The New Biographical Dictionary of Film: Completely Updated and Expanded (424 page)

Detour
is beyond remarkable. Shot in six days, on the road and in wretched, cramped rooms, its attempt at a love story never stands a chance. The Tom Neal character is waiting for a nemesis, Ann Savage—were these actors, hoping for careers, or derelicts resolved to treat the idea of a movie with contempt? Six-day B pictures may be horribly limited, but they were wide open, too—if an Ulmer could make a film that fast it might emerge dripping with disgust.

Sir Peter Ustinov
(1921–2004), b. London
1946:
School for Secrets
. 1947:
Vice Versa
. 1949:
Private Angelo
(codirected with Michael Anderson). 1961:
Romanoff and Juliet
. 1962:
Billy Budd
. 1965:
Lady L
. 1972:
Hammersmith Is Out
. 1983:
Memed My Hawk
.

There is an ostentatious, dilettante laziness in the way Ustinov handles his varied talents. In a casual setting—such as a television conversation—he can appear charming, witty, and immensely entertaining. But on film, his variety has tended to lead to shallowness and waste. As a director, he seems diffident; as an actor, a showoff. In the first, he is eclectic and basically sentimental—that blurs the stark potential of
Billy Budd
, just as much as it clogs in
Romanoff and Juliet. Billy Budd
is sincere and unambiguous, but thrown off balance by the intensity of Robert Ryan’s conception of Claggart. How often in films does the subtle portrayal of evil alter the meaning of a work. The camera becomes entranced by Ryan, whereas Melville’s sublime prose watches everything as if from the foretop.

Small but striking evidence of this is the way Ustinov adds to Melville by having Ryan’s Claggart smile with satisfaction the instant before he dies from Billy’s outraged blow. That small addition turns Claggart into an evil genius. The addition is striking, but a diminution of Melville.

Ustinov’s comedy is only decoration, not a true response to life. As a player, he is basically a comic mimic. At dinner he might be captivating; in front of the camera he is an owl. It says a lot about the supporting actor Oscar that he won it twice: for
Spartacus
(60, Stanley Kubrick) and
Topkapi
(64, Jules Dassin). The difficulty lies in reminding oneself that it is really Ustinov as the ringmaster in
Lola Montès
(55, Max Ophüls). For once there, he appeared as a fat, sly, austere man totally controlled by Ophüls’s marvelous design.

As an actor, he has also played in
Hullo Fame
(40, Andrew Buchanan);
Mein Kampf, My Crimes
(40, Norman Lee);
The Goose Steps Out
(42, Basil Dearden and Will Hay); the priest in
One of Our Aircraft Is Missing
(42, Michael Powell);
The Way Ahead
(44, Carol Reed), for which he wrote the script;
Odette
(50, Herbert Wilcox); as Nero in
Quo Vadis?
(51, Mervyn Le Roy);
Hotel Sahara
(51, Ken Annakin); as Prinny in
Beau Brummel
(54, Curtis Bernhardt);
The Egyptian
(54, Michael Curtiz);
I Girovaghi
(56, Hugo Fregonese);
Les Espions
(57, Henri-Georges Clouzot);
The Sundowners
(60, Fred Zinnemann);
The Comedians
(67, Peter Glenville);
Hot Millions
(68, Eric Till); and
Blackbeard’s Ghost
(68, Robert Stevenson). He worked for Disney again in
One of Our Dinosaurs Is Missing
(75, Stevenson) and
Treasure of Matecumbe
(76, Vincent McEveety). He was a mock villain in
The Last Remake of Beau Geste
(77, Marty Feldman) and a detective in
Death on the Nile
(78, John Guillermin). He played in
Doppio Delitto
(78, Steno) and
Ashanti
(79, Richard Fleischer).

He was in
Players
(79, Anthony Harvey);
The Great Muppet Caper
(81, Jim Henson);
Charlie Chan and the Curse of the Dragon Queen
(81, Clive Donner); as Hercule Poirot in
Evil Under the Sun
(82, Guy Hamilton);
Dead Man’s Folly
(85, Donner);
Thirteen at Dinner
(85, Lou Antonio); and
Appointment With Death
(88, Michael Winner), both as Poirot again;
La Revolution Française
(89, Robert Enrico and Richard T. Heffner); and a rather stuffy expert in
Lorenzo’s Oil
(92, George Miller).

