The New Biographical Dictionary of Film: Completely Updated and Expanded (268 page)

Crime Story
is several degrees greater. Indeed, the many hours of this unsuccessful series amount to a true American epic. It was a series and serial: the struggle between cop Mike Torello (Dennis Farina) and hood Ray Luca (Anthony Dennison) spanned years and reached from a Midwest city to the Nevada deserts, all propelled by Del Shannon’s “Runaway.” Watching it, week after week, was one of the joys of the mid-eighties, with meaty performances not just from the leads but from John Santucci, Stephen Lang, Jon Polito, Ted Levine, Joseph Wiseman, and Darlanne Fluegel and Patricia Charbonneau, who join Tuesday Weld, Madeleine Stowe, Ashley Judd, and Amy Brenneman in Mann’s corps of resolute dames in tight corners.

By the late nineties, Mann had clearly moved further ahead.
Heat
, it seems to me, was one of the best-made films of the decade, by which I mean that the need to look and listen closely was constantly rewarded. But even that richness of texture could not overcome the thematic triteness—the jungle prowled by cops and crooks alike. What more did it need? Less attitude, less deep-seated respect for these loner men, and a more intricate tracing of how money works. Something like the same could be said for
The Insider
—it was riveting and very well acted (though Al Pacino was allowed to be lazy in both films), but its view of different kinds of compromise was too pat. I think Mann the director needs better writing than he has been getting. But no one does film with better touch.

Ali
, I fear, is his least interesting film, smothered in impersonation and evasion, an irrelevant footnote to all the newsreel and documentary.
Collateral
was a brilliant exercise, a parable turning into a commercial.
Miami Vice
was so style-oriented it left you screaming. And
Public Enemies
was enough to erase the legend that Michael Mann deserves to be regarded as a talent.

Jayne Mansfield
(Vera Jayne Palmer) (1933–67), b. Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania
Jayne Mansfield is the swan song of prenude sexuality in films. For thirty years, since the coming of the Hays Code, Hollywood eroticism depended on the invitation to sex beneath whatever provocative clothing could be made to stay in place. There is an engineering of sexual fashion, whereby uplift is obtained without visible means of support, that is a matter of some technical ingenuity and of which Jayne Mansfield is the masterpiece. When she leans forward in Frank Tashlin’s
The Girl Can’t Help It
there is an extreme equation of tit exposed and fantasy induced. What the lady looked like in the raw might still be beyond public tolerance. Our cinema nudes are lean ladies, confined to some perfect diet and faintly adolescent. Because Jayne Mansfield was widely laughed at, it is now assumed that she was happy to deride her own comic-book glory. There is no evidence for or against that wishful thinking, but some to suggest that there was an actress trying to escape.

She made her debut in
Underwater
(54, John Sturges), and was in
Prehistoric Women
(55, Gregg Tallon),
The Female Jungle
(55, Bruno Ve Sota),
Illegal
(55, Lewis Allen), the excellent
The Burglar
(55, Paul Wendkos), and
Pete Kelly’s Blues
(55, Jack Webb), before Tashlin used her in
The Girl Can’t Help It
(56) and
Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter?
(57), the latter a part she had created on the stage. Her real fame was short-lived:
The Wayward Bus
(57, Victor Vicas);
Kiss Them for Me
(57, Stanley Donen); and
The Sheriff of Fractured Jaw
(58, Raoul Walsh). She was soon forced farther afield to work and a number of European films were mixed with nightclub work:
Too Hot to Handle
(60, Terence Young);
The George Raft Story
(61, Joseph Newman);
It Happened in Athens
(62, Andrew Marton); nude in
Promises! Promises!
(63, King Donovan);
L’Amore Primitivo
(64, Luigi Scattini);
Single Room Furnished
(66, Matt Cimber, her third husband); and
Spree!
(67, Mitchell Leisen).

Jean Marais
(Jean Villain-Marais) (1913–98), b. Cherbourg, France
The magnificent but rather fatuous blond figurehead of Jean Cocteau’s world, Marais has been more icon than actor. He was absurdly Apollonian, even if he has since grown heavy and grumpy—as witness his lecherous king in
Peau d’Âne
(70, Jacques Demy). Indeed, Marais in other people’s films tended to define the way Cocteau gave life to visually splendid but statuesque elements. Thus he lights up under Cocteau’s fancy, especially in
Orphée
(50, Cocteau), where he was the numbed protagonist of the provincial mythology.

