Jean Negulseco

Jean Negulesco is one of those directors that are neither well-known nor unknown, and his films, to the extent that they are known, are not necessarily known as being films by him. His most famous one today is probably How to Marry a Millionaire (1953) but it is known for its glamorous actresses (Marilyn Monroe, Lauren Bacall, Betty Grable) in the first film made (but second to be released) in CinemaScope, and not for being "a film by Jean Negulesco". But does it mean anything to say "a film by Jean Negulesco"? Are there any stylistic consistencies or a worldview that comes with that expression? I think there are at least stylistic consistencies. Another thing Negulesco is famous for is Andrew Sarris's quip "Jean Negulesco's career can be divided into two periods labeled B.C. and A.C. or Before CinemaScope and After CinemaScope." Sarris point is that the B.C. period is good and the A.C. "is completely worthless". I agree with the first part and disagree with the latter.

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.

*** 

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.

***

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

Bergman's films of the 1940s

In 1944 SF, Svensk Filmindustri, bought a play by the Danish writer Leck Fisher. SF did have different people in mind for directing it but since Ingmar Bergman was an employee and since he had had a great success with his script for Frenzy aka Torment (Alf Sjöberg 1944), and since Bergman was eager enough to direct that, he claimed, he would have been happy to make an adaptation of the phone book, SF gave it to him. He began shooting on July 4, 1945. Thus began the directing career of Ingmar Bergman.

Part of the film, to be called Crisis, was shot at SF's studio complex Filmstaden in Råsunda (just outside Stockholm) and part of it was shot on location in the small town of Hedemora in Dalarna County. The shooting ended on the last of August. The production was an unhappy one, with the nervous and insecure Bergman fighting with most everyone. He did not get along at all with the cinematographer Gösta Roosling but he did get along well with the editor Oscar Rosander, who taught him a lot about filmmaking and who would be one of his closest cooperators for 15 years until Rosander retired in 1961.

When Crisis opened the critics were torn. Some saw it as a great film, intelligent and realistic, and with very good acting. Others thought it was dreadful. But most seemed to find something of value in it, and that Bergman showed great promise. SF were not pleased though, and he was not asked to make another film for them for some time.

The story of Crisis is not very interesting. An 18-year-old girl who has lived with a foster mother in an idyllic small town is now brought to the big city and corrupted. Then in the end she returns back home to her foster home and to the man who was in love with her before she left, and still is. But there are other things about it beyond the story. The setting for example. Hedemora was not chosen by chance. Dalarna is where Bergman grow up to a large part, his maternal grandparents were buried in Hedemora, and Dalarna would continue to be important for him. Styggforsen, where he shot The Virgin Spring (1960), is some 100 kilometres northwest of Hedemora. Skattungbyn, where he shot Winter Light (1963), is just 30 kilometres northwest of Styggforsen. The town of Rättvik where Bergman was a frequent guest at the hotel Siljansborg, where he wrote many of his films, is some 20 kilometres southwest of Styggforsen. So this is Bergman country, much like Fårö.

Siljansborg

During his first five years as a filmmaker, 1945-1949, Bergman was on an exploration. Each film was different, he was trying to find himself and his own style and voice. Some efforts are more successful than others but they are all of interest, Crisis too. They are above all interesting for those scenes, shots or actions that, even if surrounded by otherwise poor material, are really powerful, moving and stylish, those moments where you can see the Bergman to come, experience the first appearance of some quintessential Bergman shot, motif, line of dialogue or facial expression. On Crisis there is in particular a scene at a train station between the foster mother and a young man which is shot, edited and written in a typical Bergman fashion. Watching these early films back to back can be an overwhelming experience, to witness his steady progression from Crisis to Thirst (1949), which I would say is his first pure Bergman film. The earlier ones are more like other films, but with a Bergman touch. Thirst is all Bergman, although like the rest of his films of the 1940s it is not entirely successful. Summer Interlude (shot in 1950 but released in 1951) is his first complete film, the first unquestionably great one, and one of his very best.

