The New Biographical Dictionary of Film: Completely Updated and Expanded (25 page)

She is close to automatic casting in grand-old-lady roles (plus women in high office), which is fine, yet a loss—for she has the gusto for high comedy still:
Point of No Return
(93, John Badham);
Mr. Jones
(93, Mike Figgis);
The Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All
(94, Ken Cameron); doing Paddy Chayefsky in
The Mother
(94, Simon Curtis);
How to Make an American Quilt
(95, Jocelyn Moorhouse);
Home for the Holidays
(95, Jodie Foster);
Dracula: Dead and Loving It
(95, Brooks);
The Sunchaser
(96, Michael Cimino);
Homecoming
(96, Mark Jean);
G.I. Jane
(97, Ridley Scott);
Critical Care
(97, Lumet);
Great Expectations
(98, Alfonso Cuaron);
Deep in My Heart
(99, Anita W. Addison);
Keeping the Faith
(00, Edward Norton);
Up at the Villa
(00, Philip Haas);
In Search of Peace
(00, Richard Trank);
Haven
(01, John Gray);
Heartbreakers
(01, David Mirkin); the Contessa, on TV, in
The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone
(03, Robert Allan Ackerman).

Antonio Banderas
(Jose Antonio Domínguez Banderas), b. Malaga, Spain, 1960
Only a little over fifty, Banderas the actor has around fifty films to his credit—and that training shows. He is a very competent actor, handsome, yet happy to make fun of himself—which may speak to his upbringing as part of the Pedro Almodóvar circle. Come to that, being married to Melanie Griffith may bring its own ironies. Still, they seem wild about each other, and Banderas did a good job directing her in the entertaining
Crazy in Alabama
(99). He was also the producer of
The White River Kid
(99), so it won’t be a surprise if he branches out as he becomes our best replacement for Cesar Romero. America is newly conscious of its growing Hispanic audience, and Banderas—a real Spaniard—might be the man to take advantage of it. He could play Desi Arnaz a treat.

He worked very hard in Spain for ten years:
Labyrinth of Passion
(82, Almodóvar);
El Señor Galíndez
(83, Rodolfo Kuhn);
Los Zancos
(84, Carlos Saura);
La Corte de Faraón
(85, José Luis García Sánchez);
Matador
(86, Almodóvar);
27 Horas
(86, Montxo Armendáriz);
Delirios de
Amor
(86, Cristina Andreu and Luis Eduardo Aute);
Law of Desire
(87, Almodóvar);
El Placer de Matar
(87, Félix Rotaeta);
El Acto
(87, Héctor Faver);
Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown
(88, Almodóvar);
Bâton Rouge
(88, Rafael Moleón);
Bajarse al Moro
(88, Fernando Colomo);
La Blanca Paloma
(89, Juan Miñón);
Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down!
(90, Almodóvar);
Contra el Viento
(90, Francisco Periñán);
Madonna: Truth or Dare
(91, Alek Keshishian);
Terra Nova
(91, Calogero Salvo);
Cuentos de Borges I
(91, Héctor Olivera and Gerardo Vera).

His breakthrough in America came in
The Mambo Kings
(92, Arne Glimcher), and since then he has worked far more in the U.S. than in Europe:
¡Dispara!
(93, Saura);
The House of the Spirits
(93, Bille August);
Philadelphia
(93, Jonathan Demme); as Mussolini in
Il Giovane Mussolini
(93, Gianluigi Calderone);
Of Love and Shadows
(95, Betty Kaplan); Armand in
Interview with the Vampire
(94, Neil Jordan);
Miami Rhapsody
(95, David Frankel);
Four Rooms
(95, Robert Rodriguez); with Stallone in
Assassins
(95, Richard Donner);
Never Talk to Strangers
(95, Peter Hall);
Desperado
(95, Rodriguez); with Melanie in
Two Much
(96, Fernando Trueba); as Ché Guevara in
Evita
(96, Alan Parker); a big hit in
The Mask of Zorro
(98, Martin Campbell);
The 13th Warrior
(99, John McTiernan); boxing in
Play It to the Bone
(99, Ron Shelton);
The Body
(00, Jonas McCord);
Spy Kids
(01, Rodriguez); with Angelina Jolie in
Original Sin
(01, Michael Cristofer); as Siqueiros in
Frida
(02, Julie Taymor);
Femme Fatale
(02, Brian De Palma). He was in
Spy Kids 2
(02, Rodriguez);
Ballistic: Ecks vs. Sever
(02, Wych Kaosayananda);
Imagining Argentina
(03, Christopher Hampton);
Once Upon a Time in Mexico
(03, Rodriguez); as Villa in
And Starring Pancho Villa as Himself
(03, Bruce Beresford);
Spy Kids 3-D: Game Over
(04, Rodriguez).

