The New Biographical Dictionary of Film: Completely Updated and Expanded (395 page)

At any event, the filmography would be incomplete without the list of works that he has produced:
I Wanna Hold Your Hand
(78, Robert Zemeckis);
Used Cars
(80, Zemeckis);
Continental Divide
(81, Michael Apted);
Poltergeist; Gremlins
(84, Joe Dante);
Back to the Future
(85, Zemeckis);
The Goonies
(85, Richard Donner);
Young Sherlock Holmes
(85, Barry Levinson);
The Money Pit
(86, Richard Benjamin); the animated film,
An American Tail
(86, Don Bluth);
… batteries not included
(87, Matthew Robbins);
Innerspace
(87, Dante);
Who Framed Roger Rabbit?
(88, Zemeckis);
Back to the Future II
(89, Zemeckis);
Dad
(89, Gary David Goldberg);
Joe Versus the Volcano
(90, John Patrick Shanley);
Arachnophobia
(90, Frank Marshall);
Gremlins 2: The New Batch
(90, Dante);
Back to the Future III
(90, Zemeckis); and
An American Tail: Fievel Goes West
(91, Phil Nibbelink and Simon Wells).

On
The Flintstones
(94, Brian Levant) he was credited as Steven Spielrock;
Twister
(96, Jan De Bont);
Men in Black
(97, Barry Sonnenfeld);
Deep Impact
(98, Mimi Leder);
The Mask of Zorro
(98, Martin Campbell);
Shrek
(01, Andrew Adamson and Vicky Jenson);
Jurassic Park III
(01); and the HBO miniseries
Band of Brothers
(01), which he and Tom Hanks had spun off from
Saving Private Ryan
.

In fact, his producing hat had grown larger still with the formation of DreamWorks in 1995. With that enterprise (formed with Jeffrey Katzenberg and David Geffen), Spielberg was part of a new studio, involved in decisions on whether to build studio space as well as every individual project they took on. So it is one more measure of the inhuman—or of a level of performance beyond common humanity—that Steven Spielberg is also still a writer and a director. Moreover, he has maintained his own level of excellence for close to twenty-five years. He has never had significant or prolonged failure. In the last few years, he may have coasted (in truth
The Terminal
is bolder than
Munich
) but he has a major Lincoln picture in the works. By all rights, that should be dull—but it’s Spielberg.

Robert Stack
(1919–2003), b. Los Angeles
The American cinema of action has always depended upon the ability of certain actors to express moral energy—conscience and intelligence—in motion, without the elaborate benefit of character study or dialogue. It has persistently seen intellectual and spiritual personality in violent activity: force of arms equals moral integrity. James Stewart in the films of Anthony Mann is a fine example. But America has had a clutch of actors with this power. Although he has never been identified with evidently important parts, Stack’s drawn face brings urgency and tension to his films. Part of his presence is the capacity for persuading us that a film can turn on a brief, intense physical demonstration. Watch his bleak blue eyes closely and you may begin to understand the depth of American cinema.

He made only a few films before service in the navy: giving Deanna Durbin her first screen kiss in
First Love
(39, Henry Koster);
The Mortal Storm
(40, Frank Borzage);
A Little Bit of Heaven
(40, Andrew Marton);
Badlands of Dakota
(41, Alfred E. Green);
Men of Texas
(42, Ray Enright);
To Be or Not to Be
(42, Ernst Lubitsch) as the Polish flier “able to drop three tons of dynamite in two minutes”; and
Eagle Squadron
(42, Arthur Lubin). After the war, he had ten years as a leading actor, though rarely in big films:
A Date with Judy
(48, Richard Thorpe);
Miss Tatlock’s Millions
(48, Richard Haydn);
Fighter Squadron
(48, Raoul Walsh);
Mr. Music
(50, Haydn);
My Outlaw Brother
(51, Elliott Nugent);
The Bullfighter and the Lady
(51, Budd Boetticher);
Sabre Jet
(53, Louis King);
Bwana Devil
(53, Arch Oboler);
Conquest of Cochise
(53, William Castle);
The Iron Glove
(54, Castle);
The High and the Mighty
(54, William Wellman); marvelously shabby as the masquerading agent in
House of Bamboo
(55, Samuel Fuller);
Good Morning, Miss Dove
(55, Koster); and
Great Day in the Morning
(55, Jacques Tourneur).

