The New Biographical Dictionary of Film: Completely Updated and Expanded (409 page)

In the same period, she appeared in Naruse’s
Mother
(52) and Gosho’s powerful
Where Chimneys Are Seen
(53) in which a poor working couple take in an abandoned child. In 1953, she also directed the first of her own six movies,
Love Letters
, with a script by the director Keisuke Kinoshita, and with herself playing a small role. A further tribute to her came from Ozu, who chose to collaborate on the script of her second film,
The Moon Has Risen
(55), a very appealing love story, with Tanaka in another supporting part.

Her films grew more adventurous:
The Eternal Breasts
(55), about a poet dying of cancer;
The Wandering Empress
(60);
Girls of the Night
(61), her own protest against prostitution; and
Love Under the Crucifix
(62), about a woman’s struggle to fulfill herself. Her directing career was the first of any significance for a Japanese woman, and it displayed the same intelligence, taste, and intensity as her acting.

In the postwar period she worked with Ozu three times:
A Hen in the Wind
(48);
The Munekata Sisters
(50); and
Equinox Flower
(58). There were fourteen films in all with Mizoguchi between 1940 and 1954, and five with Naruse, including
Ginza Cosmetics
(51) and
Flowing
(56), in which she is a maid in a declining geisha house, with three other very famous actresses—Hideko Takamine, Isuzu Yamada, and Haruko Sugimura. She acted for Ichikawa in
Her Brother
(60) and
An Actor’s Revenge
(63); for Kobayashi in
Sincerity
(53); and for Kurosawa in
Red Beard
(65). But, apart from Mizoguchi, her most consistent collaborator was Kinoshita, with whom she worked nine times from 1944–64. The most famous of these films is
The Ballad of Narayama
(58), in which she plays an old woman doomed by custom to be abandoned on a mountaintop to die. She was forty-nine then, and seems eighty—she had several teeth pulled to make her face ancient enough.

This is worthy of Gish, whom Tanaka somewhat resembles. Yet Tanaka flourished so much longer, and was more completely fulfilled. A lasting image—reminiscent of Gish—comes from Kinoshita’s
Army
(44). Tanaka is again a mother, whose son is going off to war. At first, she refuses to accept what’s happening. Then, away in the distance, she hears the new recruits parading and she starts running through the empty streets until she reaches the avenue where they’re marching. Rushing frantically through the crowd, she dodges and pushes her way until she finds her son. The emotion builds in a long tracking shot, and (because film stock was so scarce by then) it had to be done in one take. That was all Tanaka needed.

Jessica Tandy
(1909–94), b. London
Here is a strange career. Jessica Tandy began in the movies in the 1940s, in small and supporting parts. She then played Blanche Du Bois in the first production of Tennessee Williams’s
A Streetcar
Named Desire
(47)—and won the Tony award. But when the movie of that play was made, the role of Blanche was recast. Vivien Leigh was deemed sexier and surer box office. Leigh won her second Oscar, and Tandy did very little film work. For anyone able to see, Tandy’s mother in
The Birds
(63, Alfred Hitchcock) left it clear how much was being missed. Still, decades more elapsed before Tandy was hailed as a grand old lady, Oscar-worthy, an institution.

Tandy was married first to Jack Hawkins, and then, lastingly, to Hume Cronyn. Her strange record goes as follows:
Murder in the Family
(38, Albert Parker);
The Seventh Cross
(44, Fred Zinnemann);
The Valley of Decision
(45, Tay Garnett);
Dragonwyck
(46, Joseph L. Mankiewicz);
The Green Years
(46, Victor Saville), playing Hume Cronyn’s daughter;
Forever Amber
(47, Otto Preminger);
A Woman’s Vengeance
(47, Zoltan Korda); as Rommel’s wife in
The Desert Fox
(51, Henry Hathaway);
September Affair
(50, William Dieterle);
The Light in the Forest
(58, Herschel Daugherty);
Hemingway’s Adventures of a Young Man
(62, Martin Ritt);
Butley
(74, Harold Pinter);
Honky Tonk Freeway
(81, John Schlesinger);
Best Friends
(82, Norman Jewison);
Still of the Night
(82, Robert Benton);
The World According to Garp
(82, George Roy Hill);
The Bostonians
(84, James Ivory);
Cocoon
(85, Ron Howard);
Batteries Not Included
(87, Matthew Robbins);
Foxfire
(87, Jud Taylor);
Cocoon: The Return
(88, Daniel Petrie);
The House on Carroll Street
(88, Peter Yates); a best actress Oscar in
Driving Miss Daisy
(89, Bruce Beresford);
Fried Green Tomatoes
(91, Jon Avnet);
The Story Lady
(91, Larry Elikann);
Used People
(91, Beeban Kidron);
Camilla
(94, Deepa Mehta);
Nobody’s Fool
(94, Robert Benton).

