I Lost It at the Movies Read online

  In these earlier films he had also worked with Danielle Darrieux; perhaps he was helping to develop the exquisite sensibility she brings to Madame de — the finest performance of her career. Her deepening powers as an actress (a development rare among screen actresses, and particularly rare among those who began, as she did, as a little sex kitten) make her seem even more beautiful now than in the memorable Mayerling — almost twenty years earlier — when, too, she had played with Charles Boyer. The performances by Danielle Darrieux, Charles Boyer, and Vittorio De Sica are impeccable — ensemble playing of the smoothness usually said to be achieved only by years of repertory work.

  However, seeing the film, audiences are hardly aware of the performances. A novelist may catch us up in his flow of words; Ophuls catches us up in the restless flow of his images — and because he does not use the abrupt cuts of “montage” so much as the moving camera, the gliding rhythm of his films is romantic, seductive, and, at times, almost hypnotic. James Mason once teased Ophuls with the jingle: “A shot that does not call for tracks is agony for poor dear Max.” The virtuosity of his camera technique enables him to present complex, many-layered material so fast that we may be charmed and dazzled by his audacity and hardly aware of how much he is telling us. It is no empty exercise in decor when Madame de and the Baron dance in what appears to be a continuous movement from ball to ball. How much we learn about their luxurious lives, the social forms of their society, and the change in their attitudes toward each other! By the end, they have been caught in the dance; the trappings of romance have become the trap of love.

  The director moves so fast that the suggestions, the feelings, must be caught on the wing; Ophuls will not linger, nor will he tell us anything. We may see Madame de as a sort of Anna Karenina in reverse; Anna gets her lover but she finds her life shallow and empty; Madame de’s life has been so shallow and empty she cannot get her lover. She is destroyed, finally, by the fact that women do not have the same sense of honor that men do, nor the same sense of pride. When, out of love for the Baron, she thoughtlessly lies, how could she know that he would take her lies as proof that she did not really love him? What he thinks dishonorable is merely unimportant to her. She places love before honor (what woman does not?) and neither her husband nor her lover can forgive her. She cannot undo the simple mistakes that have ruined her; life rushes by and the camera moves inexorably.

  The very beauty of The Earrings of Madame de . . . is often used against it: the sensuous camerawork, the extraordinary romantic atmosphere, the gowns, the balls, the staircases, the chandeliers, the polished, epigrammatic dialogue, the preoccupation with honor are all regarded as evidence of lack of substance. Ophuls’s reputation has suffered from the critics’ disinclination to accept an artist for what he can do — for what he loves — and their effort to castigate him for not being a different type of artist. Style — great personal style — is so rare in moviemaking that critics might be expected to clap their hands when they see it; but, in the modern world, style has become a target, and because Ophuls’s style is linked to lovely ladies in glittering costumes in period decor, socially-minded critics have charged him with being trivial and decadent. Lindsay Anderson, not too surprisingly, found him “uncommitted, unconcerned with profundities” (Anderson’s Every Day Except Christmas is committed all right, but is it really so profound?) and, in his rather condescending review of The Earrings of Madame de . . . in Sight and Sound, he suggested that “a less sophisticated climate might perhaps help; what a pity he is not, after all, coming to make a film in England.” It’s a bit like telling Boucher or Watteau or Fragonard that he should abandon his pink chalk and paint real people in real working-class situations.

  The evocation of a vanished elegance — the nostalgic fin de siècle grace of Ophuls’s work — was perhaps a necessary setting for the nuances of love that were his theme. If his characters lived crudely, if their levels of awareness were not so high, their emotions not so refined, they would not be so vulnerable, nor so able to perceive and express their feelings. By removing love from the real world of ugliness and incoherence and vulgarity, Ophuls was able to distill the essences of love. Perhaps he cast this loving look backward to an idealized time when men could concentrate on the refinements of human experience because in his own period such delicate perceptions were as remote as the Greek pursuit of perfection.

