The New Biographical Dictionary of Film: Completely Updated and Expanded (31 page)

Bazin was a Catholic leftist, and a precise arguer and writer in the school of Sartre, but as a film theoretician everything for him was founded in the notion of film as a record of reality. As such, he loved documentary and any style that tended toward the use of real light, deep space, and long, extended takes. Naturally, therefore, he loved Renoir, Rossellini, and Welles, just as he aspired towards a kind of cinema that closely imitated real experience. He was also a humanist, devoted to the idea of performance and a lover of Chaplin and all kinds of natural acting. Though he was not overly fond of montage, or fragmented points of view, he was one of the first to grasp the importance of Bresson.

Cahiers
was initially based on his work and example, and on an historic view that saw the best of American, European, and Japanese film working together (he was a great admirer of Mizoguchi). He also inspired and assisted the young directors who would become the New Wave, and made the essential assumption that critical writing and real filming need not be separate. Though seldom in good health, he worked very hard and he cared for animals as much as he did for movies and moviemakers.

It happens that I am writing this piece on the same day as writing about David Begelman. And it occurs to me that whereas Begelman would have found Bazin irrelevant, Bazin would have been fascinated by Begelman. We need to recall that in an age when the Begelmans have become so powerful.

Emmanuelle Béart
, b. St. Tropez, France, 1965
Perhaps we are not supposed to say such things any more—but we can’t help thinking that there is always a cul-de-sac of cinema (it may even be an open road) that is dedicated to beautiful women. In which case, Emmanuelle Béart in
La Belle Noiseuse
(91, Jacques Rivette) is one of the odalisques of introspection. Certainly it is a Rivette film, and of course it is a meditation on drawing and the creative process. But it cannot quite help but be—in addition—a symphony on the more or less naked Béart. And it works.

Many men have tried to justify her extraordinary calm beauty and their helpless watching with the possibility that she is also a great actress. The strain of that attempt has never shown on Mlle Béart. There are signs that she is content to be a phenomenon. Famously, she was raised in a tiny village in Provence, the daughter of singer Guy Béart, kept away from both the public gaze and the experience of movies. She did do a couple of things as a child
—And Hope to Die
(72, René Clement) and
Demain les Mômes
(76, Jean Portalé)—but apparently it was while on a trip in Canada, working as an au pair, that she saw her first movies and was seen by Robert Altman, who tried to put her on screen.

That didn’t work, but she began to work for French television and was properly revealed by David Hamilton, the erotic still photographer, in
Premiers Désirs
(83). Still for TV, she made
Un Amour Interdit
(84, Jean-Pierre Dougnac);
Raison Perdue
(84, Michel Favart);
Et Demain Viendra le Jour
(84, Jean-Louis Lorenzi); and another movie,
L’Amour en Douce
(85, Edouard Molinaro).

Her breakthrough was in
Manon des Sources
(86, Claude Berri), an international hit that got her the role of the angel in
Date with an Angel
(87, Tom McLoughlin), a serious flop. So she remained in France for
À Gauche en Sortant de l’Ascenseur
(88, Molinaro); on TV as
Marie-Antoinette
(89, Caroline Huppert);
Les Enfants du Désorde
(89, Yannick Bellon);
Il Viaggio di Capitan Fracassa
(91, Ettore Scola);
J’Embrasse Pas
(91, André Téchiné);
Un Coeur en Hiver
(92, Claude Sautet), working with Daniel Auteuil, to whom she was married for a time;
L’Enfer
(94, Claude Chabrol);
Une Femme Française
(95, Régis Wargnier);
Nelly & Monsieur Arnaud
(95, Sautet).

Then came another attempt to launch her in English-speaking films—
Mission: Impossible
(96, Brian De Palma)—and the same old retreat to France:
Don Juan
(98, Jacques Weber);
Voleur de Vie
(98, Yves Angelo); as Gilberte in
Le Temps Retrouvé
(99, Raoul Ruiz);
Elephant Juice
(99, Sam Miller);
La Bûche
(99, Danièle Thompson);
Les Destinées Sentimentales
(00, Olivier Assayas);
Voyance et Manigance
(01, Eric Fourniols).

