Marilyn Monroe, Mulholland Drive, Kim Stanley

Sixty years on from her untimely death, Marilyn Monroe remains the definition of a Hollywood icon. Her films, her look, her voice and her persona all are forever etched in the annals of movie history – which means any actor hoping to step into her shoes really has their work cut out. For Andrew Dominik’s Blonde, an adaptation of Joyce Carol Oates’ fictionalised story of Monroe’s life, Ana de Armas is tasked with embodying the blonde bombshell – and it’s a responsibility that came with considerable pressure. Speaking to Empire about inhabiting Marilyn Monroe, de Armas admits she felt insecure. “I was insecure about my voice, about the accent, about the choreography, about working with American actors who know her better than me, everything!” she says. That reaction, she explains, became part of the performance. “All of that was exactly what she would be feeling. So it was incredible. Even though it seems like everything was very sad, and a lot of traumatic things were going on, we had a great time.” 

The actor had a wealth of material to draw from when crafting her performance – not just Oates’ novel, but a tome consisting of iconic Marilyn Monroe photos curated by the director. “Andrew gave us a bible of 700-and-something pictures,” de Armas says. “The whole movie was in this bible, picture by picture, every scene.” That stack of photos informed the film’s formally-playful presentation, switching between aspect ratios, and from colour to black-and-white. “That’s the relation between the black-and-white and colour; it’s because of the pictures, it’s not random,” de Armas explains. “You want the audience to immediately engage, even in their subconscious, to something that they’ve already seen, and get them into the story.” Norma Jeane shared her mother’s love of movies and the escapism that they provide, and Marilyn Monroe became her mythical alter ego. De Armas points out that Monroe wanted to be taken seriously. “She wanted to have control of the material she was going to work on. No one was thinking like that at the time.” Source: empireonline.com

C.S Lewis has written extensively on the concept of Sehnsucht, a German word which signifies "sense of deep, inconsolable longing, yearning, the feeling of intensely missing something when we don't even know what it is." Perhaps no film conveyed this sense more powerfully than David Lynch’s MULHOLLAND DR. Roughly, the first four-fifths of the film are immersed in a kind of dream-fantasy-haze, spawned within the mind of an unstable actress named Diane Selwyn. The surreal alternative universe of Selwyn’s fantasies ranges in style and mood from comedy to romance to horror to absurdism to ‘art film’. There are some funny bits, especially with the old couple with frozen faces in the limousine and the cocky movie director who finds his wife in bed with another man and later confronts the ‘cowboy’. Likewise, the story of Betty Elms (the fantasy alter ego of Diane Selwyn) goes from light comedy-drama to romance to dark romance to something approaching suspense and tragedy and finally horror. Betty is Diane’s main alternative character, much like the Norma Jeane/Marilyn Monroe dichotomy. 

Though ‘Rita’ is based on or ‘inspired’ by Camilla, a real-life person, she has certain attributes that are closer to Diane’s mind-set. And the movie director, Adam Kesher, faces obstacles in the fantasy that echo the problems faced by Diane herself in real life. Diane could only hate what became of Camilla, but she’s still in love with the Camilla whom she once knew. Also, as Camilla was beautiful and glamorous with or without stardom, she served as a psychological crutch for Diane. Even if Diane didn’t make it in Hollywood, the mere fact of being best friends and lovers with Camilla would have sufficed in filling her life with some degree of happiness. 

But a woman like Camilla is bound to be discovered by the industry sooner or later, since she's a perfect sex-symbol, a temptress. Paradoxically, men hanker for the greatest loyalty from the alpha female or temptress even though the allure of such a woman rests in the very qualities that are dynamic and hyperbolic, therefore most unstable and potentially disloyal. There’s something about Camilla that says, “I’m a born winner who must seek another born winner”, so to be associated with her charisma and beauty is to feel as a winner oneself. It is also true that the very unstable quality of Camilla/Rita is what turns Diane/Betty on the most. Through her death, Camilla now belongs to Diane alone, at least in her fantasy. 

As Camilla is gone from the world, she can only exist as a ghost, a phantom, a figment of imagination. No one can own her as a person in the flesh. Yet, what Diane now possesses of Camilla also haunts her. When Camilla was alive, Diane couldn’t have her because she ‘lost’ her to the Hollywood elites. After Camilla is dead, Diane can take possession of Camilla’s ‘soul’ as Diane, more than anyone else, has the obsessive need to weave Camilla into her elaborate myth of hope, love, and promises. But then, no matter how many times Diane resurrects Camilla as ‘Rita’ in her mind, the fact remains that Camilla is gone. 

Betty and ‘Rita’ are alternates of Diane and Camilla. Though Betty is physically the same as Diane, her radiance and talent (noticed by Hollywood casting directors) makes her more like the real-life Camilla. Though ‘Rita’ is physically the same as Camilla, her seating in the limousine in the opening scene is a variation of Diane’s situation in a limousine to Kesher’s mansion later in the film. ‘Rita’ (suffering from amnesia and unable to remember her real name) has attributes that refer to both Diane and Camilla. One of the first images of the film is the subjective view of someone moving toward a bed and laying her head on a pillow. Presumably, it’s Diane going to sleep to plunge into another stupor. In her dream, she, as Betty, is an ideal young woman. 

So pretty, so nice, so full of promises. She’s so sunny and cheerful that the whole world seems to be smiling down on her and on her side. The sun seems to exist just to radiate its heavenly rays on her. Like Doris Day. Even when she finds her suitcases missing outside the airport, it turns out that a friendly cab driver picked them up and is placing them inside the trunk as if it’s only natural to treat her like Hollywood royalty. It’s as if Los Angeles and Hollywood just can’t wait to greet her, indeed as if they are just as excited about her as she is about them. It’s Los Angeles of her mind where everything rolls out before her like a red carpet. But no matter how bright and blooming a fantasy may be, elements of doubt and doom are always hiding just around the corner. Little by little, Betty’s idealized dream fantasy begins to crack and erode. But then, the cracks are cemented and ‘repaired’ with her imaginative ‘rationalizations’ as to why things are getting weirder.

Her mind plays on three narrative threads. A confident and even principled movie director who is hounded by some sinister conspiracy that he must cast a certain woman in his new picture. He is not only pressured by a strange network of ‘gangsters’ but also a victim of marital infidelity who finds his wife in bed with some beefy working class type that is a staple of Hollywood movies. The second narrative thread involves a strange, mysterious, and beautiful woman(who is later known as ‘Rita’) who has lost her memory and has taken shelter at Betty’s place of residence. And the third thread is about Betty’s adventure for fame and fortune in Hollywood. Betty is brimming with pity and warmth for the disoriented and pitiable ‘Rita’. Indeed, she even leaves before the second audition — her first, for a soap opera, was a smash — to pick up ‘Rita’ to check out an apartment that might be Rita’s. Betty might as well be Cinderella. 

