A Rake's Progress: Lubitsch's Heaven Can Wait

"A poignant sadness infiltrates the director's gayest moments," writes Andrew Sarris of Ernst Lubitsch in The American Cinema, "and it is this counterpoint between sadness and gaiety that represents the Lubitsch touch." Of all the Lubitsch movies I've seen, I don't believe any illustrates that statement better than Heaven Can Wait (1943). Seemingly a light-hearted bauble of a movie, the film has running beneath its whimsical surface an unmistakable undercurrent of melancholy. This is not the mordant black comedy of a disillusioned idealist turned cynic, but the detached, bemused comedy of a man who, as Sarris puts it, recognizes "that we all eventually lose the game of life but that we should still play the game according to the rules."

As the movie opens, a wizened gentlemen of 70 years presents himself to a tall, well-groomed but slightly sinister-looking man sitting at a desk in a large, sparsely furnished, stylized Technicolor representation of an office, whom he addresses as "Your excellency." The gentleman is the recently deceased Henry Van Cleve (Don Ameche), and the man at the desk is the devil (Laird Cregar). Henry is resignedly presenting himself for admittance to hell. But the devil demands that Henry first explain why he thinks he belongs there, and Henry starts to relate in flashback his life of misdeeds. "Perhaps the best way to tell you the story of my life is to tell you about the women in my life," he begins. With this line, Lubitsch, the master of Continental sexual innuendo, immediately lures us in: The movie is going to be all about Henry's sexual peccadillos, surely.

Based on a play by the Hungarian playwright Laszlo Bus-Fekete called Birthdays, Heaven Can Wait has been relocated to the upper-class New York City of the late 1800s and early 1900s. Indeed, the movie is organized around the events that take place on several of Henry's notable birthdays. In relating these birthdays to the viewer, Henry tells us about significant events in his life, about the progress of his "sentimental education" in relation to women, and especially about himself. By the end of the movie Henry has revealed more about his true nature than he recognizes, and we have come to know Henry better than he knows himself.

On his fifteenth birthday Henry is plied with champagne and seduced by the French maid, recently hired by his mother to keep up with the changing social fashions of the time. At his 26th birthday party, Henry elopes with his strait-laced cousin's plucky fiancée, Martha (Gene Tierney), a rich young woman from Kansas desperate to escape her hickish parents and live in the big city. Ten years later, on his 36th birthday and 10th wedding anniversary, he must travel to Kansas with his impish grandfather (Charles Coburn) and try to persuade Martha, who has left him because of her suspicions of his philandering, to come home with him. This long sequence is one of the most charming and humorous in the movie, with Ameche, Tierney, Coburn, and also Eugene Pallette and Marjorie Main as Martha's parents all at their comic peak.

The mood of the movie begins to change perceptibly at the celebration of Henry and Martha's 25th anniversary. Henry, who has noticed that Martha has been spending afternoons away from home, suspects her of having an affair. When he hints at his suspicions to her, she responds with humor: "Why, Henry, I do believe you're jealous." She laughs off his suspicions by explaining that she hasn't been feeling well and has been seeing a doctor. Relieved, Henry waltzes with her in the hallway while the other guests are celebrating in the parlor. This is the last we see of Martha; within a few months she is dead. At 60, Henry is still squiring pretty girls around town and buying them expensive presents, but he seems a bit lost, and is reduced to asking his rather condescending son for money. By his 70th birthday, Henry is a bed-ridden invalid, but still fascinated by women, and smitten by his attractive young nurse.

The tone of the film is light throughout, but even its lightest moments are tinged with a certain sadness. Always we are aware of the unstoppable passage of time; the very choice of Henry's birthdays as a unifying and transitional device underscores this idea. In the events of his life there is a pattern of repetition that frequently reminds us of the circularity of time whirling around like the hands of a clock. When Martha decides to forgive Henry and return home with him from Kansas, sneaking away from her parents' farmhouse in the middle of the night with Henry and Grandfather Van Cleve, she calls it "a second elopement." On his 26th birthday Henry is scolded by his mother for staying out all night. Nearly 35 years later, Henry is scolded by his grown son for the same reason. We first see Henry as a baby in his crib, being cared for by his mother and grandmother. As an old man at the end of the movie, he is again in his bed, being cared for by a nurse. It almost makes you think of Jaques' seven ages of man speech in As You Like It.

As the parade of family characters passes by, it is interesting to note how they bear out the old cliché that personalities seem to skip generations. This certainly appears to be true of the male line of the Van Cleve family. Henry has more in common with his rascal grandfather than he does with his own staid and humorless father. Similarly, Henry's son more closely resembles his grandfather (Henry's father) than he does the irresponsible and pleasure-loving Henry. Henry is never shown holding down any kind of job. Yet his son, by the time he is in his early 30s, is a serious-minded executive running the family business (whatever it is—such practical details have no place in Henry's life story as he relates it) and, in a clear case of role reversal, doling out an allowance to his own father.

