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. 

The Night of the Iguana (John Huston, 1964)

Ava Gardner and Richard Burton in The Night of the Iguana

Cast: Richard Burton, Ava Gardner, Deborah Kerr, Sue Lyon, Grayson Hall, Skip Ward, Cyril Delevanti, Mary Boylan. Screenplay: Anthony Veiller, John Huston, based on a play by Tennessee Williams. Cinematography: Gabriel Figueroa. Art direction: Stephen B. Grimes. Film editing: Ralph Kemplen. Music: Benjamin Frankel. 

It's a movie adaptation of a play by Tennessee Williams, so you know you're going to see a lot of Acting and hear a lot of rather florid dialogue. As for the capital-A acting, it's Ava Gardner who almost steals the show, just by being her gorgeous, free-spirited self. It's a great part for an actress in her middle years (Gardner was 42), as the casting of Bette Davis in the original Broadway production suggests. Gardner plays Maxine Faulk, the proprietor of a slightly louche Puerto Vallarta hotel, who finds herself welcoming to the hostelry an old friend, the Rev. T. Lawrence Shannon (Richard Burton), along with a company of teachers from a Texas Baptist women's college, whose tour bus he has just hijacked. He has come to recuperate from a variety of scandals, including some carrying-on with the nubile Charlotte Goodall (Sue Lyon), who is chaperoned by the up-tight Judith Fellowes (Grayson Hall in an Oscar-nominated performance). Maxine is reluctant to shelter Shannon's flock, but his apparent disordered state of body and mind breaks down her resistance. Soon they are joined by another itinerant pair, Hannah Jelkes (Deborah Kerr) and her nonagenarian grandfather, known as Nonno (Cyril Delevanti) and billed by Hannah as "the world's oldest living poet." If I give the acting award to Gardner out of this company it's because her part is the most entertaining and she knows it. Kerr is stuck in yet another of her spinster roles, and she's given the burden of becoming the voice of truth and righteousness in the film. Fortunately, she's more than up to it, making Hannah a more interesting character than you might expect. It's Burton who comes off worst in the film, maybe because the screenplay's opening-up of the role, giving Shannon scenes that weren't originally contrived by Williams, fragments the character and causes Burton to have to act out what should have been a backstory better left to our imagination. We didn't need the prologue in which Shannon scandalizes his church and the scenes of rebellious misbehavior along the tour to understand why he's so close to a breakdown when they arrive at Maxine's hotel -- Burton is more than capable of delivering that kind of exposition, and seeing them only complicates our reaction to the character. So it's a mixed bag as a movie, though not without its pleasures and some genuinely moving scenes. It also suffers less from Hollywood censorship than most of the film adaptations of Williams's plays: By 1964 things had loosened up enough that the screenplay can be a little more explicit about things that had been swept under the carpet in the 1950s. I do happen to find that the implication that Miss Fellowes is a closeted lesbian unnecessary and tasteless, especially since it inspires disgust in the otherwise freewheeling Maxine, but such were the times.   

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.

The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (Michael Powell, Emeric Pressburger, 1943)

Anton Walbrook, Roger Livesey, and Deborah Kerr in The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp

Cast: Roger Livesey, Anton Walbrook, Deborah Kerr, James McKechnie, Roland Culver, Ursula Jeans, Valentine Dyall. Screenplay: Michael Powell, Emeric Pressburger. Cinematography: Georges Périnal. Production design: Alfred Junge. Film editing: John Seabourne Sr. Music: Allan Gray. 

This time around, I had to ask myself: Why does Casablanca (Michael Curtiz, 1943) feel timeless when The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, a film from the same year, seems so dated? Is this just the American in me, forced to dredge up knowledge of British history that might be more ingrained in a Brit? (Though I really doubt that most Brits today are familiar with David Low's political cartoons from the 1930s and '40s that featured Colonel Blimp, a corpulent old walrus of a Tory, who satirized British complacency and jingoism.) Or is it that the Powell-Pressburger film is more detailed and searching, more engaged with what it means for a country to go to war, than the Warner Bros. romance, which is "still the same old story," cast in a wartime mode, so that we respond more immediately and viscerally to it? This is a handsome movie, with beautiful Technicolor and some engaging performances, but it takes work to appreciate its story, whereas you can just let Casablanca wash over you.

