The New Biographical Dictionary of Film: Completely Updated and Expanded (368 page)

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Sabu
(Sabu Dastagir) (1924–63), b. Karapur, India
Sabu was just twelve, working in the stables of a rich man (some say the Maharajah of Mysore), when he was spotted by Robert Flaherty and signed to play the central role in the much-admired semidocumentary
Elephant Boy
(37). This film was produced by Alexander Korda, who brought the boy to England and three major movies:
The Drum
(38, Zoltan Korda); as Abu, the Douglas Fairbanks role, in the great fantasy-spectacle
The Thief of Bagdad
(40, Michael Powell, Ludwig Berger, Tim Whelan, Zoltan Korda, William Cameron Menzies, Alexander Korda); and as Mowgli in
The Jungle Book
(42, Zoltan Korda), actually filmed in Hollywood. Everyone was enchanted with the appealing little guy—Michael Powell called him “a wonderful, graceful, frank, intelligent child.” Somewhere in there he joined the American Army, but soon he was at Universal, back to being a cute lad, in a series of nonsensical exotic Technicolor romps.

First came
Arabian Nights
(42, John Rawlins) with Maria Montez (the Dancing Girl) and Jon Hall (the Caliph); they would also be his costars in
White Savage
(43, Arthur Lubin) and that camp classic
Cobra Woman
(44, Robert Siodmak), in which Montez gets to play twin high priestesses—one good, one evil—and there’s a volcano and a curse, and a different kind of curse: Lon Chaney Jr. as the high priest. Sabu is his shining self, loincloth and all. Although he’s now twenty, he looks thirteen, and therefore exempt from the lure of la Montez. (If he weren’t so obviously innocent you could take him for hunky Jon Hall’s playmate.) Montez is along for the ride in
Tangier
(46, George Waggner), but Hall is somewhere else. Even so, Sabu doesn’t get the girl (Robert Preston does), but he does sing “She’ll Be Coming Round the Mountain.”

Then comes Sabu’s last major film: the Michael Powell/Emeric Pressburger
Black Narcissus
(47), about a group of nuns in the Himalayas. He plays a rich young general—at last, at twenty-three, he’s postadolescent. He’s then in a minor Powell/ Pressburger movie,
End of the River
(47), and from there on in there’s nothing worth talking about:
Man-Eater of Kumaon
(48, Byron Haskin);
Song of India
(49, Albert S. Rogell);
Savage Drums
(51, William Berke—Sabu confronts the Commies). After these flops, he was in an Italian-financed fiasco called
Buongiorno, Elefante!
(1952, Gianni Franciolini). It had been produced by, and starred, Vittorio de Sica, but alas, it wasn’t directed by him.

Baghdad
was Indian (52, Nanabhai Bhatt);
Il Tesoro del Bengala
was Italian (54, Gianni Vernuccio). There was
Jaguar
(56, George Blair),
Jungle Hell
(56, Norman A. Cerf—Sabu meets flying saucers);
The Black Panther
(56, Ron Ormond);
Sabu and the Magic Ring
(57, Blair—put together from a failed TV series);
Herrin der Welt, Teil I
(60, William Dieterle);
Rampage
(63, Phil Karlson). Finally,
A Tiger Walks
(64, Norman Taurog) for Disney.

When things went wrong in Hollywood, Sabu took up custom-furniture making, working with his brother—who was killed in a store robbery. But he had just made his Disney movie when he died of a heart attack, at thirty-nine, so maybe things were looking up. He was survived by his wife and two children, one of whom—Jasmine—has recently written a sequel to
The Thief of Baghdad
and has seen it filmed.

Eva Marie Saint
, b. Newark, New Jersey, 1924
Educated at Bowling Green State University, she had done a little work on radio, TV, and Broadway before being cast by Elia Kazan in
On the Waterfront
(54), for which she won the supporting actress Oscar.

Wanly beautiful, she was one of the more discreet and sensitive American actresses of the late fifties. But her intelligence was seldom used properly. Twice, she exposed Elizabeth Taylor, simply by looking at her in a pained and wondering way:
Raintree County
(57, Edward Dmytryk) and Minnelli’s appalling
The Sandpiper
(65), which, deep down, contains a fine twenty-minute movie about Saint. She was funny in
That Certain Feeling
(56, Melvin Frank and Norman Panama) and
Cancel My Reservation
(72, Paul Bogart) with Bob Hope, and in
The Russians Are Coming…
(66, Norman Jewison); more moving than
A Hatful of Rain
(57, Fred Zinnemann) or
36 Hours
(64, George Seaton) deserves; and a tolerant spectator of her own neglect in
Grand Prix
(66, John Frankenheimer) and
The Stalking Moon
(69, Robert Mulligan).

