The New Biographical Dictionary of Film: Completely Updated and Expanded (179 page)

Sir Cedric Hardwicke
(1896–1964), b. Stourbridge, England
By today’s standards, it is a mystery that Hardwicke should have been knighted for his acting when only thirty-eight years old. By that date, 1934, he was successful, but hardly aristocratic. On the stage, he had played in Shaw, Eden Philpotts, and
The Barretts of Wimpole Street;
and on the screen he was in
Dreyfus
(31, Milton Rosmer);
Rome Express
(32, Walter Forde);
Orders Is Orders
(33, Forde);
The Ghoul
(33, T. Hayes Hunter); as Charles II opposite Anna Neagle’s
Nell Gwynn
(34, Herbert Wilcox); as the Rabbi in
Jew Süss
(34, Lothar Mendes); and in
The Lady Is Willing
(34, Gilbert Miller). Less than a knight, Hardwicke was a poker-faced Malvolio—short, tending to baldness, and with a voice so deep it could have come from a ventriloquist.

Was there a mischievous anarchist behind that solemn face that made Hardwicke bear his title through a career of hapless disorder? Did he take special pleasure in the shabby? Here is Don Siegel explaining why he wanted Hardwicke for the crooked doctor in
Baby Face Nelson
(57), arguably his best film: “Hardwicke, particularly in those days, was a terrible villain. He drank a great deal and was a great deal of fun and he looked like a sleazy doctor. The picture everybody has is of someone very prim and proper, but he was not at all that way.”

There is a note of lazy debauch in his Steyne in
Becky Sharp
(35, Rouben Mamoulian), and he appeared as David Garrick in
Peg of Old Drury
(35, Wilcox), as the Bishop in
Les Misérables
(35, Richard Boleslavsky) before making a last London stage appearance in
Tovarich
. After
Things to Come
(36, William Cameron Menzies),
Tudor Rose
(36, Robert Stevenson),
Laburnum Grove
(36, Carol Reed), and Allan Quatermain in
King Solomon’s Mines
(37, Stevenson), Hardwicke crossed the Atlantic to become a Hollywood actor.

For a few years he played leads:
Green Light
(37, Frank Borzage); as the missionary in
Stanley and Livingstone
(39, Henry King); Dr. Arnold in
Tom Brown’s Schooldays
(39, Stevenson);
On Borrowed Time
(39, Harold S. Bucquet);
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
(39, William Dieterle); and
Victory
(40, John Cromwell). But RKO, his studio, loaned him out at random and his career soon lost shape:
The Invisible Man Returns
(40, Joe May);
Suspicion
(41, Alfred Hitchcock);
Sundown
(41, Henry Hathaway); and
The Ghost of Frankenstein
(41, Erle C. Kenton). In 1943, Hardwicke played a leading if forlorn part in organizing a war-effort movie contributed to by British artists working in America:
Forever and a Day
(Frank Lloyd, Hardwicke, et al.). Fox then cast him as the Nazi in
The Moon Is Down
(43, Irving Pichel) and for a few years he had better parts at that studio:
The Lodger
(44, John Brahm); as Henry Cabot Lodge in
Wilson
(44, Henry King);
Wing and a Prayer
(44, Hathaway);
The Keys of the Kingdom
(44, John M. Stahl); and
Sentimental Journey
(46, Walter Lang).

But after the war his parts oscillated wildly: in Britain,
Beware of Pity
(46, Maurice Elvey); Ralph in
Nicholas Nickleby
(47, Alberto Cavalcanti);
The Winslow Boy
(48, Anthony Asquith); and
Now Barabbas …
(49, Gordon Parry). And in the United States,
Tycoon
(47, Richard Wallace);
A Woman’s Vengeance
(48, Zoltan Korda);
I Remember Mama
(48, George Stevens);
Rope
(48, Hitchcock);
A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court
(49, Tay Garnett), in which he sang “Busy Doing Nothing” with Crosby and William Bendix; and
The Desert Fox
(51, Hathaway).