Death is directly referred to only at the beginning when Henry presents himself to the devil for judgment and again briefly after Martha dies. Yet the entire movie actually takes place after Henry is dead, and he is literally a dead man telling us the story of his life. Even though not directly mentioned, several other deaths occur offscreen in the intervals between Henry's birthdays—first his grandmother, then his father, then between his 36th and 51st birthdays both his mother and his grandfather. The family butler, Flogdell, appears at several points in the movie. Then suddenly after Henry's 60th birthday the butler again appears, and he is a different, younger man.

Much of the movie takes place in the enclosed world of the Van Cleves' mansion, a place so insular that events like a world war and the Great Depression pass by without a mention and seem to leave the cushioned lives of its inhabitants untouched. As the years pass, the interior decor changes too, from the cluttered Victorian style filled with William Morris-type patterns and much elaborate ornamentation to a simpler style. Several key scenes take place in the library. At Henry's 26th birthday, he sneaks into the library to be with Martha, and it is here that he persuades her to elope with him. Their 25th anniversary finds them again alone in the library while their guests wait in the parlor. It is here that the scene where Henry becomes jealous and Martha first reveals her illness occurs. Late in the movie, Henry and his grown son are alone in the library, and Henry is trying to persuade his son to hire a young woman to come to the house and read to him. Henry wanders around the library as he talks, walks up to a bookcase, and idly takes a book from the shelf. It is a book called How to Please Your Husband, the same book that Henry, pursuing Martha around town the first time he laid eyes on her, saw her buy in Brentano's Book Store nearly 35 years earlier.

The idea of relatively lightweight actors like Don Ameche and the pre-Laura Gene Tierney playing the leads in a Lubitsch film might seem anomalous. After all, here is a director who worked with some of the greatest performers of the time, people like Gary Cooper, Fredric March, James Stewart, Greta Garbo, Carole Lombard, and Claudette Colbert. (Lubitsch was apparently very popular with his actors. He was just about the only person in Hollywood able to get along with the notoriously brittle Miriam Hopkins. He was reportedly Colbert's favorite director, and she worked with some of the very best.) Yet both Tierney and Ameche fill their roles surprisingly well. Tierney looks simply stunning, especially in the pale blue and lavender outfits that accentuate her blue eyes. She projects both sweetness and animation in a very relaxed performance (although reportedly Lubitsch sometimes had to restrain her from overacting). Even in middle age her Martha seems both girlish and just a bit saucy.

Even more surprising is Don Ameche, who was not Lubitsch's first choice to play Henry Van Cleve but was forced on the director by 20th Century-Fox studio chief Darryl F. Zanuck. Lubitsch eventually changed his mind about Ameche's suitability for the part, however, and Ameche gives the performance of his career in the most demanding role he ever played. Henry Van Cleve is the center of the movie. It is, after all, the story of his life. He not only narrates the film but appears in nearly every scene. He must convincingly age from 26 to 70, and Ameche does this with amazing verisimilitude. With the assistance of some very good makeup, he conveys the passing of the years with skillful modulations of his voice—its pitch, strength, and phrasing—as well as his facial expressions and posture.

But his performance consists of more than just externals. Henry is a man who really has no objective view of his own life and actions (that is left up to Lubitsch and the camera to provide), a man whose self-image is at odds with his true nature. Henry truly believes himself to be corrupt, a dissolute libertine who deserves to spend eternity in hell. The truth is that he is at heart not the dissipated roué he believes himself to be, but rather an innocent: the soul he offers for judgment is a young and benign one. In many ways he is at the age of 70 still harmless and child-like. His fascination with women has more to do with glorifying and idealizing them than with seducing them. It is sensual without really being sexual, as Martha realizes when she playfully calls him "my obstinate little boy" and "my little Casanova." And Ameche subtly conveys all this in a very nuanced performance.

In the end, Heaven Can Wait is at its heart a tender love story, one played out to the nostalgic melody of "By the Light of the Silvery Moon," which we hear over the opening credits and which later becomes Henry and Martha's love theme. Henry's eye and attention may wander from time to time, but it is Martha to whom he is devoted. When the morning after meeting Martha he earnestly tells his mother that Martha is the woman of his life, he is not exaggerating. After the death of Martha, Ameche's demeanor suggests that this is a man whose life is now shaded with an unshakable sense of sadness. Even though Henry still has the capacity to enjoy life and to go through the motions of adoring the female sex, he has really lost the center of his life.

But this movie is a fantasy, right? As a filmmaker, Lubitsch was by temperament incapable of dwelling on dreariness, and the mythic Lubitsch touch is always a light one, finding humor even in a serious situation. At the end of the film when the devil rejects Henry and tells him to go to heaven, he holds out to Henry the possibility of being reunited with Martha in some kind of afterlife. In Lubitsch's bittersweet world, pleasure and sadness go together like positive and negative magnetic charges, and who can really say which is the dominant mode?

