The New Biographical Dictionary of Film: Completely Updated and Expanded (88 page)

As a producer or best friend, he has been responsible for, among others,
Highway Dragnet
(53, Nathan Juran);
Stake Out on Dope Street
(57, Irvin Kershner);
Crime and Punishment
(58, Denis Sanders);
The Beast from Haunted Cave
(59, Monte Hellman);
Night Tide
(60, Curtis Harrington);
Dementia 13
(62, Francis Ford Coppola);
Queen of Blood
(65, Harrington);
The Shooting
(66, Hellman);
Ride the Whirlwind
(66, Hellman);
The Wild Racers
(67, Daniel Haller);
Targets
(68, Peter Bogdanovich);
Boxcar Bertha
(72, Martin Scorsese);
Big Bad Mama
(74, Steve Carver);
Grand Theft Auto
(77, Ron Howard);
Piranha
(78, Joe Dante);
Rock ’n’ Roll High School
(79, Allan Arkush); and
Saint Jack
(79, Bogdanovich). In the long term, Corman’s creativity must be seen chiefly in terms of the opportunities he has given to young people.

Corman seldom directs nowadays. But he continues to produce, and to be a synonym for blithe exploitation. It will be fascinating to see whether a second generation of talents will emerge from his more recent output—note the willingness to use women directors (is this feminism? or economy?):
Smokey Bites the Dust
(81, Charles B. Griffith);
Forbidden World
(82, Allan Holzman);
Love Letters
(83, Amy Jones)—a good movie;
Space Raiders
(83, Howard R. Cohen);
Streetwalkin’
(85, Joan Freeman);
Hour of the Assassin
(87, Luis Llosa);
Slumber Party Massacre II
(87, Deborah Brock);
Big Bad Mama II
(88, Jim Wynorski);
The Drifter
(88, Larry Brand);
Nightfall
(88, Paul Mayersberg);
The Lawless Land
(89, Jon Hess);
Lords of the Deep
(89, Mary Ann Fisher); and
Transylvania Twist
(90, Wynorski).

Since the close of the last paragraph, Corman has not directed again, though he has been producer or coproducer on over 130 films. The great majority of these you have never heard of—because they went straight to video or played regionally in places where drive-in exploitation still thrives. What is sadly clear is that this stress on sex, violence and horror has become a self-sufficient enterprise. Not that the training ground for talent was ever Corman’s intention. But the exploitation film is now a way of life—for audiences as well as filmmakers. The cynicism has become constitutional, and Corman is having too much fun to stop.

In 2009, he was awarded an honorary Oscar by the Academy—was it Oscar on a bike?

Axel Corti
(1933–93), b. Paris
1972:
Der Verweigerung
. 1975:
Totstellen
. 1984:
A Woman’s Pale Blue Handwriting
. 1985:
An uns Glaubt Gott Nicht Mehr/God Does Not Believe in Us Anymore; Santa Fe
. 1986:
Welcome in Vienna
. 1990:
The King’s Whore
. 1994:
Radetzky March
(TV).

Corti had a wandering childhood, living and being educated in Italy, Switzerland, England, Germany, and Austria. He studied German and Romance literature at university, but, as befits a determined survivor in unstable times, he had also acquired training as a farmer. While still in school he began working for the Austrian Broadcasting Corporation as an actor and reporter. His career as a stage director began in 1958, and has included productions in Vienna, Berlin, Brussels, and Stuttgart, as well as work with Peter Brook in London.

At the same time, he has directed films, from such varied sources as Frank Wedekind, Alfred Doblin, and Truman Capote. He has won several important awards, notably the Grosser Osterreichischer Staatpreis für Filmkunst in 1976 (the only other recipient to date has been Billy Wilder), and the 1985 Prix Italia for
A Woman’s Pale Blue Handwriting
, a two-part film for television, adapted from Franz Werfel. Since 1972, he has also been a professor of film directing at the University of Vienna.

His major work is a trilogy, made with the writer Georg Stefan Troller, under the general title,
Where To and Back
, describing the fate of Austria and Austrians in the 1940s. In the first film (made for Austrian television originally),
God Does Not Believe in Us Anymore
, the setting is Vienna in 1938, on the morning after “Crystal Night.” A Jewish youth is trying to avoid deportation to the camps by escaping to America. As he makes his way first to Prague, and then through France to Marseille, living underground, hoping for a boat, he meets a German officer who rebelled against Nazism, and was sent to and escaped from Dachau, who helps enlarge the movie’s sense of victimization.

