Bonjour Tristesse (Otto Preminger, 1958)

David Niven, Deborah Kerr, and Jean Seberg in Bonjour Tristesse

Cast: Jean Seberg, David Niven, Deborah Kerr, Mylène Demongeot, Geoffrey Horne, Juliette Gréco, Walter Chiari, Martita Hunt, Roland Culver, Jean Kent, David Oxley, Elga Anderson, Jeremy Burnham, Eveline Eyfel. Screenplay: Arthur Laurents, based on a novel by Françoise Sagan. Cinematography: Georges Périnal. Production design: Roger K. Furse. Film editing: Helga Cranston. Music: Georges Auric. 

Only a couple of years after Otto Preminger's adaptation of Françoise Sagan's novel Bonjour Tristesse was released to critical and box office indifference, filmmakers like Federico Fellini and Michelangelo Antonioni would make their international reputations with films about moneyed Europeans fighting vainly the old ennui. In fact, Bonjour Tristesse is not so very much different in content from movies like Antonioni's L'Avventura and Fellini's La Dolce Vita, both of which rocketed to success in 1960. They're all about what today we might call "Eurotrash" -- people with too much money and not enough to occupy their souls. Preminger's film was hindered a bit by the censors, who forbade any explicit descriptions of what was going on between Raymond (David Niven) and his several mistresses, much less any extrapolation about his exceptionally close relationship with his daughter, Cecile (Jean Seberg). And the casting of the British Niven and Deborah Kerr and the American Jean Seberg as characters meant to be très French, feels more than a little off-base. There's also some heavy-handed telegraphing of the film's message, summed up in a title song by composer Georges Auric with lyrics by screenwriter Arthur Laurents that's sung by Juliette Gréco in a Paris boîte. But Bonjour Tristesse has gained in favor over the years, no longer dismissed as a complete misfire. Mylène Demongeot adds some much needed comic relief in the form of Elsa, Raymond's sunburned mistress, a necessary counterpoint to Cecile's existential angst. Auric's score provides a continental flavor to the film, and Georges Périnal's cinematography makes the most of locations, especially the Paris that's viewed in monochrome as contrasted with the Technicolor vividness of the Riviera. Since the film is told from the point of view of Seberg's Cecile, the place where she feels depressed and regretful is necessarily more drab than the place where she had a brief encounter with something like freedom and power. It's Paris as Kansas and the Riviera as Oz, but without the "no place like home" nostalgia. 

Separate Tables (Delbert Mann, 1958)

Cast: Deborah Kerr, Rita Hayworth, David Niven, Wendy Hiller, Burt Lancaster, Gladys Cooper, Cathleen Nesbitt, Felix Aylmer, Rod Taylor, Audrey Dalton, May Hallatt, Priscilla Morgan. Screenplay: Terence Rattigan, John Gay, based on plays by Terence Rattigan. Cinematography: Charles Lang. Production design: Harry Horner. Film editing: Charles Ennis, Marjorie Fowler. Music: David Raksin.

This somewhat stodgy drama set in a residential hotel in England received seven Academy Award nominations, including best picture, and David Niven and Wendy Hiller actually won for best actor and supporting actress. Unfortunately, today it seems tired and rather clichéd, with Gladys Cooper reprising her smothering mother role from Now, Voyager (Irving Rapper, 1942), this time keeping her thumb on Deborah Kerr (who racked up the fifth of her six unsuccessful Oscar nominations for the film). Burt Lancaster and Rita Hayworth were called in for star power, but only seem miscast as the squabbling divorced couple. Niven's performance as the faux major whose imposture is exposed when he's arrested for sexual harassment in a theater is indeed the standout in the film, but the Oscar is also a reward for a quarter-century of playing second leads and sidekicks.

Bluebeard's Eighth Wife (Ernst Lubitsch, 1938)

David Niven, Gary Cooper, and Claudette Colbert in Bluebeard's Eighth Wife

Nicole De Loiselle: Claudette Colbert
Michael Brandon: Gary Cooper
The Marquis De Loiselle: Edward Everett Horton
Albert De Regnier: David Niven
Aunt Hedwige: Elizabeth Patterson
M. Pepinard: Herman Bing
Kid Mulligan: Warren Hymer
Assistant Hotel Manager: Franklin Pangborn

Director: Ernst Lubitsch
Screenplay: Charles Brackett, Billy Wilder
Based on a play by Alfred Savoir and its English adaptation by Charlton Andrews
Cinematography: Leo Tover
Art direction: Hans Dreier, Robert Usher
Film editing: William Shea
Music: Werner R. Heymann, Friedrich Hollaender

Almost anything goes in screwball comedy, but why does Bluebeard's Eighth Wife feel just a tad off the mark? It has everything going for it: director, screenwriters, stars and supporting cast. But something seems to be missing. There are those who think Gary Cooper is miscast, but Cooper pulled off similar roles -- lovable eccentrics like Longfellow Deeds in Mr. Deeds Goes to Town (Frank Capra, 1936) and Bertram Potts in Ball of Fire (Howard Hawks, 1941) -- and director Ernst Lubitsch had established Cooper's gift for sophisticated comedy in Design for Living (1933). There is a certain lack of spark between Cooper and his costar, Claudette Colbert, but that's partly because their characters are not supposed to spark but rather flare. I think the fault lies mainly in the script, which springs Michael Brandon's many previous marriages on us as a surprise and never makes us feel that they're integral to his character. I suspect that the Production Code, which was administered with a heavy hand by Catholic laymen like Joseph I. Breen, blue-penciled so much of the humor surrounding Brandon's divorces that they no longer get the attention they deserve. Still, Cooper and Colbert et al. are fun to watch, and it may be that they are so much more fun to watch in other movies that Bluebeard's Eighth Wife simply suffers by comparison.

