The New Biographical Dictionary of Film: Completely Updated and Expanded (244 page)

As years pass, nothing dates in
Sweet Smell of Success:
the vision of ordinary corruption is still as fresh as a warm corpse. The only thing blurry in the film—the bond between Hunsecker and his kid sister—was always blurry. It is a terrific and important movie, with fabulous dialogue.

Lehman then did
North by Northwest
(59, Alfred Hitchcock), his only original script. No one ever found Hitchcock an easy master, but Lehman handled him very well, no matter how frustrated he felt. The end product is a sublime mix of farce, chase, and layered character—the sense of Grant’s advertising man as a kid who has to find maturity in a hurry is marvelously embedded in the headlong action. Only movies could make such gossamer seem as solid as American distance.

From the Terrace
(60, Mark Robson) was strictly routine; and
West Side Story
(61, Wise and Jerome Robbins) was a test case for not getting in the way.
The Prize
(63, Robson) is a very entertaining, very silly movie.
The Sound of Music
(65, Wise) is … well, you don’t need me to tell you that.

At this point, Lehman negotiated his hot record into the job of writer-producer and he deserves great credit for turning a potential menagerie into the very effective
Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
(66, Mike Nichols). He then wrote and produced the successful but hardly interesting
Hello, Dolly!
(69, Gene Kelly). Failure came in large and loud with
Portnoy’s Complaint
(72), which he also directed personally. In hindsight, Lehman admitted that he had missed the quality of Philip Roth’s book by selecting only a part of it for film. But how could that novel ever be filmed?

His only other credits are
Family Plot
(76, Hitchcock), a fascinating idea that doesn’t click; and
Black Sunday
(77, John Frankenheimer), a knockout setup that didn’t win an audience.

After that, Lehman worked as a novelist and was a columnist for
American Film
magazine in the late seventies. He was given an honorary Oscar in 2001.

Janet Leigh
(Jeanette Helen Morrison) (1927–2004), b. Merced, California
Despite looking like a studio-manufactured, circumspect blonde broad, she found herself in some adventurous films. After owing her discovery to Norma Shearer, she made her debut, in 1947, as the mountain girl in Roy Rowland’s
The Romance of Rosy Ridge
and was a full-bosomed ingenue for MGM in Zinnemann’s
Act of Violence
(48); as Meg in
Little Women
(49, Mervyn Le Roy); in
That Forsyte Woman
(49, Compton Bennett);
The Red Danube
(49, George Sidney);
Strictly Dishonorable
(51, Melvin Frank);
Angels in the Outfield
(51, Clarence Brown);
Scaramouche
(52, Sidney);
Walking My Baby Back Home
(53, Lloyd Bacon); and
My Sister Eileen
(55, Richard Quine).

Throughout the 1950s she was the barely characterized love interest in a series of costume and adventure pictures:
Prince Valiant
(54, Henry Hathaway) and, with her then husband, Tony Curtis, in
Houdini
(53, George Marshall),
The Black Shield of Falworth
(54, Rudolph Maté), and
The Vikings
(58, Richard Fleischer)—in which Tony helpfully ripped open her Saxon princess’s dress so that she could row more freely;
The Perfect Furlough
(58, Blake Edwards); and
Who Was That Lady?
(60, Sidney). She appeared unobtrusively in a disappointing assortment of films:
Bye Bye Birdie
(63, Sidney);
Wives and Lovers
(63, John Rich);
Harper
(66, Jack Smight); and
Three on a Couch
(66, Jerry Lewis). Only
An American Dream
(66, Robert Gist) really caught the eye.

It might be a routine career but for her incredulous presence in von Sternberg’s
Jet Pilot
(51); as a crop-haired girl among men in Anthony Mann’s
The Naked Spur
(53); as the menaced wife in Orson Welles’s
Touch of Evil
(58), throughout most of which she kept a coat draped over a broken arm; as the girl met by chance on a train who saves Frank Sinatra’s sanity in
The Manchurian Candidate
(62, John Frankenheimer); and—imperishably—as Marion Crane in
Psycho
(60), a frustrated, hard-up secretary, stroked, hounded, and finally cut to pieces by Hitchcock’s attention in a shower cubicle, cabin 1, at a bypassed motel.

