The New Biographical Dictionary of Film: Completely Updated and Expanded (407 page)

His only credit in recent years is
The Ister
(04, David Barrison and Daniel Ross) in which he is interviewed.

Richard Sylbert
, (1928–2002), b. Brooklyn, New York
Dick Sylbert was an expert craftsman in the last great age of Hollywood moviemaking. With his twin brother, Paul, he had studied painting at the Tyler School of Art, at Temple University. He then moved to New York and filled any job he could get building or painting scenery for film and television. Somehow, he took it for granted that this would lead to design work, and he duly performed in that age when art directors became production designers (without getting points on pictures). You only have to think of Sylbert’s record to see how easily design’s place in the feeling of film is taken for granted. But Sylbert was more than that: he was a thoroughly educated man, someone who many regarded as a director in the making, and someone who had an executive position at Paramount in the late seventies and early eighties.

He got his first credits when he was in his late twenties:
Patterns
(56, Fielder Cook);
Baby Doll
(56, Elia Kazan)—very theatrical, yet very southern, too;
Edge of the City
(57, Martin Ritt);
A Face in the Crowd
(57, Kazan)—think of Lonesome’s insane apartment;
Wind Across the Everglades
(58, Nicholas Ray), a disaster, but a crucial experience in color;
The Fugitive Kind
(59, Sidney Lumet);
Murder, Inc
. (60, Burt Balaban and Stuart Rosenberg);
The Young Doctors
(61, Phil Karlson);
Splendor in the Grass
(61, Kazan), so full of sex and claustrophobia;
Walk on the Wild Side
(62, Edward Dmytryk);
The Connection
(62, Shirley Clarke); excelling in
Long Day’s Journey into Night
(62, Lumet),
The Manchurian Candidate
(62, John Frankenheimer);
All the Way Home
(63, Alex Segal);
The Pawnbroker
(64, Lumet); the superb
Lilith
(64, Robert Rossen), with its webs and traps and corners;
How to Murder Your Wife
(65, Richard Quine);
Grand Prix
(66, Frankenheimer);
The Graduate
(67, Mike Nichols)—perhaps the key domestic interior film of the late sixties.

As the list goes on, just consider how much Sylbert evidently understood and contributed to these films:
Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
(66, Nichols);
Rosemary’s Baby
(68, Roman Polanski), with its haunting use of the Dakota and its apartments;
Catch-22
(70, Nichols);
Carnal Knowledge
(71, Nichols):
Fat City
(72, John Huston), a stunning excursion to the plain or sordid;
The Heartbreak Kid
(72, Elaine May);
The Day of the Dolphin
(73, Nichols);
Chinatown
(74, Polanski), as magnificent in its design as in all other respects;
Shampoo
(75, Hal Ashby), an extension of
The Graduate; The Fortune
(75, Nichols);
Players
(79, Anthony Harvey);
Reds
(81, Warren Beatty).

The films were not the same after 1980, which does show the limits facing a designer. He could not rescue poorer scripts:
Frances
(82, Graeme Clifford);
Breathless
(83, Jim McBride);
The Cotton Club
(84, Francis Coppola);
Under the Cherry Moon
(86, Prince);
Tequila Sunrise
(88, Robert Towne);
Dick Tracy
(90, Beatty);
The Bonfire of the Vanities
(90, Brian De Palma);
Mobsters
(Michael Karbelnikoff);
Carlito’s Way
(93, De Palma);
Mulholland Falls
(96, Lee Tamahori), where he also plays the coroner;
Blood and Wine
(96, Bob Rafelson);
My Best Friend’s Wedding
(97, P. J. Hogan);
Red Corner
(97, Jon Avnet);
Trapped
(02, Luis Mandoki).

He won Oscars for
Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
and
Dick Tracy
—which only leaves one wondering what recess of heaven is kept for
Splendor in the Grass, Long Day’s Journey into Night
, or
Chinatown
?

