Shooting Day for Night

Day for Night, in common movie parlance, is the process of shooting film during daylight hours but using filters to convince the audience that the scene takes place after nightfall.  Day for Night is also the English-language title of a 1973 film that was a labor of love for French cinéaste François Truffaut, who directed, co-wrote, and played a central role as, bien sûr!, a director. (The film’s original title is the term that is the French equivalent of “day for night”:  La Nuit américaine. How apt that this wholly artificial but often cost-effective process is linked to American savvy.)  

 In this film about the making of a romantic melodrama called Je vous présente Paméla (or Meet Pamela), Truffaut takes a loving look at the very essence of cinema. Films may seem to reflect life as it is lived, but in fact they are wholly dependent upon artifice. So it follows that those who make movies accept—and thrive on—unreality.  Like the fact that the pretty girl in the speeding car is—temporarily—a stuntman wearing a dress and a wig.  That’s why movie sets are (believe me, I know!) little worlds unto themselves, with emotions running wild. Offscreen romantic partnerships can change from day to day, and few in the cast and crew are on their best behavior.

 Day for Night begins with what seems like an everyday street scene somewhere in the south of France. Passersby stroll along a leafy avenue, a deliveryman makes his rounds, a woman walks her dog.  Then, cut! It all has to be done again . . .  and again. As the director and his loyal assistant try to keep things under control, the film’s stars are creating their own brand of havoc. Jean-Pierre Aumont, as the veteran actor Alexandre, keeps making mysterious trips to the local airport, little knowing that one of these jaunts will have disastrous consequences.  Fellini veteran Valentina Cortese plays Séverine, an ageing actress so worried about her fading looks and diminishing skills that she imbibes heavily, leading to an hilarious scene in which she can’t quite manage to say her lines and open the proper door. (She was ultimately Oscar-nominated for this role, and singled out by winner Ingrid Bergman as the more deserving nominee.)  

 While cast and crew await the arrival from America of leading lady Julie (Jacqueline Bisset), her film spouse Alphonse (Jean-Pierre Léaud) is struggling with an on-again off-again romance with the novice script girl. (Léaud’s presence will spark a frisson of recognition from film buffs who well remember him as the fourteen-year-old Antoine Doinel at the center of Truffaut’s cinematic breakthrough, 1959’s The Four Hundred Blows.) When the oh-so-passionate Alphonse discovers his inamorata has decamped with the hunky stuntman, his agony knows no bounds. He’s determined to quit the production on the spot; in placating him, Julie inevitably puts her own new marriage at risk.

 My favorite among the minor characters may be Joëlle, the assistant director. She’s always at the director’s right hand, making smart suggestions when asked, generally taking care of business.  This doesn’t stop her, though, when out in the countryside cleaning up someone else’s mess, from stripping off her clothes and announcing to a surprised crew member that she’d enjoy a quickie.  Later, after the script girl’s sudden departure, Joëlle makes her own feelings clear. She can’t imagine leaving a production to pursue a romance. But would she quit a romance for the sake of a production? Bien sûr!  As Irving Berlin once put it, “There’s no people like show people . . . .”

Meeting George Cukor’s People

Many decades ago I was thrilled to interview film director George Cukor at his home (some called it a villa) in the hills above the Sunset Strip. He was then 80 years old, with a long string of hits behind him. After four previous nominations he’d finally won an Oscar for his lavish, charming screen adaptation of My Fair Lady. Late in life, he’d discovered the challenges of television, and had just finished directing close friend Katharine Hepburn in The Corn is Green. When we spoke, largely about his views on old Hollywood and its star system, he was unfailingly candid and witty. As he said to end our chat, “Don’t you think we’ve talked an awful lot? I think I’ve done it thin. And I sparkled!”

 Back in 1978, I’d seen many Cukor films in theatres and on television, but DVDs and streaming services did not yet exist. So I went into my quickly-arranged interview without an in-depth knowledge of Cukor’s career as a whole. Happily, I now possess a fascinating new book, George Cukor’s People: Acting for a Master Director, which puts Cukor’s fifty years in Hollywood into perspective. Its author is Joseph McBride, whose credentials make him the perfect choice to see Cukor whole. Joe has been, in the course of his own long career, a film journalist and a screenwriter. (Like me, he has a Roger Corman connection, and is credited with writing Rock n’ Roll High School.) He was also a novice but dedicated actor in Orson Welles’ last film, The Other Side of the Wind. He has taught film studies at San Francisco State for decades, and his twenty-plus books include much-admired studies of Hollywood directors John Ford, Frank Capra, and Billy Wilder. I haven’t read each and every McBride book, but I’m convinced George Cukor’s People is one of his very best.

