Movie Houses: Memorable Homes from Ten Classic Films

Ever since Aristotle wrote his Poetics breaking down narrative literature into its constituent parts, setting—where and when a story takes place—has been considered one of the fundamental elements of narration. In narrative film, which is essentially a visual art, where the action occurs is if anything even more important than in literature. In the past I've written about the importance of setting in Mon Oncle, The Haunting, and The Magnificent Ambersons, specifically the houses where those movies take place. In this post I'd like to discuss ten more movies where the setting not only is visually striking and vividly atmospheric, but also plays an important part in the narrative. Here they are, then, in no particular order:

• Citizen Kane (1941). "In Xanadu did Kubla Khan / A stately pleasure-dome decree," wrote Samuel Taylor Coleridge. That Charles Foster Kane named his mansion Xanadu is a good indication of the character's megalomania. The house depicted in Citizen Kane certainly seems to be the residence of a man with delusions of grandeur. And its position high on a hilltop—part fortress, part prison—underscores the isolation of Kane in his later years. Xanadu is the first thing we see in the movie, a light in one window, the window of the room where Kane lies dying and utters that enigmatic last word "Rosebud" as the snow globe slips out of his hand and rolls across the floor. It's also the last thing we see, in complete darkness now with smoke rising from the chimney. What a frisson when we realize exactly what is burning in that massive fireplace in front of which the second Mrs. Kane whiled away the hours with her jigsaw puzzles.

• Lost Horizon (1937). Shangri-La has become synonymous with paradise, and practically everyone, not just moviegoers, recognizes the name. When Frank Capra filmed James Hilton's novel, his set designers came up with an unforgettable vision of that exotic Himalayan home of ageless monks and their Utopian community. The design details could only be called eclectic, an eccentric fusion of modernist, Babylonian, Moorish, and Asian elements, both inside and out, that mirrors the vague East/West mysticism of the monks. The grounds are complete with reflecting pools, wandering ornamental wildfowl, architectonic conifers, and weeping Chinese trees. Dominating it all are the radiant blue skies and brilliant sunlight of Southern California.

• Meet Me in St. Louis (1944). This house could have come right out of a Currier & Ives print, so closely does it conform to the archetype of the upper middle-class American home circa 1900. The movie, all about the tribulations of the Smith family when they learn they must leave St. Louis after the father of the family takes a job in New York City, follows what will be the last few months in their familiar home as the family faces the approaching move with mounting apprehension. This house should be an idyllic place, a place of security, stability, and happiness. And everything about it does indeed convey exactly those feelings of wholesome normalcy. Who could bear to leave a place of such idealized Midwestern homeyness for the uncertainty of life in the big city?

• The Beauty and the Beast (1946). Cocteau's vision of the Beast's home is ravishingly beautiful, strange, and magical. This is a living house, where everything—from the caryatids supporting the fireplace mantelshelf to the candelabra held by human arms that swivel to light Belle's passage down the dark hallway to her room—is alive. The imaginative detail that went into this setting—indeed, into everything about the movie, including its props, costumes, and makeup—is astounding and, once seen, impossible to forget. There has never been anything quite like it in any other live-action movie: a fairy tale vision that easily does justice to the fantastic story it's such a big part of.

• Rebel Without a Cause (1955). One of the first, and probably the definitive, teen alienation movies, with James Dean, Natalie Wood, and Sal Mineo as the alienated teens. Near the end of the movie the three meet at an abandoned mansion and in a poignant sequence role-play the ideal family they long for in their real lives. This is a place of escape and fantasy, and its dereliction suggests the impossibility of their dream world. The actual location used was the Getty Mansion in Hollywood, where those scenes were shot over the course of several nights. This is, coincidentally, the same location used as Norma Desmond's mansion in Sunset Boulevard, and the empty swimming pool with Dean, Wood, and Mineo in it pictured above is the same one in which the body of Joe Gillis floats as he narrates that movie in flashback. This and other filming locations for Rebel are described in a fascinating post at the blogsite Dear Old Hollywood, which is where I located the screenshot above.

• Rebecca (1940). "Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again." Nobody who has seen this movie will forget that line. Nor will they forget the spooky seaside mansion where Maxim de Winter takes his shy, unassertive second wife and where so many memorable scenes take place. At Manderley the second Mrs. de Winter's isolation is not only physical but also social. A former paid companion, she is intimidated by the responsibility of being in charge of such a large house and staff (especially the resentful, domineering Mrs. Danvers) and by trying desperately to fit in with the idle rich with whom her new husband socializes. Alfred Hitchcock, himself the son of a greengrocer, makes Manderley a representation of the profoundly ingrained class system of pre-World War II Britain and makes it easy for the viewer to identify with the class insecurity of the timid young bride unaccustomed to the privilege and wealth of her new social position.