She would even risk her career out of her concern for Rita. She never reneges on her promises. When Diane is in the world of reality, she wants to escape into fantasy. But as alluring and beautiful as the fantasy is, there’s also forces within the mind that gnaws away like a sewer rat at the fantasy, thus creating a hole/portal back to reality. So, Diane is simultaneously running from and returning to reality. But both reality and fantasy are dead-ends. There’s no bringing back Camilla in the real world. She is gone forever from the real world. No matters how many times Diane awakens afresh from her dream/nightmare, the reality it that she finds herself lost, living in a desolate world without Camilla. 

Though Diane Selwyn’s dream/fantasy has elements of whimsy and romance, it also has horror-istic elements of paranoia, diabolic conspiracies, nightmarish surrealism, and lurking dangers. The horrible things in the dream/fantasy have an element of dark mystery that seems either unsolvable or inaccessible. She could also make believe that Camilla-as-Rita is a woman of beautiful soul who’s dependent on her love and support, someone whose rejuvenation is made possible by Betty’s kindly angel-like intervention. Of course, this Betty is the perfect girl who has the talent to be both a great actress and a great star as well a heart of gold that goes out of its way to help her muse. In a way, the fact that the two women are lesbians (or bi-sexual) underline Selwyn’s dilemma. In Chayefsky’s 1958 movie The Goddess, the Marilyn Monroe–type heroine (Kim Stanley) sought movie stardom, fame, and adulation in order to compensate for her inability to love, and ends up dependent on her lesbian secretary's care and adoration. Also Marilyn Monroe was rumored to depend emotionally on her friend and publicist Patricia Newcomb. 

Chayefsky said in 1958 that his heroine Emily Ann Faulkner “represents an entire generation that came through the Depression with nothing left but a hope for comfort and security. Their tragedy lies in that they never learned to love, either their fellow humans or whatever god they have.” Diane Selwyn in MULHOLLAND DR. has a scar that cannot be fixed. So, whenever her mind, via many detours, arrives at the dark truth, it doesn’t lead to clarity and luminance but greater horror and abject darkness. When she opens up her deepest scar, it just festers and hurts to the point of unbearableness. Truth doesn’t set her free. It just deepens her bruises. It just makes her infection fester even more. Source: medium.com

Kim Stanley: I remember that Newman was something of a joke--an erotic joke--at The Actors Studio, because he was so handsome. Frighteningly handsome. He caused as much physical commotion as Marilyn Monroe did. He created a lot of tension, jealousy and competition among the men--merely by showing up. He is a kind, patient and careful man--and he is a patient and careful actor. His incremental method of working can give some the impression that he doesn't know what he's doing, but he usually does: He investigates stealthily, and he gets things done. He waited a long time to prove that he was a real actor. And he found his soul mate in Joanne Woodward, a splendid actress. I don't know how to speak to people about acting if they don't recognize it as an art, as a high calling, as a terribly demanding pursuit that will require not only more than you realize but more than you will ever possess. For the entire life of an actor, you are burnishing and sharpening and replacing tools that you need to have at your highest levels of performance--over and over again. 

It is never enough. Your heart has to be broken. Your mind has to be challenged and stretched and adapted. It is an almost impossible task. Actually, it is an impossible task, but in bravely attempting to fulfill it, you might achieve truth or greatness or inspiration. I just don't see that passion as much as I used to. I see the aching wants, but I don't see the dream, the passion to give up everything else to become a warrior of the art of acting. Religious orders remind me of how I lived when I first began to realize the challenge that was ahead of me. When I was working with Herbert Berghof, Lee Strasberg and Harold Clurman, I began to see how hard it would all be, but also how gratifying, how ennobling. When you see what is demanded, you think of bolting, and many are right to do so. Most of the time I know I fail. Because what I'm after is perfection, truth in art. This is exceedingly rare. It's very hard to achieve and overwhelming to maintain. –Follies of God: Kim Stanley Interview with James Grissom (1992)

King Elvis, Marilyn Monroe, and Breathless

Elvis had just returned from doing military service in Germany and was back in Hollywood working on his next movie, GI Blues. While overseas Elvis had met and fallen for Priscilla Beaulieu but fidelity was never the superstar's strong suit. He was also officially dating 22-year-old starlet Anita Wood at the same time. The King was even visited by the actual princesses Margrethe of Denmark, and Margaretha of Sweden on set that summer, but it was an alleged encounter with the reigning queen of the silver screen that remains speculated about to this day. According to Hollywood agent Byron Raphael, it all started when Elvis' representatives at the William Morris Agency were keen to send him and Marilyn on some high-profile public dates for publicity – but she said no. Byron said that he had kept the details secret for fifty years, but finally told Playboy and then the New York Post all the details in 2006: "He was very embarrassed but I think she turned him down because she felt it was too public, but Presley didn't give up and secretly set up a meeting at the Beverly Wilshire hotel. The agent claimed that when it was all over, Elvis called a cab for Marilyn. "A few days later when I mentioned Marilyn to Elvis, he said, 'She's a nice gal, but she's too much for me.'" Elvis was certainly very attracted to the sexually confident Ann-Margret, with whom Elvis had a long affair after starring together in Viva Las Vegas. Marilyn, conversely, was drawn to older, powerful men, like Joe DiMaggio, Arthur Miller, and President John F Kennedy. —King Elvis: The Untold Stories Of Elvis Presley (2022) by Nicholas Spielberg 

A Rip-off with Genius: Marilyn's  mixture of wide-eyed wonder and cuddly sexiness seemed to get to just about every male; she turned on even homosexual men. And women couldn’t take her seriously enough to be indignant; she was funny and impulsive in a way that made people feel protective. She was a little knocked out; her face looked as if, when nobody was paying attention to her, it would go utterly slack—as if she died between wolf calls. She seemed to have become a camp siren; her comedy was self-satire—conscious parody that had begun unconsciously. She was not the first sex goddess with a trace of somnambulism; Garbo was often a little out-of-it, Dietrich was numb most of the time, and Hedy Lamarr was fairly zonked. But they were exotic and had accents, so maybe audiences didn’t wonder why they were in a daze; Monroe’s slow reaction time made her seem daffy, and she tricked it up into a comedy style. For Norman Mailer, she was “a proud, inviolate artist, a sex angel,” and he suggests that “one might literally have to invent the idea of a soul in order to approach her.” 

