The New Biographical Dictionary of Film: Completely Updated and Expanded (85 page)

And so in 1933–34 he met Chaplin and charmed him. Why not, they were both new adventurers on the seas of media. Cooke could laugh when required and tell good jokes and he could keep Paulette Goddard—Charlie’s new amour—happy and laughing when Charlie had to attend to business. Chaplin craved to be admired by educated people. Cooke was star-fucking. There are delirious snapshots where you can see and feel what a great time everyone is having. They holidayed on Chaplin’s yacht. Cooke had a Super 8 camera and he made a silly film about them all. By 1934, Cooke was working on a script for Charlie about the life of Napoleon! He came that close to the big time—a super credit and maybe a supporting role as Murat. But Charlie lost interest in Bonaparte—another tyrant had taken his fancy. It’s not clear how the friendship lasted. Over the years, Cooke wrote very well on Chaplin, admiring him always, but seeing an artistic decline after
City Lights
(1931) and reckoning that the final speech in
The Great Dictator
should have been cut. When Charlie’s
My Autobiography
was published in 1964 Cooke got not a mention.

You may say Cooke hardly suffered: he became American (naturalized in 1941, just before Pearl Harbor). He would be the
Guardian
’s American correspondent for decades, as well as the author, director, and performer on 2,869 installments of
Letter from America
. He was the on-camera host for
Omnibus
, a pioneering American television show on the arts in the 1950s. He was the host to
Masterpiece Theater
. And for the BBC he was the writer and introducer of the fond television series
America
(which played in 1973). Those series do not get repeated, and the idea of Cooke showing us America in the way that Kenneth Clark once opened up “Civilization” hardly works today.
America
, I’d guess, was the event of which Cooke was proudest, for he was a member of that age that believed in the necessary amity of America and Britain.

What is so striking now in Cooke’s record is the groundbreaking: in radio and television, he found ways of working—or telling the story—that were novel. What unfailingly appealed in
Letter from America
was not just what Cooke said, but the assumption that the idea of the program was obvious and proper and that Cooke’s gracious, unexcited delivery—his naturalness—was the promise of intelligence.

There’s no doubt but that in the 1930s Alistair Cooke was in love with pictures—everyday talking pictures, more than the strenuous works of art that might be coming out of Russia, Germany, or France. Cooke never fell for the notion that silent pictures were purer than those that talked, and he was not pleased with experiments in montage or style for style’s sake (he loathed the fussiness in Josef von Sternberg). Indeed, Cooke was always a little grumpy about having to address the function of directing instead of the sublime presence of screen personalities.

He was uneasy with
Bringing Up Baby
(“I think I’ll take a nice cheerful aspirin and sit it out”); he was very tough on Preston Sturges (“His movies … inflated their humors until they were indistinguishable from the absurdities of southern California itself”). He disdained the cold tricksiness in Hitchcock. He doesn’t seem to have seen Max Ophuls, Billy Wilder, or
Citizen Kane
. He did like Fritz Lang and Lubitsch, but he never feels the need to summon up the same language of nobility with directors as he does when writing about players. Talking about
Top Hat
, Cooke recognized an essential need not to unscrew Astaire’s legs with analysis, but to let the legs move.

I think he was uncertain whether the movies had ever gone further than catching Astaire on the wing, Loretta Young smiling, Fred MacMurray listening shyly, or Ava Gardner simply existing.

I’m not sure how much Cooke went to the movies in his later years. He had passing regrets over the violence of
The Godfather
and
Taxi Driver
and there is his 1977 survey, “Toward the end of the year, we began to see themes formerly relegated to slummy hard-core pornographic theatres burgeoning in full-length feature films in downtown theaters: the theme, the actual sight and sound, of rape, disemboweling, even defecation.”

Plenty of people older and less discerning than Alistair Cooke were disappointed by things that overtook the movies after the dawning of television. In hindsight, certainly, Cooke’s delight in the medium is that of an observer who sees the congregation in movie houses of the 1930s and 1940s as the vindication of what was always a popular union.

I suspect he felt that the movies—American movies—had lost touch with reality and he may even have wondered whether the earlier glory hadn’t helped make for social dysfunction.

In 1971 there was a reissue of his book
Garbo and the Night Watchmen
(an anthology of film criticism à la 1937, that included Cooke himself, Graham Greene, and Otis Ferguson). In 1971, Cooke kept his first introduction and he honored the way film had been a subject for good writing, but he added this: “Yours truly is happy indeed that he gave only a little of his life to the movies and most of it to American politics, the landscape of the West, music, golf, fishing, and every known indoor game excepting only bridge.”

