Several years later, Vidor was planning to do Our Daily Bread, a film about a collective farm, so radical it alarmed Thalberg.So Vidor had to raise the money himself and make it independently.But he wanted Murray back, because the man in Our Daily Bread was John a few years later.He was heavier and unshaven.Vidor bought him a drink and offered him the new part.But Murray had lost hope.Just because I stop you on the street and try to borrow a buck, said Murray, you think you can tell me what to do.As far as I am concerned, you know what you can do with your lousy part. In two years` time, Murray`s corpse was pulled out of the Hudson River.Years later he tried to set up a film about Murray`s life, but it was deemed too downbeat.Our Daily Bread was attacked in some places as being inspired by communism.It even won a prize in a Soviet film festival.By 1936, Vidor felt compelled to play a leading part in the foundation of the Directors Guild, set up to defend directors against studio exploitation and part of the unionization of the business that occurred in the 1930s with the organization of writers and actors.As a metaphor for the Hollywood process it was so penetrating, the system had to ignore it.And this was three years before Sunset Blvd.King Vidor is endlessly fascinating, and the dynamism of many of his pictures has not dated.He perceived the significance of the ordinary fellow for The Crowd, yet he was a relentless outsider led on by his appetite for visual melodrama.The picture is not well thought of, and not what Tolstoy is about.But it carries the enthusiasm, and reckless confidence, of a man who clearly supposed that if Tolstoy had been born a little later and come to America, he would have become a screenwriter.How could he have turned down that enormous audience?He wanted to do Cervantes or Faulkner, but he grew weary of pitching and bargaining.It had been so much easier and quicker with Thalberg.I was glad to get out of it.They were diluting every idea, changing everything, and I was at a place in my life where I didn`t have to prostitute these ideas and make these compromises.In The Fountainhead, Gary Cooper blows up the whole building because they change the façade and some of the other sections of the structure.His early years were split between that city and New York.He was a man of all trades in the early picture business in New Jersey and he served in the Signal Corps during the war.It was in 1930 that he went to Berlin, working for both Paramount and Ufa, to direct the first talking picture with Emil Jannings, who shared the widespread public feeling that he was the greatest actor alive.Von Sternberg, who acted out his own preferred style of laconic restraint, saw Jannings as an excessive bore so conceited he believed he could act with his back.In part, this clash of approaches was simply sound pulling away the carpet of silence.Von Sternberg was one of the first directors to see that beautiful people need do very little on film except be photographed.Dietrich`s pensiveness in Shanghai Express, say, is still an acting class where we wonder what she is thinking.Such moments can encourage thought itself.She was known for a few small parts already.And von Sternberg went to see her in a play, Zwei Krawatten, by Georg Kaiser.I saw Fräulein Dietrich in the flesh, if that it can be called, for she had wrapped herself up to conceal every part of her body.I remember only one line of dialogue.Here was the face I had sought.Moreover, there was something else I had not sought, something that told me my search was over.She leaned against the wings with a cold disdain for the buffoonery, in sharp contrast to the effervescence of the others, who had been informed that I was to be treated to a sample of the greatness of the German stage.She had heard that I was in the audience, but as she did not consider herself involved, she was indifferent to my presence.Dietrich and von Sternberg were both married, but not to each other.That frustration is the heart of von Sternberg`s vision, just as Dietrich`s indifference was the lash to flay him.Ufa didn`t quite get the message that audiences would swallow, so von Sternberg and Paramount were able to steal Marlene away for American pictures.Those pictures earned less and less money and mounting critical abuse.Its story was already a pastiche of movie scenarios.Amy Jolly is a cabaret singer who comes to North Africa.Amy sings, of course, and in the cabaret scene, wearing a tuxedo, tails, and a top hat, she kisses a pretty girl in her audience.Was that You Know What?Von Sternberg was skilled enough to light and photograph his own pictures, and no one knew more about luminous passivity, the capacity to let the camera in past your eyes.It may be that no one else found such intimacy in Marlene.He is maybe the greatest example of a director who appreciates that movie is a matter of beholding something you desire but cannot touch.And he prizes that as a sardonic joke.He was lucky to get six pictures in America with Dietrich.After that, his career trailed away.Did he care anymore?Frank Capra was a very funny filmmaker, and an unsurpassed entertainer, but his ambition was so intense he had no problems with caring.He was born in Palermo in 1897, and never made a Mafia picture.Coming to California at the age of six, he was later educated at what would become CalTech.He messed around in pictures for a few years and then, in 1927, he got a contract to