described as the terrible experience of two young girls in a lonesome villa. Also in this suspense film was young Bobby Harron, with whom Dorothy would fall in love, and who would die young, probably a suicide, to the anguish of the Griffith family.

The two sisters appeared in countless Biograph movies—Dorothy was in more than thirty in 1914 alone—vying for roles with Blanche Sweet, Mae Marsh, and others, but not with each other. If there was rivalry or jealousy between them—which Lillian steadfastly denied—it was never apparent. Each had her territory, and it’s hard to imagine Dorothy in
Enoch Arden
or Lillian in
Old Heidelberg
, both made in 1915 with Wallace Reid as leading man. Nor would Lillian have seemed at home in, say,
Atta Boy’s Last Race
(1916) or
Out of Luck
(1918)—when you look at stills of Dorothy making faces and posturing in that one or in her Western satire
Nugget Nell
(1919), you can understand why Paramount offered her a million dollars for a series of five-reel comedies. (She turned them down, saying, “At my age all that money would ruin my character.”) By this time Dorothy was a real star: in 1919 in
I’ll Get Him Yet
(Elmer Clifton), the him being Richard Barthelmess, whom she convinced Griffith to hire; and in
Remodeling Her Husband
(1920), the only film Lillian directed; and
Flying Pat
(F. Richard Jones), also in 1920, the latter two with James Rennie, whom she was to marry, to the bewilderment of Lillian and Mother Gish, who didn’t believe in men. Although the sisters had appeared in many films together, including Griffith’s World War I
Hearts of the World
(1918), their indelible joint appearance was as the sisters in the 1921
Orphans of the Storm
, their final Griffith film. Dorothy is the blind Louise, separated from Lillian’s Henriette in the turmoil of the French Revolution. In its most famous scene, when Lillian hears Dorothy’s voice out in the street but can’t get to her, it’s easy to be overwhelmed by Lillian’s extraordinary projection of emotion, but Dorothy actually is her match, her somewhat more stolid face transported with hope and despair. At the end, when all is harmony (and Louise’s sight has been restored), there’s a flicker of roguishness in Dorothy that is all hers.

She went on to a series of successful films:
The Bright Shawl
(23, John S. Robertson), in which she’s a Cuban dancer who dies in the arms of Barthelmess (the supporting cast included William Powell, Mary Astor, Edward G. Robinson, and Jetta Goudal); with Lillian in
Romola
(24, Henry King); an Irish colleen in the 1925
The Beautiful City
(Kenneth S. Webb), again with Barthelmess and Powell; a big hit in the 1926 British-made
Nell Gwynne
, followed by several other films made there by Herbert Wilcox, including
Tip Toes
with Will Rogers and
Madame Pompadour
with Antonio Moreno, both in 1927. Then, as sound came in, it was back to the theatre, first in a play called
Young Love
directed by George Cukor. For the rest of her life, she was on the stage, appearing in only four movies after 1930:
Our Hearts Were Young and Gay
(44, Lewis Allen);
Centennial Summer
(46, Otto Preminger);
The Whistle at Eaton Falls
(51, Robert Siodmak); and
The Cardinal
(63, Preminger). Her biggest stage hit was as Mrs. Oliver Wendell Holmes in
The Magnificent Yankee
, opposite Louis Calhern, who became another alcoholic man in her life; and like Lillian, she played Mother in
Life with Father
out of town for more than a year. The sisters’ last performance together was in the touring company of
The Chalk Garden
in 1956.

Whether or not she had the talent of her more famous sister, it’s clear that Dorothy had the happier nature, and the more normal life: she liked men, she liked a good drink, she liked a good party, she liked a good time. Her career was a satisfying one, but it wasn’t everything.

Lillian Gish
(1893–1993), b. Springfield, Ohio
It was said, when she died in March 1993, that Lillian Gish was only months short of her 100th birthday. Yet it had been reported for decades that 1896 was the year of her birth. Her manager, James Frasher, simply asserted, “She was the same age as film. They both came into the world in 1893.” And so legend begins where questions are begged. By surviving, Gish had become a great lady of the history of film. She promoted Griffith; she helped get him on a stamp. She told the old story, and who knew how true it was. Her Griffith was a strong, gentle visionary. But suppose that he was also a barnstormer, a hustler, a showman, and enough of a rogue—things she ignored. Gish had such great eyes, but did they see everything?

One thing was certain: when she died, it was as if our last mooring rope to the first moment of movies had fallen away. Miss Gish had become not just a means of grasping history; she was the muse of History itself, just as in
Intolerance
she tended the cradle of humanity. The young woman raised in Griffith’s shameless melodrama had become an old lady for whom discrepancies of fact and vagaries of memory were just dust in the wind (it is hard not to fall into the inter-title language of her movies).

