The New Biographical Dictionary of Film: Completely Updated and Expanded (80 page)

He has years of future projects lined up, but what he really needs is help or provocation not named Soderbergh. All of which reminds us that Alfred Hitchcock and Howard Hawks tested their star actors rather more fully than today’s leading directors. If
Up in the Air
is his most promising (and broken) work, he may be set on a very fruitful path. But he could give us the wink and a nod and be “himself” for ever.

Glenn Close
, b. Greenwich, Connecticut, 1947
Playing Gertrude to Mel Gibson’s
Hamlet
(90, Franco Zeffirelli) may define Glenn Close’s dilemma: men are permitted to play younger, so actresses have to move up a generation—and down a class, for Close is an experienced stage actress who has played in
Love for Love, The Real Thing
, and
Death and the Maiden
. She is only nine years older than Mel Gibson.

This is a strange movie career, full of Englishlike mums or brave girls (she does rather resemble Virginia McKenna):
The World According to Garp
(82, George Roy Hill);
The Big Chill
(83, Lawrence Kasdan);
The Stone Boy
(84, Chris Cain); and
The Natural
(84, Barry Levinson). She dubbed Andie McDowell in
Greystoke
(84, Hugh Hudson), failed at comedy in
Maxie
(85, Paul Aaron), and did a competent lawyer in love amid the hokum of
Jagged Edge
(85, Richard Marquand).

Then she won one of the plum roles of the eighties, Alex in
Fatal Attraction
(87, Adrian Lyne). Her hair went wild, she lost control, and she was better than the film or its final resolution deserved. Indeed, she transcended the boxoffice melodrama and showed us how deranging such a passion might be.

She was meticulous in
Dangerous Liaisons
(88, Stephen Frears), but could not find human depth in that very cold play and novel. She was routine again in
Immediate Family
(89, Jonathan Kaplan), and a voice-over as well as a would-be supine Sunny von Bulow in
Reversal of Fortune
(90, Barbet Schroeder). For TV, she made
Sarah, Plain and Tall
(91, Glenn Jordan). Dubbed herself this time (by Kiri Te Kanewa), she played the opera singer in
Meeting Venus
(91, Istvan Szabo). In 1993, she had a great success as Norma Desmond in the Los Angeles production of
Sunset Boulevard
, so much so that she beat out Patti Lupone for the same part on Broadway. She acted in
The House of the Spirits
(93, Bille August) and
The Paper
(94, Ron Howard).

She was a scabrous brothel-keeper in
Mary Reilly
(96, Frears), before she found a role to match that of Norma Desmond (and not so far from it)—Cruella de Vil in
101 Dalmatians
(96, Stephen Herek) and
102 Dalmatians
(00, Kevin Lima). That was her theatrical side. In a plainer mood, with little or no makeup, she did
Serving in Silence: The Margarethe Cammermeyer Story
(95, Jeff Bleckner) for television and
Paradise Road
(97, Bruce Beresford), as a prisoner of the Japanese. She has also been seen in
Mars Attacks!
(96, Tim Burton); as the vice president in
Air Force One
(97, Wolfgang Petersen);
In the Gloaming
(97, Christopher Reeve);
In & Out
(97, Frank Oz);
Cookie’s Fortune
(99, Robert Altman); a voice on
Tarzan
(99, Lima);
Things You Can Tell Just by Looking at Her
(01, Rodrigo Garcia).

She remains very enterprising in her search for work:
The Ballad of Lucy Whipple
(01, Jeremy Paul Kagan); on TV in a revival of
South Pacific
(01, Richard Pearce);
The Safety of Objects
(01, Rose Troche);
Brush with Fate
(03, Brent Shields); in the old Hepburn part in a TV remake of
The Lion in Winter
(03, Andrei Konchalovsky);
Le Divorce
(03, James Ivory);
The Stepford Wives
(04, Frank Oz). She did
The Chumscrubber
(05, Arie Posin) and
Nine Lives
(05, Rodrigo Garciá) for the big screen, but she was far better employed on television:
The West Wing; The Shield
(Emmy-nominated); and winning the Emmy for
Damages
(2007–9).

Henri-Georges Clouzot
(1907–77), b. Niort, France
1942:
L’Assassin Habité au 21
. 1943:
Le Corbeau
. 1947:
Quai des Orfèvres
. 1948:
Manon
. 1949: “Le Retour de Jean,” episode in
Retour à la Vie
. 1950:
Miquette et Sa Mère
. 1953:
Le Salaire de la Peur/The Wages of Fear
. 1955:
Les Diaboliques/The Fiends
. 1956:
Le Mystère Picasso
(d). 1958:
Les Espions
. 1960:
La Vérité
. 1963:
L’Enfer
(unfinished). 1968:
La Prisonnière
.

