The New Biographical Dictionary of Film: Completely Updated and Expanded (246 page)

But the reality is, as always, spelled out in the director’s style. Lelouch works like a still photographer for a glossy magazine. His effects are decorative, trite, and invariably the trick of a lens rather than an observed interaction of people. Lelouch persistently films in telephoto: this leads to soulful close-ups of people cut off from their environment. The background is unnaturally flat, foreground detail is out of focus. There is an accumulating, claustrophobic sterility in his films because the characters have no three-dimensional existence. They live only in the mind’s maudlin telephoto, forever gazing sadly at their self-pity.

Just as fashion photographs try to make us want clothes, Lelouch’s telephoto intimacy is intended to play on our most vicarious emotional responses. His world has already been taken over by the forces of devitalization: the sickly theme songs swan on; nothing detracts from the glamour of rational packaging; no piece of human behavior overthrows romantic cliché. And all the while, there is the ghostly intimation of greater significance so that, in
Vivre pour Vivre
, Yves Montand’s private life is supposedly paralleled by his involvement as a reporter in the world’s troublespots. Lelouch announces his concern for suffering with the offensive tact of a politician.

Lelouch works on, though he has not found the right mix of romance and advertising style to repeat the success of
A Man and a Woman
. His version of
Les Misérables
starred Jean-Paul Belmondo as Valjean and helped to revive that actor’s career.
And Now … Ladies and Gentleman
promised to be something rather more adventurous, with Jeremy Irons at its center.

Jack Lemmon
(John Uhler Lemmon III) (1925–2001), b. Boston, Massachusetts
Wasn’t it Julia Child who advised that a little lemon goes a long way? I have to confess that sometimes one squeeze of Lemmon is enough to set my teeth on edge. A whole wedge might turn Shirley Temple into Margaret Wycherly. There’s no doubt but that, as a younger actor, Lemmon could be very funny. He is hugely skilled, meticulous, and yet—it seems to me—an abject, ingratiating parody of himself. Long ago, worry set in, the detail of his work turned fussy, nagging, and anal; his mannerisms are now like a miser’s coins. There have been a few films—like
Glengarry Glen Ross
(92, James Foley)—that used this demented worryguts as necessary material. And Lemmon is very good in that film. But far too often, he stops his own roles and starts preaching anxiety, leading everything away from life and into the jitters. Thus the roles become Lemmons—or lemons: something that ought to be recalled or scrapped. Harsh words—I can picture Lemmon’s friction and anguish—but I can’t bear to see or hear that mannered regret any more.

Educated at Harvard, he worked on radio, in stock, and TV before his film debut in George Cukor’s
It Should Happen to You
(54). He won a supporting Oscar as Ensign Pulver in
Mister Roberts
(55, Mervyn Le Roy and John Ford), but even there the character was edging toward shtick and fast burn anxiety. He tried adventure and the West, in
Fire Down Below
(57, Robert Parrish) and
Cowboy
(58, Delmer Daves), but he was ill at ease in anything except a slightly ill-fitting city suit.

He preferred to work in supporting parts in generally East Coast–oriented comedies:
Three for the Show
(53, H. C. Potter);
Phffft
(54, Mark Robson); Richard Quine’s
My Sister Eileen
(55); and Dick Powell’s
You Can’t Run Away From It
(56). Preferring a few select directors, Lemmon enhanced his reputation in three more Quine movies: the hilarious
Operation Madball
(57); as a warlock in
Bell, Book and Candle
(58); with Doris Day in the more ponderous
It Happened to Jane
(59). At this stage, Lemmon was a rather fierce comic juvenile, ravenous for wit and intrigue. The part that changed him was in Billy Wilder’s
Some Like It Hot
(59), an adventure in drag that seems to have opened up the seas of neuroses to Lemmon. Lemmon, above all, recognized how the 1920s setting, and the ostensible playfulness of the story, had introduced a more contemporary character: the socialized homosexual.

He became increasingly preoccupied by mannerism, worry, and effeminacy and agonized by the sort of moral compromise undergone by C. C. Baxter in Wilder’s
The Apartment
(60). That character was central to American cinema of the 1960s and to a sort of honesty that quickly turned into solemnity and sentimentality when handled with less than rage or humor. Lemmon was the house actor now for such smart Broadway-based comedies, the world of dramatist Neil Simon, of the Nichols/May duologues overheard on a psychiatrist’s couch. That he saw himself in this role was evident in the way he kept himself for certain directors: for Quine—
The Notorious Landlady
(62) and
How to Murder Your Wife
(65); for Blake Edwards
—Days of Wine and Roses
(63), in which he is deeply harrowing, and
The Great Race
(65); for Wilder
—Irma La Douce
(63),
The Fortune Cookie
(66),
Avanti!
(72), and
The Front Page
(74); and for David Swift
—Under the Yum Yum Tree
(64) and
Good Neighbor Sam
(64).