Arthur Miller had split her mystique into The Misfits and After the Fall, and since each was only a side of her, neither was believable. Marilyn Monroe might have “grown” as an actress but she would have died as a star. The pity is that she didn’t get more of the entertaining roles that were in her range; she might have been right for Sweet Charity or for Lord Love a Duck or Born Yesterday or a remake of the Harlow comedy Bombshell. She might have had a triumph in Breakfast at Tiffany’s and she probably could have toned down for Tennessee Williams’s Period of Adjustment and maybe even Bonnie and Clyde. In his caping for Marilyn, Norman Mailer is supremely cruel to Arthur Miller, who was left devastated after her death. “Instead of jetting from New York to the funeral to get my picture taken, I decided to stay home and let the public mourners finish the mockering ritual. I loved her so much. Not that everyone there will be false, but enough. Many of them there destroyed her, ladies and gentlemen. Now you stand there weeping and gawking at this lovely girl who you at last killed.” —The Age of Movies: Selected Writings of Pauline Kael (2016) 

What sneaks up on you in Breathless is that the young hood with his loose random grace and the impervious American girl seem so remote. And you’re left with the horrible suspicion that this is a new race, bred in chaos, accepting chaos as natural, and not caring one way or another about it. The heroine, who has literary interests, quotes Wild Palms, “Between grief and nothing, I will take grief.” But that’s just an attitude she likes at that moment; at the end she demonstrates that it’s false. Michel states the truth for them both: “I’d choose nothing.” The European critic, Louis Marcorelles, describes their world as “total immorality, lived skin-deep.” And possibly because we Americans are used to live among just such people, the film may not, at first, seem quite so startling as it is. And that’s what’s frightening about Breathless: not only are the characters familiar in an exciting, revealing way, they are terribly attractive. They seem giddy and gauche and amusingly individualistic, until you consider that this individualism is not only a reaction to mass conformity, but, more terrifyingly, is the new form that mass society takes: indifference to human values. 

Despite the unrest and anarchy in the moral atmosphere, Michel is as romantic as Pépé Le Moko and as true to love (and his death scene is just as operatic and satisfying). He’s honest and likable, though socially classifiable as a psychopath; she’s a psychopath, too, but the non-classifiable sort—socially acceptable but a sad, affectless doll. Patricia seems to be playing at existence, at a career, at “love”; she’s “trying them on.” But she doesn’t want to be bothered; when her lover becomes an inconvenience, she turns him in to the police. Shot down and dying, the young man gallantly tries to amuse her, and then looks up at her and remarks—without judgment or reproach, but rather, descriptively, as a grudging compliment: “You really are a bitch.” 

And in her flat, little-girl voice, she says, “I don’t know what the word means.” If she does know, she doesn’t care to see how it applies to her, and it wouldn’t bother her much anyway. The codes of love and loyalty depend on stronger emotions than her idle attachment to this lover—one among many. They depend on emotions, and she is innocent of them. An updated version of the betraying blondes who destroyed so many movie gangsters, she is innocent even of guilt. As Jean Seberg plays her—and that’s exquisitely—Patricia is the most terrifyingly simple muse-goddess-bitch of modern movies. Next to her, the scheming Barbara Stanwyck of Double Indemnity is as archaic as Theda Bara in A Fool There Was. Godard's film was dedicated to Monogram Pictures—who were, of course, the producers of cheap American gangster-chase movies. Breathless was made for $90,000. —Deeper Into Movies: Film Writings (1969-1972) by Pauline Kael

JFK: America's Last President, WUSA

JFK warned of the danger of a comfortable complacency: The barrage upon truth will grow more constant. And some people cannot bear the responsibility of a free choice which goes with self-government. Finally, shrinking from choice they turn to those who prevent them from choosing and thus find in a kind of prison, a kind of security. We, as a society, have lost the spirit we held when John F. Kennedy was our president.Today, those who question power are considered conspiracy theorists. But where did that term originate? While there was a minimal reference to the term “conspiracy theory” in the first half of the twentieth century, it was not used in a derogatory way. The term became ubiquitous in the late 1960s after the CIA distributed a memo encouraging its assets to use the term to belittle anyone who questioned the Warren Report. The Declaration of Independence was essentially a conspiracy theory document, accusing King George of many things, some of which he was guilty, others not. Our country was born in the spirit of questioning power, John F. Kennedy embodied that spirit, and it died with his assassination. Today, we celebrate fitting in, not standing out. We honor those that follow the established and approved narrative, not those that offer opposing perspectives. Not since John F. Kennedy have we had a president who genuinely worked in the public’s interest. He was thoughtful, intelligent, and empathetic. He tried to create a fairer society, he tried to raise the living standards of the many, and he tried to create opportunity for all. He respected self-determination and abhorred imperialism. He was the president of the people. His presidency was one of those rare shining moments in history when the common man was actually represented in the halls of power. America died on November 22, 1963, and what remains is an illusion. As Robert Kennedy wrote in his book To Seek a Newer World, “Sharp criticism often goes hand in hand with the deepest idealism and love of country.” We have the right to demand better. And we once did have better. We had a president who genuinely served our interests—and not only our interests but the interests of the common man all around the globe. We are still living under the system that allowed these murders to be perpetrated, and that system is even more entrenched today. —America's Last President: What the World Lost When It Lost John F. Kennedy (2022) by Monika Wiesak 

WUSA is a perfect example of what could be labeled “liberal nightmare” cinema in the form of an abstract political artifact. A garish example of liberal exhibitionism. Stuart Rosenberg over-directed this under-written story of a right-wing political plot in New Orleans, based on an obscure novel by Robert Stone (A Hall of Mirrors, 1967). Paul Newman here is an alcoholic who drinks because he can't face himself. He's married but estranged from his equally alcoholic wife. Joanne Woodward's character is an uneducated young widow and a former hooker. Also, Anthony Perkins is an idealist going mad, and Cloris Leachman is a crippled naïf. First, I have to confess I have a fundamental aversion to movies about beautiful women whose souls have been lost, stolen or destroyed, especially when it isn't clear why. Paul Newman said he wanted the film served to critique “corporate greed” and “apathetic indifference to our national future.” 

Paul Newman plays Rheinhardt, a failed musician turned into a radio newscaster who becomes intrigued by Geraldine (Joanne Woodward), maybe falling in love with her. Geraldine befriends Morgan Rainey (Anthony Perkins), a social worker who is duped by a sinister neo-Fascist radio-station operator: Bingamon (Pat Hingle). Anthony Perkins plays an addled idealist, while Bingamon uses the burn-out Newman as his cat’s paw on his WUSA station. The score by Lalo Schifrin occasionally overwhelms the dialogue, and a late scene in which Newman's Rheinhardt delivers a harangue against the Vietnam War is difficult to hear because of the music—which I can only guess is supposed to mirror the riot that’s occurring onscreen.