He was Grandfather in
The Old Curiosity Shop
(94, Kevin Connor);
The Phoenix and the Magic Carpet
(95, Zoran Perisic);
Stiff Upper Lips
(98, Gary Sinyor); the Walrus in
Alice in Wonderland
(99, Nick Willing); the voice of Old Major in
Animal Farm
(99, John Stephenson);
The Bachelor
(99, Sinyor); William IV in
Victoria & Albert
(01, John Erman);
Salem Witch Trials
(01, Joseph Sargent).

V

Roger Vadim
(Roger Vadim Plemiannikov) (1928–2000), b. Paris
1956:
Et Dieu Créa la Femme/And God Created Woman
. 1957:
Sait-on Jamais?/When the Devil Drives; Les Bijoutiers du Clair de Lune/Heaven Fell That Night
. 1959:
Les Liaisons Dangereuses
. 1960:
Et Mourir de Plaisir/Blood and Roses
. 1961:
Le Bride sur le Cou;
“L’Orgeuil,” an episode from
Les Sept Péchés Capitaux
. 1962:
Le Vice et la Vertu/Vice and Virtue; Le Repos de Guerrier/Warriors Rest
. 1963:
Château en Suède
. 1964:
La Ronde
. 1966:
La Curée/The Game Is Over
. 1968: “Metzengerstein,” an episode from
Histoires Extraordinaires; Barbarella
. 1971:
Pretty Maids All in a Row; Hellé
. 1973:
Don Juan 1973 ou Si Don Juan Etait une Femme/Don Juan or If Don Juan Were a Woman
. 1974:
La Jeune Fille Assassinée/Charlotte
. 1976:
Une Femme Infidèle
. 1980:
Night Games
. 1982:
Hot Touch
. 1983:
Surprise Party
. 1987:
And God Created Woman
. 1988: an episode from
Deadly Nightmares
. 1994:
Amour Fou/Mad Love
.

It takes an empty-headed intellectual debauchee to enjoy so many pretty maids in the flesh and on celluloid, to watch them pass by him one after another, and yet persist with films that have all the suspended animation of a masturbatory dream. There was an idiot splendor once as Vadim turned cinema into his own seraglio, absurd enough to leave us stranded between envy and reproach.

The reality of sex (if such a thing still obtains) ought to be an interior exchanged emotion (these are the claims made by its makers), ridiculously glamorized and trivialized by naked, Cinema-Scopic eroticism. Sex in prospect, or healing retrospect; sex as a consumer product; as a magical idea—these are Vadim’s preoccupations. Scolds claimed that he disrobed so many of his own conquests to taunt us, and to make his prowess notorious. But perhaps he made so many sumptuous images to enable him to live in ideas. Human realities do not obtrude on his world, and there are depressing signs of an actual hostility to women as people, rather than the sex object that is possessed in the moment of being seen. This is what makes Vadim’s
La Ronde
mechanical and uninhabited, a toy in wraps, and Ophüls’s a perilous vehicle that carries fragile, uninsured people.

But even if you decide that Vadim’s voyeurism is sad, sordid, and lifeless, it is also a universal corruption of humanity (so universal that it becomes normal), and deep in the heart of cinema. If it is possible that the majority of sexual activity in the world is notional and private—that is to say, not mutual, but enjoyed behind closed eyes—then Vadim is worthy of study. Perhaps he is the smudged meeting place of art cinema and the sort of uninhibited catering to erotic taste that darkness has always encouraged and that the cinema may yet discover as its commercial destiny. When the streets are painful and dangerous, who is to deny the use of cinemas for lonely self-expression, where the flickering image gives a brief substance to dreams that lift intolerable pressures?

Is there an unalloyed warning to be made?
Pretty Maids All in a Row
is, sociologically, a film of disturbing insights in that its central character—an amused Rock Hudson (once all that Universal allowed to the lovelorn)—does not separate his fucking of campus nymphets from his murder of them. Too unreal to know in bed, these chicks are plastic enough to be disposed of. The sexual idea in
Pretty Maids
has become psychotic, acting out the dismissal of human reality that has always been implied in the method. And yet the film is tritely playful and the succession of postpubic children are gilded by the loving photography of that veteran, Charles Rosher, who once caught the rapture of Janet Gaynor in
Sunrise. Pretty Maids
could only be excused by lacerating satire, but Vadim was always humorless, unable to discard his obsession with glamour. Attractiveness wastes away character, and leaves the horrifying insecurity of a world of appearances. Vadim’s cinema bespeaks the isolation of the viewer.

