The New Biographical Dictionary of Film: Completely Updated and Expanded (58 page)

To conclude, I think Buñuel emerged from his refugee career fascinated by cinema.
Belle de Jour, Discreet Charm
, and the supreme
Obscure Object of Desire
are in love with the medium, still surrealist, still Spanish, but tolerant of human weakness. Is there a film with such sly charm as
Discreet Charm?
Or an occupation more bourgeois and contradictory than that of a film director? Buñuel does not savage us. He says that we are like scorpions and like sheep, fluctuating, desperate creatures, as likely to build a maze round our hearts as to obey them, but dreadfully funny. He is as intent on comedy as Kafka was, as little intent on showing off style, and as much a victim of the joke he tells.

George Burns
(Nathan Birnbaum) (1896–1996), b. New York City, and
Gracie
(Grace)
Allen
(1902–64), b. San Francisco
What an extraordinary story this is—and one that reaches far beyond the movies, of course—but who can resist the tender trap, or the liberating confinement, that marriage meant for George and Gracie? Who can ever quite forget the look on the ninety-year-old George’s face, the serenity with which he knew that Gracie was still listening in, and the flawless admiration he gave her? He was a man who always knew he had met his superior, been able to hold on to her, and then recreate a semblance of their harmony. Is there a happier pairing in American folklore—or one so happy that doesn’t act as a sedative?

They seem very different—New York meets San Francisco, at a time when those were very distant worlds. But in truth they were both raised in show business. And both performed as children. They met and formed the comedy team Burns and Allen, and in 1926 they married. As such, they excelled in vaudeville, on radio (there was a wondrous contrast of gruff and plaintive in their voices), and then moved on to movies, where they were maybe a degree too placid or happy to be really commanding. So they were often supporting figures for Bing Crosby:
The Big Broadcast
(32, Frank Tuttle);
College Humor
(33, Wesley Ruggles);
International House
(33, A. Edward Sutherland);
Six of a Kind
(34, Leo McCarey);
We’re Not Dressing
(34, Norman Taurog);
Many Happy Returns
(34, Norman McLeod), where they are the leads;
Love in Bloom
(35, Elliott Nugent);
College Holiday
(36, Tuttle), with their friend Jack Benny;
The Big Broadcast of 1937
(36, Mitchell Leisen);
A Damsel in Distress
(37, George Stevens), an Astaire film, where they sing “Stiff Upper Lip”;
College Swing
(38, Raoul Walsh);
Honolulu
(39, Edward Buzzell).

Then a gap.
Honolulu
would be their last film together. Yet surely they could have continued during the war. In fact they went back to radio, and to family life, though Gracie did make
Mr. and Mrs. North
(41, Robert B. Sinclair) and
Two Girls and a Sailor
(44, Richard Thorpe). And they did not really come back until the fall of 1950, when CBS television began
The George Burns and Gracie Allen Show
, a classic hit that ran until 1958. That is still the format in which they are best known, and even if the TV show sometimes yielded to old vaudeville patter routines, still, it was the foundation of their marital image: George, smart, rational, businesslike, and a success; Gracie, sweet, daffy, instinctive, and right. What made it work was not the exasperation and frustration that bonds so many married people (in life and on the screen), but the eternally forgiving way in which George perceived this scatterbrain who had the answers.

It’s worth noting that
The Burns and Allen Show
began a year before
I Love Lucy
—at the same network. In other words, Desi and Lucy (who had other ingredients, to be sure) were pushed by CBS to repeat a proven model.

Then, in 1958, Gracie decided to retire. George mounted another TV show,
The George Burns Show
, with some of the old cast, and a hole in the middle. It lasted four months. At which point he stopped too, and then was nursing Gracie.

He did nothing until 1975, when he made a comeback of slowly mounting glory, in the course of which he became a team (he and his huge cigar) on TV talk shows, where he quietly alluded to his sexual potency (see the cigar?) and ridiculed death. He became a phenomenon of survival, but he remained unfailingly decent (so it was OK with all faiths that he should be God), and he was always smiling at a place just off camera. He was looking at Gracie in the way, on the TV show, he had pioneered stepping out of character and talking to the camera, the audience, and the possibility of common sense.

