The New Biographical Dictionary of Film: Completely Updated and Expanded (443 page)

William A
. (Augustus)
Wellman
(1896–1975), b. Brookline, Massachusetts
1923:
The Man Who Won; Second Hand Love; Big Dan; Cupid’s Fireman
. 1924:
Not a Drum Was Heard; The Vagabond Trail; The Circus Cowboy
. 1925:
When Husbands Flirt
. 1926:
The Boob; The Cat’s Pajamas; You Never Know Women
. 1928:
Legion of the Condemned; Ladies of the Mob; Beggars of Life
. 1929:
Chinatown Nights; The Man I Love; Woman Trap; Wings
. 1930:
Dangerous Paradise; Young Eagles; Maybe It’s Love
. 1931:
Public Enemy; Other Men’s Women; Star Witness; Night Nurse; Safe in Hell
. 1932:
Hatchet Man; So Big; Love Is a Racket; The Purchase Price; The Conquerors
. 1933:
Frisco Jenny; Central Airport; Lady of the Night; Lilly Turner; Heroes for Sale; Wild Boys of the Road; College Coach
. 1934:
Looking for Trouble; Stingaree
. 1935:
The President Vanishes; Call of the Wild
. 1936:
Small Town Girl; Robin Hood of El Dorado
. 1937:
A Star Is Born; Nothing Sacred
. 1938:
Men With Wings
. 1939:
Beau Geste; The Light that Failed
. 1941:
Reaching for the Sun
. 1942:
Roxie Hart; The Great Man’s Lady; Thunder Birds
. 1943:
Lady of Burlesque; The Ox-Bow Incident
. 1944:
Buffalo Bill
. 1945:
This Man’s Navy; The Story of G.I. Joe
. 1946:
Gallant Journey
. 1947:
Magic Town
. 1948:
The Iron Curtain; Yellow Sky
. 1949:
Battleground
. 1950:
The Happy Years; The Next Voice You Hear
. 1951:
Across the Wide Missouri; It’s a Big Country
(codirected);
Westward the Women
. 1952:
My Man and I
. 1953:
Island in the Sky
. 1954:
The High and the Mighty; Track of the Cat
. 1955:
Blood Alley
. 1956:
Goodbye, My Lady
. 1957:
Lafayette Escadrille; Darby’s Rangers
.

Louise Brooks, who worked with Wellman on
Beggars of Life
, called him an “intricate” man. She found that his pacing and his interest fluctuated; she was intrigued by his sadism toward women; and she wasn’t quite sure how much to believe about the stories that he had flown with the Lafayette Escadrille unit—American pilots flying in the First World War under French colors. Yet much of “Wild Bill’s” reputation derived from that fabled beginning, and it was the legend that got him so many flying pictures, most notably
Wings
, which is actually rather routine, even if it did get the first Oscar for best picture.

Wellman was, rather by self-advertisement, a man’s man, brusque, laconic, and aggressive toward his players. But not enough of that “intricacy” comes across on screen. His long and honorable list of films has too few items that raise the pulse: so many of his aviation pictures are predictable—not just
Wings
, but
The High and the Mighty, Island in the Sky, Thunder Birds, Men With Wings
, and so on. Put the best things in those films together and you’re still nowhere near the exact lyricism and the feeling for space in, say,
Only Angels Have Wings
or
The Right Stuff
.

In addition, Wellman was often a meek servant to quite unexpected schemes: he directed Ruth Chatterton in
Frisco Jenny
and
Lilly Turner
, and then years later he made that garish prefeminist Western,
Westward the Women
. Yet no one could claim that he seemed to be interested in such projects.
Yellow Sky
is a disappointing Western;
Across the Wide Missouri
is ponderous;
Battleground
was Dore Schary’s regimental liberalism—and it’s not as interesting as
The Story of G.I. Joe. The Light That Failed
, from Kipling, is mannered and stilted, except when Ida Lupino is involved. And
The Oxbow Incident
is one of those solemn, acclaimed works that you really don’t need to see. As for
Track of the Cat
, it is flat-out arty in its attempt at a black-and-white color movie, a notion that gets in the way of a nice ghost story set in the snowy wilds.