Morgan Freeman in Famous Actors

Morgan Freeman

Morgan Freeman
Morgan Freeman

Pictures of Famous Actors Morgan Freeman

On Dangerous Ground: A Neglected Masterwork by Nicholas Ray

The American film director Nicholas Ray (1911-1979) was little appreciated during his heyday in Hollywood in the 1950s. But in 1950s France the young movie critics and future filmmakers of the original Cahiers du Cinéma generation revered him as the epitome of the American auteur, the kind of director who managed to transcend the safe impersonality of studio-financed genre pictures and leave on them his own personal stamp. His films were a huge influence on the early directors of the French New Wave. Jean-Luc Godard went so far as to state, "Le cinéma, c'est Nicholas Ray" ("Nicholas Ray is cinema").

Ray's best known films are Rebel Without a Cause (1955), his masterpiece, the movie that made James Dean a star and contains his defining performance as the alienated teenager Jim Stark; the tremendously entertaining Johnny Guitar (1954), Ray's bizarrely stylized, almost Gothic take on the Western; In a Lonely Place (1950), in which Ray revealed the darkest, most sinister side of Hollywood and of Humphrey Bogart (his Fred C. Dobbs in The Treasure of the Sierra Madre and Capt. Queeg in The Caine Mutiny notwithstanding); and Ray's first film, They Live by Night (1949), one of the great films noirs of the late 1940s, a hybrid of romance and fatalism, with its young bank robber and his lover doomed from the beginning, and a clear influence on early French New Wave films as well as the later Bonnie and Clyde. The Criterion release in 2010 of Bigger Than Life (1956), with its brilliant performance by James Mason as a teacher driven to madness by the side effects of a new drug, drew renewed attention to yet another of Ray's best films.

Alongside these movies stands a film of equal merit in Ray's oeuvre, On Dangerous Ground (1952). (It was actually made in 1950 but wasn't released for two years, while RKO tinkered with the film, shortening it by about ten minutes and forcing Ray to shoot a new, more upbeat ending.) This is a movie of more subtle appeal than those better-known works. Quieter, less dense, and less quirky, it nonetheless has many of the same virtues and thematic preoccupations as those films and really should be considered one of Ray's key works.

The main character of On Dangerous Ground is a police detective in an unnamed big city, Jim Wilson (Robert Ryan, in one of his rare lead roles, giving one of the very best performances of his impressive career). Like the main characters in so many of Ray's films, Wilson suffers from a profound sense of alienation from other people and from his environment. The opening sequence of the movie emphasizes his status as a loner with little connection to life except through his job. It begins without explanation after dark with a middle-aged man whose wife is helping him strap on a holstered gun under his suit jacket. He then drives to a suburban house where another middle-aged man, watching television with his children, is being helped into a holster and gun by his wife. The scene then switches to a shabby studio apartment where Ryan stands alone before a mirror strapping on his gun and holster and waits for the other two men to pick him up. These three could easily be criminals preparing for a heist. But they aren't: they're a team of police detectives reporting to the precinct before going out on night patrol.

For the next twenty minutes or so, the movie follows them around dark city streets as they look for a pair of criminals. It is soon clear that Wilson is more than just an upholder of the law. He channels all of his hostility and disillusionment into his job. This is a man with such a grudge against the world that he is close to being a brutal sadist—"a gangster with a badge," as his commanding officer describes him at one point. His two colleagues don't approve of his vigilante approach to law enforcement, but they understand how the job has corroded his sense of ethics. "All we ever see is crooks, murderers, stoolies, dames. . . . 'Til you find out it's different, it's kind of a lonely life," explains one of his partners to the other. And that statement exactly foreshadows what will happen during the course of the movie: Wilson will find out that there is more to life than what he experiences daily and by reconnecting to others will reconnect to himself and to the larger world.

After Wilson becomes too violent with a small-time criminal, his chief sees the need to get him out of the way for a while and sends him out of the city and into a remote mountain area to help the sheriff there investigating a killing. At this point the movie shifts gears completely, and it is this sudden change that leads Wilson to his epiphany. The victim of the killing is a young girl, and Wilson soon becomes completely involved not in helping the sheriff apprehend the suspected killer, but in controlling the girl's grief-stricken father, who is determined to track down the murderer himself and kill him. This vigilantism is too much even for Wilson, and he finds himself accompanying the grieving and enraged father to prevent him from carrying out his intentions. The father, Walter Brent, is played by Ward Bond. If you are used to seeing him playing innocuous bit roles or providing cornball comedy relief in John Ford movies, you will be surprised at the malevolence he conveys in this part, as a man driven by the obsessive need for revenge.

When their car runs off a snowy road and overturns, the pair must continue their pursuit of the suspected killer on foot, and this leads them to an isolated ranch where a young blind woman, Mary Malden, lives. The men suspect her of harboring the criminal. Although she denies it, she is sheltering him, and he is her mentally disturbed, possibly autistic, young brother. Mary is played by Ida Lupino, and like Bond she is quite effective here playing against type. There is no abrasiveness or neuroticism—traits that Lupino was expert at conveying—in this character. And it is her gentleness, sensitivity, and caring nature that give Lupino's Beauty the power to tame Ryan's Beast.

