The New Biographical Dictionary of Film: Completely Updated and Expanded (17 page)

Her early films were conventional, saucy comedies about love and marriage:
Get Your Man
is Clara Bow angling for an aristocrat husband, and in
The Wild Party
Bow forms a “hardboiled maidens” group at a college to plague Professor Fredric March.
Sarah and Son
is a Ruth Chatterton weepie about a mother struggling to be with her son.
Honor Among Lovers
features the indispensable secretary (Claudette Colbert) who will not marry the boss (March), and
Working Girls
is another tribute to independent women.
Merrily We Go to Hell
is a comedy, with March and Sylvia Sidney, in which humor barely conceals the desperation of the brittle rich.

She left Paramount and freelanced:
Christopher
Strong
is Katharine Hepburn as an aviatrix, with hints of a superwoman persona emerging as the woman kills herself rather than have an illegitimate child—more romantic agony than feminist self-determination.
Nana
was a turgid Goldwyn spectacular built around Anna Sten. But
Craig’s Wife
is a remarkably severe picture in which Rosalind Russell plays a monstrous housewife: the subject could have provided the basis for scathing criticism of a woman’s demented domestic energy, but instead she is regarded as a misfit.
The Bride Wore Red
was a Joan Crawford vehicle, about a former prostitute who is on the point of respectability.
Dance, Girl, Dance
, at RKO, is Arzner’s best film: a study of working girls and feminine career strategies, with Lucille Ball and Maureen O’Hara exemplifying the robust and the demure approaches.

Her long retirement saw her doing some teaching at UCLA, and making TV commercials for Pepsi-Cola for her old friend Joan Crawford.

Hal Ashby
(1936–88), b. Ogden, Utah
1970:
The Landlord
. 1971:
Harold and Maude
. 1973:
The Last Detail
. 1975:
Shampoo
. 1976:
Bound for Glory
. 1978:
Coming Home
. 1979:
Being There
. 1981:
SecondHand Hearts
. 1982:
Lookin’ to Get Out; Let’s Spend the Night Together
(d). 1985:
The Slugger’s Wife
. 1986:
Eight Million Ways to Die
.

Ashby hitchhiked to California in his teens, and he worked on any and every job in pictures, rising to be an assistant editor on several William Wyler and George Stevens films:
Friendly Persuasion, The Big Country, The Diary of Anne Frank
, and
The Greatest Story Ever Told
. The influence of such pious liberalism should not be forgotten: despite his sixties aura, Ashby digested attitudes in the Eisenhower years when circumspect conservatives could get away with pledging themselves to tame causes. Ashby became a full editor on
The Loved One
(64, Tony Richardson), and worked for Norman Jewison with whom he won an editing Oscar for
In the Heat of the Night
(67), another example of rightmindedness allied with old-fashioned melodramatic corn.

Jewison gave Ashby his first chance to direct: a film about a rich kid touched by the plight and authenticity of his Harlem tenants. Soft-centered,
The Landlord
is still an offbeat picture with unusual characters.
Harold and Maude
inspired the hope that Ashby might be a genuine eccentric, instead of a cute, marketable oddball. But its dark humor never visited him again, and writer Colin Higgins seems responsible for its going as far as it did to abuse our settled ideas of taste. The love story is prettified and sanitary: there’s no real sex between Bud Cort and Ruth Gordon. It slips away into another feeble endorsement of “do your own thing,” the politics of the weary soul-searcher, too selfish and superficial to deal with public causes. Still, it has a few moments of bitter glee, and a very pleasing, distant contempt for the middle class that explains its subsequent cult status: it allows establishment kids to scorn their affluence and status without risking either.

The Last Detail
is Ashby’s best film, but with what debt to writer Robert Towne and Jack Nicholson? Ashby executes a concept that is more bleak and analytical than he is used to: that living is a set of prisons.
The Last Detail
was as mutedly somber as
Shampoo
was boastfully risqué. But
Shampoo
was writers Towne and Warren Beatty, as the actor moved into the stage of his career that aspired to directing. It was a modish, bawdy film, but without any directorial personality. In the end, its restrained view of the hairdresser libertine colludes with his self-pity and the sensual pathos of Warren Beatty’s sighing mouth.
Bound for Glory
was a blatant use of Depression picturesque to obscure human and social ugliness, an insipid piece of hero worship that glossed over the intransigence of Woody Guthrie while settling for the inflated pomp with which Hollywood biopics have always guided untidy history.

