The New Biographical Dictionary of Film: Completely Updated and Expanded (91 page)

More recently, Cox has explored the theme of mortality and undying beauty in the world in
Cactus
(where Isabelle Huppert plays a woman going blind) and
A Woman’s Tale
, made with a dying actress, Sheila Florance, and filled with wonder at the ways in which flesh reaches its terminus.

There can be a depressive tone in Cox’s work, an aching sincerity that comes close to solemnity. But when his eye is encouraged into showing us inner worlds, he can be intransigent, secure, and immensely valuable. He may yet need to go to some smaller, finally remote island. Cox remains a brave personal adventurer, variable, romantic but driven.
Touch Me
was erotic, and
Innocence
is one of his best films—a story of elderly but passionate love.
Molokai
is exactly what its title says, but it is like
Exile
in that it shares a fascination with remote location and moral isolation. I have seen some of the material for
Nijinsky
, and failed to understand it—but it seems the kind of vision of the great dancer that a man might have if he lived on a tropic isle with shadows as his dancers.

Jeanne Crain
, (1925–2003), b. Barstow, California
Miss Long Beach of 1941, then a model, Jeanne Crain was one of the prettiest adornments of Fox costume films during the 1940s:
Home in Indiana
(44, Henry Hathaway);
In the Meantime, Darling
(44, Otto Preminger);
Winged Victory
(44, George Cukor);
State Fair
(45, Walter Lang);
Leave Her to Heaven
(45, John Stahl);
Centennial Summer
(46, Preminger); playing mother and daughter in
Margie
(46, Henry King), and very funny in its falling knickers sequence;
A Letter to Three Wives
(48, Joseph L. Mankiewicz);
Lady Windermere’s Fan
(49, Preminger);
Pinky
(49, Elia Kazan), purportedly as a black, photographed in lustrous low key to show the studio’s liberal intentions—Kazan said he relied on her “submissive vacuity”;
Cheaper by the Dozen
(50, Lang);
Take Care of My Little Girl
(51, Jean Negulesco);
The Model and the Marriage Broker
(51, Cukor);
People Will Talk
(51, Mankiewicz); “The Gift of the Magi” episode from
O. Henry’s Full House
(52, King);
Belles on Their Toes
(52, Henry Levin);
Dangerous Crossing
(53, Joseph Newman); and
Vicki
(53, Harry Horner).

Ironically, once away from Fox, her sweet prettiness was subtly altered to a more sophisticated glamour and hints of sexiness in King Vidor’s
Man Without a Star
(55). But no one cared to exploit this properly and her career trailed tamely away:
Duel in the Jungle
(54, George Marshall);
Gentlemen Marry Brunettes
(55, Richard Sale);
The Fastest Gun Alive
(56, Russell Rouse);
The Joker Is Wild
(57, Charles Vidor);
Madison Avenue
(61, Bruce Humberstone);
Twenty Plus Two
(61, Newman);
Pontius Pilate
(61, Irving Rapper);
Queen of the Nile
(63, Fernando Cerchio);
Hot Rods to Hell
(67, John Brahm);
The Night God Screamed
(71, Lee Madden); and
Skyjacked
(72, John Guillermin).

Wes Craven
, b. Cleveland, Ohio, 1939
1972:
Last House on the Left
. 1977:
The Hills Have Eyes
. 1981:
Deadly Blessing
. 1982:
Swamp Thing
. 1984:
A Nightmare on Elm Street
. 1985:
The Hills Have Eyes II
. 1986:
Deadly Friend
. 1987:
A Nightmare on Elm Street 3—Dream Warriors
. 1988:
The Serpent and the Rainbow
. 1990:
Shocker
. 1991:
The People Under the Stairs
. 1994:
Wes Craven’s New Nightmare
. 1995:
Vampire in Brooklyn
. 1996:
Scream
. 1999:
Scream 2
. 1999:
Music of the Heart
. 2000:
Scream 3
. 2005:
Cursed; Red Eye
. 2006: “Père-Lachaise” episode from
Paris Je T’Aime
. 2009:
My Soul to Take
.