• Gone with the Wind (1939). So essential is Scarlett O'Hara's plantation Tara to the movie that composer Max Steiner actually gave it its own musical theme. Tara represents an idealized vision of the antebellum South. Its destruction in the Civil War devastates Scarlett, and her obsession with restoring it to its previous glory becomes the driving motivation of her life. To achieve this she marries two men she doesn't love for their money and even kills. At the end of the movie, after she has lost everything else, she returns to Tara and vows to make it the Edenic place it once was. In its way, Tara is nearly as essential to the plot of the movie as any of the main characters. In a movie of lavish expenditure, clearly not a dollar was spared by David O. Selznick on making Tara the image of everything it stands for in Scarlett's memory.

• Last Year at Marienbad (1961). Shot at several palaces in Bavaria, this movie would be inconceivable without its locations. Remove those and what would remain? Little but enigmatic characters and an impenetrable fugue of a plot. It's the look of this movie that makes it an unforgettable one of a kind: those people encountering one another in baroque salons encrusted with elaborate ornamentation or in mind-bending halls of mirrors, or standing about like statues in those absolutely symmetrical, geometric French-style gardens. Forget the people, forget trying to make sense of the plot or the dialogue. Just lose yourself in those timeless, hallucinatory images. Location, location, location—that's what this film is all about.

• A Streetcar Named Desire (1951). While most of the other homes I've written about are rather grand places, the setting of this film is just the opposite. Located in a run-down building ironically named Elysian Fields, the home of Stanley and Stella Kowalski is a shabby, cramped apartment. The set designers (who won an Oscar for their work) actually turn the movie's stage origin to its advantage by creating a claustrophobic vision of poverty that looks all the more stark in the film's black-and-white cinematography by Harry Stradling, better known for opulent movies like The Picture of Dorian Gray or Technicolor extravaganzas like The Pirate and My Fair Lady. Here he perfectly captures the bleakness of the Kowalskis' apartment, with its sparse furnishings, overstuffed appearance, harsh lighting, and hanging electric cords snaking across the top of the frame. Stanley Kowalski, in his sweaty T-shirt, looks right at home here, but his fantasist sister-in-law Blanche du Bois, in her frilly, virginal Southern belle frocks, seems completely out of place in this absolutely realistic vision of limited resources and frustrated hopes.

• Psycho (1960). How else could I end this post but with what is probably the most identifiable movie house in all cinema? Old-fashioned, a bit dilapidated, and in need of a fresh coat of paint it may be, but once you've seen what goes on inside, that ordinary-looking old house looming eerily on an isolated hilltop will be burned into your memory, the ultimate image of creepiness, menace, and perversion hiding behind an innocuous facade—just like its inhabitant, Norman Bates. Who but Alfred Hitchcock could have taken such a hackneyed idea and made it so thoroughly convincing and so thoroughly entertaining?

I've limited myself to ten memorable movie homes drawn from my favorite era in cinema, some of the ones that made the strongest impressions on me. If anyone would like to add favorites of your own, please do leave a comment.
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The Best Movies of the 1980s

Another decade poll, this one on the 25 best movies of the 1980s, has concluded at Wonders in the Dark, and the results have been announced. This was for me the most difficult of the four decade polls I've taken part in. In previous decade polls—I didn't begin participating until the poll on the 1950s—my greatest problem was narrowing down a list of 40-50 possibilities—all taken from my list of **** movies, my highest personal rating—to 25 finalists. This time the problem was the opposite: I didn't have 25 to begin with, so I had to expand my preliminary list to come up with 25 finalists. This meant that for the first time a few of the titles on my final list, while very good films, didn't quite make my highest rating. One of the reasons for this was that for these lists I include only one movie per director. This practice originally began because I didn't want my lists dominated by a handful of individuals who are my own favorites at the expense of other directors. Even though this time such a limitation wasn't strictly necessary, I decided for the sake of consistency to continue observing it.

Because the WitD poll now permits television productions to be included in the poll, I could have filled out the list with the best TV mini-series of the decade. (See my list at the end.) For me the 1980s were the zenith of the TV mini-series, particularly in the UK. But as with the 1970s poll, I balked at including television productions because I don't really consider them the same thing as theatrical movies. I watch them differently, and I have different expectations of them. I expect theatrical movies to be more concentrated. I also expect to be able to watch them in one sitting, and for me that means a running time of at most around three hours, give or take a little.