The beautiful young Tristan of
L’Eternal Retour
(43, Jean Delannoy, from a Cocteau script) became a thirty-five-year-old straining to look more youthful in
L’Aigle à Deux Têtes
(47, Cocteau) and
Les Parents Terribles
(48, Cocteau). And if, in reality, he was something of a dullard, then
Beauty and the Beast
(45, Cocteau and René Clément) gave him an opportunity to embody monstrousness. The makeup in that film had only to be worn, but that had always been Cocteau’s method—beauty or ugliness in his films are emblematic. Marais said that Cocteau never directed speech or gesture but that he bathed entire crews in his own creative gaze—“he radiates a strength my pen cannot render, but of which my friendship and admiration are intensely aware.”

He had been a stage actor for some ten years before he got into films, and had played in
Les Parents Terribles
in the theatre. But his movie record shows how far he was a star chiefly in Cocteau’s firmament:
Le Pavillon Brûle
(41, Jacques de Baroncelli);
Le Lit à Colonne
(42, Roland Tual);
Voyage sans Espoir
(44, Christian-Jaque);
Les Chouans
(46, Henri Calef);
Ruy Blas
(47, Pierre Billon);
Le Secret de Mayerling
(49, Delannoy);
Le Château de Verre
(50, Clément);
La Voce del Silenzio
(52, G. W. Pabst);
Napoléon
(55, Sacha Guitry); the fire-eating general in
Eléna et les Hommes
(56, Jean Renoir);
SOS Noronha
(56, Georges Rouquier);
Typhon sur Nagasaki
(56, Yves Ciampi);
White Nights
(57, Luchino Visconti);
Un Amour de Poche
(57, Pierre Kast);
Le Testament d’Orphée
(60, Cocteau);
Austerlitz
(60, Abel Gance and Roger Richebé);
La Princesse de Clèves
(60, Delannoy);
Ponzio Pilato
(61, Irving Rapper);
Fantômas
(64, André Hunebelle);
Patate
(64, Robert Thomas);
Fantômas se Déchaîne
(65, Hunebelle);
Le Paria
(68, Claude Carliez). He was in
Le Jouet Criminel
(70, Thomas); he did a version of
Les Parents Terribles
(80, Yves André Hubert) for television;
Ombre et Secrets
(82, Philippe Delabre);
Lieu de Parente
(85, Willy Rameau); and
Parking
(85, Demy).

Fredric March
(Fredric Ernest McIntyre Bickel) (1897–1975), b. Racine, Wisconsin
March is a good instance of the durable leading man, much relied upon by major studios, but never a star who dominated audiences. The bulk of his work is nonassertive: he was content to give thoughtful, sensitive performances in support of either a real star or the plot of the film. Working often with his wife, Florence Eldridge, he moved between Broadway and Hollywood and thus acquired a reputation for seriousness that sometimes looked a little stodgy on film. But he had moments that are hard to forget: his Norman Maine in
A Star Is Born
(37, William Wellman) seems now to give that supposedly positive product a dark, cold after-feeling—he is so good as a drunk, so stricken by self-loathing and lost confidence. It is a performance of great daring, a gathering of horror stories about Hollywood crackups. And somehow it is the most glamorous thing March ever did. For in giving up the ghost, he found allure. Whereas striving to be appealing, he could be a little too classy sometimes.

He played a few small film parts in the early 1920s, but it was only with the coming of sound and after several years’ work in the theatre that March prospered. He had the looks and voice to carry off the romantic comedies that Paramount specialized in, and he was contracted by that studio for
The Dummy
(29, Robert Milton). He was loaned out for
Paris Bound
(29, Edward H. Griffith) and
Jealousy
(29, Jean de Limur), opposite Jeanne Eagels; while at Paramount he was in
Sarah and Son
(30, Dorothy Arzner);
Ladies Love Brutes
(30, Rowland V. Lee);
Manslaughter
(30, George Abbott);
Laughter
(30, Harry d’Arrast);
The Royal Family of Broadway
(30, George Cukor and Cyril Gardner), in which he took the John Barrymore part;
Honor Among Lovers
(30, Arzner);
The Night Angel
(31, Edmund Goulding); and
My Sin
(31, Abbott).

In most of these, March was subordinate to his female costar, but he established himself, and won the best actor Oscar, in the tour de force of Mamoulian’s
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
(32). As in all Mamoulian’s films, the performance was only the jewel in an elaborate setting (in this case the trick of transformation), and although the film added to March’s prestige it did not deepen his screen character. But for the next few years he worked hard as one of the most desirable leading men:
Merrily We Go to Hell
(32, Arzner); Sidney Franklin’s
Smilin’ Through
(32); in De Mille’s
The Sign of the Cross
(33);
The Eagle and the Hawk
(33, Stuart Walker); Lubitsch’s
Design for Living
(33); and the figure of Death in Mitchell Leisen’s
Death Takes a Holiday
(34).

