The New Biographical Dictionary of Film: Completely Updated and Expanded (316 page)

One other thing should be said about the Pacino cult: he owns and seemingly carries with him a short fiction film,
The Local Stigmatic
, from a play by Heathcote Williams, in which he plays a power-mad, petty, English gangster. This film is Pacino’s passion. He shows it to small groups personally. He believes in it in ways that are hard to explain: it is a study in evil, and its secondary theme is putting on an act. I have seen it, and I think it’s awful in many ways—yet it’s fascinating, and vitally important to the man who is our greatest actor now.

He was one of the salesmen in
Glengarry Glen Ross
(92, James Foley). In 1993, Pacino was reunited with De Palma for
Carlito’s Way
, but the result only helped illustrate the decline of De Palma and Pacino’s weakness for old allies.

With his Oscar at last, did Pacino relax, take on airs, or reckon to have fun? Whatever the answer, his work has been very mixed: sentimental as the grandfather in
Two Bits
(95, Foley); too macho and swaggery in
Heat
(95, Michael Mann), where De Niro treats him the way Robinson used to handle La Motta; less than credible in
City Hall
(96, Becker); superb in
Donnie Brasco
(97, Mike Newell); too broad, yet fun, in
The Devil’s Advocate
(97, Taylor Hackford); again, too much attitude in
The Insider
(99, Mann); not plausible as a football coach, but very enjoyable in
Any Given Sunday
(99, De Palma).

He also directed the odd Shakespearean mishmash,
Looking for Richard
(96), and made one more “private” movie,
Chinese Coffee
(00).

Faults and all, he is still unmissable, and if I grieve over the way he took
Heat
off course, I can’t stop watching the film. He was depressed in
Insomnia
(02, Christopher Nolan);
Simone
(02, Andrew Niccol);
People I Know
(02, Daniel Algrant);
The Recruit
(03, Roger Donaldson);
Gigli
(03, Brest); as Roy Cohn in
Angels in America
(03, Mike Nichols); as Shylock in
The Merchant of Venice
(05, Michael Radford).

The ongoing career is close to travesty, and shame, and only marginally more deserted than that of De Niro. The films are an ordeal to watch—how must they feel if you’re working in them?:
Two for the Money
(05, D. J. Caruso);
Ocean’s Thirteen
(07, Steven Soderbergh);
88 Minutes
(08, Jon Avnet); with De Niro—Tweedle-dee and Tweedle-glum—in
Righteous Kill
(08, Avnet);
You Don’t Know Jack
(10, Barry Levinson).

Géraldine Page
(1924–87), b. Kirksville, Missouri
A florid theatrical character actress, who seemed to resort to movies as a relaxation from the stage, Geraldine Page was nominated for the best actress Oscar three times. Yet she seldom treated the movies to more than a rather mannered Southern bloom—an orchid or a camellia, with a strong sweet scent, just beginning to harden at the edges, but with a bee in its heart.

She trained at the Chicago Academy of Fine Arts and was working in the theatre from the early 1940s, especially in Tennessee Williams plays and in
The Immoralist
, where she appeared with the young James Dean. She had two movie roles in the 1950s:
Taxi
(53, Gregory Ratoff), and as the widow giving as good as she got to John Wayne in the moody
Hondo
(53, John Farrow).

It was 1961 before she began to work steadily in films: repeating stage successes in
Summer and Smoke
(61, Peter Glenville), and as Alexandra del Largo in
Sweet Bird of Youth
(62, Richard Brooks);
Toys in the Attic
(63, George Roy Hill); a desperate wooer of Glenn Ford in
Dear Heart
(64, Delbert Mann);
The Happiest Millionaire
(66, Norman Tokar);
Monday’s Child
(66, Leopoldo Torre Nilsson);
You’re a Big Boy Now
(67, Francis Ford Coppola);
Truman Capote’s Trilogy
(69, Frank Perry), made for TV;
Whatever Happened to Aunt Alice?
(69, Lee H. Katzin); teaching young ladies how to be discreetly randy and serve up questionable mushrooms in
The Beguiled
(71, Don Siegel); as Cliff Robertson’s mother in
J. W. Coop
(71, Robertson); and
Pete ’n’ Tillie
(72, Martin Ritt).