One of the most interesting things I did in preparing for the poll was to watch the TV version of Ingmar Bergman's Fanny and Alexander. The theatrical film runs a little over three hours, and the TV version about five hours. I watched the TV version's four episodes over four nights, as it was intended, and then compared the two versions. The TV version contains several sequences, some brief and a couple fairly long, that do not appear in the theatrical version. Some of these add to the story, but some of them seem like digressions that aren't absolutely necessary and in some cases actually sidetrack the main narrative.

One short sequence that isn't in the theatrical version occurs when Alexander is locked in the attic for making up a story that his stepfather murdered his first wife and their two daughters. The two daughters appear to Alexander as ghosts and tell him what really happened—that they were victims of a tragic accident in the river that runs outside their house. This fairly brief sequence seems to hearken back to the dreaminess of Bergman's earlier films, a style he had largely abandoned by the time of Fanny and Alexander. Curiously, in a way it actually de-emphasizes Alexander's eidetic imagination, making the movie more a literalized ghost story than a portrait of the artist as a young man haunted by his own metaphorical ghosts rooted in his childhood experiences (the loss of this father and abuse by his stepfather).

A long sequence that also weakens the longer version occurs when their grandmother's friend Isak tells Fanny and Alexander a complicated and rather tedious story that is a parable of the human search for the locus of pure imagination and a lost state of grace. It elaborates on a point that is already obvious and doesn't tell us anything we don't already know about either Isak or Alexander. The whole extended sequence seems to exist only for a brief, although admittedly vivid, glimpse at Alexander's visualization of one event in the story. A similar sequence that appears only in the long version occurs after the Christmas feast when Alexander's father calms the restive children in the nursery by telling them a lengthy tale about a Chinese princess and her magic chair. The story is in itself not very interesting, a digression that slows the film down without contributing anything significant.

On the other hand, some things included in the longer version strengthen the movie. A couple of scenes that last only a few seconds are inexplicably missing in the short version. At the very beginning, Alexander imagines he sees a statue come to life. In the long version he also has a brief glimpse of Death as the Grim Reaper, and these few moments of counterpoint between beauty and death, with their echoes of The Seventh Seal, are so potent that I am surprised they were eliminated in the short version. Likewise, in the long version after the christening banquet, there is a brief shot of the guests all assembled, which then transmutes into a black-and-white photo, which becomes one of a pile of photos Alexander's grandmother is trying to sort out and paste into a scrapbook. This is one of the most haunting images in the movie, and again I am surprised that, lasting at most a few seconds and intensifying the movie's preoccupation with memory and time, it was eliminated in the shortened version.

A longer sequence with Alexander's uncles trying to get the two children away from their stepfather, who is holding them prisoner after their mother has left him, struck me as pertinent to the story despite its length, helping to flesh out the uncles and the way they differ in personality. This sequence was eliminated altogether from the theatrical version. And in the TV version the farewell of Alexander's mother to the actors when she announces she is closing the theater is, I feel, more poignant than the abbreviated sequence in the short version.

However, one example of trimming the movie improves the theatrical version considerably. This is the very first long sequence of the Christmas festivities at the theater and at the Ekdahls' house. The shorter version, which I described at length in a previous post, is wonderfully concentrated. I wrote that "Bergman seems to have rolled all of life into this one meal." But in the TV version, this sequence, running nearly twice as long, is bogged down in unnecessary exposition and digression, its power considerably diluted. After comparing the two versions, I decided that the ideal would probably have been something between the two, running about four hours.

Why am I writing in such detail about this one movie? One reason is that this decade poll and the previous one highlighted the proliferation of alternate versions of films under consideration—TV versions, restorations, reconstructions, director's cuts. Another reason is that I chose Fanny and Alexander as the #1 movie of the decade, as did the participants in the 1980s poll at WitD. This is the fourth decade in a row that I placed a film by Bergman at or near the top of the movies of the decade: Wild Strawberries at #2 for the 1950s, Persona at #1 for the 1960s, Cries and Whispers at #3 for the 1970s, and now Fanny and Alexander at #1 for the 1980s.

