With his large nose and piercing blue eyes, his full lips, always halfway between sorrow and sarcasm, his smooth moustache and arched eyebrows which he could wield like sabres, Vincent Price created a prototype and a lineage, whose most recent offspring is the young Dracula played by Gary Oldman and directed by Coppola: the man who is as sinned against as sinning, as wounded as he is wounding, as enthusiastic as he is disillusioned, as ruled by his past as he is firmly installed in the present that is leading him to damnation and ruin. The ending of The Master of the World provides a perfect illustration of the Price character, because he definitely came to be his own best character: the captain of the airship, the victim of his own obsessions, sits alone in his chair, contemplating the sky and waiting for the moment he will crash and be consumed by fire along with his grandiose dreams. He has sat there at other moments during the film, doubtless pondering his past. That is something Vincent Price will ponder now until the end of time, with his supernaturally generous smile and his steely, melancholy gaze.
(1994)
What If You Had Never been Born?
One day last Christmas, I was doing about four things at once (don’t worry, one of those things wasn’t writing this article, I find even music incompatible with writing), and, as I sometimes do, I had the television on mute. I’m sure you’ve done the same thing, and it’s a real test of those who appear on TV; if you take away voice and rhetoric, both of which distract enormously from the image, you can see with cruel clarity which politician is lying – even if we have no idea what he’s talking about – which writer is spouting vacuous nonsense even he does not believe, which dancers can’t dance for toffee, and which actors should long ago have retired. With a few notable exceptions – De Niro, Connery, Eli Wallach in one of his rare appearances, Keitel, Matthau, Caine – modern-day actors tend to be distinctly unimpressive, like film stars out of the Ark, who can’t even look or walk memorably, who gesticulate as if they were still stuck in the age of silent films. When put to the same test, however, most older actors positively ooze authenticity and appear not to be acting at all, but to be there, alive, with us as witnesses to their troubles.
On that particular Christmas Day, and as usually happens around that time, one channel was showing Frank Capra’s famous film It’s a Wonderful Life. It was made more than fifty years ago, and whereas a book that was still being read after all that time would immediately be labelled a classic (especially in this impatient age of ours), it seems that, because film is a comparatively young art, critics find it harder to trust the sanction bestowed by time; and so, even though almost everyone loves that film, it isn’t always acknowledged as a masterpiece. I wasn’t intending to watch it for the eleventh or twelfth time, because I know it almost by heart, but its actors, even when deprived of voice and dialogue – James Stewart, Lionel Barrymore, Donna Reed, Gloria Grahame, Thomas Mitchell and the angel Henry Travers – immediately caught my attention and drew me in. It did not take long for me to restore the sound, abandon my other tasks (which included frying an omelette), and sit down and watch it to the end, such is its intensity, complexity and power to convince.
And I realized how superficial, obtuse and repetitive critics can be sometimes, because they have often criticized the film for being too ingenuous and optimistic, a crowd-pleaser. There is, in fact, only one ingenuous detail: the town that would have existed had James Stewart not been born – and that we see during his memorable stroll through what did not happen – is far more exciting – full of houses of ill repute and gambling dens – than the ‘real’ town in the rest of the film. As for its supposed optimism, that is present only in the film’s closing moments, but it is there solely because the protagonist has seen what he has seen and will never forget. The film is not just extraordinarily complex as regards narrative and time, it is also chillingly ambiguous; and it does not attempt to explain anything about the grave matters it touches on: identity, being and not being, the real and the hypothetical, memory as something not individual but shared, as a condition of its existence or validity, the possibility of never having been born, which has appealed so much to certain philosophers. And we have rarely been shown the pure horror experienced by James Stewart during his dreadful hours of non-existence – if, that is, he is experiencing it, because if he hasn’t been born, who is seeing this world in which he has never set foot? The horror of being denied by everyone and hearing over and over from the lips of the people he most loved: ‘No, you’re not you, you’re no one, I don’t know you, I have no husband, I never had the son you want to be.’ The film is wrapped around by a vast zone of horror and darkness, which is even there in the happy ending. Perhaps surprisingly, it also contains one of the most erotic scenes I know, when Stewart and Reed are both listening on the same telephone, their heads together. And as for being ‘too popular’, it was very nearly a gigantic flop when it opened in 1946: the audience found it too pessimistic for the Christmas period and left the cinemas feeling upset and troubled and pondering their own lives, uneasy and distressed by the abyss that the film’s creator had opened up before them and made them peer into, or, worse still, in which they could see themselves reflected.
