The New Biographical Dictionary of Film: Completely Updated and Expanded (357 page)

The next year he played the title part in Dieterle’s
The Story of Dr. Ehrlich’s Magic Bullet
, about the German Jew who discovered a cure for syphilis. Robinson was now free of the hard gangster image, and in Bacon’s
Brother Orchid
(40) he was a hood who takes refuge in a monastery and grows to like the life. In 1940 he played the founder of the news agency in Dieterle’s
A Dispatch from Reuter’s;
in Le Roy’s
Unholy Partners;
in Curtiz’s
The Sea Wolf
(41); and in Raoul Walsh’s
Manpower
(41), in which his wife, Marlene Dietrich, is implausibly seduced by the best man, George Raft. Perhaps this signified true middle age, for in 1942 Robinson made
Larceny Inc
. for Bacon, his last film under contract to Warners.

He now spent most of his time doing propaganda broadcasts (he spoke eight languages) to occupied Europe and had time only for the best episodes in Duvivier’s
Tales of Manhattan
(42) and
Flesh and Fantasy
(43). His newfound sobriety was put to excellent use as the cigar-smoking insurance investigator in
Double Indemnity
(44, Billy Wilder) and then in probably his best two films, both for Fritz Lang,
The Woman in the Window
(44) and
Scarlet Street
(45), in which he is a gentle bourgeois sucked into sordid murders. Lang made Robinson’s stature seem vulnerable and his face tragic where before he had been presented as a scowling killer. Few films make so engrossing an ordeal out of the ordinary man’s alarm at being trapped in situations more appropriate to cinema.

In 1945, in Britain, he played a flying instructor in John Boulting’s
Journey Together
, a propaganda movie, and in 1946 he excelled as another dogged investigator in Orson Welles’s
The Stranger
. It was a surprise when the next year he put on the frighteners again, and very convincingly, in Delmer Daves’s
The Red House
, which Robinson himself produced. He was in
The Night Has a Thousand Eyes
(48, John Farrow), a father figure in
All My Sons
(48, Irving Reis), and in Mankiewicz’s
House of Strangers
(49), and gave a brief reprise of Little Rico, whispering obscenely in Lauren Bacall’s ear in Huston’s
Key Largo
(48).

At about that time, Robinson’s career suffered, despite being subsequently cleared, when he was called before the House Committee on Un-American Activities. He made
Actors and Sin
(52, Ben Hecht and Lee Garmes) and dropped into a run of lesser films in which he was forced to be a gangster again:
The Glass Web
(53, Jack Arnold); Aldrich’s
The Big Leaguer
(53); Fregonese’s excellent
Black Tuesday
(54);
Tight Spot
(55) for Phil Karlson;
A Bullet for Joey
(55) and
Illegal
(56) for Lewis Allen; and
The Violent Men
(56, Rudolph Maté).

Then, after appearing in De Mille’s
The Ten Commandments
(56), Robinson retired to look at his paintings and to work in the theatre again. He played in Arthur Koestler’s
Darkness at Noon
in 1951 and created the leading role in Chayefsky’s
Middle of the Night
in 1956. He returned to Hollywood as one of its most revered veterans, not entirely well and involved in several unworthy films but appearing with credit in Capra’s
A Hole in the Head
(59); in Hathaway’s
Seven Thieves
(60); in Mackendrick’s
Sammy Going South
(63); devious and exaggerated as the movie mogul in Minnelli’s
Two Weeks in Another Town
(62); as the secretary of the interior in Ford’s
Cheyenne Autumn
(64); in a double role in
The Prize
(64, Mark Robson); and by far the most assured poker player in
The Cincinnati Kid
(65, Norman Jewison). Toward the end, he was in sillier films—
The Biggest Bundle of Them All
(68, Ken Annakin);
MacKenna’s Gold
(69, J. Lee Thompson);
Song of Norway
(70, Andrew L. Stone); and
Soylent Green
(72, Richard Fleischer). He died a few months before he could receive the overall Oscar belatedly awarded to him by the Academy.

