The New Biographical Dictionary of Film: Completely Updated and Expanded (243 page)

He was in
The Longest Day
(62, Ken Annakin and others); and he began to make many films in Europe. But he was back at Hammer for
The Gorgon
(64, Fisher);
Dr. Terror’s House of Horrors
(65, Freddie Francis);
She
(65, Day);
The Skull
(65, Francis);
The Face of Fu Manchu
(65, Don Sharp); very good in
Rasputin: The Mad Monk
(66, Sharp);
The Brides of Fu Manchu
(66, Sharp);
Circus of Fear
(67, Moxey);
Blood Fiend
(67, Samuel Gallu);
Dracula Has Risen from the Grave
(68, Francis);
The Crimson Cult
(68, Vernon Sewell), with Karloff and Barbara Steele.

He played with Vincent Price in
The Oblong Box
(69, Gordon Hessler); he was a guest Dracula in
The Magic Christian
(69, Joseph McGrath);
Scream and Scream Again
(70, Hessler)—every title has been used, first as a verb and then as a noun;
Taste the Blood of Dracula
(70, Peter Sasdy);
Scars of Dracula
(70, Roy Ward Baker); as Artimedorus in
Julius Caesar
(70, Stuart Burge); as Mycroft in
The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes
(70, Billy Wilder);
The House That Dripped Blood
(70, Peter Duffell).

There is more, much more, but really you could invent the titles yourself. When Lee wrote his autobiography in 1977, what was it called?
Tall, Dark and Gruesome
. He was Lord Summerisle in
The Wicker Man
(73, Robin Hardy). He played Rochefort in Dick Lester’s two Musketeer films. He was James Bond’s villain in
The Man with the Golden Gun
(74, Guy Hamilton)—face it, he could just as easily have been Bond. And he has been seen recently in
Police Academy VII—Mission to Moscow
(94, Alan Metter); as Rameses in the TV
Moses
(96, Roger Young); as Tiresias in
The Odyssey
(97, Andrei Konchalovsky); as
Jinnah
(98, Jamil Dehlavi); in
Sleepy Hollow
(99, Tim Burton);
Gormenghast
(00, Andy Wilson); outstanding as Saruman in
Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring
(01, Peter Jackson); and very cool as Count Dooku in
Star Wars: Episode II, Attack of the Clones
(02, George Lucas);
The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers
(02, Jackson);
Graduation Day
(03, Matt A. Cade);
The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King
(03, Jackson).

He was in
Crimson Rivers II
(04, Olivier Dahan);
Greyfriars Bobby
(05, John Henderson);
Star Wars III: Revenge of the Sith
(05, Lucas);
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory
(05, Tim Burton);
The Golden Compass
(07, Chris Weitz);
The Heavy
(08, Marcus Warren);
Boogie Woogie
(09, Duncan Ward);
Glorious 39
(09, Stephen Poliakoff).

He was knighted in 2009.

Spike Lee
(Shelton Jackson Lee), b. Atlanta, Georgia, 1956
1982:
Joe’s Bed-Stuy Barbershop: We Cut Heads
(s). 1986:
She’s Gotta Have It
. 1988:
School Daze
. 1989:
Do the Right Thing
. 1990:
Mo’ Better Blues
. 1991:
Jungle Fever
. 1992:
Malcolm X
. 1994:
Crooklyn
. 1995:
Clockers
. 1996:
Girl 6; Get on the Bus
. 1997:
4 Little Girls
(d). 1998:
He Got Game; Freak
(TV). 1999:
Summer of Sam
. 2000:
The Original Kings of Comedy
(d);
Bamboozled
. 2001:
A Huey P. Newton Story
(TV);
Come Rain or Come Shine
(d);
Jim Brown All American
(d). 2002: “We Wuz Robbed,” episode from
Ten Minutes Older: The Trumpet; 25th Hour
. 2003:
S.F.C
. (TV). 2004:
She Hate Me
. 2006:
Inside Man; When the Levees Broke
(d.). 2008:
Miracle at St. Anna
. 2009:
Passing Strange
(TV);
Kobe Doin’ Work
(TV).

