The New Biographical Dictionary of Film: Completely Updated and Expanded (374 page)

Summer Lightning
is his most intimate film, about a divorced woman in contemporary Germany attempting to live and work on her own in a society centered on men. The leading part is played by Schlöndorff’s wife, Margarethe von Trotta, who also collaborated on the script.

Schlöndorff has turned himself into an international director.
The Tin Drum
was an international art-house event, and it is a hardworking picture, as distressing as anyone could expect. Yet his bigger projects are often less satisfying than the smaller ones:
Swann in Love
is a feeble, prettified pass at the huge novel;
The Handmaid’s Tale
is grimly didactic; and his TV version of
Death of a Salesman
is given over to the chronic neediness of Dustin Hoffman. But
Circle of Deceit
is a fine story of loyalty and betrayal actually filmed in war-torn Beirut, and
Voyager
is a chilling study of inadvertent incest, adapted from Max Frisch, and all the more remarkable in that it coaxes genuine acting from the hitherto intractable Sam Shepard.

In addition, Schlöndorff has done a fascinating three-part conversation with Billy Wilder, which Wilder, for no good reason, refuses to have shown.

Nothing lately has been anywhere near the class of
Voyager
. By contrast,
Palmetto
seemed like a very silly film noir. But
Die Stille Nach
concerns a former West German terrorist living quietly in East Germany, and then exposed after reunification, and that sounds much more promising.

Julian Schnabel
, b. Brooklyn, New York, 1951
1996:
Basquiat
. 2000:
Before Night Falls
. 2007:
The Diving Bell and the Butterfly; Lou Reed’s Berlin
(d). 2010:
Miral
.

Schnabel is a painter, and was one before he ever took up filmmaking. I think to this day he regards his painting as the more important of his two great pursuits. Still, the success he had with
The Diving Bell and the Butterfly
(it earned an Academy Award nomination for best director, as well as a prize at Cannes) may alter that. I have to say, it’s what gets him in this book.
Basquiat
struck me as a mess, as well as a very generous view of the New York art world (a subject that deserves scathing satire).
Before Night Falls
was a better film, thanks in great part to Javier Bardem’s performance. But
The Diving Bell and the Butterfly
had an extraordinary energy—it felt as if it was made out of a biting argument between the paralysed man and the fellow he was before disaster struck. The sense of loss and of life is unmatched. To these eyes, it is a great deal more interesting than any Schnabel paintings I have seen. So I suspect there will be more films, but whether anything can surpass the Bauby memoir is another matter.

Bert Schneider
, b. New York, 1934
No one interested in this elusive, wealthy, radical producer can afford to miss Bo Burlingham’s fine essay “Politics Under the Palms.” And no one concerned with American cinema should underestimate the part Bert Schneider played from about 1968 to 1975. Those were years of dismay for America, and Schneider’s films deal more honestly with human failure than Hollywood can normally stomach.

Where and whether he is now are in some question. Did his will and his energy lapse, or was his creative policy defined by Vietnam, the contested crusade of drugs, and an America reluctant to face dangerous futures? Schneider may have had too many interests and too much money to be a dedicated, career producer. Perhaps he’s hanging out somewhere, regathering and trying to overcome yesterday’s urgency and its sad aftermath.

His father, Abraham, was a top executive at Columbia. According to Burlingham, “Bert remembers himself as a rebellious youth, the black sheep, hanging out with the caddies on the golf course and the help in the kitchen.” He was thrown out of Columbia University, and the army refused him because of his radical connections. So he worked for Columbia’s Screen Gems until 1965 when he formed a company with his friend, Bob Rafelson. With the addition of Steve Blauner, they became BBS Productions.

Schneider and Rafelson invented the Monkees, perhaps his most effectively Dada political action, and made
Head
(68, Rafelson). That got Schneider into movies as a producer, and BBS hit a hot streak with
Easy Rider
(69, Dennis Hopper)—protest and counterculture costing $350,000 and making $35 million;
Five Easy Pieces
(70, Rafelson);
The Last Picture Show
(71, Peter Bogdanovich);
A Safe Place
(71, Henry Jaglom);
Drive, He Said
(71, Jack Nicholson);
The King of Marvin Gardens
(72, Rafelson); and
Goin’ South
(78, Nicholson).