She contributed a performance of exquisite enclosed self-pity to a movie that required exactly and only that,
Interiors
(78, Woody Allen).

She was then in
Harry’s War
(81, Keith Merrill);
Honky Tonk Freeway
(81, John Schlesinger);
I’m Dancing as Fast as I Can
(82, Jack Hofsiss);
The Dollmaker
(84, Daniel Petrie);
The Pope of Greenwich Village
(84, Stuart Rosenberg);
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
(85, Peter H. Hunt); winning the Oscar as the widow making
The Trip to Bountiful
(85, Peter Masterson);
The Bride
(85, Franc Roddam);
White Nights
(85, Taylor Hackford);
Walls of Glass
(85, Scott Goldstein);
My Little Girl
(86, Connie Kaiserman);
Native Son
(86, Jerrold Freedman); as a camp survivor in
Nazi Hunter: The Beate Klarsfeld Story
(86, Michael Lindsay-Hogg).

Marcel Pagnol
(1895–1974), b. Aubagne, France
1934:
Angèle; Le Gendre de Monsieur Poirier; Jofroi
. 1935:
César; Cigalon; Merlusse
. 1937:
Regain/Harvest
. 1938:
Le Schpountz; La Femme du Boulanger/The Baker’s Wife
. 1940:
La Fille du Puisatier/The Welldigger’s Daughter
. 1948:
La Belle Meunière
. 1950:
Topaze
. 1952:
Manon des Sources
. 1954:
Les Lettres de Mon Moulin
.

It’s impressive to see how well the influence of Pagnol has lasted. In the middle eighties, Claude Berri enjoyed international success with
Jean de Florette
and
Manon des Sources
, both taken from a Pagnol story (and filmed by him in 1952). But it was black and white then; thirty years later, the very good Berri films had color in the flowers, and Montand, Depardieu, Daniel Auteuil, and Emmanuelle Béart. The aura of these new movies mingled with the fragrant allure of our culture’s travel section and the supplement on cuisine. This is not to belittle the films, or Pagnol’s virtues, but he has been taken up. One of the most celebrated French restaurants outside France is Alice Waters’s Chez Panisse, in Berkeley, California, its name and sensibility inspired by Pagnol films shown by Tom Luddy just a few blocks away at the Pacific Film Archive. So Pagnol is a flavor in our food now, and a name to drop in tourist brochures.

Pagnol was a very popular playwright who used the Midi area and Marseilles as his settings. After working as a teacher, he turned to writing plays. He founded a film magazine and in 1931 wrote the script for the film of his own play
Marius
(Alexander Korda), and in 1932 for
Fanny
(Marc Allégret). The experience was enough to persuade him to set up his own studio in Marseilles and to continue through the 1930s with sentimental, wellwritten plays about young lovers and their lovable elders. It was an achievement based on charm, an unerring sense of popular taste, and the naturalistic acting of people like Raimu.
Marius, Fanny
, and
César
are frequently revived, their charm intact, their world forever warm. Once upon a time,
The Baker’s Wife
was a model French film.

But as cinema, it fell short of
Toni
, the film Renoir made out of Pagnol’s studio and that knifed through the mythology of rural life, preferring locations to studio-built country scenes. Pagnol always treated Marseilles as a vivacious backdrop, no matter that he knew and loved it. Renoir, however, saw quickly how to make the Midi as everyday as it is for its inhabitants.
Toni
, I think, has not one interior that was not real and lived in. The sunshine in
Toni
burns and tires, whereas in Pagnol it bathes everything in mellow, comfortable warmth. In
Toni
, the quarry cracks open and subsides, just as the little domestic drama rises and falls. Whereas Pagnol was beguiled by the notion of a comforting bond between his characters and their balmy studio Marseilles. In the 1940s and 1950s, Pagnol’s attention returned to the theatre, but his private Midi could not be recreated.

Alan J. Pakula
(1928–98), b. New York
1969:
The Sterile Cuckoo/Pookie
. 1971:
Klute
. 1972:
Love and Pain and the Whole Damn Thing
. 1974:
The Parallax View
. 1976:
All the President’s Men
. 1978:
Comes a Horseman
. 1979:
Starting Over
. 1981:
Rollover
. 1982:
Sophie’s Choice
. 1986:
Dream Lover
. 1987:
Orphans
. 1989:
See You in the Morning
. 1990:
Presumed Innocent
. 1993:
The Pelican Brief
. 1997:
The Devil’s Own
.

