Late work and last films

In Adventures in the Screen Trade, William Goldman argues that after Psycho (1960) Hitchcock lost his creative touch and began making bad film and that this was due to the lavish praise he had received during the 1950s, particularly by French critics, which had gone to his head. I do not buy this as all. It is true that his films in the late 1960s are not as good as before, but he had been highly praised already in the 1930s and should be used to it, and his two films after Psycho, The Birds (1963) and Marnie (1964) are not the films of a director in decline. Whatever happened after Marnie is related to other things; personal issues, changes within the film industry, changing tastes and so on. And he did get back on his creative feet with Frenzy (1972). Besides, Hitchcock made only two films between Marnie and Frenzy: Torn Curtain (1966) and Topaz (1969), and they have their merits. They are not worse than some of his earlier films, like Stage Fright (1950).

This is about a topic that interests me a lot, that of late films, or a "late phase", in a filmmaker's career. These films are often dismissed or unacknowledged and in general it is earlier works that are the focus of peoples' and critics' attention. Sometimes, as with Satyajit Ray, it is only the very first films that are talked about at any length. I remember a discussion I once had with a student about Billy Wilder being a filmmaker who (the student claimed) lost it completely in his later stage, and the student is not alone in this belief. But Wilder in the late 1960s/early 1970s is to me as good and interesting as he was in the 1940s, there is no decline there.

The first thing to wonder about is at what stage in a career it becomes appropriate to talk about a late phase. When does it begin? How should it be measured? Obviously the career itself must be of some length, spanning a couple of decades at best. And what is meant by it? There has to be a distinct change in the films for there to be a point of talking about a late phase. With Hitchcock it seems possible to see Psycho as the beginning of such a late phase. With Howard Hawks I would like to suggest Rio Bravo (1959) as the first film of his late, and glorious, phase. It was made after a longer pause, and it and his later films are looser, more meandering and even less concerned with plot than before. While thematically consistent with his films of the 1930s and 1940s, they have a different tone, mood and pace.

What about John Ford? Is there a late phase beginning with Sergeant Rutledge (1960) maybe? When he, as is sometimes suggested, began make films that deliberately questions assumptions and ideas from earlier days. (Although he had already done that too, in the late 1940s for example.) Does Vincente Minnelli's late phase begin with The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (1962)? David Lean's late phase, when he ventured abroad and made long epics, began with Bridge of the River Kwai (1957); a phase which, with the exception of Lawrence of Arabia (1962), is also often disparaged. Michael Powell's late phase began after the thrashing Peeping Tom (1960) got by British critics. After The Queen's Guard (1961) he did some TV-work, two fine films in Australia and an adaptation of Béla Bartók's opera Bluebeard's Castle.

Some filmmakers move around and this might make it easier to distinguish phases. Luis Buñuel's late phase might be said to begin when he began making films in France, with The Diary of a Chambermaid (1964), or perhaps better to push it forward to 1967 and Belle de Jour. Jean Renoir, who also did a version of The Diary of a Chambermaid (1946), could be said to having inaugurated his late phase when he left the US, first for The River (1951) in India, and then his last films in France. Max Ophüls is another filmmaker who moved around, and could be said to have three phases, first a European, then in the 1940s an American and then in the 1950s a French phase, although in his case the last phase is too similar to the earlier ones for it to be meaningful to talk about it as a distinct "late phase". This is also his most celebrated phase; much like Yasujiro Ozu, the later films are the ones most people talk about. Buñuel is a similar case. They are exceptions to an otherwise strong rule.

Vittorio De Sica and Ophüls on the set of The Earrings of Madame de... (1953).

But is there any value of talking about a late phase? Or argue about when it might have begun? I think there is, if you are interested in film as art, and in the artists who make them. The conventional response is to focus on the earlier work, or some alleged golden age, and then ignore or belittle the later work, but often only because the later films are in one way or another (or more ways) different from the earlier ones. Sometimes this can be put down to an inability among critics and people at large to appreciate change and development, and often it comes from an unwillingness to look beyond the usual classics and established "masterpieces". Another reason might be that a late phase is often not in tune with the prevailing styles and themes of the younger contemporary filmmakers' work, and is therefore not considered hip and trendy and consequently dismissed as old and conservative. This is often unfair though and leads to dismissals on shallow grounds. But these aspects are still interesting to discuss. To follow a filmmaker's long and winding career can be very rewarding, and lead to insights about not just personal developments and creativity but also to discussions about how filmmakers navigate changing societal and industrial contexts and circumstances, and also to discussions about how we evaluate films. Another aspect is to consider how artists deals with ageing and mortality, including their own, in their later years. Many filmmakers have done this, from Hawks to Ozu, and some not yet mentioned here such as Ingmar Bergman and Akira Kurosawa.

Sometimes it is in their late phase that filmmakers really burrow deep, get personal and sometimes reach for the sublime. I think Fred Zinnemann began to blossom in his late phase, which began with The Nun's Story (1959).

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Related to this, and particularly poignant to me, is a filmmaker's very last film, and even the very last image of them. I am not talking about the solution to the story but the very last thing we see, the final image. Here are five last images that have always struck me as being particularly suitable or poignant, from the last films of Buñuel, Lean, Hitchcock, Minnelli and Ozu.