***

Crisis could have been a Hollywood melodrama, something by Edmund Goulding, or perhaps remade by Douglas Sirk in 1953. Bergman's next film on the other hand, It Rains on Our Love (1946), feels very Swedish, a typical product of the exciting and vibrant Swedish cinema of the 1940s. This also means that you can sense the influence from French poetic realism, which had a major impact on Swedish 1940s cinema. It is about a young man and a young woman who meet at a train station, spend the night together, and then are reluctant to part. The one-night stand turns into a love affair and a relationship, but with little money and little support from society. They settle down in a small cottage on an allotment, and get by as best they can. Their attraction is a very strong physical one, and there is considerable frankness in subject matter, as well as partial nudity. Birger Malmsten and Barbro Kollberg play the couple, and they are very good. And the film is fine too, much better than Crisis. It has greater warmth and is less overbearing, it is even at times quite playful. But Bergman's fears and concerns are present. There is for example an almost dreamlike trial sequence towards the end where society is willing to condemn the couple for daring to live their own life.

Malmsten and Kollberg after a night of passion.

It Rains on Our Love was not made at SF but was produced by Lorens Marmstedt, one of very few famous Swedish producers, something like a Swedish version of Darryl F. Zanuck at Twentieth Century-Fox. He had begun his career as a film critic, became a film director in 1932 and started his own distribution company, AB Terrafilm, in 1938, which soon also began producing its own films. Marmstedt was an entrepreneur and a cinephile who helped build the career of many Swedish filmmakers, especially Hasse Ekman, but also Bergman. After Crisis, he took Bergman in and gave him the chance to make It Rains on Our Love for the company Sveriges Folkbiografer AB. Marmstedt was perhaps not overly enthusiastic by the final result, and complained, Bergman claimed, that Bergman was certainly not a Marcel Carné and Malmsten was certainly not a Jean Gabin. But he still produced Bergman's next film A Ship to India aka A Ship Bound for India (1947), again for Sveriges Folkbiografer AB. It also shows the influence that Carné and French poetic realism had on Bergman at the time. Like Crisis and It Rains on Our Love, A Ship to India was based on a play, this time by Martin Söderhjelm, and like the earlier two films Bergman rewrote it substantially. It is about a young man who falls in love with his father's mistress, whom the father has invited to come and live with them (father, mother and son), a situation which obviously does not lead to happiness for anyone. It is again a very uneven film, but with several remarkable sequences, including one at an amusement park and a sequence towards the end where the father tries to kill his son and then barricades himself in an apartment. The film competed in Cannes, and won an honourable mention.

Gertrud Fridh and Malmsten in A Ship to India.

Bergman followed it with another film for Marmstedt, this time at Terrafilm: Music in Darkness (1948). It is based on a book by Dagmar Edqvist, the male lead was as usual played by Birger Malmsten and the female lead was Mai Zetterling. She had already left Sweden for an acting career in Britain but she was able to come to Sweden now and then to make a film. Unfortunately, this is quite possibly Bergman's worst film. Unconvincing and awkward, with little coherence or sensibility. But it has some finely lit shots and a spectacular nightmare sequence. The film, like Bergman's other films produced by Marmstedt, was shot by Göran Strindberg, one of Sweden's finest cinematographer at the time. He was responsible for the look of not just these films but several of Ekman's best films as well as Alf Sjöberg's Miss Julie (1951) and Arne Mattsson's One Summer of Happiness (1951). Another member of the team Marmstedt had at his disposal was architect and set designer P.A. Lundgren who would, beginning with It Rains on Our Love, become another one of Bergman's closest collaborators, all the way until The Touch (1971).

***

After Music in Darkness, Bergman was called back to SF and made Port of Call (1948). The story is typical for Bergman, couples who cannot stand each other yet remain together, and includes disillusionment, suicidal characters, infidelities and abortions and, typical for this part of Bergman's career, the struggles of a young, working-poor couple trying to survive in a society which has little time and patient with them. Other Bergman conventions have now also been well-established such as fog horns, aggressively ticking clocks (part of Bergman's particular soundscape) and there are flashbacks, violence and faces superimposed on other faces. What is new however is that this was the first time Bergman worked together with the cinematographer Gunnar Fischer, who would from then on be his visual half until Sven Nykvist took Fischer's place in the early 1960s. (The Devil's Eye (1960) would be the last film Fischer and Bergman made together, just as it was the last film Bergman would make with the editor Rosander.)

