The New Biographical Dictionary of Film: Completely Updated and Expanded (373 page)

Sean Connery’s Barley in
The Russia House
could have been—should have been?—as much of a disaster as Susan Traherne in
Plenty
. That the film winds slowly toward a happy ending seems finally a little unworthy of Schepisi. But along the way we see so many unexpected things—there is something effortlessly wandering in Schepisi. He is like an absentminded surgeon.
The Russia House
is a fine Cold War thriller, and one of the gravest recent love stories.

Wandering became a very intricate dance in the exhilarating
Six Degrees of Separation
, a small story that explodes in range and implication, and that showed Schepisi’s unexpected capacity for comedy.

By now, though, one has to see that Schepisi has never really made a successful American film.
I.Q
. was a strange piece of whimsy coming from him, while on
Fierce Creatures
he was brought in late as a rescue act—and how rarely that works. But then he took Graham Swift’s novel,
Last Orders
, and made a superb, very touching picture of it with an assurance that suggested (yet again) that Schepisi has to feel comfortable with the social setting he is examining. Which British director has made three films that get Englishness better than
Plenty, The Russia House
, and
Last Orders?

Joseph Schildkraut
(1896–1964), b. Vienna
He was the son of the noted Austrian actor Rudolph Schildkraut, but he seems to have been a student of Albert Bassermann. He visited America with his father in 1910 when Rudolph was on tour, and he enrolled at the American Academy of Dramatic Art. But he returned to Germany in 1913, and played in a few films:
Schlemihl
(15, Richard Oswald);
Für den Ruhm des Geliebten
(16, Robert Reinert);
Der Glücksschneider
(16, Hans Otto);
Das Wiegenlied
(16, Max Mack);
The Wandering Jew
(21, Otto Kreissler).

He then returned to America and became a matinee idol onstage with Eva La Gallienne in
Liliom;
and in silent pictures, as the Chevalier de Vaudrey with the Gish sisters in
Orphans of the Storm
(21, D. W. Griffith);
The Song of Love
(23, Frank Borzage);
The Road to Yesterday
(25, Cecil B. DeMille);
Shipwrecked
(26, Joseph Henabery);
Meet the Prince
(26, Henabery); with Bessie Love in
Young April
(26, Donald Crisp); Judas in
The King of Kings
(27, DeMille);
The Heart Thief
(27, Nils Olaf Chrisander);
His Dog
(27, Karl Brown);
The Forbidden Woman
(27, Paul L. Stein);
The Blue Danube
(28, Paul Sloane);
Tenth Avenue
(28, William C. DeMille).

He was Gaylord Ravenal in the mostly silent
Show Boat
(29, Harry Pollard), with Laura La Plante as Magnolia, and then sound served to knock him down an edge, from star to foreign support:
The Mississippi Gambler
(29, Reginald Barker);
Night Ride
(30, John S. Robertson);
Carnival
(31, Herbert Wilcox);
The Blue Danube
(32, Wilcox)—a remake; General Pascal in
Viva Villa!
(34, Jack Conway);
Sisters Under the Skin
(34, David Burton); Herod in
Cleopatra
(34, DeMille); Montferrat in
The Crusades
(35, DeMille);
The Garden of Allah
(36, Richard Boleslawski);
Slave Ship
(37, Tay Garnett);
Souls at Sea
(37, Henry Hathaway).

He was doing much better as a character actor and he won the supporting actor Oscar as Dreyfus in
The Life of Emile Zola
(37, William Dieterle);
Lancer Spy
(37, Gregory Ratoff);
Lady Behave!
(37, Lloyd Corrigan);
The Baroness and the Butler
(37, Walter Lang); as Duc d’Orléans in
Marie Antoinette
(38, W. S. Van Dyke); as Latour in
Suez
(39, Allan Dwan);
Idiot’s Delight
(39, Clarence Brown); Louis XIII in
The Three Musketeers
(39, Dwan);
The Man in the Iron Mask
(39, James Whale);
Mr. Moto Takes a Vacation
(39, Norman Foster);
Lady of the Tropics
(39, Conway); as an Indian in
The Rains Came
(39, Brown); and then perhaps his best performance, as Vadas, impeccable but corrupt, in
The Shop Around the Corner
(40, Ernst Lubitsch).

