The New Biographical Dictionary of Film: Completely Updated and Expanded (72 page)

Chabrol is one of the most enigmatic directors at work today. A fringe instigator of the original New Wave, he has managed to create a world for himself—some private Hollywood—in which it is possible to produce a stream of subtle studies of human motivation. He has never shared Godard’s political preoccupations; never been willing to work as slowly as Rohmer or Rivette; and never faced the difficulties that haunted Truffaut in finding subjects. Above all, Chabrol has made commercially viable films, and come through as the most industrious of his generation. Andrew Sarris once claimed that Chabrol liked to keep his hand in, even when his heart wasn’t in a film. But does that properly describe the way in which Chabrol has settled for reticence, rather than exploring the veiled thematic originality in his early work? Sometimes, it seems, the hand moves to obscure the troubled heart.

For there is a contradiction between the man who (with Rohmer) first drew attention to the moral complexity of guilt transference in Hitchcock and the rather aggressive denigrator of “big themes.” In a famous article in
Cahiers
in 1959, Chabrol attacked the portentousness of Stanley Kramer’s type of cinema, in which significance is belabored to the exclusion of precise human truth. There is no intrinsic difference, he said, between “the final hours of a hero of the Resistance or an enquiry into the murder of a prostitute.” The true test is whether or not cinematic detail adds up to artistic size. It is a credo allied to Chabrol’s delight in spontaneous, plastic cinema, comfortable in the Hollywood genres; it comes across in his pleasure at color, detachment, beautiful women, and narrative complexity. But it is also a sign of his resort to murder rather than life, melodrama rather than the everyday. Chabrol has repeatedly taken us to the brink of novel themes and developed them only obliquely, as if slightly shy of them.

Despite such surface distractions as Antonella Lualdi and Provence in
A Double Tour;
the tribute to the Dordogne in
Le Boucher;
the discovery of Nice in winter in
Les Biches;
and the parody of intrigue in
Marie-Chantal
and the
Tigre
movies—despite all those things, Chabrol’s strength is a unique sense of the unspoken shifts of character in human relations. That may derive from his admiration for Hitchcock, and it is often connected with guilt, but it goes further—into sexual ambiguity and the idea of one person morally or emotionally overpowering another. Thus, the relationship between Brialy and Blain in
Les Cousins
hints at a deeper meaning than the distinction between irresponsibility and doggedness;
Les Godelureaux
—an adventurous movie—seems to endorse stylish intellectual dandyism;
Les Biches
is not just a study of a lesbian relationship, but of one personality consuming another; above all,
Le Boucher
studies human tenderness with an almost Oriental dispassion within a plot that involves horrifying murder.

There is also a beady-eyed cynicism in many of Chabrol’s films that was evident in the eccentric performances he gave in such movies as
Le Coup de Berger
(56, Rivette);
L’Eau à la Bouche
(59, Jacques Doniol-Valcroze); and
Paris Nous Appartient
(60, Rivette). It was an assumed blackness that permitted lurid ill manners, as if to emphasize the paramount importance of cinema. And in his films, Chabrol has scourged bourgeois values:
Les Cousins
and
Les Godelureaux
are as offensive to middle-class propriety as
Les Bonnes Femmes
is destructive of the aspiring innocence of its working-class girls. “La Muette” is a scabrous anecdote about family incompatibility, while in later films the willingness to kill has been obscurely offered as the surest proof of love. In
A Double Tour
, Belmondo assaults conventional manners time and again, just as Bernadette Laffont scandalizes the ideal of gentle feminine sexuality. And in
Landru, Le Boucher, Violette Nozière
, and
Une Affaire des Femmes
the way Chabrol seemed to explain murder away is that society’s crimes are far worse. Even in
Les Bonnes Femmes
, the shock of murder was as much lyrical as destructive. That film ended with murder, and Truffaut’s point that it should have begun with it seemed a telling criticism. In the same way,
Le Boucher
abruptly curtails the interest it has slowly aroused: the relationship between Stéphane Audran and the butcher is so subtly established that the melodramatic action seems evasive. Is the film urging that the woman is responsible in part for the man’s murders, or that her type of sexual denial is at the roots of slaughter? Is it also saying that such crimes are peripheral to emotional revelation? That is hinted at in
La Femme Infidèle, Landru, Juste Avant le Nuit
, and even in
Les Bonnes Femmes
, where the victim seems to attain ecstasy just before she is killed.