Much in Ray's movies is built around the concept of contrast and opposition. Sometimes this is simple interpersonal conflict: between the teenagers and their parents and other adults in Rebel, between Joan Crawford and her nemesis Mercedes McCambridge in Johnny Guitar. Sometimes the conflict is more generalized: between Bogart and the Hollywood system in In a Lonely Place, between the criminal young lovers and the law in They Live by Night. In On Dangerous Ground, the main conflict is between people. This conflict, though, is not strictly personal, but rather between personality types and the ways those types view the world.

Andrew Sarris writes that "Robert Ryan [suffers from] disillusion with mankind in On Dangerous Ground," and I would say that is a succinct and accurate summation of Jim Wilson's persona. But Wilson himself seems unaware of the true nature of his discontent, so focused is he on the corruption he witnesses around him. When he returns to his dreary, anonymous apartment after his shift ends, the first thing he does is go to the basin and wash his hands. Then he looks at them in disgust and washes them a second time—this time even more vigorously, as if trying to scrub away all the vileness he has been exposed to for the last several hours. He almost seems to be trying to strip away the contaminated skin from his own hands.

Wilson gains perspective about himself only after he leaves his familiar environment and is exposed to Jim Brent, the murdered girl's father, and Mary Malden, the killer's protective sister. These characters hold a mirror up to Wilson, forcing him to examine himself and consider for the first time what everyone else seems to realize about him—that his dissatisfaction with life is destroying him by creating an impenetrable barrier between him and the rest of the world.

Brent shows Wilson what he might ultimately become if he does not change the course he is on, how hatred, no matter what its origin, can become all-consuming. In Brent he sees someone whose rage is even greater than his own. Recognizing the destructive ugliness of himself reflected and magnified in Malden, he comes to realize that his own brutality makes him little different from those he despises. Instead of needing to be restrained himself, he is called on to become the restraining force on Brent, and this unaccustomed role reveals to him a side of himself of which he has been unaware. He sees that his rage fueled by disillusion can be controlled, indeed must be controlled, if he is not to become the monster he sees in Brent.

Mary also becomes a catalyst that causes Wilson to discover within himself a part of his personality that is new to him. Wilson's rigid, judgmental hostility is contrasted with Mary's gentle passivity and loyalty to her brother. Mary's selflessness and protective behavior show Wilson that it is possible to love something that is flawed. It allows him to accept imperfection and shows him that his intolerance of imperfection in the world around him is really a projection of his self-loathing and inability to accept his own flawed nature. And although Mary is quite independent and capable, she still brings out the protective instinct in Wilson. When he perceives that the beauty and nobility in her are the result of the tempering of her strength with gentleness, he is able to reconcile these opposing parts of his own personality.

Brent makes Wilson realize that his intolerance and lack of self-control are actually signs of weakness, while Mary makes him see that there is strength in tolerance, self-restraint, and empathy. If in classical tragedy the hero is brought down by some kind of imbalance in his personality, an exaggeration of some characteristic in his makeup that throws him off-center, then Wilson is in a way a tragic hero doomed by the excesses of his own nature. Yet despite its dark veneer, On Dangerous Ground is ultimately about tragedy averted, for Wilson's encounters with Brent and Mary cause a kind of balance to be restored within him and permit him to avoid a tragic fate.

As with the three main characters, Ray pursues his preoccupation with contrast and opposition in the settings of the film, and it is in this purely visual element of the movie that Ray shows how truly cinematic is his way of telling a story on film. "Few other directors had such a sense of the effect of locations and interiors on people's lives, or the visual or emotional relationship between indoors and outdoors," writes David Thomson. On Dangerous Ground could serve as an illustration of that statement.

In the opening sequence in which the three detectives gather, Ray uses their homes to tell us important things about them and in particular about Ryan's character, Jim Wilson. One of Wilson's colleagues lives is an apartment with his wife. The other is first seen in his suburban living room watching television with his four children. But the place where Wilson lives forms quite a contrast with the homey environments of his colleagues. For one thing, it is clear that he lives alone. It is also clear that he lives in a rented room in a rooming house; the presence of the wash basin in the room suggests a shared bathroom down the hall. This is a bleak, impersonal place, an ascetic environment inhabited by someone living a solitary existence, like a monk or even a prisoner.

As Wilson and his partners cruise around those city streets at night, we get a clear impression of darkness and squalor. This is archetypal film noir territory—damp urban streets illuminated by dim pools of light from streetlamps and by the garish neon signs of the sleazy bars and flophouses that line them. The buildings densely crowded together and looming over the level of the streets from which they are filmed, along with the cramped interiors of the seedy places Wilson visits searching for criminals, create an atmosphere that feels enclosed and oppressive. Everyone seems to be hemmed in, almost penned up. What a visual and atmospheric contrast the last two-thirds of the movie is, then. As soon as Wilson leaves the city, the film takes on a feeling of openness and space, and the stony, man-made harshness of the city is replaced with soft, flowing, snowy landscapes broken only by the occasional conifer. The perpetual night of the city is replaced here by natural light reflected everywhere.

