The New Biographical Dictionary of Film: Completely Updated and Expanded (55 page)

She had offended Paramount, but the excursion had had much more serious effects on her. The studio asked her to dub
The Canary Murder Case
(29, Tuttle and St. Clair), which had been made before her departure. She declined and went to France to make
Prix de Beauté
(30, Augusto Genina). Back in Hollywood, her position had so deteriorated that she played in a two-reeler,
Windy Riley Goes to Hollywood
, directed by Fatty Arbuckle. It is by no means clear how she had fallen from grace, but in 1931 she managed only supporting parts in
It Pays to Advertise
(Tuttle) and
God’s Gift to Women
(Michael Curtiz).

She resumed her dancing career, only to make a blighted comeback in the late 1930s in which she was wasted in small parts:
Empty Saddles
(36, Lesley Selander);
When You’re in Love
(37, Robert Riskin);
King of Gamblers
(37, Robert Florey); and
Overland Stage Riders
(38, George Sherman).

She made no more films and went gradually into a retreat from which she was recovered two decades later, by movie enthusiasts, her own articles in film journals, and the tribute to her made by Godard and Anna Karina in
Vivre Sa Vie
(62). Why is it that she exerts such influence still? In part, it is a cult superbly handled by the lady herself—so much more ingenious than the attempt Norma Desmond makes in
Sunset Boulevard
. But more than that, she was one of the first performers to penetrate to the heart of screen acting. That original doubt of Lotte Eisner’s applies not only to Louise Brooks but to all the great movie players. Quite simply, she appreciated that the power of the screen actress lay not in impersonation or performance, in the carefully worked-out personal narrative of stage acting, “but in the movements of thought and soul transmitted in a kind of intense isolation.” An actress had fully to imagine the feelings of a character. And perhaps it was in imagining the self-consuming rapture of Lulu that Louise Brooks laid in store her own subsequent isolation.

Mel Brooks
(Melvin Kaminsky), b. Brooklyn, 1926
1968:
The Producers
. 1970:
The Twelve Chairs
. 1974:
Blazing Saddles; Young Frankenstein
. 1976:
Silent Movie
. 1977:
High Anxiety
. 1981:
History of the World—Part I
. 1987:
Spaceballs
. 1991:
Life Stinks!
. 1993:
Robin Hood: Men in Tights
. 1995:
Dracula: Dead and Loving It
.

A besetting handicap of modern comedy is its belief that media conventions and genre takeoffs are funnier than human predicaments. The noblest comedians created a character who might have lived and suffered anywhere, without self-consciousness. The events of their comedies are everyday and ordinary. But for Woody Allen and Mel Brooks, humor grows in the hothouse of burlesque. Their own comic attitudes are less subtle and appealing because their clenched personalities are preoccupied with the clichés of entertainment and the task of rip-off parody. With Allen, this may be a substantial loss. But in the case of Brooks, everything suggests a brash, superficial personality dependent on the role of stage schmuck. Nothing shows Brooks’s vulgarity more than the reckless idea that Hitchcock merited pastiche. A serious comic would respect fat Alfred for being an inimitable black humorist, far more dainty and piercing than the clumsy efforts of
High Anxiety
.

Brooks is the product of live-audience TV, hired to write gags for Sid Caesar’s
Your Show of Shows
in 1950. For over a decade, he was a script doctor for TV, radio, and stage musicals. In 1964, he did the voice on Ernest Pintoff’s cartoon,
The Critic
. His first two features are his most personal and dangerous works.
The Producers
has moments of rich bad taste, and its Jewish showbiz angle is all the sharper for having Hitlerism as an opponent and Zero Mostel as its spokesman.

But those early works were too prickly for popular acceptance, and
Blazing Saddles
was a concession to the masses, devoid of wit or a feeling for Westerns. There is a facetious, mindless desperation grabbing laughs anywhere, anyhow, regardless of the intrinsic amusement of men in cowboy hats always appreciated by the directors of good Westerns.
Young Frankenstein
has more sense of the horror genre’s dignity, and
Silent Movie
is an unashamed revue, including fine sketches with Burt Reynolds and Brooks’s wife, Anne Bancroft.
High Anxiety
is a disaster: coarse and repetitive and without the shocking malice that Hitchcock employs to make us smile. How could the overdone Cloris Leachman role be funny, nearly forty years after the delicate ambiguity of Mrs. Danvers? It has only one unflawed sequence, when Brooks himself sings a love song and discloses a forlorn, pompous ham. That character is both funny and touching, and might be the basis of something much more worthwhile. But can Brooks risk abandoning his frantic cover?

