The New Biographical Dictionary of Film: Completely Updated and Expanded (212 page)

Roland Joffé
, b. London, 1945
1984:
The Killing Fields
. 1986:
The Mission
. 1989:
Fat Man and Little Boy
. 1992:
The City of Joy
. 1995:
The Scarlet Letter
. 1999:
Goodbye Lover
. 2000:
Vatel
. 2007:
Captivity
. 2008:
You and I
.

Initially a director for stage and television documentaries, Joffé’s first film was the natural, gruesome subject of Cambodia. On that outing, and with
The Mission
, there were Oscar nominations for best director and best picture—no matter that
The Mission
was a silly, old-fashioned melodrama lit up with National Geographic scenery. On the strength of those two films,
Fat Man and Little Boy
could hardly have had a bigger (or more scenic) subject than Los Alamos. But its drama was muffled and made respectable. Still, nothing suggested the fatuous action of
City of Joy
or the inane big-star direction of Demi Moore as Hester Prynne. It’s a strange career, not explained by Joffé’s role as producer on
Super Mario Bros
. (93, Rocky Morton and Annabel Jankel). His two most recent pictures are lurid, and very uneasy, melodramas.

Scarlett Johansson
, b. New York City, 1984
Just around the moment of publication of this book’s previous edition (2004), it became evident that Scarlett Johansson should have been in it, even with the book’s famed reticence toward beautiful young actresses. So here she is in the fifth edition (2010), by which time serious doubts have begun to shadow her serene sensual blooming. Timing is everything, so the woman who looked inevitable in 2003 is now getting closer to thirty.

The name is authentic and it comes from a Danish father and a Russian mother. Scarlett was refused entry at the Tisch School, but by then the decision was irrelevant. She had started working at the age of ten—in
North
(94, Rob Reiner)—and had made several films before she was supposedly “introduced” in
The Horse Whisperer
(98, Robert Redford). Those included
Just Cause
(95, Arne Glimcher),
If Lucy Fell
(96, Eric Schaeffer), the excellent
Manny & Lo
(96, Lisa Krueger) and
Home Alone 3
(97, Raja Gosnell).

After the big Redford picture, she shrugged off childhood as if it had been a bad shirt and began to be a sumptuous teenager:
The Man Who Wasn’t There
(01, the Coen Brothers);
Ghost World
(01, Terry Zwigoff);
An American Rhapsody
(01, Eva Gardos);
Eight Legged Freaks
(02, Ellory Elkayem).

Her glory then began in
Lost in Translation
(03, Sofia Coppola) where the sensual droop of her great mouth was stupefied and so wary as to be very intriguing. She was never more beautiful than as the child out of Vermeer in
Girl with a Pearl Earring
(03, Peter Webber) and sexier than most girls in a Woody Allen film as Nola in
Match Point
(05).

Those were and are her jeweled occasions, and even then you had to sort through duller things:
The Perfect Score
(04, Brian Robbins);
A Love Song for Bobby Long
(04, Shainee Gabel);
A Good Woman
(04, Mike Barker);
In Good Company
(04, Paul Weitz). But then, after Nola, there was a run of lesser works:
The Island
(06, Michael Bay);
Scoop
(06, Allen); as Kay Lake in the lousy
Black Dahlia
(06, Brian De Palma);
The Prestige
(06, Christopher Nolan);
The Nanny Diaries
(07, Shari Springer Berman and Robert Pulcini); Mary Boleyn in
The Other Boleyn Girl
(08, Justin Chadwick);
Vicky Cristina Barcelona
(08, Allen), where she was outpointed by three other actresses in the film;
The Spirit
(08, Frank Miller);
He’s Just Not That Into You
(09, Ken Kwapis). That last title said it all.

Ben Johnson
(1918–96), b. Foraker, Oklahoma
Part Irish and part Cherokee, Johnson had always been a rider, a man acquainted with horses. He was a rodeo cowboy once, and a horse rancher in Arizona. Along the way, he kept company with the picture business, and plenty enough times acquitted himself as an absolutely natural actor. He acted from the saddle at first, but later on there was not a horse in sight, and there was Johnson (with Strasbergians for company), rising to a well-deserved Oscar.

