The New Biographical Dictionary of Film: Completely Updated and Expanded (66 page)

But the blithe gypsy’s life ended tragically. He went to sleep one night, a cigarette in his lips, and burned himself to death.

Hoagy
(Hoagland Howard)
Carmichael
(1899–1981), b. Bloomington, Indiana
He sits at a piano that manages to be set aslant everything else in the world. He has white pants (they might be cream or ivory) with a dark stripe in them, and it could be crimson or dark blue against the cream (this is Martinique light). And in the shirt there is the same pattern of vertical dark striping on a pale ground, except that the stripes are twice as regular. He has a tie too, a rather full, floppy, silly thing, with big diamond patterns on it. And I’ll be damned if he hasn’t got a decorated band above his right elbow, of the kind card players or saloon pianists sometimes wear to keep their hands free.

He is called Cricket, and he has the sharpest face in the whole sharp film. And more or less we are at the heart of the whole matter, in a place where perfection and the absurd slide together in a way that is unbearably cool. This is 1944, at Warner Bros.,
To Have and Have Not
—even the title knows what is happening, and appreciates that this is the mystery of cinema, the dream itself.

I don’t know, but I’d guess that Hoagland Carmichael dressed himself for the occasion, checking every now and then with the Howard Hawks he revered as both friend and style master. For Hawks was a dandy, and I suspect that both men could wax lyrical together as connoisseurs on what a hip piano player reckoned to look like in the 1920s if he had done Indiana U. (law) first and was knocking around with Bix and Trumbauer, and Eddie Condon was due in tonight.

That was how Carmichael had put his life in order, dropping the law for “Star Dust,” which he wrote in 1927. And he had had songs in movies aplenty in the thirties, like Crosby doing “Moon-burn” in
Anything Goes
(36, Lewis Milestone). And somehow Hoagland had got to be acquaintanced with Slim and Howard Hawks and Howard had asked him to hang around the
To Have and Have Not
set and be atmospheric.

And it worked out that the new girl, Bacall, had this little song to sing, so why shouldn’t it be something Cricket was working up? It won’t be hard work, said Howard, you can do the whole thing sitting down. And if maybe Hoagland said, “Howard, I haven’t been on camera before,” Hawks could have said, “It doesn’t show. You can do this stuff yourself, if you try.”

So Carmichael and Bacall play around with “How Little We Know,” and the whole film is this strange new tango Bogart and Bacall do, with three guys—Marcel Dalio, Walter Brennan, and Carmichael—riding point. And you realize the weird luck that could fall on an Ernest Hemingway having such magic fall on his not-the-worst-book-in-the-world novel.

The story goes that whenever Carmichael was working, William Faulkner came to the set to watch. To be so lucky.

Sure, Hoagy Carmichael is there again and very good in
The Best Years of Our Lives
(46, William Wyler), in
Night Song
(47, John Cromwell), and in
Young Man with a Horn
(50, Michael Curtiz). And he has his songs in and out of pictures—he shared an Oscar for “In the Cool, Cool, Cool of the Evening” in
Here Comes the Groom
(51, Frank Capra). But the rest was relatively normal, and sensible, and what you might expect. Whereas Cricket was out of nowhere. Nowhere except the best and kindest mind that ever made an American picture. If you could get your clothes halfway decent.

Marcel Carné
(Albert Cranche) (1909–96), b. Paris
1936:
Jenny
. 1937:
Drôle de Drame
. 1938:
Quai des Brumes; Hôtel du Nord
. 1939:
Le Jour Se Lève
. 1942:
Les Visiteurs du Soir
. 1944:
Les Enfants du Paradis
. 1946:
Les Portes de la Nuit
. 1947:
La Fleur de l’Âge
(uncompleted). 1950:
La Marie du Port
. 1951:
Juliette ou la Clé des Songes
. 1953:
Thérèse Raquin
. 1954:
L’Air de Paris
. 1956:
Le Pays d’Où Je Viens
. 1958:
Les Tricheurs
. 1960:
Terrain Vague
. 1963:
Du Mouron pour les Petits Oiseaux
. 1965:
Trois Chambres à Manhattan
. 1968:
Les Jeunes Loups
. 1971:
Les Assassins de l’Ordre
. 1974:
La Merveilleuse Visite
. 1984:
La Bible
.