Then came two Douglas Sirk films—
Written on the Wind
(56) and
The Tarnished Angels
(57). All of Stack’s incisiveness was confounded by Sirk’s use of the actor as a man desperate to stave off insecurity. In the first, he is a wealthy oil man who fears his own impotence, and in the second, the flier who risks death for the woman he shamed by winning at dice and for the son who may not be his own. Sirk’s critical portrait of the American hero would not have been as penetrating without so monolithic a figure as Stack—a hard jaw getting the jitters. He was never so firm again in movies:
The Gift of Love
(58, Jean Negulesco); as
John Paul Jones
(59, John Farrow); and as Eliot Ness, the Chicago detective, in
The Scarface Mob
(59, Phil Karlson). That last film was a pilot for the TV series
The Untouchables
, on which for many years Stack blasted or arrested the guest stars. With that meal ticket, he made fewer movies: excellent as the distraught father in
The Last Voyage
(60, Andrew Stone);
The Caretakers
(63, Hall Bartlett);
Is Paris Burning?
(66, René Clément);
The Peking Medallion
(67, James Hill);
Le Soleil des Voyous
(67, Jean Delannoy);
Storia di una Donna
(69, Leonardo Bercovici); and
Un Second Souffle
(78, Gerard Blain).

He was in
1941
(79, Steven Spielberg);
Airplane!
(80, Jim Abrahams, David Zucker, and Jerry Zucker);
Uncommon Valor
(83, Ted Kotcheff);
Big Trouble
(84, John Cassavetes);
Midas Valley
(85, Gus Trikonis);
Dangerous Curves
(88, David Lewis);
Caddyshack II
(88, Allan Arkush);
Plain Clothes
(88, Martha Coolidge); and
Joe Versus the Volcano
(90, John Patrick Shanley).

In recent years, he had been the enthusiastic host of TV’s
Unsolved Mysteries
.

John M. Stahl
(1886–1950), b. New York
1918:
Wives of Men
. 1919:
Her Code of Honor; Suspicion; A Woman Under Oath
. 1920:
Women Men Forget; The Woman in His House
. 1921:
The Child Thou Gavest Me; Sowing the Wind
. 1922:
The Song of Life; One Clear Call; Suspicious Wives
. 1923:
The Wanters; The Dangerous Age
. 1924:
Husbands and Lovers; Why Men Leave Home
. 1925:
Fine Clothes
. 1926:
Memory Lane; The Gay Deceiver
. 1927:
Lovers?; In Old Kentucky
. 1930:
A Lady Surrenders
. 1931:
Seed; Strictly Dishonorable
. 1932:
Back Street
. 1933:
Only Yesterday
. 1934:
Imitation of Life
. 1935:
Magnificent Obsession
. 1937:
Parnell
. 1938:
Letter of Introduction
. 1939:
When Tomorrow Comes
. 1941:
Our Wife
. 1942:
The Immortal Sergeant
. 1943:
Holy Matrimony
. 1944:
The Eve of St. Mark; The Keys of the Kingdom
. 1946:
Leave Her to Heaven
. 1947:
The Foxes of Harrow
. 1948:
The Walls of Jericho
. 1949:
Father Was a Fullback; Oh, You Beautiful Doll
.

Among those Hollywood careers that still need to be appraised is John Stahl’s. I came to his films in reverse order.
Walls of Jericho, Foxes of Harrow
, and
Keys of the Kingdom
are tedious films, helped only by Linda Darnell in the first and the luminous glow of every detail in those crowded period interiors beloved of Fox. But, despite the stolidity of Gregory Peck,
Keys of the Kingdom
has moments of dreamlike if absurd beauty that point to the man Stahl once was.

The revelation came with
Leave Her to Heaven
, a film seemingly made in a trance and best seen in a state of fever. It concerns a woman of monstrous selfishness, referred to by the plot as an ogress but celebrated by Stahl’s attentions as the imperious goddess in some never-never land of tyrannical emotions. When it is said that the part is played by the sweet Gene Tierney, the effect of Medusa, Cousin Bette, and the devouring female presence of von Sternberg’s films may be recognized as an astonishing invention. The scenes in which Tierney allows her child brother-in-law to drown and coldly throws herself downstairs to abort her baby, and the moment when, on horseback, she scatters her father’s ashes, reveal Stahl as a thrilling artist in the cause of self-destructive Technicolor emotionalism.

