The Bold, The Bad, and the Bumpy Nights

The NY Times: March 30, 2008 -- The Bold and the Bad and the Bumpy Nights -- By TERRENCE RAFFERTY

BETTE DAVIS, born 100 years ago this week, made her first appearance on film in 1931 and her last in 1989, and like every star of her generation she was always ready for her close-up. The difference with Davis — part of what makes her, I think, the greatest actress of the American cinema — was, she didn’t need it. You could tell what she was thinking and feeling from across the room, even a very large one like the ballroom she swoops into, wearing a red dress, in William Wyler’s “Jezebel” (1938), scandalizing the haut monde of 1852 New Orleans; unmarried young women like her character, Julie Marsden, are expected to wear white. But Julie wants to make an impression, and she does; and as she takes a turn on the dance floor with her stiff-backed escort, you can see, although most of the sequence is long shots, her growing awareness that she has made a terrible mistake, that she has gone, for once, too far.

Her dancing is limp, reluctant; her shoulders sag; and her head is bowed a little, as if she were trying to hide from the disapproving gaze of the assembled revelers: a shocking sensation for Julie, who, like most every character Davis ever played, is accustomed to looking people straight in the eye. There are close-ups in the scene, but it’s in the long shots that you sense most powerfully the burden of that unfortunate dress on this suddenly humiliated woman, feel the depth of her regret and the strength of her desire to be wearing something, anything, else. Bette Davis could make you see red in black and white.

Davis certainly knew how to make an impression, though her boldness, like Julie Marsden’s, sometimes had unintended consequences. Moviegoers familiar with her only from late horror films like “What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?” (1962) and “Hush ... Hush, Sweet Charlotte” (1964) — the most substantial hits of the last four decades of her career — may think of her as a campy grotesque, a cartoon diva. That’s perhaps partly her own fault, for attacking those ludicrous roles with such unseemly comic gusto. And her performer’s soul must have been gratified by the attention they brought: better to be noticed, for whatever reason, than ignored. (“Baby Jane” even earned her an Oscar nomination, her last of 10.)

But on the occasion of her centennial, it’s worth remembering Davis as she was in her prime, in the 1930s and ’40s, when she commanded the screen with something subtler and more mysterious than the fierce, simple will that carried her through the mostly grim jobs of work that followed. (Though the will was there from the start, and her formidable technique never wholly deserted her.) In her heyday, as the reigning female star at Warner Brothers, she was as electrifying as Marlon Brando in the ’50s: volatile, sexy, challenging, fearlessly inventive. She looked moviegoers straight in the eye and dared them to look away.

Usually they kept looking, even when she was putting on display, as she frequently did, the unlovelier aspects of human nature. Her breakthrough role, after three years of more or less routine assignments, came in John Cromwell’s 1934 adaptation of the W. Somerset Maugham novel “Of Human Bondage,” in which she plays the coldhearted Cockney temptress Mildred Rogers, a vile specimen who cruelly — and protractedly — abuses the affections of a sensitive, artistic, clubfooted young medical student.

It was a part Davis had campaigned for. At that point in her career she had nothing to lose by taking on a juicy role that the better-established actresses in town wouldn’t touch for fear of damaging their images. But even after she was a star herself, and had plenty to lose, Davis persisted in playing women who were frankly, unapologetically bad: characters like Stanley Timberlake in John Huston’s odd, disturbing Southern melodrama “In This Our Life” (1942); Rosa Moline in King Vidor’s overheated “Beyond the Forest” (1949); and especially Leslie Crosbie and Regina Giddens, the heroines of two further collaborations with William Wyler, “The Letter” (1940) and “The Little Foxes” (1941).

There’s no mystery, really, about why she would choose to portray so many selfish, conniving, amoral, downright malevolent human beings: any actor who doesn’t know that, say, Lady Macbeth and Iago are pretty good parts should probably consider a different line of work. It’s also perfectly clear why other stars of her stature were less keen to dirty their hands with such unattractive characters: in the studio era actors were brand-name products, and audiences tended to identify them with the parts they played. Late in life Davis ruefully told an interviewer, “The more successful an actor, the less he or she gets to act.” She added, “People come to expect a personality, and that’s the kind of parts you get offered, ones to suit audience expectations of your star’s persona.”

Bette Davis, God knows, could supply some personality. Versatile though she was, she was never an empty-vessel sort of actor like Daniel Day-Lewis. Part of the strange thrill of watching her perform is the tension you feel between the demands of the role and the demands of her outsize self, constantly threatening to breach the boundaries of the character.