He has a great range now—doing Puss in Boots in the
Shrek
films; in the sequel
The Legend of Zorro
(05, Campbell);
Take the Lead
(06, Liz Friedlander);
Bordertown
(07, Gregory Nava);
My Mom’s New Boyfriend
(08, George Gallo);
The Other Man
(09, Richard Eyre);
The Code
(09, Mimi Leder).

Tallulah Bankhead
(1903–68), b. Huntsville, Alabama
My admiration for Alfred Hitchcock cannot prevent the admission that
Lifeboat
(44) is a silly film from a crazy idea. But it has a lunatic justness in the way it uses Tallulah Bankhead, one of those very famous players who never adapted to the movies. By 1944, she and the movies had given one another up. Thus there is some of Hitch’s malicious irony in asking her to dominate a lifeboat adrift in the Twentieth Century–Fox studio tanks. Such fatuous eminence is plainly a challenge to the actress’s affected languor. To her credit, Tallulah remains damp but unaltered, allowing her bracelet to be used as pretty bait for nourishing fish. She ends by stealing the picture, underlining the film’s limitations and serenely steering it into camp. It shows the sort of self-mocking grandiloquence at which she might have excelled had Hollywood not chosen to cast her as the sultry man-eater she pretended to be. Very early in her career, she had been in a movie—
When Men Betray
(18, Ivan Abramson)—but she opted for the London stage during the 1920s and was called to Paramount only when sound seemed to beg for her famous drawl. The films she made there were banal and dogged, instead of nutty and irreverent:
The Cheat
(31, George Abbott);
Tarnished Lady
(31, George Cukor);
My Sin
(31, Abbott);
Devil and the Deep
(32, Marion Gering); and
Thunder Below
(32, Richard Wallace). In all these, she was required to be the stirred point of action in romantic triangles. Unconvinced, she did not stay in place. Paramount let her go to MGM for
Faithless
(32, Harry Beaumont), whereupon she bounced back to the theatre. (Her best part was Regina Giddens in
The Little Foxes
. Bette Davis—who did the film—said she never got over seeing Tallulah on stage.) After
Lifeboat
, Fox cast her in
A Royal Scandal
(45, Otto Preminger and Ernst Lubitsch). But she dropped away again and appeared briefly in
Main Street to Broadway
(52, Tay Garnett) and more extensively in a dreadful British horror film,
Fanatic
(65, Silvio Narizzano), a last gesture toward neglected extravagance.

Travis Banton
(1894–1958), b. Waco, Texas
Travis Banton never won, or was nominated for, an Oscar, and that was because the category of costume design wasn’t created by the Academy until 1948, when the award went to Roger Furse for
Hamlet
. Of course, in the same year, Banton (almost certainly alcoholic by then) got one of his last credits, for the clothes in
Letter from an Unknown Woman
(Max Ophüls). Very little works out perfectly. But try finding a character dressed by Banton who isn’t “right.”

Banton was one of a small band of men and women who realized that clothes might photograph at least as well as skin—and that was the threshold to the paradise where the two were mixed together. He did a few silent pictures, but it is crucially the coming of sound that marks the arrival of couture in movies. From this, we should deduce that clothing makes noises; you can hear a great dress as the girl passes by. Moreover, clothing—or the matching of things—is on the way to the classic two-shots of American cinema: think of Herbert Marshall in a black tuxedo and Kay Francis in a black dress side by side in
Trouble in Paradise
(32, Ernst Lubitsch). Of course, there’s a bigger, more climactic urge to it all. See how, as America meets poverty in a big way (they called it the Depression), Banton and others advised better dress to knock its impoverished eyes out.

No one directed such a policy, but in hindsight Hollywood’s decision to have the dream stay rich and stylishly dressed is vital. It goes with the rooms larger than life and the cult of lovely people. It reaches its apogee, I suppose—the height of careless rapture—in the Deco look, the suave clothes and the blithe unreality of the Rogers-Astaire musicals. But the great era of Paramount, convinced that a wardrobe budget big enough to keep Waco, Texas, well fed for six months, is a close second. Think of Carole Lombard’s great dress at the dump in
My Man Godfrey
(36, Gregory La Cava), and you’re there—and that dress is Travis Banton.

He studied at Columbia and the Art Students League and he was a student of the celebrated designer Robert Kalloch, and worked for the house of Madame Frances. It was while there, in 1919, that he designed a wedding dress for Mary Pickford when she married Douglas Fairbanks. In 1924 Banton was hired by Paramount to do
The Dressmaker from Paris
(Paul Bern). He stayed and he found he loved it. Until he started serious drinking, he was a very fast worker not too interested in getting his hands on the female talent. He also bargained with the studio for a budget that let him go to Paris every year for the new season—and thus he began the fertile links between the movies and clothes ordinary(!) people could buy.