direct at Columbia, securely in the second rank of Hollywood studios and led by Harry Cohn, a boss Capra loved to hate.Capra never abandoned the professional urge to entertain, and he was as good with actors as he was blessed by having the screenwriter Robert Riskin at hand.His breakthrough occurred in 1934, with It Happened One Night.Nobody liked the idea at first.And nobody wanted to play in the film.Mayer said no, but then he thought to punish the cocksure Clark Gable, who required too much money, by sending him instead.At last, Claudette Colbert agreed to play the runaway heiress, with Gable as the reporter she falls for.You know, he said to Colbert, I think this wop`s got something!The picture opened in New York on February 23, 1934, and broke records at Radio City Music Hall.Then, without reason, business fell off, and the picture failed in many cities.The Capra common man was coming into view, and the public must have been flattered.It ended up with rentals of $2 million, a dazzling figure.His bitter triumph was made complete at the Oscars awarded on February 27, 1935, at the Biltmore Hotel in Los Angeles.Capra won the award for Best Director.Robert Riskin won for his script.I feel as happy as a kid and a little foolish they picked me, he said.Colbert won, but she was at the rail station about to board the train for New York.A car was sent after her.Studio publicists implored her to return, and so she did.Then Colbert rushed off to get the train being held in her honor.At last, Cohn stepped up to receive the award for Best Picture.He admitted, I was just an innocent bystander.For the first time, Columbia had won Best Picture, and for the first time in Oscar history a comedy had won and swept the top five awards.For Capra and the studio it was the beginning.On the one hand these pictures say they love the people, their natural decency, and the way it stands for American values.On the other, they fear the ease with which that crowd can be carried away by hatred and the lust for melodrama.Such pictures are still taught in American high school, and they have not faded as powerful shows.But they deserve warnings or caution, for they show how confused Hollywood and its best talents were over their place in an anxious society, coming out of Depression and anticipating war.As portraits of politics, the Capra films are so afraid of compromise that they seem poised for an urge toward extremism.So it was easier always for filmmakers to say they were mere entertainers and let the larger issues go fish.That is far from the whole Capra story.Kaufman and Moss Hart, and a film that has not survived as well as Smith and Deeds.In the late 1930s, Capra was nominated five times as Best Director.After that, he went off the boil and, like many Hollywood people, failed to grasp the postwar mood.He became a government informer and an uneasy rich man frightened by the way America was going.But he had always been as suspicious of the huddled masses as he longed to believe in noble souls from the hinterland.No less esteemed and no less confused was John Ford.Sean Aloysius O`Feeney, or O`Fearna, was born in Cape Elizabeth, Maine, in 1894, the thirteenth child of Irish immigrants.As Jack Ford first, he did many jobs in pictures, including riding with the Ku Klux Klan in The Birth of a Nation.Selznick, but a work blithely removed from the feeling of 1940 and which typifies Hollywood`s love of England, or is it olde England?Vidor, von Sternberg, Capra, and Ford were sketchily known as names, and at the time they worked, few people still could have told you what a director did.The public knew what actors did, and went to the movies for them.Deeds Goes to Town, and Meet John Doe.Then discover that in real life, Cooper was unreliable, promiscuous, and rather cowardly.But the 1930s could not handle such difficult truths, and the studios had a publicity machine to protect their properties.The system and the nation had not yet turned on their celebrities.Fields, Laurel and Hardy, Mae West, and Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers.Of course, sound made more of him than it did of Jolson.I don`t just mean the singing voice, which becomes ever more endearing and ghostly.I mean the sly clatter of his feet.Astaire did not direct these films.He did not write them, or seem to care that they were so lamely written.He was not credited as choreographer.But he dominated the films and then had the cool nerve to act shy or deferential.The films are black and white.It is one of the finest inventions America ever made, and then it was largely abandoned.Is that coincidence?And they have the songs of Irving Berlin, Jerome Kern, George Gershwin, and Cole Porter.Was that luck, or did the country produce a wave of talents across the board who joined forces in the musical?Were they the true spit of the 1930s?The results are unsurpassed and a defense of film to put beside Renoir, Buñuel, Bresson, or Ozu.Carefree perhaps, yet always linked to business calculations.But if you feel for the medium and its power in the late 1930s, you have to recognize how far they were a light unto themselves and cherished.Several French pioneer figures were devoured in competition with America.Moreover, the French cineaste has lived all his life with very mixed feelings about America.We must leave cinema to the Americans.We all have our different reasons, but the light is shared.That threat involves an aspect of huddling in which the light