The New Biographical Dictionary of Film: Completely Updated and Expanded (345 page)

Then there is
The Third Man
, a tour de force on postwar Vienna, once again from Greene, and for Korda (for Selznick, too, though he was always the potential spoiler to be kept at a distance). Reed acknowledged that Orson Welles had a lot to do with his own scenes, and Welles may have influenced the saturnine look of the film (Krasker again). But Welles was not the best casting (Noel Coward had been thought of): he gives Harry Lime more charm than Greene intended. There is a struggle between Greene’s bleak attitude (poisoned penicillin for children) and the film’s urge to give people a lift (not just Welles, but the comedy and the zither).

Still, for decades
The Third Man
has worked as a mystery: you can smell the sewers, the fear, and the mistrust in Vienna. A time and a place were captured; scenario and locale were stirred, like cream going into dark coffee. Joseph Cotten and Holly Martins are from a writer’s forgotten drawer. But Trevor Howard, Valli, and the wolfish Viennese faces tell the truth.
The Third Man
has one of the most intense atmospheres the screen has ever delivered—seeing it again always brings back the scent of the grandmother who took me to see it.

But then Reed ran out of steam, or need.
Outcast of the Islands
is a Conrad story, with Trevor Howard and Ralph Richardson, and it’s effective. But
A Kid for Two Farthings
was insipid whimsy passed off as urban folklore;
Trapeze
was a tame rehearsal of the duel between Lancaster and Curtis actually achieved by Alexander Mackendrick;
The Key
is heavy with Carl Foreman’s pretension.
Oliver!
was a hit (it won best picture and best direction), but it’s awful and unrecognizable as the work of the man who made
Odd Man Out. Our Man in Havana
was even poor Greene.
The Agony and the Ecstasy
was a picturesque hoot.

If Reed had died in, say, 1950, then he would probably be treasured now as a great director. As it is, we can only puzzle over the complex of collaborators, timing, inspiration, and chance that made those three films in a row—perhaps the swan song of black-and-white’s grandeur. The illegitimate son of actor Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree, Reed had access to inner circles. Yet he was as diffident as a rich boy used to the company of servants.

Donna Reed
(Donna Mullenger) (1921–86), b. Denison, Iowa
I have a soft spot for this lovely lady, since she it was who first impressed upon me the trade of whoring. Not that
From Here to Eternity
(53, Fred Zinnemann) ever refers to her part as anything other than a nice girl who sits on a sofa and talks to soldiers. In the 1930s, there would have been less shyness, and more skillful suggestions of the sexuality in James Jones’s novel. But in the 1950s, Hollywood was suppressed sexually. As if conscious of a breakthrough to come, and nervous of the huge forces of reaction, sexy ladies in movies were often overdressed, tight-lipped, and genteel. A proof of this was the fact that Donna Reed should ever have been playing a whore. She was so plainly decent, wholesome, and romantic that Harry Cohn’s personal casting of her in what was a major production bespeaks the system’s inhibition (she was also married to one of his executives). So perhaps Donna Reed was only a twelve-year-old’s whore, but I remember still the wondering way she stroked Montgomery Clift. Hollywood seemingly was affected by this hint of wantonness in so nice a girl and gave her the supporting actress Oscar.

It was years later that I discovered her Mary Bailey in
It’s a Wonderful Life
(46, Frank Capra), the epitome of wholesomeness, loyalty, and the patient, smalltown sweetheart. Donna Reed had the sure look of a first love that lasts forever. Yet she was pretty enough to be the classy whore in a Honolulu brothel. And she was the ideal embodiment of sensuality within the proper niceness that appealed to a twelve-year-old male imagination—for so long the gold in the hills of the movie business. There is a dream in American movies that the girl who looks like mother may be a sexual paradise—and that a slut is really a good girl: it’s there not just in
From Here to Eternity
, but in such recent hits as
Risky Business
and
Pretty Woman
. Compare that abiding fantasy with the nearly savage psychological insights of Jean Eustache’s
The Mother and the Whore
, and you begin to measure the odd way that Hollywood arouses and tranquilizes us at the same time.