With the usual caveat, that this a personal list limited by my own viewing experiences and cinematic preferences—and acknowledging that on reflection it strikes me as a fairly conservative list, heavy on period movies and movies about children—here are my top films of the 1980s:


THE BEST MOVIES OF THE 1980s

1. Fanny and Alexander, Bergman (1983)
   
2. Blue Velvet, Lynch (1986)
3. The Night of the Shooting Stars, Taviani & Taviani (1982)
4. A Sunday in the Country, Tavernier (1984)
5. The Dead, Huston (1987)
6. Kagemusha, Kurosawa (1980)
7. Tootsie, Pollack (1982)
8. Hannah and Her Sisters, Allen (1986)
9. Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, Almodóvar (1988)
10. The Last Emperor (Director's Cut), Bertolucci (1987)
11. Au Revoir, les Enfants, Malle (1987)
12. Hope and Glory, Boorman (1987)
13. Pixote, Babenco (1981)
14. Pelle the Conqueror, August (1988)
15. Babette's Feast, Axel (1987)
16. A Room with a View, Ivory (1986)
17. Dangerous Liaisons, Frears (1988)
18. Raging Bull, Scorsese (1980)
19. Brazil, Gilliam (1985)
20. E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial, Spielberg (1982)
21. Terms of Endearment, Brooks (1983)
22. La Traviata, Zeffirelli (1982)
23. Jean de Florette, Berri (1986)
24. Paris, Texas, Wenders (1984)
25. The Home and the World, Ray (1984)

HONORABLE MENTION: The Elephant Man, Ran, The Big Red One: The Reconstruction, The Purple Rose of Cairo, Manon of the Springs, Radio Days, Crimes and Misdemeanors

BEST TV PRODUCTIONS: The Singing Detective, Brideshead Revisited, The Jewel in the Crown, Paradise Postponed

If I were to single out one film director for especially good work during the 1980s, it would be Woody Allen, for the films I mentioned plus Zelig (for the boldness of its concept and its meticulous execution).

This will likely be the last decade poll I'll be participating in. The 1980s lie at the outside edge of my knowledge of cinema, and my interest in movies produced after this decade begins to wane seriously. I find fewer and fewer movies of the last 20 years that appeal to me enough to go out of my way to seek them out, and when I do, I too often find they don't live up to my hopes. I'll continue to follow Allan Fish's concise and knowledgeable reviews at Wonders in the Dark, and the stimulating comments and discussions that his sometimes surprising choices evoke. And I'll be trawling the site for titles to add to my watch-list to help update my film knowledge. It's been a pleasure discovering and rediscovering the best movies of the 1950s-1980s, and I thank Allan and Sam Juliano of WitD for inspiring those of us who regularly visit the site to do this.

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I Love Paris: Billy Wilder's Love in the Afternoon

NOTE: This post is part of the LAMBs in the Director's Chair event on Billy Wilder. For more about Billy Wilder at LAMBs in the Director's Chair, click here.


"In Paris people make love . . . well, perhaps not better . . . but certainly more often. They do it any place, any time," says Maurice Chevalier at the beginning of Billy Wilder's Love in the Afternoon (1957). As he speaks these words in voice-over, we are treated to a montage of the people and sights of Paris, a montage filled with phallic symbols—an erect baguette, a soldier standing at attention with a ceremonial French flag projecting from a holster several feet out and up from his crotch, the Eiffel Tower, and finally a slow camera tilt up the Vendôme Column, at the top of which we find Chevalier.

Chevalier plays Claude Anet, a private detective who specializes in cases of marital infidelity, and he is in the process of photographing the wife of his latest client, Monsieur X (John McGiver), in a tryst with the notorious American playboy Frank Flannagan (Gary Cooper) at the Ritz Hotel on the other side of the Place Vendôme. When Anet presents photographic evidence of his wife's infidelity to his client, the client vows to go to the hotel that evening and shoot Flannagan in a crime passionel. In the next room, Anet's daughter Ariane (Audrey Hepburn), a cello student at the music conservatory, overhears this and, horrified, determines to save Flannagan.

Thus is set in motion a thoroughly delightful sex comedy that, although a commercial failure when released, today seems one of Wilder's warmest, least sardonic films and contains one of Audrey Hepburn's most charming and underappreciated performances. It is also one of Wilder's most subversive movies in the way it deals with sexual situations entirely obliquely, constantly suggesting sex while rarely referring to it openly and never showing it. This risqué, Continental attitude toward sex and the allusive style of telling a story that is, after all, largely about sex, has caused many critics to call Love in the Afternoon Wilder's valentine to Ernst Lubitsch.