Originally a photographer, Carné was camera assistant on
Les Nouveaux Messieurs
(28, Jacques Feyder) and
Cagliostro
(29, Richard Oswald). He turned to writing and in 1930 he codirected a documentary short,
Nogent, El Dorado du Dimanche
, with Michel Sanvoisin. Thereafter, he was assistant to Feyder on
Le Grand Jeu
(33),
Pension Mimosas
(34), and
La Kermesse Héroïque
(35) before, on his own, directing Feyder’s wife, Françoise Rosay, in
Jenny
.

In the period 1936–46, Carné was probably the most highly regarded of French directors. The six films he made after
Jenny
earned him a great reputation as a tidy pessimist and adroit technician. Those films still have virtues: the scripts by Jacques Prévert are as witty as the cinema has ever been; amazing studio exteriors, designed often by Alexandre Trauner; and memorable performances from Rosay, Michel Simon, Louis Jouvet, Jean-Louis Barrault, Gabin, Michèle Morgan, Arletty, Jules Berry, and Pierre Brasseur. It was once claimed that films like
Quai des Brumes
and
Le Jour Se Lève
spoke for prewar despair. But they are less harsh than Fritz Lang’s films, and less poignant than Renoir’s. Carné’s forte was theatricality and it was the limelight of worldly melancholy that really inspired him. Thus, his films are less disenchanted than enchanted. He had an instinct for the tragic fairy story, evident in the near allegory of
Quai des Brumes
and spelled out in the medievalism of the wartime
Les Visiteurs du Soir
. There is no passion or anger in his work, but a rather meretricious resignation and an eye for the sad romance of fog-laden streets and squalid lodging houses. His most entertaining film,
Les Enfants du Paradis
, is a glorification of French theatre by a magnificent troupe of actors. It shows Carné’s strength—his sympathy with actors, his taste for pretty sets, and his nostalgia—but his weakness, too, in that he does not appreciate the way theatre reflects back on life.
Les Enfants du Paradis
is a lesser film than
The Golden Coach
, which balances stage and reality.

After the war, Carné gradually lost his best collaborators and his own momentum.
Les Portes de la Nuit
was a pretentious fable so overlaid by false pessimism that that quality was read into his earlier work. It lost so much money that Carné was forced to be more cautious.
La Marie du Port
is a simple, realistic story, well acted by Gabin and Nicole Courcel. But
Juliette
was another extravagant attempt to rediscover fantasy: about a man in prison, Gérard Philipe, who dreams himself into Bluebeard’s castle.
Thérèse Raquin
was conventional melodrama, spiked by the sensuality of Simone Signoret. After that, Carné deteriorated steadily. His attempt to cash in on youth with
Les Tricheurs
was woeful and he became restricted to antiquated, run-of-the-mill pictures. It seems clear that his world depended heavily on collaborators, and that it was at best bittersweet escapist; but the urban fatalism of
Quai des Brumes, Hôtel du Nord
, and
Le Jour Se Lève
is unique and
Les Enfants du Paradis
splendidly undiminished.

Martine Carol
(Marie-Louise Mourer) (1922–67), b. Biarritz, France
In the still, if not turgid, waters of French cinema in the early 1950s, Martine Carol was the foremost ladylike voluptuary: a blonde, red-lipped courtesan, forever in and out of baths and peignoirs, seen to best effect with contented smile on crushed pillows. The epitome of these roles was
Caroline Chérie
(50, Richard Pottier) and its sequels, but she was also proudly exposed by her then husband Christian-Jaque in a series of undress costume films:
Adorables Créatures
(52),
Lucrezia Borgia
(52), and
Nana
(55). Her personality was at the same time florid and genteel and, despite their gloss of daringness, her films reaffirmed very old-fashioned attitudes to sex. It was with his characteristic irony and tenderness that Max Ophuls made her famous forever by casting her as
Lola Montès
(55), that archetype of the woman driven to offer herself as substance for men’s dreams. Carol was no actress, but she was suitably picturesque and she seemed genuinely stirred by some of the implications in Ophuls’s film.
Lola Montès
is a masterpiece and proof that a commonplace actress can be made resplendent by the greatest directors. Carol’s career began in the war years and included a brief, unhappy excursion to America in the late 1950s. Significantly, and despite their love for Ophuls, she was ignored by the New Wave directors. Among her films were
Les Inconnus dans la Maison
(42, Henri Decoin);
Voyage Surprise
(46, Pierre Prévert);
Les Amants de Vérone
(48, André Cayatte);
Night Beauties
(52, René Clair);
La Spiaggia
(53, Alberto Lattuada);
Les Carnets de Major Thompson
(57, Preston Sturges);
Action of the Tiger
(57, Terence Young);
La Prima Notte
(58, Alberto Cavalcanti);
Ten Seconds to Hell
(59, Robert Aldrich);
Natalie, Agent Secret
(59, Decoin);
Le Cave Se Rebiffe
(61, Gilles Grangier); good again in
Vanina Vanini
(61, Roberto Rossellini); and
Hell Is Empty
(66, John Ainsworth and Bernard Knowles).