If Bergman so far had made an American melodrama (Crisis), a distinctly Swedish film with a touch of French poetic realism (It Rains on Our Love) and another poetic realist work (A Ship to India), he now, with Port of Call, made his neorealist film. Much has been made of Bergman being influenced by Roberto Rossellini, not least by Bergman himself, with the emphasis on the on-location shooting. But it is not obvious that there is more on-location shooting in Port of Call than Bergman's earlier films. There are other things that are more relevant for making the Italian connection, and that is partly the way work and casual incidents are shown, and given ample screen time, at least before the melodramatics of the plot take over. In the beginning of the film there are lot of scenes in the harbour, with the actors working alongside genuine dock workers. 

Speaking of influences, Bergman was a committed cinephile too, like Marmstedt. There was no official film school but by watching films over and over Bergman did teach himself a lot. One particular favourite was Michael Curtiz, whose films he would watch night after night. (In an interview with John Simon in 1971 Bergman also said that George Cukor had influenced him "very much".) This influence on Bergman of 1940s Hollywood cinema is often overlooked, as critics and historians prefer to focus on his European peers. But it is an important part of his emergence, and of his style. Hollywood cinema of the 1940s was constantly experimenting with narration, like different layers of flashbacks and various forms of voice-overs, and Bergman does this too. Crisis has an all-knowing, dispassionate narrator, heard but not seen. It Always Rains on Our Love has a character, a benevolent father-figure, who acts as our guide in the story, appearing with regular intervals and sometimes talking directly into the camera. A Ship to India is one long flashback, first narrated by the main character directly to us, the audience. Port of Call has several flashbacks, and Thirst has one genuine flashback and several scenes that might appear to be flashbacks but are better described as parallel storylines. And Prison is so narratively complex, with so many layers, that it is not enough space here to disentangle it. Curtiz might have approved. In Bergman's films there also sometimes appear shots and light patterns similar to Curtiz's style, which may or may not be deliberate. 

Swedish films of the time had a rather relaxed sense of nudity and in, for example, Music in Darkness and Port of Call there are scenes with what you might called casual nudity, that is unrelated to sex or eroticism but just the way people dress, change clothes or wash up when they are home. Sweden would in the 1950s get a reputation for sex and nudity in films, but this earlier casual nudity instead gives the films added realism, as it is so mundane. (It was there already in the 1930s.) But since nudity is so extremely rare in films from this age, globally speaking, it is still somewhat startling to suddenly see, for example, a woman baring her breasts because she is putting on a new dress.

***

By now Bergman had established himself as a filmmaker, and there was even talk about an international career. David O. Selznick was interested, among others. There were meetings, proposals and scripts passed back and forth, but nothing came of it. After Port of Call Bergman would direct three more films before the decade was over and two of them would be released in 1949: Prison, produced by Marmstedt at Terrafilm, and Thirst, made by SF. (The third, To Joy, was released in 1950.) The first is a short (76 minutes) and cheap experimental work which is completely unlike anything Bergman did at the time, or until Persona (1966). It is an allegory about the devil's work and the absence of God, with elaborate dream sequences, tales within tales and a high level of reflexivity as it takes place on a film set. The credit sequence does not have text but a spoken narration by Hasse Ekman (not by Bergman, as some claim), and Ekman also plays a leading role as the film director in the film. This is the first time Ekman and Bergman work together, and much can be said about the way this creates yet another meta-level to the films. The two were rivals and both were considered "the best" by the Swedish critics, and they influenced one another, competed in various ways, and also, in various way, incorporated their relationship in their films. After Prison, Ekman wrote and directed The Girl from the Third Row (1949), calling it his "anti-Bergman film". Sawdust and Tinsel (1953) was the last time Ekman acted in a Bergman film and that whole film can profitably be seen partly as an allegory about their rivalry and relationship. Sawdust and Tinsel is a fascinating, great film, but since it came out in 1953 it is outside the scope of this article. Prison on the other hand is not a great film (it is crude, sometimes too emphatic and didactic) but it is one of Bergman's most interesting, and among all the horror and despair it portrays there are also several really funny scenes. It is also the first time the "Bergman scream" and the "Bergman light" appears, both in scenes involving Birgitta Carolina, the young prostitute the film is centred around and who is played by Doris Svedlund. 

In one scene, after having been assaulted by a pimp, she screams with such a deep, agonising force that it is almost impossible to watch. Here the acting goes beyond just acting and reach some other level, some primal fear or terror or trauma, and moments like these appear on occasion in Bergman's films, creating a crack in the fabric of fiction.