The extended sequence in which Ryan and Bond pursue the killer on foot through this snowy landscape is one of the most striking in the entire movie. This sequence contains virtually no dialogue or interaction between the two. It is all motion, just the images of their tiny, dark figures, filmed largely in long shot, crossing the vast, white screen. What the sequence does have, though, is the powerful music of Bernard Herrmann, which reaches its peak here, a kind of tone poem of perpetual motion that prefigures Herrmann's later scores for Hitchcock in Vertigo and North by Northwest. This is cinema of absolute simplicity and purity. And every element in these austere landscapes suggests liberation just as strongly as the earlier cityscapes suggested confinement.

Just as striking is the farmhouse Mary Malden lives in, at which Wilson and Brent arrive near dark and end up spending the night. What a contrast this house is to both Wilson's cheerless room in the city and the by-now freezing outdoors. This is a house that wraps its inhabitants in a womb-like atmosphere. Everything about it is warm and cozy: the wood from which it is constructed, the soft light from the oil lamps, the fire burning in an open fireplace, the comfortable furniture. Things that seem a little odd about the house are quickly explained by Mary's blindness. The pot of ivy hanging in the middle of the main room just below the height of her head and immediately in front of a large doorway, the little glass wind chime beside the front door that tinkles in the draft every time the door is opened, the large piece of curved, polished wood near the fireplace—these are all cues to guide the blind woman through the house. This house is a threat-free zone, a place of refuge and security.

In the end, both the environment and the people he meets during his sojourn work their spell on Wilson. He is a man redeemed. The pat ending in which Wilson abruptly turns around on his way back to the city and returns to Mary, who having rejecting him changes her mind—an ending apparently imposed on Ray by the studio—is the only thing in the movie that doesn't quite ring true. But this is a minor quibble. The rest of the movie is a remarkable blend of realistic romanticism and detached cynicism, the exact blend of opposed but complementary attitudes found in Ray's best movies.

Richard Boleslawski's Les Mis&#233rables: An Exemplary Hollywood Literary Adaptation

When I saw Richard Boleslawski's Les Misérables (1935) recently I was mighty impressed. Nominated for an Oscar as best picture, the film was called by David Thomson "the best version of Hugo's novel," and Dave at Goodfella's Movie Blog, who is doing a year-by-year countdown of the best movies of each year, named this his own pick as the best movie of 1935, citing many of the things about it that I found praiseworthy. The movie simplifies Victor Hugo's massive novel about the ex-convict Jean Valjean and his relentless pursuit by the obsessive Inspector Javert but retains most of the novel's essential themes and still manages to cover a lot of narrative ground in under two hours. In some ways—especially the richer development of its two main characters and its overall concision—it even betters the massively detailed, nearly five-hour long French version directed by Raymond Bernard that was made just the year before and seems in comparison rather unnecessarily drawn out, with its far slower pacing and elaborations of tangential plot lines that divert attention from the conflict between Valjean and Javert.

The movie opens with Jean Valjean (Fredric March) in court, being sentenced to ten years' hard labor in the galleys for stealing a loaf of bread for his sister's children. His heartfelt plea to the unsympathetic judge about being unable to find work anywhere and the inhumanity of letting children starve must have had a powerful resonance with Depression-era audiences. At the same time, Inspector Javert (Charles Laughton), the son of criminals, is receiving his commission—but, because of his questionable background, only through the kindness of a sympathetic official. Ironically, his response to this act of kindness is to systematically purge any manifestation of human kindness from himself. Javert swears always to uphold the letter of the law, becoming an emotionless human law enforcement machine. He is assigned to the galley where Valjean is serving his sentence, and it is here that the two become lifelong antagonists.

Valjean is finally released a broken and disillusioned man. Shunned by society, he is given shelter one night by a kindly and trusting bishop (Cedric Hardwicke). When Valjean steals the bishop's silver plate and absconds in the night, he is caught by the local gendarmes. But the bishop insists that he gave Valjean the silver and even adds to the takings a pair of silver candlesticks. This act of faith and kindness by the bishop transforms Valjean's life. Those silver candlesticks become the emblem of forgiveness, trust, and the bishop's admonition to Valjean always to treat others with kindness and dignity. Valjean keeps those candlesticks with him always, and they are conspicuously displayed in many scenes throughout the movie.

The rest of the movie follows Valjean through several successive stages of his life. At each stage a chance encounter with Javert forces him to flee and assume a new identity, leading to a new life. (As an ex-convict, he has broken the conditions of his release by not reporting to the police and is considered a fugitive who will be returned to prison if caught.) He becomes first the prosperous owner of a glass factory. Then as the surrogate father of an orphaned child he has adopted, Cosette (Rochelle Hudson), he pretends to be a gardener at the convent where she is being educated, and finally in Paris impersonates a rich retired merchant. It is here that Cosette becomes involved with student radicals pressing, among other things, for prison reform during the 1832 uprising. By this point Javert is a member of the secret police ferreting out revolutionaries and again discovers Valjean.

At the end of the movie, Valjean must resolve several personal and ethical dilemmas. He plans to use the disorder of the rebellion as an opportunity to escape with Cosette to England and finally be free of Javert. But Cosette wants to stay behind with Marius, the leader of the student revolutionaries, with whom she has fallen in love. Valjean must face the truth about his true feelings for the now-grown Cosette, and it is clear that these are more than just fatherly. He makes two difficult decisions in rapid succession. He saves Marius from the gendarmes on the barricades rather than using the occasion to rid himself of a romantic rival. And when given the opportunity to kill his nemesis Javert with impunity, he lets him go free instead.

