Negulesco was born in Romania; one of the many who came from Mitteleuropa and eventually ended up in Hollywood. Negulesco had spent his teenage years in Vienna and then moved to Paris to be an artist and designer, and he was good at it. He went across the Atlantic in the mid-1920s for a New York exhibition of his paintings, and found his way to Hollywood. There he continued to paint and do drawings, and selling his work, but he also did all sorts of things in the film business, often related to design, and short films and documentaries. In the early 1940s he began making feature films at Warner Bros.
Warner Bros. of the 1940s is mainly associated with the rough and the hardboiled. The films of Negulesco had a different sensibility. Dreamy, velvety, romantic. Even those of his films that are usually referred to as film noir, such as the exceptional The Mask of Dimitrios (1944), have that different ambiance. Part of the charm of The Mask of Dimitrios is how strange it is at times. Here is an image from the Peter Lorre's visit to the Bureau of People in Athens. Greece, a sequence that is best described as Kafkaesque, almost surreal. Greece is not the only European country Lorre turns up in during the film: he travels from Istanbul and across southern Europe and up to Paris. That is one consistency in Negulesco's oeuvre, Europe.
Peter Lorre, as well as Sydney Greenstreet, returned in Three Strangers (1946), which is not as exceptional but still strange and dreamlike, and with a script by John Huston and Howard Koch. The Conspirators (1944), a film with Hedy Lamarr and Paul Henreid as well as Lorre and Greenstreet, set in Portugal among refugees from the Nazis, is uneven but has many moments of greatness, mostly because of Negulesco's skill at creating that recurring mood of fear, desire and the slightly otherworldly, all at once. Here is a scene that I particularly like. It is good from the beginning but after 1.50, when the song begins, something happens and it turns into something else, even better. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=291OV74G9F8
After these thrillers, or what they might be called, he made the extravagant melodrama Humoresque. The first 40 minutes or so is too much transition, and not interesting, about the main character's life from childhood until his breakthrough as a violinist. But when that happens, and he meets the female lead of the film, the film stops rushing through exposition, slows down, and instead goes deeper into the inner lives of the characters. That is when it becomes great. The style is more withdrawn and "tasteful" then Negulesco's previous films, but with inspired shots here and there that are more noticeable, and it still at times has that same velvety mood, look and tone as his other films of this period. Its use of music is excellent, and there is a lot of it. Some of the best parts of the film is from practice and concerts when the main character, played by John Garfield, plays his music while we see how it affects him and the audience, and there will be several minutes of only that. It is Isaac Stern and not Garfield who plays the violin, but the illusion is complete. There are also several scenes at a jazz club, which are also very good, and where Negulseco's skills at creating that certain mood shines through. The female lead is played by Joan Crawford and she is marvellous. Her face and body, even her mouth, working together with her voice to create depths and complexities beyond the spoken words. She and Garfield have a telephone sequence towards the end which is at least as good as the famous backseat sequence between Marlon Brando and Rod Steiger in On the Waterfront (Elia Kazan 1954).
Negulesco followed Humoresque with Deep Valley (1947), with Ida Lupino. It is one of his best, equal almost to The Mask of Dimitrios, and about love and desire, and the female gaze, in rural America. That female gaze is something that is recurring throughout Negulesco's career. Many of them are centred on women (frequently three), and are about their interactions with each other and their desires, and the struggles of living in a male-dominated world.
Deep Valley
After Deep Valley, Negulesco moved from Warner Bros. to 20th Century Fox, where he became a close friend of Darryl F. Zanuck, and initially made a series of good films. Road House (1948) for example, which continues the ambiance of the earlier films for Warner Bros. and also stars Ida Lupino. Three Came Home (1950) is about women held in a Japanese prisoner-of-war camp during World War 2. Claudette Colbert plays the female lead and Sessue Hayakawa plays the camp commander, foreshadowing his similar role in The Bridge on the River Kwai (David Lean 1957). It is a powerful film, and complex, and the prison commander is not demonised but humanised. In one scene he talks about how afraid he is for his family in Tokyo, which is always being bombarded by the Allies. Then he mentions that he is happy now because they are finally getting away from the capital. Instead they will sit out the rest of the war in a smaller town where they should be safe. The town he mentions is Hiroshima. It is impossible to watch that scene without feeling a knot in the stomach; the contrast between his happiness of his family hopefully being saved, and our awareness of the horror that awaits them, is unbearable.
