The New Biographical Dictionary of Film: Completely Updated and Expanded (416 page)

The daughter of a New York socialite family, she made her debut in 1940 in Fritz Lang’s
The Return of Frank James
. She worked steadily for Fox: as a breathtaking, doelike Ellie May in
Tobacco Road
(41, John Ford);
Hudson’s Bay
(41, Irving Pichel);
Sundown
(41, Henry Hathaway);
The Shanghai Gesture
(41, Josef von Sternberg);
Son of Fury
(41, John Cromwell);
Rings on Her Fingers
(42, Rouben Mamoulian);
Belle Starr
(42, Irving Cummings);
Thunder Birds
(42, William Wellman);
China Girl
(43, Hathaway);
Heaven Can Wait
(43, Ernst Lubitsch); blonde in
A Bell for Adano
(45, Henry King);
The Razor’s Edge
(46, Edmund Goulding);
Dragonwyck
(46, Joseph L. Mankiewicz);
The Iron Curtain
(48, Wellman);
Where the Sidewalk Ends
(50, Preminger);
Night and the City
(50, Jules Dassin);
The Mating Season
(51, Mitchell Leisen);
On the Riviera
(51, Walter Lang);
The Secret of Convict Lake
(51, Michael Gordon);
Close to My Heart
(51, William Keighley);
Way of a Gaucho
(52, Jacques Tourneur);
Plymouth Adventure
(52, Clarence Brown);
Never Let Me Go
(53, Delmer Daves);
The Egyptian
(54, Michael Curtiz); and
The Left Hand of God
(55, Edward Dmytryk).

She was seldom a happy woman. Her marriage to Oleg Cassini, the designer, produced a daughter, but Tierney had German measles during the pregnancy. The child was retarded, and later institutionalized. A nervous breakdown kept her out of action for several years, until 1962, when she returned in Preminger’s
Advise and Consent
as Walter Pidgeon’s urbane and just as beautiful “front-elevator romance”; less happily, she stayed on for
Toys in the Attic
(63, George Roy Hill) and
The Pleasure Seekers
(65, Jean Negulesco).

James Toback
, b. New York, 1944
1978:
Fingers
. 1982:
Love and Money
. 1983:
Exposed
. 1987:
The Pick-up Artist
. 1989:
The Big Bang
. 1997:
Two Girls and a Guy
. 1999:
Black and White
. 2001:
Harvard Man
. 2004:
When Will I Be Loved?
2008:
Tyson
(d.) Dear Jim,

You may not know it, but you are the best friend I feel obliged to include in this book. That may be a wretched position, for both of us. You are also one of the friends I most value in life. Our friendship is the odder in that so many others I know marvel that we get on. They have read so many lurid stories about you. They must see in me so much duller, and more domestic, a person than you are. (I could go senile trying to remember your new phone numbers.) In short, we are very different in outward ways. Yet we may have one thing in common: we are both torn between watching, making, and analyzing films—and behaving as if we were
in
one. Maybe I should stop there, just adding that you have been the writer on
The Gambler
(74, Karel Reisz) and
Bugsy
(91, Barry Levinson). For the rest, I will repeat what I wrote about
Fingers
before friendship had begun, with the coda that I think it remains your best work yet: “James Toback’s
Fingers
is the best first film by an American director since
Badlands
. Even that is inadequate praise, for whereas Terry Malick’s debut was an inventive ballad about innocent energy run amuck,
Fingers
is ingrowing and wounding. It does not belong to any familiar genre: it is more like a psychological allegory or ordeal. The outward signs of a New York crime movie are only its vehicle—like the body that houses the shivers of a dream.
Fingers
is that genuine oddity: an American feature movie that treats plot as merely the imprint for compulsive passions of terrible but dynamic force.”

I can’t run the whole review—there isn’t a
Real Paper
in Boston now, so where would I go to get permission? And the review may be breathless—like the movie. But I still think it’s a great picture, and I’m happy to see that the belated fame of Harvey Keitel is helping to bring it back.