Mark Robson
(1913–78), b. Montreal, Canada
1943:
The Seventh Victim; The Ghost Ship
. 1944:
Youth Runs Wild
. 1945:
Isle of the Dead
. 1946:
Bedlam
. 1949:
Home of the Brave; Champion; Roughshod; My Foolish Heart
. 1950:
Edge of Doom
. 1951:
Bright Victory; I Want You
. 1953:
Return to Paradise
. 1954:
Hell Below Zero; Phffft
. 1955:
The Bridges at Toko-Ri; A Prize of Gold; Trial
. 1956:
The Harder They Fall
. 1957:
The Little Hut; Peyton Place
. 1958:
The Inn of the Sixth Happiness
. 1960:
From the Terrace
. 1962:
Nine Hours to Rama
. 1963:
The Prize
. 1965:
Von Ryan’s Express; Lost Command
. 1967:
Valley of the Dolls
. 1969:
Daddy’s Gone A-Hunting
. 1971:
Happy Birthday, Wanda June
. 1974:
Earthquake
. 1978:
Avalanche Express
.

Robson is perhaps the most superficial talent to emerge from the Orson Welles circle. After studying at the Pacific Coast University he joined RKO as an editor and worked on both
Citizen Kane
and
The Magnificent Ambersons
, though without credit, and as fully fledged editor on
Journey Into Fear
(43). Like his marginally more talented colleague, Robert Wise, Robson graduated to directing through Val Lewton’s small-budget horror pictures. His first five films were for Lewton, and the fact that he has never equaled the atmospheric inventiveness of
The Seventh Victim, The Ghost Ship
, and
Youth Runs Wild
is a reflection of Lewton’s authorship and of Robson’s neutrality. Brought up under one genius and one petitmaître, Robson oscillated between styles and genres. He indulged in a spurious, Kramerian realism—in
Home of the Brave, Champion
, and later with
Trial
and
The Harder They Fall
—but without missing a step he abandoned that for the most calculating sentimentality
—The Inn of the Sixth Happiness, The Bridges at Toko-Ri
, and
Nine Hours to Rama
—or a special taste for bestseller vulgarity:
Peyton Place
and
Valley of the Dolls
. But the business trusted him with big projects—as witness
Earthquake
. To see
The Seventh Victim
again, so strange, morbid, and poetic, is enough to let the auteur theory slip through a crack in
Earthquake
’s silly ground.

Nicolas Roeg
, b. London, 1928
1968:
Performance
(codirected with Donald Cammell). 1971:
Walkabout
. 1973:
Don’t Look Now
. 1976:
The Man Who Fell to Earth
. 1980:
Bad Timing
. 1982:
Eureka
. 1985:
Insignificance
. 1986:
Castaway;
an episode from
Aria
. 1988:
Track 29
. 1989:
The Witches; Sweet Bird of Youth
(TV). 1992:
Cold Heaven
. 1994:
Heart of Darkness
(TV). 1995:
Two Deaths; Full Body Massage
(TV);
Hotel Paradise
(s). 1996:
Samson and Delilah
(TV). 2000:
The Sound of Claudia Schiffer
(s). 2007:
Puffball
. 2010:
Night Train
.

Need a man be praised for taking interesting pictures of Mick Jagger, the Australian desert, or Venice? Or would any novice find it difficult to make those subjects unspectacular?

It is the old question of the margin between exposure and revelation. Nicolas Roeg is often reckoned as one of the best photographers to move on to be a director. But the films he photographed are as variable as the directors who made them; it is impossible to discern Roeg beneath the deliberate gaudiness of
The Masque of the Red Death
(64, Roger Corman), the pastoral dullness of
Far from the Madding Crowd
(67, John Schlesinger), or the uneasy science-fiction abstraction of
Fahrenheit 451
(66, François Truffaut). A cameraman rarely hinders an inspired director or resolves the confusion of a mediocre one.
Fahrenheit 451
is visually stranded between offhand realism and fire-engine red schematics because Truffaut failed to discover his necessary intimacy in England.

Yet Roeg’s reputation led him into direction and to that intriguing puzzle,
Performance
(68). When Warner Brothers delayed over releasing that film, and finally hacked it about, there were several cries in defense of mutilated art. But the film suggests that Warners only added to existing confusion.
Performance
looks like a film self-consciously attempting to use the gangster genre as the basis for existentialist riddle.