You may say he was lucky to be at Paramount in the age of Lubitsch, Sternberg, and Mitchell Leisen (himself a clothes designer). But the studio was lucky to have him and to trust his faith in clothes. The icon of every thin dress and a very thin woman inside it lives on, and as she turns the dress whispers—it is a height of modern eroticism. Banton could go as wild as Sternberg wanted, but Park Avenue is his natural style—if only Park Avenue would remember it.

Until 1938, he ran Costume at Paramount—hiring Edith Head as a principal assistant. But it was Banton who did these films (and many more):
The Wild Party
(29, Dorothy Arzner)—in fact, Clara Bow was his most disobedient model, often thinking to “improve” his work with belts, buckles, bows, and decoration;
The Canary Murder Case
(29, Malcolm St. Clair and Frank Tuttle);
Morocco
(30, Josef von Sternberg);
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
(31, Rouben Mamoulian);
Dishonored
(31, Sternberg);
Shanghai Express
(32, Sternberg)—suppose she had a veil?;
Blonde Venus
(32, Sternberg);
Love Me Tonight
(32, Mamoulian);
One Hour with You
(32, Lubitsch and George Cukor);
A Farewell to Arms
(32, Frank Borzage);
Design for Living
(33, Lubitsch);
Belle of the Nineties
(34, Leo McCarey);
The Scarlet Empress
(34, Sternberg);
The Devil Is a Woman
(35, Sternberg);
Hands Across the Table
(35, Mitchell Leisen);
Desire
(36, Borzage);
Easy Living
(37, Leisen);
Angel
(37, Lubitsch);
Intermezzo
(39, Gregory Ratoff);
Made for Each Other
(39, John Cromwell).

Of course, Banton concentrated on women, but he did not neglect men—think of Gary Cooper’s raffish dress in
The General Died at Dawn
(36, Lewis Milestone) and the uniforms in
The Lives of a Bengal Lancer
(35, Henry Hathaway).

But Banton was eased out of Paramount in 1938 and he went over to Fox—simply not the same deal:
The Return of Frank James
(40, Fritz Lang) offers so much less opportunity. But he did
Blood and Sand
(41, Mamoulian);
Man Hunt
(41, Lang); and
Scarlet Street
(45, Lang), which is much more interesting. After this he went to Universal and he got credits on
A Double Life
(47, Cukor) and
The Paradine Case
(48, Alfred Hitchcock). But Miss Head was now the doyenne of his art and craft, gathering Oscars and giving a more middle-class look to Audrey Hepburn and Grace Kelly. If Travis Banton had done
Rear Window
, Kelly would have worn a cocktail dress or a nightdress in every scene.

Theda Bara
(Theodosia Goodman) (1890–1955), b. Cincinnati, Ohio
The anagrammatic connection between Theda Bara and Arab Death so often evoked in awed tones is today like an archaeological find, proving only that we live in a different culture. But if Theda Bara is no longer perceived as sexy, there is at least an historical significance attached to her as securely as the flower-bloom bra she wore as
Cleopatra
(17, Gordon Edwards): she was the first woman offered commercially, in movies, as an object of sexual fantasy. In addition, the Fox Film Company was built on her dithery sultriness. For in 1914, William Fox bought the stage play
A Fool There Was
, and its director, Frank Powell, discovered Theodosia to play the vamp—“the woman who did not care.” The success of the film encouraged Fox to form his company. He launched the first major publicity promotion for Bara and worked her hard for a few years in “Theda Bara Superproductions.” She made over thirty-five films, most of them directed by Edwards, before rivals overtook her: among others,
Lady Audley’s Secret
(15);
Carmen
(15);
The Serpent
(16);
The Eternal Sappho
(16);
East Lynne
(16);
Under Two Flags
(16);
Romeo and Juliet
(16);
The Vixen
(16);
The Tiger Woman
(17);
Camille
(17);
Madame Dubarry
(18);
The Soul of Buddha
(18);
When a Woman Sins
(18);
Salome
(18);
The She Devil
(18);
When Men Desire
(19);
The Siren’s Song
(19); and
A Woman
There Was
(19). A new director, Charles Brabin, could not save her from a disastrous Boucicault adaptation,
Kathleen Mavourneen
(19), and after
The Lure of Ambition
(19), Fox dropped her. She married Brabin and waited for a comeback. When it came, it was a brief pastiche of her former allure:
Unchastened Woman
(25, James Young) and
Madame Mystery
(26, Richard Wallace and Stan Laurel).