There lies his interest: the sense of useless power stoked up in the spectator. Vadim created the Bardot legend. He began in movies as an assistant to Marc Allégret:
Blanche Fury
(47). And it was through Allégret, on
Futures Vedettes
(55), that he met Bardot. No doubt, he was sufficiently alert to tumescent fashion to see the coming relevance of such dumb glory. He made a blank, magnificent body aware that it was being watched and tolerant of the spectacle. In pinups, the girl knows that the man may be jacking-off (within touch however far away), and still she smiles, lips moist, with a maternal inability to be angry. Despite the farce of his Jane Fonda period, it is likely that
Klute
would not have been as frank had Vadim not taught her first to admire herself (
Barbarella
) and then to loathe that nihilist insight. Fonda brought Vadim his one moment of humor, making Barbarella a simpleton in the pleasure machine. But in
Klute
, as the call girl who looks at the time as she impersonates bliss in a salesman’s arms, she might be sticking out her tongue at Vadim.

By all literary standards Vadim purveys rubbish. But on film, that leads one to ask, “Are wide-screen displays of naked women rubbish, or am I the rubbish watching them?” Visually, his films are as adolescent and as imaginative—for what age is more imaginative?—as advertisements for body lotions and lingerie. Where he is of unavoidable importance for the horny humanist is in the emphasis on titillation of himself and his audience. He suggests that eroticism is superior to sex. We claim that it ought not to be. But if we have righteousness on our side, then perhaps he has accuracy. The sexiest woman in his work is Françoise Arnoul in
Sait-on Jamais?
, who hardly drops a garment. The resplendent nakedness of Bardot and Fonda—in
Et Dieu Créa la Femme, Bijoutiers du Clair de Lune, Le Repos de Guerrier, La Curée
, and
Barbarella
—is purely iconographic He is instinctively a decadent, subordinating plot, people, and meaning to visual harmony. But in
Sait-on Jamais?
, at least, the hero who slips into Venetian intrigue from a Gerald McBoing-Boing film is a forerunner of Belmondo in
Breathless
. Otherwise, that film employs Venice and the Modern Jazz Quartet as modishly as he later resorted to Laclos, Sheridan le Fanu, and so many ladies, stripped bare but undiscovered. Most distressing is the publicity-conscious nastiness. Instinctively, Vadim always had a feeling for depraved taste: thus the pairing of Peter and Jane Fonda in
Histoires Extraordinaires
and the return to Bardot helplessly aged—for
Don Juan 73
, in bed with Jane Birkin in an effort to revive his jaded fantasies.

So many sexual revolutions (and catastrophes) left Vadim looking more of an anachronism. Thus, in 1987, when he was nudging sixty, his camera caressed Rebecca De Mornay in a forlorn remake of the Bardot movie that needed so much of 1956’s innocence to seem daring.

Rudolph Valentino
(Rodolpho Guglielmi di Valentina d’Antonguolla) (1895–1926), b. Castellaneta, Italy
In the summer of 1926, Valentino collapsed in New York. Doctors cut open that dreamed-of, sleek body and found peritonitis. It was an inoperable case, but when Valentino came round, according to Dos Passos in
U.S.A.
, he asked anxiously, “Well, did I behave like a pink powder puff?” That question still hangs in the air, even if Valentino himself is beyond comfort. For he had an extraordinary career, sufficient to bring out huge crowds for his funeral, to persuade many women that he spoke to them from the grave, and to unsettle a rather dull, uninspired boy from the Italian countryside. There were at least three ways of interpreting Valentino.

1. He was the screen’s great lover, who in five years and a dozen films carnalized the idea of the hero as a sexual weapon. Although he had his first great success in
The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse
(21, Rex Ingram) and starred in
Uncharted Seas
(21, Wesley Ruggles), with Nazimova in
Camille
(21, Ray C. Smallwood), and in
The Conquering Power
(21, Ingram), this image was based principally on
The Sheik
(21, George Melford). In that he played an Arab who captures “a proud and spirited English girl.” Rape is imminent for much of the film, and only gradually domesticated when the Sheik is wounded, nursed by the girl, and brought to see the desirability of marriage.

The banality is easy to mock, but it was the guileless credulity of so many feminine imaginations that explained Valentino’s passionate following.
The Sheik
embodied the ambivalence of the cinema: offering to ravish callow minds with dreams of taboo glamour but eventually settling for social stability. It is worth recalling that the “English” girl in
The Sheik
is captured when masquerading as an Arab slave girl. Slavery, capture, peril, nurse, beloved, and wife—there is the nightly gamut of the middle-class Mrs., a safe, easeful journey, renewing hopes of excitement and restoring the lady’s estimate of her own attractiveness. For Valentino, it meant a split personality: initially, the wild man, his body oiled, his eyes as hard as his penis; but finally, the wounded thruster, humbled, brought back to a calmer, subservient health and marriage.