It is an impressive list, and the generous launching of several careers.
Marvin Gardens
is a masterpiece, and none of the others less than unique, personal, and a foray into fresh ground for movies. Schneider was apparently a very tolerant producer: he let the boys do what they liked, and for a few years it worked until boxoffice failure led to inhibition. He may have protected some of his talent from real commercial pressures: Rafelson is an intermittent director, and Bogdanovich has not fared well in recent years. Schneider may have presided over the making of his films while concentrating on deeper interests—Cuba, Black militancy, drugs, Candice Bergen, and an eventual Oscar for the Vietnam documentary
Hearts and Minds
(75, Paul Williams). Give him credit for being a focus for some remarkable people and for letting his own mixed background out on film. In many of the BBS films there is a conflict of artistic yearning, business flair, and the painful texture of ordinary life that reflects parts of Schneider’s own history and predicament: a creative man used to commerce, an idealist fighting compromise.
Marvin Gardens
, especially, is a picture that wonders if business is not the great American art.

Schneider’s next production
—Days of Heaven
(78, Terrence Malick)—was another example of that conflict, and a victim of the fallacy that astonishing beauty necessarily yields inner truth.

Romy Schneider
(Rosemarie Albach-Retty) (1938–82), b. Vienna
The daughter of actress Magda Schneider and actor Wolf Albach-Retty, Romy Schneider broke into films as a German teenager in a run of plump, plain, sentimental movies:
Wenn der Weisse Flieder Wieder Bluht
(53, Hans Deppe);
Feuerwerk
(54, Kurt Hoffmann);
Madchenjahre einer
Konigin
(54, Ernst Marischka);
Die Deutschmeister
(55, Marischka);
Der Letzte Mann
(55, Harald Braun);
Sissi
(55, Marischka);
Kitty und die Grosse Welt
(56, Alfred Weidenmann);
Sissi, die Junge Kaiserin
(56, Marischka);
Robinson Soll Nicht Sterben
(57, Josef von Baky);
Monpti
(57, Helmut Kautner);
Sissi, Schicksalsjahre einer Kaiserin
(57, Marischka);
Scampolo
(58, Weidenmann);
Madchen in Uniform
(58, Geza von Radvanyi);
Die Halbzart
(59, Rolf Thiele);
Ein Engel auf Erden
(59, von Radvanyi); and
Die Schone Lugnerin
(59, Fritz Kortner).

It was a hard grind and depressing work to judge by her retirement in 1960. But she came back and, after
Die Sendung der Lysistrata
(61, Kortner), she escaped to play the wife in the “Il Lavoro” episode from
Boccaccio ’70
(62, Luchino Visconti). Immediately, she looked prettier, sharper, and wittier. In 1963, Orson Welles touched her with the morbid inquisitiveness of Kafka’s work when she played Leni, the advocate’s depraved ward, in
The Trial
. Her scenes with Anthony Perkins in that film had a nightmarish seductiveness that culminated in her childish pride at showing her webbed hand.

After that, she was an international actress, invariably interesting if never quite as funny as when guesting on TV’s
LaughIn:
excellent in
The Cardinal
(63, Otto Preminger);
The Victors
(63, Carl Foreman);
Good Neighbor Sam
(64, David Swift);
What’s New, Pussycat?
(65, Clive Donner);
Schornstein No. 4
(66, Jean Chapot);
10:30 p.m. Summer
(66, Jules Dassin);
Triple Cross
(66, Terence Young);
La Piscine
(68, Jacques Deray);
My Lover, My Son
(69, John Newland);
Qui?
(70, Léonard Keigel);
Les Choses de la Vie
(70, Claude Sautet);
Bloomfield
(71, Richard Harris);
Max et les Ferrailleurs
(71, Sautet);
The Assassination of Trotsky
(71, Joseph Losey);
Ludwig II
(72, Visconti);
César et Rosalie
(72, Sautet);
Le Trio Infernal
(74, Francis Girod);
Le Mouton Enragé
(74, Michel Deville);
L’Importance c’est d’Aimer
(75, Andrzej Zulawski);
Le Vieux Fusil
(75, Robert Enrico);
Une Histoire Simple
(78, Sautet);
Bloodline
(79, Terence Young);
La Banquiere
(80, Girod);
Deathwatch
(80, Bertrand Tavernier);
Fantasma d’Amore
(80, Dino Risi);
The Inquisitor
(81, Claude Miller); and
La Passante de Sans-Souci
(82, Jacques Rouffio).