In short, WUSA is a mess - but a fascinating mess, that ends in the most overtly manipulative tear-jerking way imaginable. The truth is there aren't enough politics in WUSA. The film is hobbled by an emphasis on too many wounded or compromised characters. Even the hippies living down the hall turn out to be shameless opportunists who take a gig singing at the right-wing rally, and then they slip their stash into Geraldine’s purse when the cops arrive. But WUSA is strangely fascinating in its complete defeatism. Nothing is ever really stated outright and instead the viewer is left to infer what's going on. It serves as a scrapbook of American sensibility at the end of the 1960s, a time when there really were people who believed we were on the brink of a revolution, when it was not difficult to imagine that the cycle of political assassinations and conflict begun in Dallas in 1963 would not only continue, but would escalate catastrophically. —Deeper Into Movies: Film Writings (1969-1972) by Pauline Kael

"At the movies, we are gradually being conditioned to accept being shown acts of violence. The directors used to say they were showing us how ugly it was in order to sensitize us to its horrors. You don’t have to be very keen to see that they are now in fact desensitizing us. They are saying that if everyone is brutal, the heroes must be as brutal as the villains or they turn into fools. There seems to be an assumption that if you’re offended by movie brutality, you are somehow playing into the hands of the people who want censorship. But this would deny those of us who don’t believe in censorship the use of a counterbalance: the freedom of the press to say that there’s anything conceivably damaging in these films—the freedom to analyze their implications. If we don’t use this critical freedom, we are implicitly saying that no brutality is too much for us—that only squares and people who believe in censorship are concerned with brutality. How can people go on talking about the dazzling brilliance of movies and not notice that the directors are sucking up to the thugs in the audience?" —The Age of Movies: Selected Writings of Pauline Kael (2016) edited by Sanford Schwartz 

WUSA was a giant flop in 1970 and the film was lost to history, barely remembered as a footnote to Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward’s careers. Despite its high-quality stack of actors and ideas, WUSA never delivers on its promise to become a political thriller. The screen time spent in examining the rootless characters played by Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward seems unrelated to the story's center of interest, the barely-glimpsed conspiracy. Geraldine sees herself as too dumb for working for a phone company and is quite antisocial. When Rainey goads Rheinhardt to show a conscience about the deal-making he sees back at the WUSA station, the DJ's response is to turn hostile. 

As much as Rheinhardt's disenchantment and apathy may reflect reality, it only frustrates the audience that expects Newman's character can find his moral footing and stop being so passive. WUSA belongs in the company of other "conspiracy" thrillers like All the King's Men, A Face in the Crowd, The Manchurian Candidate, Network, The Candidate, Executive Action, JFK, and Bulworth. Either way, these movies all envision a political environment beholden to corporate interests, a mass media run by capitalist sharks who manipulate the public opinion through demagogues, and an electoral process where candidates are stripped of their ideals in order to gain power. Director Stuart Rosenberg fails to bring WUSA to anything resembling an articulate conclusion. Rheinhardt's hippie neighbors are allowed to entertain at the rally, an unexplained choice that makes little sense. Rheinhardt is finally about to speak against WUSA when gunshots ring out. Later, Laurence Harvey's preacher advises Rheinhardt that the WUSA group is finished and that they'd all best leave town. In reality, it would make more sense that the publicity from the attempted assassination would actually strengthen Bingamton's circle of power.  

Critics of the time acknowledged WUSA's parallels to earlier political films like Frank Capra's Meet John Doe but blamed its failure on an aimless script and Rosenberg's limp direction. The film's passive-apocalyptic tone has more in common with Nathanael West's novella The Day of the Locust. A committed anti-war protester, Paul Newman was added to President Nixon's "unfriendly" list. Newman and Woodward did their best to promote WUSA and were complaining about Paramount's limited support for the film. In at least one interview Newman hinted at political interference, explaining that Rosenberg had been forced by the studio to cut over 20 minutes. But a decade later, Newman's final verdict was that WUSA was "a film of incredible potential which the production loused up. We tried to make it political, and it really wasn't." The DVD offers no subtitles and no extras. This is a shame, as several critics hinted that Robert Stone's Bingamton character was based on oil tycoon H.L. Hunt, who in the 1950s backed a syndicated conservative political TV show called Facts Forum. Hunt is also frequently named in several conspiracy theories surrounding the assassination of John F. Kennedy. Source: parallax-view.org

"Hud: Deep in the Divided Heart of Hollywood"

Hud, Deep in the Divided Heart of Hollywood:

As a schoolgirl, my suspiciousness about those who attack American “materialism” was first aroused by the refugees from Nazi Germany who so often contrasted their “culture” with our “vulgar materialism” when I discovered that their “culture” consisted of their having had servants in Europe, and a swooning acquaintance with the poems of Rilke, the novels of Stefan Zweig and Lion Feuchtwanger, the music of Mahler and Bruckner. And as the cultural treasures they brought over with them were likely to be Meissen porcelain, Biedermeier furniture, oriental carpets, wax fruit, and bookcases with glass doors, it wasn’t too difficult to reconstruct their “culture” and discover that it was a stuffier middle-class materialism and sentimentality, than they could find in the new world. These suspicions were intensified by later experience: the most grasping Europeans were, almost inevitably, the ones who leveled the charge of American materialism. Just recently, at a film festival, a behind-the-iron-curtain movie director, who interrupted my interview with him to fawn over every Hollywood dignitary who came in sight, concluded the interview with, “You Americans won’t understand this, but I don’t make movies just for money.” Americans are so vulnerable, so confused and defensive about prosperity—those who live by making movies showing a luxurious way of life worry over the American “image” abroad. But, the economics of moviemaking being what they are, usually all the producers do about it is worry—which is probably just as well because films made out of social conscience have generally given an even more distorted view of America than those made out of business sense, and are much less amusing. The most conspicuous recent example is Hud—just possibly the most completely schizoid movie produced anywhere anytime. 

Hud is a commercial Hollywood movie that is ostensibly an indictment of materialism, and it has been accepted as that by most of the critics. But those who made it protected their material interest in the film so well that they turned it into the opposite: a celebration and glorification of materialism—of the man who looks out for himself. The writers’ and director’s “anti-materialism” turns out to be a lot like the refugees’ anti-materialism: they had their Stefan Zweig side—young, tender Lonnie (Brandon de Wilde) and Melvyn Douglas’s Homer, a representative of the “good” as pious as Polonius; and they had their protection, their solid salable property of Meissen and Biedermeier, in Paul Newman. You can almost hear them say: “It’s a modern western, see, with this hell-raising man who doesn’t respect any of the virtues, and, at the end, we’ll fool them, he doesn’t get the girl and he doesn’t change!” “But who’ll want to see that?” “Oh, that’s all fixed—we’ve got Paul Newman for the part.” They could cast him as a mean man and know that the audience would never believe in his meanness. For there are certain actors who have such extraordinary audience rapport that the audience would not believe in their villainy, as with James Dean. 

