Tag: Louis Calhern

Julius Caesar (1953)

Mason and Gielgud confront Brando in Hollywood’s faithful Shakespeare adaptation Julius Caesar

Director: Joseph L Mankiewicz

Cast: Marlon Brando (Mark Antony), James Mason (Brutus), John Gielgud (Cassius), Louis Calhern (Julius Caesar), Edmond O’Brien (Casca), Greer Garson (Calpurnia), Deborah Kerr (Portia), George Macready (Marullus), Michael Pate (Flavius), John Hoyt (Decimus Brutus), Douglass Watson (Octavius)

Hollywood has always been in awe of Shakespeare. For large chunks of Hollywood’s Golden Age, it was felt the Bard’s mighty words could only be performed in a certain way by certain actors and that it somehow besmirched the Bard to put him on celluloid. It’s partly why there are few truly radical productions of Shakespeare on screen. By 1953 Orson Welles had directed inventive, challenging productions of Macbeth and Othello that reworked Shakespeare for cinematic effect, but these had been met by horror by some critics (‘how dare he change things!’). Julius Caesar fit the mould in many ways for how Hollywood felt Shakespeare should be done – traditionally, respectfully and by a cast of trained theatre actors. Then they threw in a curve ball by casting Brando as Mark Antony.

It’s hard now to really understand the hesitancy (and outright snobbery) from many about the very idea of Brando doing Shakespeare. This was the mumbling Stanislavsky-trained star of Streetcar, the earthy, T-shirt wearing slab of muscle that yelled “Stella!” – who on Earth did he think he was? Shakespeare is for plummy accents, focused on poetry. Brando took a huge risk taking this role on. But, today, his performance feels fresh, vivid and in many places strikingly modern.

Brando bought a more relaxed, natural style – and, yes he also affected a slightly plummy Brit accent – and bought a emotional realism to the most exhibitionist of Shakespeare’s great roles. (Let’s not forget, most of Antony’s part is a massive public speech). Brando creates an Antony who is passionate, loyal, committed – but also cunning, manipulative and very aware of the effect he is attempting to generate in that famous speech. He delivers the speech with aplomb, but concentrated as much on the emotion of what he was saying as the poetry of how he said it. It makes for an excellent marriage between two different styles of theatre, and Brando’s powerhouse delivery (Oscar nominated) carries real energy and dynamism.

It sits within a very traditional production, carefully shepparded to the screen by Joseph L Mankiewicz. Mankiewicz was a two-time Oscar winner for Best Director – but his reputation was largely formed on his mastery with dialogue and actors, rather than any visual sensibility. Julius Caesar is intelligently and faithfully bought to the screen – albeit with little cinematic flourish – shot with a moody black-and-white (designed to ape news-real footage and add further dramatic urgency to the action) on sets that were leftover at the studio from Quo Vadis. (Some of the busts are hilariously out of place – pretty sure Brutus has a bust of the Emperor Hadrian in his home, quite something seeing as he died 160 years before Hadrian was born.)

Mankiewicz by and large lets the play speak for itself. What Shakespeare wrote, he largely says, and there is little in the way of message in a play that has been reversioned to almost any oppressive regime you can imagine. A few flourishes diverge from the text. He radically simplifies Acts 4 and 5 of the play (particularly the Battle of Philippi and the consecutive suicides of Brutus and Cassius), reducing these down to little more than half an hour. Wisely he focuses on the more dramatic Acts 1-3. The scheming is tense and moody, the assassination swift and brutal. The crowd scenes in Rome bustle with an immediacy and vibrancy – the camera often sits among the plebians during the speeches, encouraging us to share their feelings and reactions to the speeches. Antony is made a calculating and cunning figure – consciously waiting for certain reactions: he even, in one directorial flourish, enters bearing Caesar’s corpse during Brutus oration.

Mankiewicz’s main strength is in working with actors. Although Brando claimed the plaudits, the play is actually centred around Brutus, the intellectual of good intentions drawn into a conspiracy for the best intentions who finds principles and coups make for impossible bedfellows. The film’s finest performance is from the simply superb Mason, who was born to play tortured decent patricians like this and creates a Brutus stuffed with doubt, pride, arrogance, uncertainty and a little touch of fear. His patrician voice is perfect for this “most honourable of all the Romans”, and he sets about murder as the deeply unpleasant task it is, guided by his assumption that he-knows-best. The little moments are brilliantly done: from his petrified nerves at the assassination to his pious sermons on morality to Cassius to his tenderness and care for his wife and servants. It’s a wonderful performance.

