by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2018 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Last night Charles and I watched a movie that reminded me of
how much I’ve missed without the ability to do advance recordings of TV shows,
which has largely cut me off from the legacy of classic (and often
not-so-classic but still quite interesting) films on the Turner Classic Movies
channel: George Stevens: A Filmmaker’s Journey, a 1984 documentary produced, written and directed by Stevens’ son,
George Stevens, Jr. It helped that it was made recently enough that the
filmmakers got serious interviews but long enough ago that many of the people
who worked with Stevens — Katharine Hepburn, Fred Astaire, Ginger Rogers,
producer Pandro S. Berman and others — were still alive and available to be
interviewed. There are basically two stories about the career of George
Stevens: the “white legend” that after a series of commercially successful and
entertaining but not especially profound movies, his service in World War II
(where he commanded the camera crews that recorded the D-Day invasion of
Normandy as it was happening) and in particular his presence when the Dachau
concentration camp was liberated. Some of the gruesome images of bodies piled
up like cordwood are shown — oddly, in color from George Stevens’ own home
movies rather than the official footage in black-and-white, which tends to make
them just a bit less gruesome though still disgusting — and the “white legend”
of Stevens’ career is that his wartime experiences in general and photographing
the opening of Dachau in particular made him into a serious filmmaker anxious
to use his medium and his talents to tell moving, serious stories about the human
condition. The “black legend” is that the experience of photographing World War
II and being on the scene when the horrors of the Holocaust were revealed to
the outside world for the first time caused Stevens to turn his back on the
sort of light-hearted comedy he did best and make a series of increasingly
leaden, pretentious films that aspired to Great Art and achieved only bathos.
Oddly, while I’ve enjoyed quite a few of Stevens’ pre-war films — including his
first feature, Bachelor Bait, a
1934 RKO movie about a dating service that took some unlikely material and did
quite a lot with it, as well as the acknowledged classics like Alice
Adams, Swing Time, A Damsel in Distress, Gunga Din and Woman of the Year
(the first Katharine Hepburn-Spencer Tracy movie and one for which Hepburn
specifically asked for Stevens — though other sources indicate she only asked
for Stevens because her favorite director and lifelong friend George Cukor was
otherwise employed at the time) as well as The More the Merrier, which somehow has eluded me even though it has a
first-rate reputation and one of the scenes in it — in which hero Joel McCrea
and heroine Jean Arthur are talking government shop-talk while making out just
this side sort of actual Production Code-verboten sex on screen — is shown here and was specifically
praised by Stevens’ contemporary Frank Capra both in his autobiography and his
interview here — I’ve generally been less sympathetic to the “serious” films he
made after World War II. A Place in the Sun seems to me to be a McCarthy-era exercise in turning
a socially conscious story, Theodore Dreiser’s An American Tragedy, into a big-time soap opera (the scene excerpted
here, in which Montgomery Clift goes to a fancy party and Elizabeth Taylor
cruises him big-time, seemed in this context to be a remake of the party scene
in Alice Adams with the genders
reversed — Clift as Katharine Hepburn and Taylor as Fred MacMurray). I remember
watching Shane with Charles and
liking it, though more for Alan Ladd’s understated performance (he deserved an
Academy Award but got screwed out of it because it was his last film under his
Paramount contract, and the “suits” at Paramount were so incensed that he
signed with Warner Bros. instead of renewing with them they ordered Paramount’s
employees in the Academy not to
vote for him) than Stevens’ overwrought direction; and Giant is all too accurately described by imdb.com reviewer
as “merely a ponderous soap opera,” though I would add to that, “except for the
30 minutes of this 3 ½-hour film in which James Dean is on screen.”