Hud’s shouted last remark, his poor credo, “The world’s so full of crap a man’s going to get into it sooner or later, whether he’s careful or not,” has, at least, the ring of his truth. And it seems to me that perhaps the audience at large didn’t take all this very seriously, that we enjoyed it for its obvious hokum and factor of Western nostalgia, and for the wisecracking and slick style. Oddly, often more of American spirit and life came through thrillers and domestic comedies than through important, “serious” films like Marty or A Place in the Sun, which seemed like paralyzed, self-conscious imitations of European art, or films like Gentleman’s Agreement, with the indigenous paralysis of the Hollywood “problem” picture. And when the commercial filmmakers had some leeway, as well as some talent, an extraordinary amount came through—the rhythm of American life that gives films like She Done Him Wrong, I’m No Angel, Bringing Up Baby, The Thin Man, You Can't Take It with You, The Lady Eve, Double Indemnity, Strangers on a Train, Singin’ in the Rain, The Big Sleep, Pat and Mike, The Manchurian Candidate and Charade a freshness and spirit that makes them unlike the films of any other country. These movies were no Lillian Hellman's melodramas with good and evil clay pigeons. Our movies are the best proof that Americans are liveliest and freest when we don’t take ourselves too seriously. 

Hud doesn’t really have a dramatic adversary; his adversaries were out of Lillian Hellman-land. The setting wasn’t too melodramatic, it was not the legendary West of myth-making movies like Shane but the modern West I grew up in, the ludicrous real West. The comedy in Hud was in the incongruities of Cadillacs and cattle, crickets and transistor radios, jukeboxes, Dr. Pepper, paperback books—all emphasizing the standardization of culture within the loneliness of vast spaces. My West wasn’t Texas; it was northern California, but our Sonoma County ranch was very much like this one—with the frame house, and the housekeeper’s cabin, and the hired hands’ bunkhouse, and my father and older brothers charging over dirt roads, not in Cadillacs but in Studebakers, and the Saturday nights in the dead little town with its movie house and ice cream parlor. This was the small-town West I and many friends came out of. In the back of my mind, Hud began to stand for the people who would vote for Goldwater, while Homer was clearly an upstanding Stevensonian. And it seemed rather typical of the weakness of the whole message picture idea that the good liberals who made the film made their own spokesman a fuddy-duddy—except for the brief sequence when Homer follows the bouncing ball and sings “Clementine” at the movies. I was even more bewildered when the reviews started coming out; what were the critics talking about? Unlike the laughing audience, they were taking Hud at serious message value as a work of integrity, and, even in some cases, as a tragedy. In the New York Herald Tribune, Judith Crist panned the film. 

In the Saturday Review, Arthur Knight said that “it is the kind of creative collaboration too long absent from our screen . . . by the end of the film, there can be no two thoughts about Hud: he’s purely and simply a bastard. And by the end of the film, for all his charm, he has succeeded in alienating everyone, including the audience.” According to Bosley Crowther in the New York Times: “Hud is a rancher who is fully and foully diseased with all the germs of materialism that are infecting and sickening modern man . . . And the place where he lives is not just Texas. It is the whole country today. It is the soil in which grows a gimcrack culture that nurtures indulgence and greed. Hud is as profound a contemplation of the human condition as one of the plays of Eugene O’Neill”. The director carefully builds up the emotion that Crowther and probably audiences in general feel when the cattle, confused and trying to escape, are forced into the mass grave that has been dug by a bulldozer, and are there systematically shot down, covered with lime, and buried. This is the movie’s big scene, and it can be no accident that the scene derives some of its emotional power from the Nazis’ final solution of the Jewish problem; it’s inconceivable that these overtones would not have occurred to the group—predominantly Jewish—who made the film. Within the terms of the story, this emotion that is worked up is wrong, because it is manipulative. But I guess that they couldn’t resist the opportunity for a big emotional scene, a scene with impact. They got their big scene: it didn’t matter what it meant. So it’s pretty hard to figure out the critical congratulations for clarity and integrity, or such statements as Penelope Gilliatt’s in the Observer, “Hud is the most sober and powerful film from America for a long time. The scene when Melvyn Douglas’s diseased cattle have to be shot arrives like the descent of a Greek plague.” Whose error are the gods punishing? Was Homer, in buying Mexican cattle, merely taking a risk, or committing hubris? One of the things you learn on a ranch is that nobody is responsible for natural catastrophes; one of the things you learn in movies and other dramatic forms is the symbolic use of catastrophe. The locusts descended on Paul Muni in The Good Earth because he had gotten rich and bad: a farmer in the movies who neglects his wife and goes in for high living is sure to lose his crops. 

Hud plays it both ways: the texture of the film is wisecracking naturalism, but when a powerful sequence is needed to jack up the action values, a disaster is used for all the symbolic overtones that can be hit—and without any significant story meaning. The English critics got even more out of it: Derek Prouse experienced a “catharsis” in The Sunday Times, “It is a drama of moral corruption—of the debilitating disease of avaricious self-seeking—that is creeping across the land and infecting the minds of young people in this complex, materialistic age. It is forged in the smoldering confrontation of an aging cattleman and his corrupted son.” John Dyer in Sight and Sound seemed to react to cues from his experience at other movies; his review worth a little examination. “From the ominous discovery of the first dead heifer, to the massacre of the diseased herd, to Homer’s own end and Hud’s empty inheritance of a land he passively stood by and watched die, the story methodically unwinds like a python lying sated in the sun.” 

Hud certainly couldn’t be held responsible for the cattle becoming infected—unless Dyer wants to go so far as to view that infection as a symbol of or a punishment for Hud’s sickness. Even Homer, who blamed Hud for just about everything else, didn’t accuse him of infecting the cattle. Dyer would perhaps go that far, because somehow “the aridity of the cattle-less landscape mirrors his own barren future.” Writing of the “terse and elemental polarity of the film,” Dyer says, “The earth is livelihood, freedom and death to Homer; an implacably hostile prison to Hud”. The scriptwriters give Homer principles; but they’re careful to show that Hud is rejected when he makes overtures to his father. Homer was generous and kind, and democratic in the Western way that Easterners still don’t understand: it was not out of guilty condescension that mealtimes were communal affairs with the Mexican ranchhands joining the family, it was the way Westerners lived. No doubt we’re really supposed to believe that Alma is, as Stanley Kauffmann says, “driven off by his Hud’s vicious physical assault.” 

But in terms of the modernity of the settings and the characters, as well as the age of the protagonists (they’re at least in their middle thirties), it was more probable that Alma left the ranch because she was looking for new opportunities. Alma obviously wanted to go to bed with Hud, but she has been rejecting his propositions because she doesn’t want to be just another casual dame to him. Despite his limitations, Paul Newman is good at playing blowhards who reveal the needs behind their transparent lies. The scriptwriters for Hud, who, I daresay, are as familiar as critics with theories of melodrama, know that heroes and villains mostly want the same things and that it is their way of trying to get them that separates one from the other. They impart this knowledge to Alma, who tells Hud that she desired him and he could have had her if he’d gone about it differently. Dyer expresses his personal view when he says it’s “on a level of sophistication totally unexpected from their scripts for two of Martin Ritt’s previous Faulkner-inspired films.” This has some special irony because not only is their technique in Hud a continuation of the episodic method they used in combining disparate Faulkner stories into The Long Hot Summer, but the dialogue quoted most appreciatively (Alma’s rebuff of Hud, “No thanks, I’ve had one cold-hearted bastard in my life, I don’t want another”) is lifted almost verbatim from that earlier script—when it was Joanne Woodward telling off Paul Newman. 