If Renoir is the
sud
of French cinema, then Clouzot is an exponent of the
nord
. The enormous commercial success of
Le Salaire de la Peur
—one of the first French films to obtain a wide showing in English-speaking countries—and the deliberate emphasis on “putting the audience through it” in
Les Diaboliques
have made Clouzot artistically suspect. But he has a consistent vision that is more jaundiced than any other in the French cinema. Where Renoir tends always toward the acceptance of failings, Clouzot’s world disintegrates through mistrust, alienation, and a willful selfishness that is like an illness.

Clouzot began as an assistant director and it is worth noting that he worked in Berlin in the early 1930s, directing French versions of German films. He was a scriptwriter for some ten years:
Un Soir de Rafle
(32, Carmine Gallone);
Le Duel
(39, Pierre Fresnay); and
Les Inconnus dans la Maison
(41, Henri Decoin). His first film was a romantic thriller, but
Le Corbeau
proved a sensation. Its baleful view of a French provincial town split by hatred and the intrigue of a poison-pen letter writer was interpreted as being blatantly anti-French and led to a virtual ban on Clouzot until 1947. The film was made by pro-Nazi interests; but the sense of destructive misanthropy now seems characteristic of Clouzot. Even
Quai des Orfèvres
, a more conventional police thriller, shows suspicion widening the cracks in a central love relationship. The comparison with Hitchcock was clear, but Clouzot’s rather gloating concentration on weakness is also Balzacian. His updated
Manon
was utterly unromantic, with Cécile Aubry a slut and an opportunist.

Clouzot honeymooned in South America and after writing a book about Brazil
—Le Cheval des Dieux
—he made
Le Salaire de la Peur
. Again, he subjects characters to such strain that they break up. For all the attempt to endorse comradeship, the film is more a study of a rat race induced by spiritual boredom and capitalist greed. The style of the film so ably adds to the physical tension that there is never any doubt that Clouzot regards the destructive competition as unavoidable. Two years later he made
Les Diaboliques
, one of the most frightening of all films and starring his wife, Vera, as its victim. The character she plays is an invalid, eventually frightened to death. The shabby private school setting, with its swimming pool clogged by weed, offers some of the most disturbingly poisoned images in all Clouzot’s work. The director was himself dogged by illness, and Vera Clouzot died young, in 1960.
Les Diaboliques
certainly looks like the product of a pathological imagination, and the implausibility of the story does not detract from the conviction that it brings to the idea of decay.

After that, Clouzot had to abandon two more projects because of illness; the four finished films he made are an odd collection. The Picasso study is a documentary, ingeniously photographed, and catching the painter’s goblin playfulness.
Les Espions
was a failed attempt to keep his international audience, and
La Vérité
was a strident but unfeeling account of a girl’s wretched life, based on her trial for murder. Again, the tone and accumulation of crushing detail are nineteenth century, and Brigitte Bardot’s performance is melodramatic.
La Prisonnière
returned to the way one partner in a relationship may corrupt another. He occupied himself after that in filming orchestral concerts for TV. Clouzot is not easy to take; for all that his visual style is facile. Although
Le Salaire de la Peur
is crammed with exciting action, his real object for dissection is the personality and it is as difficult to warm to him as it is to shrug off the loathsome memories of
Les Diaboliques
. This is a cinema of total disenchantment. The discovery of material from
L’Enfer
only underlined this feeling.

Lee J. Cobb
(Leo Jacob) (1911–76), b. New York
He had worked extensively in the American theatre before making his screen debut in
North of the Rio Grande
(37, Norman Watt) followed by
Ali Baba Goes to Town
(37, David Butler). Having played in the stage production of Clifford Odets’s
Golden Boy
(through his participation in the Group Theatre), Cobb also played in the movie, directed by Rouben Mamoulian in 1939. Cobb (in a supporting part) must have been intrigued by the story of a man torn between the violin and boxing, for as a child, only a broken wrist had prevented him from pursuing the violin. From the mid-1940s, he became a leading character actor, chiefly for Fox:
Men of Boy’s Town
(41, Norman Taurog);
The Moon Is Down
(43, Irving Pichel);
Tonight We Raid Calais
(43, John Brahm); as the doctor in
The Song of Bernadette
(43, Henry King);
Winged Victory
(44, George Cukor); and
Anna and the King of Siam
(46, John Cromwell). Never abandoning the theatre, he created the role of Willy Loman in the Broadway production of
Death of a Salesman
. But his greatest screen impact was as a gangster villain, a character he returned to over twenty-five years with a loudmouth bravado that tends to become monotonous when dressed up in Actors’ Studio realism. He was happiest if encouraged to be grandiose:
Johnny O’Clock
(47, Robert Rossen);
Boom erang!
(47, Elia Kazan);
The Dark Past
(48, Rudolph Maté);
Call Northside 777
(48, Henry Hathaway);
The Miracle of the Bells
(48, Pichel);
Thieves’ Highway
(49, Jules Dassin); and
Sirocco
(51, Curtis Bernhardt). After some difficulties with Joe McCarthy, he came back strong as the hoodlum-in-chief in
On the Waterfront
(54, Kazan);
The Racers
(55, Hathaway);
The Left Hand of God
(55, Edward Dmytryk); as the last relenter in
12 Angry Men
(57, Sidney Lumet);
The Garment Center
(57, Vincent Sherman and Robert Aldrich); as the crazed outlaw chief in
Man of the West
(58, Anthony Mann); as the mobster fond of acid in
Party Girl
(58, Nicholas Ray). The snarl in these films is more credible than the occasional venture into fulsomeness:
The Brothers Karamazov
(57, Richard Brooks);
Exodus
(60, Otto Preminger); and
The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse
(61, Vincente Minnelli). In the 1960s, he spent some time in the TV series,
The Virginian
, but still turned in some rather mellow performances:
Our Man Flint
(65, Daniel Mann);
Coogan’s Bluff
(68, Don Siegel);
Mackenna’s Gold
(69, J. Lee Thompson);
The Liberation of L. B. Jones
(70, William Wyler);
Macho Callahan
(70, Bernard Kowalski);
Lawman
(71, Michael Winner); and
The Exorcist
(73, William Friedkin).