Fortunately, Stevens fils decided
to represent Giant by its best
scene; Jett Rink (James Dean) has just discovered oil on the little patch of
ground on the big Reata ranch he inherited from the sister of ranch owner Bick
Benedict (Rock Hudson). As I described it in my notes on Giant after Charles and I watched it together, “Once he
hits his gusher Dean becomes an apparition, coated head-to-toe in oil, visually
linked not only with oil as a symbol of sudden wealth but also oil as a symbol
of primordial nature. In the film’s most intensely dramatic scene, he goes
forth to the big house at Reata, dripping with oil, plants his black hand on
the column holding up the awning over the virginal white front porch of Reata,
then confronts Hudson (who is wearing a white suit that matches the exterior of
his house) and punches him out while two of Hudson’s friends hold him back from
retaliating. It’s a marvelous moment, and it’s linked to East of Eden
not only dramatically but thematically as
well; Jett Rink hopes that by becoming rich he will win the affection, or at
least respect, of his surrogate father, Bick Benedict.” I haven’t seen any of
the three films Stevens made after Giant: The Diary of Anne Frank
(represented here by some noir-ish
clips of the streets of occupied Amsterdam and some effective use of sound to
depict the omnipresence of the Nazi occupiers and the vulnerability of the
Franks in their attic), The Greatest Story Ever Told (Stevens’ mega-flop on the life of Jesus — for all
its tackiness and demented silliness, Cecil B. DeMille’s 1927 silent The
King of Kings remains my favorite Jesus
biopic — and it didn’t help that Stevens’ stated intent in making The
Greatest Story Ever Told was to create a
version of the life of Jesus both believers and skeptics would like — lots of
luck with that, as later
filmmakers like Martin Scorsese and Darren Aronofsky have discovered with their attempts at post-modern Biblicals), and The
Only Game in Town (with Warren Beatty as a Vegas
card dealer and Elizabeth Taylor, in her later zaftig incarnation, as a showgirl with whom he has an
affair — Stevens, Jr. doesn’t mention this film at all even though it was Stevens, Sr.’s last — he
interviewed Beatty but only to get out of him a marvelous anecdote that Beatty,
as producer as well as star of Bonnie and Clyde, wanted the gunshots boosted in volume because he
liked the way Stevens had done that in Shane, and when the film was shown in London the shots
didn’t ring out the way he wanted them to because the projectionist was
deliberately turning the volume down; when Beatty questioned him about this,
the projectionist said, “I’m saving you from bad sound editing. This is the
worst-mixed picture I’ve shown since Shane”).
George Stevens: A Filmmakers’ Journey suffers from some especially bad cases of
“first-itis,” my name for the tendency of biographers in all media to assert
that the people they’re biographing were the first to do something even though
there were plenty of other people doing it before. Stevens fils gives Stevens père for the approach to comedy of Laurel and Hardy, and
in particular the deliberate pace of the Laurel and Hardy films compared to the
frenetic pace of previous comedies, without mentioning that Stevens was only
the cinematographer on the early Laurel and Hardy films and it was their
director, Leo McCarey, who worked that out (and even before Laurel and Hardy
there was Charlie Chaplin, whom Laurel had understudied in the music halls and
vaudeville and who was the first comedian to slow down his stories to delineate
character as well as get the audience to laugh). We also get extraordinary
interviews from Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire’s longtime choreographer, Hermes
Pan, saying that the big “Never Gonna Dance” number from Stevens’
Astaire-Rogers film Swing Time
was the first time the team had staged a seduction scene on the dance floor —
when Mark Sandrich had done that with “Night and Day” from The Gay
Divorcée two years earlier. (Aside from
being my namesake, Sandrich was an underrated director largely because he died
in the 1940’s and therefore didn’t live long enough to be interviewed by
serious film writers.) Nonetheless, George Stevens: A Filmmaker’s
Journey is a compelling documentary, yet
more evidence that they really don’t make ’em like they used to: the films of
the 1930’s and 1940’s could be naïve and frankly unrealistic in their depiction
of human life, but they could also be subtle and brilliant in a way that the
Production Code restrictions oddly encouraged — since they couldn’t show people
openly expressing their sexuality, talented directors like Stevens, Ernst
Lubitsch, William Wyler, Billy Wilder and Orson Welles figured out ways to get
the message across with subtlety and sophistication. It’s also worth mentioning
that the film explores Stevens’ courageous resistance to Cecil B. DeMille’s
McCarthyite attempt to expel Joseph L. Mankiewicz from the presidency of the
Screen Directors’ Guild in 1950 — Stevens stepped down from the Guild’s board
to protest DeMille’s secretive tactics, though when this episode is told today
it’s usually John Ford who emerges as the hero. (DeMille would go after Mankiewicz in 1950, the year Mankiewicz
made his best film, All About Eve!)