The set design for Road House is striking, maybe Negulescian
In 1950, Negulesco also directed John Garfield in Under My Skin (1950), based on Hemingway's short story "My Old Man" adapted by Casey Robinson, and set in Italy and France. One of several Hemingway adaptations Robinson did, and the least successful. It is an average film, but a terrific performance by Garfield. A better film is the college drama Take Care of My Little Girl (1951), with Jeanne Crain as a new student at Midwestern University, and her struggles in her sorority and with men. Lydia Bailey (1952), set in 1802 during the Haitian slave rebellion, is a remarkable film, of which I have written at some length before here.
Lure of the Wilderness (1952) is based on the same book as Jean Renoir's Swamp Water (1941) and shot in the same swamps of Georgia (and Florida). The swamps are the best thing about the film. The long sequences without dialogue, only canoes and people moving through the water, or people hunting, are quite beautiful, and it has an unusual and ominous score by Franz Waxman. Walter Brennan is great, alas Jean Peters and Jeffrey Hunter are not. But it is a strange film, with Negulesco clearly more interested in the natural world than the young leads, and rightly so. On occasion I was thinking of Walter Hill's Southern Comfort (1981) and at times even of Terrence Malick.
Phone Call from a Stranger (1952), written and produced by Nunnally Johnson, is a drama about a plane crash and a lone survivor's decision to visit the relatives of some of the people whom he had spent time with on the flight. It has its moments but is nothing special. The same can be said about Titanic (1953), written and produced by Charles Brackett. Both those two feel more like the work of the studio, 20th Century Fox, than any creative individual, and are rather bland.
After this Negulesco entered his new phase, the glamorous one in colour and CinemaScope. There were mainly two kinds of films, those set around scenic parts of Europe (and a weak one set in India, The Rains of Ranchipur (1955)) and those set at offices in Manhattan, depicting the rat race. Of the first kind there is for example the sweet-natured Woman's World (1954) and the more neurotic The Best of Everything (1959). I like them both, but The Best of Everything is more memorable, and it has been influential on many films set in offices, including Working Girl (Mike Nichols 1988), and series like Mad Men (2007-2015).
Hope Lange and Joan Crawford
Of the European ones, I believe Three Coins in a Fountain (1954) is the most famous one but I do not particularly care for it. Set and shot in Rome (the second unit also went to Venice), it lacks wit, the actors have little chemistry, and the plot is not enough to carry 102 minutes. It is template filmmaking. I do like Boy on a Dolphin (1957), partly because it is preposterous in a good way, but it is uneven and everybody feels slightly off, or miscast, even Sophia Loren. One of the best things about it is the sequence were Clifton Webb's character travels around the stupendously scenic Greek countryside, all the way from Athens to Meteora, in a grey 1953 Ferrari 375 America Coupe. Visually, the film is spectacular from beginning to end. I wonder if Greece has ever looked so good. In her autobiography, Sophia Loren says that Negulesco fell in love with landscape and made the Mediterranean Sea the heart of the film. The story about hidden treasures, and the politics of removing such treasures from the country where they came from and bring it the United States or Britain, is interesting, albeit handled without much conviction.