“Jimmy (Harvey Keitel) is an aspiring concert pianist and the best debt collector in New York. The juxtaposition is as implausible as his polarized parents: a father out of a Mafia film, wondering whether to marry a nineteen-year-old redhead; and a fearfully troubled mother, who lives in an asylum. Jimmy is preparing for a Carnegie Hall audition, but his father calls on him now and then to collect debts from sulky restaurateurs and imposing members of the mob. The young man is full of nervous intensity that he can channel in either direction: his mastery of Bach sonatas extends to pistol whipping defaulters or screwing their mistresses in the ladies’ room.

“But Jimmy is haunted by his lack of wholeness. He finishes a piece by Bach, looks out of his window and sees a lovely, wan woman (Tisa Farrow) who has stopped to listen to his passionate, disciplined spilling of notes. He falls for her as rapidly as a child, but she is aloof and nearly stoned by her allegiance to some sexual current far greater than Jimmy can muster. That sardonic life force proves to be Jim Brown, a secret shit-brown id glowing with a mastery that lashes out in moments of magnificent, authoritative punishment. He is power and magic, radiant with a lack of anxiety. The pale woman yields her body once to Jimmy’s petulant demands, but it is a flawed coupling. Brilliant in lonely rehearsal, Jimmy disintegrates at his audition: his deft fingers stick in the cracks between notes. Even as a collector he fails: one gangster outwits him, and Jimmy has to cringe under the loudmouth abuse of his father and the ravaged contempt of his mother. He is a naughty little boy being told off.”

And so on.… Anyway, our friendship began a few days after the review ran, and it lasts. I hope. Have you known, or guessed, that I’ve never liked anything of yours quite as much—or nearly as much—since? Have we betrayed each other? Is it possible for a moviemaker and a critic to be friends?

That’s really my point in this essay. In no small measure, it was you who introduced me to the society of moviemakers. And I know now that those writers on film who reject such offers cannot really understand American movies—they cannot know the swamp of compromise that produces them, or the determination. I value that education: I believe the world needs to know how the dreams are done. But in knowing you—and others—am I cut off from critical objectivity? Or is objectivity a kind of ignorance? I don’t know, except that I know your friendship is too much to lose.

Tyson
was a remarkable film, far better than most features of its year—yet not really adequately described as a documentary.

Gregg Toland
(1904–48), b. Charleston, Illinois
Toland was forty-four when he died of a heart attack. He was, by general consent, the outstanding cameraman in Hollywood, yet his longtime employer, Samuel Goldwyn, deplored the fact that no stars attended Toland’s funeral. Men like Toland didn’t get the respect they deserved. Much of the time, they didn’t even get worthy pictures. Immediately before his death, Toland had shot three unremarkable pictures for Goldwyn:
The Bishop’s Wife
(47, Henry Koster);
Enchantment
(48, Irving Reis); and
A Song Is Born
(48, Howard Hawks). Had he lived, it is most likely that Toland’s filmography would have continued as it had been for twenty years—a cross section of industrial output, with here and there outbursts of something extraordinary.

Toland was vital at a key moment in film history. I think it is clear that
Citizen Kane
(41, Orson Welles) could not have had its look or its élan without him. He was excited to work with the outrageous newcomer; and Welles was so innocent of photography that he did not feel threatened by Toland’s advice. That shared credit of theirs at the end of the film is testament to Welles’s sentimental feeling for friendship—which is to say that while Orson wanted to be friends he was not always able to make the meeting. But for once the scorpion held hands with another kind of creature. And so all of Toland’s private experiments with lenses, coatings, lights, and new film stock bore fruit. He photographed a great film—his only one, I think—and he was essential to its greatness. Yet not one of his other films took that bulging new “realism” in photography and turned it into the passionate, hallucinatory, and slightly warped view from inside monomania’s head. Like Méliès seeing the Lumières’ invention, Welles understood what Toland had found.

As a kid, Toland had studied electrical engineering. He was a teenager still when he went to Hollywood, found work as an office boy, and then became apprentice to George Barnes (1893–1953), the man who shot King Vidor’s
Alice Adams
(23);
The Eagle
(25, Clarence Brown), with Valentino; and Raoul Walsh’s
Sadie Thompson
(28).