It’s understandable that in time that writer was most reliable as a Hollywood obituarist, as someone who felt the loss of real and imaginary friends. So he’s very touching on Gary Cooper and Bogart, and pioneering still in his understanding of how one odd, pretty girl had gone hopelessly out of her depth in trying to belong to all of us. In the summer of 1962, he had this to say of Marilyn Monroe: “The orphan of the rootless City of the Angels at last could feel no other identity than the one she saw in the mirror: a baffled, honest girl forever hunted by the nightmare of herself, sixty feet tall and naked before a howling mob. She could never learn to acquire the lacquered shell of the prima donna or the armour of sophistication. So in the end she found the ultimate oblivion, of which her chronic latecomings and desperate retreats to her room were tokens.”

Chris Cooper
, b. Kansas City, Missouri, 1951
At the University of Missouri, Cooper studied both acting and agriculture—and somehow that rural awareness shows in his stretched-parchment face and his way with horses. The rural manner (let alone rural thinking) is far more prevalent in America than on its screens, so it’s good to see Cooper gaining in recognition.

He had his debut in John Sayles’s
Matewan
(87), and he has stayed loyal to Sayles and to the sincerity in acting that he practices. But Cooper did a lot of television in his early days, notably as July Johnson in
Lonesome Dove
(89, Simon Wincer) and
Return to Lonesome Dove
(93, Mike Robe). He was also in
In Broad Daylight
(91, James Steven Sadwith);
Guilty by Suspicion
(91, Irwin Winkler); as Eugene Debs in
Darrow
(91, John David Coles);
City of Hope
(91, Sayles);
Ned Blessing: The True Story of My Life
(92, Peter Werner);
This Boy’s Life
(93, Michael Caton-Jones);
Money Train
(95, Joseph Ruben);
Pharaoh’s Army
(95, Robby Henson);
Boys
(96, Stacy Cochran).

He was more prominent as Sheriff Sam Deeds in
Lone Star
(96, Sayles);
A Time to Kill
(96, Joel Schumacher);
Breast Men
(97, Laurence O’Neil);
Alone
(97, Michael Lindsay-Hogg);
Great Expectations
(98, Alfonso Cuarón);
The Horse Whisperer
(98, Robert Redford);
The 24 Hour Woman
(99, Nancy Savoca);
October Sky
(99, Joe Johnston).

Still, his breakthrough was as the colonel in
American Beauty
(99, Sam Mendes);
Me, Myself & Irene
(00, Bobby and Peter Farrelly);
The Patriot
(00, Roland Emmerich);
Interstate 60
(02, Bob Gale);
The Bourne Identity
(02, Doug Liman); winning the supporting actor Oscar for
Adaptation
(02, Spike Jonze); with Maggie Smith in
My House in Umbria
(03, Richard Loncraine); the trainer in
Seabiscuit
(03, Gary Ross);
Silver City
(04, Sayles).

He was back in
The Bourne Supremacy
(04, Paul Greengrass); as the Kansas cop in
Capote
(05, Bennett Miller);
Jarhead
(05, Sam Mendes);
Syriana
(05, Stephen Gaghan); outstanding as spy Robert Hanssen in
Breach
(07, Billy Ray);
The Kingdom
(07, Peter Berg);
Married Life
(07, Ira Sachs);
The Company Men
(10, John Wells).

Gary Cooper
(Frank James Cooper) (1901–61), b. Helena, Montana
The young Cooper was a laconic, beautiful, solitary soul, saved from vanity by his preoccupation with some deeper mystery. Like so many of the great stars, he gave the impression of being caught unexpectedly in his own thoughts. His shyness enabled him to seem aloof from or abashed by stories. But as time went by, his beauty cracked and his face began to show the dreadful anxiety of his own thoughts.

It is only in retrospect that one recognizes the astonishing integrity of Cooper’s work: he never played a malicious or dishonest man. That worry he had nursed for so many years, and that eventually grew into the cancer that made his face wretched, was wondering how the American hero could remain a good man in this world. The iconography of classical American virtues of simplicity and honor being racked by violence, corruption, and compromise is traced in the succession of images of Cooper, his sheriff’s stride becoming ever more spindly and perilous with the years. It is especially notable how he appealed to such varied interpretations of the American dream: other actors marveled at the astonishingly uncluttered submission of himself to the cameras; Hemingway always saw Cooper as the embodiment of his detached heroes; while Carl Sandburg called him “one of the most beloved illiterates this country has ever known.” Cooper could have played most of the nineteenth-century Americans: he was Tom Sawyer grown up; he could have appreciated Ishmael or even the baleful obsession of Ahab; he was a Hawkeye and an Adam Verver. Look at Cooper and you will see the stoical knowledge of the world that stares out of late portraits of Lincoln. In cinematic terms, he proved amazingly flexible. Who else could have been a central character for Hawks, Capra, von Sternberg, De Mille, Lubitsch, Borzage, King Vidor, and Anthony Mann? As he told Niven Busch, one of his screenwriters, “Just make me the hero.”

