Gaslight (George Cukor, 1944)

Charles Boyer and Ingrid Bergman in Gaslight

Paula Alquist: Ingrid Bergman
Gregory Anton: Charles Boyer
Brian Cameron: Joseph Cotten
Miss Thwaites: May Whitty
Nancy: Angela Lansbury
Elizabeth: Barbara Everest

Director: George Cukor
Screenplay: John Van Druten, Walter Reisch, John L Balderston
Based on a play by Patrick Hamilton
Cinematography: Joseph Ruttenberg
Art direction: William Ferrari, Cedric Gibbons

There is a tendency among critic-historians to prefer the 1940 Thorold Dickinson film of Gaslight to the slicker and more opulent 1944 version directed by George Cukor, partly because MGM attempted to suppress the earlier film -- an absurd and vicious effort that evidently failed. But although I myself went along with that attitude in my entry on the Dickinson version, I have to admit that rewatching Cukor's film has brought me around, partly because Cukor is a director I have more and more come to appreciate for his warm professionalism. He loves actors and showcasing them, which he does to great effect in the 1944 film, winning an Oscar for Ingrid Bergman -- largely, I think, for her wonderful scene in which Paula turns the tables on Anton -- as well as bringing out Charles Boyer's great gift for attractive menace. And perhaps best of all, giving the teenage Angela Lansbury an opportunity to shine -- and to earn the first of her sadly unrewarded Oscar nominations. Lansbury's Nancy is a saucy baggage, and she steals the show from the stars by wielding her sharp little chin like a knife, making Paula's fear of Nancy entirely credible while flirting boldly with Anton. May Whitty as the nosy Miss Thwaites, with her delight in the macabre, provides a needed bit of comic relief, too. Her curtain line, "Well!", when she comes upon Paula with Brian Cameron after Anton's arrest, provides a satisfactory ending, partly because it's delivered in a different tone -- this time one of delight -- than her earlier scandalized "Well!" when she saw Paula and Anton kissing. This is high Hollywood filmmaking at its most satisfying.

Notorious (Alfred Hitchcock, 1946)

"Alex, will you come in, please. I wish to talk to you." Reinhold Schünzel, Ivan Triesault, and Claude Rains in the final scene of Notorious

T.R. Devlin: Cary Grant
Alicia Huberman: Ingrid Bergman
Alexander Sebastian: Claude Rains
Mme. Sebastian: Leopoldine Konstantin
Paul Prescott: Louis Calhern
Dr. Anderson: Reinhold Schünzel
Eric Mathis: Ivan Triesault
Joseph: Alexis Minotis
Walter Beardsley: Moroni Olsen
Emil Hupka: E.A. Krumschmidt

Director: Alfred Hitchcock
Screenplay: Ben Hecht
Cinematography: Ted Tetzlaff
Music: Roy Webb

The critics have canonized Vertigo (1958) as the greatest film of all time, but I don't think it's even Alfred Hitchcock's greatest film. That would have to be Notorious, with Rear Window (1954) close behind, and North by Northwest (1959) and maybe Psycho (1960) edging up in the pack. I have a theory that Hitchcock threw himself so whole-heartedly into Notorious because it was begun under the infernal meddling of David O. Selznick, who was forced to sell the project to RKO in order to devote himself full-time to the impossible task of making Duel in the Sun (1946). Hitchcock had just suffered through making Spellbound (1945), with Selznick and Selznick's shrink, May Romm, breathing down his neck throughout the filming, and he must have felt such a great relief at being freed from Selznick's control that he was determined to make Notorious as good as it could be. He succeeded: It's a tight, witty, suspenseful showcase of everything that Hitchcock could do well. It has two or three of his most impressive directorial touches, specifically the two minute, 40 second single-take kissing scene that follows Devlin and Alicia from room to balcony and back again, and the great crane shot that begins on the balcony of Sebastian's entrance hall and swoops down to the key clutched in Alicia's hand. But technical mastery is only part of the glory of Notorious. It begins, after the sentencing of Alicia's father, with a film noir moment: "bad girl" Alicia entertaining her rather dubious friends as Devlin, whom we see only from behind, watches. And it ends, not with a lovers' clinch, but with the villain being summoned to a doom we know will be very unpleasant. Hitchcock trusts the audience to feel a little bit sorry for Alex Sebastian at that moment when the door shuts him inside with his mother and some very angry Nazis. But the whole film is full of masterly touches, including the characteristic concentration on objects like wine bottles and coffee cups and keys, which play almost as important role in the narrative as the actors. Not that the actors are ignored: Hitchcock was one of the few directors* who saw and exploited the dark side of Cary Grant, who effectively lets his mouth grow tense and his eyes grow cold in his first scenes with bad-girl Ingrid Bergman, so that he can loosen up as they fall in love and then resume the icy tension when Devlin is forced into virtually prostituting Alicia to Sebastian. Hitchcock also invents great business for Leopoldine Konstantin as the sinister Mme. Sebastian, such as the wonderful moment when, awakened by her son with the bad news that Alicia is a spy, she sits up in bed and calmly lights a cigarette before getting down to business. I also love that when Devlin comes to confer with his boss, Prescott, over Alicia's plight, Hitchcock has the usually debonair Louis Calhern stretched out in bed insouciantly eating cheese and crackers. In short, Notorious is a showcase for everything Hitchcock had learned in his first 20 years of moviemaking, as well as a demonstration of the great things to come. When Alicia overhears the argument between Sebastian and his mother, it's a foreshadowing of Marion Crane's hearing the argument between Norman and Mrs. Bates.