In Valjean and Javert, we have two men of a strikingly similar mindset. Both are men of strong principles who stay true to those principles in every situation despite their personal feelings. The conflict of the story arises from the fact that those two sets of principles stand in direct opposition to each other. Valjean represents tolerance, forgiveness, and adaptability of rules to circumstances. Javert represents inflexibility, obsessive pursuit of the guilty, and the merciless punishment of transgressors. Each is in a sense the product of his experiences. The bishop's treatment of Valjean has instilled in the embittered ex-convict a deep-rooted humanity, whereas Javert's shame at his origins has caused him to repress all feelings of humanity, transforming him into an inhumane fanatic.

One of the reasons Les Misérables succeeds so well at examining the paradoxical relationship between these two men is the performances of the two leads. Laughton has the smaller and clearly less sympathetic role. Yet he makes the character of Javert far more than the two-dimensional martinet he might have been. Psychologically, his Javert is an example of the type of individual attracted to totalitarianism: In his slavish devotion to conformity and rectitude, he voluntarily surrenders freedom of thought to a higher authority in order to escape the responsibility and risk of making his own decisions. His actions are always reflexive and unquestioning.

Laughton conveys the unyielding self-control Javert must exert to suppress all feelings of empathy for those he pursues and the enormous personal cost—the forgoing of any possibility of meaningful emotional growth—of adhering so single-mindedly to a set of principles. And he suggests that Javert's almost pathological need to control criminality is actually an attempt to destroy in others what he regards with dread as potential flaws in his own character—a sort of pre-emptive strike against self-corruption. His Javert is outwardly a self-assured professional dedicated to the law. But inwardly he is a deeply insecure man equally afraid of both his baser and his finer impulses and terrified of the dangerous possibility of loss of control over himself. That Laughton was in real life a gay man living and working in an environment where he was obliged to conceal his sexual orientation adds an extra dimension to the element of emotional repression in his interpretation of Javert.

Laughton, an actor prone to overemoting (David Thomson attributes to him "some of the most recklessly flamboyant characterizations the screen has ever seen"), gives one of his most subdued performances. It is amazing to think that in the same year this picture was released, he also played the Jeeves-like Ruggles in Ruggles of Red Gap and the nefarious Captain Bligh in Mutiny on the Bounty. In temperament his Javert falls somewhere between those two characters, balancing the unfailing self-control of Ruggles with the cold hatefulness of Captain Bligh.

Even more impressive is Fredric March as Jean Valjean. The more I see of March in his movies of the 1930s, the more convinced I am that he is the pre-eminent American movie actor of that decade. He is expert at both comedy—in films like Lubitsch's Design for Living and Wellman's Nothing Sacred (interestingly, he turned down It Happened One Night)—and drama. In serious films like this one, his Oscar-winning turn in Dr. Jeckyll and Mr. Hyde, Anthony Adverse, and especially A Star Is Born, he conveys depth, sensitivity, focus, and superior modulation of technique without ever becoming self-consciously actorly. His artistry is closer to the surface than in purely naturalistic, instinctive actors of the time like Spencer Tracy or Clark Gable—not surprising in a trained stage actor who alternated between films and the theater for much of his long career. But nothing about his movie performances ever seems stilted.

March portrays Valjean as a character whose personality evolves during the course of the movie as the result of his experiences. His Valjean is a man who begins with an innate sense of decency and caring (you can see this in his incomprehension of the impersonal cruelty of the law in the opening sequence), only to see those qualities nearly crushed by his treatment at the hands of a soul-destroying social and legal system. Yet those qualities are never quite extinguished even by his dehumanizing experiences in a brutal penal environment. The bishop's act of kindness is enough to rekindle in him his vestigial humanity, setting him on a course of lifelong growth.

March's interpretation of Valjean really makes you sense the continuous refinement and ennobling of the character's personality. As Valjean refuses to let any of the setbacks he suffers destroy the sensitivity at his core, March shows you the character growing stronger and more whole year by year. It is by any measure an extraordinary performance, the best by an actor I've seen in any American film released that year: Just when you think the character of Valjean is fully defined, March adds yet another layer.

Besides those two key performances, Les Misérables has several other things to recommend it. For one thing, it was photographed by perhaps the greatest of all Hollywood cinematographers, Gregg Toland, a man with one of the most identifiable visual styles of the studio era. His accomplished use of highly defined light and shadow, one of the constants of his style, is used here not for stylized effect, as it is in Citizen Kane, but rather for a softer look that realistically simulates natural lighting, particularly in indoor scenes and in outdoor scenes that take place at night. Toland does, however, go for a more emphatic, almost expressionistic look in one sequence in which Valjean is pursued through the sewers of Paris, a sequence reminiscent of the famous sewer chase in The Third Man but which predates that film by nearly 15 years. Toland received a well-deserved Oscar nomination for his work in Les Misérables and probably was set to win. But he unexpectedly lost to Hal Mohr for A Midsummer Night's Dream, a write-in candidate—the only time a write-in candidate has ever won an Oscar.

