Stephane Audran | Movie stars

Stephane Audran | Movie stars

Lord Richard Attenborough | Movie stars

Lord Richard Attenborough | Movie stars

Movie Film Stars

Movie Film Stars

Alexandre Astruc

Alexandre Astruc, b. Paris, 1923 1948: Aller-Retour (s); Ulysse et les Mauvaises Rencontres (s). 1952; Le Rideau CramoisilThe Crimson Curtain (s). 1955: Les Mativatses Rencontres. 1958: line Vie. I960: !M Proie fioiir I'Ombre. 1961: [.'Education Sentwnen-talc 61. 1963: Le Puitfs et le Penduk (s). 1964: Evariste Gallois (s). 1966: La Longue Marche, 1%8: Flantmen sur l'AdriatiAstruc is a fascinating example of a man from literary culture identifying his true allegiance to the movies. He holds a special place in the still small library of worthwhile cinema theory, even if his own films rarely live up to all his admirable principles. Une Vie, though, is a perfect collaboration of Maupassant's novel, Astruc's treatment, the photography of Claude Renoir, Roman Vlad's music, and the presence of Maria Schei], Christian Mar-quand, Ivan Desny, Pascals Petit, and Antort-ella Lualdi. Rather out of fashion today, not even the considerably inferior quality of Astruc's other work can prevent it from some future rediscovery. It justifies the man as surely as Night of the Hunter does Charles Laughton. Une Vie is the demonstration of a view of cinema—la camera-stylo—that is a most fruitful critical bond between classical and modern cinema.
Astnic was a critic, a novelist—Les Vacances (45)—and assistant to Marc Allegret on Blanche Fury (47). In 1948, in £cran Francois, he wrote a short article, "The Birth of a New Avant-Garde: La Cam era-Stylo." It argued for a new appreciation of the language of film:
... the cinema will gradually break free from the tyranny of what is visual, from the image far its own sake, from the immediate and concrete demands of the narrative, to become a means of writing just as flexible and subtle as written language.. . . We have tome to realise that the meaning which the silent cinema tried to give birth to through symbolic association exists within the image itself, in the development of the narrative, in every gesture of the characters, in every line of dialogue, in those camera movements which relate objects to objects and characters to objects. All thought, like all feeling, is. a relationship between one human being and another human being. . ..
That can still claim to be the most important critical theory the cinema has yet produced. It led Astruc to the identification of a pantheon that was shared by most of the Cahien group and that enriched the films they made-. Eisen-stein, Welles, Kenoir, Bresson, von Stroheim, Murnau. Hawks, Mizoguchi, Hitchcock, Lang, and Rossellini.
At the same time, it was not difficult to detect the young novelist at work, who looked forward to the cinema's achieving the autonomy of, say, Sartre, Camus, or Faulkner, Astruc's own films showed that in la camdra-stylo he remained very conscious of the pen. His movies relied not only on literary models, but what was often an academic demonstration of his theories. For example, Le Rideav Cramoisi is a very cold film, more engaged by the abstract realization of human connection than actually involved in it. Astruc is capable of passages of extraordinary beauty and utter clarity, but the heart is often left behind. No surprise that he once listed Anthony Mann's Men in War as a favorite film, for in that film Mann achieves an eerie detachment through cinematic grace. Une Vie works because of Maria Schell's insistent emotionalism—a quality that has marred other films, but brings a touching plaintiveness to Une Vie. Elsewhere, Astruc's films have the distinction of blueprints; by contrast, Renoir's sire untidy houses. It is a serious limitation, but Astruc's theory is still correct and vital. No student of the movies should neglect it or leave Une Vie unseen.


