The New Biographical Dictionary of Film: Completely Updated and Expanded (263 page)

The Rose Tattoo
had been written for Magnani by Tennessee Williams—he adored her and her courage in living beyond convention. The movie (55, Daniel Mann), for which she won the Oscar, feels like a set piece, and Magnani is not as tenderly supported by the production as she was by
The Golden Coach
. So we feel the force of the acting too much. In American films, Magnani could never find an ordinary context.

She was a nun in
Suor Latizia
(56, Camerini); with Anthony Quinn and so many sheep it feels as if someone is trying to get to sleep in
Wild Is the Wind
(58, George Cukor);
Nella Citta l’Inferno
(58, Renato Castellani), in prison with Giulietta Masina; in her best American film, opposite Brando,
The Fugitive Kind
(60, Sidney Lumet);
Risate di Gioia
(60, Mario Monicelli);
Mamma Roma
(62, Pier Paolo Pasolini);
Le Magot de Josefa
(64, Claude Autant-Lara);
Made in Italy
(65, Nanni Loy); with Quinn again in
The Secret of Santa Vittoria
(69 Stanley Kramer); and then a series for Italian TV, directed by Alfredo Giannetti—
1943: Un Incontro
(71);
L’Automobile
(71);
La Sciantosa
(71); …
Correra l’Anno di Grazia
(72)—before a brief final appearance in
Roma
(72, Fellini).

Tobey Maguire
, b. Santa Monica, California, 1975
Peter Parker in
Spider-Man
(02, Sam Raimi) may be the most deferential of modern superheroes—thanks to the dreamy, slightly archaic, if not Dickensian openness of Tobey Maguire. Beyond that—does that very openness sometimes verge on emptiness? Or is there a serene mystery about Maguire that promises to be unusually intriguing? He’s like a kid who isn’t especially bothered to act. And this quality seems to have troubled the powers behind
Spider-Man
just a little—did they want Maguire for the sequel? Well, finally, they decided they did (at more than four times his salary for the first film—$4 million becomes $17 million). But somehow I doubt that he’s going to turn into Tom Cruise. There’s a stubborn edge to Maguire beneath all the sweetness.

His young parents split up when he was only a boy and so he had a difficult upbringing. He was in pictures in his teens: uncredited in
The Wizard
(89, Todd Holland); in the TV series
Great Scott!
(92);
This Boy’s Life
(93, Michael Caton-Jones);
Spoils of War
(94, David Greene);
A Child’s Cry for Help
(94, Sandor Stern);
Revenge of the Red Baron
(94, Robert Gordon);
Seduced by Madness: The Diane Borchardt Story
(96, John Patterson);
Duke of Groove
(96, Griffin Dunne);
Joyride
(96, Quinton Peeples).

He attracted large attention in
The Ice Storm
(97, Ang Lee), a model of unsentimental pathos;
Deconstructing Harry
(97, Woody Allen);
Fear
and Loathing in Las Vegas
(98, Terry Gilliam);
Pleasantville
(98, Gary Ross); very Dickensian as Homer Wells in
The Cider House Rules
(99, Lasse Hallström); as the country boy who grows up in
Ride with the Devil
(99, Lee); excellent again as the young genius in
Wonder Boys
(00, Curtis Hanson);
Don’s Plum
(01, R. D. Robb and John Schindler); the jockey in
Seabiscuit
(03, Ross), suggesting more troubles than the film cares to explore. It’s notable that he was a producer on both
Seabiscuit
and Spike Lee’s
The 25th Hour
(02).

He was the franchise:
Spider-Man 2
(04, Raimi) and
3
(07, Raimi)—4 and 5 are announced. He also appeared in
The Good German
(06, Steven Soderbergh), looking like a kid who might get a million on a good day;
Brothers
(09, Jim Sheridan).

Dusan Makavejev
, b. Belgrade, Yugoslavia, 1932
1966:
Covek Nije Tijka/Man Is Not a Bird
. 1967:
Ljubavni Slucaj, Tragedlja Sluzbenice P. T. T./The Switchboard Operator
. 1968:
Nevinost bez Zastite/Innocence Unprotected
. 1971:
WR-Misterije Organizma/WR-Mysteries of the Organism
. 1974:
Sweet Movie; Wet Dreams
. 1981:
Montenegro
. 1985:
The Coca-Cola Kid
. 1988:
Manifesto
. 1993:
Gorilla Bathes at Noon
. 1994:
Rupa u Dusi/A Hole in the Soul
(d). 1996: an episode from
Danske Piger Viser Alt/Danish Girls Show Everything
.