In another scene, towards the end, she has committed suicide and after her death the light breaks through the window and embalms her, as if it has come to caress her and take her away. This light, as from a different dimension, like a religious manifestation, will also appear again and again in Bergman's films, disproving the idea of a godless universe.

Svedlund and Malmsten

That leaves Thirst, the first film in which, as argued above, Bergman finally feels ready. After all his experimenting and exploration, he has now found his voice, and there is a sense of self-confidence that had not necessarily been there before. The story in itself is not new, couples locked in mutual hatred yet unable to be apart, but the way it is shot and told is different. Scenes are longer without much happening externally but are instead about inner turmoil. Scenes are often silent and there is much less music. (This is the only film Bergman directed in the 1940s that Erland von Koch did not write the music for). In general the staging, pacing and ambiance just feels distinctly Bergmanesque for the first time. Malmsten plays the male lead, now established as something of Bergman's alter ego, and Eva Henning plays the female lead. The film is based on some short stories by Birgit Tengroth, who also plays a major part, but although the stories do not successfully coalesce together, and some scenes have a certain histrionic tension, it is a fitting end of the decade; a filmmaker finally finding himself after having been searching for several years.

Ekman and Henning in Prison

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Regarding Bergman's claim (in Images: My Life in Film) that Marmstedt criticised him for trying and failing to be Marcel Carné, and Malmsten for not being a Gabin, it is worth pointing out that Ekman earlier had said that Marmstedt had said the same thing to him after Ekman wrote and directed Changing Trains (1943), in which Ekman also played the male lead. Marmstedt might have said it to both Ekman and Bergman, but it is also possible that Bergman borrowed Ekman's anecdote, or appropriated it. Bergman has never been a reliable teller of his own story.

A few films written by Bergman but directed by others also came out in the 1940s but they will be discussed in a separate piece later.

A person not mentioned but of vital importance, as friend, mentor and cooperator, is Herbert Grevenius, theatre critic and writer. They co-wrote the scripts for several films, including It Rains on Our Love and Thirst.

During the period covered in this post Bergman was also contracted director at Göteborgs stadsteater (1946-1950). He got his first job as theatre manager through Grevenius, at Helsingborg stadsteater in 1944, but it was at Malmö stadsteater, beginning in 1952, that he really came into his own, and began building up his now famous stock company.

A few links to related pieces:
Schamyl Bauman
Mai Zetterling
Michael Curtiz

The romantic expressionism of Michael Curtiz

A couple of years ago I was switching from one channel to another on the TV. On one channel there was a film showing. I did not recognise it, and since I had not seen it from the start I did not watch it for very long, only a few minutes. But I guessed that it was directed by Michael Curtiz, and to satisfy my vanity I had a look in a TV Guide later. It was indeed a film I had not seen and it was directed by Curtiz. I recognised his style almost immediately. Perhaps no filmmaker ever had such an infatuation with shadows, and few have been able to equal his expressive use of camera movement, mise-en-scène and lighting to make the images glow and dazzle. He had a remarkably dynamic style and I have always thought that Gunnar Fischer and Ingmar Bergman were visually influenced by Curtiz. Curtiz and Marcel Carné. It is not just the initials Curtiz and Carné have in common; Curtiz, like Carné (working with Jacques Prévert), was also something of a romantic, making his shadow play enhance the often doomed love affairs, or even the tentatively successful. James Agee once wrote that Curtiz "has always seemed like Franz Murnau under onions". I assume he meant F.W. Murnau, and I do not exactly understand "under onions" but although it is not perhaps a compliment he did notice Curtiz's expressionist style.

20,000 Years in Sing Sing (1932)

All of the films are not like this, he was too uneven and had many bad days but when he was inspired, which was often enough, he could make anything come alive and shine. His work in the late 30s and early 40s is usually singled out for praise, when he made films such as Captain Blood (1935), The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938) and Casablanca (1942), but it was there before and it was still there in his last films, at least as late as 1958, when he made The Proud Rebel, in which almost every single interior shot is a masterpiece. The story is not much, but it looks better than practically any other film you might see, and might be the most visually stimulating colour film Curtiz ever made. It was shot by Ted McCord, who worked with Curtiz several times in the later years. Perhaps the finest film they made together is Breaking Point (1950), a film that also has one of the saddest and greatest ending I know.