  Born Max Oppenheimer in Germany in 1902 (he changed his name because of family opposition to his stage career) he worked as an actor and then directed more than 200 plays before he turned to movies in 1930. His first film success, Liebelei, came in 1932; because he was Jewish, his name was removed from the credits. The years that might have been his artistic maturity were, instead, a series of projects that didn’t materialize or, if started, couldn’t be completed. He managed to make a few movies — in Italy, in France, in Holland; he became a French citizen; then, after the fall of France, he went to Switzerland, and from there to the United States, where, after humiliating experiences on such films as Vendetta he made Letter from an Unknown Woman, Caught, and The Reckless Moment. In 1950 in France he finally got back to his own type of material with La Ronde; the flight from Hitler and the chaos of the war had lost him eighteen years. Working feverishly, with a bad heart, he had only a few years left — he died in 1957. No wonder the master of ceremonies of La Ronde says, “J’adore le passé”; the past of Ophuls’s films is the period just before he was born. There was little in his own lifetime for which he could have been expected to feel nostalgia. Perhaps the darting, swirling, tracking camerawork for which he is famous is an expression of the evanescence of all beauty — it must be swooped down on, followed. It will quickly disappear.

  [1961]

  The Golden Coach*

  (1953)

  At his greatest, Jean Renoir expresses the beauty in our common humanity — the desires and hopes, the absurdities and follies, that we all, to one degree or another, share. As a man of the theater (using this term in its widest sense to include movies) he has become involved in the ambiguities of illusion and “reality,” theater and “life” — the confusions of identity in the role of man as a role-player. The methods and the whole range of ideas that were once associated with Pirandello and are now associated with Jean Genet are generally considered highly theatrical. But perhaps it is when theater becomes the most theatrical — when the theater of surprise and illusion jabs at our dim notions of reality — that we become conscious of the-roles we play.

  Jean Renoir’s The Golden Coach is a comedy of love and appearances. In her greatest screen performance, Anna Magnani, as the actress who is no more of an actress than any of us, tries out a series of love roles in a play within a play within a movie. The artifice has the simplest of results: we become caught up in a chase through the levels of fantasy, finding ourselves at last with the actress, naked in loneliness as the curtain descends, but awed by the wonders of man’s artistic creation of himself. Suddenly, the meaning is restored to a line we have heard and idly discounted a thousand times: “All the world’s a stage.”

  The commedia dell’arte players were actors who created their own roles. They could trust in inspiration and the free use of imagination, they could improvise because they had an acting tradition that provided taken-for-granted situations and relationships, and they had the technique that comes out of experience. The Golden Coach, Renoir’s tribute to the commedia dell’arte, is an improvisation on classic comedy, and it is also his tribute to the fabulous gifts, the inspiration, of Anna Magnani. At her greatest, she, too, expresses the beauty in our common humanity. It is probably not coincident with this that Renoir is the most sensual of great directors, Magnani the most sensual of great actresses. Though he has taken Prosper Merimée’s vehicle and shaped it for her, it will be forever debatable whether it contains her or is exploded by her. But as this puzzle is parallel with the theme, it adds another layer to the ironic comedy.

  Perhaps only those of us who truly love this film
will feel that Magnani, with her deep sense of the ridiculous in herself and others, Magnani with her roots in the earth so strong that she can pull them out, shake them in the face of pretension and convention, and sink them down again stronger than ever — the actress who has come to be the embodiment of human experience, the most “real” of actresses — is the miraculous choice that gives this film its gusto and its piercing beauty. If this woman can wonder who she is, then all of us must wonder. Renoir has shaped the material not only for her but out of her and out of other actresses’ lives. Talking about the production, he remarked, “Anna Magnani is probably the greatest actress I have ever worked with. She is the complete animal — an animal created completely for the stage and screen . . . Magnani gives so much of herself while acting that between scenes . . . she collapses and the mask falls. Between scenes she goes into a deep state of depression . . .” Like the film itself, the set for the film is an unreal world where people suffer. In The Golden Coach we see Magnani in a new dimension: not simply the usual earthy “woman of the people,” but the artist who exhausts her resources in creating this illusion of volcanic reality.