Part of the impact of
WR
lies in the way Makavejev was able to compare American and Eastern European experience without seeming fanciful. It is easy to relate Makavejev to Godard or Norman Mailer, on the grounds of his leaping associative technique that goes from the human particular to the social and political pattern, and that also sees political behavior as a response to psychological and sexual frustration. But the enterprising width of Makavejev’s essayist cinema reminds me also of Chris Marker, partly because he works with the same nimbleness and not with the stalking obsessiveness of those romantic dictators, Godard and Mailer.

To see a Makavejev film is as close to a stimulating educational process as the cinema has come. The “stories” of his films are models, pulled this way and that until the flexibility of shape itself becomes the center of attention. The scenes in
WR
of background copulation are both casual and lyrical, experiments to alter our heavy preconceptions about such a spectacle. Only a very tender scientist could have filmed the plaster-cast-penis scene with so little emotional prurience and such human curiosity.

The persistent implication of Makavejev’s work is that man is still a wild, anxious species, all too ready to rest his instinctive energies in such misleading causes as hero worship, the shouting of slogans, and the repressive support of authoritarianism. The relationship between sexual despair and gross political complacency—in both capitalist and Communist countries—is made strikingly clear. But
WR
also contrasts two heroes and their cohorts: Stalin and Wilhelm Reich. It seems to conclude that only the outcast hero is reliable, only the solitary prophet is the poet of the body, and that popular acceptance is the most serious threat of devitalization.

That is why Makavejev offends much doctrinaire commitment. Politics, his films reveal, is a behavior pattern that can be played into various forms and manners. The amusement that goes along with this realization—rather than anger or sadness—is his great virtue as an artist. Despite the bristling armory of his style and the violence of his contrasts, the gaze is always equable and tolerant.

Makavejev was a psychology graduate at Belgrade University who went on to study film. He made experimental films and a series of documentaries before getting into features. However, that term is inadequate as a description of the way he has worked.
The Switchboard Operator
is a love story, but also a description of how society reduces love to sexual pathology. While
Innocence Unprotected
is a reflection upon a classic Yugoslav film through the various personalities of the man who starred in it. In both cases, as in
WR
, Makavejev rejects anecdote and insists on the significance of the processes that produce anecdote.

It has proved difficult for Makavejev to make films—and he shows no readiness to compromise with material, or story forms, that are not his. Indeed, I doubt if he comprehends any way of proceeding except from his own dangerous, fertile mind. In
Montenegro
, Susan Anspach plays a wife who finds sexual liberation in the company of some Yugoslavian workers; in
Coca-Cola Kid
, Eric Roberts plays a salesman sent to Australia who finds among other things the unmitigated erotic image of Greta Scacchi; and
Manifesto
is a crazy comedy set in the Balkans.
Gorilla Bathes at Noon
is a lively return to form, about a Russian officer stranded in Berlin after Soviet withdrawal. It is artfully naïve, surreal, and it employs footage from the 1949 Russian epic,
The Fall of Berlin
. It is typical of Makavejev that his view of Berlin, history, and helpless refugees is so fresh and unexpected. In its climactic scene—the dismantling of a vast concrete statue of Lenin—Makavejev is as good as ever, averse to tyranny yet ready to see the beauty in concrete and to be respectful of Lenin.

Karl Malden
(Karl Malden Sekulovich) (1912–2009), b. Chicago
Of Serbian descent, and an established Broadway character actor—in
Golden Boy, Key Largo, Truckline Cafe, All My Sons
, and Mitch in
A Streetcar Named Desire
—Malden made his movie debut in
They Knew What They Wanted
(40, Garson Kanin). His film appearances remained isolated, in Cukor’s
Winged Victory
(44); Kazan’s
Boomerang
(47); Hathaway’s
13 rue Madeleine
(47) and
Kiss of Death
(47); Henry King’s
The Gunfighter
(50); Preminger’s
Where the Sidewalk Ends
(50); and Milestone’s
Halls of Montezuma
(51), until in 1951 he won the supporting actor Oscar repeating the part he had played on the stage in Kazan’s
Streetcar
.

