Reel tears
Peter Ackroyd
The Men Who Made the Movies Richard Schickel (Elm Tree Books £5.95)
Fritz Lang Lotte H. Eisner (Secker and Warburg £9.75)
The Bogart File Terence Pettigrew (Golden Eagle £4.50)
Rudyard Kipling never got over the surprise of moving pictures; his short story, 'Mrs Bathurst' (1904) is a study of the insidious effects of the Biograph, when the same woman on the same piece of film turns a man mad, his face like 'white an' crumply things—previous to birth as you might say.' The same moon-struck but slightly resentful awe characterises most of the writing about the cinema. Scott Fitzgerald, in The Last Tycoon, could even write of the Hollywood he knew at first hand as 'an escape into a lavish, romantic past that perhaps will not come again into our own time.' Already the film-makers and their studios had turned into those enormous, Babylonian props which were built, knocked down and then rebuilt. The film industry has the dimensions of an empire but one which only exists through fantasy and nostalgia, its product a continuous present tense on the screen, taken out of time, which can only be experienced vicariously and in the dark.
Such instant, intense but impermanent experiences can rarely be analysed or described. Since they are literally beyond words, most writers rush toward images and analogies to do their work for them—and the most constant association is with childhood. The most evocative memories of 'the pictures' are from infancy—every tired journalist will write lovingly of the days when he queued for the Saturday matinee, when he goggled at the posters CA GIRL risked everything for it! 20 MEN lost their lives for it! WHO was the CREEPER?'), when he sidled into a 'horror-film' under age. It is as if childhood and the cinema formed some unacknowledged partnership, with the same tone and that same perfect mixture of innocence and gratuitous violence.
Since most actors and film-makers prefer to ignore the industrial elements in their grand designs, it is these overtly childish elements of the cinematic myth which are most assiduously propagated. The audience are encouraged to sit, toffees in hand, openmouthed at each development in each dumb plot ; even the plots of Fritz Lang's films, as described by Lotte Eisner in Fritz Lang, are composed solely of cliché: 'As she drinks her champagne, she opens and reads his latest letter. He has suddenly broken the engagement; he has met a nurse and is going to marry her.' The actors relentlessly dispense cartoons of themselves as drunks or Casanovas; as Terence Pettigrew says of Humphrey Bogart in The Bogart File: 'He could play-act shamelessly in real life, a sport he enjoyed almost as much as filming.' The directors themselves revel in their story-book image as tyrants, the bogeymen of childish imaginings. So when novelists write about Hollywood, they have the perfect context for sloppy characterisation and half-sketched narratives: Sammy Glick is a sort of William in Filmland, and Monroe Stahr a barely credible study in scarlet. The difficulties in writing intelligently about films are, therefore, enormous; it has become a peripheral sport, tending toward simple reviewing or formless gossip.
Richard Schickel's The Men Who Made the Movies is an exercise in anecdote. Mr Schickel has collected the reminiscences of eight directors who successfully spanned the eras of silence and sound. Just as novelists will cultivate the role of the director as monster, so Mr Schickel adopts the image of the film-directors as embodying 'the spirit of an older America'—as though the United States itself were a cinematic phenomenon. His reverential attitude toward the filmdirectors does not, of course, allow any insights into the nature of their work. The screen casts long shadows but no substance, and all of his interviewees simply place themselves in the films they have made.
They become their own characters: Raoul Walsh treats the job of film-director as if it were that of cattle-rustler. He tells a lot of. funny stories, full of drunken binges and sexual adventures. Vincente Minnelli is as charming, intelligent and as ultimately unrevealing as any of the people he put on the screen. King Vidor is as self-effacing and as tough-minded as the Spencer Tracy he created for Northwest Passage, playing the role of 'the common man' as carefully as anyone in The Crowd. William A. Wellman is the self-conscious 'he-man,' and Alfred Hitchcock as self-obsessed and as neurotically pernickety as anyone in Psycho or Strangers on a Train. Their personalities have disappeared somewhere in the process; they are now perfect Blakean stereotypes: they have become what they beheld.
And so naturally the writers, all those 'literary gentlemen' whom Mr Schickel professes to despise, are drawn to these ruthlessly prefabricated characters. Just as the directors themselves are intrigued by the roles of arch-criminals, like Moriarty and Dr Mabuse—men of vice and guilt who hide anonymously behind gangs and technical devices for crime—so the novelists and biographers are drawn to these literally faceless men who skulk behind cutters, editors and studio technicians. In this sense, Lotte H. Eisner's study, Fritz Lang, is by way of being a hagiography. It is a detailed exposition of each of Lang's films, as she follows a career which encompassed both Germany and Hollywood, and ended with that evil allegory of the film director's art, The Thousand Eyes of Dr Mabuse. Since
Lotte Eisner's methods are both exhaustive and reverential, her most interesting obser vations about Lang emerge only as asides : A fat diary records every event of his day, every telephone call, every visit, even the menu of his meals. Without writing everything down carefully in this way, he believes, it is impOssible to remember a few days later what happened on any particular day.
It may well be fanciful to connect Lanes mecahnical obsessions with his early arrest on suspicion of his wife's murder (she had, in fact, committed suicide); but this attention to the details and neat surfaces of Ide is certainly a convenient method of handling all of the guilt and paranoia which gives such films as M, The Big Heat, Beyond a Reasonable Doubt their particular strength.
Like Hitchcock, Lang hides his own obsessions behind the technical minutiae and perfectionism of his film-making. He is quoted as saying that 'out of detail. Is created atmosphere,' but there is something particularly claustrophobic about the waY he orchestrates these details within a shadowy space. It is like looking into the man's mind. This is not to say that his films are, in any conventional sense, 'artistic.' His work does not have the facile, literary qualities of a Bergman. Lang wanted to provide 'entertainment.' He hitches his fears and fantasies to a star, or to a stereotyped story-line. A strange transformation then takes place, because his art becomes a technological venture, a skill shared by the cameramen, the scriptwriters and the actors themselves. The result is the most powerfully generalised and the least permanent of our cultural sensations and the one most difficult to describe. None of the books under review is even close to doing so.
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