Is it humorless to be angry at Wes Craven? Or is it simply long past anyone’s caring that someone with an excellent education, and already started as a teacher, should leap over into the drivel he has perpetrated, which veers from being cruel and hideous to saying, well, who ever thought to take this stuff seriously? Are the people who would vote, vaguely and blindly, for better pay for teachers (a swinging 7 percent increase on a salary of $35,000, say) just as likely to chuckle at one dry-as-dust academic who chucked it all for gold and gore?

Of course, it is worth saying that horror can be as valuable as good teaching (they can come very close). There are horror films—from
The Night of the Hunter
to
Vampyr
, from
Blue Velvet
to
Alien
—that are remarkable works of beauty, the imperiled imagination and our hope for virtue. Horror need not be as blunt and cynical as a giggly rip-off and the dank knowingness of the
Scream
pictures. Horror can be a basis for taste, skill, and poetry—Mr. Craven has not yet troubled the scorer on any of those accounts. Yet he is intelligent enough to know how surely the darts of horror do penetrate the vulnerable mind. He would surely have a smooth, funny riposte for why that reproach is archaic and sentimental. He is very rich.

Still, having studied philosophy at Johns Hopkins, he started to teach and then entered into filmmaking with
Last House on the Left
, a modernization of Bergman’s
The Virgin Spring
, with loathsome rape and murder scenes. Craven directed, wrote, and edited, but he has seldom shown a real interest in any of those things. His concern has been to shock, and to profit from it.

His commercial breakthrough came with Freddie Krueger and the
Elm Street
pictures, though I find Louis Jourdan in
Swamp Thing
more intriguing, largely because Jourdan is a grave, melancholy actor rarely fulfilled. But there have been times when Craven the academic has shown through in his ironic appreciation of family structure as an horrific thing in itself.

But over the years maybe the most odious thing about him is the postmodern self-reflection of
Wes Craven’s New Nightmare
and the
Scream
pictures, which amounts to a frenzied, disdainful redoubling of nastiness because no one really believes in it. That is a dreadful manipulation of his own audience, with a view to excusing him and letting him feel superior. He is not alone, of course: real academe has people who write learned treatises on the imagery in Wes Craven, people who might faint at a drop of blood, but who have learned to gaze through the revolting fury of his films and see tenure beckoning. And surely there are kids in the dark who have lost their sense of secure reality, too, who hardly know what to believe. They see the stabbings of
Scream
and struggle to reconcile them with the film’s “cool” pose. They are expected to share Mr. Craven’s contempt, but they have less funding to help ensure that it stops short of self-contempt.

Meanwhile, having seen some kind of light, Mr. Craven can claim to be a reformed character: and so he splits his time between more
Scream
ing and the prestige of Meryl Streep going to East Harlem to help deprived kids. Why not? She plays a teacher!