There is little more to be said for Brooks the director. He has acted occasionally—in
To Be or Not to Be
(83, Alan Johnson) and as a voice in
Look Who’s Talking, Too!
(91, Amy Heckerling). But it is as an executive producer that he has been most adventurous and useful:
The Elephant Man
(80, David Lynch);
Frances
(82, Graeme Clifford);
The Doctor and the Devils
(85, Freddie Francis);
84 Charing Cross Road
(86, David Jones);
The Fly
(86, David Cronenberg); and
Solarbabies
(86, Johnson)—a remarkable attention to deformity and the grotesque.

Anything else? Yes, of course—the prodigious Broadway success of
The Producers
, and its final proof that setting out to fail is as sure a way as any.

Richard Brooks
(1912–92), b. Philadelphia
1950:
Crisis
. 1951:
The Light Touch
. 1952:
Deadline, U.S.A
. 1953:
Battle Circus; Take the High Ground
. 1954:
The Flame and the Flesh; The Last Time I Saw Paris
. 1955:
Blackboard Jungle
. 1956:
The Last Hunt; The Catered Affair/Wedding Breakfast
. 1957:
Something of Value; The Brothers Karamazov
. 1958:
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
. 1960:
Elmer Gantry
. 1962:
Sweet Bird of Youth
. 1964:
Lord Jim
. 1966:
The Professionals
. 1967:
In Cold Blood
. 1969:
The Happy Ending
. 1971:
$/The Heist
. 1975:
Bite the Bullet
. 1977:
Looking for Mr. Goodbar
. 1982:
Wrong Is Right
. 1985:
Fever Pitch
.

A sports reporter and radio commentator, Brooks had screenwriting credits on
Sin Town
(42, Ray Enright),
White Savage
(43, Arthur Lubin),
My Best Gal
(44, Anthony Mann), and
Cobra Woman
(45, Robert Siodmak) before war service in the Marines. He emerged with his first novel,
The Brick Foxhole
, which became the movie
Crossfire
(47, Edward Dmytryk). He then scripted
Swell Guy
(47, Frank Tuttle),
Brute Force
(47, Jules Dassin),
To the Victor
(48, Delmer Daves),
Key Largo
(48, John Huston),
Mystery Street
(50, John Sturges),
Storm Warning
(50, Stuart Heisler), and
Any Number Can Play
(50, Mervyn LeRoy) before Cary Grant’s good offices enabled him to direct the script he had written for
Crisis
.

In interviews, Brooks often gave pungent and hilarious accounts of his early life in the film world. But his own films are solemnly respectable, exactly what one might expect from “the writer” figure as presented in American films. Attempts to see great pictorial or thematic virtues in his work are an ingenious diversion from his characteristic preference for literary properties and unambiguous messages. His early films are at best neat—
Crisis
—and at worst corn
—Take the High Ground
and
The Last Time I Saw Paris
. One has only to compare him with Kazan, especially in the matter of Tennessee Williams adaptations, to see how far emotional intensity eludes him. And whenever he has taken on larger subjects—Dostoyevsky, Conrad, and
In Cold Blood
—he has settled for a rendering of the plot that is elementary and cautious. Nor did John Alton’s arty color photography supply the proper complexity to
Brothers Karamazov. The Last Hunt
is an unusual Western and
Elmer Gantry
has a good period flavor. But Sinclair Lewis is not the most stimulating of models and
Gantry
is too obvious a vehicle for Burt Lancaster.

He took great risks personally to make
Goodbar
, and made large demands on Diane Keaton. But it is a coarse, brutal film, unaware that its own sensationalism stops any chance of a serious commentary on sexuality.

Pierce Brosnan
, b. Navan, County Meath, Ireland, 1951
Some people regard Pierce Brosnan as touched by Irish luck. He got the lead role in the TV series
Remington Steele
by just happening to be in the right place at the right time. It made his name when he had few other claims on fame. Then the role of James Bond was offered to him—as that strange franchise languished—and he had to turn it down because of the
Steele
commitment. But then Bond waited for him and was available again in the midnineties. Since when, he has undoubtedly helped pump life back into the ailing beast.

On the TV show (1982–87), Brosnan was said to be “debonair.” As Bond, he is sometimes called “authoritative.” So be it. But in
The Thomas Crown Affair
(99, John McTiernan), which he helped produce, Brosnan was eaten alive by the sheer warmth and presence of Rene Russo. Indeed, he looked like a stick being toyed with by a lush cat.