Yet that was nothing compared with
Coming Home
, a movie that looked like a TV commercial, patronized paraplegics, Vietnam, the military, and love with its maudlin nobility and the thought that soap-opera histrionics could enclose political subject matter. It was Jane Fonda’s pet project this time, and in the process it threw away Nancy Dowd’s very tough script and asked us to believe that Fonda could represent a lowly, unaware army wife, that Bruce Dern was an average soldier, and that the paraplegic screw is an ultimate panacea—the sex again as obscure and profound as in
Harold and Maude
. (If only prostrate Jon Voight had been given a merciful job by lusty Ruth Gordon.)
Coming Home
was adolescent and decadent. Its most ruinous failing is the self-satisfaction that confuses a vacuous cult of emotion with intelligence and responsibility.
Coming Home
, more than Ashby dreamed of, is a film about self-excuse and the isolation that learns to forget mistakes and problems.

Ashby’s work in the eighties was fitful, and suffered from his difficulties with drugs. At least
Let’s Spend the Night Together
—a Rolling Stones concert film—shows his skill as an editor.
Lookin’ to Get Out
was on the shelf two years before it got a release.
Eight Million Ways to Die
was a thriller steeped in alcohol and drugs, as well as a project that had several helping hands. In hindsight,
The Last Detail
and
Shampoo
look like absorbing models of touch and control—and Ashby seems like a sad casualty who depended on strong collaborators.

Anthony Asquith
(1902–68), b. London
1927:
Shooting Stars
(codirected with A. V. Bramble). 1928:
Underground
. 1929:
The Runaway Princess
. 1930:
A Cottage on Dartmoor
. 1931:
Tell England
. 1932:
Dance, Pretty Lady; Marry Me; The Window Cleaner
. 1933:
The Lucky Number
. 1934:
Unfinished Symphony
(codirected). 1935:
Forever England; Moscow Nights
. 1938:
Pygmalion
(codirected with Leslie Howard). 1939:
French Without Tears
. 1940:
Freedom Radio; Channel Incident
(d);
Quiet Wedding
. 1941:
Cottage to Let/Bombsight Stolen; Rush Hour
(d). 1942:
Uncensored
. 1943:
We Dive at Dawn; The Demi-Paradise; Welcome to Britain
(codirected with Burgess Meredith). 1944:
Fanny by Gaslight; Man of Evil; Two Fathers
(d). 1945:
The Way to the Stars/Johnny in the Clouds
. 1947:
While the Sun Shines
. 1948:
The Winslow Boy
. 1950:
The Woman in Question
. 1951:
The Browning Version
. 1952:
The Importance of Being Earnest
. 1953:
The Net; The Final Test
. 1954:
The Young Lovers/Chance Meeting
. 1955:
On Such a Night
. 1956:
Carrington V.C
. 1958:
Orders to Kill
. 1959:
The Doctor’s Dilemma; Libel
. 1960:
The Millionairess
. 1962:
Guns of Darkness
. 1963:
The V.I.P.s
. 1964:
The Yellow Rolls-Royce
.

Asquith was the son of the Liberal prime minister, a man apparently torn between social opposites. On the set, he affected a boilersuit and yet he was happiest with material that had built-in social distinctions. In the dark days of the British cinema—in the 1950s—he had a high and quite unmerited reputation. In fact, he was a dull, journeyman supervisor of the transfer to the screen of proven theatrical properties. The myth that his first film exploited sound audaciously survived only as long as its gimmicky claptrap remained unseen. For the rest,
Dance, Pretty Lady
is charming and
The Importance of Being Earnest
a decent reading of the play.
Pygmalion
is more than decent: it is a fine record of the play, and even if Leslie Howard is an odd Higgins, Wendy Hiller and Wilfred Lawson are matchless. But it is symptomatic of Asquith that he managed to make the Shaw of
The Doctor’s Dilemma
no better a dramatist than the Rattigan of
The Browning Version
and
The Winslow Boy
. Venturing beyond such stagy subjects, he quickly floundered:
Orders to Kill
is a complete failure and
Libel
is lurid melodrama. In his last years he subsided into atrocious all-star vehicles, addled movies that accepted a 1920s notion of the intrinsic appeal of wealthy and successful people.