Being thirty has done nothing to alter her beauty, though a certain glassiness begins to appear:
La Répétition
(01, Catherine Corsini);
8 Femmes
(02, François Ozon);
Les Égarés
(03, Téchiné);
L’Histoire de Marie et Julien
(03, Rivette);
Nathalie …
(03, Anne Fontaine);
À Boire
(04, Marion Vernoux);
Un Fil à la Patte
(05, Michel Deville); Milady in
D’Artagnan et les Trois Mousquetaires
(05, Pierre Aknine);
L’Enfer
(05, Denis Tanovic);
A Crime
(05, Manuel Pradal);
The Witnesses
(07, Téchiné);
Disco
(08, Fabien Onteniente);
Vinyan
(08, Fabrice Du Welz);
Mes Stars et Moi
(08, Laetitia Colombani).

Warren Beatty
(Henry Warren Beaty), b. Richmond, Virginia, 1937
1978:
Heaven Can Wait
(codirected with Buck Henry). 1981:
Reds
. 1990:
Dick Tracy
. 1998:
Bulworth
.

The prized son of well-to-do parents—professionals with strong creative instincts—Beatty is also the younger brother of Shirley MacLaine. (If he seems in some ways very different from her, that may only prove the strength of her influence—for Beatty has taken great pains to look like his own master.) Having grown up near Washington, Beatty did a year at Northwestern before opting for New York and show business. He did some TV drama (he would play Milton Armitage in
The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis
in 1959–60), and he had a lead role onstage in William Inge’s
A Loss of Roses
in 1959. He has never again acted onstage.

Then, as a discovery of Elia Kazan’s, he was running in the steps of Brando and Dean for his full-starring movie debut,
Splendor in the Grass
. He was sexual, cerebral, troubled, a little withdrawn. He had unquestioned beauty and the early legend of being the enchanter of costars and any other lady he met. But as an actor, Beatty was not open or generous. He seemed reluctant to yield himself up, and so early on he had more fame and critical attention than public love. But from the outset, he was regarded as either very intelligent or very difficult: sometimes his own puzzled look has seemed beset by the same question.

He was very good as the gigolo to Vivien Leigh in
The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone
(61, Jose Quintero). But he seemed torn between playing aloof, unwholesome young men, or lending himself to lightweight packages. He was the phony hero and the unlikable older brother in
All Fall Down
(62, John Frankenheimer), and he was excellent as the nurse who risks his own breakdown in falling in love with
Lilith
(63, Robert Rossen).
Mickey One
(65, Arthur Penn) is a truly pretentious picture, but it still seems remarkable that the young actor got it made, and Beatty is brilliant as the paranoid nightclub entertainer. On the other hand, he was in
Promise Her Anything
(66, Arthur Hiller) and
Kaleidoscope
(66, Jack Smight), projects with no claim upon 1966, let alone eternity.

Beatty was a figure on the screen, yet he was not popular. Then, in 1967, he took responsibility and control and came of age, by starring in and producing
Bonnie and Clyde
(67, Penn). His performance was so remarkable in its mixture of good looks and stricken limp, of assertion and shyness, and of that convincingly youthful fatalism that says “Ain’t life grand?” as he recounts how he shot off his toes the day before learning that he was to be released from prison. Moreover, he won an audience and drove a film to be a hit through his performance. Yet his contribution was greater still as a producer, for he had bought the script, hired Penn, done the casting, ordered the rewrites, and then
insisted
on the very startling film as a key expression of late-sixties sensibility. Few films have been better produced. It helped one see why Beatty was not always fully committed to mere acting or looking pretty.

But he did not advance decisively—as if some lassitude or disquiet flinched from a life in production, or that of running a studio. So his acting became odder and more distracted:
The Only Game in Town
(69, George Stevens) and $ (71, Richard Brooks). But the right project could capture his interest: he has never been better as actor than in the moody, self-deluding, talking-himself-into-a-corner frontier producer in
McCabe and Mrs. Miller
(71, Robert Altman). He was good again as a spookily dark investigative journalist in
The Parallax View
(74, Alan J. Pakula), too frightening a film for public comfort.

Then he produced again:
Shampoo
(75, Hal Ashby), a tough comedy about love and sex, hairdressing and politics, set in Los Angeles. Beatty wrote the script with his friend Robert Towne, and he dominated a movie in which he was also seen as playing a side of himself—the Don Juan (Beatty had by then been linked with many women, including Joan Collins, Natalie Wood, Leslie Caron, and Julie Christie—some said he helped their careers, others believed he was always competitive).