Nothing detracts from the self-lacerating irony and precision of most of these performances except the feeling that, despite repeated attempts, no blood flows. Lemmon did permit himself new directors but at the same time he took on lesser material in which the sameness of his work grew more obvious. Thus, although he was as good as ever in Gene Saks’s
The Odd Couple
(68);
Luv
(67, Clive Donner);
The April Fools
(69, Stuart Rosenberg);
The Out-of-Towners
(70, Arthur Hiller);
The War Between Men and Women
(72, Melville Shavelson); and won the best actor Oscar in
Save the Tiger
(72, John G. Avildsen); they are heavy with the tramp of marking time. It seemed a natural development that Lemmon should become a director, and his first film,
Kotch
(71), though sharing his actor’s neurosis and dependent on the very technical acting of Walter Matthau, was an interesting debut.

The Prisoner of Second Avenue
(75, Melvin Frank) was one more step in the same direction—from Neil Simon again, about a middle-aged man, made redundant, unhappy, and insecure. No one could do it as well as Lemmon; but who else could have endured the monotony of doing it so often? He seemed increasingly at a loss with
Alex & the Gypsy
(76, John Korty) and the pilot in
Airport ’77
(77, Jerry Jameson). But he had a hit in
China Syndrome
(79, James Bridges), no matter that its contrived melodrama did no more than put his nervous twitching in a novel setting.

For television, in 1975, he had played Archie Rice in
The Entertainer
(Lemmon says this was at the urging of Laurence Olivier—which may just show Olivier’s cunning). Lemmon did
Tribute
(80, Bob Clark);
Buddy Buddy
(81, Wilder);
Missing
(82, Costa-Gavras);
Mass Appeal
(84, Glenn Jordan);
Macaroni
(85, Ettore Scola); and
That’s Life!
(86, Edwards).

He was slipping, and who could bear to see Lemmon’s anxiety in decline? But he rallied: he was a respectable Tyrone in
Long Day’s Journey
Into Night
(87, Jonathan Miller) on TV; and good again as Governor John Staton in TV’s The
Murder of Mary Phagan
(88, Billy Hale);
Dad
(89, Gary David Goldberg); one of the better turns in
JFK
(91, Oliver Stone); briefly in
The Player
(92, Robert Altman);
Glengarry Glen Ross
(92, James Foley); the man who insists on delivering his own horror story in
Short Cuts
(93, Altman); and
Grumpy Old Men
(93, Donald Petrie).

There was no slackening in Lemmon’s last years:
The Grass Harp
(95, Charles Matthau);
Grumpier Old Men
(95, Howard Deutch); awful as a Nazi war criminal in
Getting Away with Murder
(96, Harvey Miller);
A Weekend in the Country
(96, Martin Bergmann);
My Fellow Americans
(96, Peter Segal); Marcellus in
Hamlet
(96, Kenneth Branagh); with Matthau again in
Out to Sea
(97, Martha Coolidge); the TV
12 Angry Men
(97, William Friedkin);
Puppies for Sale
(97, Ron Krauss);
The Long Way Home
(98, Glenn Jordan);
The Odd Couple II
(98, Deutch); on TV in
Inherit the Wind
(99, Daniel Petrie);
Tuesdays with Morrie
(99, Mick Jackson), which is either very moving or very unbearable, depending on your nature;
The Legend of Bagger Vance
(00, Robert Redford), where he is uncredited.

Paul Leni
(1885–1929), b. Stuttgart, Germany
1917:
Das Ratsel von Bangalor
(codirected with Alexander Antalffy). 1918:
Dornroschen
. 1919:
Die Platonische Ehe; Prinz Kuckuck
. 1920:
Fiesko; Patience; Die Verschworung zu Genua
. 1921:
Das Gespensterschiff; Die Hintertreppe
(codirected with Leopold Jessner);
Komodie der Leidenschaften; Das Tagebuch des Dr. Hartl
. 1924:
Das Wachsfigurenkabinett/Waxworks
. 1927:
The Cat and the Canary; The Chinese Parrot; The Man Who Laughs
. 1929:
The Last Warning
.