Of course, Wilder's films often dealt covertly with sex, and for much of his career he was engaged in a running battle with censors over how directly he could present the sexual content of his movies. He actually managed to get away with quite a lot. The very first movie he directed, The Major and the Minor, was about a man in his thirties who believed he was in love with a 12-year old girl (although the viewer knew from the start that she was actually Ginger Rogers masquerading as a rather long-in-the-tooth 12-year old). Pedophilia, anyone? Double Indemnity featured Fred MacMurray as a sucker held in sexual thrall by the sluttish Barbara Stanwyck. Sunset Boulevard suggested that William Holden was being kept by Gloria Swanson. The Seven Year Itch showed nerdy, lecherous Tom Ewell driven to distraction by his sexy neighbor, Marilyn Monroe, while his wife and child were out of town for the summer. By the time of Some Like It Hot (transvestism), The Apartment (workplace sexual harassment), and Irma la Douce (prostitution), Wilder was growing ever bolder in the sexual implications of his plots.

In a scene that is a cunning variation on the conventions of French bedroom farce, Ariane saves Flannagan's life by changing places with Madame X and impersonating her when her husband bursts into the hotel room with a pistol. Flannagan slyly maneuvers Ariane into a passionate kiss during this scene, and the romantic and impressionable girl immediately falls in love with him, agreeing to return to the hotel room the next afternoon, Flannagan's last day in Paris. When she arrives, Flannagan lays on the full array of his tools of seduction—champagne, a gypsy orchestra playing romantic music, and plenty of smooth talk. Later the gypsies are seen tiptoeing from the room, and the next we see of Ariane, she is standing in front of the bathroom mirror combing her hair—Wilder's shorthand to let us know that sex has taken place.

The first date at the Ritz

One year later Ariane and her would-be boyfriend are at the opera (the opera being performed is Tristan und Isolde, and Franz Waxman, the composer of the music score for Love in the Afternoon, is conducting Wagner's ultra-romantic music) when she spots Flannagan in the audience. Contriving to encounter him in the lobby, she finds that at first he automatically turns on the seductive charm without even recognizing her. When he does remember her (she has never told him her name; he knows her only as "Thin Girl"), they arrange a standing date in his hotel room every afternoon for the two weeks Flannagan will be in Paris. What follows is a two-week long idyll that even includes a memorably romantic picnic in the country.

A day in the country

At the end of the two weeks, Ariane, who has led him to believe she is far more sexually experienced than she really is, shows reluctant willingness to play the seduction game by Flannagan's rules and allow him to leave in pursuit of his next conquest. "I know the rules . . . love and run. Everybody's happy, nobody gets hurt," she tells him wistfully. "Works out great all around." This is followed by the crucial scene in the movie.

As Ariane prepares to leave the hotel room after their last afternoon together, she finds she is missing one of her shoes. (Flannagan is lounging in his dressing gown, the shoe hidden in his pocket. If there was ever any doubt about what was going on at these afternoon dates, this should settle the question. ) As they search for the shoe together, Flannagan tells her how perfect she is and asks her how many men have told her that. (We know the answer: just one.) At that moment the telephone rings—another of his conquests wanting to arrange an assignation. As Ariane hides out in the bedroom, she spots Flannagan's dictaphone and impulsively decides to wind him up. Using her father's case files for inspiration, she decides to answer Flannagan's question about her past lovers by concocting a fictitious love life in which she catalogues her imaginary lovers. When Flannagan later listens to the recording, he is at first amused and then overcome with jealousy. Whether this was Ariane's intention or not, she now has him on the hook, and it is inevitable that she will eventually land him, although not before many complications are worked through.

When it was released, Love in the Afternoon was not a commercial success, and this was attributed to the obvious age difference between Cooper and Hepburn. Even today many viewers find this unnerving. Yet nobody seemed to find it odd that Cooper's bride in High Noon (1952) was played by Grace Kelly, who was the same age as Hepburn. And there had been few complaints when Wilder cast Humphrey Bogart opposite Hepburn in Sabrina just three years earlier. (Bogart was actually two years older than Cooper.) Bogart's own wife at the time was Lauren Bacall, who was some 25 years his junior, and they are considered one of Hollywood's legendary couples, both onscreen and off.

It's true that Wilder wanted Cary Grant, who was nearly the same age as Cooper, to play Frank Flannagan but that Grant turned down the part because he thought he was too old to be paired with Hepburn. (Grant later married Dyan Cannon, who was eight years younger than Hepburn. Perhaps that helps explain why he finally relented and agreed to play opposite Hepburn in 1963's Charade.) It's also true that, unlike Grant, Cooper looked every year of his age (56), although pains were clearly taken to downplay his raddled appearance with flattering camera angles and lighting and by avoiding close-ups. Tellingly, he does clearly show his age in one very unflattering close-up, a reaction shot when Chevalier tells him that Ariane is his daughter. Add to all this the fact that Hollywood has a long tradition of teaming older men with younger women (and also that there is psychobiological evidence to explain such mutual attraction: men tend to equate youth in women with fertility, while women tend to equate age in men with the stability and material resources necessary to maintain a family), and such a romantic pairing as Gary Cooper and Audrey Hepburn—although certainly not fashionable in today's more age-conscious world—doesn't seem entirely implausible.