Charles Coburn
(1877–1961), b. Savannah, Georgia
Only at the age of fifty-eight did Coburn weary of the life of a traveling player and turn himself into a character actor for the movies. He had been on the stage since the 1890s and, with his wife, had formed a touring Shakespeare company. But he settled into movies like an old man relaxing in a comfortable armchair in the club library. He was, invariably, a benign, elderly spectator, bewildered by energetic comedy, with a favorite trick of having his monocle pop out when he was startled. There was never a trace of rhetoric, but a most subtle comic timing, brought to a fine pitch in
Monkey Business
(52, Howard Hawks) when his senile businessman scents monkey glands in the air and feels the primordial urge whenever Marilyn Monroe fluctuates past. “Look at that old chimp, Miss Laurel,” says Coburn. “Eighty-four years old. Fourteen years older than I am! And just look at him!” In fact, Coburn was only nine years younger than the chimp, but still hopeful enough to make the laurels wobble.

Coburn worked especially hard during the 1940s and never let a film down:
The People’s Enemy
(35, Crane Wilbur);
Of Human Hearts
(38, Clarence Brown);
Vivacious Lady
(38, George Stevens);
Lord Jeff
(38, Sam Wood);
Bachelor Mother
(39, Garson Kanin);
Idiot’s Delight
(39, Brown);
Made for Each Other
(39, John Cromwell);
Stanley and Livingstone
(39, Henry King);
In Name Only
(39, Cromwell);
The Road to Singapore
(40, Victor Schertzinger);
Edison, the Man
(40, Brown); glorious at the card table in
The Lady Eve
(41, Preston Sturges);
The Devil and Miss Jones
(41, Wood);
Our Wife
(41, John M. Stahl);
H. M. Pulham Esq
. (41, King Vidor);
King’s Row
(42, Wood);
In This Our Life
(42, John Huston);
George Washington Slept Here
(42, William Keighley); the supporting actor Oscar for
The More the Merrier
(43, Stevens) and very good at the physical comedy;
The Constant Nymph
(43, Edmund Goulding);
Heaven Can Wait
(43, Ernst Lubitsch);
Princess O’Rourke
(43, Norman Krasna);
My Kingdom for a Cook
(43, Richard Wallace);
Wilson
(44, King);
Knickerbocker Holiday
(44, Harry Brown);
The Impatient Years
(44, Irving Cummings);
A Royal Scandal
(45, Otto Preminger);
Rhapsody in Blue
(45, Irving Rapper);
Over 21
(45, Charles Vidor);
Colonel Effingham’s Raid
(45, Irving Pichel);
The Green Years
(46, Victor Saville);
Lured
(47, Douglas Sirk);
The Paradine Case
(47, Alfred Hitchcock);
B.F.’s Daughter
(48, Robert Z. Leonard);
Everybody Does It
(49, Goulding);
Louisa
(50, Alexander Hall);
Mr. Music
(51, Richard Haydn);
The Highwayman
(52, Lesley Selander);
Has Anybody Seen My Gal?
(52, Sirk); still marveling at the prospect of Monroe in
Gentlemen Prefer Blondes
(53, Hawks);
Trouble Along the Way
(53, Michael Curtiz);
The Long Wait
(54, Saville);
How to be Very, Very Popular
(55, Nunnally Johnson);
The Power and the Prize
(56, Henry Koster);
Town on Trial
(57, John Guillermin), as a villain; as Benjamin Franklin in
John Paul Jones
(59, John Farrow); and
Pepe
(60, George Sidney).