The New Biographical Dictionary of Film: Completely Updated and Expanded (324 page)

David and Lisa
and
Last Summer
begin as sensitive portraits of young people, but gradually harden into crude psychiatric landscapes.
The Swimmer
is a splendidly silly parable, taken from a John Cheever story, about Burt Lancaster swimming across suburbia. Although Perry was taken out of the film so that Sydney Pollack could shoot a tidier ending, and while the film is pretentious, its view of suburban atrophy is based on a stunning metaphor, and the film stays in the memory.
Diary of a Mad Housewife
is beautifully acted, but rather overawed by its unmitigated black view of marital destructiveness. It speaks with a literary pessimism that may be more appropriate to the novel. However, the film of
Play It As It Lays
is a disaster among literary adaptations, a disgrace to Joan Didion and Tuesday Weld.
Doc
is another solemn elevation of a well-known myth, too deliberate to please.

Mommie Dearest
was his biggest picture, yet it had its brakes on, somehow—as if tact had been preferred to the deadpan abandon of an Andy Warhol.
Compromising Positions
(from a Susan Isaacs novel) is a nice, tart comedy.
Monsignor
, however, is one of those pictures made only for the purpose of later parody. Which is not enough reason for making it.

Joe Pesci
, b. Newark, New Jersey, 1943
Just as Walter Brennan used to have two ways of acting—with teeth or without—so Joe Pesci has fallen into two approaches: street rough; or in-your-face gruesome appealing. It’s a close call whether he is more frightening, or disturbing, as the unpredictable hood in
Goodfellas
(90, Martin Scorsese), which he dominated and for which he won the supporting actor Oscar, or as the sleazebag-you-love-to-hate in any kind of
Lethal Weapon Home Alone
. Still, as Joe Pesci has become a popular “character,” one has to worry that he is the less as an actor.

He tried to stay in honest work for twenty years before he established himself as the long-suffering brother in
Raging Bull
(80, Scorsese). Thereafter, he played in
I’m Dancing As Fast As I Can
(82, Jack Hofsiss);
Dear Mr. Wonderful
(82, Peter Lilienthal);
Easy Money
(83, James Signorelli);
Eureka
(83, Nicolas Roeg);
Once Upon a Time in America
(84, Sergio Leone);
Man on Fire
(87, Elie Chouraqui); in Michael Jackson’s “Moonwalker” video (88);
Lethal Weapon 2
(89, Richard Donner);
Backtrack
(90, Dennis Hopper);
Betsy’s Wedding
(90, Alan Alda);
Home Alone
(90, Chris Columbus);
The Super
(91, Rod Daniel); brilliant as David Ferrie in
JFK
(91, Oliver Stone);
My Cousin Vinny
(92, Jonathan Lynn);
Lethal Weapon 3
(92, Donner); as a Weegee-like photographer in
The Public Eye
(92, Howard Franklin);
Home Alone 2: Lost in New York
(92, Columbus); and
Jimmy Hollywood
(94, Barry Levinson).

His output declined in the nineties, but not before
Casino
(95, Martin Scorsese), which is in many ways a helpless tribute to the energy, anarchy, and life force of his disruptive character. As with
Goodfellas
, the principle was proved yet again that Pesci could be uniquely fearsome and dangerous. More than that, one has the feeling that Scorsese is fascinated by his actor’s loss of control. By comparison, Pesci was dull in
8 Heads in a Duffel Bag
(97, Tom Schulman);
Gone Fishin
(97, Christopher Cain);
Lethal Weapon 4
(98, Richard Donner).

He had a cameo as a Giancana-like gangster in
The Good Shepherd
(06, Robert De Niro) and then in
Love Ranch
(10, Taylor Hackford).

Wolfgang Petersen
, b. Emden, Germany, 1941
1973:
Einer von uns Beiden
. 1976:
Vier Gegen die Bank; Reiferzeugnis
. 1977:
Die Konsequenz/The Consequence
. 1978:
Schwarz und Weiss wie Tage und Nächte/Black and White Like Day and Night
. 1981:
Das Boot/The Boat
. 1984:
The NeverEnding Story
. 1985:
Enemy Mine
. 1991:
Shattered
. 1993:
In the Line of Fire
. 1995:
Outbreak
. 1997:
Air Force One
. 2000:
The Perfect Storm
. 2004:
Troy
. 2006:
Poseidon
.