She won a beauty contest and was taken up by MGM:
Babes on Broadway
(41, Busby Berkeley);
The Getaway
(41, Edward Buzzell);
Shadow of the Thin Man
(41, W. S. Van Dyke);
Eyes in the Night
(42, Zinnemann);
Calling Dr. Gillespie
(42, Harold S. Bucquet);
Apache Trail
(42, Richard Thorpe);
The Courtship of Andy Hardy
(42, George Seitz);
The Human Comedy
(43, Clarence Brown);
The Man from Down Under
(43, Robert Z. Leonard);
See Here, Private Hargrove
(44, Wesley Ruggles);
Gentle Annie
(44, Andrew Marton); overshadowed by Hurd Hatfield in
The Picture of Dorian Gray
(45, Albert Lewin); the nurse in
They Were Expendable
(45, John Ford);
Green Dolphin Street
(47, Victor Saville);
Beyond Glory
(48, John Farrow);
Chicago Deadline
(49, Lewis Allen);
Saturday’s Hero
(51, David Miller);
Scandal Sheet
(52, Phil Karlson), and probably her best film;
The Caddy
(53, Norman Taurog); fetchingly disturbed in her bath by Phil Carey in
Gun Fury
(53, Raoul Walsh);
Trouble Along the Way
(53, Michael Curtiz);
They Rode West
(54, Karlson);
This Is My Love
(54, Stuart Heisler); as Liz Taylor’s frosty sister in
The Last Time I Saw Paris
(55, Richard Brooks); as an Indian girl in
The Far Horizons
(55, Rudolph Maté); the wife in
The Benny Goodman Story
(55, Valentine Davies);
Three Hours to Kill
(55, Alfred Werker);
Ransom!
(56, Alex Segal); halfway aggressive in the interesting
Backlash
(56, John Sturges);
Beyond Mombasa
(57, George Marshall); and
The Whole Truth
(58, John Guillermin).

She did a great deal of television—notably
The Donna Reed Show
(1958–66), a commercial for niceness, and a brief life as Miss Ellie on
Dallas
(1984–85)—and she was in two TV movies:
The Best Place to Be
(79, David Miller) and
Deadly Lessons
(83, William Wiard).

Christopher Reeve
, (1952–2004), b. New York City
On Saturday, May 27, 1995, in Virginia, riding the cross-country section of a three-day event, Christopher Reeve was thrown at the third fence. He landed on his head. He was unconscious for four days. His first and second cervical vertebrae were fractured. He was paralyzed, but after that worked a little—as actor and director—and campaigned for further research into spinal injuries. In the SuperBowl telecast of January 2000, there was even an advertisement in which he stood and walked. But such superiority is the norm in those little movies. He died in 2004.

Christopher Reeve was never a great or indelible actor, but his likability shone through, and that and his physique were all that Clark Kent and Superman needed. So Reeve became the star in a franchise where the dream of flying is the most important special effect. He got into other movies, but he was always regarded as a curiosity. Then fate, and irony, turned him into a real hero—and he made his most famous movies seem even more specious.

He worked in the theatre and on the soap opera
Love of Life
before movies—and he was effectively an “unknown” at the time of
Superman: Gray Lady Down
(78, David Greene);
Superman
(78, Richard Donner);
Superman II
(80, Richard Lester);
Somewhere in Time
(80, Jeannot Szwarc);
Deathtrap
(82, Sidney Lumet); out of his depth in
Monsignor
(82, Frank Perry);
Superman III
(83, Lester);
The Bostonians
(84, James Ivory);
The Aviator
(85, George Miller); as Vronsky, with Jacqueline Bisset, in a TV version of
Anna Karenina
(85, Simon Langton);
Street Smart
(87, Jerry Schatzberg)—his best film;
Superman IV: The Quest for Peace
(87, Sidney J. Furie), on which he helped write the story and did some second-unit directing;
Switching Channels
(88, Ted Kotcheff);
Noises Off
(92, Peter Bogdanovich);
The Remains of the Day
(93, Ivory);
Speechless
(94, Ron Underwood);
Village of the Damned
(95, John Carpenter);
Above Suspicion
(95, Steven Schachter).

After his accident, for TV, he directed
In the Gloaming;
played the old Jimmy Stewart role in a remake of
Rear Window
(99, Jeff Bleckner); and did
A Step Toward Tomorrow
(96, Deborah Reinisch).

