The New Biographical Dictionary of Film: Completely Updated and Expanded (230 page)

Werner Krauss
(1884–1959), b. Gestungshausen, Germany
Das Kabinett des Dr. Caligari
(19, Robert Wiene) is a rough-and-ready piece of celluloid, no matter how complex the ideas it yields. But it has one of the first deeply frightening shots in cinema, in which the arousal of fear depends upon the manner of a performance and the way it is recorded:

The top-hatted figure of Dr. Caligari appears walking up the flight of steps in the center of the fairground setting; he is clutching at the banister-rail. When he reaches the top of the steps, he turns towards the camera. His black cloak is tightly wrapped around him; he peers quizzically, irascibly, around him through large round spectacles, then hobbles painfully forward, leaning heavily on his stick with one hand and carrying a book in the other. He is wearing white gloves, on the back of which are painted three broad black stripes, extensions of the spaces between his fingers. Hobbling forward, he looks a sinister, menacing cripple, capable of the utmost evil. His lips are tightly pursed and he glares wildly ahead; his white hair straggles out from beneath the brim of his hat. Iris out on Caligari’s face, leaning back slightly as if sniffing the atmosphere.

That is from a script transcribed and published in 1972, so that “a sinister, menacing cripple, capable of the utmost evil” is written with benefit of Kracauer’s
From Caligari to Hitler
. But the images of Werner Krauss’s Caligari are filled with dread. That threatening stare into the camera shows how far Caligari is the dominant presence in the film. In camera terms, it foreshadows the chilling denouement in which Caligari is found to be in charge of the asylum where the story of the film is being told by an inmate. As far as Krauss is concerned, we can only admit the sense of concentrated, shabby rancor that the actor conveys, and suggest that his later work in central parts in Nazi films is life’s banal attempt at coincidence.

Krauss was a stage-trained actor, suited to the Expressionist gesture:
Hoffmanns Erzahlungen
(16, Richard Oswald);
Nacht des Grauens
(16, Arthur Robison);
Zirkusblut
(16, Oswald);
Die Rache der Toten
(17, Oswald);
Die Seeschlacht
(17, Oswald);
Es Werde Licht
(18, Oswald);
Das Tagebuch einer Verlorenen
(18, Oswald);
Opium
(18, Robert Reinert);
Die Frau mit den Orchideen
(19, Otto Rippert);
Rose Bernd
(19, Alfred Halm);
Die Bruder Karamazoff
(20, Dmitri Buchowetzki and Carl Froelich);
Der Bucklige und die Tanzerin
(20, F. W. Murnau);
Johannes Goth
(20, Karl Gerhardt);
Das Lachende Grauen
(20, Lupu Pick);
Christian Wahnschaffe
(21, Urban Gad);
Danton
(21, Buchowetzki);
Grausige Nacht
(21, Pick);
Der Roman der Christine von Herre
(21, Ludwig Berger);
Scherben
(21, Pick);
Sappho
(21, Buchowetzki);
Der Brennende Acker
(22, Murnau);
Josef und Seine Bruder
(22, Froelich);
Luise Millerin
(22, Froelich);
Lady Hamilton
(22, Oswald);
Die Nacht der Medici
(22, Karl Grune); as Iago in
Othello
(22, Buchowetzki);
Tragikomodie
(22, Wiene);
Das Alte Gesetz
(23, E. A. Dupont);
Fridericus Rex
(23, Arsen von Cserepy);
I.N.R.I
. (23, Wiene);
Der Schatz
(23, G. W. Pabst);
Das Unbekannte Morgen
(23, Alexander Korda);
Zwischen Abend und Morgen
(23, Robison);
Dekameron-Nachte
(24, Herbert Wilcox);
Waxworks
(24, Paul Leni); as the butcher in
Die Freudlose Gasse
(25, Pabst);
Das Haus der Luge
(25, Pick); as Orgon in
Tartuff
(25, Murnau);
Geheimnisse einer Seele
(26, Pabst);
Man Spielt Nicht mit der Liebe
(26, Pabst); as Comte Muffat in
Nana
(26, Jean Renoir); as the devil in
Der Student von Prag
(26, Henrik Galeen);
Funkzauber
(27, Oswald);
Laster der Menschheit
(27, Rudolf Meinert);
Looping the Loop
(28, Robison);
Napoleon auf St. Helena
(29, Pick);
Yorck
(31, Gustav Ucicky);
Mensch Ohne Namen
(32, Ucicky);
Burgtheater
(36, Willi Forst);
Robert Koch, der Bekampfer des Todes
(39, Hans Steinhoff); several “Jewish” roles in
Jud Süss
(40, Veit Harlan);
Annelie
(41, Josef von Bady);
Die Entlassung
(42, Wolfgang Liebeneiner);
Zwischen Himmel und Erde
(42, Harald Braun);
Paracelsus
(43, Pabst);
Pramien auf den Tod
(50, Curd Jürgens);
Der Fallende Stern
(50, Braun); and
Sohn Ohne Heimat
(55, Hans Deppe).