The popular wisdom is that the suspenseful submarine picture
Das Boot
changed the direction of Petersen’s career and carried him from small, psychological pictures to Hollywood. In fact,
Das Boot
was originally a German TV miniseries that went all the way to dubbed American theatrical release. But I think
In the Line of Fire
was really the turning point in that it proved Petersen’s ability to operate suspense on the small and the grand scale at the same time, and to catch a snappy American idiom. It is a very cute film that sets up two intriguing relationships for the often impenetrable Clint Eastwood—with a rich, eccentric villain, John Malkovich, and a warm woman, Rene Russo. Since then, Petersen has cornered the market in upscale disaster films that have vestiges of human character.
Air Force One
—simultaneously bland and hysterical—is very close to an ideal modern movie. And Petersen seems able to balance the frenzy and the emptiness without a qualm. He also helped produce the equally desperate and banal
Red Corner
(97, Jon Avnet).

The Perfect Storm
was a perfect marketing operation, predictable in every detail and line, but undeniably impressive in its great storm and with a certain stormy feeling for the nobility of the fishermen. If only
Troy
had an atom of nobility, or
Poseidon
a fluid ounce of its feeling for the sea.

Elio Petri
(1929–82), b. Rome
1961:
L’Assassino/The Assassin
. 1962:
I Giorni Contati
. 1963:
Il Maestro di Vigevano
. 1964: “Peccato nel Pomeriggio,” episode from
Alta Infedelta
. 1965:
La Decima Vittima/The Tenth Victim
. 1966:
A Ciascuno il Suo
. 1968:
Un Tranquillo Posto di Campagna/A Quiet Place in the Country
. 1970:
Indagine su un Cittadino al di Sopra di Ogni Sospetto/Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion
. 1972:
La Classe Operaia va in Paradiso
. 1973:
La Proprieta non e piu un Furto
. 1976:
Todo Modo
. 1979:
Buone Notizie
. 1981:
Chi Illumina la Grande Notte?

Although his manner of filming increasingly tended toward flashiness, Petri’s films are often made from very intriguing subjects. His use of glamorous players, pretty colors, and a frantic visual style served to make some films modish and too deliberately mystifying. Part of the difficulty may lie in his inability to achieve the truly neutral, futurist world, a Kafka environment, that his situations demand. Arguably, Welles’s
The Trial
also reproduced Kafka’s distilled reality through a mixture of wide-angled close-ups and distracting camera movements. Petri’s real shortcoming may be that his attitude toward a world of lost identities and invented purpose is only sardonic, that black comedy is his natural vein rather than the philosophical thriller.

Even so, at least three of his films make compelling viewing.
L’Assassino
has Marcello Mastroianni as an indolent, wealthy dilettante, charged with a crime that conforms with all his secret knowledge of his own culpability.
The Tenth Victim
is genuine futurism, with Mastroianni hunted by the lethal Ursula Andress. Both films were lip-smacking dissections of the effete Italian bourgeoisie. But
Investigation of a Citizen …
is his most ambitious work, about a fascist policeman who kills his mistress and then taunts the law with clues to see how long it is before his own authority is discredited. The man is a grotesque, strutting tyrant, a puppet trying to strangle himself in his own strings. The meaning is patent, but built around startling revelations of plot, a fascinating performance from Gian Maria Volonte, and arrangements of individual and group that may have affected
The Conformist
. Few films so reveal our macabre need to be found out and accused. Thus its reference to Kafka seems merited.

Michelle Pfeiffer
, b. Santa Ana, California, 1957
As a regular Hollywood performer, Michelle Pfeiffer is a mystery. For a few years (around 1990), she was beautiful, mysterious, and potent. People guessed she could do anything—but then anything turned into so many forlorn choices. She still carries the rather stunned, obedient air of an ex–checkout girl at the El Toro Vons supermarket, as well as the luster of an Orange County beauty pageant winner. Someone as successful, and as popular, from Manhattan or Cleveland, might have earned a higher reputation as trouble. Moreover, to judge by her appearance on the Barbara Walters show, Pfeiffer is not all honey and buttermilk. Indeed, she seemed odd, hidden, and rather ungiving in spirit. Yet she has been (and given up on being) the young American actress most in demand and most trusted to find something fresh in routine or underwritten roles. She has great skill and inventiveness, a genuine glamour, and an appealing vulnerability, even when she is as tough as she was in
Scarface
(83, De Palma).