(1998)
The Ghost and Mrs Muir
There is something peculiar about The Ghost and Mrs Muir, a peculiarity shared, I think, by few other films, in that we desperately want the protagonist to die, even though we bear her no ill feeling at all. On the contrary, the character played by Gene Tierney – Lucy Muir – is an instantly touching figure from the very first moment she appears, when, having been a widow for a year, she decides to leave her unpleasant sister-in-law and her mother-in-law in order to go and live by the sea with her small daughter, Anna (Natalie Wood), and the old maidservant she brought with her when she married, Martha (Edna Best). With the income from some gold shares left to her by her husband, the late Edwin Muir, she intends renting a house in Whitecliff-by-the-Sea. At first, this seems like a feeble act of rebellion, a modest escape, as does her decision to shut herself away. Lucy Muir is going to withdraw into a tiny, female world, in which one would assume nothing unexpected would happen, as if – rather than quickly and easily embracing widowhood – she were regressing to a state of adolescent waiting and hoping: a vague and possibly hopeless wait, an empty wait, letting the doubtless monotonous days pass, with the only change being Anna growing up and Mrs Muir and her maid Martha gradually growing older. Lucy Muir comments how useless she feels, adding: ‘Here I am nearly halfway through my life and what have I done?’ to which Martha retorts: ‘I know what I done, all right … cooked enough steaks to choke an hippopotamus.’ Lucy’s comment about her uselessness is just that, a comment, not a complaint. In a way, you could see Lucy Muir as someone who is not so much resigned as reconciled to her lot: a conventional marriage, affectionate rather than passionate; a daughter for whose existence she takes no credit (‘She just happened’); a death that didn’t even take away her reason for living or cause her to fall into despair; silent acceptance, an absence of desires: perhaps that is what being reconciled to one’s fate means.
Mankiewicz’s film is, however, a film about words, about their power, their ability to enchant and persuade as well as to incite, seduce and enamour. It isn’t only about that, of course, but it’s certainly also about that. The ghost who inhabits the house, the ship’s Captain, Daniel Gregg – who has Rex Harrison’s magnificent face – immediately infects Lucy Muir with his slightly coarse, sailor’s vocabulary. One night, in the middle of a storm, Lucy goes down to the kitchen to boil some water, and the candles and the matches she tries to light keep going out; she angrily challenges the ghost to speak and show himself, calling him a coward. That is when Captain Gregg makes his first appearance as, first, an audible voice, then, a visible presence, and Lucy accepts him at once, asking only to be given a moment to get accustomed to the idea. And in that same conversation – in which the ghost is still slightly threatening in his manner as he explains why he haunts the
house that was once his (a rather feeble plot device: he wants the house to become a home for retired sailors, which is why he doesn’t want any tenants) – Lucy becomes annoyed and, to show her annoyance, repeats the Captain’s favourite word three times: ‘Blast! Blast! Blast!’, the first symptom of contagion. Verbal contagion, that is.