He got into pictures first when he worked as a wrangler on
The Outlaw
(43, Howard Hughes). He doubled in dangerous sequences for John Wayne and Joel McCrea, and in a few years he was in real parts:
The Naughty Nineties
(45, Jean Yarbrough);
Badman’s Territory
(46, Tim Whelan);
Wyoming
(47, Joseph Kane);
Fort Apache
(48, John Ford);
3 Godfathers
(48, Ford); as Sergeant Tyree in
She Wore a Yellow Ribbon
(49, Ford);
Mighty Joe Young
(49, Ernest B. Schoedsack); as Travis Blue in
Wagonmaster
(50, Ford);
Fort Defiance
(51, John Rawlins);
Wild Stallion
(52, Lewis D. Collins); and loyally letting a pint-size Alan Ladd beat him up in
Shane
(53, George Stevens).

He was in
Oklahoma!
(55, Fred Zinnemann);
Rebel in Town
(56, Alfred J. Werker);
War Drums
(57, Reginald Le Borg);
Fort Bowie
(57, Howard W. Koch);
Slim Carter
(57, Richard Bartlett);
Ten Who Dared
(60, William Beaudine);
Tomboy and the Champ
(61, Francis D. Lyon);
One-Eyed Jacks
(61, Marlon Brando);
Cheyenne Autumn
(64, Ford);
Major Dundee
(64, Sam Peckinpah);
The Rare Breed
(66, Andrew V. McLaglen);
Will Penny
(67, Tom Gries); and
Hang ’Em High
(67, Ted Post).

He played Tector Gorch, brother to Warren Oates’s Lyle, in
The Wild Bunch
(69, Peckinpah);
The Undefeated
(69, McLaglen);
Ride a Northbound Horse
(69, Robert Totten);
Chisum
(70, McLaglen); weather-beaten, wistful, and restrained as Sam the Lion in
The Last Picture Show
(71, Peter Bogdanovich), and winning the supporting actor Oscar;
Something Big
(71, McLaglen);
Corky
(71, Leonard Horn);
Junior Bonner
(72, Peckinpah); as the villain in
The Getaway
(73, Peckinpah); as Melvin Purvis, every bit as set on celebrity as
Dillinger
(73, John Milius);
Kid Blue
(73, James Frawley);
Blood Sport
(73, Jerold Freedman);
Runaway!
(73, David Lowell Rich);
The Train Robbers
(73, Burt Kennedy);
The Red Pony
(73, Totten);
Locusts
(74, Richard T. Heffron); as the tolerant police chief in
The Sugarland Express
(74, Steven Spielberg);
Bite the Bullet
(75, Richard Brooks);
Hustle
(75, Robert Aldrich);
The Savage Bees
(76, Bruce Geller);
Breakheart Pass
(76, Gries);
The Town that Dreaded Sundown
(77, Charles B. Pierce);
The Greatest
(77, Gries);
Greyeagle
(77, Pierce);
The Swarm
(78, Irwin Allen);
The Sacketts
(79, Totten);
Wild Times
(79, Richard Compton);
Ruckus
(80, Max Kleven);
The Hunter
(80, Buzz Kulik);
Soggy Bottom U.S.A
. (80, Ted Flicker);
Terror Train
(80, Roger Spottiswoode);
Tex
(82, Tim Hunter);
The Shadow Riders
(82, McLaglen);
Champions
(83, John Irvin);
Red Dawn
(84, Milius);
Wild Horses
(85, Dick Lowry);
Cherry 2000
(86, Steve DeJarnatt);
Let’s Get Harry
(86, Stuart Rosenberg);
Trespass
(86, Loren Bivens);
Dark Before Dawn
(88, Totten);
Stranger On My Land
(88, Larry Elikann);
My Heroes Have Always Been Cowboys
(90, Rosenberg);
The Chase
(91, Paul Wendkos); on TV in
Bonanza: The Return
(93, Jerry Jameson);
Angels in the Outfield
(94, William Dear);
The Evening Star
(96, Robert Harling);
Ruby Jean and Joe
(96, Geoffrey Sax).