In fact, Wilder deals proleptically with the issue of age disparity in Love in the Afternoon. At one point he has Flannagan accuse Ariane of being too young to behave so promiscuously, to which she responds by asking him if he isn't a bit too old to be playing Casanova. At another point, when Flannagan wonders why she is interested in a man as mature as himself, she tells him, "Actually, I don't much care for young men. Never did. I find them conceited, clumsy, and very unimaginative."

The question of age difference aside, both Cooper and Hepburn give outstanding performances. I've never been a big fan of Cooper, who often strikes me as a rather stiff actor of limited range. In Love in the Afternoon, for once he doesn't play the kind of laconic he-man, naive idealist, or romantic innocent he specialized in. His Frank Flannagan is purely and simply a serial philanderer—at one point Ariane's father refers to him as "a hit-and-run lover"—a shallow sensualist who uses his money to lure, seduce, and sexually exploit women. In this performance he redirects the geniality he seemed to project so effortlessly to the role of a cad, a compulsive Don Juan.

But near the end of the movie, his character undergoes a radical transformation. As he listens to that recording of her fictitious sex life that Ariane leaves him, you can see the change in him happening. In the course of one sequence, Flannagan goes from bemused detachment to frantic jealousy, and Cooper is very, very good at showing this rapid Jeckyll and Hyde-like transformation from suave seducer to lovesick nervous wreck. Wilder shows the aftermath of this change when Flannagan gets drunk with his gypsy orchestra, even working in a very funny bit of business with Flannagan and the gypsies passing a rolling liquor cart back and forth between the bedroom and the sitting room as they get more and more drunk.

Of all the charming performances the young Audrey Hepburn gave in the 1950s, this is one of the richest and most varied, and it is perhaps the most subtly comic. As the innocent Ariane in the first part of the movie, she does exactly what the audience expects from her. But after that kiss from Flannagan awakens her latent eroticism, we see a very different side of her from the expected one. She becomes, in a word, a minx. Her deviousness is entirely benign, but its purpose is unambiguously sexual: she deceives her father, her boy friend, and even Frank himself in order to create and prolong an erotic encounter.

Like Frank, Ariane undergoes her own transformation—from a romantic, innocent girl to a sexually experienced young woman. I don't think anyone else but Wilder working in his Lubitsch-inspired mode could have made such a transformation seem so inoffensive when it involved such a cinematic idealization of innocence and chastity as Audrey Hepburn. He even coaxed Hepburn, who was the fashion icon of the 1950s, into making fun of her looks. While she and Cooper are searching for the missing shoe, she complains that her feet are too big (they were, and Hepburn was notoriously sensitive about it), adding, "I'm too thin and my ears stick out and my teeth are crooked and my neck is much too long." If you look closely, you can see that the divine Audrey is actually correct in this physical self-assessment, although I'm inclined to agree with Frank's response: "Maybe so, but I love the way it all hangs together."

Wilder never wrote and directed a movie quite like this one before or after, which is perhaps why it is so seldom mentioned in considerations of his oeuvre as a director. Wilder's films are typically shot through with a self-professed cynicism, a belief that people basically act to further their own self-interest. Even so, he has frequently been criticized for failing to follow through with the harsh world view that informs his movies. David Thomson, for instance, complains that Wilder was a director who "knew how to sweeten his own sour pills but who time and again slipped out of the ugly position of offering tough medicine." The decision to work entirely in the gentler Lubitsch mode in Love in the Afternoon was one that served Wilder well by making the film immune to such criticism. Rather than dishing out his usual bitter cynicism, Wilder here assumes a detached and whimsical point of view. Like Lubitsch, he stands back and observes the participants in the game of love and sex, emphasizing the ritual of their romantic dance rather than dwelling on the dark side of human nature.