After that, he sank away a little, in part because he signed a misguided contract with Republic and suffered the consequences. But he did more television—often theatrical adaptations—and came back to the stage (in 1955) in the role of the father in
The Diary of Anne Frank
. In turn, that led to the movie that may have his best-known performance. His other movies were
Phantom Raiders
(40, Jacques Tourneur); excellent in the short
The Tell-Tale Heart
(41, Jules Dassin);
Flame of the Barbary
Coast (45, Joseph Kane)—a John Wayne picture; with Bob Hope in
Monsieur Beaucaire
(46, George Marshall); Claudius in the Maurice Evans
Hamlet
(53, Albert McCleery) on TV—Ruth Chatterton was Gertrude;
The Diary of Anne Frank
(59, George Stevens); a very good
Twilight Zone
episode in which an old man forgoes renewed life to stay with a sick wife; and Nicodemus in
The Greatest Story Ever Told
(65, Stevens).

John Schlesinger
(1926–2003), b. London
1962:
A Kind of Loving
. 1963:
Billy Liar
. 1965:
Darling
. 1967:
Far from the Madding Crowd
. 1969:
Midnight Cowboy
. 1971:
Sunday, Bloody Sunday
. 1973: “The Longest,” episode from
Visions of Eight
(d). 1975:
The Day of the Locust
. 1976:
Marathon Man
. 1979:
Yanks
. 1981:
Honky Tonk Freeway
. 1983:
An Englishman Abroad
(TV). 1984:
The Falcon and the Snowman; Separate Tables
(TV). 1987:
The Believers
. 1988:
Madame Sousatzka
. 1990:
Pacific Heights
. 1991:
A Question of Attribution
(TV). 1994:
The Innocent
. 1995:
Cold Comfort Farm
(TV). 1996:
Eye for an Eye
. 1998:
The Tale of Sweeney Todd
. 2000:
The Next Best Thing
.

Schlesinger was once acclaimed as one of the world’s leading directors, on the strength of two equivocal studies of sexual undertone. Yet I feel bound to stand against the tide and list my reservations.

He uses anecdotes that are shy of thematic coherence or human roots. This may be because he is reluctant to contradict the self-pity of his characters. Thus there is a wasteful pain in his work whereby feelings are worked up only to be wiped away by the resolution of the story. The pessimism is not searching but decorative, and he does not observe people so much as gossip about them.

Because he believes in “story” above all, his pictures seem opportunist, and employ superficial, gimmicky stylistic imitations. This is not uncommon in the cinema, and would be tolerable if his films were not so plain-looking. In other words, he has a dull eye, he is often unsure as to where to put the camera, and he edits uneasily.
Billy Liar, Darling
, and
Sunday, Bloody Sunday
contain more lapses in mise-en-scène than most other directors could offer: cuts that do not match, setups that miss the action that needs to be shown, shots that take the easy way out.

He indulges actors. This has two consequences: talented players like Dirk Bogarde, Peter Finch, and Dustin Hoffman are allowed to pose or impersonate, while someone as uneasy as Julie Christie is displayed.
Darling
deserves a place in every archive to show how rapidly modishness withers. Beauty is central to the cinema and Schlesinger seems an unreliable judge of it, overrating Christie and rarely getting close enough to the action to make a fruitful stylistic bond with it.

Midnight Cowboy
, it must be said, is free from most of his defects; it does seem taken with the taut vitality of New York; it prospers to the extent that it has no women in main parts. But that only makes it a sly transposition of a women’s picture, with Hoffman a grotesque Joan Crawford sacrificing himself for a blond stud.

His return to America produced two dreadful clangers in a row, evidence of unease with period, genre, and actors.
Marathon Man
was never going to be more than routine suspense, but it at least needed a director capable of delivering that.
Day of the Locust
, though, is an original dear to most movie lovers, and there is no forgiving Schlesinger’s shrill, hysterical ruining of its stark vision.