She worked comparatively rarely, and it was no credit to Hollywood that only a few films were worthy of her: in Frankenheimer’s
All Fall Down
(62); as the mysterious Eve Kendall in
North by Northwest
(59, Alfred Hitchcock), where as seductress, betrayer, and sacrificial victim, she is the pale blonde sign of seriousness beneath the initial comedy; ideal as the central observant sensibility in Preminger’s
Exodus
(60); forlornly stranded as the wife in Irvin Kershner’s
Loving
(70). She was older than she looked, but we are content with the restrained eroticism of the auction scene in
North by Northwest
where she sits mute in red brocade between the inflamed politeness of Grant and Mason; and later, in an alarmed orange dress, as she dangles from the stone lip of George Washington.

She was the wife of a POW in
When Hell Was in
Session
(79, Paul Krasny); a mother in TV’s
Splendor in the Grass
(81, Richard Sarafian); the mother to Jennifer Jason Leigh’s anorexia in
The Best Little Girl in the World
(81, Sam O’Steen);
Jane Doe
(83, Ivan Nagy);
Love Leads the Way
(84, Delbert Mann);
Fatal Vision
(84, David Greene);
The Last Days of Patton
(86, Mann);
Nothing in Common
(86, Garry Marshall);
Norman Rockwell’s Breaking Home Ties
(87, John Wilder);
I’ll Be Home for Christmas
(88, Marvin J. Chomsky); and
Voyage of Terror: The Achille Lauro Affair
(89, Alberto Negrin). She also played Cybill Shepherd’s mother for a season in
Moonlighting
.

She still works on projects that move her: winning an Emmy in
People Like Us
(90, William Hale);
Palomino
(91, Michael Miller);
My Antonia
(95, Joseph Sargent);
Mariette in Ecstasy
(96, John Bailey);
Titanic
(96, Robert Lieberman);
I Dreamed of Africa
(00, Hugh Hudson);
Because of Winn-Dixie
(05, Wayne Wang);
Superman Returns
(06, Bryan Singer).

Walter (Moreira) Salles
, b. Rio de Janeiro, 1956
1991:
A Grande Arte
. 1995:
Socorro Nobre
. 1996:
Terra Estrangeira
(codirected with Daniela Thomas). 1998:
Central do Brasil / Central Station; Somos Todos Filhos da Terra
. 2001:
Abril Despedaçado
. 2002:
Armas e Paz; Castanha e Caju Contra o Encouraçado Titanic
. 2004:
Diarios de Motocicieta / The Motorcycle Diaries
. 2005:
Dark Water
. 2006: episode “Loin du 16ème,” from
Paris Je T’Aime
. 2007: episode “A 8,944 km de Cannes,” from
Chacun Son Cinéma
. 2008:
Linha de Passe
(codirected with Thomas). 2008:
Stories on Human Rights
(codirected) The sons of a successful banker, Walter Salles and his brother Joäo are apparently heirs to a large bank—but why should we discriminate? He did film studies at the University of Southern California, and he has worked in Spanish and English as well as Portuguese. He has a habit of basing his movies around epic journeys of self-discovery, so that we should regard his plan to film Jack Ker-ouac’s
On the Road
with special interest (and with Francis Coppola producing).

He first drew attention with
Terra Estrangeira
, about a woman going back to the land of her childhood. But
Central Station
was an international hit. Its story about a woman who writes letters for the illiterate, and how she is drawn to help a child, proved a vital arc—the movie had an Oscar nomination as Best Foreign Film and another for Fernanda Montenegro in the lead part.
The Motorcycle Diaries
(Che Guevara is one of the characters and the script is based on his diaries) was a superb coming-of-age story cut with a loose road film—and one of the key moments in the recent surge of Latin American cinema.

Nor should
Dark Water
be forgotten. It is a very spooky American horror film set on Roosevelt Island in New York. The film did not get much notice, but it gives every sign that the USC graduate has it in him to flourish in American genres.

George Sanders
(1906–72), b. St. Petersburg, Russia
The son of a rope manufacturer and a British horticulturalist—it could be the start of a Nabokov novel. And Sanders’s own cultivated offensiveness, his ostentatious and articulate disdain, and his grammatical malice are all the display of an amused, intelligent, and playful Nabokov narrator. No one but Sanders by this reckoning would have derived so much rueful pleasure from the grotesque disarray of his movies; no one would have been more aghast at the intensity of his own labor over thirty years; and no one would be more dismissive of that handful of roles that properly exercised him.