All in all, Love in the Afternoon is, for Wilder, a movie of rare grace and charm. It is a beautifully written film (the first of twelve he wrote with long-time collaborator I. A. L. Diamond), one packed with incident, clever plot turns, witty dialogue, and memorable details and bits of business—all of which slot together in precise, clockwork fashion. It is in a way a fairy tale, containing elements of Sleeping Beauty, Cinderella, even Beauty and the Beast. And it is a valentine to Francophiles everywhere, presenting a story that feels, and a movie that looks, like the romanticized images in the minds of those who love all things Gallic.
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1962: Hollywood's Second Greatest Year? Part 2

The Play's the Thing

Lawrence of Arabia, which I wrote about in the previous installment of this series, is based on an original screenplay by Robert Bolt and Michael Wilson, which in turn was based on the writings of T. E. Lawrence himself. But two of the other great American movies released in 1962 are film versions of stage plays. One of these is the Nobel Prize-winning playwright Eugene O'Neill's Long Day's Journey Into Night (itself the winner of the 1957 Pulitzer Prize for drama), directed by Sidney Lumet. Lumet came to movies from television, where he had worked as a director for nearly ten years before directing his first film, 12 Angry Men (1957).

Running nearly three hours in its unedited version, Journey is possibly the best film version of a stage play I have ever seen. Anyone who has seen it will understand when I say that watching it is an emotionally devastating experience, an experience comparable to watching one of the most emotionally intense films of Ingmar Bergman. By the end of the movie the viewer knows thoroughly the Tyrone family and the deeply flawed relationships of each of its members to the others. And what a family: a tyrannical, obsessively miserly father, a morphine-addicted mother, an alienated, alcoholic older son, and a sensitive younger son dying from tuberculosis.

Credit for the film's powerful impact must go, of course, to O'Neill, but also to director Lumet, who prudently resists the temptation to "open out" the play, keeping it confined to the Tyrone house and to the four members of the family and their maid. In doing this he emphasizes the isolation of the family and their self-created entrapment in despair. In addition, the black-and-white cinematography of Boris Kaufman (Vigo's Zero de Conduite and L'Atalante, On the Waterfront) must be mentioned, with its masterful use of light and shadow within the house, and its capturing of the subtly shifting intensity of light as the day progresses into night, and daylight progresses to lamplight. But above all, credit must go to the ensemble cast—Katharine Hepburn, Ralph Richardson, Jason Robards, and Dean Stockwell. At the Cannes film festival Hepburn was voted Best Actress, and Richardson, Robards, and Stockwell all shared the Best Actor award.

If I had to single out one of these brilliant performances for special recognition, it would be Katharine Hepburn's Oscar-nominated turn as Mary Tyrone. I greatly admire Hepburn's comedy and light dramatic performances, but her straight dramatic performances sometimes strike me as emphasizing her weaknesses as an actress. Her Mary Tyrone, though, is in a class by itself and unlike anything she had done before or has done since. It has none of the overly earnest histrionics or the idiosyncrasies and tics that can diminish the force of her weightier dramatic performances.

Here she poignantly makes you feel all of the pain, disappointment, and years of frustrated expectations that have broken Mary Tyrone and driven her to become a morphine addict. Hepburn constantly makes you see that trapped inside the dope-addled woman is the hopeful, naive girl who married the dashing older actor. Pauline Kael wrote of her performance that "Hepburn's transitions here—the way she can look 18 or 80 at will—seem iridescent." A comparison of her interpretation of Mary Tyrone to that of the British actress Constance Cummings in Laurence Olivier's 1973 television version—where Mary Tyrone is unsympathetically portrayed as rather self-pitying, petulant, and neurotic—shows how profoundly affecting Hepburn, forlorn and vulnerable, really is in this movie. The cumulative effect of her performance on the viewer is not unlike the terror and pity experienced by the viewers of Greek tragedy. As Pauline Kael put it, "[T]he screen's most beautiful comedienne of the 30s and 40s becomes our greatest screen tragedienne."

The other great movie of 1962 adapted from a stage play is The Miracle Worker, adapted by William Gibson from his play about Helen Keller (Patty Duke) and her teacher and lifelong friend Annie Sullivan (Anne Bancroft). The director of The Miracle Worker, Arthur Penn, had like Sidney Lumet come from television, and this was only his second movie.

The Miracle Worker was rightly described in promotional material as "An Emotional Earthquake!" When the movie begins, the nearly blind Sullivan, a graduate of and teacher at the Perkins School for the Blind in Boston, has been hired by Keller's wealthy, genteel Alabama family as governess to an essentially spoiled and untamed creature. Stricken at the age of nineteen months with an illness—possible scarlet fever or meningitis—that left her blind and deaf, Helen has been allowed to develop without any sort of training except for a rudimentary kind of sign language she has been able to acquire spontaneously.