Broderick Crawford
(1911–1986), b. Philadelphia
The son of actors Lester Crawford and Helen Broderick, Broderick Crawford was squat, burly, fast talking, and belligerent. He began playing gangsters and knockabout comedy:
Woman Chases Man
(37, John Blystone); Hathaway’s
The Real Glory
(39);
Beau Geste
(39, William Wellman); Tay Garnett’s
Eternally Yours
(39);
Slightly Honorable
(40, Garnett); George Marshall’s
When the Daltons Rode
(40);
Seven Sinners
(40, Garnett);
Trail of the Vigilantes
(40, Allan Dwan);
The Black Cat
(41, Albert S. Rogell);
Larceny Inc
. (42, Lloyd Bacon); and
Broadway
(42, William A. Seiter). After war service, he returned to cheap Westerns,
Night Unto Night
(47, Don Siegel);
Slave Girl
(47, Charles Lamont);
The Time of Your Life
(48, H. C. Potter);
A Kiss in the Dark
(49, Delmer Daves); and Irving Rapper’s white
Anna Lucasta
(49). Robert Rossen then cast him as the demagogue in
All the King’s Men
(49), a part so suited to Crawford’s loudmouth style that he won an Oscar. But the same character is more cleverly portrayed in Cukor’s
Born Yesterday
(50)—a Columbia film in which Crawford gives a remarkable likeness of the studio boss, Harry Cohn. Crawford never capitalized on these successes, and after
Lone Star
(52, Vincent Sherman),
Last of the Comanches
(52, André de Toth),
Scandal Sheet
(52, Phil Karlson),
Night People
(54, Nunnally Johnson), and Fritz Lang’s
Human Desire
(54), he cashed in as the central figure in the TV series
Highway Patrol
(55–59). As a relaxation he played one of the swindlers in Fellini’s
Il Bidone
(55); in
New York Confidential
(55, Russell Rouse);
Not as a Stranger
(55, Stanley Kramer);
Big House, USA
(55, Howard W. Koch); Rouse’s
The Fastest Gun Alive
(58); and as the heavy in
The Decks Ran Red
(58, Andrew L. Stone). When his TV career faded out, he returned to movies in small parts but his own monotonous bluster and the TV familiarity had largely exhausted his appeal. He became a support in B Westerns, such as
Red Tomahawk
(66, R. G. Springsteen); in
Embassy
(72, Gordon Hessler);
Smashing the Crime Syndicate
(73, Al Adamson); and
Terror in the Wax Museum
(73, Georg Fenady). He was also the victim of a serious automobile accident, but came back full force as the nation’s top cleaner in
The Private Files of J. Edgar Hoover
(77, Larry Cohen); and played “Brod” in
A Little Romance
(79, George Roy Hill);
There Goes the Bride
(79, Terence Marcel);
Harlequin
(80, Simon Wincer);
Den Tuchtigen Gehort Die Welt
(81, Peter Patzak); and
Liar’s Moon
(81, David Fisher).

Joan Crawford
(Lucille Fay Le Sueur) (1906–77), b. San Antonio, Texas
One year after Joan Crawford’s death, her adopted daughter Christina published
Mommie Dearest;
in another three years, that book had been brought to the screen, without any effort to balance or challenge the injured daughter’s point of view. In the movie, Faye Dunaway offered a brilliant but lynching impersonation in which startling resemblance overwhelmed tougher tests of character credibility. And so Joan Crawford has passed into myth as a demented martinet whose greatest need or belief concerned padded clothes hangers.
Mommie Dearest
is, arguably, the most influential Hollywood memoir ever published. It changed the way publishers, readers, stars, and ghosts approached such volumes; and it pushed home the growing awareness that “Hollywood” was only a bad movie where lives were played out in the chiaroscuro of “camp.”

I am not questioning the gist of what Christina Crawford had to say—the history of child abuse in the movie world is all too rich (even if most of the abuse is in spoiling), and well worth telling as a corrective to the burnished advertising with which Hollywood has regularly marketed the ideas of home and family. Still,
Mommie Dearest
threatens to obscure the real story of Joan Crawford; in turning her into nothing but a witch, it loses the fascinating ordeal and tragedy of her career. Remember that in wanting to adopt and possess perfect children (and in
believing
in perfect children), she was doing her best to live up to the crackpot ideology she had done so much to illustrate.

If nothing else, Crawford was the living and movie example of how a woman from very lowly, if not shady, places could triumph in that version of the American class system known as Hollywood royalty. Crawford sought to be an egalitarian heroine, standing up for herself among nobs, snobs, foreigners, and allegedly classy, educated actresses. For she was a star at MGM to rival Garbo, Norma Shearer, Jeanette MacDonald, Katharine Hepburn, Myrna Loy, and Lassie. Crawford was from hot, Latino Texas; her name had changed—her parents were a touch mysterious—and there was no end to the nasty stories about the things she had done to get ahead. That same Joan Crawford sought class, respectability,
respect
, and her terrific struggle to get there is one of the great career stories in pictures. Maybe the effort unhinged her; surely she behaved badly; and clearly her work deteriorated. But her Hollywood lost confidence long before she did, and she had to become strident and exaggerated. In the best Crawford films, she has the eye of aspiration and of a sweet hope that clothes, makeup, and position will mask all compromises made on the way: she was as Texan as Lyndon Johnson, as insecure and as close to caricature. And in two films called
Possessed
, as well as
Grand Hotel, Sadie McKee, Mannequin, The Women, Mildred Pierce, Daisy Kenyon, Harriet Craig, Johnny Guitar
, and
What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?
, there is a career as interesting as politics.