He became increasingly indispensable as a good-natured but ugly support:
Decision Before Dawn
(51, Anatole Litvak);
Diplomatic Courier
(52, Henry Hathaway); the policeman in
I Confess
(52, Alfred Hitchcock); the kindly NCO in Brooks’s
Take the High Ground
(53); the priest in
On the Waterfront
(54, Kazan). But, already, in Vidor’s
Ruby Gentry
(52), he had taken a leading part, and in 1956 Kazan cast him in his best movie part, Archie Lee Meighan in
Baby Doll
, a cuckold whose horns grew like pimples in front of the camera. He was also excellent as the domineering father in Mulligan’s
Fear Strikes Out
(57) and in the same year he directed his only film,
Time Limit
(57), with Richard Widmark—a taut, reasonable movie. He was also in
Phantom of the Rue Morgue
(54, Roy del Ruth);
No Sleep Till Dawn
(57, Gordon Douglas);
The Great Imposter
(60, Robert Mulligan);
Parrish
(61, Delmer Daves);
Birdman of Alcatraz
(62, John Frankenheimer); and
All Fall Down
(62, Frankenheimer).

Gradually he found himself cast in villainy—in Daves’s
The Hanging Tree
(59); a little bemused by Brando’s
One-Eyed Jacks
(61); and outrageous in Ford’s
Cheyenne Autumn
(64). His parts became either overfamiliar or hopelessly exaggerated, as if his care for realism no longer had a usefulness: thus the dealer in
The Cincinnati Kid
(65, Norman Jewison);
Murderer’s Row
(66, Henry Levin);
Nevada Smith
(66, Hathaway);
Hotel
(67, Richard Quine);
Billion Dollar Brain
(67, Ken Russell);
Blue
(68, Silvio Narizzano); and
Wild Rovers
(71, Blake Edwards). Two performances stand out from this: as the agent/hustler in
Gypsy
(62, Mervyn Le Roy), cannily absorbing all Rosalind’s Russell, and as Omar Bradley in
Patton
(69, Franklin Schaffner), again mopping up another’s energy.

Otherwise, Malden’s 1970s were dominated by the success of his TV series,
The Streets of San Francisco
(1972–77), in which his widower detective looked after the character played by Michael Douglas.

It was 1980 before Malden returned to movies, often for television: very good as a steelworker in
Skag
(80, Frank Perry);
Meteor
(80, Ronald Neame); as a newspaperman in
Word of Honor
(81, Mel Damski);
Miracle on Ice
(81, Steven Hilliard Stern); to Yugoslavia for
Twilight Time
(82, Goran Paskaljevic);
The Sting II
(83, Jeremy Paul Kagan);
With Intent to Kill
(84, Mike Robe); as the father in
Fatal Vision
(84, David Greene);
Billy Galvin
(86, John Gray);
Nuts
(87, Martin Ritt);
My Father, My Son
(88, Jeff Bleckner); as Klinghoffer in
The Hijacking of the Achille Lauro
(89, Robert Collins);
Call Me Anna
(90, Gilbert Cates); and
Absolute Strangers
(91, Cates), a study of the abortion debate. In working with Cates, Malden was extending a partnership, for Cates often directed the Academy Awards show for television—and Malden was president of the Academy (1988–93).

Terrence Malick
, b. Waco, Texas, 1943
1973:
Badlands
. 1978:
Days of Heaven
. 1998:
The Thin Red Line
. 2005:
The New World
. 2010:
Tree of Life
.

Badlands
may be the most assured first film by an American since
Citizen Kane
. It does not have the persisting tragedy of another debut,
They Live by Night
, but it has the virtue of an oblique approach to a familiar genre and iconography that makes an easy transition from circumstantial detail to epic perspective. As a study of misbegotten energy run wild, it is as American as
Kane
. It was a modest film, though, whereas
Kane
set out to demolish and remake the temple of narrative film. Yet both films have a serene, willful disdain for the surrounding industry. In Welles’s case, that attitude was a challenge to the picture business. But for Malick it seems increasingly like the lofty indifference of deliberate art. Whatever his failings, Welles had a zest for show business; he liked to chew on audiences. Malick’s second film,
Days of Heaven
, underlined the European archness of the first, and it was as blithe and self-sufficient as a painting labored over in an attic. Whether we see Malick as leisurely or elitist in his approach, two such mannered films in twenty years bespeak an exquisite and uncompeting talent.