He made his feature movie debut in
The Long Good Friday
(80, John Mackenzie); and then in
The Mirror Crack’d
(80, Guy Hamilton) he had the right period look for an Agatha Christie man;
Nomads
(86, McTiernan);
The Fourth Protocol
(87, Mackenzie), in which he was Russian; the inexplicable
Taffin
(88, Francis Megahy);
The Deceivers
(88, Nicholas Meyer), a disaster made in India;
Mister Johnson
(90, Bruce Beresford);
Live Wire
(92, Christian Duguay);
Mrs. Doubtfire
(93, Chris Columbus);
Love Affair
(94, Glenn Gordon Caron); his Bond debut,
GoldenEye
(95, Martin Campbell);
Dante’s Peak
(97, Roger Donaldson), with no box office carry-over from Bond;
The Mirror Has Two Faces
(96, Barbra Streisand);
Mars Attacks!
(96, Tim Burton);
Tomorrow Never Dies
(97, Roger Spottiswoode);
The World Is Not Enough
(99, Michael Apted);
The Tailor of Panama
(01, John Boorman); very Irish and good in
Evelyn
(02, Beresford); Bond again in
Die Another Day
(02, Lee Tamahori);
Laws of Attraction
(04, Peter Howitt);
After the Sunset
(04, Brett Ratner);
Laws of Attraction
(04, Peter Howitt);
The Matador
(05, Richard Shepard);
Seraphim Falls
(06, David Von Ancken);
Butterfly on a Wheel
(07, Mike Barker);
Married Life
(07, Ira Sachs);
Mamma Mia!
(08, Phyllida Lloyd);
The Ghost Writer
(10, Roman Polanski).

Clarence Brown
(1890–1987), b. Clinton, Massachusetts
1920:
The Last of the Mohicans
(codirected with Maurice Tourneur);
The Great Redeemer
. 1921:
The Foolish Matrons
(codirected with Tourneur). 1922:
The Light in the Dark
. 1923:
Don’t Marry for Money; The Acquittal
. 1924:
The Signal Tower; Butterfly
. 1925:
Smouldering Fires; The Eagle; The Goose Woman
. 1926:
Kiki; Flesh and the Devil
. 1928:
The Cossacks
(codirected with and credited to George Hill);
A Woman of Affairs
. 1929:
The Trail of ’98; Wonder of Women; Navy Blues
. 1930:
Anna Christie; Romance
. 1931:
Inspiration; A Free Soul; Possessed
. 1932:
Emma; Letty Lynton; The Son-Daughter
. 1933:
Looking Forward; Night Flight
. 1934:
Sadie McKee; Chained
. 1935:
Anna Karenina; Ah, Wilderness!
. 1936:
Wife vs. Secretary; The Gorgeous Hussy
. 1938:
Conquest/Marie Walewska; Of Human Hearts
. 1939:
Idiot’s Delight; The Rains Came
. 1940:
Edison, the Man
. 1941:
Come Live With Me; They Met in Bombay
. 1943:
The Human Comedy
. 1944:
The White Cliffs of Dover; National Velvet
. 1946:
The Yearling
. 1947:
Song of Love
. 1949:
Intruder in the Dust
. 1950:
To Please a Lady; It’s a Big Country
(codirected). 1951:
Angels in the Outfield
. 1952:
When in Rome; Plymouth Adventure
.

Brown studied at the University of Tennessee and was an engineer before getting a job as assistant to Maurice Tourneur. He acknowledged a great debt to Tourneur, with whom he worked for seven years. Brown’s first solo film was scripted with John Gilbert and by the mid-1920s he was with Universal. Subsequently he joined MGM and stayed there until the 1940s. He was one of their leading directors of female stars. Five times he worked with Joan Crawford:
Possessed, Letty Lynton, Sadie McKee, Chained
, and
The Gorgeous Hussy
. More important, he had the reputation of being Garbo’s director:
Flesh and the Devil, A Woman of Affairs, Anna Christie, Anna Karenina
, and
Conquest
. But these are not Garbo’s best films—just as the Crawford movies are more reserved than those she made with, say, Michael Curtiz or Robert Aldrich. Brown had a gentle, reflective taste, inclined to persist with lush visual effects learned in the silent cinema. He was at his best with atmosphere, and least assured with dialogue.
Idiot’s Delight
, for instance, is a garrulous muddle, but
The Yearling
and
Intruder in the Dust
are touching works, even if old-fashioned and very slow. Attempts to elevate Brown’s status are stopped in their tracks by a comparison with George Cukor. It is more useful to see him as a pictorialist who managed to negotiate sound without effectively altering his style. Like so many directors of that generation in America he was conventional, placid, and humorless. He never outgrew novelettish material, and
The Goose Woman, Anna Karenina
, and
National Velvet
have the same soothing plush of absorbency. Essentially, Brown treated Louise Dresser, Garbo, the young Elizabeth Taylor, and animals in
The Yearling
and
National Velvet
with the same considerate but uncritical awe.