Postscript: in 1964, Henri-Georges Clouzot had begun and abandoned
L’Enfer
, with Schneider. Decades later the footage ws recovered, and it is clear that it could have been the actress’s great work. It still is.

Ernest B. Schoedsack
(1893–1979), b. Council Bluffs, Iowa
1926:
Grass
(codirected with Merian C. Cooper and Marguerite Harrison) (d). 1927:
Chang
(codirected with Cooper) (d). 1929:
The Four Feathers
(codirected with Cooper and Lothar Mendes). 1931:
Rango
. 1932:
The Most Dangerous Game/The Hounds of Zaroff
(codirected with Irving Pichel). 1933:
King Kong
(codirected with Cooper);
Son of Kong; Blind Adventure
. 1934:
Long Lost Father
. 1935:
The Last Days of Pompeii
. 1937:
Trouble in Morocco; Outlaws of the Orient
. 1940:
Dr. Cyclops
. 1949:
Mighty Joe Young
. 1953:
This Is Cinerama
(codirected with Ruth Rose).

The standard photograph of Schoedsack might have been submitted for casting Allan Quatermain: a lean-faced man with long jaw and direct gaze, open-necked shirt, pipe in mouth, and pith helmet on his head. He is an engagingly wayward figure in the American cinema, attracted equally to authenticity and hokum—like the producer who goes in search of Kong. His work is so much a matter of collaboration that it is difficult to assess his talent. But his long partnership with Merian C. Cooper never lost its faith in thrills, never forsook a schoolboy’s rapture with spectacle.

When the First World War broke out, Schoedsack was a cameraman at Keystone. He joined the U.S. Signal Corps and filmed battle scenes. After the war he went into journalism and it was in 1926 that he met Cooper. Paramount hired them first to visit Abyssinia to film Haile Selassie, then to make documentaries:
Grass
(about the Bakhtiari tribes in Iran) and
Chang
(in Thailand). The two men filmed locations in the Sudan for
The Four Feathers
while producer David Selznick hired Lothar Mendes for the studio story scenes. Schoedsack then went to Sumatra on his own to make
Rango
.

When he returned, he shared
The Most Dangerous Game
with Irving Pichel at RKO. A disturbingly sadistic suspense film, produced by Cooper, its studio-made Malaya clearly owes something to Schoedsack. Selznick was now at RKO, and he backed Cooper and Schoedsack to make
King Kong
from the Edgar Wallace story. Still a very exciting film, it owes a lot to the sexual undertones—perhaps provided by scriptwriter Ruth Rose, Schoedsack’s wife—and to the superbly animated models by Willis O’Brien.
King Kong
is the original wild monster film, and its images of Kong striding between skyscrapers seem more potent as our cities grow increasingly insecure.

Thereafter, Schoedsack’s career waned.
Son of Kong
was a dismal failure: perhaps significantly, it had O’Brien still, but no Cooper.
Long Lost Father
was a film John Barrymore made on the slide. Cooper produced
Last Days of Pompeii
and, in the same year, Schoedsack went to India to shoot location footage for
The Lives of a Bengal Lancer
. The film stock deteriorated so Henry Hathaway reshot it in California, a sign of Hollywood’s retreat from expensive documentary material for adventure features. From 1937, he was making second features at Columbia, but
Dr. Cyclops
was a good color horror film at Paramount.
Mighty Joe Young
, made with Cooper, Ruth Rose, and O’Brien, was an attempt to revive the Kong potency, but to no avail. Cinerama came as a new toy for this perpetually enthusiastic outsider.

Paul Schrader
, b. Grand Rapids, Michigan, 1946
1977:
Blue Collar
. 1978:
Hardcore
. 1979:
American Gigolo
. 1981:
Cat People
. 1985:
Mishima
. 1987:
Light of Day
. 1988:
Patty Hearst
. 1991:
The Comfort of Strangers
. 1992:
Light Sleeper
. 1994:
Witch Hunt
(TV). 1997:
Touch; Affliction
. 1999:
Forever Mine
. 2002:
Auto Focus
. 2003:
Exorcist: The Beginning
. 2005:
Dominion: Prequel to the Exorcist
. 2007:
The Walker
. 2008:
Adam Resurrected
.