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Mary Astor (Lucille Langhanke) (1906-87)

Mary Astor (Lucille Langhanke) (1906-87), b. Quincy, Illinois
Mary As tor's autobiography. My Story, published in 1951, is better written than most similar exercises and much more frank. Dotted through her morf than one hundred movies, there are many signs of an intelligent woman. That those views are too rare was only one of her problems: originally, an ambitious German father had thrust her into the movies; after her affair with John Barrymore, her first husband, Kenneth Hawks, was killed in an air crash; three more marriages ended in divorce, and the second saw the scurrilous publication, in 1936, of alleged and lurid extracts from her diary, including a graphic love affair with playwright George Kaufman. She never stayed a star for more than one year at a time, and she slipped from supporting parts into alcoholism and sessions with an analyst that eventually led to the autobiography. Despite her long career, she disliked Hollywood—though whether for itself or for the way it thwarted her is an open question. Fairly early, she won ii reputation for being independent, and later something stuck from the diary incident; as a result, she had her best chances playing polite bitches or demure snakes in the grass—above all Hammett's Brigid O'Shaughnessy in The Maltese Falcon (41, John Huston). That picture of chronic King did not hinder her genuine warmth as the mothers in Meet Me in St. iMtis (44, Vincente Minnelli) and Little Women (49, Mervyn Le Roy).
She made her debut in 1921 with Sentimental Tommy (John S. Robertson), and worked nomadically without ever being more than a promising newcomer: Bought and Paid For (22, William C. De Mille); Second Fiddle (22, Frank Tuttle); Puritan Passion (23, Tuttle); Success (23, Ralph Ince); Tlte Fighting Coward (24, James Cruze); Beau Brummel (24, Harry-Beaumont); Unguarded Woman (24, Alan Crosland); Inez from Hollywood (24, Alfred E. Green); Don Q, Son of Zorro (24, Donald Crisp); The Scarlet Saint (25, George Archain-baud); The Wise Guy (26, Frank Lloyd); and Don Juan (26, Crosland). That innovatory

sound Him (opposite a Barrymore who would have preferred^ Dolores Costello to his discarded mistress) boosted her, but she rarely got good parts: The Rough Riders (27, Victor Fleming); Two Arabian Knights (27, Lewis Milestone); No Place to Go (27, Le Roy); Dressed to Kill (28, Irving Cummings); and Dry Martini (28, Harry d'Arrast). Despite her subsequent prowess with good dialogue, she failed a test for talkies and was briefly put out of work before Ladies Love Brutes (30, Rowland V. Lee); The Runaway Bride (30, Crisp); Holiday (30. Edward H. Griffith); Other Men's Women (31, William Wellman); The Sin Ship (31, Louis Wolheim); The Royal Bed (31, Lowell Sherman); Smart Woman (31, Gregory La Cava); Red Dust (32, Fleming); The World Changes (33, Le Roy); The Kennel Murder Case (33, Michael Curtiz); Easy to Low (.34, William Kmghley); / Am a Thief (35, Robert Florey); and Page Miss Glory (35, Le Roy). Her career seems to have been enhanced by the diary scandal, for 1936-42 was the period of her best parts: Dodstoorth (36, William Wyler); never more beautiful than in The Prisoner of Zenda (37, John Cromwell); Hurricane (37, John Ford); Listen Darling (38, Edward L. Marin); There's Always a Woman (38. Alexander Hall); pregnant and hilarious during the making of Mia-night (39, Mitchell Leisen); Brigham young (40, Henry Hathaway); winning a best supporting actress Oscar opposite Bette Davis in The Great Lie (41, Edmund Goulding); looking too old in Across the Pacific (42, Huston); and Palm Beach Story (42. Preston Sturges), MGM put her under contract, but only for poor leads or good supporting parts: young Ideas (43, Jtiles Dassin); Thousands Cheer (43, George Sidney); Fiesta (47, Richard Thorpe); Desert Fury (48, Lewis Allen); fine as the hooker in Act of Violence (49, Fred Zin-nemann); and Any Number Can Play (49, Le Roy). Her crack-up meant that she played only small parts thereafter: So This Is Love (53, Gordon Douglas); A Kiss Before Dying (56, Gerd Oswald); The Devil's Hairpin (57, Cornel Wilde); This Hapjiy Feeling (58, Blake Edwards); A Stranger in My Arms (58, Helmut Kautner); Return to Peyton Place (61, Jos6 Ferrer); Youngblood Hawke (64, Delmer Daves); and Hush . . . Hush, Sweet Charlotte (64, Robert Aldrich), After her autobiography, she was encouraged to go on to novels.

