The New Biographical Dictionary of Film: Completely Updated and Expanded (302 page)

Until 1917, Niblo had had a varied career as an actor, first in vaudeville, then touring, and finally on Broadway. But in that year he married the actress Enid Bennett, who worked for Thomas Ince. Within a year Niblo himself was directing for Ince. He continued to act, on and off, and appeared in two films in 1922 with his wife, both directed by Victor Schertzinger
—The Bootlegger’s Daughter
and
Scandalous Tongues
—and as late as 1932, played in
Two White Arms
. Niblo’s first films, made for Ince, were not distinguished, but he was hired by Douglas Fairbanks to direct
The Mark of Zorro
and
The Three Musketeers
. He directed Valentino in
Blood and Sand
for Famous Players and then went to work for Louis B. Mayer on romantic melodramas:
Thy Name Is Woman
, starring Ramon Novarro and Barbara La Marr.

Mayer carried Niblo with him on the merger that made MGM, and Niblo directed his wife and Novarro in
The Red Lily
. By then,
Ben-Hur
seemed likely to prove the first and last great disaster of the new company. When the idea to replace George Walsh with Novarro was accepted, it was a short step to drop the original director, Charles Brabin, and hope that Niblo might recollect Nobile. So it was that Niblo was the director of Hollywood’s greatest epic. But he was the choice of Thalberg and Mayer and, as with Joseph Mankiewicz years later on
Cleopatra
, Niblo’s task was contradictory: to spend money to save money.
Ben-Hur
is a film of many talents and trades, spectacular but inflated, needing the dynamic eye of a King Vidor.

While
Ben-Hur
was being edited, Niblo took over from Stiller on the Garbo project,
The Temptress
, and then directed Norma Talmadge as
Camille
. He remained a leading director for only a short time, despite the initial praise for
Ben-Hur
. Sound appears to have probed the cavities in his style.

Thus, he made some key silent films after sound had become a possibility. He directed Lillian Gish in
The Enemy
, Ronald Colman and Vilma Banky in
Two Lovers
, and Garbo again in
The Mysterious Lady
. But by 1930 he left MGM, made a few films at RKO, and went to Britain for two pictures before retiring. A few years before his death he took up acting again.

Dudley Nichols
(1895–1960), b. Wapakoneta, Ohio
1943:
Government Girl
. 1946:
Sister Kenny
. 1947:
Mourning Becomes Electra
.

The three films directed by Dudley Nichols are garishly ill-assorted, unlikely, and pretentious—a sign, perhaps, of the strain of writing dutiful scenarios for most of his Hollywood career.
Government Girl
, which he wrote, produced, and directed at RKO, was Olivia de Havilland and Sonny Tufts;
Sister Kenny
, written with Mary McCarthy, was an admiring biopic with Rosalind Russell as an Australian nurse; while
Mourning Becomes Electra
is a hams’ free-for-all, with Russell, Michael Redgrave, Katina Paxinou, and Kirk Douglas rolling their eyes at one another. Clearly, someone suggested that Nichols abandon directing and return to his regular output of safe scripts for major films.

Nichols is what passed in Hollywood for a durable, talented writer. Yet he was a sausage machine for Ford’s sentimentality, cardboard characters, and predictable situations. His screenplay for
For Whom the Bell Tolls
(43, Sam Wood), for instance, is defeated by the sententious grandeur of the novel and Hollywood’s appetite for Spanish cliché; whereas, in the same year,
Air Force
(43, Howard Hawks) proved snappy, with colloquial talk and a suggestion of how often scripts were refashioned in the shooting.