Alain Tanner
, b. Geneva, Switzerland, 1929
1957:
Nice Time
(d) (codirected with Claude Goretta). 1964:
Les Apprentis
(d). 1966:
La Vie à Chardigash
(d). 1969:
Charles: Mort ou Vif
. 1971:
La Salamandre/The Salamander
. 1972:
Le Rétour d’Afrique
. 1974:
Le Milieu du Monde
. 1976:
Jonas, Qui Aura 25 Ans en L’An 2000/Jonah, Who Will Be 25 in the Year 2000
. 1978:
Messidor
. 1981:
L’Années Lumières/Light Years Away
. 1982:
Dans la Ville Blanche/In the White City
. 1985:
No Man’s Land
. 1987:
Une Flamme dans Mon Coeur/A Flame in My Heart; La Vallée Fantôme
. 1989:
La Femme de Rose Hill
. 1991:
The Man Who Lost His Shadow
. 1993:
The Diary of Lady M
. 1995:
Les Hommes du Port
(d). 1996:
Fourbi
. 1998:
Requiem
. 1999:
Jonas et Lila, à Demain
. 2002:
Fleurs de Sang
(codirected with Myriam Mézières). 2004:
Paul s’en Va
.

In
La Vallée Fantôme
, a movie about the dilemma of making movies, a central character says he cares only about cinema, women, and history. The Godardian remark is made by a man of advanced middle age (played by Jean-Louis Trintignant, at fifty-five-plus), and there is some sense of history being the least reliable consolation as movies and women work their way toward betrayal or disillusionment. Tanner has been around, and lived through many stages of development. They have all been vital and personal, and there is much to commend. But Tanner cannot resist a brooding disquiet, a weary sensualism that says, alas, that in the end, all is history.

He was the son of an actress and a writer-painter, and he was educated in economics at Calvin College in Geneva. In the fifties he went to London and was on the edges of the Free Cinema documentary movement—that was how he and Goretta made
Nice Time
together. Then Tanner worked in television documentary in Europe.

In the seventies, he made three films in collaboration with John Berger—
The Salamander, Le Milieu du Monde
, and
Jonas
. Berger was and is novelist, writer of polemical nonfiction, and art critic. But he is also one of those people whose passing comments on film and photography are filled with insight and passion. The collaboration was very fruitful. Berger brought a sense of play and community to Tanner that kept his own inner melancholy at bay. They also managed to convey the nature and the problem of being Swiss in telling ways.
The Salamander
is a young woman (Bulle Ogier) who refuses to succumb to the views of her held by two suitors.
Jonas
is a rumination on how Europe will develop, but it is also one of those films in which a group of individuals build a portrait of a society—anyone familiar with Berger’s nonfiction can see how important he was to the film.

As Tanner moved on, without Berger, he delved more deeply into personal and then sexual dismay.
Messidor
shows the relationship between two women breaking up.
Light Years Away
picks up the
Jonas
character, in Ireland, and it has fine performances from Trevor Howard and Mick Ford. The
White City
is Lisbon, with Bruno Ganz living alone, infatuated with a waitress, drawn to violence and the history of the city, yet half lost in tracking shots that explore the city. The mood becomes sadder, but
In the White City
may be the archetypical Tanner film in its depiction of a man working his way toward solitude.