The second film,
Santa Fe
, is set entirely in New York (though a twenty-minute harbor sequence was filmed in Trieste). The ship arrives from Europe, and the Austrians try to make new lives in the city. One of them is Freddy Wolff, who works in a sweatshop and a delicatessen and who longs to go to New Mexico. These immigrants are all impoverished and overwhelmed. They struggle with the English language and the astonishing, frightening liberty of America. We see an actor, a surgeon, a writer, and a photographer trying to adjust but recognizing that for the first generation of newcomers there is only the humor and tragedy of loss and dislocation, and the desperate assertion that, “We are good Americans.”

In the climax,
Welcome in Vienna
(the one film made for theatrical release), Freddy is an American soldier sent back to Austria to interrogate prisoners. Now we are in the world of
The Third Man
—a time of survival at any cost, compromise, lying, and forgetting. Another Austrian-American soldier, Adler, thinks of going over to the Russians. But when he is rebuffed by them, he becomes as cynical as Harry Lime. Freddy falls in love with Claudia, a young actress, the daughter of a Nazi who is now set up in America because he had secrets to sell. Freddy wants a reason for remaining in Austria. But the country is ruined by its ordeal and the cheating required for survival, and Freddy is welcome in Vienna only so long as he wears the conqueror’s uniform.

The overall story is absorbing, as we see Austria carried from the age of Schnitzler, Musil, and Freud toward that of Kurt Waldheim. But it is the manner of Axel Corti’s work that is most remarkable. He is a realist whose appetite for life, gesture, and place is inseparable from his moving camera and his reluctance to repeat camera setups. Without hysteria or ostentation, he is always showing us new points of view in a human and social panorama in which there is so much ambiguity, caution, comparison, and irony that any naïve rush to judgment is drained of energy. We see people who have lied, cheated, and pretended in these films; but in the next instant we have to recognize that few resorts are more human or inevitable. Everyone is compromised. Not that Corti becomes cynical. He cherishes ideas and principles and the urge to be just. But he is faithful to the terrible struggle to stay alive, with dignity, in such times.

Axel Corti was the first in a great line of Viennese filmmakers who actually worked in Vienna. He was the true successor to von Stroheim, Lang, Wilder, and Preminger. Think of the five of them and you can begin to appreciate an “Austrian attitude”—amused, wary, hopeful, sad, but strong.

Bill
(William H.)
Cosby
, b. Philadelphia, 1937
From Temple University, Cosby became a stand-up comedian in the early sixties who addressed political and social realities with lazy confidence and an edge of protest. That took him into TV and a costarring role with Robert Culp in the series
I Spy
(65–68), in which Cosby played a man who happened to be black. The series was very successful, and encouragingly influential in its natural, unstrained partnership of a black and a white. Three times in a row, Cosby won the Emmy for best actor in a drama series.

He followed that with the sitcom,
The Bill Cosby Show
(69–71), in which he played a high school gym teacher in Los Angeles. For the first time, Cosby surrounded himself with kids. At the same time, he went back to school, getting a doctorate in education at the University of Massachusetts.

He began to make movies, acting in and being executive producer on
Man and Boy
(72, E. W. Swackhamer); reunited with Culp in
Hickey & Boggs
(72, Culp);
Uptown Saturday Night
(74, Sidney Poitier);
Let’s Do It Again
(75, Poitier);
Mother, Jugs & Speed
(76, Peter Yates);
A Piece of the Action
(77, Poitier); with Richard Pryor in
California Suite
(78, Herbert Ross).

These movies did well, but it was notable that Cosby was working now more often in a merely black context. And while he was funny in movies, his intimacy was far more interesting on the small screen.
The New Bill Cosby Show
(72–73) was a variety show that lasted only one season. But
Fat Albert and the Cosby Kids
was a cartoon series he narrated that ran from 1972–77. Equally, Cosby translated his rapport with kids into very successful ads for Jell-O Pudding and Coca-Cola.