Toland was promoted when very young, and he signed up with Goldwyn, who would allow him unusual liberties in choice of subject, as well as his own camera crew. Such things were not possible without a clear strain of eminence and authority in Toland himself: he did contrive the trade to RKO for
Kane
, on which the package was him, his crew, his equipment, and the lenses he had refined. Yet he hardly ever sought to shape a project or to be more than vision’s servant. He did remark that
Kane
was a joy because of the extensive preproduction time, but in that time Toland tried only to meet Welles’s needs and aims. Toland had the cameraman’s curse: he had no subject.

You can see this in the very mixed list of pictures that the most discriminating cameraman shot:
Bulldog Drummond
(29, P. Richard Jones), which he and Barnes shot together;
One Heavenly Night
(30, George Fitzmaurice), again with Barnes; Eddie Cantor’s
Whoopee!
(30, Thornton Freeland), done in two-strip Technicolor;
Palmy Days
(31, Edward Sutherland);
The Unholy Garden
(31, Fitzmaurice);
The Kid from Spain
(32, Leo McCarey);
The Masquerader
(33, Richard Wallace);
Roman Scandals
(33, Frank Tuttle); loaned out to MGM for
Tugboat Annie
(33, Mervyn Le Roy).

To this point, opportunity for Toland had been largely a question of furnishing the very different atmospheres of Ronald Colman or Eddie Cantor. But gradually, his range widened—he got Anna Sten pictures, too:
Forsaking All Others
(34, W. S. Van Dyke), at Metro again;
Nana
(34, Dorothy Arzner);
We Live Again
(34, Rouben Mamoulian);
The Dark Angel
(35, Sidney Franklin);
Mad Love
(35, Karl Freund), on loan to Metro again, and maybe the first film in which people have identified Kane-like images;
Les Miserables
(35, Richard Boleslavsky), for which he got an Oscar nomination;
Splendor
(35, Elliott Nugent);
The Wedding Night
(35, King Vidor);
Come and Get It
(36, Hawks and William Wyler);
The Road to Glory
(36, Hawks);
These Three
(36, Wyler); another nomination for the stagy
Dead End
(37, Wyler);
History Is Made at Night
(37, Frank Borzage);
The Cowboy and the Lady
(38, H. C. Potter);
The Goldwyn Follies
(38, George Marshall); and
Kidnapped
(38, Alfred L. Werker).

To this point, Toland’s black and white was often moody, but it showed no great command of, or yearning for, the deep focus that was to come. Surely developments in lenses and new film stock, and the decision to film black and white under Technicolor arcs, had a lot to do with the deepening of the images. And, sometimes, the reaching out was very uneasy:
Intermezzo
(39, Gregory Ratoff), for Selznick; the Jascha Heifetz vehicle
They Shall Have Music
(39, Archie Mayo). Then came
Wuthering Heights
(39, Wyler), for which Toland won the Oscar. That film is often noirlike, and it has moments of striking depth—but it never gets the feeling of Yorkshire or Emily Brontë.
The Grapes of Wrath
(40, John Ford) is very Walker Evans and Dorothea Lange, but very sharply framed—Toland was now getting a more precise, jeweled image than anyone else.

The Long Voyage Home
(40, Ford) seems to me an example of terrible, arty photography—but it has depth, like echoes, and it got another nomination.
The Westerner
(40, Wyler) is routine, and
Ball of Fire
(41, Hawks) was rather claustrophobic. And then Toland shot
Kane
, which is the supreme merger of art and journalism in cinematography, and uniquely rooted in dramatic need.

For Wyler again, Toland shot
The Little Foxes
(41), which uses deep focus like a teaching textbook. Toland then joined John Ford’s military unit, where he shot and codirected the documentary,
December 7th
(43).

Toland never worked for Welles again—why, I wonder? Was he more comfortable with Wyler? Was he seeking to soften the very startling look of
Kane
and
The Long Voyage Home
to be more acceptable? He shot some of
The Outlaw
(43, Howard Hughes)—the single display of erotics in his credits. Then he shot
The Best Years of Our Lives
(46, Wyler), a display of deep focus that established the reliability of the world—whereas, in
Kane
, the depth was a mark of delusion. Then came
The Kid from Brooklyn
(46, Norman Z. McLeod), the live-action sequences from
Song of the South
(46, Harve Foster), and the final films listed above.