The Revolt of the Pendulum (28 page)

On the sound stage at Pinewood, however, all seemed workman-like and under control. So does most of the movie, for those who care to look.
David
still shows up occasionally on television,
giving the newspaper preview writers a chance to flex their tiny wits. They know not of what they speak. Apart from the action scenes, which are obviously crippled by lack of coverage – you
can see the same army going in opposite directions to do battle with itself – the feeling for the far past is unusually subtle. Beresford when young admired Pasolini’s
Gospel
According to Saint Matthew
, and some of that admiration rubbed off on
David
. Unlike almost every Hollywood biblical epic ever made,
David
feels like a transposition to another
time and somewhere else. At Pinewood a visitor could already sense that something unusual was in the works. The sets, for example, had proper low ceilings, carefully violating the usual Hollywood
assumption that in ancient times the ruling classes met to break bread in dining rooms the size of an aeroplane hangar. There was no sense that everybody concerned was participating in a salvage
operation with all hands to the bilge pumps. Richard Gere was relaxed and charming. Out of his hearing, I made my standard joke to Beresford: if he wanted a film star with small eyes, why
didn’t he use me? At lunch, perhaps tactlessly, I offered my favourite aria about movies that had been ruined by the producer’s heavy, uncomprehending hand. Beresford, whose knowledge
of his medium is encyclopaedic, was hilarious on the subject. Marty Elfand seemed to enjoy the ribbing, but decisively countered with the aforementioned piece of folk wisdom: there are more bad
director’s movies than bad producer’s movies.

I had to admit that he was right. The list of movies ruined by a director’s being given a free hand begins with D. W. Griffith, moves on through Stroheim, and can be entertainingly
extended far beyond Antonioni’s
Zabriskie Point
. The implication, not often enough noted, is that the producer’s interference is frequently an important factor in keeping a
project within reasonable bounds. Stories about a producer’s stupidity or philistinism should always be given a second look from that angle. Orson Welles was appalled when the producer added
crass explanatory shots to
Touch of Evil
, but the explanatory shots really do explain things: perhaps Welles should not have left them out in the first place. A key case is David O.
Selznick’s much-derided interference at the scripting stage of
The Third Man
. Later on, Graham Greene made comic capital out of Selznick’s suggestion that it looked
‘faggy’ for Holly Martins to hang around in Vienna after he had been told that Harry Lime was dead. But if we look at Nicholas Wapshott’s hard-headed and useful biography of Carol
Reed
(The Man Between)
we find that another piece of interference by Selznick was crucial to the coherence of the movie. Neither Reed nor Greene wanted any scenes dealing with the effects of
Lime’s penicillin on the children who were treated with it. Selznick insisted, and got his way.

To avoid the obvious, Reed assembled the required scenes entirely out of reaction shots. All we see is Trevor Howard and Joseph Cotten looking at us out of the screen, as if we were the children
in the hospital beds. The movie’s whole moral structure pivots on that one point. Unless we are convinced that the two men are seeing horrors, there would be no justification for Holly
Martins’ delivering the
coup de grace
to his erstwhile friend. No doubt Selznick was a vulgarian compared with Graham Greene, but Selznick was the one who put his unsubtle finger on
the point that simply had to be dramatised. It was Reed’s job, which he cleverly fulfilled, to find a way of doing it that did not look crass. If Reed had been a greater man, a true
auteur,
he might have written his own scripts and brought out such key points every time. But a working director was all he was, albeit an unusually inventive one.
(Trapeze
was one of
the few early Cinemascope movies to fill its format satisfactorily, because Reed spotted that the rehearsing circus acts could fill the yawning background behind the main actors.) Reed was a
stylist working within an industry, in conformity with its traditional division of labour. That the division of labour also entailed a division of creative labour was the point missed even by a
later generation of critics who knew quite a lot about the technical aspects of film making but not enough about cash flow.