István Szabó
, b. Budapest, Hungary, 1938
1964:
Almodozasok Kora/Age of Illusions
. 1966:
Apa/Father
. 1970:
Szerelmesfilm/Love Film
. 1974:
Tuzolto Utca 25/25 Firemen’s Street
. 1977:
Budapest Tales
. 1979:
Bizalon/Confidence
. 1981:
Mephisto
. 1985:
Redl Ezredes/Colonel Redl
. 1988:
Hanussen
. 1991:
Meeting Venus
. 1992:
Edes Emma, Drága Böbe—Vázlatok Aktok
. 1996:
Offenbach Titkai
. 1999:
Sunshine
. 2002:
Taking Sides
. 2002: “Ten Minutes After,” episode from
Ten Minutes Older: The Cello
. 2004:
Being Julia
. 2006:
Rokonok
. 2010:
The Door
.

A graduate of the Academy for Theater and Film Art in Budapest, Szabó deepened his own craft steadily in the sixties and seventies. His focus was Hungary, and his essential approach was realistic, but he had an intricate way with symbols and the interaction of past and present.
Father
was very touching, and
25 Firemen’s Street
was like an anthology of hopes, fears, and dreams in an apartment building about to be demolished.

But in the eighties, Szabó made an international trilogy of films all dealing with flawed heroes, ambition and power, egotism and betrayal. Szabó has usually been his own writer, and in the trilogy he discovered the perfect actor for his theme, Klaus-Maria Brandauer, uncertain whether to love or loathe himself. All three stories
—Mephisto, Colonel Redl
, and
Hanussen
—had a basis in fact, and they seemed to describe European politics in this century. (In his use of symbols, Szabó has often made allusions to the relations between Hungary and its neighbors.)
Mephisto
is a startling film. It moved forward rather lurchingly, half-wounded, but half-driven. Its women were vivid, and Brandauer was a marvel as the actor who will do anything for career. In turn,
Colonel Redl
and
Hanussen
seemed slighter, and even a little repetitive—and Brandauer’s persistence only drew attention to this problem.

Meeting Venus
was a departure: much lighter and more romantic, it told of the love between a conductor and a singer—Glenn Close was excellent in this role, though whenever she sang Kiri Te Kanawa did the work.

Sunshine
was another epic film on Europe in the twentieth century. It dealt with three generations of a Jewish Hungarian family, and had excellent performances from Ralph Fiennes and William Hurt. It proved yet again that Szabó is at his best when dealing with moral courage and compromise.

T

Hideko Takamine
, b. Hakodate, Japan, 1924
Takamine must be the only actress in movie history to have three distinct careers. She began at the age of five, quickly becoming the most adored child star in Japan—appearing in over a hundred movies as a cute, perky tot, male or female depending on the exigencies of plot, her adorable smile plastered on posters and toothpaste ads across the country in her stepparents’ determination to squeeze money out of their meal ticket. She was called the Japanese Shirley Temple, but she says she was more natural—more like Margaret O’Brien.

Then came her teenage period, which lasted through the war (she was a pinup girl for the boys overseas). She had an immense success in 1938 with
Composition Class
(Kajiro Yamamoto), about a poor young schoolgirl who wins a composition contest with an essay about raising rabbits. Then in 1941 she triumphed in
Horse
(Yamamoto), a semidocumentary that took four years to make, about a seventeen-year-old girl who raises a horse she loves and eventually sacrifices it to the need of the army. This movie, much of it shot in primitive locations, involved her with Akira Kurosawa, who was a young man in charge of the location shooting. Their tentative romance was ruthlessly ended by her family and the studio authorities, and she never worked with him again.

Finally, after a spell as a popular club singer during the Occupation, came her mature period, during which she was one of the most popular and highly paid actresses, playing strong, energized women.

She worked for many directors after the war. With Ozu in
The Munekata Sisters
(50), though her rebellious and rather lower-class demeanor was less suited to Ozu’s drama of resignation (and innately conservative attitudes?) than was Setsuko Hara’s more well-bred presence. They had appeared together in
The Opium War
(43, Masahiro Makino), a strange adaptation of Griffith’s
Orphans of the Storm
(22), in which Takamine took the Dorothy Gish role of the blind girl while Hara replaced Lillian. Hara was the refined ideal; Takamine, with her nasal voice and direct manner, was the woman next door. She worked for Gosho in
Where the Chimneys Are Seen
(53), in which she almost drives her suitor out of his mind with nagging; with Shiro Toyoda in a period film,
The Mistress/Wild Geese
(53), in which she is forced to become the concubine of an elderly merchant; and several times for her husband, Yasuzo Masamura, a screenwriter who turned to directing.

