The New Biographical Dictionary of Film: Completely Updated and Expanded (446 page)

The combination of the sententious and the meretricious in Bo Widerberg’s work shows modern Sweden absorbing film into the crass neatness of its comprehensive social democracy. Life in Sweden may be cleaner, more rational, and more institutionalized against suffering than anywhere else. The artist then risks becoming another social engineer, unable to escape moral complacency and self-satisfied visual distinction. The Bergman of
The Seventh Seal
was in danger of producing inert parables to adorn regularized social democratic homes—dutiful, unfeeling messages of apocalypse. Once he surpassed that simplification, Bergman rediscovered the fruitfully Swedish ways of describing the solitary life people live with their emotions, consciences, and minds for company. Widerberg’s characters are shriven of those loads, absolved by the director’s gentility.

The success that Widerberg enjoyed in art houses all over the world was shaming, but his trite claims on commitment and the surreptitious resort to prettification were typical of a dreadful hollow that could easily come to occupy the center of “serious” cinema. He is not the only exponent of such soft options: Lelouch, Schlesinger, Kubrick, and Mike Nichols have all enjoyed some of the success of
Elvira Madigan
and been hailed in some quarters for novelty and insight.

In Widerberg’s case, there has been a rapid softening in his work, in step with his success. He was a novelist originally, a film critic and author of an earnest book,
Vision in Swedish Film
. The first two features he made
—The Pram
and
Raven’s End
—were modest, academic but promising. They both concerned young people from stifling, provincial backgrounds facing the need to break away. Their social accuracy may have owed itself to autobiographical content, even if
Raven’s End
was set, with great care, in 1936. In subject and style, neither film exceeded the grinding Swedish flaw of tastefulness, but it was possible in
Raven’s End
to see personal and political themes working together.
Love 65
was a Fellini-like account of a director having difficulty making a film. Despite such obvious derivation, it did not treat its subject too glibly.

Elvira Madigan
, however, was a total plunge into intellectual sentimentality that mooned over the fatal tryst of an army officer and a tightrope dancer: remorselessly graceful telephoto composition, cosmetic color, blurred foreground foliage caressing the pristine, advertising meadow picnic, a Mozart piano concerto, and central players—Pia Degermark and Thommy Berggren—of enervating and gutless beauty. It is a film made without a trace of humor or awareness of how close it comes to a parody of specious high art. Compare it with Penn’s
Bonnie and Clyde
and you may begin to see the vastly superior compassion in the American movie. Penn uses our identification with the central couple as a means of probing and disturbing our attitudes to glamour, violence, love, and social justice. We are made to feel the destructiveness of their world in two contradictory ways: they bleed and society falters. Liberty and order are locked in opposition. But in
Elvira Madigan
the discrepancy between the couple and the world is artificial and irrelevant.

As for
Adalen 31
and
Joe Hill
, the first was about a strike that occurred in Sweden in 1931, and the latter an American-made would-be ballad on the founding figure of International Workers of the World. Together, they address us with a flat, unappealing smugness about the self-righteousness of Swedish moral concern. Gavin Millar took
Adalen 31
to task with proper bite when he complained that Widerberg “is not speaking to us but shouting delicately.” Thus, there is a clammy, painterly treatment of its tragic events, and the effect of the eye overpowering the mind. “In other words,” said Millar, “at every real moment of dialectic, the thinness of the idea is disguised by an assault of charm.” Widerberg makes Sweden look like a land taken over by body-snatchers or placidly content with the manufacture of Orson Welles’s cuckoo clocks.

Richard Widmark
(1914–2008), b. Sunrise, Minnesota
Widmark came into movies a little later than most male stars, already in his early thirties. But that debut is still haunting, no matter that Widmark was later turned into an authentic hero, suntanned, laconic, and grudgingly aligning himself with proper causes.