In her bad movies, and there are many, you can always sense her impatience with the material she’s been given. She’ll start working her huge eyes a little more, bulging them out for emphasis or hooding them like a snake about to strike. Or she’ll pace restlessly, her clicking heels punctuating every clipped, spit-out line. Or she’ll do something tricky with her (ever-present) cigarette, holding it in an unusual way or stubbing it out abruptly or amusing herself by varying the rhythm of her exhalations. She’s like a kid with too much energy; when she’s bored, she fidgets and colors outside the lines.

As a moviegoer you can’t help being grateful for that nervous ingenuity. Her endless bits of business may not always be, strictly speaking, necessary for her characters, but the truth is that most of the dozens of movies she appeared in her long career — 45 in the first 10 years alone — were, strictly speaking, junk. The women she portrayed wouldn’t be any more believable if she’d played them straight; just duller.

And when she got a part worthy of her gifts, she had the wit to put the lab work done in her lesser pictures to good use. In Lloyd Bacon’s terrific “Marked Woman” (1937), for instance, in which she plays a nightclub hostess (read prostitute), you see a kind of distillation of all the tramps, gun molls and shady dames she’d played as an eager young nonstar under contract to studios that didn’t know what to do with her. Her character in “Marked Woman,” is a wonderfully complex creation, a wary survivor who’s both proud of her sex appeal and slightly uncomfortable with it: not a hooker with a heart of gold, exactly, but a hooker who prefers to keep her heart as much to herself as possible.

And in one of her most celebrated roles, as the panicky aging actress Margo Channing in Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s “All About Eve” (1950), Davis trots out every bad habit she’d developed over the years, every “Bette Davis” mannerism, and makes them all seem, strictly speaking, necessary: real aspects of an unmistakably real woman. It helps, obviously, that Margo happens to be an actress. (This was a specialty of Davis’s. She played actresses in no fewer than five of her pictures, including “Dangerous,” for which she won her first Academy Award in 1935. The other was for “Jezebel.”) She can get away with gestures and intonations that might be considered somewhat over the top in, say, a real-estate lawyer; theatricality is part of who she is, maybe the largest part.

But — and this is the beauty of the performance — it isn’t all she is. It would have been easy for Davis to play Margo as a pathetic drama queen. What she does is much more interesting: the performance is dry-eyed and free of camp posturing, the portrait of a woman whose theatricality is natural, both as an expression of her self and as a tool of her peculiar trade. It’s something she’s learned to live with, and to make a living from. Bouts of insecurity and emotional neediness are occupational hazards, as is a certain inability to resist the dramatic moment — standing on a staircase at a party, for example, to announce, “Fasten your seat belts, it’s going to be a bumpy night” — but on balance Margo, mannerisms and all, seems a surprisingly level-headed woman. In the end she’s a trouper.

So was Davis, who never retired from acting and lasted, improbably, to 81, after a lifetime of abusing alcohol, nicotine and, often, her directors. Her best director was Wyler, who abused her back, productively. The three movies they made together represent one of the great collaborations of a filmmaker and an actor in the history of movies, because Wyler’s theatrical intelligence was a match for hers. (She once referred to him, admiringly, as “the male Bette Davis.”)

They fell out during “The Little Foxes,” perhaps because both realized, on some level, that they couldn’t hope to surpass the intimate anatomy of evil they had together managed to get on the screen in “The Letter.” That picture’s heroine, a Singapore planter’s wife, is, like so many of Davis’s most vivid characters, a creature of urgent need, but she’s cooler, more controlled than most. She kills her lover and lies to her husband (and the court) with remarkable equanimity. And because Wyler persuaded Davis — “persuaded” may be too mild a word — to mute her mannerisms, her every glance and movement seems to register with particular force, passion straining to burst free of its confinement.

Watching the first scene of “The Letter” is as good a way as any to remember Davis on her birthday. She strides out, with that fast, purposeful walk of hers, onto the veranda, pumps some lead into her prone paramour, then pauses, lowering her gun hand slowly, to contemplate what she’s done, striking a pose (in medium long shot) that looks both melancholy and defiant. That’s Bette Davis as she was at her best: first in furious motion, then eerily, eloquently still. She was no drama queen. She was drama in the flesh.

Dave Kehr - NY Times - Widmark, An Appraisal

Above - Murph pencil drawing of Widmark - done in the 1950s

March 29, 2008
An Appraisal - A Star Who Mastered a New Moral Ambiguity -- By DAVE KEHR

Of the generation of leading men who emerged in the aftermath of World War II, quite a few began their careers playing villains. Kirk Douglas, Anthony Quinn, Robert Mitchum, Jack Palance and Lee Marvin were among the postwar stars who served apprenticeships — some long, some short — as outlaws gunned down in the last reel of westerns or as hoodlums crumpling under police fire in crime pictures. Richard Widmark, who died at 93 on Monday, was another.