Olivier Assayas
, b. Paris, 1955
1986:
Désordre
. 1989:
L’Enfant de l’Hiver
. 1991:
Paris S’Éveille/Paris at Dawn
. 1993:
Une Nouvelle Vie
. 1994:
L’Eau Froide
. 1996:
Irma Vep
. 1997:
Cinéma de Notre Temps: Hou Hsiao Hsien/HHH: A Portrait of Hou Hsiao-Hsien
(d). 1998:
Fin Août, Début Septembre
. 2000:
Les Destinées Sentimentales
. 2002:
Demonlover
. 2004:
Clean
. 2006: “Quartier des Enfants Rouges,” an episode for
Paris Je T’Aime
. 2007:
Boarding Gate
. 2008:
L’Heure d’Été
. 2010:
Carlos
.

It’s a mark of changing times that Assayas—a onetime editor of
Cahiers du Cinéma
, and then a director himself—works in an age when the screening of his films outside France depends largely on film festivals and art museums.
Irma Vep
was released in America—with little response. And so we are back to an isolation in which foreign films, and foreign filmmakers of distinction, risk going unknown to all but a few in the English-speaking world. The risk in this affects French funding, of course. But it falls most heavily on American audiences. For there has never been an age in film history when America needed more external input—not least the works of a director who regards Hou Hsiao-Hsien as a master and a model. Of course, Assayas has his own world: that of young people, often Parisians, troubled about virtually everything in their lives—it is like
Paris Nous Appartient
for a later time when the huge threat may have dissipated, but only after pioneering the way for smaller, more intimate dreads.
Une Nouvelle Vie
is about half-sisters who only meet at the age of twenty. And Assayas is especially acute at showing us young people whose elders are in the same lost condition. In
Paris at Dawn
, Jean-Pierre Léaud is living with the dangerously young Judith Godreche, until his mixed-up son arrives and goes off with her.

Assayas benefits from the camerawork of Denis Lenoir, and he is adept at making noir situations seem everyday. He is already a master at overlap, betrayal, and stray coincidence, and he seems to be improving as time passes. Moreover,
Irma Vep
gave a welcome sign of humor in its awareness of the many poseurs and paranoids one meets in film production.

Fred Astaire
(Frederick Austerlitz) (1899–1987), b. Omaha, Nebraska
There is something very suggestive of Americana in the way a Napoleonic battle is turned into a name without roots or etymology. Yet how evocative that name is: run the parts together and the result is as rhythmic as Frenesi; separate them and it could be Fred a Star or Fred on a staircase, astride the stair—thus Astaire,
l’esprit d’escalier
.

It is proper to respond in this way because so much of Astaire is a matter of stylish carriage, and I do not think it accidental that the name evokes some specially serene agility. This leads to the questions, is Astaire a movie actor? and what makes for great acting in the cinema? There is a good case for arguing that, in the event of a visit by creatures from a far universe, ignorant of the cinema, one would do best to show them some steps by Astaire as the clinching evidence of the medium’s potential. Better that than the noble actors—Olivier, Jannings, Brando, Barrymore,
et al.
Astaire is the most refined human expression of the musical, which is in turn the extreme manifestation of pure cinema: the lifelike presentation of human beings in magical, dreamlike, and imaginary situations. That might be thought to imply that Astaire’s dancing depends on illusion. Not so. He was always the most technically exacting and ambitious of screen dancers, the most eager to perform in uninterrupted setups. In the 1920s, it would have been possible to see him dancing virtuoso routines on stage. The spatial and temporal continuity of theatre would have made clear how difficult the feat was. Cinema wipes away the sense of difficulty and substitutes the ease that permits every transformation needed by the chronic dreamer. Astaire is not a great dancer so much as a great filmed dancer. Nureyev on film is less than in the flesh, because he is himself most stimulated by an actual audience and a real leap. Astaire, like all dreamers, is a perfectionist who loved to work in the feverish secrecy of a studio toward the flawless image of his own grace. He lends himself to the detachment of cinema because he is a rather cold, even indistinct personality who celebrates the spirit of elegance as channeled through elaborate, rapid, photographed motion.