Nichols was a top journalist who moved into films with the coming of sound:
Born Reckless
(30, John Ford and Andrew Bennison);
A Devil with Women
(30, Irving Cummings);
Men Without Women
(30, Ford);
On the Level
(30, Cummings);
Seas Beneath
(31, Ford);
The Lost Patrol
(34, Ford);
Judge Priest
(34, Ford);
Steamboat Round the Bend
(35, Ford); an Oscar for the script of
The Informer
(35, Ford);
The Crusades
(35, Cecil B. De Mille);
Mary of Scotland
(36, Ford);
The Plough and the Stars
(37, Ford);
The Hurricane
(38, Ford); an exceptional comedy,
Bringing Up Baby
(38, Hawks), which hardly seems to belong to the scribe of the Ford saga;
Stagecoach
(39, Ford);
The Long Voyage Home
(40, Ford);
Swamp Water
(41, Jean Renoir);
Man Hunt
(41, Fritz Lang), turned down by Ford, made into a gem by Lang, thus showing the vulnerability of writers to a director’s authorship. According to Lang, Nichols himself admitted: “A script is only a blueprint—the director is the one who makes the picture.” It follows that Ford might have ruined
Air Force
and Hawks transformed
For Whom the Bell Tolls
, just as there can be no doubt how much extra backchat Hawks would have added to
Stagecoach
. Nichols worked on
This Land Is Mine
(43, Renoir), which he coproduced;
It Happened Tomorrow
(44, René Clair);
And Then There Were None
(45, Clair);
Scarlet Street
(45, Lang), which treats people with a depth and sharpness missing in the Ford films;
The Bells of St. Mary’s
(45, Leo McCarey);
The Fugitive
(47, Ford);
Pinky
(49, Elia Kazan);
Rawhide
(51, Henry Hathaway);
Return of the Texan
(52, Delmer Daves);
The Big Sky
(52, Hawks);
Prince Valiant
(54, Hathaway);
Run for the Sun
(56, Roy Boulting);
The Tin Star
(57, Anthony Mann);
The Hanging Tree
(59, Daves); and
Heller in Pink Tights
(60, George Cukor).

Mike Nichols
(Michael Igor Peschkowsky), b. Berlin, 1931
1966:
Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
. 1967:
The Graduate
. 1970:
Catch-22
. 1971:
Carnal Knowledge
. 1973:
The Day of the Dolphin
. 1975:
The Fortune
. 1980:
Gilda Live
(d). 1983:
Silkwood
. 1986:
Heartburn
. 1988:
Biloxi Blues; Working Girl
. 1990:
Postcards from the Edge
. 1991:
Regarding Henry
. 1994:
Wolf
. 1996:
The Birdcage
. 1998:
Primary Colors
. 2000:
What Planet Are You From?
. 2001:
Wit
(TV). 2003:
Angels in America
(TV). 2004:
Closer
. 2007:
Charlie Wilson’s War
.

Mike Nichols is an unquestioned figure in our culture, a smart man, a funny man, a proven success in cabaret, on records, as a stage director, and as a deliverer of talking-point movies—movies that are smart, funny, “adult,” “on the pulse,” and “of their moment.” Yet I find it hard to grasp a him in there, a movie director: after fifteen or so films, is there anything there more substantial than a high reputation and a producer’s instinct for what smart people might want to see? Is there soul, intelligence, theme, or character holding these films together in series? Or, if Nichols is essentially a producer, a packager of things, then we have to note how well he fits the law of averages for producers. He is hit and miss.
Virginia Woolf, The Graduate
, and
Working Girl
were all nominated for best picture, and Nichols won the directing Oscar for
The Graduate. The Fortune, Heartburn
, and
Regarding Henry
, on the other hand, are movies that send audiences out into the night with the lament, “Why did they ever think of making that?”

Actually, you can see why. Warren Beatty and Jack Nicholson competing to have or kill an heiress is a neat idea. Everyone smart thought that movie would make a bundle.
Heartburn
was a story about real infidelities in the smart set: there must have been ten thousand bold-type names from the columns who were wild to see that one. And
Regarding Henry
is the sort of 1950s plot idea—smart husband goes back to zero because of brain damage—that usually guarantees Oscars (so long as you don’t cast Harrison Ford). Those are magazine stories; any one of them could have made a good segment on
60 Minutes
as handled by Mike Nichols’s lovely and smart wife, Diane Sawyer.

Nichols makes movies from really neat, cute, smart ideas that can be grasped in twenty minutes. Sometimes they do go off the deep end—
Carnal Knowledge
and
Silkwood
, for instance, don’t leave too much room for the comfortable feeling that just thinking smart will sort things out. In that respect,
Working Girl
was a knockout, smart picture: terrific entertainment, topical issue, Melanie Griffith in her underwear, and very positive, smart ending: working women rule, okay? With a Carly Simon song.