Keanu Reeves
, b. Beirut, Lebanon, 1965
Keanu Reeves has come through all the routine questions that seem to face a young, on-the-margins American movie actor. Questions like “What does that hair style mean?” “What sort of name is that?” “Where are you really from?” and “Are you for real?” By the time he was thirty, Reeves had made around twenty films—some were forgettable, a few were very big hits, a few seemed beyond him; yet Reeves kept coming, the energy undaunted, his watchful face unclouded. As yet, maybe, he shows not too much of what it is like to be in your thirties—being thirty now for actors is akin to the difficulty of being forty for actresses. But Reeves has been good often enough to have earned respect.

He is the son of an English mother and a father of mixed Chinese and Hawaiian extraction. There are even rumors that “Kee-ah-noo” means “cool breeze over the mountains.” He lived for a while in Australia, but was mostly raised in Canada, in Toronto, where he had his start in local TV and had a role in a picture called
The Prodigal
(84).

His progress was rapid:
Flying
(86, Paul Lynch);
Youngblood
(86, Peter Markle); outstanding as the kid who goes to the cops in
River’s Edge
(87, Tim Hunter);
The Night Before
(88, Thom Eberhardt); as the hero’s friend in
Permanent Record
(88, Marisa Silver); very good in
The Prince of Pennsylvania
(88, Ron Nyswaner); rather uneasy with costume and poised dialogue in
Dangerous Liaisons
(88, Stephen Frears); generating big money and funny in
Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure
(89, Stephen Herek);
Parenthood
(89, Ron Howard); an assassin, with William Hurt, in
I Love You to Death
(90, Lawrence Kasdan), hovering between comedy and gravity; good again in
Tune in Tomorrow …
(90, Jon Amiel), adapted from Mario Vargas Llosa.

He was the undercover FBI man in
Point Break
(91, Kathryn Bigelow); reunited with Alex Winter for
Bill & Ted’s Bogus Journey
(91, Peter Hewitt); rather in the shadow of River Phoenix (a close friend) in
My Own Private Idaho
(91, Gus Van Sant); as Harker, wide-eyed and helpless, in
Bram Stoker’s Dracula
(92, Francis Coppola); laboring in
Much Ado About Nothing
(93, Kenneth Branagh);
Even Cowgirls Get the Blues
(93, Van Sant).

Then, in 1994, he went from Siddhartha in
Little Buddha
(Bernardo Bertolucci) to
Speed
(Jan de Bont). After the former, he needed the latter the way Harker needed blood transfusions. But at last he seemed grown up, not much short of tough, and potentially sexy.
Speed
is a vehicle, of course, but it required warmth and deftness in its playing, and Reeves kept the bus on a human and funny course.

Johnny Mnemonic
(95, Robert Longo) was a misstep, but in the full-blooded
A Walk in the Clouds
(95, Alfonso Arau), he developed his romantic capacity and looked like the Indiana Jones in between River Phoenix and Harrison Ford. One could feel something like an old-fashioned heartthrob might be carried on his cool breeze.

He was in
Chain Reaction
(96, Andrew Davis);
Feeling Minnesota
(96, Steven Baigelman);
The Last Time I Committed Suicide
(97, Stephen T. Kay); game for everything in
The Devil’s Advocate
(97, Taylor Hackford); and as Neo, one of the great millennial images, Valentino in black leather, in
The Matrix
(99, Andy and Larry Wachowski).

He has been downright serene since then (waiting for the
Matrix
sequel):
The Replacements
(00, Howard Deutch);
The Watcher
(00, Joe Charbanic);
The Gift
(00, Sam Raimi);
Sweet November
(01, Pat O’Connor);
Hardball
(01, Brian Robbins). The sequels arrived—
The Matrix Reloaded
and
Revolutions
(both 03, Wachow ski)—and Reeves seemed weary of them. He was much more fun in
Something’s Gotta Give
(03, Nancy Meyers), followed by
Thumbsucker
(04, Mike Mills);
The Lake House
(06, Alejandro Agresti);
A Scanner Darkly
(06, Richard Linklater);
Street Kings
(08, David Ayer); as Klaatu in
The Day the Earth Stood Still
(08, Scott Derrickson);
The Private Lives of Pippa Lee
(09, Rebecca Miller).