About the Author
David Thomson has taught film studies at Dartmouth College, has served on the selection committee for the New York Film Festival, and has been a regular contributor to The Guardian, The Independent, The New York Times, The Nation, Movieline, The New Republic, and Salon. His other books include “Have You Seen . . . ?”: A Personal Introduction to 1,000 Films; Showman: The Life of David O. Selznick; and three works of fiction: Suspects, Silver Light, and Warren Beatty and Desert Eyes. Thomson lives in San Francisco with his family.
From the Hardcover edition.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
CHAPTER ONE
A
Abbott and Costello:
Bud (William A.) Abbott (1895-74),
b. Asbury Park, New Jersey; and
Lou Costello (Louis Francis Cristillo) (1906-59), b. Paterson, New Jersey
The marital chemistry (or the weird mix of blunt instrument and black hole) in coupling is one of the most persistent themes in tragedy and comedy. At their best, you can't have one without the other. More than fifty years after they first tried it, Abbott and Costello's "Who's On First?" sketch is about the best remedy I know for raising laughter in a mixed bag of nuts-or for making the collection of forlorn individuals a merry mob.
Many people know the routine (written, like most of their stuff, by John Grant) by heart. Amateurs can get a good laugh out of it. But Bud and Lou achieve something lyrical, hysterical, and mythic. Watch them do the sketch and you feel the energy and hope of not just every comedian there ever was. You feel Beckett, Freud, and Wittgenstein (try it!). You see every marriage there ever was. You rejoice and despair at the impossibility of language. You wonder whether God believed in harmony, or in meetings that eternally proved our loneliness.
Lou is the one who has blood pressure, and Bud hasn't. So they are together in the world, yet together alone, doomed to explain things to each other. They are companions, halves of a whole, chums, lovers if you like. But they are a raw display of hatred, opposition, and implacable difference. They are also far better than all the amateurs. And if Lou is the performer, the valiant seeker of order, while Bud is the dumb square peg, the one who seems oblivious of audience, still, nobody did it better. If I were asked to assemble a collection of things to manifest America for the stranger, "Who's On First?" would be there-and it might be the first piece of film I'd use.
At the same time, they are not very good, rather silly, not really that far above the ocean of comedians. It isn't even that one can separate their good work from the poor. Nor is it that "Who's On First?" is simply and mysteriously superior to all the rest of their stuff. No, it's only that that routine feels an inner circle of dismay within all the others, the suffocating mantle next to Lou's heart. It isn't good, or superior; it's divine. Which is why no amount of repetition dulls it at all. I think I could watch it every day and feel the thrills and the dread as if for the first time.
They bumped into each other. Bud was a theatre cashier where Lou was playing (around 1930), and he grudgingly took the job when Lou's partner was sick. They were doing vaudeville and radio for ten years before they got their movie break at Universal: One Night in the Tropics (40, A. Edward Sutherland) was their first film, but Buck Privates (41, Arthur Lubin) was the picture that made them. There were twenty-three more films in the forties, a period for which they were steadily in the top five box-office attractions. Buck Privates, and their whole appeal, reflected the unexpected intimacies of army life.
They broke up in 1957, long since outmoded by the likes of Martin and Lewis. But there again, Abbott and Costello are the all-talking model (as opposed to the semi-silence of Laurel and Hardy) of two guys trapped in one tent.
Costello made one film on his own-for he had great creative yearnings-The 30-Foot Bride of Candy Rock (59, Sidney Miller). He died of a heart attack, which had always seemed about to happen. Bud lived on, doing next to nothing.
Ken (Klaus) Adam, b. Berlin, Germany, 1921
At the age of thirteen, Adam came to Britain, and stayed: he would be educated as an architect at London University and the Bartlett School of Architecture, and he served in the RAF during the war. It was in 1947 that he entered the British picture business, doing set drawings for This Was a Woman (48, Tim Whelan). Thereafter, he rose steadily as an assistant art director on The Queen of Spades (48, Thorold Dickinson); The Hidden Room (49, Edward Dmytryk); Your Witness (50, Robert Montgomery); Captain Horatio Hornblower (51, Raoul Walsh); The Crimson Pirate (52, Robert Siodmak); Helen of Troy (56, Robert Wise); he did uncredited work on Around the World in 80 Days (56, Michael Anderson), and assistant work on Ben-Hur (59, William Wyler).
Clearly, he was adept at getting hired by American directors, or on Hollywood productions, yet he did not seem overly interested in going to Hollywood. Indeed, he built a career as art director and then production designer in Britain, and he would be vitally associated with the design look and the huge, hi-tech interiors of the James Bond films: Soho Incident (56, Vernon Sewell); Night of the Demon (57, Jacques Tourneur); The Angry Hills (59, Robert Aldrich); The Rough and the Smooth (59, Siodmak); The Trials of Oscar Wilde (60, Ken Hughes); Dr. No (62, Terence Young); Sodom and Gomorrah (62, Aldrich); Dr. Strangelove (64, Stanley Kubrick); Woman of Straw (64, Basil Dearden); Goldfinger (64, Guy Hamilton); The Ipcress File (65, Sidney J. Furie); Thunderball (65, Young); Funeral in Berlin (66, Hamilton); You Only Live Twice (67, Lewis Gilbert); Chitty Chitty Bang Bang (68, Hughes); Goodbye, Mr. Chips (69, Herbert Ross); to America for The Owl and the Pussycat (70, Ross).