Educated at Lake Forest College, he worked there as a teacher, and as a stage and radio actor, before being cast as Tommy Udo in
Kiss of Death
(47, Henry Hathaway). The sadism of that character, the fearful laugh, the skull showing through drawn skin, and the surely conscious evocation of a concentration camp degenerate established Widmark as the most frightening person on the screen. The glee in the performance may even have shocked Widmark himself. It made
Kiss of Death
untypical of Fox or Hathaway. The studio kept him on a leash, and mixed more conventional heavies with nerve-strained heroes, as if to imply that Tommy Udo was the result of overwork: as the spoiled-child owner of
Road House
(48, Jean Negulesco); the gangster in
The Street With No Name
(48, William Keighley); menacing Gregory Peck in
Yellow Sky
(48, William Wellman); a boy’s best friend in
Down to the Sea in Ships
(49, Hathaway);
Slattery’s Hurricane
(49, André de Toth); as a whining coward hounded by the London underworld in
Night and the City
(50, Jules Dassin); as the doctor racing against time and bubonic plague in
Panic in the Streets
(50, Elia Kazan); as a hardnosed, bigoted cop in
No Way Out
(50, Joseph L. Mankiewicz).

But even as a hero, Widmark barely suppressed malice, anxiety, and violence; the straight voice readily broke into a sneer or a giggle; and the eyes once had an insolent way of staring a woman out. That was how he lifted microfilm from Jean Peters’s handbag at the beginning of
Pickup on South Street
(53, Samuel Fuller). He was excellent as Fuller’s sentimental hoodlum and brought a special relish to the brutal love scenes and to the situation of a guttersnipe able to crow to the police.

Not enough films reprised that spiteful urban knowingness. In the 1950s, Widmark found himself following the middle of the road:
Halls of Montezuma
(51, Lewis Milestone);
The Frogmen
(51, Lloyd Bacon); as a milder Udo in the “Clarion Call” episode from
O. Henry’s Full House
(52, Hathaway); with Marilyn Monroe in
Don’t Bother to Knock
(52, Roy Baker);
Red Skies of Montana
(52, Joseph Newman); in his first comedy
My Pal Gus
(52, Robert Parrish); as the martinet sergeant in
Take the High Ground
(53, Richard Brooks);
Destination Gobi
(53, Robert Wise); highly strung and aggressive in
Hell and High Water
(54, Fuller); as a gambler in
Garden of Evil
(54, Hathaway).

Having left Fox, he found rather more worthwhile parts: the analyst whose own life is breaking up in
The Cobweb
(55, Vincente Minnelli); in three enterprising Westerns (even if one is ostensibly set in modern-day Latin America
)—Backlash
(56, John Sturges),
Run for the Sun
(56, Roy Boulting), and
The Last Wagon
(56, Delmer Daves); outstanding as the shriveled, timid intelligence of the Dauphin in
Saint Joan
(57, Otto Preminger); as actor and coproducer on
Time Limit
(57, Karl Malden); an old-fashioned, sardonic heavy in
The Law and Jake Wade
(58, Sturges); with Doris Day in
The Tunnel of Love
(58, Gene Kelly); and
Warlock
(59, Edward Dmytryk). He was Jim Bowie in
The Alamo
(60, John Wayne) and then actor and producer on a violent espionage movie,
The Secret Ways
(61, Phil Karlson). His third venture into production,
The Bedford Incident
(65, James B. Harris), had him as an overwrought naval commander edging the world into nuclear holocaust. At one point in that film, Widmark turns on a critic and says, “It’s a lot of work being a mean bastard,” as if truly tired.

In addition, he made two pictures with John Ford—
Two Rode Together
(61) and
Cheyenne Autumn
(64)—and was the unsubtle prosecutor in
Judgement at Nuremberg
(61, Stanley Kramer).

Working rather less, he was refreshingly ruthless in
Alvarez Kelly
(66, Dmytryk); initiated Don Siegel’s appraisal of the new brutal cop in
Madigan
(68); in
Death of a Gunfighter
(69, Siegel and Robert Totten); and made two offbeat studies of rural America:
The Moonshine War
(70, Richard Quine) and as an alcoholic has-been rodeo man in
When the Legends Die
(72, Stuart Millar). He was elderly and fussy as the man killed in
Murder on the Orient Express
(74, Sidney Lumet);
The Sellout
(75, Peter Collinson);
To the Devil a Daughter
(76, Peter Sykes);
Twilight’s Last Gleaming
(77, Robert Aldrich);
Rollercoaster
(77, James Goldstone);
The Domino Principle
(77, Stanley Kramer); and
Coma
(78, Michael Crichton).