It must be said that Hardwicke was seldom less than absorbing in these films: in middle age he had acquired a sunken gravity like that of Rumpelstiltskin once his name has been discovered. But with the 1950s he made whatever was offered:
The White Tower
(50, Ted Tetzlaff);
The Green Glove
(52, Rudolph Maté);
Botany Bay
(53, John Farrow);
Salome
(53, Dieterle);
Bait
(54, Hugo Haas);
Helen of Troy
(55, Robert Wise); the fascinating insight of
Baby Face Nelson
, which came only two years after his Edward IV in
Richard III
(55, Laurence Olivier); and
The Vagabond King
(56, Michael Curtiz). Thereafter he had tiny parts in epics and, in the year of his death, a fine cameo as the father in
The Pumpkin Eater
(64, Jack Clayton).

David Hare
, b. St. Leonard’s-on-Sea, England, 1947
1977:
Licking Hitler
(TV). 1980:
Dreams of Leaving
(TV). 1985:
Wetherby
. 1988:
Paris by Night
. 1989:
Strapless
. 1991:
Heading Home
(TV). 1992: “Paris, May 1919,” episode from
The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles
(TV). 1997:
The Designated Mourner
. 2008: “Paris,” an episode from
Young Indiana Jones: Winds of Change
(TV).

After an education at Lancing College and Cambridge, Hare grew into one of the best playwrights concerned with Britain’s sense of decline in the seventies and eighties. His plays include
Fanshen
(75);
Plenty
(78);
Pravda
(85), written with his sometime collaborator, Howard Brenton;
The Secret Rapture
(88); and, most recently, a trilogy on the Church, the law, and politics. His movie career cannot be distinguished from his life in the theatre; both media have shared his projects and themes, and Hare began to direct some of his own plays, as if stimulated by the company of actors. He has been less than happy with the impact of his movies—whereas several of his plays had great critical and commercial success—but it is likely that Hare will move fluently from one medium to another so long as his concern, and Britain’s troubles, persist.

This is especially welcome, for the three movies Hare made for theatrical release in the late eighties
—Wetherby, Paris by Night
, and
Strapless
—are unsurpassed in Britain in those years. In the world as a whole, it is hard to think of films so focused on real social and political dilemma, but which seem so expansive, so ready to be about anything and everything. Hare is far from stagy in his movies. His direction of actors works through the intimate observation of gesture, and even in those kinds of rest, passivity, or inner being that would be impossible on stage. In structure, he never employs anything as obvious as acts or scenes; instead, he assembles fragments, broken pieces of action, and likes to move back and forth in time. As early as
Plenty
on stage, he seemed influenced by editing and movie assembly. By now, his sense of structure appears as excited by film as by theatre.

If there is still a note of severity in his mise-en-scène that may be Hare’s wariness over the sheer delight of filming. Even then, any threat of schematic composition is removed by his fascination with complicated women and the actresses who play them. There has been in Hare’s films so far something of the intellectual tension of a fallible monk examining wonderful women.

Yet the woman who hovers above and beyond Hare’s three movies is a monster, a black hole of liberty, Mrs. Thatcher. It was her regime and spirit, Hare believes, that undermined not just English institutions but the taste for tolerance, argument, diversity, and inner life in Britain. Thus, probably, his movies mean more to the British (and maybe the English) than they ever could to foreigners. What counters the particularity is the airy vastness of spiritual concern that pervades these entirely agnostic pictures. For it is not just the educational system, the National Health Service, or the language of Tory managers that are under scrutiny. Hare is touched by memory, bond, loss, and hope, in ways that link him to the novels of Hardy, George Eliot, and Henry James. He is the most Leavisite of moviemakers.

Wetherby
, I think, is his best film, largely because its prompting suicide leads us into a consideration of when, how, and whether passion needs to be shifted or freed; and because Vanessa Redgrave has never done anything better.
Paris by Night
is his biggest failure (it was never released in America): it comes close to implausibility at times, and Charlotte Rampling is not required to be pleasant as its heroine. Still, the speed of consequence in its story is fascinating, and the movie develops Hare’s faith in the rush of melodrama beneath English manners and propriety. (
Plenty
is filled with the same struggle.)
Strapless
has Blair Brown as an American doctor in London, swept off her feet by a mysterious, faithless man, and troubled by her own, rootless sister. The title is too blunt, for the film’s point is that life stands up on its own, despite our worries. There is hardly another modern film of which one can say that its subject is, simply, the force of life, the endurance that rolls over error, death, and disaster.