Unlike many of his contemporaries, Mr. Widmark never quite shook the dark associations of his early roles, even after his studio, 20th Century Fox, rehabilitated him as a leading man. The obituaries that followed Mr. Widmark’s death almost invariably began by evoking his first and still most famous film appearance, as the psychotic killer Tommy Udo in Henry Hathaway’s 1947 film noir, “Kiss of Death” — a role that required Mr. Widmark to giggle and grin as he bound an old woman (Mildred Dunnock) to her wheelchair and shoved her down a flight of stairs.

The sadistic, unhinged Udo was something new in American movies, and the impression he left was indelible. “Mr. Widmark runs away with all the acting honors,” The New York Times said, and Mr. Widmark was rewarded with an Oscar nomination for best supporting actor — the one and only time the Academy took notice of him. (On Friday night, Turner Classic Movies is set for a Widmark triple feature: “Alvarez Kelly,” “Take the High Ground” and “The Tunnel of Love.”)

Mr. Widmark, then 33, had fourth billing in “Kiss of Death”; his Oscar nomination earned him better billing but similar roles in three 1948 films: William Keighley’s “Street With No Name,” Jean Negulesco’s “Road House” and William Wellman’s “Yellow Sky.” Only with Hathaway’s “Down to the Sea in Ships” (1949) did Mr. Widmark get a heroic role and his name on top, but the public didn’t seem interested in this bright, blond, squeaky-clean figure: they wanted their morally flawed, unpredictably violent Widmark back.

And so, through much of the 1950s, Mr. Widmark moved back and forth — shuttling between heavies and heroes — with a freedom mostly unknown to other performers of the period. He was a selfless Public Health Service doctor searching for a gangster (Jack Palance) infected with plague in Elia Kazan’s 1950 “Panic in the Streets”; that same year found him as a racist street punk taunting a black doctor (Sidney Poitier) in Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s “No Way Out.”

Mr. Widmark’s richest roles were those that placed him somewhere in the middle — in that great swamp of moral ambiguity that four years of active conflict and a shadowy new cold war had made Americans ready to acknowledge.

In Samuel Fuller’s “Pickup on South Street” (1953) Mr. Widmark is Skip McCoy, a New York pickpocket who unknowingly lifts a microfilmed roll of government secrets from a fallen woman (Jean Peters) working for a cell of Soviet agents. Smirkingly antisocial to the last (Skip has learned to taunt cops into hitting him, as a way of invalidating arrests), he ends by lending his criminal skills to the side of law and order, motivated less by patriotism than by a desire for revenge.

In “Hell and High Water” (1954) Mr. Widmark again worked with Mr. Fuller, and the film helped to move Mr. Widmark’s screen personality in a different direction. In this slightly mad cold war fantasy, he is a former Navy officer hired by a group of civic-minded scientists to pilot a submarine to the Arctic Circle, where, they suspect, the Red Chinese are constructing a nuclear missile base. The military lent a new context to Mr. Widmark’s moral equivocality: in films like “Halls of Montezuma,” “The Frogmen,” “Take the High Ground!” and “Destination Gobi” Mr. Widmark played hard-bitten commanders whose apparent coldness and cruelty masked a deeper concern with the safety of their men.

His psycho killers and military leaders shared one prominent character trait: callousness, a quality Mr. Widmark portrayed with disdainful ease. From the mid-’50s on, his filmography was filled with colonels, captains, lieutenants and even a couple of generals.

In Robert Aldrich’s 1977 “Twilight’s Last Gleaming” Mr. Widmark had his last great role, as a senior officer whose job it is to persuade a renegade general (Burt Lancaster, Mr. Widmark’s contemporary and fellow recovering gangster) to relinquish control of the nuclear missile silo he has taken over as a political protest. The casting is impeccable: here are two actors whose careers have run in parallel, just as their characters’ lives have.

As an actor, Mr. Widmark fell between the presentational style of prewar filmmaking and the inner-directed, psychological focus of the Method actors, who came into vogue in the 1950s. With his prominent teeth and tight skin, his face had a certain skull-like quality that suggested Conrad Veidt in the German Expressionist films of the ’20s, yet there was a watery, vulnerable quality in his large blue eyes that could sometimes make him seem almost childlike.