Leni was a painter, a set designer, and an art director before and after he became a director:
Das Panzergewolbe
(14, Joe May);
Die Geierwally
(21, E. A. Dupont);
Kinder der Finsternis
(21, Dupont);
Tragodie der Liebe
(23, May); and
Der Tanzer meiner Frau
(25, Alexander Korda). While his contribution to Expressionism is based chiefly on his visual sense, it is likely that his early death from blood poisoning lost us a first-class director.
Waxworks
and
The Cat and the Canary
are major items in the history of the horror film.

He had worked with both Max Reinhardt and Leopold Jessner in the theatre and he was art director on
Hintertreppe
—Lotte Eisner argues that the film might have profited if Leni had had greater control of the direction. Certainly,
Waxworks
is an advance, employing an overall pattern of design—in sets, grouping, and costume that is as effective an evocation of nightmare as
Caligari
. One of the three figures in that film was Ivan the Terrible (played by Conrad Veidt), and its influence on Eisenstein is clear.

Leni was a theorist, and in 1924 he wrote of using sets to transcend photographic reality. “For my film
Waxworks
I have tried to create sets so stylized that they evince no ideas of reality.… It is not extreme reality that the camera perceives, but the reality of the inner event, which is more profound, effective and moving than what we see through everyday eyes.”

It is remarkable that so lucid and self-conscious a director should have moved so easily to Carl Laemmle’s Universal studios. But
The Cat and the Canary
was a classic haunted house movie in which Leni’s overall visual design seemed just as complete and in which he had acquired new narrative urgency. In
The Man Who Laughs
he was reunited with Conrad Veidt, who played the man whose face has been set in a ghastly permanent smile.
The Last Warning
was another skillful manufacture of fear in a semi-Gothic interior—this time a theatre where a murder was once committed. It reaffirmed Leni’s preference for the atmosphere of menace, rather than the actual manifestation of horror.

Robert Z. Leonard
(1889–1968), b. Chicago
1916:
The Plow Girl
. 1917:
A Mormon Maid; Princess Virtue; Face Value
. 1918:
Her Body in Bond; The Bride’s Awakening; Danger, Go Slow; Modern Love
. 1919:
The Delicious Little Devil; The Big Little Person; The Scarlet Shadow; What Am I Bid?; The Way of a Woman; April Folly; The Miracle of Love
. 1920:
The Restless Sex
. 1921:
The Gilded Lily; Heedless Moths
. 1922:
Fascination; Peacock Alley; Broadway Rose
. 1923:
The French Doll; Jazzmania; Fashion Row
. 1924:
Love’s Wilderness; Circe the Enchantress; Mademoiselle Midnight
. 1925:
Cheaper to Marry; Bright Lights; Time, the Comedian
. 1926:
Dance Madness; The Waning Sex; Mademoiselle Modiste
. 1927:
The Demi-Bride; A Little Journey; Adam and Evil; Tea for Three
. 1928:
Baby Mine; The Cardboard Lover; A Lady of Chance
. 1929:
Marianne
. 1930:
In Gay Madrid; The Divorcee; Let Us Be Gay
. 1931:
The Bachelor Father; It’s a Wise Child; Five and Ten; Susan Lenox
. 1932:
Lovers Courageous; Strange Interlude
. 1933:
Peg o’ My Heart; Dancing Lady
. 1934:
Outcast Lady
. 1935:
After Office Hours; Escapade
. 1936:
The Great Ziegfeld; Piccadilly Jim
. 1937:
Maytime; The Firefly
. 1938:
The Girl of the Golden West
. 1939:
Broadway Serenade
. 1940:
New Moon; Pride and Prejudice; Third Finger, Left Hand
. 1941:
Ziegfeld Girl; When Ladies Meet
. 1942:
We Were Dancing; Stand by for Action
. 1943:
The Man from Down Under
. 1944:
Marriage Is a Private Affair
. 1945:
Weekend at the Waldorf
. 1946:
The Secret Heart
. 1947:
Cynthia
. 1948:
BF’s Daughter
. 1949:
The
Bribe; In the Good Old Summertime
. 1950:
Nancy Goes to Rio; Duchess of Idaho; Grounds for Marriage
. 1951:
Too Young to Kiss
. 1952:
Everything I Have Is Yours
. 1953:
The Clown; The Great Diamond Robbery
. 1954:
Her Twelve Men
. 1955:
The King’s Thief; La Donna piu Bella del Mondo/ Beautiful but Dangerous
. 1956:
Kelly and Me
.