The director was Richard Boleslawski, who died at the age of 47 just two years after this movie was released. Born in Poland, Boleslawski studied acting at the Moscow Art Theater and was for several years its assistant director before coming to New York in the 1920s, where he directed plays on Broadway and taught the Stanislavksi style of acting he had learned in Russia (forerunner of Method acting) to students like Lee Strasberg and Stella Adler. He came to Hollywood in 1929 and directed all kinds of movies but especially glossy, big-budget pictures like The Painted Veil with Greta Garbo and The Garden of Allah with Marlene Dietrich and Charles Boyer. He also made comedies like Operator 13 with Marion Davies, the delightful screwball comedy Theodora Goes Wild with Irene Dunne, and his final film, The Last of Mrs. Cheney, with an all-star MGM cast that included William Powell, Robert Montgomery, and Joan Crawford.

With such a varied output, Boleslawski would never be considered an auteur by devotees of that concept and isn't even mentioned in Andrew Sarris's The American Cinema. But he does an exemplary studio-style job on Les Misérables, forging into a professional if slightly impersonal whole the diverse technical and artistic elements necessary for a successful literary adaptation in 1930s Hollywood—production design, acting, staging, and rather formalistic composition. Toland's trademark deep-focus photography is little in evidence here. Boleslawski prefers to use focus to emphasize people and objects in the foreground. He is adept at action sequences like the nighttime escape of Valjean and Cosette in a horse-drawn cart with Javert and a group of horsemen in pursuit, as well as intimate scenes and conversations. Especially striking is his staging of scenes of the uprising in the streets of Paris near the end of the movie. These have the complicated composition, spatial organization, and choreographed chaos of paintings on similar subjects by Delacroix.

The history of 1930s Hollywood contains many examples of adaptations of classic novels by European authors—movies like David Copperfield, A Tale of Two Cities, Crime and Punishment, Anna Karenina, Wuthering Heights—the ultimate prestige project of the Hollywood studios of the time. Les Misérables is in all respects an exemplar of this kind of movie and easily holds its own with the best of the genre. There is nothing stodgy about the movie. It tells a thoughtful, compelling story in a dynamic way, with brisk pacing (especially in the first section, with its rapid succession of concise scenes that quickly propel the movie through ten years of narrative), meticulous production values, and forceful performances by two of the major actors of the 1930s at the top of their form.

1962: Hollywood's Second Greatest Year? Part 1

A Riddle Wrapped in a Mystery Inside an Enigma

This year marks the 70th anniversary of that landmark year in American movies, 1939, and the year has been observed in a number of ways, including a new documentary on Turner Classic Movies and a slew of the notable films of that year shown on the channel. Much has been written about the year 1939 and how it was Hollywood's greatest year in terms of the sheer number of great American films released that year. Entire books have been written on this subject. When you read a list of the memorable movies from that year, it is difficult to disagree with the premise. Gone With the Wind, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, Wuthering Heights, The Wizard of Oz, Stagecoach, Ninotchka, The Women, Love Affair, Destry Rides Again, Midnight, Only Angels Have Wings, Dark Victory, The Hunchback of Notre Dame, The Roaring Twenties, Goodbye Mr. Chips— it really was a year filled with wonderful movies of all genres and also with remarkable performances by some of the greatest stars of the studio era.

Although no other year quite equals 1939 in the history of the American cinema, several others come close. The years 1937, 1940, 1941, 1949, and 1950 also strike me as remarkably strong years in American film. But at the very end of the studio era—in fact, after the studios had reached their peak and were already in decline, doomed by television, independent productions, and the newfound interest in foreign-language films—Hollywood had as a last gasp a year that to me arguably ranks second only to 1939 for the number of memorable films released. That year is 1962.

Of all the great movies of that year, Lawrence of Arabia (technically an Anglo-American production, produced by Horizon Pictures for Columbia) is universally considered the greatest. David Lean, the director of Lawrence of Arabia, had been directing for nearly twenty years when this movie was released. Sharing directing credit for his first film, In Which We Serve (1942), with Noel Coward, who also wrote and starred in it, Lean continued to work for several more years with Coward. His next three movies were all adapted from plays by Coward and included the classic romance Brief Encounter (1945). In the late 1940s Lean aimed higher than the relative simplicity of his earlier work, escalating the scale of production values in two excellent adaptations of novels by Charles Dickens, Great Expectations (1947) and Oliver Twist (1948, although not released in the US until 1951), the former in my view the best screen adaptation ever made of a work by Dickens and one of the greatest movies of any kind ever made.

For the next several years, although he occasionally revisited period projects such as Madeleine (1950) and Hobson's Choice (1954), Lean returned to movies of more modest scale. In 1955 he made Summertime, the delightful story of an unmarried, middle-aged American librarian traveling to Venice and having a brief but ultimately unhappy love affair there, starring Katharine Hepburn. Summertime marked a return to the pronounced emphasis on pictorial values of Lean's earlier Dickens films. In Summertime the setting was restricted to Venice, and the city, ravishingly photographed in Technicolor by Jack Hildyard, became almost the second lead character in the story, sharing equal importance with Hepburn. Yet the spatially confined settings never threatened to overwhelm the rather simple story.