The role that best combined these two sides of Mr. Widmark was, perhaps, that of the naïve American boxing promoter, Harry Fabian, who is devoured by the London underworld in Jules Dassin’s 1950 noir masterpiece, “Night and the City.”

It’s hard to imagine another tough-guy actor of the period allowing himself to come as close to tearful impotence as Mr. Widmark does at the end of that film, at the moment his character realizes that there is no escape from the vengeful associates he has betrayed. Running toward the camera, as well as toward his death, Mr. Widmark allows his face to go slack and his limbs to loosen; he seems to become a panicked child before our eyes, shrinking into infantile helplessness. A jump cut might take us to the opening scene of “Rebel Without a Cause,” when James Dean’s drunken teenager collapses on the sidewalk, playing with a toy monkey.

A great star, perhaps, is someone who embodies a cultural moment while nudging us on to something new, to feelings not yet explored and contradictions not yet expressed. By that definition, as well as by many others, Richard Widmark was a great star.

MovieCrazed - Widmark interview

MovieCrazed - Widmark Interview

I felt a shiver in 1977 when I began my New York Times interview with the meanest man in all of the movie world. But it didn’t take long for me to realize that Richard Widmark was in fact Mister Nice Guy. --GUY FLATLEY

Lips, camera, action! - The best and worst screen smooches

The Independent: Lips, camera, action! - The best and worst screen smooches

The kiss is the iconic Hollywood moment, far more significant than mere sex. Kaleem Aftab chooses 12 osculatory encounters that scorched the screen – or not

Richard Widmark dies at 93

With Victor Mature in Kiss of Death

The NY Times: Richard Widmark, actor, dies at 93

Master and Commander

The New Yorker: Master and Commander -- Remembering David Lean by Anthony Lane

There are two of them, man and boy. They emerge from a sandstorm and pass through the remains of civilization—a few broken walls and a swinging door. Beyond, they see something amazing: a ship sailing calmly through dry land. Only as the pair advance does the vision explain itself. This is the Suez Canal, a shocking stripe of blue. A motorbike buzzes along a road, on the far side, and the rider catches sight of the stragglers. He halts and shouts across the water, “Who are you?,” and again, “Who are you?” We look at the face of the man from the desert. His eyes are even bluer than the canal, but he says nothing. Maybe his tongue is too dry for speech. Maybe he has no answer.

Bill Hayward dies at 66

Variety: Bill Hayward dies at 66 -- 'Easy Rider' associate producer commits suicide (He was the son of actress Margaret Sullavan and famed agent Leland Hayward)

Margaret Sullavan
This is so sad. If you have read Brooke Hayward's book "Haywire," You will know all about the tragedies that stalked this family - three suicides - Sullavan, her daughter Bridget and now Bill.

Paul Scofield, British Actor, Dies at 86

Another sad passing. What a magnificent actor he was!

The NY Times: Paul Scofield, British Actor, Dies at 86

Tributes to Anthony Minghella

The BBC: Tributes to Anthony Minghella

Oscar-winner Minghella dies after cancer op

Such Sad News: The UK Independent: Oscar Winner Minghella dies after cancer op

My site for The English Patient

What's doing with these guys?

Two actors I love, Bill Nighy and Nicky Katt, have something on at the moment.

Nighy is in Hot Fuzz, a 2007 film that is being shown on USA Cinemax tonight at 10PM

Nicky Katt is in Snow Angels, a new film reviewed in the NY Times:

Even in despair and under duress, people make jokes, say silly things and even laugh.

Mr. Katt and Ms. Sedaris are especially helpful in this regard, since they are able to suggest ridiculousness without making fun of the characters they are playing.

COENS' 'BURN AFTER READING' TO OPEN WIDE ON SEPTEMBER 12

Hollywood Wire Tap: COENS' 'BURN AFTER READING' TO OPEN WIDE ON SEPTEMBER 12

Hot off their “No Country for Old Men” Oscars, the Coen brothers latest effort, “Burn After Reading,” will open in wide release on September 12. Variety notes that Focus Features and Working Title have decided to go wide thanks to the film's comedic appeal and cast.

The dark spy-comedy stars George Clooney, Brad Pitt, John Malkovich, Frances McDormand and Tilda Swinton, who recently picked up an Oscar for her turn opposite Clooney in "Michael Clayton."

The announcement comes one week after the brothers picked up the Academy Awards for for picture, director, adapted screenplay and supporting actor.

The Coens wrote, directed and produced "Burn," which revolves around an ousted CIA official whose memoir inadvertently falls into the hands of two bumbling Washington, DC, gym employees