Donald Cammell seemed intent on drawing in every possible comment on the mysteries of identity, shuffling the spurious in with the portentous and the eclectic. The film howls with ideas, like the Babel of
Paris Nous Appartient
, and the reluctance to order wide reading into something more lasting than an arrogant catalogue of the holy underground. Jagger was an extraordinarily magnetic androgyne, apparently unwilling to relate himself to material or themes. While Roeg looked like a very skilled photographer full of superficial originality.

Roeg went on to direct, alone,
Walkabout
(71), a pretty piece of middlebrow anthropology about civilization and savagery confronting each other in the Australian outback. There was more reason to hope that Donald Cammell might one day make a film in which his Borgesian preoccupations were worked out temperately than that Roeg might direct a film in which the photography was only a means to an end.

But in 1973, he directed his third film,
Don’t Look Now
, a Venice-bound occult thriller. Its widespread praise neglected the gulf between busy cinematic skill and the specious melodrama of the situation. From a Daphne du Maurier story,
Don’t Look Now
makes a fascinating contrast with
The Birds:
whereas Hitchcock uses the bird invasion as a symptom of psychological unease, Roeg never relates the manifestation to his characters. While Hitch teases us with the idea of birds, Roeg jolts us into realizing that we doubt the occult.

The Man Who Fell to Earth
is a dazzling idea, with the added prospect of the gauntly beautiful David Bowie as the fallen angel. Needless to say, it is a wonderful-looking film. But the aggressive imagination in the visuals is even further from narrative coherence. Roeg seemed ready to sacrifice sense to visual pretension, and long before the end this bleak parable has become nonsensical and precious. It was the thematic vanity that is most disconcerting.

Roeg has had a long career in films, working his way up by the hallowed but rarely trod ladder of clapper boy, assistant operator, operator, lighting cameraman, and director. He was assistant operator on, among others,
Bhowani Junction
(56, George Cukor) and operator on
The Trials of Oscar Wilde
(60, Ken Hughes). As director of photography he also worked on the second unit of
Lawrence of Arabia
(62, David Lean) and was in charge of
The Caretaker
(63, Clive Donner);
Nothing But the Best
(64, Donner); cameraman and second-unit director on
Judith
(65, Daniel Mann);
A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum
(66, Dick Lester); and
Petulia
(68, Lester).

In his age of Theresa Russell (Mrs. Roeg), Roeg became ever more wayward and unpredictable.
Bad Timing
(on which they met and Russell played the blank-eyed temptress) is an authentically disturbing sexual picture, as well as Roeg’s most pessimistic work.
Eureka
is incoherent, but pretentious;
Insignificance
is fatuous;
Castaway
is a subject for Buñuel or Strindberg;
Track 29
is unintentionally comic;
The Witches
is a nearly perfect horror movie for wise children on their second breakdown, with a superb use of naïve effects;
Sweet Bird of Youth
was as windy as Miami waiting for a hurricane;
Cold Heaven
is a fine story lost in cloudbanks of mysticism.
Heart of Darkness
left one wondering—again—why anyone ever wanted to film that story. Conrad’s horror is so elusive, while movie’s has to be there. Life is actually not quite as strange as Roeg believes.

Since then, Roeg has had a very odd career—as if age or his reputation for lofty incoherence had caught up with him. But once upon a time he would have run riot with
Samson and Delilah
, and caused a storm with Claudia Schiffer (even silent). It’s not a kind world for visionaries.

Puffball
, set in Ireland, is about magic, primitivism, art, and babies—and it needs its bottom smacked.

Ginger Rogers
(Virginia Katherine McMath) (1911–95), b. Independence, Missouri
Ginger was not the most sophisticated lady in films, and yet she had an enormously popular partnership with Fred Astaire, that sublime mannequin and rare distillation of masculine aplomb. Astaire was never the easiest man to partner: not only because as a dancer he was meticulously exacting, but because his screen character was almost abstract—especially in the RKO 1930s musicals, in which slicked-down hair and perfect costume add to the effect of some spirit of the dance floor and cocktail lounge. Very difficult for a woman to be so rarefied without seeming vapid; all too easy to frighten the faun away with cheerfulness or to expose oneself as brash.