She retired effectively in 1980, having made a few films in the preceding years, mostly for television:
Murder at the World Series
(77, Andrew V. McLaglen);
Telethon
(77, David Lowell Rich);
Boardwalk
(79, Stephen Verona);
Mirror, Mirror
(79, Joanna Lee)—about plastic surgery; and
The Fog
(80, John Carpenter), where she played with Jamie Lee Curtis, her daughter by Tony Curtis. Then, later, she did
In My Sister’s Shadow
(97, Sandra Stein);
Halloween H20
(98, Steve Miner);
A Fate Totally Worse Than Death
(00, John T. Kretchmer).

Jennifer Jason Leigh
, b. Los Angeles, 1958
She is the daughter of actor Vic Morrow (1932–82), from
Blackboard Jungle
(55, Richard Brooks) and
Men in War
(57, Anthony Mann), and of actress-writer Barbara Turner, who acted in Robert Altman’s
Nightmare in Chicago
(64) and wrote
Petulia
(68, Richard Lester) for Altman. Patrick McGilligan’s biography of Altman,
Jumping Off the Cliff
, suggests that the relationship between Altman and Turner hastened the end of her marriage to Morrow. And then, nearly thirty years later, Leigh appears, brilliant (if a little too close to an audition set piece), as the dour phonesex provider in
Short Cuts
(93, Altman).

It’s natural to think that Leigh’s grim pout comes from Vic Morrow, one of the most steadily blocked Method actors. But to judge from photographs, she resembles her mother, too. Hers has been a tough career, working in many poor films, sometimes close to exploitation. As if from necessity, she has a long-suffering, wistful air that comes close to depravity or saintliness. She was a blindmute in
Eyes of a Stranger
(81, Ken Wiederhorn); catching the eye in
Fast Times at Ridgemont High
(82, Amy Heckerling);
Wrong Is Right
(82, Richard Brooks);
Easy Money
(83, James Signorelli);
Grandview, U.S.A
. (84, Randal Kleiser);
Flesh + Blood
(85, Paul Verhoeven);
The Hitcher
(86, Robert Harmon); a dead-eyed call girl in
The Men’s Club
(86, Peter Medak);
Sister, Sister
(87, Bill Condon);
Under Cover
(87, John Stockwell); and
Heart of Midnight
(88, Matthew Chapman).

She was very funny in
The Big Picture
(89, Christopher Guest); wan, working-class, and endlessly raped as Tralala in
Last Exit to Brooklyn
(89, Uli Edel); authentically dumb in
Miami Blues
(90, George Armitage); credibly a junkie in
Rush
(91, Lili Fini Zanuck); beguiling and creepy in
Single White Female
(92, Barbet Schroeder) in which her very quietness was sinister; tense, mannered, and even amateurish in
The Hudsucker Proxy
(94, Joel Coen); and Dorothy in
Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle
(94, Alan Rudolph).

As she approached forty, it was plain that she was too frowningly independent to notice that hurdle. She may not be ingratiating; she may come off stranger than some films require, but she is full of damaged history and shy ideas:
Dolores Claiborne
(95, Taylor Hackford);
Georgia
(95, Ulu Grosbard), written by her mother;
Bastard out of Carolina
(96, Anjelica Huston);
Washington Square
(97, Agniezska Holland);
A Thousand Acres
(97, Jocelyn Moorhouse);
eXistenZ
(99, David Cronenberg). Then, in 2001, with actor Alan Cumming, she codirected a very nice, sour inside-Hollywood picture,
The Anniversary Party
, a further, welcome sign of Altman’s touch.

She was in
The Quickie
(01, Sergei Bodrov);
Crossed Over
(02, Bobby Roth); completely wasted in
Road to Perdition
(02, Sam Mendes);
In the Cut
(03, Jane Campion);
The Machinist
(04, Brad Anderson);
Palindromes
(04, Todd Solondz);
The Jacket
(05, John Maybury);
Margot at the Wedding
(07, Noah Baumbach, her husband);
Synecdoche, New York
(08, Charlie Kaufman).

Mike Leigh
, b. Salford, England, 1943
1972:
Bleak Moments
. 1975:
Nuts in May
(TV). 1977:
Abigail’s Party
(TV). 1980:
Grown Ups
(TV). 1981:
Home Sweet Home
(TV). 1983:
Meantime
(TV). 1984:
Four Days in July
(TV). 1987:
The Short and Curlies
(s). 1988:
High Hopes
. 1991:
Life Is Sweet
. 1993:
Naked
. 1996:
Secrets & Lies
. 1997:
Career Girls
. 1999:
Topsy-Turvy
. 2002:
All or Nothing
. 2004:
Vera Drake
. 2008:
Happy-Go-Lucky
. 2010:
Another Year
.