I didn’t approach
Malcolm X
with high hopes. Ten minutes before it began, I had just gotten out of
A Few Good Men
, a rousingly meretricious picture, empty of ideas or purpose, but a lot of fun. I knew how long
Malcolm X
was going to be. The theatre was unheated, which surely indicated the steep decline in the movie’s audience after its “event” opening. More than all of that, I was not a Spike Lee fan. His unsmiling entrepreneur pose and his inclination to have no one not black write about
Malcolm X
were allied in my mind with his limits as a director. The early films by Lee seem to me opportunistic, stylistically uncertain, naïve yet reckless (
Do the Right Thing). Jungle Fever
, I felt, failed to deal with the real human story and the mixed motives of interracial love or sex. I could see how tough it was to be a black movie director, without having to assume the profile of Black Movie Director. But I didn’t always admire Lee’s responses to the difficulty, or his unblinking insistence that a white had no right to say that, or believe it. It was so cold in the theater, and
Malcolm X
reached so far into the evening.

It is a movie that needs its three-plus hours, because it concerns change and needs to feel gradual.
Malcolm X
is also the work of a man Lee had hitherto lacked the confidence to reveal. It is measured, careful, a little distant even; it has largely set aside fireworks; and it is almost as if, in studying Malcolm, Lee has himself developed. There was an attempt in
Do the Right Thing
to show that everyone had his or her reasons, but it was thwarted by the agitprop scenario. In
Malcolm X
, however, the enlargement of Malcolm’s own perspectives becomes the structure of the film—without any need to treat him as Helen Keller or Rocky Balboa. The melodrama was gone.

It is no small thing for an American movie to lead its audiences into an unfamiliar religion, and then out of it, without ever lapsing into zealotry or scorn. Yet
Malcolm X
is a movie about the need for religion, or moral steadfastness; and as its central character complicates his thinking, so he distills his behavior, and the flashy “Red”-ism of the first half settles into Denzel Washington’s extraordinary, meditative performance.

One might argue that Lee’s prior films were his “Red” period, with one eye on art, another on “rep,” and a third on how to make the next film. That is one eye too many already, yet it puts Lee in the context of every other moviemaker—what do I do next? how do I get to do it? and how do I make it at least 50 percent mine?

Lee’s Malcolm battles through many kinds of fierceness to a kind of liberal humanism. If Lee has himself made that journey—and in the movie it does feel achieved—then he might want to try
Jungle Fever
again, or do a movie, or two or three, with white material, or stories that do not depend upon just one color. In which case, his continued interest in style, his verve with actors, his ear and his eye could be the basis for an extraordinary career.
Malcolm X
makes serious demands on its audiences—but graver ones still on Lee.

The great thing about Lee is that he has not tired or faltered. The question mark still hangs over the degree of his talent. So he has been a growing presence, producing such films as
Tales from the Hood
(95, Rusty Cundieff);
New Jersey Drive
(95, Nick Gomez);
The Best Man
(99, Malcolm D. Lee);
Love & Basketball
(00, Gina Prince) and
3 A.M
. (01, Lee Davis). But, in truth, none of those films is remarkable, or as daring and accomplished, as
Do the Right Thing
.

As a director, too, Lee has not matched his own best work.
Clockers
is a good picture of the drugs in the city, but more dogged than brilliant.
Bamboozled
—an attempt at satire—fell rather flat. Best of all was
Summer of Sam
, a great film in the making, but one that gave away its own control to lots of raw talk, improvs for their own sake, a settling for urban atmosphere, and a tough treatment of women. But Lee is doing so much, and he is still only in his midforties. He is capable, I think, of a great film about New York—and it might be better if he saw that as his subject and let the responsibility of being the best black director around look after itself.

Michel Legrand
, b. Paris, 1932
Consider the very start of this film. It is a grey early morning in Nice—the Promenade des Anglais, I think. A blonde woman in a white suit is walking aimlessly toward the camera; somehow, we know she has been up all night. Then, the camera begins to speed away from her and as it does so its movement is made more sweeping by an intense, rolling piano—like a flood—made of descending notes. The shot travels way ahead of the woman until she is only a speck in the dawn, but the roiling, rolling music has given her (and us) a sense of exhilaration and frenzy. You could easily say that the form of the music is imitating the roulette wheel, but its feeling of something endless by spinning is far more intense than a mere “interest” in gambling. No, the circulation of the wheel and the whirl of the music are akin. We know the woman; we share her ups and downs. We see that no one really has a choice about being committed to gambling—a halfhearted gamble is a very sad thing, sadder than losing. The film is
La Baie des Anges
(63, Jacques Demy). The woman is Jeanne Moreau. The music is by Michel Legrand. It is passionate; it is the life force; and it is quite mad.