Kris Kristofferson
, b. Brownsville, Texas, 1936
You can’t take Kristofferson too solemnly as an actor, because you can hear his good-natured growl that he was always about so many other things—singing and writing songs, having every good time he could find, and just growing older gracefully, or whatever. At the same time, he has at least one great film (Pat
Garrett
), several fascinating curiosities, and a few genuine monstrosities to his credit. Plus there is the fact that his outer shell seems so thoroughly lived in that he may be at his best now, in his sixties.

From Pomona College, he became a Rhodes scholar, an army officer, a teacher, and only then a singer. It was as the latter that he began to be cast in pictures: acting in and doing the music for
The Last Movie
(71, Dennis Hopper); doing both on
Cisco Pike
(72, B. W. L. Norton); not doing the music but so puppy-fat fresh, lazy, and carnal as the Kid in
Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid
(73, Sam Peckinpah);
The Gospel Road
(73, Robert Elfstrom); pretty good in a plain role in
Blume in Love
(73, Paul Mazursky); a small role in
Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia
(74, Peckinpah);
Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore
(74, Martin Scorsese); a very romantic image in
The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea
(76, Lewis John Carlino);
Vigilante Force
(76, George Armitage).

He was self-parody in
A Star Is Born
(76, Frank Pierson); a football player in
Semi-Tough
(77, Michael Ritchie);
Convoy
(78, Peckinpah); looking superb as a Western gentleman in
Heaven’s Gate
(80, Michael Cimino); in high finance with Jane Fonda in
Rollover
(81, Alan J. Pakula);
Flashpoint
(84, William Tannen);
Songwriter
(84, Alan Rudolph);
Trouble in Mind
(85, Rudolph);
Big Top Pee-Wee
(88, Randal Kleiser);
Millennium
(89, Michael Anderson); back from Cambodia in
Welcome Home
(89, Franklin J. Schaffner);
Night of the Cyclone
(90, David Irving);
Cheatin’ Hearts
(93, Rod McCall); seeming older and impressive in
Lone Star
(96, John Sayles);
Fire Down Below
(97, Félix Enríquez Alcalá); very good as a James Jones figure in
A Soldier’s Daughter Never Cries
(98, James Ivory);
Limbo
(99, Sayles);
The Joyriders
(00, Bradley Battersby);
Planet of the Apes
(01, Tim Burton);
Wooly Boys
(01, Leszek Burzynski);
D-Tox
(01, Jim Gillespie);
Blade II
(02, Guillermo del Toro);
Disappearances
(02, Jay Craven);
Where the Red Fern Grows
(03, Lyman Dayton and Sam Pillsbury).

He was the patriarch in
Silver City
(04, Sayles); in the TV miniseries
Lives of the Saints
(04);
Blade: Trinity
(04, David S. Goyer);
The Jacket
(05, John Maybury);
The Wendell Baker Story
(05, Andrew and Luke Wilson); the narrator on
I’m Not There
(07, Todd Haynes);
Lords of the Street
(08, Amir Valinia);
Powder Blue
(09, Timothy Linh Bui);
He’s Just Not That Into You
(09, Ken Kwapis).

Stanley Kubrick
(1928–99), b. Bronx, New York
1953:
Fear and Desire
. 1955:
Killer’s Kiss
. 1956:
The Killing
. 1957:
Paths of Glory
. 1960:
Spartacus
. 1962:
Lolita
. 1963:
Dr. Strangelove, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb
. 1968:
2001: A Space Odyssey
. 1971:
A Clockwork Orange
. 1975:
Barry Lyndon
. 1980:
The Shining
. 1987:
Full Metal Jacket
. 1999:
Eyes Wide Shut
.

