The aftershock effect

Some films were disasters of such magnitude, they changed cinema for ever. David Thomson reflects on a higher class of failure

* David Thomson
*
o David Thomson
o The Guardian,
o Friday September 12 2008

Greed (1924)

The film that showed movies could be uncomfortable

You can talk of Greed as a ruin, if you are inclined. That means despairing of a system that would let a nine or 10-hour monster survive as about 140 minutes of rare sensation. It is part of the culture of ruin that points to a gathering of memorials: like Rich Schmidlin's reassembly with the use of stills, which runs to four hours; like Herman Weinberg's book The Complete Greed, which prints a lot of those stills. Some people even mention Frank Norris's novel McTeague: A Story of San Francisco, published in 1899. And then there is Greed itself, plainly a masterpiece, a model of a kind of psychological realism that shocked most people, because it gave them no one in the film "to like".

There is the point: a movie that might feel like the great realist novels, at least until Erich von Stroheim used the visionary trigger in film to show the characters' inner states - and then, as they became more dependent on loneliness or madness, greed or desire, fear or violence, we shrank back from them even more forcefully. All that is there, still. And even if hardly one von Stroheim film is intact, what does that mean except that he made ruined films? That is his lesson. Learn to regard so many films as ghosts of themselves.

So Von Stroheim had had his falling out with Irving Thalberg at Universal over Merry-Go-Round. He went to the Goldwyn Company and made a deal to do Norris's novel - he would write and direct it himself. The schedule was said to be nine months, and the cost $470,000. That was not a ridiculous sum.

But as Von Stroheim cut his film, so Goldwyn entered into the merger with Metro and Mayer. By a narrative stroke that Stroheim the fatalist must have relished, he was back under the command of Thalberg. There was a dispute. There were screenings of the full-length version. Some fairly smart people saw it and judged it overdone. So Greed was released and you can say it is a bastard version of its proper self. There is no doubt but that MGM betrayed itself by throwing away the cut material, though that was standard practice at the time. Otherwise, it behaved like a movie studio, like the kind of place that sold pictures for its living. And all one can say about Greed is that it is essential, frenzied yet under control, and one of the great indicators of film and its future. It is still hard to make pictures about people viewers do not like - at the movies, the audience is afraid of the dark.
The Magnificent Ambersons (1942)

The film that proved studios couldn't handle a free spirit

There is only one way to start - by saying that this might have been the greatest of American pictures, the clear and present expression of the tragedy that occurred in when such things as the motor car, personal obsession and "development" eclipsed the late 18th-century republic. Just as Orson Welles spoke with reverence and nostalgia (as if he had been there) about the "olde England" behind Chimes at Midnight, so this is his bow to "olde America", and the surest sign of how much a very modern man loved the past.

I am speaking as if the movie we have is not our great tragedy. But it is, in two ways; as the masterwork on the screen, and as the story of its own ruin - a story that becomes George Orson Welles just as fully as the on-screen disaster is fit for George Amberson Minafer.

It was the second film of his RKO contract, made in the dismay that followed Kane. It was from a novel by Booth Tarkington, published in 1918, and it developed from a radio version in which Welles had played George. For the film, he gave that part to Tim Holt, and chose to be the narrator. Thus we have the gravest 27-year-old reading the decline of the Ambersons into the national record. Stanley Cortez did the photography, and he was slower than Gregg Toland on Kane. But he had his own genius, and he was well suited to the deep continuities of space and time required by the old house and the placid naturalism of life there. And Ambersons may also contain the greatest ensemble acting in American film.

So, the film was shot by the end of 1941. Early in 1942, after throwing a rough cut together, Welles went away to Rio, leaving Robert Wise to edit the film and his manager Jack Moss to guard it. They tried. They cabled Welles. He stayed away. It was his momentous decision. And in his absence, RKO previewed the film and found raucous laughter in a crowd of kids. They intervened. It seems likely that Welles' version would have been 132 minutes. RKO released the picture at 88. Much of the closing material was gone. A studio ending was tacked on. Years later, the cut footage - the last hope of rescue - was apparently dumped in the ocean. The full film was lost, but its full meaning was vindicated.
The Night of the Hunter (1955)

The film that told audiences they didn't always know best

I recall the first time at Dartmouth College in the late 1970s when I tried showing The Night of the Hunter to Americans. The kids had no trouble with the film - though it scared them. But the adults (the senior faculty) found the picture silly and fanciful, and they remembered that it had done very badly when it opened - so badly, indeed, that Charles Laughton gave up all thoughts of directing again. Never forget that it can take nearly 50 years for a picture to go from crushing ignominy to being accepted at the Library of Congress as a work that must be preserved.

The producer Paul Gregory was working with Laughton on stage productions, and he thought to follow up on the actor's occasional feeling that he'd love to make a movie. They picked on a novel, by Davis Grubb about a mad "preacher" who goes after stolen money possessed by two young children. So he marries their widowed mother. He kills her. And he pursues the children across one of the great nightmare filmscapes.

The plot thickens here. James Agee was asked to do the screenplay and he delivered a work too long and too dependent on the literary power of the novel. Laughton was compelled to rewrite the script himself. He hired the great Stanley Cortez to do the photography, and asked him to look at DW Griffith pictures to get that simplicity of vision that becomes a fairy story. Hilyard Brown did the sets, and Walter Schumann the music.