Leslie Caron
, b. Boulogne-Billancourt, France, 1931
When she first appeared, in
An American in Paris
(51, Vincente Minnelli), her ballet training was more impressive than her looks. She had the face of someone who had been doing exercises: tight, preoccupied, and dull. But with the years, she grew into beauty. From
Gigi
(58, Minnelli) onwards, she is truly handsome, even if nothing has suggested that she acts better than a thousand others. Nor, in truth, is she a dancer to set the screen alight.
Lili
(53, Charles Walters), a touching portrait of gaucheness, is her best film, even if it is too fey. Her marriage to Peter Hall had the effect of removing her from Hollywood to London, a move ill-advised for one so restrained:
Glory Alley
(52, Raoul Walsh); Farley Granger’s governess in
The Story of Three Loves
(52, Minnelli);
The Glass Slipper
(54, Walters);
Daddy Long Legs
(55, Jean Negulesco);
Gaby
(56, Curtis Bernhardt);
The Doctor’s Dilemma
(58, Anthony Asquith);
The Man Who Understood Women
(58, Nunnally Johnson);
The Subterraneans
(60, Ranald MacDougall);
Fanny
(61, Joshua Logan);
Guns of Darkness
(62, Asquith);
The L-Shaped Room
(62, Bryan Forbes);
Father Goose
(64, Ralph Nelson);
A Very Special Favor
(65, Michael Gordon);
Promise Her Anything
(66, Arthur Hiller); and
Is Paris Burning?
(66, René Clément). In 1955, she acted on the stage in Jean Renoir’s play
Orvet
.

More recently, she has become active again: as the housekeeper in
Sérail
(76, Eduardo de Gregorio); Nazimova in
Valentino
(77, Ken Russell);
The Man Who Loved Women
(77, François Truffaut);
Goldengirl
(79, Joseph Sargent);
Tous Vedettes
(79, Michel Lang);
Kontrakt
(80, Krzysztof Zanussi);
Chanel Solitaire
(81, George Kaczender);
The Imperative
(82, Zanussi);
The Unapproachable
(82, Zanussi);
Dangerous Moves
(85, Richard Dembo);
Guerriers et Captives
(89, Edgardo Cozarinsky);
Courage Mountain
(89, Christopher Leitch);
Blue Notte
(90, Giorgio Serafini); as the mother in
Damage
(92, Louis Malle);
Funny Bones
(95, Peter Chelsom);
The Reef
(97, Robert Allan Ackerman);
The Last of the Blonde Bombshells
(00, Gillies MacKinnon);
Chocolat
(00, Lasse Hallstrom);
Le Divorce
(03, James Ivory).

John Carpenter
, b. Bowling Green, Kentucky, 1948
1970:
The Resurrection of Bronco Billy
(s). 1974:
Dark Star
. 1976:
Assault on Precinct 13
. 1978:
Halloween
. 1980:
The Fog
. 1981:
Escape from New York
. 1982:
The Thing
. 1983:
Christine
. 1984:
Starman
. 1986:
Big Trouble in Little China
. 1987:
Prince of Darkness
. 1988:
They Live
. 1992:
Memoirs of an Invisible Man
. 1993:
Body Bags
. 1995:
Village of the Damned; In the Mouth of Madness
. 1996:
Escape from L.A
. 1998:
Vampires
. 2001:
Ghosts of Mars
. 2006: two episodes of
Masters of Horror
.

At the outset, John Carpenter knew he was a throwback, but he had no guilt: “If I had three wishes, one of them would be ‘Send me back to the ’40s and the studio system and let me direct movies.’ Because I would have been happiest there. I feel I am a little bit out of time. I have much more of a kinship for older-style films, and very few films that are made now interest me at all. I get up and walk out on them.”