Salt of the Earth (Herbert J. Biberman, 1954)

Striking miners in Salt of the Earth

Although it holds one's interest and is a largely successful American attempt to imitate the neo-realism of postwar Italian directors like Roberto Rossellini and Vittorio De Sica, Salt of the Earth is not, I think, a great movie. The acting is amateurish -- necessarily so, because most of the actors are in fact amateurs -- and the plotting is tendentious, with "bad guys" who are given no depth of characterization. But I think it is, perhaps more now than ever, an essential movie. It tells the story of a miners' strike in New Mexico that's based on an actual 1951 strike by the workers of the Empire Zinc Company. The point of view is mostly that of a Mexican-American married couple, the miner Ramon Quintero (Juan Chacón) and his wife, Esperanza (Rosaura Revueltas). When the miners go on strike for better working conditions, especially to put Latino workers on a par with the Anglos, the company invokes the Taft-Hartley Act, enjoining the striking workers from picketing. But the miners' wives take up the cause, in part because they want to improve the standards of the company-owned housing they live in. The film develops a tension not only between workers and management but also between Juan, who clings to a traditional machismo, and Esperanza, who is pregnant but insists on joining the other women on the picket line, where they are subjected to harassment and threats of violence, and are briefly thrown in jail. The story has a happy ending, with the miners and their wives triumphing, but the film itself was denounced as communist propaganda, and its director, Herbert J. Biberman, was one of the Hollywood Ten who were cited for contempt of Congress for refusing to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee. Biberman went to jail for six months. The film's screenwriter, Michael Wilson, was blacklisted, though he continued to work on films sub rosa: His work on the screenplay for The Bridge on the River Kwai (David Lean, 1957) won an Oscar, though only Pierre Boulle, who neither spoke nor wrote English, was credited. In 1984, the Academy posthumously restored Wilson's credit on the film and his Oscar, as it later also restored his credits on the Oscar-nominated screenplays for Lawrence of Arabia (David Lean, 1962) and Friendly Persuasion (William Wyler, 1956). Salt of the Earth itself got a kind of belated recognition in 1992 when the Library of Congress chose it for inclusion in the National Film Registry. And the story of the treatment of its filmmakers could serve as an object lesson in an era when resurgent racism and anti-feminism threaten to turn the clock back to the era in which the film was made.

The Bridge on the River Kwai (David Lean, 1957)

Alec Guinness and David Lean made six features together, starting with Guinness's film debut in Great Expectations (1946). The Bridge on the River Kwai won him his only Oscar, but he seems to have been as much a good-luck charm for Lean as vice versa, since Lean miscast him rather badly in two otherwise successful films: Lawrence of Arabia (1962), in which he is rather embarrassingly non-Arab as King Feisal, and A Passage to India (1984), in which he plays Prof. Godbole with an accent that sounds more like Apu on The Simpsons than any actual Brahmin scholar. The part of Col. Nicholson in Bridge is a bit underwritten: We never really learn what the character's motives are for his eventual collaboration with the Japanese in building the bridge, and his moment of self-awareness as he says, "What have I done?" when he realizes the bridge is about to be blown up, is not adequately prepared for. But Guinness was a consummate trouper, even though he often clashed with Lean about the character, whom he wanted to be less of a stiff-upper-lip type than the director did. The movie won seven Oscars, including one for screenplay that was presented to Pierre Boulle, the author of the novel on which it was based. In fact, Boulle spoke and wrote no English; the screenplay was by Carl Foreman and Michael Wilson, who were blacklisted for supposed communist ties and were judged ineligible under Academy rules. Their Oscars and their screen credit were restored posthumously in 1984. Today, Bridge looks like a well-made entertainment with some major flaws: The moral dilemma that centers on Col. Nicholson, who wants to demonstrate the superiority of the British at the expense of actually serving the Japanese cause, feels artificially created -- surely some of the officers and enlisted men under Nicholson's command had something to say about the colonel's plans. Sessue Hayakawa deserved his supporting actor nomination as Col. Saito, though the part verges on stereotype. The role of the American, Shears (William Holden), who opposes Nicholson, seems to be cooked up to provide something for a major movie star to play: Note that Holden receives top billing, and that Guinness, even though he was nominated for and won a leading actor Oscar, is billed third. The trek through the jungle by Shears, Maj. Warden (Jack Hawkins), Lt. Joyce (Geoffrey Horne), and their attractively nubile team of female bearers takes up a lot of not very involving screen time. And the demolition of the bridge and the train crossing it seems oddly anticlimactic, owing to some complications in blowing up and filming an actual full-size bridge and train. Today, of course, miniatures and special effects would be used to make the scene more exciting, but even for an actual blowing up of a bridge and a train, a sequence that had to be got right the first time, the one in Bridge is actually less successful than the one done 30 years earlier by Buster Keaton in The General (1926).