So you can propose that this opening is very “beautiful,” but you also have to allow that it is giddy and dangerous. The sum total of film’s effects can summon us to action—to violence, to love, to death, to taking a chance. If solemn guardians of our order elected to say that
La Baie des Anges
was a film that encouraged gambling (A BAD THING), and in great part because of the music, I could not deny the charge. But winning and its glory have always been the greatest inducement to joining the tables—and no one, not even in Las Vegas (the factory for the fantasy) has managed to eliminate all thought of winning. That is why Las Vegas looks so absurd!

Michel Legrand is a maestro and a genius. He has been a jazz musician worthy of playing with the masters. He has won countless awards—including Oscars for “The Windmills of Your Mind” from
The Thomas Crown Affair
(68, Norman Jewison); the score for
Yentl
(83, Barbra Streisand); and the score for
Summer of ’42
(71, Robert Mulligan). Are those Oscars adequate or appropriate? No, of course not. The suite of songs (lyrics by Alan and Marilyn Bergman) for
Yentl
is exquisite and perfectly sung by Streisand. But even a modest list of Legrand’s scores for film will offer finer things—including the score for
La Baie des Anges
. I have chosen the Demy film—and not the most famous Demy film on which Legrand worked—inasmuch as the argument can be made that the music there is an emotional beast sweeping away order, good sense, and decency. But what do we have cinema for? It is a wild animal that hears the music the way wolves rally to their own howling.

As Michel Legrand might tell you, he deserves a book and albums of recordings—he is not a modest man, but he has no reason to be when madness has him in its grip:
Lola
(61, Jacques Demy);
Une Femme Est une Femme
(61, Jean-Luc Godard);
Cléo de 5 à 7
(61, Agnès Varda);
Eva
(62, Joseph Losey);
Vivre Sa Vie
(62, Godard);
Le Joli Mai
(63, Chris Marker and Pierre Lhomme);
Les Parapluies de Cherbourg
(64, Demy)—where all the dialogue is sung;
Bande à Part
(64, Godard);
Les Demoiselles de Rochefort
(67, Demy);
The GoBetween
(70, Losey);
Peau d’Âne
(70, Demy);
F for Fake
(73, Orson Welles);
Atlantic City
(80, Louis Malle);
Trois Places pour le 26
(88, Demy).

In Truffaut’s
Tirez sur le Pianiste
, there is a moment when a character opens a music box and it plays a fragment of the waltz from
Lola Montes
. You either get it or you don’t. I wish whenever this book is opened, the spine played the opening piano from
La Baie des Anges
. Knopf?

Ernest Lehman
(1915–2005), b. New York
Around the age of sixty, Ernest Lehman seemed to have stopped doing scripts—and that’s our loss. Of course, he may have been writing away (like Billy Wilder) on screenplays that are smart, funny, and beautifully constructed, only to be told that no one has the patience for movies like that any more and, anyway, what does he know about what kids want? So the kids are deprived, too, and everyone misses Lehman’s subtle way of getting us to grow up.

He went to City College in New York, and then he worked for a while for a show business publicity agency. That’s where he saw and heard the world of
Sweet Smell of Success
(57, Alexander Mackendrick), which began life as a novella by Lehman and grew eventually into a screenplay where he shared credit with Clifford Odets. The novella and other short stories won offers from Hollywood—one story sold in the late forties and became
The Inside Story
(48, Allan Dwan).

Lehman was in Hollywood by the early fifties, where John Houseman found him “prickly but stimulating,” loved his work, and hired him for
Executive Suite
(54, Robert Wise). Next, he had a baptism of fire-by-collaboration, working with Billy Wilder on
Sabrina
(54). For
The King and I
(56, Walter Lang), he displayed a very different talent, that of taking a war-horse from one medium and making it work in another. The script for
Somebody Up There Likes Me
(56, Wise) is Lehman’s favorite, because he felt he had got at things left unsaid in boxer Rocky Graziano’s autobiography.