An international figure now, he worked increasingly in America, while keeping his British attachment to Bond and Kubrick: Diamonds Are Forever (71, Hamilton); Sleuth (72, Joseph L. Mankiewicz); The Last of Sheila (73, Ross); winning an Oscar for Barry Lyndon (75, Kubrick); Madam Kitty (76, Tinto Brass); The Seven-Per-Cent Solution (76, Ross); The Spy Who Loved Me (77, Gilbert); Moonraker (79, Gilbert).
Illness caused a significant gap in his work in the early eighties, at which time his only credit was as design consultant on Pennies from Heaven (81, Ross). Since his return, he has been based in America and Bond-less. He also seems to work on more modest projects, while staying loyal to Herb Ross: King David (85, Bruce Beresford); Crimes of the Heart (86, Beresford); The Deceivers (88, Nicholas Meyer); Dead Bang (89, John Frankenheimer); The Freshman (90, Andrew Bergman); The Doctor (91, Randa Haines); Undercover Blues (93, Ross); Addams Family Values (93, Barry Sonnenfeld); then back to Britain, with another Oscar, on The Madness of King George (94, Nicholas Hytner); Boys on the Side (95, Ross); Bogus (96, Norman Jewison); In & Out (97, Frank Oz); The Out-of-Towners (99, Sam Weisman).
Isabelle Adjani, b. Paris, 1955
There is something so frank, so modern in her feelings, yet so classical in her aura, so passionate and so wounded, that Isabelle Adjani seems made to play Sarah Bernhardt one day. Why not? She is a natural wearer of costume capable of making us believe that the "period" world we are watching is happening now. She is bold, a mistress of her career, and has been a fiercely equal partner in her romantic relationships with Bruno Nuytten, Warren Beatty, and Daniel Day-Lewis.
Her mother was German, and her father Algerian and Turkish. When only a teenager, she was invited to join the Comédie Française, playing to great praise in Lorca and Molière. She has been making movies since the age of fourteen: Le Petit Bougnat (69, Bernard T. Michel); Faustine ou le Bel été (71, Nina Companeez); La Gifle (74, Claude Pinoteau); and made an international impact as the love-crazed girl in L'Histoire d'Adèle H. (75, François Truffaut), for which she won an Oscar nomination.
She was on the brink again in The Tenant (76, Roman Polanski); Barocco (76, André Téchiné); Violette et François (76, Jacques Rouffio); made an uneasy American debut in The Driver (78, Walter Hill); as a woman infatuated with the vampire in Nosferatu, Phantom der Nacht (79, Werner Herzog); as Emily in The Bronté Sisters (79, Téchiné); Possession (80, Andrzej Zulawski); and Clara et les Chics Types (80, Jacques Monnet).
She played the central victim, a version of Jean Rhys, in Quartet (81, James Ivory); L'Année Prochaine si tout va bien (81, Jean-Loup Hubert); Tout Feu, Toute Flamme (82, Jean-Paul Rappeneau); Mortelle Randonnée (82, Claude Miller); Doktor Faustus (82, Frank Seitz); as Antonieta Rivas Mercadi, a melodramatic arts patron, in Antonieta (82, Carlos Saura); was stark naked for much of L'été Meurtrier (82, Jean Becker), something between an erotic force of nature and a village idiot; Subway (85, Luc Besson); entirely wasted in Ishtar (87, Elaine May).
She was the producer as well as the star of Camille Claudel (88, Bruno Nuytten), her most overwhelming and characteristic performance, as a woman in love with art, exhilaration, and danger. Once more, she was nominated for the Oscar. If only Warren Beatty could have given her a role as strong. After four years, she made La Reine Margot (94, Patrice Chéreau). Granted that she does films so seldom, why do Diabolique (96, Jeremiah S. Chechik), with Sharon Stone, or La Repentie (02, Laetitia Masson)?
Ben (Benjamin Geza) Affleck, b. Berkeley, California, 1972
Here is a test of critical responsibility. On the one hand, I have a soft spot for Mr. Affleck in that he is the only actor who has played, or is ever likely to play, the man who founded the school I attended. I refer to Edward (or Ned) Alleyne, the Shakespearian actor-manager and founder of Dulwich College, as offered in Shakespeare in Love (98, John Madden). I daresay I would be joined in this sentiment by other Old Alleynians-Michael Powell, Clive Brook, Leslie Howard, Raymond Chandler, P. G. Wodehouse, Michael Ondaatje, and Paul Mayersberg, among others. But I have heard not one word from any of them, or from anyone, come to that, to dispute my other view that Mr. Affleck is boring, complacent, and criminally lucky to have got away with everything so far. If there was any doubt in my mind it was settled by the mere presence-and it wasn't anything more than mere-of Affleck ...
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