The later films are
The Sunshine Boys
—for which he won an Oscar (75, Herbert Ross);
Oh, God!
(77, Carl Reiner), with John Denver;
Movie Movie
(78, Stanley Donen);
Just You and Me Kid
(79, Leonard Stern), with Brooke Shields;
Going in Style
(79, Martin Brest), with Art Carney and Lee Strasberg;
Oh, God! Book II
(80, Gilbert Cates);
Oh, God! You Devil
(84, Paul Bogart);
18 Again!
(88, Paul Flaherty);
Radioland Murders
(94, Mel Smith).

He died aged one hundred plus six weeks. Goodnight, George.

Ken Burns
(Kenneth Lauren Burns), b. Brooklyn, New York, 1953
1981:
Brooklyn Bridge
(d). 1984:
The Shakers
(d). 1985:
Huey Long
(d);
The Statue of Liberty
(d). 1988:
Thomas Hart Benton
(d);
The Congress
(d). 1990:
The Civil War
(d). 1991:
Empire of the Air
(d); 1994:
Baseball
(d). 1997:
Lewis & Clark: The Journey of the Corps of Discovery
(d);
Thomas Jefferson
(d). 1998:
Frank Lloyd Wright
(d). 1999:
Not For Ourselves Alone: The Story of Elizabeth Cady Stanton & Susan B. Anthony
(d). 2001:
Jazz
(d). 2002:
Mark Twain
(d). 2005:
Jack Johnson
(d). 2007:
The War
(d). 2009:
The National Parks
(d).

America is self-consciously loaded up with information systems, and it has the worst education in the developed world. It has developed one of the supreme storytelling media in the history of stories, and yet that medium has neglected the real history of America, to the point of nearly doctrinal insistence. America has more televisions than any country in the world, but the multiplicity of channels remains fearful of documentaries made with any sort of vision or aesthetic structure. There has been nothing in America in the age of television to match Dziga Vertov, Humphrey Jennings, Resnais, Marcel Ophuls, or Claude Lanzmann. Nothing? Certainly not Frederick Wiseman, whose movies have made an increasing cult of passivity. Only Ken Burns has shown what might be.

Moreover, Burns has both the energy and the educational zeal of one of the great nineteenth-century historians. His films are old-fashioned, romantic, made in the spirit of the time they are describing—essentially, the America of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. He believes in still pictures (paintings, prints, or photographs), new live footage that evokes place and atmosphere, and words. Burns makes intricate, written films, in which the interplay of narrative, interview, and original document is moving.

A graduate of Hampshire College, he spent ten years working for PBS, developing his own unit and his powers as a fund-raiser. This was like a campaign for
The Civil War
, five years in the making, eleven hours on the screen, one of the great American films and the redemption of national history for a large audience. Above all, it was the emotional undertaking that was so powerful. Burns knew that we needed to rediscover the feeling of the war before we could have a chance of understanding it. The achievement was such that one could feel the series entering the mind and nervous system of the country.

Burns did the history of baseball and the history of jazz next. He asserts that he has no interest in doing features—and one believes him, for he shows no
need
for fiction. But can he easily take on smaller subjects after the Civil War?

Burns’s quilt of American history grows. For me, his series on ideas (like baseball and jazz) are richer than those on heroes (Jefferson or Twain). But the study of race is both earnest and committed—and it makes the mindset of feature film seem frivolous. On the other hand, there is by now a Burns tone that has earned parody, and some critical disquiet. For it is lofty, so high-minded, that it is sometimes hard to see how America has ever gone astray. One would like to see Burns face ordinary iniquity, or shortcoming. That omission was a serious flaw in
Jazz
, a series that could not account for—and therefore ignored—the decline in the music.