They didn’t get acclaim for their integrity and honesty that time because, although The Long Hot Summer was a box-office hit, the material was resolved as a jolly comedy, the actor and actress were paired off, and Newman as Ben Quick the barn burner turned out not really to be a barn burner after all. They hadn’t yet found the “courage” that keeps Hud what Time magazine called him, “an unregenerate heel, a cad to the end.” In neither film do the stories hold together, but Ritt, in the interim having made Hemingway’s Adventures of a Young Man and failed to find an appropriate style—with the aid of James Wong Howe’s crisp cinematography—found something more European at last. Visually Hud is so unadorned, so skeletonic, that we may admire the bones without being quite sure of the name of the beast. This Westerner drama is part Rebel Without A Cause, part East of Eden, part Champion, with hints of the cynic anti-hero who is damaged and pretends not to care. Hud doesn't achieve a defined vision, except it's an anti-Western and somehow an anti-American film. 

In the New Yorker Brendan Gill writes, “It’s an attractive irony of the situation that, despite the integrity of its makers, Hud is bound to prove a box-office smash. I find this coincidence gratifying.” Believing in this kind of coincidence is like believing in Santa Claus. Hud is so astutely made and yet such a mess that it's only redeemed by its fundamental dishonesty. It is perhaps outwardly an archetypal Hollywood movie, but split in so many revealing ways that, like On the Waterfront or From Here to Eternity, it is the movie of its year (even though it’s shallow unlike those classics). The creators of Hud are probably the type of folks who want government's centralized power when it just works for their libertarian aims. They may hate cops but call them at the first hint of a prowler: they feel split and confused, and it shows in a million ways. I imagine they’re very like Hud. —{Film Quarterly, Summer 1964} by Pauline Kael

"It's So Easy to Fall in Love" with Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward (video)

A video dedicated to Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward, featuring stills of their films and candids of the legendary couple. Soundtrack: "Crazy for my baby" by Randy Newman, "It's So Easy to Fall in Love" and "Tell Him" by Linda Ronstadt, "Bring It on Home to Me" by Sam Cooke, and "Cry to Me" by Solomon Burke.

Love and Tragedy: The Hustler by Robert Rossen

Percy Sledge’s song When a Man Loves a Woman touched enough people to make it a number-one song in 1966. Next, compare the feeling of love in Sledge’s song with that of Odysseus in Homer’s epic the Odyssey. The eponymous hero doesn’t want to fly. When the beautiful goddess Calypso tries to keep him as her bedmate, he turns her down even though she promises him immortality – a place with the gods. He wants to go home to his wife. Before Ekman and Friesen, love had most certainly been considered an emotion. Indeed, the two psychologists were bucking a long tradition that made love not only an emotion but sometimes also the premier emotion. In the 4th century BCE, love was one of 12 passions named by Aristotle (though he knew that he was leaving out many others). In the 13th century CE, Thomas Aquinas made love the prime mover of every emotion. And in the 1960s, Magda Arnold, a pioneer of cognitivism, classified love as a positive ‘impulse’ emotion. For all of these theorists, love was paradigmatic of all the other emotions. Percy Sledge’s inability to think about anything but his girl tapped into a Western tradition of very long-standing: love as an obsession. It means coveting, admiring, desiring and being frustrated. 

Researchers from Harvard Chan SHINE and the Human Flourishing Program have published a new paper in Social Psychiatry and Psychiatric Epidemiology (August, 2, 2022) exploring the role of strengths of moral character and love in mental health. Authors Dorota Weziak-Bialowolska, Matthew T. Lee, Piotr Bialowolski,  Ying Chen, Tyler J. VanderWeele, and Eileen McNeely used longitudinal observational data. “Our findings show that persons who live their life according to high moral standards have substantially lower odds of depression.” —Dorota Weziak-Bialowolska concluded. 

In the 18th and 19th centuries, obsessive love’s narrative became darker. In Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774), the eponymous hero is hopelessly in love with Lotte. He constantly thinks how, if only she were with him, he would cover her with kisses. He never stops wearing the outfit that he wore at their first meeting and, when it wears out, he gets another that is identical. Lotte is everywhere in his imagination. He loves her ‘solely, with such passion and so completely’ that he knows nothing except her. He measures up because he loves. He’s glad to be miserable. When he kills himself, it is because one must go to any length for love. Romantic profundity is not merely about duration, it is also about complexity. An analogy can be found in music. In 1987, William Gaver and George Mandler, psychologists from the University of California, San Diego, found that the frequency of listening to a certain kind of music increases the preference for it. As with music, so it is with love. The complexity of the beloved is an important factor in determining whether love will be more or less profound as time goes on: a complex psychological personality is more likely to generate profound romantic love in a partner, while even the most intense sexual desire can die away. Source: aeon.co

“Happiness in marriage is not something that just happens. A good marriage must be created. In the art of marriage, the little things are the big things. It's never being too old to hold hands. It's remembering to say 'I love you' at least once a day. It's never going to sleep angry. It's at no time taking the other for granted; the courtship should not end with that honeymoon, it should continue through all the years. It is havig a mutual sensue of values. It is standing together facing the world. It is not looking for perfection in each other. It is cultivating flexibility and a sense of unity and patience. It is doing things for each other not in the attitude of duty or sacrifice but in the spirit of joy. It is having the capacity to forgive and forget. It is finding room for the things of the spirit. It is a common search for the good and the beautiful. It is not marrying the right partner, it’s being the right partner.” – Excerpt from Paul and Joanne’s vow renewal letter.

Robert Rossen came to another performance of our play, and this time he came backstage and was introduced to me by my agent. He was dressed very casually and seemed a little nervous holding the script that he presented to me. “I saw you in the plays at the Actors Studio,” he told me. “I’ve written something I’d like you to read.” My agent Bob Richards thought this approach was a waste of time, but I persisted. I thought of all the hours the writer had spent, and I felt I owed them more than a hasty read. Rossen’s script was called The Hustler. My character, Sarah, didn’t enter till about page forty, but around page five I already knew I wanted to be in this movie. The script was so clean and strong, and I was excited. I had never before read a script where I could so vividly feel the characters and rooms. I could pour myself into it and disappear. I told my agent right away that I wanted to do it. Thank God, Rossen had been patient. We agreed to meet. He came up to my empty apartment, where the living room now had a chair in addition to the daybed, and we talked a little about this mysterious girl, Sarah Packard. Who she really was. I thought I understood her, even if I didn’t know the particulars, the truth about her background. Rossen told me Sarah was sort of a fallen woman, and a romantic at heart. The film was being produced by 20th Century-Fox. The studio had wanted Anne Francis to play the part. They finally relented and agreed to sign me but wouldn’t move above a certain figure. My agents and I stood firm on $40,000—not a princely sum, but a fair one for the time. Rossen took a stand on my behalf and insisted on my playing the role and their paying me the $40,000. The studio finally agreed.