Leigh was a doctor’s son, raised in a working-class area of Manchester. His special territory is the underclass, of undereducated, often unemployed people. Yet, just as he is a sharp observer of a real society, Leigh is also a play-maker, addicted to actorly recreations of the underclass. He is sometimes described as a social realist, yet I’m not sure that he isn’t just as much a rapt observer of the process of acting. And it is in the ornate, very funny details of masquerade that Leigh may come dangerously close to a patronizing attitude to the people in his films.

Leigh went to the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, the most celebrated acting school in Britain. He found there an undue emphasis on technique at the expense of reality. He moved away, to art school and the London Film School, with his chief goal being to make films about ordinary existence in which the quality of the acting was so given over to the characters (rather than the actors’ reputations) that the results seemed documentary.

He worked in theatre first, and in 1970 he turned a play,
Bleak Moments
, into his feature film debut. Since then he has worked in television and theatre, on plays that he devises and directs, which emerge from a process of improvisation and search by Leigh and his actors. He selects actors for his group out of an instinct that sees ability, a sense of reality, objectivity, and a distinct lack of movie glamour. Leigh then sits down with each actor alone. He asks him or her to compile a list of people the actor knows. They sort through the list and find a few about whom Leigh begins to question the actor, until a kind of gradual natural “casting,” or suggestion, has been achieved.

He then brings the group of actors (or people) together, and asks, what happens if these people meet? Thereafter, in group work (inadequately called rehearsal), they move toward a play.

If that sounds too free or disordered, see the films. As a camera director, Leigh maintains a detached, medical watchfulness that is more caring and demanding than it seems at first, and that has reasonably been compared to the sensibility of Ozu. More than that, “scripts” arrived at by means of group interaction close to the flux of life still possess flights of talk that are hilarious, poignant, and so wordy that, at one moment in
Grown Ups
, a character says “A handbag!” and we suddenly see how close this inspired spontaneity has come to Oscar Wilde, Harold Pinter, and Joe Orton.

Leigh has an obsessive ear for the rhythms of small talk, and he is very good at getting a certain kind of monotone English humor, of deprecation masked as irony. But he loves the strange lilt of it so much, he is sometimes carried away, or carried beyond the strict realism of character. His films are full of delicious performances—his wife, Alison Steadman, Lesley Manville, Philip Davis, Timothy Spaull, Tim Roth, Jim Broadbent, Jane Horrocks. And some of the films are superbly satisfying, comic, and touching:
Meantime
and
High Hopes
, most notably. But the line between the grimly real and the elegantly farcical is fine and perilous, and sometimes we feel we are seeing not so much life as “something by Mike Leigh.” There’s nothing wrong with that, and much that is good. But there’s also a hint of false pretenses, and a danger of the underclass being condescended to.

Naked
was a big advance: it is the film in which real pain breaks through, along with Leigh’s political anger. Suddenly it was easier to see how far the high comedy of low manners had been masking Leigh’s distress with modern England.

Secrets & Lies
was classic Leigh, and his biggest hit yet.
Career Girls
relied on exceptional performances from Katrin Cartlidge and Lynda Steadman. But
Topsy-Turvy
was a big departure—into fond period reconstruction and the world of Gilbert and Sullivan. For me, the film was too slow, but no one could deny the courage of so much fresh thinking, and it leaves one wondering what next? Will Leigh pick up the tradition of James Ivory, or is he about to open up English history?

Vivien Leigh
(Vivian Mary Hartley) (1913–1967), b. Darjeeling, India
It was a Saturday evening, December 10, 1938, the first day of shooting on
Gone With the Wind
. On the forty-acre backlot behind the Selznick Studio in Culver City, the burning of Atlanta was to be staged. To that end, old sets—some as old as
King Kong
and
King of Kings
—were dressed up with Atlanta, 1864, facades. When all the burning was done, the real sets for
Gone With the Wind
could be built on the cleared ground, so that proper shooting might begin in the last week of January. Selznick as yet had no actress to play Scarlett O’Hara: the standins for the escape from the fire were told to keep their faces averted so that they could match with any chosen star—most likely Paulette Goddard at that stage.