Raymond Burr
(1917–93), b. New Westminster, Canada
Educated at the universities of Stanford, California, and Columbia, he was director of the Pasadena Community Playhouse and an experienced stage actor before making his screen debut in
San Quentin
(46, Gordon Douglas). How can one avoid calling him the archetypal heavy? His bulk was invested with every degree of villainy, from the robust to the perverted. To add to his size, his sad features were always ready to sink into grave jowls and puffy malice. Burr worked hard and this list mentions only his best-remembered parts:
Desperate
(47, Anthony Mann);
Pitfall
(48, André de Toth);
Ruthless
(48, Edgar G. Ulmer);
Sleep, My Love
(48, Douglas Sirk);
Raw Deal
(48, Mann);
Walk a Crooked Mile
(48, Douglas);
Bride of Vengeance
(49, Mitchell Leisen);
Abandoned
(49, Joseph M. Newman);
The Adventures of Don Juan
(49, Vincent Sherman);
Fort Algiers
(50, Lesley Selander);
Key to the City
(50, George Sidney);
His Kind of Woman
(51, John Farrow);
New Mexico
(51, Irving Reis);
M
(51, Joseph Losey);
Meet Danny Wilson
(51, Joseph Pevney); as the hostile, limping district attorney in
A Place in the Sun
(51, George Stevens);
Horizons West
(52, Budd Boetticher);
The Blue Gardenia
(53, Fritz Lang);
Passion
(54, Allan Dwan);
Gorilla at Large
(54, Harmon Jones);
Godzilla
(55, Inoshiro Honda);
Count Three and Pray
(55, George Sherman);
A Man Alone
(55, Ray Milland);
Great Day in the Morning
(56, Jacques Tourneur);
The Brass Legend
(56, Gerd Oswald);
A Cry in the Night
(56, Frank Tuttle);
Crime of Passion
(57, Oswald); and
Affair in Havana
(57, Laslo Benedek). Having incurred so much audience hostility, how Hitchcockian it is that in
Rear Window
(54)—as the killer across the courtyard—he should finally confront us, so troubled that he wins our sympathy. In the cinema, Burr’s mold had been cast and, no matter how many times he might fill it, it could not be remade. Astutely, he moved into TV, and two great successes: first as
Perry Mason
, an attorney triumphant from 1957 to 1966 and then, as if all that pacing round witnesses had tired him, as
Ironside
, a wheelchair detective. Perhaps that posture gave him pleasant memories of James Stewart in
Rear Window
.

He had no need to make films and only appeared twice in a decade:
New Face in Hell
(67, John Guillermin) and
Tomorrow Never Comes
(77, Peter Collinson). But in the eighties, he was back on TV as Perry Mason again, and he did a few more movies:
Out of the Blue
(80, Dennis Hopper);
The Return
(81, Greydon Clark);
Airplane II: The Sequel
(82, Ken Finkleman); and
Godzilla 1985
(85, Kohji Hashimoto and R. J. Kizer).

Ellen Burstyn
(Edna Rae Gillooly), b. Detroit, Michigan, 1932
In all of Ellen Burstyn’s best work (though there is not too much of it), a desperate cheerfulness struggles with grim prospects and her battered good nature comes near to breaking down. She has a round face, a little swollen, like a doll soaked in tears or straining to hold back crying. Her finest moment is as the aging girlfriend in
The King of Marvin Gardens
(72, Bob Rafelson), trying not to notice that her own stepdaughter is appropriating her man. Her good spirits are listless, as if she kept going back to that dread worry. And when it is too much for her, she turns first to self-abuse, hacking off her hair, before the helpless yielding to violence in what is one of the cinema’s most understandable and distressing killings.

That part is a woman whose life has been filled with struggle and compromise, and who is defiantly aware that she is nothing more magical than a pretty forty-year-old. And Edna Rae Gillooly came up the hard way too. She worked as a waitress, a store clerk, a model, and many other things, trying to get into show business. All through the fifties, she worked under the name of Ellen McRae: on TV as a chorus girl on the Jackie Gleason show and in
The Doctors;
in the theatre, in
Fair Game
, a Broadway comedy; and with tiny parts in several films, including
Goodbye Charlie
(64, Vincente Minnelli).

She played a bigger part in
Tropic of Cancer
(69, Joseph Strick), but it was the talent display of
The Last Picture Show
(71, Peter Bogdanovich) that established her. Her frustrated wife in that movie is probably a cleverer performance than Cloris Leachman’s (who got the supporting actress Oscar). Burstyn frets, sighs, lusts, and lies, but there is a kindness in her understanding of, and brief temptation by, the young, and a wholesome delight in her memories of “the Lion.” She was the wife in
Alex in Wonderland
(71, Paul Mazursky); the mother in
The Exorcist
(73, William Friedkin)—a part not really accessible to humane acting;
Harry and Tonto
(74, Mazursky); winning her own Oscar in
Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore
(74, Martin Scorsese), a good performance in a flawed film, but far from her best work; helplessly out of her element being asked to model clothes and esoteric time schemes in
Providence
(77, Alain Resnais); and more removed from her roots still in
A Dream of Passion
(78, Jules Dassin).
Same Time, Next Year
(78, Robert Mulligan) was as close as she had ever come to a standard American entertainment.