The Graduate
was the cutest package (oddly, it is a film that derides the plastics-packaging urge in America), in which a numb rebel (very intriguing concept) becomes a happy conformist, with terrific sideshows along the way, like Mrs. Robinson as a zipless fuck and great songs. Nichols never neglects the songs. Yes, Mike Nichols gives me a pain. With
Postcards from the Edge
, say, I can only see the taming of a tough, wry book and the remorseless, smart casting that went for MacLaine and Streep instead of Debbie Reynolds and Carrie Fisher. Maybe it was smarter to have smart people just know who the characters were. And maybe someone thought MacLaine and Streep were better box office—which only shows the tangle being smart can get into.

The child Nichols came to America as a refugee at the age of seven. When the father died, the family had difficult times, but Nichols worked his way through the University of Chicago, and studied to be an actor. Then he formed a comedy group with Alan Arkin, Barbara Harris, Paul Sills, and Elaine May, which led to the Nichols and May double act in the late fifties and early sixties—on stage, in clubs, on records. They were a brilliant team, and their dialogues had as big an effect on screenplays and how smart people talked and thought as Jules Feiffer cartoons.

It says something about the team that Nichols has been so much more successful and organized than Elaine May. More recently, it says a great deal about his producer’s acumen that he allowed
The Remains of the Day
to be a Merchant-Ivory film (though Nichols retains a credit from his early ownership of the book’s screen rights). Did he know in advance that he couldn’t deliver the closed heart in that intriguing project?

He had a fairly obvious commercial success with
The Birdcage
, and made a good sharp comedy from
Primary Colors
. But, to my mind,
Wit
, done for HBO, with the maximum severity, made so many of his recent movies look fussy and decorative.
Wit
trusted the aching iron of its subject and the steel of its players. I think it is the best work he has ever done.

His
Angels in America
on TV (at about $6 million per hour) was a great event, but it didn’t hide the shortcomings in the play and it couldn’t match the intensity of the stage. Still, it did suggest that Nichols was most comfortable serving very strong, or very famous, material. The breakthrough personal touch of
Wit
was gone again. And then
Charlie Wilson’s War
turned out to be an amiable, modest comedy about a huge subject.

Jack Nicholson
, b. Neptune, New Jersey, 1937
In 1975 and 1980, I wrote: There was once a reference book that claimed Nicholson as the son of James H. Nicholson, chief executive of American International Pictures. Further research discloses that he was the son of a smalltown alcoholic of Irish descent. It is a proof of Nicholson’s suggestive flexibility that both seem plausible; indeed, they both might be admissions—half drawling, half whining—from a sleepy, deadpan tease. The source of Nicholson’s charm lies in his sweet evasiveness. There goes with it a subtle mastery of his own appearance, so that he is never quite the same in looks, from one film to the next, if always the same droll, bleakly cheerful, enigmatic Nicholson. Remember the truculent wavy hair of
Five Easy Pieces
, the middle-aged thinning of
The King of Marvin Gardens
, the navy crewcut of
The Last Detail
, and the central parting of
Chinatown
where he looks like a sleek, more prosperous Elisha Cook, his eyes slitted by some narcotic fatalism.

It is an attractive, humorous but skeptical face, pleased to make people laugh, but ready for those cold mornings when he will ditch his pregnant girl at a filling station and hitch, helplessly, to Alaska. In
Five Easy Pieces
(70, Bob Rafelson), an engrossing film made around Nicholson’s living in two worlds, there are marvelous moments that express his contradictoriness: caught in a Texas traffic jam, he gets out of his car, jumps on a truck, and plays the piano tethered there—the vehicle glides off the freeway with Nicholson lost in his crazy concerto. But when the oil-rigger goes north to his family, embedded in music, he churlishly rebukes praise for his playing of Chopin and warns off the most promising relationship of his life. The persistent call of the road is a characteristic of immaturity—for Nicholson’s character, Robert Eroica (or Bobby) Dupea, will desert those who need him—but it is also an expression of an implacable American dissatisfaction with present things and a yearning for something more convincing: Huckleberry Finn has it, so do Jay Gatsby (surely the part that needed Nicholson), Dos Passos’s Vag and Mailer’s heroes. In cinematic terms, Nicholson is the most intriguing contemporary development of the Bogart of
High Sierra
and
Casablanca
, but a man who does not conceal middle age, increasing baldness, or the hurtful intractability of his failings.