In the early days Helen's reaction to her new governess and teacher alternates unpredictably between co-operation and hostility. Annie succeeds in making limited progress with her pupil only to experience sudden setbacks marked by violent tantrums and physical attacks by Helen. Her greatest success is in teaching Helen to spell with her fingers the names of objects. Yet Annie realizes that Helen is really only mimicking her without grasping the relationship between objects and words. "It's still a finger game to her—no meaning," she tells Helen's mother.

The uneasy relationship between Annie and Helen erupts into all-out conflict one day during the family meal, which as in most traditional Southern households of the time takes place at midday. Helen has never been taught to eat properly, instead roaming around the table while the rest of the family eat and picking bites of food off their plates. Finally Annie can stand this no longer and orders everyone else out of the dining room. What follows is a truly mesmerizing scene lasting nearly ten minutes and containing not a single word of dialogue.

Determined to teach Helen to eat at the table using a plate and spoon, Annie must physically subdue the intractable child. The scene is filled with a relentless physicality that almost borders on brutality on the part of Sullivan. This is in reality less a conflict than a war in which she must conquer her opponent if she is to have any chance of making progress in educating her. The scene occupies less than ten minutes of screen time, but in narrative time it goes on for several hours, until in fact it is time for the next meal of the day. By sheer persistence and force of will Annie does at last succeed at teaching the child to eat properly.

At a loss as to how to proceed with Helen's education beyond this point, Annie finally hits upon a plan to isolate the child from the family and live with her in a cottage on another part of the estate. "I don't think Helen's worst handicap is deafness and blindness," she tells her mother. "I think it's your love and pity." The family reluctantly agree to a two-week trial of the scheme. The two do grow closer as Helen gradually accepts the situation and learns to trust her teacher. But Annie is frustrated in her chief desire, to teach Helen the concept of language. "One word and I can put the world in your hand," she says to Helen in frustration one day.

The two weeks, however, come to an end without this happening, and the family refuse to extend the trial period. At dinner on the first night after their return, things are going badly. Helen is behaving willfully, defying Annie and testing her limits. After she throws a pitcher of water in Annie's face, Annie physically drags her from the dining room in front of the horrified family. Outside at the well Annie tries to force Helen to re-fill the water pitcher using the old-fashioned hand pump. In the unforgettable scene that follows, the breakthrough that Annie has been working for suddenly happens.

Helen's mother has already told Annie that at the age of six months Helen had actually vocalized the word for water, saying "wa-wa." As Helen holds her hand under the stream of water, Annie recognizes in Helen the dawning of awareness of the relationship between objects and words, the birth in Helen's consciousness of the concept of language. Helen, in truth an extraordinarily intelligent child, is somehow able to remember her first experience with language from babyhood and like an unimpaired infant learning her first word, finally vocalizes her first word, "wa-wa." The emotional impact of this scene on the viewer is almost overpowering.

The Miracle Worker has numerous cinematic virtues that make it far more than just a filmed version of a stage play. Repeated images of water throughout the film foreshadow the climactic scene. Penn's use of sound is brilliant. To form a transition between scenes, he frequently overlaps sound and image, beginning the sound from the next scene before the actual cut to it. At the end of the dining room scene, we hear a clock begin to chime; Penn then cuts to the family waiting outside, and the clock finishes chiming. His use of the hand-held camera and of grainy or slightly out-of-focus images superimposed on Annie's face, instead of the conventional flashback, to tell us details about Annie's sad history suggest that Penn had been carefully watching the early films of the French New Wave directors like Alain Resnais and François Truffaut.

But the movie really belongs to Bancroft and Duke. So fully do they inhabit their roles (both had played them in the Broadway production, also directed by Penn) that it is impossible to imagine anyone else playing Annie and Helen. Both were deservedly rewarded with Oscars, Bancroft for best actress and Duke for best supporting actress. Duke became the first child ever to win an Oscar in competition.

The award was a special triumph for Bancroft, who after years spent in Hollywood in the 1950s making cheesy movies like Gorilla at Large, had finally deserted Hollywood for the New York stage, where she won two Tony awards. After The Miracle Worker Bancroft became a bona fide movie star, turning in memorable performances in several other movies, including The Pumpkin Eater (1964), The Graduate (1967), in which she played the iconic Mrs. Robinson, Agnes of God (1985), and 84 Charing Cross Road (1987). In the process she received four more Oscar nominations. For me Bancroft was the pre-eminent American actress of the 1960's.
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I'll be discussing more masterpieces from 1962 in future installments and remarking briefly on the other noteworthy American movies of that year.