But for twenty years her most important work was divided between Naruse and Kinoshita. She made seventeen movies with Naruse, the most important of which demonstrate her capacity for struggle and endurance. In
Floating Clouds
(55), set in the impoverished postwar period, she suffers everything a woman can at the hands of a worthless lover—she is beaten, abandoned, betrayed; she is arrested, forced to have an abortion, stricken with tuberculosis—and then she dies, still hoping for his love. But she is equally noted for her resistance to adversity in Naruse’s
Lightning
(52),
Flowing
(56),
When a Woman Ascends the Stairs
(60), and
Yearning
(64).

Floating Clouds
won the critics’ award for Naruse as best picture for 1955. The year before, another Takamine vehicle had won the prize for Kinoshita:
Twenty-Four Eyes
, a sentimental epic about a noble schoolteacher on a remote island who lives through the quarter century that saw the rise of militarism, the war, and defeat. All Japan wept at Takamine’s resolute teacher and the fate of her twelve pupils (twenty-four eyes). For Kinoshita she also made the hilarious comedy
Carmen Comes Home
(51), in which she is a not very bright stripper who returns to her native village for a brief but eventful visit. This was Japan’s first color film, and another huge success. She made almost a dozen films for Kinoshita, and it was he who coaxed her out of retirement, in 1979, for her last appearance on the screen,
Oh My Son!

More or less self-educated, angry at her family who exploited her, suspicious of the studios, resentful about acting, still Takamine had a triumphant career. Today, she and her husband happily divide their time between Japan and Hawaii; and she has written a number of books, ranging from her two-volume, very frank autobiography,
My Professional Diary
(76), to a travel book and a cookbook. Like so many of her beset heroines, she has survived.

Constance Talmadge
(1898–1973), Brooklyn, New York
Constance Talmadge had three great advantages. She had her mother, Peg, the most implacable of the famous Hollywood mothers, known throughout the industry as Ma Talmadge. (Having steered Constance and Norma into stardom, she failed to do the same for her third daughter, Natalie, and married her off to poor Buster Keaton.) From Ma, Connie went on to a kind of Pa—her sister Norma’s much older mogul husband, Joseph M. Schenck, who took over her affairs in 1917 and steered her through more than a decade of almost uninterrupted success. Finally, she had a hoydenish charm, a happy nature, and a piquant Irish prettiness. Everybody loved this madcap girl, most famously Irving Thalberg, who pursued her to no avail before settling for the more placid Norma Shearer. It was just as well: given his fragile health, Connie’s wild streak might have speeded up his already premature death.

Big sister Norma was the tragedienne, all glamour and suffering. Connie—known to her pals as Dutch—was the comedienne. (They were like a rerun of the Gishes.) She shot to national attention as the Mountain Girl in Griffith’s
Intolerance
(16), where her tomboy high spirits and good humor provided what lightness there is to that monumental epic. Soon she was starring in vehicles handmade for her, almost all of them sophisticated romantic comedies in which she dresses up in glorious gowns, furs, and the odd tiara, and gets her man. In every one of her films that I’ve been able to see she’s utterly appealing. Typical Constance Talmadge titles:
Wedding Bells
(21);
The Primitive Lover
(22);
Her Night of Romance
(24);
The Goldfish
(24);
Her Sister from Paris
(25);
The Duchess of Buffalo
(26);
Venus of Venice
(27);
Breakfast at Sunrise
(28). Among her leading men: Conway Tearle, Ronald Colman, and Antonio Moreno, twice each. But leading men weren’t the point: a film with Constance Talmadge was a Constance Talmadge film.

Her great pal Anita Loos and Loos’s husband, John Emerson, wrote half a dozen of her films. Everything about them was super-deluxe, even when the heroine pretended to be slumming, but Dutch herself was sensible, down-to-earth, and fun. She walked away from movies when sound came in and never looked back. In a telegram to Norma, who was making a stab at the talkies, she wrote, “Quit pressing your luck, baby. The critics can’t knock those trust funds Mama set up for us.”