  The work has been called a masque, a fairy tale, and a fable — each a good try, but none a direct hit: the target shimmers, our aim wavers. The Golden Coach is light and serious, cynical and exquisite, a blend of color, wit, and Vivaldi. What could be more unreal than the time and place — a dusty frontier in Renaissance Peru. (You can’t even fix the time in the Renaissance — the architecture is already Baroque.) A band of Italian players attempts to bring art to the New World. Magnani is Camilla, the Columbine of the troupe; among her lovers is the Spanish viceroy, who, as the final token of his bondage — the proof of his commitment to love over position and appearances — presents her with the symbol of power in the colony, the golden coach. Through this formal “taken-for-granted” situation, life (that is to say, art) pours out — inventive, preposterous, outrageous, buoyant. And in the midst of all the pleasures of the senses, there is the charging force of Magnani with her rumbling, cosmic laughter, and her exultant cry — “Mama mia!”

  The script has its awkward side, and those who don’t get the feel of the movie are quick to point out the flaws. Some passages of dialogue are clumsily written, others embarrassingly over-explicit (“Where does the theatre end and life begin?” which isn’t even a respectable question). Much of the strained rhythm in the dialogue may be blamed on the fact that Renoir’s writing in English doesn’t do justice to Renoir the film artist. And, though Magnani herself, in her first English-speaking role, is vocally magnificent, some of the others speak in dreary tones and some of the minor characters appear to be dubbed. The “international” cast — in this case, largely Italian, English and French — never really seems to work; at the basic level they don’t speak the same language. And Renoir allows some of the performers more latitude than their talent warrants; though Duncan Lamont and Ricardo Rioli are marvelous love foils, Paul Campbell is shockingly inept, and the scenes in which he figures go limp. Another defect is in the directorial rhythm. This was Renoir’s second color film, and as in his first, The River, which was also a collaboration with his great cinematographer-nephew, Claude Renoir, static patches of dialogue deaden the movement; his sense of film rhythm seems to falter when he works in color. Instead of indulging in the fancy fool’s game of Freudian speculation that he fails when he tries to compete with his father, it seems simpler to suggest that he gets so bemused by the beauty of color that he carelessly neglects the language of cinema which he himself helped to develop.

  But in the glow and warmth of The Golden Coach, these defects are trifles. When the singing, tumbling mountebanks transform the courtyard of an inn into a playhouse, the screen is full of joy in creative make-believe. When, at a crucial point in the story, Magnani announces that it is the end of the second act, and the movie suddenly becomes a formalized stage set, we realize that we have been enchanted, that we had forgotten where we were. When the hand of the creator becomes visible, when the actor holds the mask up to view, the sudden revelation that this world we have been absorbed in is not life but theater brings us closer to the actor-characters. So many movies pretend to be life that we are brought up short, brought to consciousness, by this movie that proclaims its theatricality. And the presence of the artists — Renoir and Magnani — is like a great gift. When, in the last scene of The Golden Coach, one of the most exquisitely conceived moments on film, the final curtain is down, and Magnani as the actress stands alone on stage, bereft of her lovers, listening to the applause that both confirms and destroys the illusion, the depth of her loneliness seems to be the truth and the pity of all roles played.

  [1961]

  Smiles of a Summer Night

  (1955)

  Late in 1955 Ingmar Bergman made a nearly perfect work — the exquisite carnal comedy Smiles of a Summer Night. It was the distillation of elements he had worked with for several years in the 1952 Secrets of Women (originally called The Waiting Women), the 1953 A Lesson in Love, and the early 1955 Dreams; these episodic comedies of infidelity are like early attempts or drafts. They were all set in the present, and the themes were plainly exposed; the dialogue, full of arch epigrams, was often clumsy, and the ideas, like the settings, were frequently depressingly middle class and novelettish. Structurally, they were sketchy and full of flashbacks. There were scattered lovely moments, as if Bergman’s eye were looking ahead to the visual elegance of Smiles of a Summer Night, but the plot threads were still woolly. Smiles of a Summer Night was made after Bergman directed a stage production of The Merry Widow, and he gave the film a turn-of-the-century setting. Perhaps it was this distance that made it possible for him to create a work of art out of what had previously been mere clever ideas. He not only tied up the themes in the intricate plot structure of a love roundelay, but in using the lush period setting, he created an atmosphere that saturated the themes. The film is bathed in beauty, removed from the banalities of short skirts and modern-day streets and shops, and, removed in time, it draws us closer.