His best part was the critic/narrator, Addison de Witt, in Joseph Mankiewicz’s
All About Eve
(50), a demonstration of soft-spoken, tranquil caddishness. And how would de Witt have described Sanders’s career? “Sanders had early gauged that there was a profitable, supporting life to be had in Hollywood as a gracious scoundrel: he noticed that his English drawl, provokingly good manners, and high sartorial standards were vouchsafes of insolence and bad intentions. He so practiced the sneer that eventually he required no words. He imagined his mouth drawn down by some astringent spirit that he was on the point of swallowing—hemlock perhaps—and gazed skeptically at earnest heroes and condescendingly at ripe bosoms afforded by his height and so many costume films.”

When the Depression obliged him to abandon tobacco farming, Sanders took up acting and made a few films in England:
Find the Lady
(36, Ronald Gillette);
Strange Cargo
(36, Lawrence Huntington);
The Man Who Could Work Miracles
(36, Lothar Mendes); and
Dishonour Bright
(36, Tom Walls). But it was clear that his hollow loftiness was worthy of bolder nonsense: he went to Hollywood to play in
Lloyds of London
(36, Henry King) and stayed. Fox put him under contract and, when war came, employed his polish as Hun, spy, or Gestapo in several films. In addition, they loaned him to the more perceptive RKO where he was the lounge-suit hero in two B-picture series, featuring the Saint and then the Falcon. These are in advance of Ian Fleming’s James Bond, the depraved gentleman, supposedly acting in the name of honor and probity, but visibly unconvinced by such causes:
The Saint Strikes Back
(39, John Farrow);
The Saint in London
(39, John Paddy Carstairs);
The Gay Falcon
(41, Irving Reis);
A Date with the Falcon
(41, Reis); and
The Falcon Takes Over
(42, Reis).

Apart from those enjoyable excursions, Sanders was a hardworked support:
Slave Ship
(37, Tay Garnett);
Love Is News
(37, Garnett);
Lancer Spy
(37, Gregory Ratoff, another old St. Petersburg ham);
Four Men and a Prayer
(38, John Ford);
Confessions of a Nazi Spy
(39, Anatole Litvak); grilling Anna Neagle in
Nurse Edith Cavell
(39, Herbert Wilcox);
Green Hell
(40, James Whale);
Bitter Sweet
(40, W. S. Van Dyke);
Son of Monte Cristo
(40, Rowland V. Lee); roguishly stepping through the window in
Rebecca
(40, Alfred Hitchcock);
The House of the Seven Gables
(40, Joe May);
Foreign Correspondent
(40, Hitchcock);
Man Hunt
(41, Fritz Lang);
Rage in Heaven
(41, Van Dyke);
Sundown
(41, Henry Hathaway);
Son of Fury
(42, John Cromwell);
Her Cardboard Lover
(42, George Cukor); the painter in
The Moon and Sixpence
(42, Albert Lewin);
They Came to Blow Up America
(43, Edward Ludwig);
This Land Is Mine
(43, Jean Renoir);
The Lodger
(44, John Brahm); harking back to Russia in the Chekhov-based
Summer Storm
(44, Douglas Sirk); brilliant in
Uncle Harry
(45, Robert Siodmak);
The Picture of Dorian Gray
(45, Lewin);
Hangover Square
(45, Brahm);
A Scandal in Paris
(46, Sirk);
The Strange Woman
(46, Edgar G. Ulmer);
The Ghost and Mrs. Muir
(47, Mankiewicz); as Charles II in
Forever Amber
(47, Otto Preminger);
The Private Affairs of Bel Ami
(47, Lewin, and his third film for that idiosyncrat);
Lured
(47, Sirk);
Lady Windermere’s Fan
(49, Preminger); and
Samson and Delilah
(49, Cecil B. De Mille).

How could any actually uninterested actor have appeared in so many fetching films? Plainly, languor was a disguise for stamina. But once Hollywood had given him a supporting actor Oscar for
All About Eve
, it set about discouraging him. He was asked to dress up in armor and ride horses, engage in sword fights and other arduous contests. He went into a decline that was remarkable for lasting so long without reaching extinction:
I Can Get It For You Wholesale
(51, Michael Gordon);
The Light Touch
(51, Richard Brooks);
Ivanhoe
(52, Richard Thorpe);
Assignment Paris
(52, Robert Parrish);
Call Me Madam
(53, Walter Lang);
Witness to Murder
(54, Roy Rowland);
King Richard and the Crusaders
(54, David Butler);
The Scarlet Coat
(55, John Sturges); and
The King’s Thief
(55, Robert Z. Leonard).