The Hucksters (Jack Conway, 1947)

The Hucksters (Jack Conway, 1947)

Cast: Clark Gable, Deborah Kerr, Sydney Greenstreet, Adolphe Menjou, Ava Gardner, Keenan Wynn, Edward Arnold, Aubrey Mather, Richard Gaines. Screenplay: Luther Davis, Edward Chodorov, George Wells, based on a novel by Frederic Wakeman. Cinematography: Harold Rosson. Art direction: Cedric Gibbons, Urie McCleary. Film editing: Frank Sullivan. Music: Lennie Hayton.

The Hucksters was made in the era depicted in Mad Men, when men who had served in World War II were returning to their civilian jobs. In the advertising business, that included men like Don Draper in the TV series and Victor Norman in the movie, men whose wartime experience had toughened them and given them a fresh angle on the business of selling to the postwar clientele. If Mad Men seems to us to have a more reliable point of view than The Hucksters on that business, it's partly because hindsight is keener than the contemporary view, but also because popular entertainment is less tight-assed now. Frederic Wakeman's novel was a bestseller in part because it was frank about the sex lives of its characters, which movies in the Production Code era couldn't be. So Gable's Victor Norman is turned into a more buttoned-up character than Jon Hamm's Don Draper, but censorship especially worked to a disadvantage for Deborah Kerr, in her first American film. Kerr is forced to be chaste and prim -- characteristics that would type her in the movies until 1953, when Fred Zinnemann finally allowed her to have a sex life in From Here to Eternity.  Kerr's character may agree to go away for a weekend with Vic, but only after she's assured that they will have separate rooms at opposite ends of the hotel. And when she discovers that they instead have adjoining rooms with a connecting door, she bolts. The effect on the movie is to sap any chemistry that MGM might have hoped Gable and Kerr would have. In contrast, Gable and Ava Gardner, as one of Vic's old girlfriends, strike fire immediately, which makes the ending of the movie, in which Gable's and Kerr's characters wind up together, feel phony. The Hucksters, coming a year after her breakthrough performance in Robert Siodmak's The Killers, helped make Gardner a star. Kerr had to muddle through in costume parts in movies like Quo Vadis (Mervyn LeRoy, 1951) and The Prisoner of Zenda (Richard Thorpe, 1952) before finally getting a chance to be sexy. There is some zippy dialogue in the movie, and the hits on the advertising business are often funny, but the only real reason to see The Hucksters today is to watch some skillful old character actors like Adolphe Menjou and especially Sydney Greenstreet do their thing. Greenstreet plays an imperious soap manufacturer sponsor with non-negotiable ideas about what his commercials should be, and likes to intimidate his advertising clients by doing things like hocking a loogie on the conference table to get their attention. If the film had stuck with the ad biz and not strayed off into tiresomely predictable romance, it might have been a classic, or at least a lot better.

Black Narcissus (Michael Powell, Emeric Pressburger, 1947)

Cast: Deborah Kerr, David Farrar, Kathleen Byron, Flora Robson, Sabu, Jean Simmons, May Hallatt, Jenny Laird, Judith Furse, Esmond Knight, Eddie Whaley Jr. Screenplay: Michael Powell, Emeric Pressburger, based on a novel by Rumer Godden. Cinematography: Jack Cardiff. Production design: Alfred Junge. Film editing: Reginald Mills. Music: Brian Easdale.

This much-loved film has so far escaped condemnation for its "orientalism," the brown-face performances of Jean Simmons, May Hallatt, and Esmond Knight, and its treatment in general of the Indian characters as mysterious and alien. And perhaps it's better to concentrate on the erotic instead of the exotic in Black Narcissus, to enjoy its stunning, Oscar-winning cinematography and production design. Who can forget the vertiginous moments at the precipice where the bell was rung -- even though those moments were sheer camera-trickery, accomplished in the Pinewood Studios with matte paintings? Or the erotic charge every time David Farrar walks shirtless among the nuns and Kathleen Byron gives him the eye?