Buñuel's That Obscure Object of Desire (1977) ends with a sudden and unexplained explosion, a fabulous end to an explosive and surreal style of filmmaking. Lean's A Passage to India (1984) ends with Judy Davis's main character turning away from a window, on which it is raining. A temperamental person trapped in a damp English apartment which is too small for her outreaching personality. Hitchcock's Family Plot (1976) ends with the main character, played by Barbara Harris, looking directly into the camera and wink to us, as if it has all been one big joke and Hitch wants to let us know. Minnelli's last film, the flawed but marvellous A Matter of Time (1976), ends with a freeze frame of the face of his daughter Liza Minnelli, who plays the lead. But most moving of all is the last shot of Ozu's last film An Autumn Afternoon (1962). Chishu Ryu who had played the male lead in Ozu's films ever since the 1930s, sits alone in a small room, now old and tired, looking away from the camera and us, faced with his own loneliness and approaching death. It is the end scene to end all end scenes.

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The meaning of a last image might change, or deepen, depending on whether you know if the filmmaker knew that this was the last film they would make. That is a topic worthy of a book...

And speaking about books, Goldman says a lot of dumb things in his book, but I shall have to come back to that another day.

Mexico, Buñuel and Illusion Travels by Streetcar

One of the countries and eras I am most interested in exploring further is Mexican cinema of the 1940s and 1950s, often referred to as the "golden age" of Mexican cinema, when several hundreds of films were made. So far I have seen very few of them, and the few I have seen have almost all been directed by Luis Buñuel. I have probably seen more films from the U.S. from that time which were shot entirely in Mexico, such as John Ford's The Fugitive (1947), than I have seen actual Mexican films, and that is clearly my loss. In particular I would like to explore the films of Emilio Fernández, of whom I have only seen The Pearl (1947), and possibly all films shot by Gabriel Figueroa. (They both participated on The Fugitive, which Figueroa shot.) Until the day comes when the films become readily available Buñuel will have to do, and it is not a bad start. He is no particular favourite of mine but if I had to choose a part of his career it would be the Mexican one. Many disagree, including Buñuel himself, but films such as Los olvidados (1950) and Simon of the Desert (1965) are among his very best, and Exterminating Angel (1962) could be seen as the apotheosis of his career. Maybe his late work, in France and Spain, has been overemphasised by the same reason that it used to be argued that directors like Fritz Lang or Max Ophüls, or even Hitchcock, did their best work in Europe; Eurocentric snobbery unrelated to the actual value and meaning of the films themselves.

When Buñuel is discussed it is often as a surrealist and as a heckler of the bourgeoisie and the Catholic Church. But that is incomplete. During his long and varied career he made all sorts of films (21 of which are Mexican productions) and they are not all surreal, and Buñuel's targets are not just the bourgeoisie and the clergy. Few are beyond his ridicule and criticism; it is hypocrisy, selfishness and vanity in general he is after, regardless of who is guilty of it: peasants or priests. What the films all, almost, have in common though is their precise, pointed style. Not a scene, shot or spoken word is out of place or unnecessary, everything carefully judged to maximise the impact as quickly as possible and, despite the dreams and the surreal touches, it is for the most part an unobtrusive and discrete style.

One I have a particularly fondness for is the 1954 film Illusion Travels by Streetcar. It was a studio film, produced by CLASA, and written by Luis Alcoriza. He wrote or co-wrote most of Buñuel's Mexican films and might be said to be the equivalent of Jean-Claude Carrière from Buñuel's (second) European phase. The film is about two employees at the streetcar company who after a party, when they are drunk, borrow a streetcar that is to be decommissioned, number 303, and go for a ride in it. The next day they are unfortunately unable to take it back unnoticed because they are constantly interrupted by people believing it is in service and wanting to use it, or believe it is the one they have chartered for a school trip. There is a similarity here with the dinner guest unable to leave the room in which they have dined in Exterminating Angel or the way the six characters in The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (1972) are interrupted every time they try to have a meal.

But Illusion Travels by Streetcar is not about the bourgeoisie but primarily about the poor and the working class, although it provides a cross section of the people of Mexico City. There is no overt surrealism, but there are certainly Buñuelian motifs sprinkled throughout the film. It also has a gentle humour and a fine sense of the spaces of the city. (The cinematographer was not Figueroa but Raúl Martínez Solares.) There is also a long section of the film which is a stage performance of a religious play, a form called pastorela, based on the Bible, which is performed at the party in which the two men get drunk and decide to take that one last drive in their beloved 303. The play is sincere but rather absurd whereas the film itself is rather sweet and playful, and with a pointed political message.

Of the handful of Buñuel's Mexican films I have not yet seen there is one in particular I am curious about: Mexican Bus Ride (aka Ascent to Heaven 1952), made with the same female lead, Lilia Prado, as Illusion Travels by Streetcar but with a different crew. But I am curious of so much of Mexican cinema in general of that time. There is always so much more to explore.

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It would be interesting to research other nomadic directors with South American connections, comparable to Buñuel, such as the Argentinian Hugo Fregonese, who made films in Argentina, the U.S. and Europe, or the Brazilian Alberto Cavalcanti who began making avant garde-films in continental Europe in the 1920s and then moved to Britain, joined the GPO film unit and then became a part of the Ealing team before returning to Brazil in the 1950s. See an earlier post by me about GPO here.

For unknown reasons it is sometimes claimed that Buñuel was the first to use a freeze frame, in Los olvidados. That is of course not true at all. Earlier the same year Joseph L. Mankiewicz used it to great effect in All About Eve for one thing, but it had appeared on occasion for many years. Another prominent example is in It's a Wonderful Life (Frank Capra 1946).

Buñuel, seated in the middle, with friends.