Alan Ladd and Sophia Loren
Negulesco continued making such Europe-based films (France, Italy, Spain) in the late 1950s/early 1960s but of those I have only seen A Certain Smile (1958), which has exquisite colour coordination and a fine Joan Fontaine in a smaller role, but that is all to be said for it. I am curious about Jessica (1962), where Angie Dickinson plays a nurse in Sicily. His penultimate film The Invincible Six (1970) is something completely different, an Iranian/American co-production about an effort to steal some Persian crown jewels in Tehran but that turns into a riff on Seven Samurai (Akira Kurosawa 1954), or so I am told as I have not seen it. Then Negulesco replaced Ronald Neame on one of Zanuck's vanity projects, Hello-Goodbye, which is yet another glossy European romance, and the last thing Negulesco directed before retiring and settling down in Marbella in Spain. He moved there soon after Hasse Ekman moved to Fuengirola, not far from Marbella, and they both remained there until they died. I wonder if they met, or knew each other.
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From 1944 to 1952, Negulesco made a series of great films which are noticeable for their tone, temperament and style, the nuances of love and desire, the importance put on decoration (plenty of sculptures, busts and figurines) and faces, and for a number of exceptional performances. While much of this remained after 1952, it does feel like he somehow lost his ambition, but, unlike Sarris, I do not think this can be blamed on CinemaScope. He had already made some uninspiring films right before CS, and there were still some good films after CS. He remained seemingly incapable of doing anything that did not look good and enticing, but the excitement and conviction, and distinction, of those earlier years were not there anymore. But neither do I think, as David Thomson did, that it is about which studio he worked for. Negulesco's first films at Fox were about as good as his earlier films at Warner Bros.
I think it is a question of subordinating yourself to the kind of film you are making, and aiming to serve that. This is of course something almost everybody does, but there are different ways of going about it. You either make films were the original idea and impetus comes from you to begin with, which was a position it usually took some time before you could reach in the studio era, and only if you had distinguished yourself or had ways to maintain your independence. Or you push almost every film you make as far as it will go towards becoming subordinated to your overall artistic project, regardless of whether it was your initial idea or an assignment handed to you. Or you focus primarily on each individual film as a unique object, and try to make as good a job as you can under the given circumstances, without any particular need to assert yourself on top of the given material. I think Negulesco can be included in that last category.
But in those years from the mid-1940s to the early 1950s he was able to reach some higher level of achievement, and some of those films are special. As for his later career, he was adapting to changing circumstances like everyone else, and maybe he just wanted to return to Europe after the war. There he was paid well for directing beautiful people in beautiful locations, sometimes making a good film, and possible enjoying the good life. Whether or not he did, I am not in a position to say.
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Audrey Wilder, wife of Billy, was known for making spontaneous limericks. Here is what she came up with when asked for one by a woman whom Negulesco had brought as a date to a party:
There was a lewd man from Unesco
Who was humping a lady al fresco
From the gathering crowd,
A voice clear and loud:
"Why, it's Jean Negulesco."
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John Garfield acted in two Hemingway adaptations in 1950 and the one to treasure is not Negulesco's but The Breaking Point, directed by Michael Curtiz, and adapted by Ranald MacDougall from To Have and Have Not. That is an especially fine film, possibly better than anything Negulesco ever made, and it has one of the greatest, and saddest, ending I have ever seen.
In general, a comparative study of Curtiz and Negulesco would be interesting. I have written about Curtiz here before.
I mentioned above that Casey Robinson had made other adaptations of Hemingway besides Under My Skin. They are The Macomber Affair (Zoltan Korda 1947) and The Snows of Kilimanjaro (Henry King 1952) and very good.
I use the words ambiance in the piece. Here is my longer discussion about that word.
The Sarris quote is from The American Cinema Directors and Directions 1929-1968 (1968) p. 262
David Thomson's thoughts on Negulesco from A Biographical Dictionary of Film (1994) p. 539
Sophia Loren's anecdote about Negulesco from Yesterday, Today, Tomorrow: My Life (2014) p. 116
I can recommend this article by Sarah Berry about the women in Negulesco's films: https://contrappassomag.wordpress.com/2015/05/12/writers-at-the-movies-sarah-berry-on-jean-negulesco/
Crawford in Humoresque