Pakula and his colleague of the 1960s, Robert Mulligan, worked in the dilute vein of intelligent, cautiously bold entertainment still congratulating itself in American movies. Thus Pakula spoke of his own approach: “I am oblique, I think that has to do with my own nature. I like trying to do things which work on many levels, because I think it is terribly important to give an audience a lot of things they may not get as well as those they will, so that finally the film does take on a texture and is not just simplistic communication.”

But that earnestness, and the “texture” of his films, are too bland and calculated. Pakula is a little simpler than he hopes, and
Klute
and
The Parallax View
(though very gripping) show the dangers of falling between brilliantly acted crime melodrama and intellectual coat trailing. It is too easy to say that
Klute
reveals brooding urban paranoia, confused sexual identity, and a type of morbid voyeurism. No one could miss those themes or allow them to disguise Jane Fonda’s clutching of the film to herself so that the potentially disturbing Klute is left a blank character and the audience is as preoccupied with the actress’s studied feelings as are Bree Daniels’s clients.

Perhaps that balance of the commercial and the perilous is in the character of an ex-producer, a confessed admirer of actors, and someone who once thought of being a psychoanalyst (the surrogate and passive director in
Klute
). From Yale, where he majored in drama, he went to the cartoons department of Warner Brothers and then into producing. In retrospect, it seems likely that his taste for out-of-the-way people and situations, plus an instinct for respectable, well-planned pathos, were guiding elements in the partnership with Robert Mulligan that made
Fear Strikes Out
(57),
To Kill a Mockingbird
(63),
Love With the Proper Stranger
(63),
Baby, The Rain Must Fall
(65),
Inside Daisy Clover
(66),
Up the Down Staircase
(67), and
The Stalking Moon
(69).

Pakula’s debut, and his third film, were attempts at unsentimental portraits of emotional grotesques: Liza Minnelli as a gauche college girl, and Maggie Smith trembling with terminal illness. Both films suffer from the somewhat distasteful way in which they “work” so well. In other words, the grotesques are the result of neat scripting and very cute acting. Their essential vulgarity should be remembered against the welcome touch and subtlety of the thrillers.
Klute
is much better, but still a meek vehicle for a grave actress encouraged into mannerism. The best thing about it is the deliberate visual claustrophobia.

Pakula was exactly the director for the Watergate thriller in that he allowed film noir to obscure the chance of a more searching study of American compromise. The film is deft, thrilling, and cheerful; whereas the events it trades on were clumsy, tedious, and very depressing. Hollywood is not dead or defunct when it turns that story into the heroics of crusading journalism as embodied in two star actors. Pakula has such mastery with the melodramatics of Deep Throat and the sinister climate of a spooked Washington that one could believe in Mabuse again. The disregard of interpretation or political understanding in the movie (and the book) bear witness to the way the media have made justice a theme for entertainment. It follows from this that anxiety and conspiracy theory—neurotic preoccupations of Pakula—are never treated, only preyed upon.
All the President’s Men
proved that the sense of fiction was so rampant in America that you could go from fact to legend in three years without passing understanding.

Just as Pakula seemed very close to the jittery pulse of America in the seventies, so in the eighties a gap opened up. Good as he had been at conveying paranoia, he seemed less interested in other moods.
Sophie’s Choice
was his only success, and that had literary prestige, a fine cast, and Meryl Streep at her most virtuoso moment. Still, Pakula didn’t quite make that queasy story work or flow; rather he left us reminded of its implausibilities and of things a screen cannot show without prompting revulsion.

So many of his other films have been strained in tone and less than compelling. He tried to regain commercial momentum with the old-fashioned legalese melodrama of
Presumed Innocent
and
The Pelican Brief
, and it worked well enough. But
The Devil’s Own
was a mess over which Harrison Ford and Brad Pitt had fought. It was a sad decline, capped by Pakula’s death in a freak accident. In his absence now, it’s easier to see how good
Klute
is and how accurately Pakula caught a moment in American history.