Breaking Point

The Proud Rebel could very well be the title for most of Curtiz's best films, it was one of his favourite themes. But themes are not all that important with Curtiz, style is what matters here. The producers and writers often complained that he did not care for the story but was only interested in compositions, and actors complained that he was not interested in them either. But there are many great performances in his films, Spencer Tracy, Bette Davis, James Cagney and Claude Rains for example, and Olivia de Havilland is marvellous in The Proud Rebel, much older than she was in Captain Blood or Robin Hood, and a better actress. What is more is a general warmth that fill his best films, which also help make them rise above their often humdrum stories. While We're No Angels (1955) is rather uninspired visually, a rare failure in that respect, it too is rescued by its warmth and charm. A better film, also filled with warmth, is Life With Father (1947), so well-directed it should be mandatory at film schools. Beyond the acting and the lighting there are three things worth studying: the use of mirrors, the use of space (which parts of the house are used and for what purposes) and how people move in that space between scenes.

Life With Father. Who but Curtiz would shoot a discussion between husband and wife this way?

It is conventional wisdom to consider Casablanca a happy coincident yet it is really a typical Curtiz-film when he is inspired. The combination of wit, romance and cynicism is intoxicating and a lot of it comes from writers Howard Koch and the Epstein brothers, but after being attacked and expanded upon by Curtiz's forceful personality and camera it became something else. In addition, Curtiz was Hungarian (with a large but rather unknown European body of work), and he lost family members in the Holocaust, so the subject of the film was probably close to him.

Casablanca

Although not his best, the film in which his visual creativity reigned particularly free was The Unsuspected (1947), a convoluted story about greed, jealously and murder told with extraordinary boldness. It was also the first film produced by Curtiz's own (short-lived) company Michael Curtiz Productions. The cinematographer was Woody Bredell and Curtiz made it together with his wife Bess Meredyth, who worked on the script. She often did that but The Unsuspected is one of the few times she got a screen credit.

A useful compare and contrast study can be made between Curtiz and Raoul Walsh. In the 1930s Curtiz was one of the top directors at Warner Bros. (together with Mervyn LeRoy and Roy Del Ruth) and Walsh came to Warner in 1939. They made (superficially) similar films, and often with James Cagney, Errol Flynn and Humphrey Bogart, yet they were also very different, with Walsh being the more complete and more interesting filmmaker, and less uneven. They differ in style too, Walsh's visuals are nowhere near as expressionistic and energetic as Curtiz. Walsh had a more naturalistic style, with a few exceptions. A typical Curtiz image is claustrophobic but a typical Walsh image is open and boundless. But whereas Curtiz's style is more energetic than Walsh's, Walsh's characters are more energetic than Curtiz's, always on the move. Walsh also had a clearly defined and consistent outlook on life in his films. But even though Walsh is the greater artist, Curtiz is good enough.

Angels With Dirty Faces (1938)

The Sea Hawk (1940)


Mildred Pierce (1945)

The passing of polyester

One of the things that appealed to me when I was working as a projectionist was the fact that if one of the Lumière brothers had made an unexpected visit to my cinema, they would have been able to load the projector and screen the film. The central parts of the projector was the same as it had been since the very beginnings of film projection. Now this is no longer the case. Today, not only is the equipment different, but everything around it too. There is not even a need for a projectionist any more. In the more advanced systems, a computer in the basement of the multiplex will be enough. The computer might not even be in the cinema but at the main office of the cinema owner. Instead of a person in a small (and hot) room at the back of the screening room putting the film through the projector, and pushing the proper buttons and switches, somebody is just readjusting some software, or inserting a flash drive. I am glad that I no longer work as a projectionist because, besides being demoted to a popcorn pusher, I would not have any personal investment in the screening. When I worked at the cinema, it was my fault if something went wrong, but I could take a lot of pride in a successful screening, when I had dimmed the lights and opened the curtains at the exact right moment, for example having the UIP trademark appearing at the very moment that the curtains were so far apart that the logo fit perfectly between them. 