  Bergman found a high style within a set of boudoir farce conventions: in Smiles of a Summer Night boudoir farce becomes lyric poetry. The sexual chases and the round dance are romantic, nostalgic: the coy bits of feminine plotting are gossamer threads of intrigue. The film becomes an elegy to transient love: a gust of wind and the whole vision may drift away.

  There are four of the most beautiful and talented women ever to appear in one film: as the actress, the great Eva Dahlbeck, appearing on stage, giving a house party and, in one inspired suspended moment, singing “Freut Euch des Lebens”; the impudent love-loving maid, Harriet Andersson — as a blonde, but as opulent and sensuous as in her other great roles; Margit Carlquist as the proud, unhappy countess; Ulla Jacobsson as the eager virgin.

  Even Bergman’s epigrams are much improved when set in the quotation marks of a stylized period piece. (Though I must admit I can’t find justification for such bright exchanges as the man’s question, “What can a woman ever see in a man?” and her response, “Women are seldom interested in aesthetics. Besides, we can always turn out the light.” I would have thought you couldn’t get a laugh on that one unless you tried it in an old folks’ home, but Bergman is a man of the theater — audiences break up on it.) Bergman’s sensual scenes are much more charming, more unexpected in the period setting: when they are deliberately unreal they have grace and wit. How different it is to watch the same actor and actress making love in the stuck elevator of Secrets of Women and in the golden pavilion of Smiles of a Summer Night. Everything is subtly improved in the soft light and delicate, perfumed atmosphere.

  In Bergman’s modern comedies, marriages are contracts that bind the sexes in banal boredom forever. The female strength lies in convincing the man that he’s big enough to act like a man in the world, although secretly he must acknowledge his dependence on her. (J. M. Barrie used to say the same thing in the cozy, complacent Victorian terms of plays like What E
very Woman Knows; it’s the same concept that Virginia Woolf raged against — rightly, I think — in Three Guineas.) The straying male is just a bad child — but it is the essence of maleness to stray. Bergman’s typical comedy heroine, Eva Dahlbeck, is the woman as earth-mother who finds fulfillment in accepting the infantilism of the male. In the modern comedies she is a strapping goddess with teeth big enough to eat you up and a jaw and neck to swallow you down; Bergman himself is said to refer to her as “The Woman Battleship.”

  But in Smiles of a Summer Night, though the roles of the sexes are basically the same, the perspective is different. In this vanished setting, nothing lasts, there are no winners in the game of love; all victories are ultimately defeats — only the game goes on. When Eva Dahlbeck, as the actress, wins back her old lover (Gunnar Bjornstrand), her plot has worked—but she hasn’t really won much. She caught him because he gave up; they both know he’s defeated. Smiles is a tragi-comedy; the man who thought he “was great in guilt and in glory” falls — he’s “only a bumpkin.” This is a defeat we can all share — for have we not all been forced to face ourselves as less than we hoped to be? There is no lesson, no moral — the women’s faces do not tighten with virtuous endurance (the setting is too unreal for endurance to be plausible). The glorious old Mrs. Armfeldt (Naima Wifstrand) tells us that she can teach her daughter nothing — or, as she puts it, “We can never save a single person from a single suffering — and that’s what makes us despair?’

  Smiles of a Summer Night was the culmination of Bergman’s “rose” style and he has not returned to it. (The Seventh Seal, perhaps his greatest “black” film, was also set in a remote period.) The Swedish critic Rune Waldekranz has written that Smiles of a Summer Night “wears the costume of the fin de siècle period for visual emphasis of the erotic comedy’s fundamental premise — that the step between the sublime and the ridiculous in love is a short one, but nevertheless one that a lot of people stub their toe on. Although benefiting from several ingenious slapstick situations, Smiles of a Summer Night is a comedy in the most important meaning of the word. It is an arabesque on an essentially tragic theme, that of man’s insufficiency, at the same time as it wittily illustrates the belief expressed fifty years ago by Hjalmar Söderberg that the only absolutes in life are ‘the desire of the flesh and the incurable loneliness of the soul.’ ”