This was a rare team, but it would have been as nothing without the cast. Robert Mitchum - who played the preacher - helped get the financing for the picture, but then imagine the depth of insight that could see through Mitchum's deliberate casualness and indifference over work and guess that he could be inspired, elemental and quite monstrous. Shelley Winters (the widow) was a student of Laughton - so she was natural casting. But to go to Lillian Gish as the strict fairy godmother was intuitive in a way that almost lets us see Laughton the actor. And still Laughton - famously inarticulate as an actor - had to know how to direct.

No, of course it doesn't look or feel like an American film of 1955, but at that moment it was essential that some movies begin to do things differently. The Night of the Hunter is not just a great film, it is among the great expressions of America's sense of childhood giving way to warped adulthood. Everything that was "wrong" about it was right - because an artist had perceived the work as a whole and brought it home. It was the public that was wrong, and nothing is more alarming.
Cleopatra (1963)

The film that killed the self-indulgent costume epic

Long before this monster of its own doom dragged itself across the wide screen, the picture had been stifled by its fuss and furore. So what chance does a real queen of Egypt have when trying to emerge from the embrace of Elizabeth Taylor? No wonder, then, if, despite all the research on period, she and Richard Burton manage to look like a couple from mid-America "enjoying" themselves at Caesars Palace.

It's not that Taylor is bad in the film. She was always, beneath all the fuss, a smart actress who knew her range very well. But that meant she was shrewd enough to know there was little point in doing Cleopatra as a thinking person's epic - sooner or later, it's sex and the asp. It's spectacle, and yet the strange rescuing decision made by Darryl F Zanuck as the film spun out of control was to make it intelligent.

The whole thing had begun as a Walter Wanger production, with Rouben Mamoulian directing. Sets were built at Pinewood, and Cleopatra herself caught a mighty chill that turned to pneumonia. She didn't perk up until she got to Rome, with Joseph Mankiewicz in charge. She waited while he made the script literate, sitting on an Egyptian throne with her then husband, Eddie Fisher, and then along came Burton. Imagine the forlorn task of Mankiewicz trying to make these sex-and-publicity freaks sound Shavian.

All you can say is that the film got done - for $44m, more or less. It earned $26m. Worse by far was the gulf opening up between publicity and reality. The picture business had always been for barkers and come-on artists - Wait for next week! Wait for Gone With the Wind! We did, and we judged that the wait had been worthwhile. But the years of publicity and paparazzi on Cleopatra could not hide a sluggish, dull film without wit, beauty, sex or blood. The only people to emerge with credit are Pamela Brown and Roddy McDowall, but that's not quite enough.
Heaven's Gate (1981)

The film that closed a studio, and tied down the American auteur movement

It was all too easy in 1981, and for years afterwards, to say that Heaven's Gate had gone out of control. Final Cut, the excellent, pained and nearly confessional book by Steven Bach - one of the United Artists executives who took the fall in the film's disaster - gave an exactly plausible account of where and how control had been given up. That book remains one of the most frank and alarming descriptions of the film business written from the inside. Bach takes on a good deal of the blame himself, which makes it fairer for him to point out the arbitrary outrages by Michael Cimino, the writer-director who had been hired as a saviour by United Artists, and who was given every indulgence allowed to a great artist. So I am not saying that Heaven's Gate might not have turned out better with more modesty and an urge to compromise on all sides.

Still, in the four or five times I have looked at it since 1981, and in the most recent re-viewing, where fate spared me the prolonged opening scenes in Harvard (actually Oxford), so that I began as James Averill comes to Wyoming on the train, I thought it was close enough to a real film to leave no worthwhile gap.

Of course, it is not impossible to have a good film that destroys not just itself, but its business enterprise and many settled ideas of what makes a movie. More or less, Greed, Gone With the Wind, Citizen Kane and Apocalypse Now all build that pattern. But there is a rich American tradition (Melville, James, Ives, Pollock, Parker) that seeks a mighty dispersal of what has gone before. In America, there are great innovations in art that suddenly create fields of apparent emptiness. They may seem like omissions or mistakes at first. Yet in time we come to see them as meant for our exploration.

So I'd like to stress in Heaven's Gate, the uncertainty that exists wherever we look - and which at first seemed so offensive in so big and expensive a film. Spending that much, why not establish the emotional facts in the triangle of central romantic triangle? Yet as I see the film again, their yearning glances, those things unsaid, the very doubt, become as fruitful as the wide-open landscapes of Wyoming - beautiful, dangerous, extreme, inhuman. Wouldn't it be something if Cimino had found a way of looking at his characters that was affected by the scale of the place?

That may be enough to persuade you to look again. But there are other virtues: Vilmos Zsigmond's heartbreaking photography; the music - a prelude to Ken Burns and films like Cold Mountain but still not surpassed; the eastern European faces and the savagery of Wyoming; the murderous violence; the perfect parable for control and the lack of control in using the great spaces. And the very title - Heaven's Gate and hell's journey. Yes, it was a disaster, but disasters are 10-a-penny. It is also a wounded monster.

· Adapted from 'Have You Seen...?': A Personal Introduction to 1,000 Films by David Thomson, published by Allen Lane on September 25