*The others would be Howard Hawks in Only Angels Have Wings (1939) and George Cukor, who was the first to glimpse Grant's darkness in Sylvia Scarlett (1935), but I think Hitchcock exploited it best.

Spellbound (Alfred Hitchcock, 1945)

Opening title cards for Spellbound

Constance Petersen: Ingrid Bergman
John Ballantyne: Gregory Peck
Alexander Brulov: Michael Chekhov
Murchison: Leo G. Carroll
Mary Carmichael: Rhonda Fleming
Fleurot: John Emery
Garmes: Norman Lloyd
House Detective: Bill Goodwin

Director: Alfred Hitchcock
Screenplay: Ben Hecht, Angus McPhail
Based on a novel by Hilary St. George Saunders and John Palmer
Cinematography: George Barnes
Art direction: James Basevi, Salvador Dalí
Music: Miklós Rózsa

Although David O. Selznick held Alfred Hitchcock under contract, Hitchcock made only three films directly under his niggling presence: Rebecca (1940), Spellbound, and The Paradine Case (1947). The best of his work during this period -- Foreign Correspondent (1940), Suspicion (1941), Saboteur (1942), Shadow of a Doubt (1943), Lifeboat (1944), and Notorious (1946) -- was done on loanout to other producers and studios. It was clear from the tensions between director and producer during the work on Rebecca that things would never go smoothly in their relationship. So I have a strong suspicion that Spellbound represents a sly Hitchcockian subversion of Selznick, an attempt to undermine the producer's obsessiveness by playing off Selznick's own quirks, in this case his preoccupation with psychoanalysis. Selznick notoriously gave his own analyst, May E. Romm, a screen credit as "psychiatric advisor" on the film, leading to some criticisms of her by the psychoanalytic community. Though Romm isn't credited as a writer on the film, it's thought that the title cards "explaining" psychoanalysis in the opening of Spellbound are her work. Romm and Hitchcock clashed during the filming, he studiously ignoring her suggestions and once dismissing her criticism with a characteristic "It's only a movie" retort. The result is one of Hitchcock's wackier, more improbable films, one that probably sent many in the audience away convinced that analysis was movie hokum, and not a real-life solution to mental problems. From the outset, for example, it's clear that the doctors in Green Manors, the fancy mental hospital in the film, are at least as nutty as the patients, with Dr. Fleurot constantly horndogging his beautiful colleague, Dr. Petersen, and the rest of the staff showing off their own ineptness. When the supposed Dr. Edwardes, the replacement for the retiring Dr. Murchison, arrives, he turns out to be a twitchy young man, given to fainting spells and other bits of odd behavior, but he succeeds in winning over the icy Dr. Petersen in an instant. And so on, through various bits of Hitchcockian obsession, mistaken identities, and unlikely revelations. There's the famous Dalí-designed dream sequence and Miklós Rózsa's Oscar-winning score, one of the first to use the eerie-sounding theremin in key passages, but it's never terribly convincing. Ingrid Bergman and Gregory Peck are gorgeous, of course, and for once Peck doesn't seem like he was whittled out of wood -- perhaps because he and Bergman had an affair during the filming. The rest of the cast hams it up nicely, though the fact that the hammiest of them all, Michael Chekhov, got an Oscar nomination for his stereotypical shrink is lamentable. This is one of those movies that are more fun if you know all the backstories about the production.

Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (Rouben Mamoulian, 1931; Victor Fleming, 1941)

MGM's 1941 Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde is a virtual remake of Paramount's 1931 version of the Robert Louis Stevenson novella: John Lee Mahin's screenplay is clearly based on the earlier one by Samuel Hoffenstein and Percy Heath. The similarities are so obvious that MGM, having bought the rights to Paramount's version, tried to buy up all prints of it.* Seeing the two versions back-to-back is a pretty good lesson in how things changed in Hollywood over ten years: For one thing, the Production Code went into effect, which means that the "bad girl" Ivy (Miriam Hopkins in 1931, Ingrid Bergman in 1941) ceased to be a prostitute and became a barmaid. Hopkins shows a good deal more skin than does Bergman, and in the 1931 we see the scars on her back, inflicted by Hyde's whip, whereas in 1941 we see only the shocked reaction of those who witness them. As for Jekyll/Hyde (Fredric March in 1931, Spencer Tracy in 1941), the earlier version gives us a lustier Jekyll -- we sense that he's so eager to marry the virtuous Muriel Carew (Rose Hobart) because he wants to go to bed with her. Tracy's Jekyll indulges in a little more PDA with his fiancée, Beatrix Emery (Lana Turner), than her Victorian paterfamilias (Donald Crisp) would like, but there's no sense of urgency in his attraction to her. It's widely known that the original casting had Turner playing Ivy and Bergman as Beatrix, but that Bergman wanted to play the bad girl for a change -- it's clearly the better part -- and persuaded director Victor Fleming to make the switch. March's Hyde is a fearsome, simian creature with a gorilla's skull and great uneven teeth; Tracy's is just a man with a lecherous gaze, unruly hair, bushy eyebrows, and what looks like an unfortunately oversize set of false teeth. March's Jekyll -- pronounced to rhyme with "treacle" -- is a troubled intellectual, whereas Tracy's -- pronounced to rhyme with "heckle" -- is a genial Harley Street physician who genuinely wants to find a cure for bad behavior. March won an Oscar for his performance, and he does lose his sometimes rather starchy manner in the role. Tracy, I think, was just miscast, though in real life he had his own Jekyll/Hyde problems: The everyman persona hid a mean drunk.

*MGM did the same thing to Thorold Dickinson's 1940 film of Gaslight when it made its own version, directed by George Cukor, in 1944, but didn't succeed in either case.

Casablanca (Michael Curtiz, 1942)

Humphrey Bogart, Madeleine Lebeau, and Leonid Kinskey in Casablanca

Rick Blaine: Humphrey Bogart
Ilsa Lund: Ingrid Bergman
Victor Laszlo: Paul Henreid
Capt. Louis Renault: Claude Rains
Maj. Heinrich Strasser: Conrad Veidt
Signor Ferrari: Sydney Greenstreet
Ugarte: Peter Lorre
Carl: S.Z. Sakall
Yvonne: Madeleine Lebeau
Sam: Dooley Wilson
Emil: Marcel Dalio
Annina Brandel: Joy Page
Berger: John Qualen
Sascha: Leonid Kinskey
Pickpocket: Curt Bois

Director: Michael Curtiz
Screenplay: Julius J. Epstein, Philip G. Epstein, Howard Koch
Based on a play by Murray Burnett and Joan Alison
Cinematography: Arthur Edeson
Art direction: Carl Jules Weyl
Film editing: Owen Marks
Music: Max Steiner

A few weeks ago, Madeleine Lebeau, the last surviving member of the cast of Casablanca, died at the age of 92. Lebeau played Yvonne, the Frenchwoman with whom Rick Blaine has been having an affair. When he breaks off their relationship coldly, she comes to his cafe on the arm of a German officer to spite him, but when the crowd starts singing the "Marseillaise" to drown out the Germans' singing of "Die Wacht am Rhein," Yvonne, tears streaming down her face, joins in. It's one of the many character vignettes that make Casablanca so entertaining. The film is filled with characters who have nothing at all to do with the main plot: the choice Rick has to make whether to renew his old affair with Ilsa Lund or let her leave Casablanca with her husband, Victor Laszlo. But if the movie simply focused on that love triangle, would it be the classic that it appears today to be? What makes Casablanca such an enduring film, I think, is the texture of its screenplay, which won Oscars for Julius J. Epstein, Philip G. Epstein, and Howard Koch. And that texture is provided by several dozen character players, to whom somehow the screenwriters managed to give abundant time. The result is such memorable bits as the one in which the waiter, Carl, sits down at a table with an elderly couple, the Leuchtags (Ilka Grüning and Ludwig Stössel), who have just received the visas they need to immigrate to the United States. Carl speaks German to them at first, but the Leuchtags insist that they should speak English so they will fit in when they reach America. Then Herr Leuchtag turns to his wife and asks what time it is:

Liebchen -- sweetness -- what watch?
Ten watch.
Such much? 

