Jimmy Stewart

At 6'3", Jimmy Stewart possessed a good-natured lankiness that underscored an inherent earnestness and sincerity--an impression augmented--despite his gawky build--by his soft eyes and mouth.  In so many ways, the Stewart character was that archetypal American: the innocent, the babe, the naif.  And to dwell on his career is to dwell  on the difficult art of self-enciphering; in role after role Stewart seemed to excise from his characters anything that might suggest guile and depth, duplicity and ambiguity, plotting and sophistication, irony and ambiguity.  To be regarded as a man who knows too much--in the Stewart ethos--is to imply the possibility of hidden motivations, to assume a complexity that would compel the viewer to--in the words of my students--read too much into the character.  Undoubtedly, those suffering under the weal of the Depression would have found something reassuring in the "What you see is what you get" simplicity of Stewart's cinema.

But the effect, of course, is artifice--a testament to Stewart's ability to so thoroughly efface his characters of anything that implies real profundity.  Some might argue, "What about It's a Wonderful Life?"  But George Bailey's engagement with the darker region of his being must be viewed conditionally.  The religious cosmology of the film's opening make clear from the beginning that this is a man who--despite his lapses and his failures--is always-already saved: his life, his wealth, and his faith restored.  He will, in the film's iconic ending, be the richest man in Bedford Falls. And so his encounter with his dark self is ultimately tantamount to a very scary ride at the amusement park, shaking us momentarily but not fundamentally.

Could he make it today?  There's a world of difference between the guileless and the vapid.

Mia Farrow

I am just about through reading Ira Levin's masterfully gothic novel Rosemary's Baby.  I've seen the film numerous times, and the the greatest praise I can offer it is this: Polanski's adaptation is nearly a page-for-page transcription of its fictional source.  In any event, I'm pretty certain that no one could have filled the role of Rosemary Woodhouse better than Mia Farrow.  In fact, it's virtually impossible for me to divorce Rosemary Woodhouse from Mia Farrow, or, for that matter, Farrow from Rosemary Woodhouse.  In role after role, Farrow--even when granted a certain neurotic complexity in Woody Allen's films--is pure milquetoast (I mean this is the best way possible, by the way).  No one's whine grates as thoroughly as hers; she possesses a stereotypically feminine neediness that marks her as thoroughly Victorian.  Can anyone argue the near-ideal reciprocity that exists between her body and her temperament (her characters' temperament)?   Pallid, slight, boyish (whither Twiggy)?  One of Hollywood's greatest casting debacles: Mia Farrow as Daisy Buchanan.

Could she make it today?  Doubt it; today's misogyny is neanderthal not Victorian

Edward G. Robinson

Maybe it's because in the years leading up to his death in 2004,  I had come to develop a real soft spot for my father that I continue to be deeply moved whenever I see a picture with/of Edward G. Robinson.  The two men bore an uncanny resemblance.  Physically, each was short and portly, full-lipped, round-headed, dark haired and dark eyed.  Each man born in the former Austro-Hungarian Empire (Robinson in Romania; my father in Poland).  Each man a representative of a bygone Yiddish culture. 

In film after film (whether in lead or supporting roles)--from Little Caesar to The Stranger to Soylant Green--Robinson plays a professional; a man who, when presented with a job, will--no matter what--insist on seeing the job through (in Double Identity, he sends his good friend to the gas chamber); a man who brings to his vocation an incredible mixture of reflection, feeling, and learning (Imagine any contemporary actor quoting Emerson in a mainstream crime movie, as Robinson does in The Stranger).

While he stood only 5'6", Robinson dominated virtually every scene he shared with other stars.   Here was a man for whom the act of thinking was central to the act of acting, whose lines seem to come not from the mouth but from a profound intelligence.  And so we conclude that for Robinson acting was a job, but  like all great professionals he seems to have recognized a fact lost on so many of us: work is not an adjunct to one's life, it is one's life.  Given the depth of this insights and the way Robinson translated it on screen, how could he not command an incredible cinematic presence?
 