 McBride avoided writing about  Cukor for many years, because he wasn’t sure how to approach the career of a man whose films covered such a wide range of styles and subjects. Recognizing that Cukor’s close work with actors was the key to his success, McBride has now chosen to zero in on the way he handled his stars, drawing out brilliant performances from luminaries ranging from John Barrymore (in Dinner at Eight) to Greta Garbo (in Camille) to Maggie Smith (Travels with My Aunt). He also identifies Cukor’s favorite subjects: dreamers, outsiders, the legend of Pygmalion creating (and then falling in love with) Galatea, and life as a performance.

 Of the book’s 28 chapters, I was perhaps most taken with McBride’s sensitive analysis of Cukor’s contributions in Gone With the Wind before he was fired by David O. Selznick, and with his appreciation for the brilliant Technicolor work in 1954’s A Star is Born, despite the film’s mangling by studio execs. His close analysis of Ingrid Bergman’s Oscar-winning performance in Gaslight  (he told her to visit a mental institution and study the patients) is memorable as well. And he ends with a tender paean to a TV film I too love: the teaming of a late-in-life  Katharine Hepburn and Laurence Olivier in 1975’s scintillating but sweet Love Among the Ruins.

 What makes McBride’s work so memorable is that he combines the erudition of a scholar and the savvy of an insider with the soul of a poet who loves movies. Here’s his take on Love Among the Ruins: it “serves as one of the purest expressions of Cukor’s career-long dedication to the transcendent power of the dreamer and the role of the theatre in heightening and improving upon reality.”  Beautifully said. 

 

Here’s Looking at You, Casablanca

Recently I was on a transatlantic flight: destination Morocco. The plane landed at Mohammed V Airport in Casablanca, the country’s largest and most international city. One of many choices on my plane’s seatback television screen was that golden oldie from 1942, Casablanca. It’s still revered, more than 80 years later, as one of the great screen romances of all time. The movie’s ability to combine a poignant love story with a World War II thriller is part of why it’s lasted so long. Among its many honors, it was in the first class of films accepted (in 1989) into the National Film Registry due to its cultural, historical, and aesthetic significance.

The release history of Casablanca is a fascinating one. The film’s setting in a North African city that was then part of a French protectorate but also served as a gateway to far corners of the globe ensured there’d be plenty of on-screen friction between a  multitude of nationalities. Casablanca was released at the height of World War II, so of course the worst of the bad guys who frequent Rick’s Café are Nazi officers. They’re linked with functionaries of the French Vichy government who perform their duties under the heavy German thumb. That’s why in March 1943 the film was officially banned in Ireland, which sought to retain its wartime neutrality. Two years later, Casablanca was finally released in Ireland, after trims were made to romantic dialogue focusing on Rick and Ilsa’s Paris love affair.

 Of course German audiences would not see Casablanca until long after the war was over. A shortened and heavily edited version was released by Warner Bros. in West Germany in 1952.  Remarkably, this de-Nazified Casablanca changed Ilsa’s husband, Victor Lazlo, from a heroic Czech Resistance fighter who has escaped from a Nazi concentration camp  to a Norwegian atomic physicist who has broken out of jail. It was not until 1976 that German audiences could watch the film in its original version.

 Lovers of Casablanca always point to the dramatic intensity of the film’s supporting players, especially in the famous “duel of the anthems” sequence.  Nazi soldiers kicking back at Rick’s Café enthusiastically begin to sing “Die Wacht am Rhein,” but their voices are drowned out by the rest of the crowd’s heartfelt rendition of the Free French anthem, “La Marseillaise.” The closeups in this section are dramatic, partly because so many of the players—notably Madeleine LeBeau, Marcel Dalio, Peter Lorre, and Conrad Veidt—were themselves exiles and refugees. (Ironically, Jewish actors who had fled Europe during Hitler’s reign often found their careers depended upon playing Nazi roles in Hollywood.)