Lawrence of Arabia (David Lean, 1962)

Peter O'Toole in Lawrence of Arabia

T.E. Lawrence: Peter O'Toole
Prince Faisal: Alec Guinness
Auda Abu Tayi: Anthony Quinn
Gen. Allenby: Jack Hawkins
Sherif Ali: Omar Sharif
Turkish Bey: José Ferrer
Col. Brighton: Anthony Quayle
Mr. Dryden: Claude Rains
Jackson Bentley: Arthur Kennedy
Gen. Murray: Donald Wolfit
Gasim: I.S. Johar
Majid: Gamil Ratib
Farraj: Michel Ray
Daud: John Dimech
Tafas: Zia Mohyeddin

Director: David Lean
Screenplay: Robert Bolt, Michael Wilson
Based on the writings of T.E. Lawrence
Cinematography: Freddie Young
Production design: John Box
Film editing: Anne V. Coates
Music: Maurice Jarre

It's often said -- in fact, it was said in today's San Francisco Chronicle -- that David Lean's Lawrence of Arabia is one of those films that must be seen in a theater. That statement kind of gets my back up: If a movie's story and performances are secondary to its spectacle, is it really a good movie? As it happens, I first saw Lawrence in a theater in the year of its release (or at least its European release, which was 1963), but it was a theater in Germany and the film was dubbed in German. Only moderately fluent in spoken German, I don't think I followed the dialogue very well, though I certainly appreciated the spectacle, especially Freddie Young's Oscar-winning cinematography. It took some later viewings on TV in the States for me to grasp the movie's story, though the film was trimmed for time, interrupted by commercials, and subjected to atrocious panning-and-scanning because viewers objected to letterboxing of wide-screen movies. So this viewing was probably my first complete exposure to Lean's celebrated film. And though I watched it at home -- in HD on a 32-inch flat screen TV -- I think I fully appreciated both the spectacle and the story. Which is not to say that I think the movie is all it's celebrated for being. The first half of the film is far more compelling than the latter half, and some of the casting is unforgivable, particularly Alec Guinness as Prince Faisal and Anthony Quinn as Auda. Guinness was usually a subtle actor, but his Faisal is mannered and unconvincing. Quinn simply overacts, as he was prone to do with directors who let him, and his prosthetic beak is atrocious. Omar Sharif, on the other hand, is very good as Ali. The producers are said to have wanted Horst Buchholz or Alain Delon, but they settled on Sharif, already a star in Egypt, and made him an international star. His success points up how unfortunate it is that they couldn't have found Middle Eastern actors to play Faisal and Auda. In his film debut, Peter O'Toole gives a tremendous performance, even though he's nothing like the shorter and more nondescript figure that was the real T.E. Lawrence, and it's sad that screenwriters Robert Bolt and Michael Wilson couldn't have found room in the script to trace the origins of Lawrence's obsession with Arabia. I recently read Scott Anderson's terrific Lawrence in Arabia: Deceit, Imperial Folly and the Making of the Modern Middle East, which not only depicts Lawrence's complexity but also the madness of the spy-haunted, oil-hungry wartime world in which he played his part. It's beyond the scope of even a three-and-a-half-hour movie to tell, though maybe it would make a tremendous TV miniseries some day.