Hare’s films are not easy—he works with the subtlety of a novelist. But they repay repeated viewing and I am confident they will survive as a landmark of work in the 1980s. As to the future, so much depends on what happens to Britain. He stands now as something like the documentarian Humphrey Jennings as the war ended. What
is
his subject?

As well as his own films, Hare has done the screenplays for
Saigon—Year of the Cat
(83, Stephen Frears), a brilliant invasion of American territory, and the best evidence that he could go beyond home;
Plenty
(85, Fred Schepisi); and
Damage
(92, Louis Malle), the first thing Hare has done that seemed like an opportunistic chore—for the people in
Damage
never convince us that they deserve a moral life. He also adapted his own play,
The Secret Rapture
(94, Howard Davies).

Hare’s chief efforts are for the theatre—and why not?—but he has also scripted and appeared in
Via Dolorosa
(00, John Bailey), and he has adapted the Michael Cunningham novel for
The Hours
(02, Stephen Daldry). As a director, his most significant new work is
The Designated Mourner
, which was far better received by some others than by this writer.

But as a writer, he continues to be involved with important projects:
Pogled u Nebo
(07, Milivoje Milojevic), a version of his play
Skylight; My Zinc Bed
(08, Anthony Page) for TV; and a masterly screen adaptation of
The Reader
(08, Daldry).

Veit Harlan
(1899–1964), b. Berlin
1935:
Die Pompadour
(codirected with Willy Schmidt-Gentner and Heinz Helbig);
Krach im Interhaus
. 1936:
Der Mude Theodor; Kater Lampe; Alles für Veronika; Maria der Magd
. 1937:
Mein Sohn, der Herr Minister; Die Kreutzersonate; Der Herrscher
. 1938:
Jugend; Verwehte Spuren
. 1939:
Die Reise nach Tilsit; Das Unsterbliche Herz
. 1940:
Jud Süss
. 1941:
Pedro Soll Hangen
. 1942:
Die Goldene Stadt; Der Grosse Konig
. 1943:
Immensee
. 1944:
Opfergang
. 1945:
Kolberg; Der Puppenspieler
(uncompleted). 1950:
Unsterbliche Geliebte
. 1951:
Hanna Amon
. 1953:
Die Blaue Stunde
. 1954:
Sterne uber Colombo; Die Gefangene des Maharadscha
. 1955:
Verrat an Deutschland
. 1957:
Anders als Du und Ich
. 1958:
Liebe Kann wie Gift Sein; Ich Werde Dich auf Handen Tragen
. 1962:
Die Blonde Frau des Maharadscha
.

There is still an unthinking orthodoxy that distinguishes those directors who quit Germany in the 1930s from those who stayed there. There are major figures whose choice of where to work was an expression of artistic personality—most obviously, Lang. But beneath Lang, there are several artisan directors who were content to flourish within one system or another. Michael Curtiz worked as enjoyably in Germany until 1926 as he did in Hollywood thereafter. And there is perhaps rather less than the barrier we have been taught to see between, on the one hand, Curtis Bernhardt and even Douglas Sirk, and on the other, Veit Harlan.

That is not to say that
Jud Süss
is not an uncompromising piece of anti-Semitism, made at a time when Harlan had no right to be ignorant of Germany’s treatment of Jews. Nor can one deny the odious mixture of sentimentality and inspirational grandeur in many of Harlan’s films as an expression of Nazi attitudes. But much American cinema has the same uneasy defects. Griffith inaugurated them. Many American war films are horribly bigoted. Do not forget the glee with which we applaud Conrad Veidt’s death in
Casablanca
. The level of caricature in that film may be wittier than the way German films ridiculed the Allies, but the resort to caricature was common. Winning sides often condition our tolerance toward hokum. With a German victory, the Curtiz of
Casablanca
might have been just as trenchantly investigated as the Harlan of
Jud Süss
was blacklisted from 1945–50. Of course, that case can be overstated. The clearest corrective is the fact that Harlan survived to make more films, whereas Curtiz (and many others) could have had no such hopes. But the point needs making: we could safely advance beyond righteous condemnation of German cinema after that celebrated night when Lang fled.