More lately, Chabrol films have had a harder time making their way outside France. He has done several thrillers, as well as the Sartre adaptation for American television.
Une Affaire des Femmes
is an excellent movie—feminist, yet wry and unexpected, and making fine use of Isabelle Huppert. But sad to say, with the same actress, Chabrol made an academic, passionless thing out of
Madame Bovary
. Despite such ups and downs, this is a career that cries out for retrospectives—is
Les Bonnes Femmes
still as great as it once seemed? Better. Is
Violette Nozière
disturbing? And some.

He remains very productive, doing relaxed thrillers, Huppert as a crusading magistrate, and now Maupassant stories—he could go on forever, the last great pro.

Jackie Chan
(Kong-sang Chan), b. Hong Kong, 1954
When you go to any database to get information on Jackie Chan (only just fifty), page after page is produced. Not just because so many of his projects go under different titles in all their outlets; not just because Chan is involved on them in so many capacities—actor, writer, director, producer, stunt creator, and engineer—but because the guy works like crazy. But how can that come as a surprise, granted the inordinate, good-humored energy that seems the essential characteristic of Jackie Chan?

I am not a fan or an enthusiast. This does not mean I don’t like him. Rather, I see him as the lifelike embodiment of all those comic-book warriors in the video combat games that my twelve-year-old son loves. They are less virtuous or noble (in the way Gary Cooper was, say) than charged with elan, readiness, perfect athletic skill, resilience, and something like the capacity to withstand enormous violence (or degradation) that was the keynote of Tom in the Tom and Jerry cartoons, but which there seemed like a curse—for the wretched feline could not even die in peace, but was compelled to be inventive and hopeful anew so that he could be shattered. I suppose what I mean by this is to venture the suggestion that Jackie Chan seems to be alive, too. Or is he just
on?

He is often called the modern Buster Keaton. Someone else I know compares him with Douglas Fairbanks Sr. And there’s a point in both ideas. After all, Chan more than anyone else is responsible for introducing a self-deprecatory humor into the world of martial arts. He grins a lot. But, of course, that is untypical of Keaton, who inspired humor so often in the numb, aghast, or stoical ways in which he tried to ignore outrage and tumult. Doug grinned, and bounded and twisted, very much in the way of Chan, who has lasted in the business despite his pride in doing his own stunts and seemingly defying the laws of physics. The one law that does apply is that of box office. Chan comes from a notoriously piratical world where film and video are concerned (a big reason, perhaps, for getting a foothold in America), but he is not just big business. He is an industry. That he can never have time to enjoy his own wealth is just one factor underlining that condition of being alive, yet not obviously—or do I mean fatally?—human.

As a small boy, Chan was taken by his parents to Australia, and it was there that he did a Peking Opera training in acrobatics, mime, and the martial arts. In fact, he got his first credits as a child performer in Hong Kong films of the early and mid-1960s. A key step in his progress was working on
Fists of Fury
(73), which was Bruce Lee’s acting debut. After Lee’s death, Chan was one of several contending successors, and it was at that point that he elected (and the decision seems to have been his) to opt for comic action instead.
Half a Loaf of Kung Fu
(78) was the decisive film in that move.

Chan came to America in the early eighties and he appeared in
The Big Brawl
(80, Robert Clouse) and
The Cannonball Run
(81, Hal Needham). In hindsight, it is sad to think of him coiled yet unreleased as Burt and the aging Rat Pack did their desultory routines.

So the human spring went back to Hong Kong and embarked on what purists feel is his best work—no doubt being assisted by being in his physical prime:
Project A
(87),
Police Force
(89),
Operation Condor
(90),
Crime Story
(93).