He was always associated with the women’s picture, throughout the 1920s with Louis Mayer and MGM. Of that period,
The Wanters, Memory Lane
, and
Lovers?
, with Ramon Novarro and Alice Terry, are outstanding. At a time when he might have looked forward to directing Garbo, Crawford, and Shearer at MGM, he went to Universal to lay down the foundation works of the genre:
Back Street
(with John Boles and Irene Dunne);
Only Yesterday
(with Boles and Margaret Sullavan);
Imitation of Life
(with Claudette Colbert);
Magnificent Obsession
(with Dunne and Robert Taylor);
Letter of Introduction
(with Andrea Leeds and Adolphe Menjou); and
When Tomorrow Comes
(with Dunne and Charles Boyer). In its day,
Parnell
was thought a great failure, but today, its reprise and a chance to see
The Immortal Sergeant
might redeem Stahl from oblivion. He seems the forerunner and at best the equal of Douglas Sirk.

Sylvester Stallone
(Michael Sylvester Stallone), b. New York, 1946
Stallone may be the most self-conscious noble savage since Mussolini. His weird monument,
Rocky
(76, John G. Avildsen), is a fairy tale that fakes everything down to its own naïveté. A large, domineering presence, Stallone is not casually nicknamed Sly. He is as nimble and cunning as a much smaller know-it-all. His script for
Rocky
and his way of selling its package were concocted with the same chutzpah; his version of an innocent oaf is shot through with poker-faced calculation. Those lavish spaniel eyes are worked on like a muscle. The appeal to little men is as much arrogant demagoguery as was Chaplin’s. And, since Chaplin, who has offered tramps with such velvety romantic eyes? Such men know they are really princes in disguise, and scorn ordinariness.

He had a Sicilian father and a French mother, the one a hairdresser and the other a dancer. After some time at a private school for children with learning or behavior problems, he attended an American college in Switzerland. He studied drama at the University of Miami, and worked Off-Broadway. The alleged obscurity out of which
Rocky
emerged was actually filled with quite memorable bit parts and one major supporting role:
Bananas
(71, Woody Allen);
The Lords of Flatbush
(74, Stephen Verona and Martin Davidson);
Death Race 2000
(75, Paul Bartel); very good as the nemesis of
Capone
(75, Steve Carver);
The Prisoner of Second Avenue
(75, Melvin Frank); and
Farewell, My Lovely
(75, Dick Richards).

His script for
Rocky
, he claims, was written over a long weekend. Instead of taking $265,000 for it from Robert Chartoff and Irwin Winkler, he held out for $75,000, a percentage, and the lead part. I think it’s true that no one else could have so disguised the sentimentality of the concept, or counted on an actor’s craving for success fitting the boxer’s corny shell.

Stallone also worked on the script of his follow-up,
F.I.S.T
. (78, Norman Jewison), an interesting treatment of American labor unions that would have been more absorbing if the hero had been more thoroughly infected by Stallone’s own second-nature manipulativeness. He wrote, directed, and starred in
Paradise Alley
(78), a benign, Runyon-esque view of Bronx lowlife in 1946 that caught everybody off-guard. But
Rocky II
(79) was so brutally obvious a package that it only made one suspicious of Stallone’s sympathy for little men.

Within the space of a few years, Stallone converted himself from a raw naïve to a sad-eyed stale smoothie. Rocky picked up Rambo as a friend, and Stallone became the unmistakable comforter to rednecks. His more recent work has sought fresh directions and more humor, but he lacks the will or the wit to change:
Nighthawks
(81, Bruce Malmuth);
Victory
(81, John Huston);
First Blood
(82, Ted Kotcheff);
Rocky III
(82, Stallone);
Staying Alive
(83, Stallone), a sequel to
Saturday Night Fever
for John Travolta;
Rhinestone
(84, Bob Clark), with Dolly Parton;
Rambo: First Blood Part II
(85, George P. Cosmatos);
Rocky IV
(85, Stallone);
Cobra
(86, Cosmatos); arm-wrestling in
Over the Top
(87, Menahem Golan);
Rambo III
(88, Peter Macdonald);
Lock Up
(89, John Flynn);
Tango and Cash
(89, Andrei Konchalovsky);
Rocky V
(90, Avildsen);
Oscar
(91, John Landis);
Stop! Or My Mom Will Shoot
(92, Roger Spottiswoode);
Cliffhanger
(93, Renny Harlin), his most entertaining film in years; and
Demolition Man
(93, Marco Brambilla).