This scene incorporates two of the film’s other fundamental elements: the natural acceptance of the dead as an active presence and the potency of inanimate objects and their capacity to choose the living and people in general, and not just, as is commonly believed, the other way round. Even though he is dead, has no material existence, no body – as he himself points out, ‘I haven’t had one for four years’ – Lucy immediately acknowledges the Captain as the true owner of the house, which, in fact, officially belongs to a cousin of his, to whom Lucy pays the rent. When the Captain proposes that they make a bargain and tells her that she can stay, that he won’t drive her out, she responds with gratitude, as if she had received the blessing and the permission of the genuine owner, the spirit of the house, because things belong to the person, whether living or dead, whom they choose to belong to, and not the other way round; the worldly convention of legal possession has no real importance, but is merely a formalistic, bureaucratic hassle that one must dodge, avoid or fight. To Lucy it is immediately obvious that the house she is living in, and for which she pays rent, belongs to the Captain, who designed and built it, and she therefore accepts his world without hesitation, as an act of justice. The Captain, in turn, despite his initial response, agrees to let her stay because Lucy tells him that the moment she saw the house, she felt it welcoming her, as if it were waiting for her. The Captain understands this, for he remembers having the same feeling when he stood before his first ship, which he found ‘rusting in the Mersey, gear all foul and a pigsty below’ and recalls how she sailed twice as sweetly for him as she would for any other master, out of gratitude, words that could have been drawn from Conrad’s memoirs (especially The Mirror of the Sea), in which he speaks at length about the sensitivity of ships, their gratitude, their refusal to be mistreated, their understanding of the character of their captain, their ability to recognize and feel betrayed or supported by the person in charge. That is why the house, called Gull Cottage, suddenly appears as a ship, not just in the characters’ imaginations, but in the viewer’s imagination too, helped by the proximity of the sea and by the telescope that presides over Lucy’s room, in which most of the scenes that she and the Captain appear in take place, and which is, in effect, their room. The Captain promises not to leave that room and not to frighten Anna, on condition that Lucy moves his portrait in there (‘It’s a very poor painting,’ she says. ‘It’s my painting,’ retorts the ghost).
From that point on, they lead an almost conjugal life. Even though she can see and hear the Captain, Lucy immediately grasps that he is pure spirit and so she happily gets undressed and goes to bed in a room that is not only haunted, but inhabited by him. Even on the first night, when the ghost’s voice makes some appreciative comment about her figure (which he has obviously studied at his leisure), she barely protests, because the Captain is a spirit, albeit a talking one, a figment. One of the most extraordinary aspects of The Ghost and Mrs Muir is that the two characters are fully conscious of the two different dimensions in which they move – the physical and the illusory – and they never rebel against them. It would have been a simple enough way of tugging at the viewer’s heartstrings if either character had made a fruitless, despairing attempt to touch or embrace the other. This never happens; they never touch, and the impossibility of any contact is never underlined, the frustration and horror of wanting contact but never achieving it is never made visible, or only in that early scene, when they are both in the kitchen and Lucy goes over to him, pleased because she’s being allowed to stay in the house, and he stops her, warning her to keep her distance, but this might simply be because they don’t know each other and because, in England, at that time, people didn’t usually shake hands, still less kiss or embrace by way of greeting, nor does that scene insist on their different material or immaterial natures. And yet that is the main cause of the heartbreak contained in the story being told: we know this and know it well enough for it not to be shown visually.
I described the story as heartbreaking, and in my view it is, despite the happy ending, because that ending lies outside the story itself, even though it is necessary and in no way seems like an addition or a sop to the audience. From the moment one accepts that the living and the dead can live together in the world, that happy ending is the only possible one, but it doesn’t make what happens to the characters during the film any less sad, especially what happens to Lucy Muir. As the Captain says at one point, he has unlimited time at his disposal (one assumes he doesn’t even have such a thing as ‘time’), but she, of course, does not: time in her dimension – the only one she knows and that she can, therefore, imagine for herself – is limited and must be made the most of, because there will be no other time, and the ghost, who has experienced both dimensions, knows this well: the time of the flesh and the body, the time of the living – real time – does not come back. There are several scenes in which Lucy rebels against the Captain’s slightly superior manner. When he tries to persuade her not to fall into the clutches of the seductive Miles Fairley, the children’s author known as ‘Uncle Neddy’ – an extraordinary performance by George Sanders – Lucy asks him if it’s a crime to be alive, and if he feels so superior because he isn’t. And the Captain responds by saying that sometimes living is a great inconvenience because ‘the living can be hurt’. Then, shortly afterwards, he adds: ‘Real happiness is worth almost any risk,’ and behind this confession lies his own decision to disappear.