It’s so untidy a career, as sentimental and hokey as
Buffalo Bill
, but then as rough and socially urgent as
Wild Boys of the Road
and
Heroes for Sale. The Conquerors
is a routine epic of building up the West, but
Night Nurse
is edgy, frightening, and very tough.
Public Enemy
has a higher reputation than it deserves, yet the famous grapefruit scene is always unexpected and nasty.
Beau Geste
did well at foreign legion heroics, but it’s an entirely foreseeable picture.

Still, it comes in the period of three movies that aren’t on automatic, and which are Wellman’s best—if they are his:
A Star Is Born, Nothing Sacred
, and
Roxie Hart
, romantic satires that pour on the acid in mounting glee. Wellman and Robert Carson got the Oscar for original story on
A Star Is Born
, and Wellman at different times admitted that it was all David Selznick’s idea, really—but hell, no,
he
wrote the damn thing!

Wellman was always like that, showoff tough and … intricate. Anyway,
Nothing Sacred
is swift, funny, and very cynical, while
Roxie Hart
is a wicked satire, with Ginger Rogers giving a knockout brassy act in the lead. Nunnally Johnson wrote
Roxie Hart
, while Ben Hecht did
Nothing Sacred
. Yet at other times, hours could go by in a Wellman movie without so much as a smile.

Maybe he was called Wild Bill because he was just out of order?

Wim Wenders
, b. Dusseldorf, Germany, 1945
1967:
Schauplatze
(s);
Same Player Shoots Again
(s). 1968:
Silver City
(s);
Polizeifilm
(s). 1969:
Alabama
(s);
3 Amerikanische LPs
(s). 1970:
Summer in the City/Summer in the City: Dedicated to the Kinks
. 1971:
Die Angst des Tormanns beim Elfmeter/The Goalie’s Anxiety at the Penalty Kick
. 1972:
Der Scharlachrote Buchstabe/The Scarlet Letter
. 1974:
Alice in den Stadten/Alice in the Cities; Aus der Familie der Panzereschen
(s). 1975:
Falsche Bewegung/Wrong Movement
. 1976:
Im Lauf der Zeit/Kings of the Road
. 1977:
Der Amerikanische Freund/The American Friend
. 1979:
Lightning Over Water/Nick’s Movie
(codirected with Nicholas Ray). 1982:
Quand Je m’Eveille/Reverse Angle
(s);
The State of Things
. 1983:
Hammett
. 1984:
Chambre 666
(s);
Paris, Texas
. 1985:
Tokyo-Ga
(d). 1987:
Himmel uber Berlin/Wings of Desire
. 1989:
Auszeichnunger zu Kleidern und Stadten/Notebooks on Cities and Clothes
(d). 1991:
Bis ans Ende der Welt/Until the End of the World
. 1993:
Faraway, So Close!
. 1994:
Lisbon Story
. 1995:
Beyond the Clouds
(codirected with Michelangelo Antonioni);
Die Gebrüder Skladanowsky
. 1997:
The End of Violence
. 1998:
Willie Nelson at the Teatro
(d). 1999:
Buena Vista Social Club
(d). 2000:
The Million Dollar Hotel
. 2001:
In America
. 2002:
Viel Passiert—Der BAP-Film
. “Twelve Miles to Trona,” episode from
Ten Minutes Older: The Trumpet
. 2003: “The Soul of a Man,” episode from
The Blues
(TV). 2004:
Land of Plenty; Don’t Come Knockin’
. 2008:
Palermo Shooting
Of all the new German directors of the 1970s, none had Wim Wenders’s rhapsodic sense of America.

He was brought up on American Forces radio and the glut of Hollywood movies that occupied Germany after the war. The influence of the first is on nearly all his soundtracks, and in the tough urban blues that challenges fate. The second tradition rose to a peak with the affectionate use of Nicholas Ray and Samuel Fuller in
The American Friend
, that seminal film for determined outcasts that might just as well have for its title Ray’s own tattered motto, “I’m a stranger here, myself.”

Wenders studied medicine, philosophy, and painting, and it was while he was taking etching classes in Paris in 1965–66 that he discovered the Cinemathèque. He went back to Germany, to film school in Munich, and to work as a film critic. His early shorts were often built around pop music, and
Summer in the City
is a three-hour love letter to the Kinks.