I have found no greater pleasure in Schlesinger’s subsequent theatrical work—apart from a druggy edginess in the acting in
The Falcon and the Snowman
. But the director is something like the Lubitsch of English espionage in two delicious films made for television and taken from Alan Bennett scripts. In the first,
An Englishman Abroad
, the actress Coral Browne, doing Shakespeare in Moscow, meets the exiled Guy Burgess (Alan Bates); and in the second,
A Question of Attribution
, Sir Anthony Blunt (James Fox) meets the Queen (Prunella Scales). The two pieces
are
very alike in structure, in veiled cross talk and in their worried fidgeting over matters of loyalty and taste. They may be just set pieces of writing and clever playing (to say nothing of the poised comedy of embarrassment). But I think they are better than that—crucial English comedies—and I am happy to acclaim Schlesinger for his expert realization.

Cold Comfort Farm
was very funny—though I can’t believe many outside Britain (or a certain age range) got the joke. But it showed Schlesinger’s sense of class and it was one of the first pictures to see the prospects in Kate Beckinsale. The rest is grim:
Eye for an Eye
was a hideous melodrama;
The Next Best Thing
was a contender for the worst film ever made. And what can one say about a version of
Sweeney Todd
made in this age if it isn’t Stephen Sondheim’s version?

Volker Schlöndorff
, b. Wiesbaden, Germany, 1939
1960:
Wenn Kummert’s
(s). 1966:
Der Junge Törless/Young Torless
. 1967:
Mord und Totschlag
. 1969:
Michael Kohlhass Der Rebell
. 1970:
Baal
. 1971:
Der Plötzliche Reichtum der Armen Leute von Kombach/The Sudden Fortune of the Poor People of Kombach
. 1972:
Die Ehegattin; The Moral of Ruth Halbfass; Summer Lightning
. 1974:
Ubernachtung in Tirol
. 1975:
Die Verlorene Ehre der Katharina Blum/The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum
(codirected with Margarethe von Trotta). 1976:
Der Fangschuss/Coup de Grâce
. 1978:
Deutschland im Herbst
(codirected). 1979:
The Tin Drum; Kaleidoskop: Valeska Gert, Nur zum Spass-nur zum Spiel
(d). 1980:
Der Kandidat
(d). 1981:
Die Falschung/Circle of Deceit; Krieg und Frieden
(d). 1984:
Un Amour de Swann/Swann in Love
. 1985:
Death of a Salesman
(TV). 1986:
Vermischte Nachrichten
. 1987:
A Gathering of Old Men
(TV). 1990:
The Handmaid’s Tale
. 1991:
Voyager
. 1992:
Interview with Billy Wilder
(TV). 1996:
Der Unhold
. 1998:
Palmetto
. 2000:
Die Stille Nach dem Schuss/Legend of Rita
. 2002:
“The Enlightenment,”
episode from
Ten Minutes Older: The Cell
. 2004:
Der Neunte Tag / The Ninth Day
. 2006:
Strike
.

Schlöndorff’s training was largely in France, an indication of the aridity of German cinema in the late 1950s. He studied at IDHEC and worked for Louis Malle and Alain Resnais as an assistant. But he had an especially close relationship with Jean-Pierre Melville, and may have inherited some of that director’s flexible movement from entertainments to more personal works. He was an assistant director on Melville’s
Léon Morin, Prêtre
(61) and
Le Doulos
(62), and was also involved on the preparation of
L’Aîné des Ferchaux
(63).

His own work began with TV reportage in Algeria and Vietnam—French colonial situations—and his first short film was about French people living in Frankfurt. But with the resurgence in experimental, committed filmmaking in Germany, Schlöndorff found himself in his own country, more particularly as one of the Munich-based directors.
Young Torless
was a thorough, psychologically detailed version of Robert Musil’s novel. At the time, it seemed a conventional if accomplished period piece. But in the light of Schlöndorff’s later work, it seems the beginning of an historical analysis of German irrationality. It is not just a study of the defects of pre-Nazi militarism, but a sign of the way individual conscience is smothered and suppressed.

Schlöndorff made several films for TV and had to play off traditional features
—Michael Kohlhass
and
The Moral of Ruth Halbfass
—with more searching works.
The Sudden Fortune of the Poor People of Kombach
is his most original film, telling how, in 1821, a group of peasants rob the local tax cart and are pursued, interrogated, and tried by the harsh authorities. Its style is deliberately plain and analytic, stressing the inevitable failure of the robbery, and the extent to which the peasants’ revolutionary action is neutralized by their own conformity to rules and by their inability to comprehend their condition. As a film about the daydreaming conservatism of the poor it is exact, poignant, and subtly pointed at later worlds.