There was then a three-year gap before
Heaven Can Wait
(78), which he wrote with Elaine May and directed with Buck Henry—how could so flimsy a hit bear up under so many talents?
Heaven Can Wait
now looks like the least interesting large project of a man determined to be significant. After another interval of three years, Beatty delivered
Reds
(81), a life of John Reed, with scenes of the International Revolution. He directed himself, as well as playing Reed, and got a terrific performance from his love of the time, Diane Keaton, playing Louise Bryant. In the first half of
Reds
there was a stirring balance of love story and mankind story—a balance that slipped in the second half. The film never did well enough, but Beatty got the directing Oscar and, in his use of real witnesses, made a very intriguing mix of melodrama and history.
Reds
is still a fascinating picture with passages of greatness—but it never seems the work of a Marxist.

Beatty may have been tired; yet he has a deserved reputation for tirelessness. Whatever the reasons, he waited six years to make
… Ishtar
(87, Elaine May), a folly and now a legend of extravagance. It is something of a mystery as to just what Beatty was doing in the mid-eighties. Was it weariness or the readiness to turn to politics? (He was much involved with Gary Hart, just as he had worked for McGovern in 1972.) Was it a life of women and the telephone? He did function as executive producer (even if he took no credit) on
The Pick-Up Artist
(87), which brought together unlikely protégés—actress Molly Ringwald and writer-director James Toback.

Dick Tracy
(90) may have been one of the best-promoted films ever made. Beyond that, not a lot can be said except in praise of the comic-book design. Tracy figured the latest woman in Beatty’s life, Madonna, and her documentary,
Truth or Dare
(91, Alek Keshishian), has exquisite glimpses of a Beatty who seems like a man trying to escape from a Borges story.

He found liberty, and a wife (at last) in
Bugsy
(91, Barry Levinson), an old-fashioned piece of gangster nostalgia, written by Toback, and costarring Annette Bening, who became Mrs. Beatty and the mother of their children.
Bugsy
is smart, at its best when funny, yet helplessly pledged to the fantasy that being (or acting like) a gangster ought to be fun and glamorous. Despite valiant efforts, Beatty the actor never persuaded me that he knew how to lose control, let alone become psychotic. Control
is
his thing—and maybe his curse. And now he has a daughter, the ultimate enchantress, perhaps, for the great seducer. He will be a veteran by the time she comes of age.

In 1994, having taken a long time over it, he produced and acted in
Love Affair
(Glenn Gordon Caron). Annette Bening was his co-star again—and they were pregnant again.

The film was not, and suggested that there was no need for true love to translate to the screen. Beatty was a busy father now, a vague figure still in Democratic Party circles and a rather surprising Irving Thalberg Award recipient. His next film was
Bulworth
, a very lively and enterprising political satire (until around halftime), and then a sadder sign of Beatty’s receding energy. Still, in the arid nineties,
Bulworth
was a real achievement. Whereas
Town & Country
was a travesty.

In 2010, Peter Biskind published a 600-page bio of the man, and a grim truth was revealed—so few people knew who he was.

Harold Becker
, b. New York, 1950
1972:
The Ragman’s Daughter
. 1979:
The Onion Field
. 1980:
The Black Marble
. 1981:
Taps
. 1985:
Vision Quest
. 1988:
The Boost
. 1989:
Sea of Love
. 1993:
Malice
. 1995:
City Hall
. 1998:
Mercury Rising
. 2001:
Domestic Disturbance
.

Twelve films in thirty years hardly amounts to character or consistency. But there are plenty of virtues here. Becker can tell a complicated story, even if complexity is all you get. He can handle actors and let big stars have their set pieces. In
The Boost
, he delivered one of the rare films about ordinary people and money. Elsewhere, he has seemed just as happy in competently dealing with the everyday melodrama that exists only in the movies. He helped bring Al Pacino back to the scene with
Sea of Love
, and made that a wry, grubby glamorization of the police, no matter that
The Onion Field
had seemed concerned to reproduce the impossible realities of the job. And James Woods was way out of the ordinary in that picture.
Malice
is silly trickery, but
City Hall
is nearly an authentic study in local politics. I’d guess that Becker would be an entertaining raconteur on his own ups and downs and his gallery of tough-minded, ambivalent heroes.