Goalie’s Anxiety
got made because of the novel and script by Peter Handke. But it had an extraordinary visual capacity for revealing the alienation of the beaten goalie, and the violence that awaits him. Filmed in Robbie Muller’s somber color, and filled with the realities of Vienna, it is still indebted to the dead ends of film noir.
Alice in the Cities
is a journey film for a lost child and a photographer bruised after an American assignment. It is fragmentary, meandering, and proof of Wenders’s eye and ear for inconsequential scenes that build into a subtle mood. A little reminiscent of Truffaut, its mixture of humor and sadness manages to move from everyday reality to a grand, poetic allusion to John Ford.

Wrong Movement
was another Handke script, based on Goethe’s
Wilhelm Meister
. It is a journey again, in which physical enquiry resembles the movements of the mind and feelings. That method had its richest expression in
Kings of the Road
, a three-hour study of two men who are on the road, servicing the projectors in failing movie theatres. It is full of film references and the situation of a Hawksian bond tested against the newer threats of tedium and cultural deterioration in which Germany has become a satellite of Americana. The pace is leisurely, and the action is not emphatic, but
Kings of the Road
is one of the best films of the seventies. It seemed to predict Wenders’s future: an increasingly existential concern underlying the unforced dealings between lonely people.

That certainly describes
American Friend
, the most vivid film Wenders had yet made, but as self-contained as a dream. The use of Highsmith/ Hitchcock motifs, the antagonistic casting of Bruno Ganz and Dennis Hopper, the rogues’ gallery of movie directors in small parts, the variety of bloody sunset reds, and the jaunty pleasure with set-piece murders shot through with New Wave spontaneity, all made for a film of high enjoyment. Still, the view of women was hostile, the comradeship went into an obscure spiral at the end and the entire picture relied on a piece of implausible motivation that Wenders was not good enough to hide.

Wenders is forever a wanderer, and seemingly set upon his own furious ups and downs.
Lightning Over Water
is a difficult film for anyone who loved Nicholas Ray (as director or man), for it seems exploitative of his illness and his desperate urge to make the film.
The State of Things
seemed to me naïve and pretentious, rather like a Kafka view of the world in which the Law has been replaced with the Movie Business.
Hammett
was a disastrous foray to the real America, long premeditated, supposedly a gift from Zoetrope, yet a clear proof of limits in Wenders. Yet
Paris, Texas
is the real thing: a gentle, slow unpeeling of the family onion, sublime in its use of desert, city, Harry Dean Stanton, and Nastassja Kinski, and one of the fondest and most ambivalent films about America that a European has ever made. There are many people who esteem
Wings of Desire
as much as I like
Paris, Texas
—I will not argue, I walked out. But I would defend the position that
Until the End of the World
is as awful a film as a good director has made.

Wenders remains romantically itinerant, in love with music, America, and the idea of the movies. But he is closing in on sixty, and nothing lately has been as big or as cogent as one would like to see. Not that one isn’t appreciative: it was Wenders’s tact and assistance that helped Antonioni to make another film—far from worthless and altogether cleaner than the earlier hero-worship of Nick Ray;
Buena Vista Social Club
is a delight—if a little monotonous. On the other hand,
The End of Violence
is pretentious and silly, and no feature film has really reminded us of the younger Wenders.
In America
is a project involving Sam Shepard, and one can only say that they both need the best in each other.

Oskar Werner
(Josef Bschliessmayer) (1922–84), b. Vienna
Sad falling out of former comrades: 29 March 1966, François Truffaut’s diary on the making of
Fahrenheit 451:

Oskar’s performance isn’t as “cool” as I would like. Clearly he doesn’t want to appear less intelligent than Clarisse, although that is the situation. He always manages to sneak in a couple of unnecessary smiles. In his resistance to playing the part the way I want it, there is faulty reasoning in relation, for example, to theatrical dramatization which is therefore nobly meant, but there are also some more dubious reasons bound up with his new Hollywood aspirations. So many women went into ecstasies over his smile in
Ship of Fools
and his sticky kisses with La Signoret, that he seems determined now to play the “glamour game” to titillate elderly American ladies. When we were making
Jules et Jim
five years ago he was a long way from all that; he wasn’t thinking about building up his part, thought even less about his make-up, his hairstyle or his comfort. He did his work in an honest and dignified way.