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Fred Astaire (Frederick Austerlitz)

Fred Astaire (Frederick Austerlitz) (1899-1987), b. Omaha, Nebraska There is something very suggestive of Americana in the way a Napoleonic battle is turned into a name without roots or etymology. Vet how evocative that name is; run the parts together and the result is as rhythmic as Fre-nesi; separate them and it could be Fred a Star or Fred on a staircase, astride the stair— thus Astaire, /'esprit d'escaiier.
It is proper to respond in this way because so much of Astaire is a matter of stylish carriage, and I do not think it accidental that the name evokes some specially serene agility. This leads to the questions, is Astaire a movie actor? and what makes for great acting in the cinema? There is a good case for arguing that, in the event of a visit by creatures from a far universe, ignorant of the cinema, one would do best to show them some steps by Astaire as the clinching evidence of the medium's potential. Better that than the noble actors— Olivier, Jannings, Brando, Barrymore, et al. Astaire is the most refined human expression of the musical, which is in turn the extreme manifestation of pure cinema: the lifelike presentation of human beings in magical, dreamlike, and imaginary situations. That might be thought to imply that Astaire's dancing depends on illusion. Not so. He was always the most technically exacting and ambitious of screen dancers, the most eager to perform in uninterrupted setups. In the 1920s, it would have been possible to see him dancing virtuoso routines on stage. The spatial and temporal continuity of theatre would have made clear how difficult the feat was. Cinema wipes away the sense of difficult)' and substitutes the ease that permits every transformation needed by the chronic dreamer. Astaire is not a great dancer so much as a great filmed dancer. Nureyev on film is less than in the

flesh, because he is himself most stimulated by an actual audience and a real leap. Astaire, like al! dreamers, is a perfectionist who loved to work in the feverish secrecy of a studio toward the flawless image of his own grace. He lends himself to the detachment of cinema because he is a rather cold, even indistinct personality who celebrates the spirit of elegance as channeled through elaborate, rapid, photographed motion.
Such a notion was underlined by Astaire's latter-day appearance in "straight" parts. After Silk Stockings, in 1957, he largely gave himself up to television spectaculars and to acting. The first sour fruit of this was On the Beach (59, Stanley Kramer), If anyone had ever doubted Kramer's crassness, here was final proof. For he cast Astaire as a motor-racing driver, a man essentially hidden in the shell of a car. Surely nuclear holocaust could have been as glibly dramatized by Astaire's playing a golfer? Then at least we might have enjoyed his dainty prowling round the greens. Yet once Astaire was asked to partake of earnest melodrama, it was a strain to watch him at all. In play-acting, he is downright shifty: like a philosopher at a bingo session, there is the embarrassing and depleting sense of a man having been caught on the blind side, but gamely trying to be polite. Furthermore, drama blurred his appearance. In On the Beach, he is sometimes disheveled, which is heresy against the perpetual grooming of his characteristic work. This applied as much to Finian's Rainbow (68, Francis Ford Coppola), a respectful and nostalgic tribute to his greatness, as to his other totally mediocre films of the 1960s: The Pleasure of His Company (61, George Seaton); The Notorious Landlady (62, Richard Quine); The Midas Run (69, Alf Kjellin); and The Towering Inferno (74, John Cuillermin).
In musicals, too, Astaire is the man without character; sometimes not so far from the man without humanity. But in the musicals, this is not so much a shortcoming as an audacious emphasis on style. Astaire is preeminently the saint of 1930s sophistication, the butterfly in motion till he dies, whose enchanting light voice kids the sentimentality of his songs. (He is a great singer—no wonder all the songwriters wanted him—who treats the song with reverence.) He is the man about town, empty of personality, opinions, and warmth, but a man who carries himself matchlessly. There is something of the eighteenth-century dandy in his preference for taking nothing seriously, save for the articulation of his superb movement.


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