no longer sees individual faces.Méliès was born in Paris in 1861 to a boot and shoemaker who catered to the fashionable bourgeoisie.Méliès was fascinated by the collection of tricks and contrivances Houdin had on show, and soon thereafter he went to London to study at Maskelyne and Cooke`s Egyptian Hall, probably the leading magic theater in business in the late nineteenth century.The theater was busy, but not commercially successful.Méliès was already intrigued by the potential of photographs.He grasped that, among other things, the photograph was a way of altering our faith in reality, the essence of magic.The Lumières` material was what we would call documentary. It was a cinematic record of things that proved the viability of the cinematograph.It would take a strict historian to deny the legend that an eager Méliès approached the Lumières and asked to buy or rent their machine, to be met by the wintry assurance that it had no commercial future.Méliès never wavered.For 1,000 francs he bought a camera from Robert Paul in London, and soon he was on his way.What followed is one of the outstanding early careers in film.From 1896 to 1912, he made hundreds of short films, most of them inspired to show his audience something even more wondrous and mystifying than his repertoire of stage tricks.But he also built fantastical sets and put many actors in fanciful costumes.So the aspiration to the miraculous is always offset in Méliès by a cheerful but untidy or improvised human action.He was a technician, to be sure, but he was as fond of people as any showman who relied on the loyalty of audiences.What`s more, he had a greater readiness for using the camera simply to record reality than is generally reckoned.But he was not a sophisticated businessman.There was an early enthusiasm for his pictures in America, and Georges soon sent his brother Gaston to handle those affairs.In time, Gaston began making Westerns out of San Antonio, as well as handling his brother`s films.But those films` whimsicality and their literary roots were not always to American tastes, and the Mélièses` interests fell foul of the Motion Picture Patents Company, which liked to ban or fine productions that had not used their approved equipment.That monopoly was restrictive inside America, but it fell most harshly on foreigners.But there was also a move toward realism and longer narrative films.Then, in 1913, his beloved wife died.A year later, with the outbreak of war, many French theaters closed.His studio became a hospital for war wounded.He faded away, and ended up running a small toy shop at the Gare Montparnasse.Many of his films were lost, as the celluloid was used to make military boots.In 1931 he was awarded the Légion d`Honneur, and in his last years, he dreamed of a movie museum, a Notre Dame du Cinéma.He died in 1938, not unknown but largely forgotten.History has been kinder.In 1952, Georges Franju made a very touching film about Méliès.Today Criterion has a boxed set of most of the Méliès that survives, and it has served to restore childhood or innocence to moviegoing.More important still, we have passed through the way of seeing him as merely a fantasist or a magician.And while the surrealists formed an early attachment to Méliès, it is easier now to see how far he established the screen as a place where the real and the dream were married.Whereas Méliès fabricated his world and tossed in the yeast of real people, Louis Feuillade had an eye for the actual Paris that lets us believe in conspiracy and secret purposes running the city instead of government.Those purposes are often criminal, but in the end it emerges that they are fiction itself, or its possibility.Without ever taking his eye from the real places, Feuillade is the first film artist who guesses that the real is a diversion.It is an area of blazing sun, yet Feuillade is a poet of misty city prospects.But he was swayed by the sight of moving imagery.By 1906 he had joined the Gaumont Film Company and begun to work as what we would call a storyteller for pictures.He furnished narrative material, and like many movie writers, he saw that the variations on plot, character, and action were repetitive and musical.So his serial films are the first in which we feel an elegant amusement at story itself.I have said already that Méliès`s career was terminated by the circumstances of the Great War, but Feuillade`s was inspired by them.Feuillade knew it was his moment to see the light.He was a mastermind criminal, vaguely aristocratic, a man of many disguises, a thief, a murderer, and a sociopath, and opposed by Inspector Juve of the police.Prewar in his origins, Fantômas slips over into the war mood like a ghost and becomes a subversive figure.If we think of the protagonists of Griffith or his contemporaries, we may feel poleaxed by their virtue.The ambiguity of Fantômas, the mixture of charm and threat, is of a quite different order.This allowed Fantômas, as image and character, to become a cult with the surrealists.Magritte painted the character many times.Crime was a sport at which he excelled.He was continually refining the rules of human treachery, constantly seeking to surpass his own record and to invent even more daring atrocity with which to petrify the mob.Parallels could be drawn here with the anarchic and destructive activities of the Surrealists, and their continued efforts to mystify society.
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