Tanner made another collaboration with the actress-writer Myriam Mézières: she acts in
No Man’s Land
and both wrote and acted in
A Flame in My Heart
, a study of a woman’s sexual self-determination, and a truly erotic movie. This mood was repeated in
La Femme de Rose Hill
. But Tanner’s most recent films have not prospered, or been seen widely. One might guess that without the presence of another galvanizing collaborator, he is increasingly a poet of isolation, trying to insist on a gloomy eroticism as he grows older—the sadness of older eyes gazing at ever youthful pictures.

Tanner would seem to have found fresh collaborators in writer Bernard Comment, and his daughter, actress Cécile Tanner. His recent films have not been seen much outside the festival circuit, but
Requiem
has a high reputation as an Altmanesque mingling of overlapping stories. This is a director who deserves retrospective seasons.

Quentin Tarantino
, b. Knoxville, Tennessee, 1963
1992:
Reservoir Dogs
. 1994:
Pulp Fiction
. 1995: “The Man from Hollywood,” an episode from
Four Rooms
. 1997:
Jackie Brown
. 2003:
Kill Bill: Vol. I
. 2004:
Kill Bill: Vol. II
. 2007:
Death Proof
, released with
Planet Terror
, by Robert Rodriguez, as
Grind House
. 2009:
Inglourious Basterds
.

It’s easy to be distracted by the fuss and hype over Tarantino, not least by his own interviews (no one else can so swiftly bring “incessant” and “insufferable” to mind). There are already more biographies of Tarantino than pictures to his credit; too many youthful, brutal, but perversely talking pictures funded in hopes of repeating the
Pulp Fiction
bonanza; and too many hysterically manic young geniuses doing “a Tarantino” and behaving as if they knew every B picture ever made but nothing else about life. In so many ways, he is the epitome of that brilliant, remorseless, empty-life student that every film teacher has tried to avoid.

And yet, he is a real, weird writer, a conduit for swinging, hardboiled talk which, if it is gangsterese for the moment, might one day end in inspired comedy. For all the much-copied riffs and routines, sometimes Tarantino’s characters are eloquent and human in their talk—especially in
Jackie Brown
. In addition, he seems to know his own crippling immaturity for what it is: for instance, he declined Kit Carson’s script for Walker Percy’s
The Moviegoer
because he felt it was too grownup for him. Of course, how a raging success in Hollywood, with time to act in
From Dusk to Dawn
(96, Robert Rodriguez) and preside over the travesty of
Four Rooms
, actually gets to grow up is another matter. As yet, Tarantino is an uneasy mix of sage and sensationalist, doing the rewrites on
Crimson Tide
and using the money to finance debauch.

Still, in his years in the dark and as a clerk at video stores, Tarantino learned to love Hawks and Godard—you can do worse. And in
Pulp Fiction
, one can see Godard’s love of structure and Hawks’s delight in comic vagary just as much as the violence and the overall swagger of kid noir.
Pulp Fiction
has rare energy, exuberant panache, and comedy—it is a self-sufficient arabesque, not so far from
The Big Sleep
. Anyone as blessed with a sense of movie shape might get away with knowing nothing else. Was Hawks a paragon of human behavior, or an artist who worshipped a certain notion of cool elegance?

But then there is the Tarantino of violence: not just the maker of
Reservoir Dogs
—which seems to me gloatingly cruel and mechanical—but the screenwriter of
True Romance
(93, Tony Scott) and the supplier of story and first script for
Natural Born Killers
(94, Oliver Stone). Tarantino has said he regards the violence in his films as comic—even the grisly sequence of torture in
Reservoir Dogs?
Perhaps it is more the result of constant sugar highs generated by the collective movie violence of the ages.

Everything, I suspect, comes down to this barbed idea of humor. When, towards the end of
Pulp Fiction
, the curve of the story bends back to meet itself, there is something deeply, musically satisfying—a formal magic that is also very moving. Let us put all our chips on that number, and hope. Then, even if nothing else comes our way—and that could happen
—Pulp Fiction
may stand as the macabre farewell to classic American movie grace.

Tarantino responded to arrival by doing—not very much. Perhaps he is giving himself time to live and grow up. Certainly,
Jackie Brown
caught his hard-core fans off guard. I like it a lot, and I see it as the best evidence that Tarantino could become a maker of great comedies. It’s very hard to sit through the combat of
Kill Bill
without feeling a huge loss of ambition.