Dream Wife (Sidney Sheldon, 1953)

Betta St. John, Cary Grant, and Deborah Kerr in Dream Wife

Cast: Cary Grant, Deborah Kerr, Betta St. John, Walter Pidgeon, Eduard Franz, Buddy Baer. Screenplay: Sidney Sheldon, Herbert Baker, Alfred Lewis Lewitt. Cinematography: Milton R. Krasner. Art direction: Daniel B. Cathcart, Cedric Gibbons. Film editing: George White. Music: Conrad Salinger.

A romantic comedy so inane and inept that it seems to have driven Cary Grant into retirement for a couple of years, until Alfred Hitchcock persuaded him to return in To Catch a Thief (1955). It's certainly a waste of the considerable talents of Grant and Deborah Kerr. Grant plays a businessman who gets tired of his fiancée's (Kerr) devotion to her career with the State Department and calls off the engagement when he falls for a Middle Eastern princess (Betta St. John) who has been raised to serve men. Because the princess comes from an oil-rich country, the State Department enlists Kerr's character in handling the negotiations leading to the princess's marriage to the businessman. The result is a queasy 1950s take on feminism and international relations in which no one behaves like the rational human beings they're supposed to be.

Julius Caesar (Joseph L. Mankiewicz, 1953)

Julius Caesar is the starchiest of Shakespeare's major plays, the one with the least sex, which is why many of us first encounter it in a high school English class. It's a play about soldiers and politicians, professions from which women were (unless they were Queen Elizabeth) excluded in Shakespeare's time, so there are only two female roles: Brutus's wife, Portia, and Caesar's wife, Calpurnia, and both of them are almost walk-ons. (My high school drama teacher wanted to stage Julius Caesar as our class play until he realized that three times as many girls as boys wanted to try out for parts.) So the remarkable thing about MGM's all-star production is that it turned out so well: It's one of the best Hollywood productions of Shakespeare. (Calpurnia and Portia are lavishly cast with Greer Garson and Deborah Kerr, respectively, in the small roles.) That said, it's a shame that not quite enough was done to take the starch out of the play. The casting of Marlon Brando as Mark Antony was a start, but although it's a very good performance, it tends to throw the film out of whack. When it was released, Brando had been stereotyped as a "Method mumbler," for his celebrated performance on stage and screen as Stanley Kowalski in A Streetcar Named Desire (Elia Kazan, 1951). Could he rise to the demands of speaking Shakespearean diction? critics burbled. Of course he could, with a little bit of coaching from his distinguished co-star John Gielgud, who plays Cassius, and who was so impressed that he wanted Brando to go to London where he would direct him in Hamlet. That, of course, never took place, more's the pity. But the attention directed at Brando does tend to shift the focus away from the real central character of the play, Brutus, played with exceptional distinction by James Mason. Gielgud is also very good, although it seems to me that in the first part of the film he is a bit too stagy. Mason gives a kind of colloquial spin to his lines -- a sense that he's speaking what Brutus thinks and feels, and not reciting Shakespearean verse. Later in the film, when Brutus and Cassius go to war against Antony, Gielgud has loosened up more. Mankiewicz's adaptation of the play is solid, and he does smart things with camera placement -- putting the camera in the middle of the crowd, for example, when Brutus and Antony give their great speeches after Caesar's (Louis Calhern) assassination. But there is a kind of Hollywood Rome quality to the film -- not surprising, since it was made after the lavish MGM spectacle Quo Vadis (Mervyn LeRoy, 1951) and uses some of the same sets -- that tends toward the stodgy. That's more surprising when you realize that the producer of the film was John Houseman, who had also been a producer of Orson Welles's celebrated 1937 modern-dress Mercury Theatre production of the play, which created a sensation with its evocation of the rise of fascism in Italy and Germany.