 The screenplay for Casablanca, based on an unproduced play, was the work of many hands, notably those of brothers Julius and Philip Epstein. The story goes that the Epsteins and others were busy writing even while the film was being shot. That’s why Ingrid Bergman, as Ilsa, honestly wasn’t clear on whether she’d be getting on a plane with her husband (Paul Henreid) or staying behind with onetime love Humphrey Bogart. She’s said to have faulted her own performance because she wasn’t sure as an actress which option her character would choose. But generations of moviegoers agree that her uncertainty was exactly right for this film.

 Casablanca was rushed onto movie screens to tie in with the real-life North African offensive that put the locale on the international map. How well does the film reflect the actual city? Not at all, because it was filmed on a Hollywood backlot. There’s a Rick’s Café in today’s Casablanca, but it’s strictly a tourist trap.

 Much has been written about the making of this film. I’ve used other sources, but want to cite here Noah Isenberg’s 2017 publication, We'll Always Have Casablanca: The Life, Legend, and Afterlife of Hollywood's Most Beloved Movie

 

We All Ride in a Yellow Rolls-Royce

“They don’t make them like this anymore!” – That’s the tag line on the DVD box containing a splashy British film from 1964. The posters from the era proclaim, “The season’s most exciting cast . . . in the year’s most magnificent movie.” Well, no. Though the international cast is full of big names, excitement is definitely lacking. But The Yellow Rolls-Royce is a great example of how, in the advent of television, movie folk were desperate to use spectacle as a way to separate the big screen from the little ones in people’s living rooms.

 The Yellow Rolls-Royce, written by famed British dramatist Terence Rattigan (Separate Tables) and directed by Anthony Asquith, is one of those compilation films that try to yoke together separate tales set  in different locations and time frames by means of some sort of linking device. (A more recent example: 1998’s rather lugubrious The Red Violin). Here it’s a 1931 stretch limo, in gaudy yellow and black, that passes from owner to owner, from country to country. The real star of the film is undoubtedly that magnificent car, first seen being secretly conveyed through the streets of London to a posh dealership. There it’s spotted by a veddy wealthy British aristocrat (Rex Harrison), who quibbles about the placement of its back-seat telephone, but snaps it up as an anniversary gift for his beloved wife.

 What he doesn’t know is that this wife (a young Jeanne Moreau), having tired of life among the British swells, has found herself a handsome young functionary with whom to canoodle. Naturally, the yellow Rolls-Royce plays a role in their assignations. (It has roll-down window shades that come in very handy under the circumstances.) There’s a mournful, but by no means tragic, ending to their story, at which point the car is quickly returned to the dealer.

 After the bittersweet tone of Story #1, we move on to Italy, where after many presumed adventures with owners from diverse lands, the Rolls is acquired in Genoa by a Miami mobster played by the unlikely George C. Scott, who seems to be having a ball speaking in dems and doses. His sidekick is the always welcome Art Carney, and his blonde-bimbo fiancée is none other than Shirley MacLaine. She falls for street photographer/gigolo-in-training Alain Delon, but ultimately recognizes on which side her focaccia is buttered. Of course the Rolls figures into the story.

 Story #3 plays out in 1941, on the border between Trieste and Yugoslavia. A mega-wealthy and mega-powerful American, played by Ingrid Bergman, buys the yellow Rolls, although it has clearly seen better days. Determined to motor into Yugoslavia to visit her friend the president, she blithely ignores the very real threat of a Nazi takeover.  At first she seems tragically naïve, but when a Yugoslav partisan (Omar Sharif) begs her to transport him back to his country in the boot of the Rolls, she blossoms into a fierce defender of Yugoslav freedom.—and into the earnest, patriotic Bergman we know and love from films like Casablanca.  

 This third segment definitely has the most meat to it; it’s also the only one of the tales  in which a central character grows and changes. Otherwise, these are mostly interesting stories that didn’t much capture the hearts of the viewing public. The whole impetus for the Yellow Rolls-Royce was The VIPs, a highly successful all-star film from the same production team. That flick, set at Heathrow Airport, featured Taylor and Burton at the height of their celebrity, along with Maggie Smith, Orson Welles, and others.  But not, I believe, a single Rolls-Royce.