Long before
The Shining
, Stanley Kubrick had retreated to his Overlook Hotel. It was not just an estate in Buckinghamshire, nor simply England—as opposed to America. His real aerie was withdrawal to the higher, more spiritual places, an abode of paranoia, kingdom, and the cunning suggestion of being grander than others could dream of. His retreat was like the opening bars in a Wagner overture. Warner Brothers apparently abided by his view of himself (they funded films
after Barry Lyndon
), announcing themselves in advance as privileged to fund whatever he settled on. It cannot have been a profitable faith, which is enormous proof of Kubrick’s cold, humorless authority.

Now that filmgoing has broken free of habit, we have an audience that is supposedly more discriminating. All that that seems to mean, in practice, is that whereas people once went to the pictures in the way they did to the baker’s, they now make specific decisions to see films that have been made to match up to their supposedly loftier expectations. Clearly, the present system allows audiences to make wrong choices, as well as right ones, whereas once they never thought of choice. It also encourages certain directors into a garishly intelligent “evening out” package like
A Clockwork Orange
. Kubrick signaled his own gravity with years of preparation, endless painstaking in shooting, the courting of serious topics, and pandering to the audience’s appetite for sensation and vulgarity in the guise of importance.

After 1961, Kubrick was based in England, with some of the precious decorousness of the writer in
A Clockwork Orange
who is broken in on by Alex and the Droogs. Five films were passed out to the world from that retreat, which took an increasingly sententious and nihilistic view of our social and moral ethics, but which are as devoid of artistic personality as the worlds that Kubrick elegantly extrapolates.

The laboriousness of this process needs to be stressed because it directly affects the seldom admitted tedium of the pictures. Preparation and shooting for Kubrick are extended operations, with special emphasis on art direction and the engineering of lenses, but with cursory attention to character or narrative. The point is crucial: cinematic inventiveness must grow out of an attitude to people, and in the form of a preoccupation with the medium. Grant that Hitchcock was a chilling man; his style fitted him perfectly. Kubrick’s style, however, is meretricious, fussy, and detachable.

The ridiculous labor of
2001
, the cavernous sets, and the special lenses, ride upon a half-baked notion of the origins and purpose of life that a first-year student ought to have been ashamed of. But this message in a bottle lasts over three hours, and the movie has long sequences of directorial self-indulgence. One marvels at the trite sensibilities tickled by the use of the two Strausses—as silly as the effects of some instant TV program—amid so much ultimate philosophizing and so many interminable shots of notional machines.

Kubrick treats computers in the way Sternberg did Dietrich. The comparison that comprehensively diminishes
2001
is with
Metropolis. 2001
is immeasurably more educated, not just in terms of the secret of existence, but because
Metropolis
is a childlike film. But all the inventiveness of
Metropolis
—as outstanding in its day as the budget of
2001
—is subordinated to the human aspect of the film.
Metropolis
is about society and it still resounds with the clash of anger at authority and hope for the future. Beside it,
2001
looks like an elaborate, academic toy, made slow to seem important and to divert attention from its vacuity.

2001
also made clear Kubrick’s defects as a storyteller. This was a real loss, the result of narrative instinct submitting to intellectual pretensions. Initially, in
Killer’s Kiss
and
The Killing
, Kubrick had been able to tell stories well enough, even if full of melodramatic punch and slick connections. But
Lolita
and
Dr. Strangelove
illustrated the gradual disparagement of narrative in an effort to achieve the blend of visual gaudiness and thematic load to which Kubrick aspires.
2001
is all implications and no story, whereas Kubrick’s
Lolita
had been all story and not a trace of style, mood, or flavor. That love story to America was ruinously shot in England.

But the most striking evidence of Kubrick’s faltering narrative is
A Clockwork Orange
. Despite its set-piece outrages, that film is uncertain how to develop narrative and pusillanimous in its attitude to violence. Anthony Burgess’s novel is far more barbed because it avoids Kubrick’s digression into the inane task of inventing the future with wide-angle lenses and art direction. Whereas
Alphaville
is based soundly on the way the world is already the future in the mind of a visionary, Kubrick thumps home his fearsomely clever sets and his shamelessly borrowed wide-angle views. Indeed, he has always been eclectic, especially given to imitation of Welles. But whereas
Kane
’s wide angles are the distortions of a man’s soul, in
Clockwork Orange
they assist the obscene prettiness of set after set. The vulgar baroque of Kubrick’s mind lies in his reluctance to let a plain or simple shot pass under his name. The consequences of an art director’s cinema are rampant in
A Clockwork Orange
, as witness the condescension in the design of Alex’s parents’ home.