Finally, the money talks. At the time when film criticism first came into its own as a recognised genre, in the 1930s, the critics were still coping with the miracle that the pictures could
talk. There was not much that they knew. They could tell that a good movie was different from a bad one, but they didn’t know yet quite why. (C. A. Lejeune, a distinguished critic of the
post-war period, thought that the tilted pictures of Reed’s characteristic manner were obtained in the printing, rather than by tilting the camera.) Nowadays, the critics know about
everything, down to and including the money; but unless they have been involved in a collaborative venture themselves, they still tend to heap all the praise, or all the blame, on the head that
shows most prominently. Hence the usefulness of the director’s movie that turns out to be a mess: when produced by himself, as it often is, it is a powerful hint that in his successful
earlier creations there was somebody else behind the scenes, performing the unsung function of the slave in the Roman general’s triumphal chariot, but with different dialogue. The Roman slave
whispered: ‘Remember you are mortal.’ The producer, or the money man, or sometimes even the studio boss, whispers something else. He whispers: ‘Remember that the audience is
mortal.’ You can be as subtle as you like, but one way or another you have to spell it out. Why does Harry Lime have to die? Because he is evil. What is the evidence that he is evil? His
penicillin. What does the penicillin do? Show us.

None of this means that the money is always right. From the first stage of scripting, Beresford wanted to tie
David
together with a voice-over of David reading the Psalms. The studio
vetoed the idea: not because the language was biblical, but because it was poetry. (The King as a
poet
? Too faggy.) From that moment, the film was on the road to ruin. It just took many
millions of dollars to get there. If you find, as I do, that the ruin has life in it, there is still no call to believe in the romantic prescription that posterity will decide the issue. The issue
has already been decided. Apart from the occasional, very rare exception like
Blade Runner
, lost big movies don’t come back, and most of the lost small ones don’t come back
either. How many people ever saw John Sayles’s
Lone Star
? I saw it, and thought it the best movie about racial prejudice that I had seen for a long time. But I find it hard to name,
from memory, any of the leading players apart from Chris Cooper. They almost all missed the wave, which is the wave of publicity. Movies are not like poems. They cost too much to be anything except
a popular art. If the digital revolution changes all that, it might well be a good thing, but there is always the chance that Dennis Hopper’s
Last Movie
will be made a thousand times;
and there will never be a cheap way of filming the battle scenes in
David
– the scenes that were never shot because it snowed in Palestine.

The Monthly
, December 2005 – January 2006

Postscript

I am aware that I have made the point about Selznick and
The Third Man
twice in this book, but I think it bears repetition: needs grinding in, in fact. Unless a
director in full charge of his own project has a producer’s instincts as well – unless, that is, he can keep an eye on himself – the chances for a fatal indulgence of his ego are
very great. It will always be a good game to list the director’s-movie movies that went wrong. My favourites, for their awfulness, include Dennis Hopper’s
Last Movie
, Michael
Cimino’s
Heaven’s Gate
, and Francis Ford Coppola’s
One from the Heart
. Coppola’s
Apocalypse Now
would be on the list too if the whole movie were as
terrible as its last act. But nothing could redeem
One from the Heart
: it was a feel-good movie that made you feel bad. It will be noticed that all the people on this list are talented. They
made edifyingly bad movies. Directors without talent just make bad movies. Even good directors with their egos well reined in, however, will have failures, because circumstances will conspire
against them. A poem can’t be stopped even if the poet runs out of ink. A movie can be wrecked by a single actor who flips his lid when it is too late to replace him. I should put in a
warning to the reader concerning my opinions about Bruce Beresford’s
David
, a film which he himself would rather forget. Beresford has been a close friend of mine since we were
students together, so I am vulnerable to the charge that I am apt to overlook the faults in some of his movies because I know too much about the conditions in which they were made. (When I started
out as a television critic, I quickly learned to stay ignorant about production problems, having been tipped off to the trap by the number of producers who rushed to tell me about them.) The
inventor of
Black Robe
, the best movie I have ever seen about the Red Man, needs no help from a sympathiser who knows something about how hard it was to shoot.
The Getting of Wisdom
,
Don’s Party
and
The Club
are all important chapters in the story of the rise to prominence of the post-war Australian film industry, which was itself, in a large part,
Beresford’s personal creation. I would be free to state that last fact more assertively if I hadn’t had a ringside seat for how he did it. One of his secrets was a diligent competence
that the money-men always knew they could rely on. Unfortunately they too often exploited the knowledge. Budgets would dry up in the second last week, leaving Beresford to complete the movie at his
own expense. After the box-office success of
Double Jeopardy
, he was in demand for directing Hollywood thrillers. His reputation for getting the job done on schedule left him vulnerable to
the kind of producers ready to supplement their own salaries with a share of his.
The Contract
is on a par with
Double Jeopardy
for its gripping narrative, but the production values
hit a lower mark because the money ran out. Hence the car that goes over the cliff is not the same car that dives into the gorge. A critic who spots such an anomaly should be slow to assume that
the director didn’t.