Could he make it today: not on your life.

Kirk Douglas

Born Issur Danielovitch (in nearby Amsterdam, NY), Douglas worked (willed?) his way from rag-picker's son to Hollywood powerhouse.  For more than two decades, Douglas commanded headliner status.  Spartacus, Paths of Glory, Out of the Past are only the immediately notable high points in a career full of high points.  But consider the austerity of that face.  Yes, it's as iconic as Groucho Marx's, Cary Grant's, or Marilyn Monroe's, but has there ever been a face as chiseled and sharp-edged (a weapon in its own right)?    In many ways it's the parody of a face--a simulacrum of a chin, cheeks, nose, and brow.

Could he make it today?  It's a toss-up.

Barbara Stanwyck

This is the woman who leads mild-mannered (if a bit randy) insurance man, Walter Neff (Fred MacMurray) to murder (in Billy Wilder's masterful Double Indemnity).  Everything about Barbara Stanwyck's face is wrong by today's studio standards.  Her nose alone would get her no further than the casting couch.  To put it bluntly, there is something mannish about her.  But Stanwyck excelled in the role of  the femme fatale and in conveying unquenchable sensuality. And it's precisely her ability to channel/deploy this near-metaphysical eroticism that makes Neff's attraction to her so understandable and believable--even today.

Joseph Cotten

Over the course of the last three or four years, it's been a practice of orthodoxy for me to screen The Third Man for my classes (I teach English at a community college in Upstate, New York).   While I'm certain that--with some thought and effort--I could find some educational justification for showing the film to a bunch of largely disinterested 101 students, I will readily admit that I do so for purely selfish reasons.  I never tire of The Third Man.  The movie's use of light and shadow, of apocalyptic setting and highly expressive camerawork represent some of the finest moments in post-war cinema; and so too the screenplay by Graham Greene; and so too Anton Karas' spare score.  But it's the performances that make the film.  Everyone from the world-weary and heartbroken Anna (played by Valli), to the dogged Major Calloway (Trevor Howard), to the muscular yet gentle Sargent Paine (Bernard Lee), to the evasive and Machiavellian Harry Lime (Orson Welles) contribute to the film's psychological depth.  But the movie belongs to Joseph Cotten's Holly Martins.  This is another stunning turn by one of Hollywood's most overlooked actors. A man who, whether playing a serial kill (Shadow of a Doubt), a cuckolded husband (Niagara), or the voice of Charles Foster Kane's conscience (Citizen Kane), excelled at understatement.  And Cotten's looks are part and parcel of his craft.  While he occasionally had a romantic lead (opposite Joan Fontaine in September Affair and Marilyn Monroe (!) in Niagara), all his roles are celebrations of a poetic average-ness, of the non-descript.  His are the bodies and faces most of us possess and occupy: not a virtue valued in contemporary, mainstream cinema.

Kieślowski's Anti-Hollywood

Some friends and I got together the other night to watch a couple of episodes  of Krzysztof Kieślowski's monumental series, The Decalogue.  I continue to find each viewing a revelation--this after having seen it in its entirety several times.  I am always amazed by Kieślowski's use of close-up--the way his faces are--especially in the film's use of lighting--so reminiscent of High Renaissance and Dutch Master portraiture--an aesthetic in which the face serves as the outward sign of a profound inner life. 

Kieślowski's people--suggesting as they do, humanity in all its potential forms and incarnations--are defiantly anti-Hollywood.  His is a frame that admits the old and young; the angelic and demonic; the beautiful and ugly; the pained and serene; the cruel and kind; the brutalized and convalescent; the uncertain and defiant; the fat and thin; the exhausted and alert; the calculating and naive; the wise and foolish; the comical and serious.  Kieślowski's camera dotes on all of them in a way that suggests a loving fascination with all of life.  These are faces that are--literally and figuratively--free of make-up and artifice, partaking of a realism I wish were more present in mainstream American films.