Dodsworth (William Wyler, 1936)

Walter Huston in Dodsworth

Sam Dodsworth: Walter Huston
Fran Dodsworth: Ruth Chatterton
Edith Cortright: Mary Astor
Arnold Iselin: Paul Lukas
Captain Lockert: David Niven
Kurt Von Obersdorf: Gregory Gaye
Baroness Von Obersdorf: Maria Ouspenskaya
Matey Pearson: Spring Byington
Tubby Pearson: Harlan Briggs
Renée de Penable: Odette Myrtil
Emily: Kathryn Marlowe
Harry: John Payne

Director: William Wyler
Screenplay: Sidney Howard
Based on the play adapted by Sidney Howard from a novel by Sinclair Lewis
Cinematography: Rudolph Maté
Art direction: Richard Day
Music: Alfred Newman
Costume design: Omar Kiam

I have a feeling that Dodsworth is not quite as well known as it ought to be. It's one of the few Hollywood dramas of the 1930s that seem to have been made for grownups, avoiding melodrama and sentimentality in its treatment of marriage and growing old, and sidestepping the Production Code's infantilizing attitudes toward adultery and divorce. And most of all, it has a wonderful performance by Walter Huston, who was nominated for an Oscar but lost, rather shamefully, to Paul Muni's hammy turn in The Story of Louis Pasteur (William Dieterle, 1936). Huston's Sam Dodsworth is a captain of industry, founder of an automobile company, who decides to sell the business and spend the rest of his life figuring out what to do with himself. His wife, Fran, knows exactly what she wants to do: Sail to Europe and flirt with all those interesting men who can't be found in the Midwestern city of Zenith -- which was also the setting for Sinclair Lewis's novel Babbitt, whose title character became a byword for Midwestern fatuousness. Fran is a few years younger than Sam -- Chatterton was 44, Huston 53 -- and unwilling to grow old gracefully, claiming to be 35 and unwilling to reveal that she has just become a grandmother. Opportunity presents itself immediately on shipboard in the form of a British military officer, but after flirting shamelessly with him, Fran takes fright when they reach England and he wants to take their relationship another step. But when the Dodsworths move on to Paris, Fran becomes bolder and after Sam, bored with life in Europe, returns alone to the United States for a visit with their daughter and her husband, she begins an affair with a suave European. Getting wind of the affair, Sam returns to Paris and confronts Fran, who breaks it off. But their efforts to patch things up fail and Fran asks him for a divorce. In Vienna she finds another suitor, a younger, rather effete aristocrat named Kurt Von Obersdorf, and is ready to marry him once the divorce goes through. Meanwhile, Sam travels on his own and in Naples is reunited with Edith Cortright, a divorcee he had met earlier. Sam moves in with Edith in the villa she is renting, but their happiness is interrupted by Fran's misery: Kurt's mother, the baroness, forbids their marriage on the grounds that Fran is not only divorced but also too old to provide an heir for the family line. A distraught Fran, facing up to failure, urges Sam to return to America with her, presenting him with the dilemma of continuing a marriage that has proved hopeless or exploring the new vistas that have opened for him. Lewis's novel is more in the satirical vein of Babbitt than the film version; Sidney Howard's screenplay, based on his Broadway play, which also starred Huston, evokes Henry James's stories about American encounters with Europeans. William Wyler, with his smooth, unobtrusive professionalism, is the perfect director for the film, which was made under the aegis of producer Samuel Goldwyn, who aimed for polish and prestige and for once achieved it. Given that Dodsworth was made in the mid-1930s, when Nazism was on the rise in Germany and fascism had taken hold in Italy, it seems a bit out of its time. Sam and Edith's dream of traveling the world together feels more than a little naive in the context of the period. The only reference to the rumblings of war perceptible in the film comes in Sam's comment that he prefers the United States because there are "no soldiers along the Canadian border."

Watched on Turner Classic Movies

A Matter of Life and Death (Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, 1946)

David Niven and Marius Goring in A Matter of Life and Death

Peter D. Carter: David Niven 

June: Kim Hunter 

Bob Trubshaw: Robert Coote 

An Angel: Kathleen Byron 

An English Pilot: Richard Attenborough

An American Pilot: Bonar Colleano 

Chief Recorder: Joan Maude 

Conductor 71: Marius Goring 

Dr. Frank Reeves: Roger Livesey 

Abraham Farlan: Raymond Massey 

Director: Michael Powell, Emeric Pressburger 

Screenplay: Michael Powell, Emeric Pressburger 

Cinematography: Jack Cardiff 

Production design: Alfred Junge 

Fantasy, especially in British hands, can easily go twee, and though Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger had surer hands than most, A Matter of Life and Death (released in the United States as Stairway to Heaven, long before Led Zeppelin) still manages occasionally to tip over toward whimsy. There is, for example, the symbolism-freighted naked boy playing a flute while herding goats, the doctor's rooftop camera obscura from which he spies on the villagers, and the production of A Midsummer Night's Dream being rehearsed by recovering British airmen. And there's Marius Goring's simpering Frenchman, carrying on as no French aristocrat, even one guillotined during the Reign of Terror, ever did. Many find this hodgepodge delicious, and A Matter of Life and Death is still one of the most beloved of British movies, at least in Britain. I happen to be among those who find it a bit too much, but I can readily appreciate many things about it, including Jack Cardiff's Technicolor cinematography (Earth is color, Heaven black and white, a clever switch on the Kansas/Oz twist in the 1939 The Wizard of Oz) and Alfred Junge's production design. On the whole, it seems to me too heavily freighted with message -- Love Conquers Even Death -- to be successful, but it must have been a soothing message to a world recovering from a war.