Then, for
Rumble in the Bronx
(96), his character came back to the U.S. (looking like Vancouver), and the phenomenon took root in America.
No More Mr. Nice Guy
(98) was another Hong Kong picture, but then came
Rush Hour
(98, Brett Ratner) and the teaming with Chris Tucker. That was a colossal hit, yet not as big as
Rush Hour 2
(01, Ratner);
The Tuxedo
(02, Kevin Donovan);
Shanghai Knights
(03, David Dobkin).

Jackie Chan should be past his peak as an acrobat. But he is bigger than ever commercially. Putting those two realities together may make for some sad compromises. But nothing, I’d guess, will remove the smile from his face. He was Passepartout in
Around the World in 80 Days
(04, Frank Coraci);
Joe’s Last Chance
(04, Andrew Bergman),
San Ging Chaat Goo Si
(04, Benny Chan) and another
Rush Hour 3
(07, Ratner).

Lon Chaney
(Alonso Chaney) (1883–1930), b. Colorado Springs, Colorado
Chaney has the sweet, slow stealth of a magician who lingers at the moment of revealing a transformation, to avoid any hint of trickery and to leave everything to poetic imagination. There is not a screen performer who so illustrates the fascination for audiences of the promise and threat of metamorphosis. Why do we go to the cinema, sit in the dark before overwhelming fantasies that appear real? To share in these plastic movements, to change our own lives, and to encourage the profound spiritual notion of our flexible identity. Hope breeds on the exercised fantasy. Cinema has always depended upon the moment when screen creation and spectator begin to partake of one another. Who embodies that potential for transformation better than the actor known as “the man of a thousand faces”? That description was not just the boast of a versatile makeup box, but one of the most alluring invitations to an audience. For the man in the cinema with the endlessly changing face is the spectator. Chaney’s fluctuating appearance seethed with the audience’s lust for vicariousness.

The facts of his own life are as stark as the events of a scenario: they seem factually unlikely but imaginatively inevitable. He was the child of deaf-and-mute parents. When Alonso was nine his mother was made an invalid by rheumatism. Inert, unhearing, and unable to reply, she was the first, tragic representative of the movie audience that Chaney had. The story goes that he mimed his own experiences to entertain her. Perhaps that seems closer to the retrospective sentiment of the publicity machine than to actual family life. It may also be a sign of Chaney’s discovering the imaginative truth in his own life. The facts of his screen work make it clear that he was a supreme pantomimist. But did he subject his mother to mimes of suffering and horror? That, again, seems unlikely, even if her plight made him conscious of the suffering in life, just as it created a yearning for miraculous cure or transformation.

He became a traveling player and, by 1912, he drifted, broke, to Los Angeles and the Universal studio. Already, he carried a makeup box and liked to disguise himself, play jokes with false noses, and slip in and out of grotesque characters. Allan Dwan interpreted this as touting for work and began to use Chaney as an exotic heavy. His prowess with makeup often enabled him to play several parts within one film. From 1913 to 1917 he made over seventy films at Universal, from two-to five-reelers. The directors he worked with included Dwan—
Back to Life
(13);
Red Margaret—Moonshiner
(13);
The Lie
(13);
Discord and Harmony
(13);
The Embezzler
(13);
The Tragedy of Whispering Creek
(14);
The Forbidden Room
(14); more often Joseph de Grasse
—Her Bounty
(14);
Her Escape
(14);
The Threads of Fate
(15);
Maid of the Mist
(15);
The Stronger Mind
(15);
Bound on the Wheel
(15);
Quits
(15);
Grasp of Greed
(16);
The Mark of Cain
(16);
Place Beyond the Winds
(16); and occasionally, Chaney himself
—The Stool Pigeon
(15);
For Cash
(15);
The Oyster Dredger
(15);
The Violin Maker
(15); and
The Trust
(15).

He hauled himself into public recognition as a San Francisco gangster at the time of the earthquake in
Hell Morgan’s Girl
(17, de Grasse), a melodrama in which Chaney was in love with a girl who loves someone else. His physical harshness often led to this theme of unrequited love, and it heralds a major theme of horror films whereby romantic and sexual frustration provoke misanthropic, demonic revenge. Chaney’s ugliness is often interpreted as an effect of brutal society. In
Phantom of the Opera
, he says, “If I am a Phantom it is because man’s hatred has made me so.”