It was two years before Lean's next movie, The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957), was released. With this film Lean returned to the outsized production values of his works based on Dickens and clearly attempted to match an epic-scale story with epic-scale production values. The movie was a huge success, winning both the Oscar and the New York Film Critics Circle award for best picture, and Lean won the best director award from both groups as well. Many film critics, though, especially those of an auteurist bent including Andrew Sarris and David Thomson, view this movie as the beginning of Lean's artistic downfall, a slide marked by Lean's preoccupation with visual grandiosity over personal expression, what Thomson calls "the Selznick syndrome." (I have to admit that I find some justification in this view, although at this point in Lean's career it was still more of a possibility than a certainty. For me the rot didn't really set in until 1965's Dr. Zhivago.)

Lawrence was Lean's next project after Kwai, and this time a full five years passed before the film's release. Lawrence also won the Oscar for best Picture and Lean the Oscar for best director. (The New York newspapers were on strike that year, and the New York Film Critics Circle, who were all newspaper critics, chose not to give any awards. If they had, Lawrence almost certainly would have won, and Lean would have received his third best director award, having also won previously for Summertime. In 1984 he did receive his third best director honor from the group for his last movie, A Passage to India.)

The film critic Andrew Sarris was one of the few who was not bowled over by Lawrence or by Lean. (Nor, apparently, was New York Times film critic Bosley Crowther, possibly the most influential critic of the time. Lawrence did not even appear on his list of the top ten films of the year, and he later wrote that if the New York Film Critics Circle had given awards that year, he would have voted for the British film A Taste of Honey.) In The American Cinema Sarris rather sarcastically opined that Lean's "modest virtues . . . have been inflated with the hot air of Lawrence of Arabia." With his rigidly dogmatic bias in favor of the auteur view of films and film directors, Sarris observed that the "sheer logistics of Lawrence . . . cannot support the luxury of a directorial point of view."

Of course he was correct in this assessment. With its intricate structure that begins with Lawrence's death ride on his motorcycle, its large cast of consummately professional actors, and its purposefully chosen stylistic grandeur, the movie would have caused any director to engage in an ongoing struggle with his simultaneous roles of project manager, cinematic construction engineer, and film artist. But does it really matter with a movie as magnificent as Lawrence of Arabia? I think not. The proof is in the pudding, as they say, and Lawrence is one mighty impressive pudding filled with unquestionable movie artistry and a profusion of unforgettable images.

This is the movie that defines the term epic and was indeed named by the American Film Institute as the best epic movie ever made. Running in excess of three and a half hours and filmed, according to the Internet Movie Database, in 34 separate locations including, among other places, Morocco, Jordan, Spain, England, and even the Imperial Desert of southern California, Lawrence of Arabia is monumental in every respect. No movie had ever looked quite like this one. Photographed by the great Freddie Young (Goodbye Mr. Chips, Lust for Life, Doctor Zhivago, Ryan's Daughter), the film would have been inconceivable without Technicolor and the widescreen format. Wrapped in Maurice Jarre's rapturous, exotic theme music, it created in the cinematic collective consciousness the archetypal images of the deserts of the Middle East—sun-drenched light; radiantly blue, cloudless skies; vast, empty, horizontal landscapes where "lone and level sands stretch far away"—as vividly and indelibly as the Westerns of John Ford did for the American Southwest.

Lawrence of Arabia is dominated not only by its imagery, but equally by the stunning and star-making performance by Peter O'Toole as the title character. Here is one of those instances of an actor being the embodiment of the role. I find it impossible to imagine Lawrence of Arabia without O'Toole as T. E. Lawrence. Yet that was very nearly the case, for O'Toole was not Lean's first choice to play Lawrence and was offered the role only after Albert Finney, a sublime actor in his own right, turned it down. Some have criticized the movie and its star for not offering a more specific point of view about who and what Lawrence really was. But isn't that really the point of the movie and the person himself—that Lawrence, with his self-created mythological persona, was ultimately an enigma who defied any precise explanation or definition?

My only regret about O'Toole is that he did not receive the Oscar for best actor that to me he so plainly deserved. The winner that year was Gregory Peck—to my mind one of the most wooden of all major American movie actors—for To Kill a Mockingbird. I have always believed he won more for the noble character he played than for superior acting ability. The Academy voters evidently preferred a modest, prejudice-defying American civil rights crusader/martyr to a mysterious Brit of ambiguous sexuality and an oversized ego. Peck also had an advantage over O'Toole in that he was American, a big Hollywood star popular with his fellow professionals, and although nominated four times before had never won.

In the coming months I'll be writing about other great movies of 1962. But by any standard, Lawrence of Arabia must be viewed as the greatest American film of that memorable year.

Brad Pitt in Famous Actors

Brad Pitt in Famous Actors

Brad Pitt

Brad Pitt

Brad Pitt in Pictures of Famous Actors