He was in
The Swarm
(78, Irwin Allen);
Mr. Horn
(79, Jack Starrett);
All God’s Children
(80, Jerry Sharp);
Bear Island
(80, Don Sharp);
A Whale for the Killing
(81, Richard T. Heffron);
Hanky Panky
(82, Sidney Poitier);
Who Dares Wins
(82, Ian Sharpe);
Against All Odds
(84, Taylor Hackford);
Blackout
(85, Douglas Hickox);
A Gathering of Old Men
(87, Volker Schlöndorff);
Once Upon a Texas Train
(88, Burt Kennedy);
Cold Sassy Tree
(88, Joan Tewkesbury); and
True Colors
(91, Herbert Ross).

Robert Wiene
(1881–1938), b. Sasku, Germany
1914:
Arme Eva
(codirected with A. Berger). 1915:
Er Rechts, Sie Links; Die Konservenbraut
. 1916:
Der Liebesbrief der Konigin; Der Mann im
Spiegel; Die Rauberbraut; Der Sekretar der Konigin; Das Wandernde Licht
. 1919:
Ein Gefahrliches Spiel; Das Kabinett des Dr. Caligari/The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari; Der Umweg zur Ehe
. 1920:
Die Drei Tanze der Mary Wilford; Genuine; Die Nacht der Konigin Isabeau; Die Rache einer Frau
. 1921:
Hollische Nacht; Das Spiel mit dem Feuer
(codirected with Georg Kroll). 1922:
Salome; Tragikomodie
. 1923:
I.N.R.I.; Der Puppenmacher von Kiang-Ning; Raskolnikoff
. 1924:
Orlacs Hande
. 1925:
Pension Groonen
. 1926:
Der Gardeoffizier; Die Konigin vom Moulin-Rouge; Der Rosenkavalier
. 1927:
Die Beruhmte Frau; Die Geliebte
. 1928:
Die Frau auf der Folter; Die Grosse Abenteurerin; Leontines Ehemanner; Unfug der Liebe
. 1930:
Der Andere
. 1931:
Panik in Chikago; Der Liebesexpress
. 1934:
Polizeiakte 909; Eine Nacht in Venedig
. 1938:
Ultimatum
(codirected with Robert Siodmak).

There is no reason to dispute Lotte Eisner’s proposal that Wiene was a second-rate director who capitalized on the vogue for Expressionism. But he is forever associated with one of the most intriguing of cinema landmarks
—Das Kabinett des Dr. Caligari
—and for that he deserves rather more personal credit than he is usually given. As to his other movies, very few are well known.

He was originally an actor and director in the Berlin theatre, but in 1914 he went into the cinema, principally to direct Emil Jannings pictures.
Caligari
had begun as a script by Carl Mayer and Hans Janowitz that dealt with what is now the central plot of the story: how Caligari, a fairground entertainer, keeps a somnambulist, Cesare, who murders by night; and of how Caligari is discovered to be the director of an asylum, himself a madman obsessed by sleepwalking; of how he is exposed and confined.

Kracauer calls it a “revolutionary” story: “reason overpowers unreasonable power, insane authority is symbolically abolished.” Historically that may be so, but today it seems a conventional Hoffmanesque fate. Erich Pommer of Decla accepted the famous, neurotically distorted sets by Hermann Warm, Walter Reimann, and Walter Rohrig, and asked Fritz Lang to direct. When Lang was diverted by
Die Spinnen
, the project fell to Wiene. Lang, apparently, had suggested a framing to the story, which Wiene endorsed: now, the story was told by a man seen in a prologue sitting in a gloomy garden; in the epilogue, this setting is revealed as another asylum, all the figures in the story, including the narrator, are patients there, and Caligari is the doctor in charge.

At the time, Mayer and Janowitz fought bitterly against the framework, but today it seems the greatest coup in what is often a plain film, slowed by so many iris effects, rarely using its sets enterprisingly, and most vivid in Conrad Veidt’s movements. The extra perspective makes the implication of madness far more chilling. For
Caligari
is one of the first films to exploit the resemblance between watching a film and dreaming. The framework implies a sense of spectators and projects the view of insanity upon an audience that has been identified with the storyteller. In other words, its impact bypasses any local German relevance. In fact,
Caligari
seems to represent German intellectual disillusion just as much as the images in
Metropolis
invalidate its own glib happy ending.
Caligari
asks, crudely, the basic question that confronts a movie audience: are we watching reality or fantasy? That is why the film has lasted and why Wiene should not be dismissed.