Carl assures them, "You will get along beautiful in America." Has there ever been a movie more quotable? It is, of course, a great movie, largely because everyone took the time to weave such moments into its fabric. I don't claim perfection for it: The subservience of Sam to Rick, whom he calls "Mr. Rick" or "Boss," smacks of the racial attitudes of the era, and I wince when Ilsa refers to Sam as "the boy." (Dooley Wilson was in his 50s when the film was made.) James Agee, who was not as impressed with Casablanca as many of his contemporaries were, "snickered at" some of the expository dialogue, such as Ilsa's plea, "Oh, Victor, please don't go to the underground meeting tonight." But it continues to cast a spell that few other films have ever equaled.

Europa '51 (Roberto Rossellini, 1952)

The films Rossellini made during his affair with and marriage to Ingrid Bergman have an everlasting fascination for movie buffs intrigued by the clash of styles: Bergman's Hollywood-style star glamour and Rossellini's gritty, improvisational neo-realism. But they have few real enthusiasts except for hardcore critics inclined toward the auteur theory. For most movie-watchers they seem like failed experiments. Stromboli (1950) has some moments of cinematic excitement -- the volcano explosion, the tuna hunt -- that draw on Rossellini's skill at filming actuality, but the ending, Bergman's epiphany on the side of the volcano, comes out of nowhere and goes nowhere, narratively speaking. Both Journey to Italy (1954) and Fear (1954) end with reconciliations of the conflicted couples that are dramatically unearned. When it comes to dramatic structure, only Europa '51 seems relatively coherent, tracing the journey of Bergman from grief at the loss of her child to a kind of beatific transcendence. But even a sympathetic critic like James Harvey, in his fine discussion of the Bergman-Rossellini oeuvre in his book Watching Them Be, finds the screenplay "Like a play of ideas without the ideas." I don't think that's entirely fair: It seems to me that Europa '51 is crowded with ideas to the point that it becomes a movie about the failure of ideas -- or rather ideology. Nothing suffices to explain Bergman's drive toward saintly service -- she helps a poor family pay for the medical treatment of a child; she befriends a young woman (Giulietta Masina) to the point of filling in for her one day at the woman's job in a horrifying factory; she helps a young hoodlum elude the police; she nurses a dying prostitute -- all of which appalls her husband (Alexander Knox) and her wealthy family. Not religion, not politics, not even psychoanalysis serves to explain or justify her actions, at least in the eyes of the church, the state, and the medical establishment. Or, for that matter, in her own eyes. She doesn't know why she becomes a secular saint, and this of course means she winds up in a mental institution -- where she continues to radiate benevolence even toward the tormented inmates. David Thomson, one of the film's admirers, says, "It's a movie that resonates with the deep-seated urge for moral reform after the war." But ultimately it also seems to me to forecast the failure of any attempt at moral reform. It might be instructive to watch this movie in tandem with a slightly later examination of the moral malaise of postwar Europe, La Dolce Vita (Federico Fellini, 1960).

Elena et les hommes (Jean Renoir, 1956)

Like French Cancan (1954) and The Golden Coach (1952), this is one of Renoir's brightly Technicolored entertainments, with ravishing cinematography by his nephew, Claude Renoir, that recalls the rich colors of the paintings by Jean's father and Claude's grandfather, Pierre-Auguste Renoir. And like many of those paintings, the movie opens itself up to criticisms of possessing more style than substance. Elena et les hommes, which was originally released in the United States under the title Paris Does Strange Things, is a giddy, somewhat brainless romp whose chief claim to our attention is that it was the first film Ingrid Bergman made after her break from Roberto Rossellini. I watched it just after having seen three of those films -- Stromboli (1950), Voyage to Italy (1954), and Fear (1954) -- in which Bergman is put to extremes of emotional torment. Making Elena must have been an enormous relief for her, because it shows: She has never been more beautiful onscreen, wearing the opulent finery of 1880s Paris. She has also never been more lively or funny, throwing herself with complete abandon into the nonsense of the plot. It makes me regret that she did so few comedies: Only Indiscreet (Stanley Donen, 1958) and Cactus Flower (Gene Saks, 1969) gave her a real chance to lighten up the way Renoir's film does, although she showed her comic skills by parodying her more glum roles, especially the doughty missionary in The Inn of the Sixth Happiness (Mark Robson, 1958), in her Oscar-winning performance in Murder on the Orient Express (Sidney Lumet, 1974). It's too bad that her leading men in Elena aren't up to her standards: Jean Marais looks like he doesn't understand what's going on (which is understandable when so much is), while Mel Ferrer looks like he gets it but can't quite overcome the handicap of being Mel Ferrer when what is needed is a Cary Grant or a James Stewart to match Bergman's skills.