The romance between Lucy and the Captain is that of married life, of habit, of long knowledge of each other, of growing trust, and the gradual discovery that one cannot do without the other. It is the romance of conversation, and it is perhaps appropriate to recall that, shortly before he died and when asked in an interview what he thought of present-day films, Joseph L. Mankiewicz said that what he missed most of all was the loss of the word: for him, the cinema was not just about image, but an inseparable combination of image and word, the latter, according to him, having been driven out in the 1970s and 80s. The relationship between Lucy and the Captain is forged, initially, out of their day-to-day contact (Lucy sews, and instead of sewing in silence and alone, she chats to the ghost – who, unlike any real husband, has nothing else to do), and, later, out of their joint endeavour writing the autobiography that the Captain decides to dictate to her so that she can earn enough money to enable her to buy the house, when the shares left to her by Edwin Muir plummet in value, leaving her penniless. It’s through the story of the Captain’s life, Blood and Swash (Lucy is the physical intermediary, the one putting the words down on paper, although not without blushing occasionally) that she gets to know him and to begin ‘to miss him’ and to regret not having coincided with him in constantly passing time, not to have seen him when he first went to sea at sixteen or even before that as a boy living with a maiden aunt who missed him when he left. One of the most moving moments comes early on, when Lucy Muir identifies with that aunt, who, according to the Captain, must have thanked heaven to see the back of him and not have to clean her carpets so often. Lucy says nothing, and when the Captain asks her what she’s thinking, she says: ‘I’m thinking how lonely she must have felt with her clean carpets.’ Lucy knows what is happening, and so does the ghost. The Spanish writer Juan Benet wrote in one of his novels: ‘I have never understood why love always arrives so late for its appointment with the appointed person.’ Here love arrives even later than usual, when nothing can happen, when there is no possible plan for the future and everything is already in the past. When they finish writing the book, and Lucy realizes that she was happy while they were doing it, because they were doing something together, she asks the Captain: ‘What’s to become of us
, Daniel? Of you and me?’ and the Captain’s response leaves no room for doubt: ‘Nothing can become of me. Everything’s happened that can happen.’ ‘But not to me,’ says Lucy, suddenly aware that her time continues to flow. And it is then that the ghost reminds her that she should go out into the world more, meet people, ‘see men’, as he puts it.
But while that aspect of the story is quite heartbreaking enough, it isn’t only that: it isn’t the story of a love that arrives too late, that begins too late and will come to nothing; it’s a story of renunciation, the renunciation of something that is only words and imagination, the renunciation of the unsatisfactory and the absurd, the dreamed or fantasized, the renunciation, above all, of memory. Lucy meets Miles Fairley, who courts and seduces her. There is a moment in the film when Bernard Herrmann’s marvellous music (which stands comparison with even the finest soundtracks he composed for Hitchcock) announces the threat and the imminent end of her relationship with the Captain in a very subtle way, while what we see on screen doesn’t appear to suggest this at all: an old sailor, Mr Scroggins, has just carved little Anna Muir’s name on a piece of wood, saying that her name will remain there for ever. Lucy is swimming in the sea, her daughter calls to her to come and see the present that Mr Scroggins has made for her. That is all. It seems to be no more than a linking scene, tranquil, neutral and rather joyful (although the progressive deterioration of the piece of wood and the still intact name will give us an idea, later on, of the passing of the years). And yet the music is terrifying, at once nostalgic and ominous, apparently referring to what is going to happen as if it had already happened: that act of renunciation, the disappearance of the Captain, his farewell and his fall into oblivion. Miles Fairley sweeps Lucy off her feet, and she finds him exciting and fascinating. The Captain doesn’t like him and is clearly jealous, although he denies this, saying: ‘Jealousy is a disease of the flesh,’ knowing full well that this is not strictly true. Martha doesn’t like ‘Uncle Neddy’ either and does everything she can to dissuade Lucy, until Lucy counters with the cast-iron argument: ‘But he’s real.’