Ironically, Cooper’s parents were both English, only lately come to America when he was born. And in the years from 1910 to 1917, Cooper himself lived in Britain. When he came back to Montana, he studied agriculture and worked on a ranch. A variety of jobs led him in 1924 to Los Angeles, where he took up working as an extra. The name “Gary” was given him by an agent, after the town in Indiana, and Henry King chose him for the second male lead in
The Winning of Barbara Worth
(26) when the original actor failed to turn up. That was a Goldwyn picture, but the producer let Cooper go to Paramount who gradually built him up into one of their most successful stars: briefly with Clara Bow (embarrassed by her directness) in
It
(27, Clarence Badger) and
Children of Divorce
(27, Frank Lloyd);
Arizona Bound
(27, John Waters);
Nevada
(27, Waters);
The Last Outlaw
(27, Arthur Rossen);
Beau Sabreur
(28, Waters);
Legion of the Condemned
(28, William Wellman);
Doomsday
(28, Rowland V. Lee);
Half a Bride
(28, Gregory La Cava);
Lilac Time
(28, George Fitzmaurice);
The First Kiss
(28, Lee);
The Shopworn Angel
(28, Richard Wallace);
Wolf Song
(29, Victor Fleming);
Wings
(29, Wellman); and
Betrayal
(29, Lewis Milestone). His first alltalking picture was as
The Virginian
(29, Fleming), which established him as a Western hero. After
Only the Brave
(30, Frank Tuttle),
The Texan
(30, John Cromwell),
Seven Days’ Leave
(30, Wallace),
A Man from Wyoming
(30, Lee), and
The Spoilers
(30, Edwin Carewe), came the first of his great films: as Tom Brown, in
Morocco
(30, von Sternberg), a sardonic, independent soldier, too taciturn to spell out his love for Dietrich. After
Fighting Caravans
(31, Otto Brower), he excelled in the Dashiell Hammett adaptation,
City Streets
(31, Rouben Mamoulian). This is the period of Paramount salon flirtations and Cooper proved as attractive in a lounge suit as he had been in buckskins: with Carole Lombard in
I Take This Woman
(31, Marion Gering); Claudette Colbert in
His Woman
(31, Edward Sloman); and Tallulah Bankhead in
Devil and the Deep
(32, Gering). It was remarkable how the haltingly eloquent Cooper overawed sophisticated women. His first Hemingway role was as Frederick Henry opposite Helen Hayes in
A Farewell to Arms
(33, Frank Borzage). He went to MGM for the Faulkner-scripted
Today We Live
(33, Howard Hawks) and for
Operator 13
(34, Richard Boleslavsky). But usually Paramount kept him to themselves:
Design for Living
(33, Ernst Lubitsch); as the White Knight in
Alice in Wonderland
(33, Norman Z. McLeod);
One Sunday Afternoon
(33, Stephen Roberts); and with Lombard and Shirley Temple in
Now and Forever
(34, Henry Hathaway). This was the period when all his films were exceptional, so that by the end of the 1930s he was America’s top earner:
Wedding Night
(35, King Vidor);
The Lives of a Bengal Lancer
(35, Hathaway); with Ann Harding as the dream-crossed lovers in
Peter Ibbetson
(35, Hathaway); reunited with Dietrich in
Desire
(36, Borzage); and as
Mr. Deeds Goes to Town
(36, Frank Capra), an Everyman figure pushed close to self-pity by Capra, and the first note of Cooper’s capacity for pain. After
The General Died at Dawn
(36, Lewis Milestone), he was very moving as the fatalist Wild Bill Hickok in
The Plainsman
(37, Cecil B. De Mille), driving Jean Arthur mad with his understatement;
Souls at Sea
(37, Hathaway); the one thumping failure—for Goldwyn—of
The Adventures of Marco Polo
(38, Archie Mayo);
Bluebeard’s Eighth Wife
(38, Lubitsch);
The Cowboy and the Lady
(38, H. C. Potter);
Beau Geste
(39, Wellman); and
The Real Glory
(Hathaway).