Celia Johnson
(1908–82), b. Richmond, England
In the 1930s, Celia Johnson was one of the most promising young actresses on the London stage, someone ranked with Peggy Ashcroft and Diana Wynyard. But she did not play too many of the great roles; nor did she have the push or vanity to make herself great. She was, famously, more interested in domestic life, no matter that she was often brilliant on stage and usually less than competent at home. (She once insisted to the management on a certain actor for one of her plays because he lived near her, and could give her a lift home every night.) There’s the germ of a comic character there, and it may be regretted that Celia Johnson never got enough chances to be funny. Her Laura Jesson in
Brief Encounter
(45, David Lean)—far and away her best known film—is resigned to home life, and her romance may only flourish in the steadfast assurance that it can never be lived. Roger Manvell once wrote of that performance: “I do not remember any more moving performance … I do not remember a moment when [her] performance falters in a part where overplaying or false intonations would have turned the film from a study of life itself into another piece of cinematic fiction.… She looks quite ordinary until it is time for her to look like what she feels.”

That last observation is acute, but it points to the ways in which Noel Coward’s script and Lean’s direction are forlornly sure about what must happen. Her alive look is a bird whose flight is so short-lived that a life of regret is guaranteed thereafter. So the love story is faintly masochistic and a little self-righteous.

Ms. Johnson’s understatement did nothing to disturb that, or to suggest that Laura might end up crazy. If the film had let the love story be disruptive it would have been truer to the volatile England of 1945, and the film might seem less preciously jeweled and contained. But, for that, the bogus cover of the dull, decent husband would have had to be blown.
Brief Encounter
will not risk that: Coward’s gayness was too tolerant of such hollow men. Thus, the brevity of the encounter is desperately necessary to the shaky upper lip.

Brief Encounter
did not make her a film actress. After the war, she remained most notable theatrically, in Rattigan’s
The Deep Blue Sea
, William Douglas Home’s
The Reluctant Debutante
, and Robert Bolt’s
Flowering Cherry
. She played in
The Three Sisters
and
The Cherry Orchard
, too, but made the latter seem a little too suburban.

Her other movies were
In Which We Serve
(42, Lean and Coward);
Dear Octopus
(42, Harold French);
This Happy Breed
(44, Lean);
The Astonished Heart
(50, Terence Fisher and Anthony Darnborough);
I Believe In You
(51, Basil Dearden);
The Captain’s Paradise
(53, Anthony Kimmins);
The Holly and the Ivy
(54, George More O’Ferrall);
A Kid for Two Farthings
(55, Carol Reed); and
The Good Companions
(56, J. Lee Thompson). The modulated acid of her headmistress in
The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie
(68, Ronald Neame) revealed her at last as a character actress.

She was not seen much more, but she was in
Les Misérables
(78, Glenn Jordan) for TV;
The Hostage Tower
(80, Claudio Guzman); and playing with Trevor Howard once more in
Staying On
(82, Silvio Narizzano).

Nunnally Johnson
(1897–1977), b. Columbus, Georgia
1954:
Night People; Black Widow
. 1955:
How to Be Very, Very Popular
. 1956:
The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit
. 1957:
The Three Faces of Eve; Oh, Men! Oh, Women!
. 1959:
The Man Who Understood Women
. 1960:
The Angel Wore Red
.

From scriptwriting, Johnson moved laboriously through producing to directing. But his long career is sadly short of creative character. (His published letters, though, are very witty and informative. So often, in the golden age, people were smarter than their movies indicated.) His scripts may be bland simplifications of novels, orderly in sequence and digestible in character, but they are too often the blueprints for routine films. His best writing credit—on
The Woman in the Window
(44, Fritz Lang)—is somewhat diminished by Lang’s report that he had to battle with Johnson to use the dream structure that activates the black comedy of the film. But what sort of view of authorship is it that could rate the writer more seriously than the eye that foresaw Joan Bennett appearing out of the darkness beside an Edward G. Robinson musing over her portrait? I do not admire
The Grapes of Wrath
(40, John Ford), but the film has more to do with Ford’s spurious feeling of family nobility than with Steinbeck’s soulful pessimism or Johnson’s script. And consider that moment in
O. Henry’s Full House
, when we see the hapless kidnappers make off with J.B. in the same frame as his indifferent parents. Is that O. Henry’s story, Johnson’s script, or Hawks’s decision to see both levels of action in one setup? Always, it is the visual element that indicates the author, because it is the sharp point that pricks our senses.