He made
The Devil and Max Devlin
(81, Steven Hilliard Stern), a flop, at Disney. But then, in 1984, at NBC (after having been turned down originally) he launched
The Cosby Show
, one of TV’s most prodigious successes. It was the ongoing story of the Huxtable family, living in New York (where it was filmed). Cliff was an obstetrician, with a lovely, sweet, reasonable wife (Phylicia Rashad) and a gang of kids to rival Shirley Temple, Dickie Moore, and Freddy Bartholomew. Cosby ran the show, and it often seemed as if he had thrown out scripts in favor of freewheeling improv sessions. He was also billed as Dr. William Cosby, a sign of how far the show was meant to embody his views on child rearing.

The Cosby Show
was the most popular show on television from 1985 to 1990. (There was a spin-off,
A Different World.
) It carried NBC, and it made a fortune for Cosby, especially as it went into syndication. The show was very cute: it had great warmth, conservative attitudes and liberal rhetoric, Cosby’s adroit, wry leadership, and the kids. Some argued that its portrait of black family life was highly atypical (these were the years of Reagan and Bush, of deterioration of real black family life, and of growing anger in the work of Spike Lee and others). Cosby himself said that the show was a vital role model for black families.

There’s no knowing the effect it had. There’s every reason to regard it as show business: and clearly the show worked as well as it did because so many white households felt comfortable with it. In years to come, it may look embarrassing (even at the time it could be very sweet, very manipulative, and breathtakingly rosy). Surely the Cosby of
I Spy
could have done a more mixed and challenging show. Yet white America grew up on impossibly happy family shows. Doesn’t black America deserve the same chance?

Cosby made two more poor films:
Leonard, Part 6
(87, Paul Weiland) and
Ghost Dad
(90, Poitier). Otherwise, he rested. But he was still only in his fifties, and he has proved himself full of ideas in the past. He may yet deliver a TV show to confront the toughest problems of race relations in America, and a show in which some black kids meet darker destinies than the Huxtables ever knew.

Alas, Cosby has seemed content to be an icon. He has appeared in two more films—
The Meteor Man
(93, Robert Townsend) and
Jack
(96, Francis Ford Coppola). He has also produced a picture,
Men of Honor
(00, George Tillman Jr), about a black military hero.

Costa-Gavras
(Konstantinos Gavros), b. Klivia, Greece, 1933
1965:
Compartiment Tueurs/The Sleeping Car Murders
. 1967:
Un Homme de Trop/Shock Troops
. 1969:
Z
. 1970:
L’Aveu/The Confession
. 1973:
Etat de Siège/State of Siege
. 1975:
Section Spéciale
. 1979:
Clair de Femme/Womanlight
. 1982:
Missing
. 1983:
Hannah K
. 1986:
Conseil de Famille
. 1988:
Betrayed
. 1989:
The Music Box
. 1991:
Contre l’Oubli;
1993:
La Petite Apocalypse;
“Les Kankobals,” an episode from
À propos de Nice, la Suite
. 1997:
Mad City
. 2002:
Amen/Eyewitness
. 2009:
Eden Is West
.

Z
was a sensation in its day, a political thriller that seemed to combine authentic events, star players, and a restless way of presenting action journalistically that was a mix of early Frankenheimer and cinema verité.
Z
won the jury prize at Cannes and the Oscar for best foreign film at that historical moment when filmmakers believed they were not just politicized but capable of affecting the outcome of events.

Time has exposed Costa-Gavras as the maker of sketchy melodrama. Still his films of the late sixties and early seventies are better and more urgent than his recent, dismal association with the screenplays of Joe Eszterhas (
Betrayed
and
The Music Box
, the latter so conventional that its bald mechanics came as a relief after the idiocies of
Betrayed
). Before that,
Missing
and
Hannah K
. were steps in decline, movies in which political consciousness became more and more strident. It is as if Costa-Gavras had learned that real politics had a complexity not reachable in his work.

The son of a Russian father and a Greek mother, he went to France in his teens and studied at the Sorbonne and IDHEC. He got his start as an assistant:
Tout l’Or du Monde
(61, René Clair);
La Baie des Anges
(63, Jacques Demy); and
Jour et l’Heure
(63, René Clément). Two decades later, he took over the directorship of the Cinemathèque Française, where he had had so much of his education.