But it is not only in the projection room that the physical film strip was your's to touch. In all stages of the filmmaking process, it was there. You shot on it, you edited on it, you screened on it, and you stored the film on it, in the archives. You could hold it and touch it, making the material of the art form almost sensual, a haptic experience. Many filmmakers loved the sensation of having "their" film strip in their hands, Ingmar Bergman being one of them.

I love it too. I have spent many hours in various archives, in different parts of the world, investigating, cataloguing, cleaning, editing film, and it is always with the same kind of excitement. (Here is a photo of me at a visit to the Georgian National Film Center in Tbilisi.)

A lot has been written about the dangers involved in the conversion from analog to digital, such as analog cinemas difficulties in getting films that are released digitally only or the danger of films not being preserved in a long-term perspective (This article from LA Weekly highlights some of these dangers). What I here today is concerned with is the lack of physicality, and the immediate connection between film and hand, between object and subject if you like. Is there not a danger that when the film strip is gone, film gets devalued, possibly even as an art form?

The advantages with digital film are many, but considering that film has been alive and well for over 100 years, it is not like it was in desperate need for a change of costume, or a power boost. When excited filmmakers, cinematographers and other converts sing the praise of the new possibilities with digital filmmaking you sometimes get the impression that film was just awaiting the arrival of the digital era in order to release its full potential. But a film like Casque d'Or (Jacques Becker 1952) is pure perfection, and the fact that it was made in a analog world is not a problem, there is more to cinema than visual effects and portable equipment. But that is of little consequence, people in general have a tendency to get carried away, and is more annoying than alarming. What I find more disturbing is a certain laziness. When everything can be made, and remade, in the computer, the art of shooting sometimes get lost. If you always have the ability to say "Oh, it doesn't matter, we can fix that later." does this not run the risk of making you sloppy, less involved, evolved, as an artist. (This leads to an interesting question, of where the artistry lies in a digital film. In production or post-production? Come to think of it, it even raises questions of what is production and what is post-production.)

Another thing that gets lost with computer-generated imagery (CGI) is a sense of awe. When you watch a film like Intolerance (D.W. Griffith 1916) or a later film by David Lean, it is the sheer scope and richness of the images and all that the images contain, the number of people and horses for example, that is part of the magic. At the end of the The Avengers (Joss Whedon 2012), New York is attacked by hordes of faceless creatures from another world, but it has not the same effect because I know that some programmer made one creature on his computer and then copied it, and what is awe-inspiring about that? There is a legendary quote from Michael Curtiz, "Bring on the empty horses.", which he said when he was making Charge of the Light Brigade (1936). Today the director would more likely say (if s/he had Curtiz's poetic relationship with the English language) "Bring on the empty software.", which is not quite the same thing.

Of course, when Terminator 2 (James Cameron 1991) and Jurassic Park (Steven Spielberg 1993) came out, a sense of awe and wonder was there, not despite them having fantastic digital effects, but because they had them. Because it was new and amazing. But today, that sense of wonder of something new is long gone. How will cinema reinvent itself this time? The studios have tried with 3D but that has not (yet) really worked, and besides, 3D is not something new. 

There are amazing films being made out there, and technical progress is inevitable, and often-times a good thing. The likes of Michael Mann, Abbas Kiarostami and Zhang Ke Jia make wonderful use of the digital possibilities. But that does not mean that some things will not be lost on the way, or that people can succumb to irrational exuberance.

Among the more iconic still images from the world of cinema are the shots of Jean-Luc Godard holding up a piece of film strip, like this one:

Many a cineaste have had themselves photographed in a similar way (myself included). But will such an image be understood by future generations? With the rapid disappearance of analog film, nowadays usually made out of polyester, when will the very idea of the touchable film strip be a thing of the past? The final question is this, what will a future Godard be photographed holding up? 

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Last year I gave a lecture on digital cinema and realism (with some ethical concerns thrown in for good measure) and I might some day publish it here.

Patricia Neal 1926-2010

I've long been a fan of Patricia Neal (when I wrote a review, over a decade ago, of Cookie's Fortune (1999), it was very much about her and very little about anything else), so the news are sad of course. But according to some press information before she died she said "I've had a lovely time." And so have I, all those hours I've spent watching her doing wonders on the screen.

Here's a scene from The Breaking Point (1950), with John Garfield. Possibly Michael Curtiz's best film, and with a final scene so heartbreaking it'll haunt you forever. And she's magnificent, as she usually was.