At this stage, March refused to re-sign with Paramount and began freelancing. Inevitably, he was caught up in the costume films that were in vogue:
The Affairs of Cellini
(34, Gregory La Cava); as Browning opposite Norma Shearer in Franklin’s
The Barretts of Wimpole Street
(34); in Mamoulian’s
We Live Again
(34), a version of Tolstoy’s
Resurrection;
in
Les Miserables
(35, Richard Boleslavsky); Vronsky to Garbo’s
Anna Karenina
(35, Clarence Brown); Bothwell to Katharine Hepburn’s
Mary of Scotland
(36, John Ford); and
Anthony Adverse
(36, Mervyn Le Roy). He then made three films in a row that mark his best work: Hawks’s
The Road to Glory
(36), and
A Star Is Born
(37) and
Nothing Sacred
(37), both for William Wellman. Next, he was in De Mille’s
The Buccaneer
(38) and after a return to the theatre he made
Susan and God
(40, Cukor) and
Victory
(40) and
So Ends Our Night
(41), both for John Cromwell.

During the war, apart from René Clair’s
I Married a Witch
(42) and
The Adventures of Mark Twain
(44, Irving Rapper), his material became more sentimental, and in 1946 he won his second Oscar for Wyler’s
The Best Years of Our Lives
. The part’s Oscar appeal was very obvious, but March found the real, awkward man.

He still did theatre—notably A
Bell for Adano
and
Long Day’s Journey Into Night
—but his movies lacked stature:
Another Part of the Forest
(48, Michael Gordon);
An Act of Murder
(48, Gordon); as
Christopher Columbus
(49, David MacDonald); Willy Loman in
Death of a Salesman
(51, Laslo Benedek);
Man on a Tightrope
(53, Elia Kazan);
Executive Suite
(54, Robert Wise);
The Bridges at Toko-Ri
(55, Mark Robson); the father in
The Desperate Hours
(55, William Wyler); an interesting tycoon, half-Paley, half-Selznick, in
The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit
(55, Nunnally Johnson); Philip of Macedon in
Alexander the Great
(56, Robert Rossen); and very good as an older man infatuated with Kim Novak in
Middle of the Night
(59, Delbert Mann).

But he had seldom been worse than as William Jennings Bryan in
Inherit the Wind
(60, Stanley Kramer) and after that he made only four ill-assorted films:
The Young Doctors
(61, Phil Karlson);
Seven Days in May
(64, John Frankenheimer); a rare scoundrel in
Hombre
(67, Martin Ritt); and
Tick … Tick … Tick
(69, Ralph Nelson).

Chris Marker
(Christian François Bouche-Villeneuve), b. Ulan Bator, Mongolia, 1921
(The previous edition and other reference books give Belleville, France, as his place of birth—but Marker told me himself that Mongolia is correct. I have since concluded that Belleville is correct—but that does not spoil the spiritual truth of Ulan Bator.) All films are documentaries, except for
La Jetée:
1952:
Olympia ’52
. 1953:
Les Statues Meurent Aussi
(codirected with Alain Resnais). 1955:
Dimanche à Pékin
. 1957:
Le Mystère de l’Atelier 15
(codirected with Resnais). 1958:
Lettre de Sibérie
. 1959:
Les Astronautes
(codirected with Walerian Borowczyk). 1960:
Description d’un Combat
. 1961:
Cuba Si!
. 1963:
Le Joli Mai; La Jetée
. 1965:
Le Mystère Koumiko
. 1966:
Si C’Etait Quatre Dromadaires
. 1968:
La Sixième Face du
Pentagon
. 1969:
A Bientôt, J’Espère
. 1970:
La Bataille des Dix Millions
(codirected with Valerie Mayoux);
Les Mots Ont un Sens
. 1971:
Le Train en Marche
. 1977:
Le Fond de l’Air Est Rouge
. 1981:
Junkopia
(s). 1982:
Sans Soleil
. 1984:
2084
(s). 1985:
A.K
. 1986:
Hommage à Simone Signoret
. 1988:
L’Heritage de la Chouette
(TV—thirteen-part series). 1993:
Le Dernier Bolchevik/The Last Bolshevik
. 1997:
Level Five
. 2000:
Une Journée d’Andrei Arzenevitch
. 2002:
Le Souvenir d’un Avenir
. 2004:
Chats Perchés
(d). 2006:
Leila Attacks
(s).