Rossen felt he couldn’t speak to an actor about what he wanted for a particular moment or scene in terms “useful to the actor,” though he knew it when he saw it. If it rang true to him, he’d record. I’d done Until They Sail with Paul Newman two years before at MGM, but on that film there had never been an occasion for me to be close to him. Lifting my head from the script to speak my first line to Paul, I was met with the blinding force of his unearthly blue eyes. It was more than the eyes; it was also of course the mouth, and the unbelievable grace of his cheekbones. Almost two weeks passed before I could do my work and just see a man acting his part. Working with Paul was a joy from the beginning. I’m sure he was unaware of the effect his beauty had on people. He was very serious about the work, often thinking he wasn’t good enough. But outside the work, he was generally easygoing and quite down to earth. When I arrived every morning, I would see Paul reading a newspaper in the makeup room. Up to that time, he was the only actor I had ever seen doing that. Not many actors read anything but the trade papers or their script that early in the morning. It surprised me because generally Paul made an effort to come off as cool and casual. I saw clearly he had a lot of interests. Was I seeing the budding philanthropist he'd become in the future? 

And he liked to joke with me, trying to soften the gritty tone of the film. In an innocent way, I played house with Paul. Our cell-like dressing rooms were right next to each other, somewhere upstairs in the huge warehouse that was now our studio. We each had only a cot and a small table. I set up a hot plate in my room and brought soups for myself for lunch. One day Paul told me of a favorite imported dehydrated soup that he loved. After that I made a point of getting that soup or something close to it, heating it up, and bringing him a mugful at lunchtime. I sat on his cot with him while we both smiled and ate. It was a silent bonding time. One day Paul invited me to join him and his wife, Oscar-winning actress Joanne Woodward, at a fund-raiser ball for the Actors Studio. I had met Joanne only once. She visited the set for a brief time, wearing a beautiful red coat. I believe it was the only time she came to the set to see Paul. I thought it was very sensitive of her. My boyfriend John was shooting in California, so Paul and Joanne suggested their friend Gore Vidal be my escort to the ball. The night of the ball we all met at the Newmans’ apartment (I had heard about their dining room, and yes indeed, it was completely empty save for a large pool table). Joanne wasn’t quite ready and invited me to come back to the bedroom to keep her company while she was finishing up. A couple of flourishes to her hair, a powder puff, and some jewelry. I doubted I would have been that open with a woman I didn’t really know, but John, who knew her, was right; he had described her as someone I would like, “a really straight dame.” Gore Vidal was charming and witty, and the evening seemed festive. It was a release for everyone. 

Every morning while we were shooting, the hairstylist would come to my apartment and blow-dry my hair straight in front of the makeup mirror. Then she’d wrap my head carefully with fine tulle to protect it for the drive to the location or the studio. One day Paul asked if I’d like him to pick me up for work in the morning on his motor scooter. Of course, I said yes. The next morning we flew through Central Park. It was beautiful, no traffic, round and around through the trees. Somewhere in Central Park my head covering floated away, but I didn’t care. Bob Rossen greeted us when we arrived at the studio and gave us both holy hell before he sent us to makeup. Rossen was very caring of me, beyond my being the actress in his movie. When he found out I was not sleeping well, he hired a masseuse to come to my apartment a couple of times a week at the end of the day. It didn’t help my sleep much, but it sure felt good. When I’d first told John I was going to do the movie, he’d asked about Rossen’s interest in me. Was it personal or strictly professional? I told him I thought it was both. There had been some unspoken but palpable anger between Rossen and Paul on the set. I think Paul may have been aware that he was not Rossen’s first choice, and that couldn’t have made things easier. Rossen once told me that his dream casting would have been John Garfield, if he’d been alive, or Peter Falk, whom the studio vetoed because he wasn’t a big enough star. Peter was terrifically attractive in the days before he dressed himself down for Columbo.

One day I went to Rossen and told him that I didn’t think I should be wearing clothes in the scene where Fast Eddie and I first wake up in bed. I should at least appear as if I weren’t. The bedsheets would hide most of my body. The production code was still very strict at the time; even married people could not be seen sleeping in the same bed. But Paul and I would be in the same bed, and Paul, of course, wouldn’t be wearing much, so why should I? I asked Rossen to tell Paul what I was planning to do beforehand so it wouldn’t be a total surprise. Rossen said, “I don’t think Paul is going to like that; he may be uncomfortable.” But nothing more was said about it, and that’s what we did. Rossen shot two versions: one for the foreign market, with Paul and me undressed under the sheets, and one for the United States, with me wearing a robe and lying on top of the sheets and Paul wearing a T-shirt. Interestingly, the acting in the clothed scene was far better, so that’s the one that was used. A few days later John went back to California to finish All Fall Down. Paul had seen John coming to pick me up at the rehearsal hall after work when John visited. He used to say to me, “Why don’t you marry the guy?” 

I didn’t know if Paul was serious or not, but that idea, even with John, was frightening to me.  It took fifteen years to pass for me to see the genius of what was done, of editor Dede Allen’s brilliant work. How perfect the movie is. I saw how wrenchingly sensitive Paul’s Fast Eddie was, and how brave. He made me weep over my own (Sarah’s) death. It’s a pity it took me so long to see it. There were lots of subsequent screenings of The Hustler, and though I did not attend them, I heard about them. Everyone seemed to love the movie, even the critics. —Learning to Live Out Loud (2011) by Piper Laurie

By the time of The Hustler’s completion, Rossen summed up one capsule version of his intentions in this way: “The game represents a form of creative expression. My protagonist, Fast Eddie, wants to become a great pool player, but the film is really about the obstacles he encounters in attempting to fulfill himself as a human being. He attains self-awareness only after a terrible personal tragedy which he has caused—and then he wins his pool game. Eddie needs to win before everything else; that is his tragedy.” In later discussions, Rossen touched on more intertwined aspects of the themes. “Filming The Hustler, I was extremely conscious of what I was doing from beginning to end. In every region, on every level, from that of billiards to the fact that Eddie associates with a cripple. In fact, why is she lame? It is hard to say, and yet it could not be otherwise. He too is a cripple, but on the level of feeling, while she is one even physically.” He spoke of this again when he was asked about his tendency to speak of disability in his last films. He replied, “It is because if I look at the world in which we live, if I think about this world of today, I cannot keep from seeing in it a great number of cripples, and I want to speak of them with sympathy, to try to understand them.”