THE MEASURE OF A. D. HOPE

The first collection of poems by A. D. Hope,
The Wandering Islands
, belatedly appeared in 1955, and consolidated the position he had already established as the leading
Australian poet of his time. The book had to appear belatedly (Hope was already 48) because if it had appeared much earlier its author might have been prosecuted. Australia was still a censored
country and several of Hope’s poems dared to mention the particularities of sexual intercourse. Without his air of authority, Hope might never have got his book into the shops before old age
supervened. But an air of authority was what he had. He spoke from on high. His vocabulary was of the present, but it had the past in it, transparent a long way down. And it was all sent forward
like a wave by his magisterial sense of rhythm.

The Western Tiers were in his home state, Tasmania: but you didn’t have to know that. In fact you didn’t have to know that the poems had been written in Australia at all. Most of
them sounded as if they could have been written anywhere in the international English-speaking world that had two-way communications with Olympus, which was probably why even those of us in the
younger generation who were making a point of not reading much avowedly Australian poetry still felt it permissible to read Hope’s. A few people even argued that he had missed a trick by not
sounding Australian enough. What nobody argued was that he ever sounded anything less than oracular. His opening stanzas brought his readers to attention like a general walking unannounced into a
barracks. I can still remember reading the opening quatrain of ‘The Death of the Bird’ for the first time.

Whatever else you might have conceivably planned to be doing in the next few minutes, going on to the next stanza was what you did, and then to the next, until, in the last stanza, ‘the
great earth . . . Receives the tiny burden of her death.’ The diction was unashamedly grandiloquent – born on the border where the grandiose couples with the eloquent – but the
narrative drive made it compulsory to keep reading. And everybody concerned with poetry felt the same imperative. There were other accomplished Australian poets in Hope’s generation but they
were obliged to acknowledge his primacy even when they weren’t glad about it. He was the governor, and after half a century he still is. Though there are questions to be asked about what
happened to his poetry after that first amazing volume, nobody worth hearing from has ever seriously tried to attack him. There is an awkward possibility, however, that if he is short of detractors
to take him down, he has admirers who might do the same job.

Burdened with the simultaneously vaulting and diffident subtitle ‘A Study of the Selected Notebooks of A. D. Hope’, Ann McCulloch’s
Dance of the Nomad
achieves the rare
feat of making you fear for its sleeping subject’s repose before the book is even opened. I should hasten to say that much of the fear turns out to be unjustified. Dr McCulloch, although
unusually prone to cultstud jargon for the pupil of a man who hated the whole idea of a specialised academic vocabulary, is on the whole a good and faithful servant to her master’s memory,
and does not deserve to be executed along with her publisher. The publisher is, or are, Pandanus Books, billed as part of the Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies at the Australian National
University. For purposes of capital punishment, let us call this organization ‘the publishers’. The publishers need to be told, before they are led out to face the firing squad, the
following things, lest they rise from the dead and publish something else without ever realising what all the noise was about.