That there was something innately pure about Lillian Gish had been substantiated by her enduring spinsterhood; the reverence for Griffith in her touching book,
The Movies, Mr. Griffith and Me;
and the fact that in her sixties she remained as serenely beautiful as ever, bringing the benign authority of a Wasp fairy godmother to
The Night of the Hunter
(55, Charles Laughton).

She has a secure place among the great actresses of the cinema, even if her emotional range was uncommonly narrow. Only great discretion and integrity prevented her from seeming coy or sententious; for instance, Susie (of
True Heart Susie
) is now a tedious creature, but Lillian Gish is, simply, true-hearted—a feeling intelligence, recognizable apart from the Victorian primness of the role. Indeed, there are moments when one feels that she may have possessed a subtler artistic personality than Griffith. Her best work, which was not done for Griffith, and her life as a whole seem to glow with the robust integrity of a great singer or dancer.

She was a rare mixture of the unbridled and the very restrained. Was that Gish herself, or simply the conflicting strains of late Victorian melodrama? King Vidor was very interesting on working with Gish on
La Bohème
(26). The actress then was a great power at MGM. She was highly paid and her contract gave her liberties with cast, director, and rehearsal. Gish prevailed upon Vidor and her costar John Gilbert to do a
Bohème
in which the lovers never touched. The two men were perplexed—wasn’t this a love story? and movie love in 1926 was measured against Gilbert and Garbo and their open-mouthed kisses. But Gish had her contract and her profound, devout authority (that was there into her nineties). So they shot the lovers apart, looking, yearning, kissing from either side of a windowpane. It was lovely and precious, but Mayer and Thalberg looked at the cut and said, “Are you kidding? Do it again with flesh!”

And then, as the day for shooting Mimi’s death drew near, Gish began to fast. She grew gaunt. She drank nothing. She used cotton pads to dry up her saliva. She seemed as ill as Mimi. And Vidor could have sworn that she stopped breathing as the cameras rolled. He was persuaded she might be dead—he believed that Gish would have given everything, not just physically but in the way of emotional commitment.

Gish was possessed by a phenomenal romantic intensity—she was like a nun with Christ when it came to meeting the camera. And so real men felt jilted or unnecessary. You can see in these stories why men as good as Vidor marveled at her, and why her career was doomed by 1926. And so the question remains: did she turn claptrap into art (like Verdi)? Or was she one of the last relics of the nineteenth century in movies? I’m still not sure, but I suspect she drew equally upon veins of hysteria and transcendence, abandon and purity, that leave her eternally fascinating.

When their father deserted them, the Gish children, Lillian and her younger sister Dorothy (1898–1968) went into traveling theatre. Visiting an old friend, Mary Pickford, at Biograph one day in 1912, they were both coaxed into movies by D. W. Griffith:
An Unseen Enemy
. Lillian made twenty two-reelers for Griffith in two years and then appeared in
Judith of Bethulia
(13), the first four-reeler. When Griffith left Biograph she worked with him on
The Battle of the Sexes
(14);
The Escape
(14);
Home Sweet Home
(14); and
The Birth of a Nation
(15), in which she played Elsie Stoneman. She made
The Lost House
(15),
Enoch Arden
(15, Christy Cabanne),
The Lily and the Rose
(15),
Daphne and the Pirate
(16), and
An Innocent Magdalene
(16), before Griffith cast her as the girl rocking the cradle of humanity in
Intolerance
(16)—it was entirely suitable that so frail a figure should be the driving force in Griffith’s view of the world, and that Gish should make the conception memorable.

She made
Diane of the Follies
(16),
Pathways of Life
(16),
The House Built Upon Sand
(17), and
Souls Triumphant
(17), before going to France to make
Hearts of the World
(18, Griffith). There followed a run of films for Griffith that were the finest flowering of the director’s view of a virginal, self-sacrificing heroine:
The Great Love
(18);
The Greatest Thing in Life
(19);
A Romance of Happy Valley
(19); amazing in
Broken Blossoms
(19), as a battered Limehouse waif;
True Heart Susie
(19); a wronged innocent driven onto the ice floes in the White River in
Way Down East
(20); and, with Dorothy, in
Orphans of the Storm
(21). Her thorough competence and overall imagination were demonstrated when she directed Dorothy in
Remodelling Her Husband
(20).

But she left Griffith in 1921, incredibly over a money dispute. She went to Inspiration and there made
The White Sister
(23, Henry King) and
Romola
(24, King). There followed one of the unprovoked “incidents” of her career. Charles Duell, the president of Inspiration, first manipulated her contract and then claimed that she had promised to marry him: she sued and won, and very few credited the scandal.