In April 1966 the influential French journal Cahiers du Cinema devoted a special issue to Rossen’s work, two months after his death. It was an important, if still limited, re-claiming of the value of his work—at least in Europe. In his homage to The Hustler, Jacques Bontemps poetically evoked this motif of being “crippled” and its relationship to a central theme of knowing yourself, of attempting to know and connect to others: This was a story of wounded ones, of isolated ones, of unknowns. Constrained to limp alone. At the threshold of the insurmountable strangeness of the other was revealed an irremediable strangeness to one-self. Bontemps wrote of one provocative sense of these resonances: “The film, its story full of digressions and lacunae, said that, essentially ‘hustled,’ each person was perhaps most deeply his own ‘hustler’ forever.” For Rossen, the materials of the story, as he adapted them, resonated on a personal level. With the ideological turmoil of the blacklist and testifying somewhat loosening its hold on his imagination, he sensed in this narrative a parable on the hustlers of Hollywood—at any time. Bontemps, again, was insightful on this implication, writing that in “a universe dulled with leveling... the one who wins is not the one who concerns himself with the beauty of the gesture, but he for whom everything poses itself in terms of efficacy of return. Compromise and resignation are required. There is a place only for Bert or for Minnesota Fats.”

The gesture of The Hustler, with its own kind of beauty, is jagged and unsettling, a paradox. As Claude Ollier had perceptively written when the film first came out, what gives The Hustler its special quality, its staying power, goes beyond its “ultra-classical skill.” It is that “one has the constant impression that something else is happening that is escaping, being only briefly suggested by acting and dialogues with two meanings.... A sense of indecision hovers permanently over this strange film, and the final explanations are not enough to dispel it.” Nevertheless, the preconceptions of the critics kept most from seeing The Hustler for what it really was. Most critics, while praising it, did not allow it to resonate on these deeper themes. Some even complained that the whole affair with Sarah—the crux of the film’s deepest feelings and insights—was too depressing and destructive. Brendan Gill in The New Yorker felt Rossen had become “over-ambitious.” He bemoaned “the marvelous picture it might have been if it hadn’t got so diffuse.” For Gill, Bert Gordon was another “tough gangster-gambler.” Pauline Kael dug a bit deeper into it: “George C. Scott in The Hustler suggests a personification of the power of money. The Last American Hero isn’t just about stock-car racing, any more than The Hustler was only about shooting pool.” She does not, however, go on to differentiate the vast differences in insight and artistry in dealing with what else the two films were about. The Hustler is the most achieved and fulfilled of Rossen’s films. It is the quintessential version of Rossen’s deepest, abiding interests and insights, his core sense of the shape of things, and his unflagging hopes. Rossen felt that we could all be driven through the turbulent, often inexplicable flux of our inner weaknesses and external pressures, to betray others—and ourselves. 

Certainly part of the work’s artistic fulfillment was his writing the best dialogue of his career—credible and moving, yet thoughtful, meaningful, and even iconic. Rossen’s wonderful use of Cinemascope (in black and white) to create an oppressive, elongated world in which ceilings always seem terribly low; and people terribly separate from each other; in one shot Newman is even separated from his own image in a mirror by almost the whole width of a very wide screen. It is a world in which the pool table seems the one natural shape, while human beings seem untidy intruders, and that, of course, is the film’s chief concern: the human cost of being the greatest pool player in America. This sense of oppressive, enclosing settings—décor in the broadest sense—is one of the central constellations of visual motifs that span the structure of the film. These settings help to shape the restricting pressures of the world in which the characters live—their enclosed trap and arena. Only one major scene takes place within an outdoor setting. The sensitive, quietly magnificent cinematography of Eugen Shuftan captures and projects every nuance. 

In Rossen’s parable of the artist in Hollywood, all are merely human, all are hustlers. They need—to win, to be right, to believe. The artist strives too much to hustle and win, to be a success; the Party member goes beyond reason to hold on to his beliefs. The more either (or both in one) hustles and strives, the more he betrays his gift, his élan, betraying his ideals and dreams of a better world. And the more he strives, the more he ends up placing himself in the hands of the moguls who not only want to control the product, but, like the gambler Bert Gordon, want to own and control the people who create it for them—or in the bloody hands of political tyrants, who, too, must control all in ways that have even more dire and dreadful results. But Bert is a more subtle Hollywood power broker, a Congressional Committee member, a Communist Party manipulator. He too is one of those who will use you and break your spirit if he has to. Bert’s drive for power rises from an ego that is paradoxically both strong and uncertain. 

The woman in this strange triangle of struggle and power also is more fully, and ambiguously, developed than any of Rossen’s previous female characters. Patric Brion even saw “the center of interest displaced from Paul Newman to Piper Laurie and, indeed thereby, acquiring a very attaching [attachant, engaging] truth and tenderness.” He saw Sarah as a mid-point in an important new strain of interest, from Adelaide in Cordura to Lilith. Sarah is a potential artist, a writer, but far from the perfection of her counterpart, Peg, in Body and Soul. She understands and spreads the value and joy of love (a scene lovely in her awkwardly winning openness when she goes shopping and girlishly proclaims, “I’ve got a fella”). But, lame and alcoholic, she too is psychologically crippled. She is, as Bert Gordon recognizes, a born loser. Too familiar with defeat, Sarah is drawn to it, almost seems to need it. And so she cannot help herself; she lets Bert Gordon win, and lets herself betray Eddie and herself, as though she just couldn’t fight anymore, as though that were the only tragic way left for her to win. ”Well, what else have we got? We’re strangers. What happens when the liquor and the money run out, Eddie? You told Charlie to lay down and die. Will you say that to me too?” When he slaps her, she says coldly “You waiting for me to cry?” Wearing a jacket and tie, he had taken her to a fancy French restaurant. She won’t believe him, can’t. “Is that your idea of love?” “I got no idea of love,” he answers. “And neither have you. I mean, neither one of us would know what it is if it was coming down the street.” She says later, “They wear masks, Eddie. And underneath they’re perverted, twisted, crippled. Bert's not going to break your thumbs. He’ll break your heart.” 

Pool is Eddie’s craft, his way of expressing himself. It is what he does best; yet, until the very last game, it reveals the worst and most destructive drives and needs within him. Eddie’s redemption is not in his winning, but in why he wins, in what he recognizes and accepts about himself. And so he will not play their game anymore—the Bert Gordons, the dominators, the moguls, the tyrants of the world. His redemption comes not only from what he has won for Sarah, but what he is willing to lose for her. It has left him exiled from the world of pool playing that he now for the first time really understands. He will never be able to play pool in the places and competitions that he deserves. He gives up all that he has left to love. He is alone and has given up what he does best, and he accepts that. He has paid his debt—by winning and losing. One can sense the personal echoes for Rossen in this final resignation: Eddie’s acceptance of this risk and his banishment, his exile, for the sake of what he believes in. —Robert Rossen: The Films and Politics of a Blacklisted Idealist (2013) by Alan Casty