Before that she had done whatever came her way
—Charlie Chan and the Curse of the Dragon Queen
(81, Clive Donner) and
Grease II
(82, Patricia Birch), from which she was the only newcomer to survive. But it was as Elvira, in
Scarface
, dangerously thin and pale, coming down in a glass elevator, wearing an aqua sheath and an air of recrimination, her eyes ruined already, that she made her real entry. Her junkie was the only source of moral intelligence within that film, a nymph turning into a witch before our eyes.

She has not looked back: in
Ladyhawke
(85, Richard Donner) she was a fair maiden; in
Into the Night
(85, John Landis) she did countless variations on charm without ever being grating; she was sweet and smart in
Sweet Liberty
(86, Alan Alda); and in
The Witches of Eastwick
(87, George Miller) she seemed to understand the helpless rapture of having the devil as a lover, as well as conveying the stunned summeriness of New England women late in the afternoon. Her face seemed to know the effect of humidity.

In the next few years, she made film after film that took her, and our expectations, further.
Tequila Sunrise
(88, Robert Towne) was the least of these films, and it had moments when her half-teary, half-bloodshot eyes swam in the soft focus. But she lifted
Married to the Mob
(88, Jonathan Demme) with her timing and her humor. In
Dangerous Liaisons
(88, Stephen Frears), she brought life to the least interesting role. Then in
The Fabulous Baker Boys
(89, Steve Kloves), she was a slinky sensation, singing her own songs, dominating the film, and deserving of huge success. Next, she was very close to Bergman and effortlessly European in
The Russia House
(90, Fred Schepisi).
Frankie and Johnny
(91, Garry Marshall) was a rather strained reunion with Al Pacino, for she was no longer credible as a dumb waitress.

Her Catwoman in
Batman Returns
(92, Tim Burton) was a real portrait of neurosis that seemed more than Burton was interested in noticing. But she was astounding as the Texas girl hooked on Jackie Kennedy in
Love Field
(92, Jonathan Kaplan). That movie was long delayed, and then little seen, but it contained her best work yet. In
The Age of Innocence
(93, Martin Scorsese), she seemed the only one of the three leading players who understood the rhythms and layers of the piece. Opposite Nicholson in
Wolf
(94, Mike Nichols), she brought grave intelligence to a modest role.

But then, despite marriage to the powerful TV mogul David E. Kelley, she fell into a pattern of edgeless or worse material (as if she were Loretta Young, instead of Bette Davis):
Dangerous Minds
(95, John N. Smith);
Up Close & Personal
(96, Jon Avnet);
One Fine Day
(96, Mark Hoffman);
To Gillian on Her 37th Birthday
(96, Michael Pressman), coproduced by Kelley;
A Thousand Acres
(97, Jocelyn Moorhouse); Titania in
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
(99, Hoffman);
The Story of Us
(99, Rob Reiner);
What Lies Beneath
(00, Robert Zemeckis);
I Am Sam
(01, Jessie Nelson).

With
White Oleander
(02, Peter Kosminsky), the truth was inescapable—Pfeiffer had not made a decent movie for ten years. She was a voice on
Sinbad: Legend of the Seven Seas
(03, Patrick Gilmore and Tim Johnson), and a witch in
Stardust
(07, Matthew Vaughn). She was in
Hairspray
(07, Adam Shankman), an older woman with a younger guy in
I Could Never Be Your Woman
(07, Amy Heckerling). But no fall was as sad as her Lea in
Chéri
(09, Frears), where she flinches from every hint of coarseness, age, or bitter truth.

Gérard Philipe
(Gérard Philip) (1922–59), b. Cannes, France
There is a type of romantic actor who imprints himself the more deeply by dying early: Valentino, James Dean, and Gérard Philipe. Philipe was younger than Yves Montand and only three years older than Michel Piccoli. He died as the regeneration of French cinema was beginning, and it is tantalizing to imagine him in the films of Demy, Chabrol, or Rohmer. In fact, from the end of the war until his death, Philipe had foreshadowed the precarious shift of comedy and tragedy in the New Wave. Although he often exploited his reputation of matinée idol, Philipe never hammed. Like most great stars, he smiled when sad and never forgot melancholy in moments of gaiety.