To complement him, Mankiewicz recruited one of the greatest Shakespearean actors living as Cassius. Gielgud hadn’t done a film for over ten years (he always felt the cinema to be a minor art), and Julius Caesar was the only opportunity he had to capture one of his great Shakespearean performances on film until Prospero’s Books nearly 40 years later. It’s fascinating to watch a film where the old school (in Gielgud) and new school of acting (in Brando), both bring their own approaches to Shakespeare. This is Gielgud’s finest Shakespearean performance on camera – he must surely have learned more about acting on camera from Mason and Brando – the first time his style moved away from ‘singing the verse’ towards something more emotional, his Cassius a bitter, manipulative man who starts the film holding all the cards and ends up with none of them.

Watching these three powerhouse performers work is a treat – and also to see their styles merging and playing off each other. Mason is the perfect fusion of the realism of Brando and theatricality of Gielgud. Brando learned huge amounts from Gielgud, frequently consulting him on delivery. Gielgud surely took as much from Brando on adding greater emotion and realism into his screen performances, shirking the declamatory style that often makes him grand but unconnectable. The other actors around them offer versions of these styles: O’Brien stands out best as a shrewd and cunning Casca, Calhern tries a little too hard to be grand as Caesar, Kerr and Garson are a bit too theatrical in thankless parts as “the wives”.

Julius Caesar as a whole though is a lean, pacey and intelligent staging of the play, directed unobtrusively but professionally, very well acted by the cast. While Mankiewicz does nothing radical here – look at Orson Welles Othello and there you’ll see how the language of cinema can add a whole new perspective to Shakespeare, in a way this film never does. But while not radical, it focuses on story and character really well. The set-piece moments – the speeches, the murder, the plotting – are staged with urgency, energy and drama. Mainstream Hollywood still wasn’t ready for radical reworking of Shakespeare (this got lots of Oscar noms, Welles Othello was a flop), still seeing him as someone best cast in marble – but with Julius Caesar Hollywood took baby steps towards suggesting there could be a different future.

The Life of Emile Zola (1937)

Oscar-winning biopic that laid down many of the conventions we expect

Director: William Dieterle

Cast: Paul Muni (Emile Zola), Gloria Holden (Alexandrine Zola), Gale Sondergaard (Lucie Dreyfus), Joseph Schildkraut (Captain Alfred Dreyfus), Donald Crisp (Maitre Labori), Erin O’Brien-Moore (Nana), John Litel (Charpentier), Henry O’Neill (Colonel Picquart), Morris Carnovsky (Anatole France), Louis Calhern (Major Dort), Ralph Morgan (Commander of Paris), Harry Davenport (Chief of Staff), Vladimir Sokoloff (Paul Cezanne)

One of the lesser-known Best Picture winners, The Life of Emile Zola is a prime example of the 1930s trend for “Great Man” pictures, setting the template for a whole genre of biographical movies. A whistle-stop tour of how the Great Man came to be, before a tight focus on what made him great – ideally ending in either triumph or disaster (or, as is the case here, with both). It’s from a time when the viewing public didn’t expect a rigid adherence to the fact – and when films were very open with their flexibility with the truth (the film opens with an on-screen caption which happily states most of what happens in it is made up.) Actually, I think being told from the start you are watching a heavily fictionalised version of the truth covers a multitude of sins: and that The Life of Emile Zola is pretty entertaining when you get past that.

Emile Zole (Paul Muni) is of course one of the most famous French authors. But he was also at least as famous for his campaigning and presence as he was for his volumes and volumes of best sellers. The film follows Zola, for its first forty minutes or so, from poverty-stricken writer, struggling to make ends meet in the draughty hovel he shares with similar future-genius Cezanne, to success (although in real life by the time he wrote Nana, the book that makes him a sensation here, he was already hugely famous). Zola becomes increasingly aimless. What worlds are there left to be conquered? That all changes when Lucie (Gale Sondergaard) the wife of army officer Alfred Dreyfus (Joseph Schildkraut) asks for his help to save his life from unjust imprisonment and exile on Devil’s Island. Because the army are convinced Dreyfus is a spy – and won’t let inconvenient things like evidence that someone else did it get in the way.

The film is called The Life of Emile Zola but really it might as well have been called The Dreyfus Affair. This infamous miscarriage of justice drives the entire second half of the movie – with Zola himself disappearing from focus for stretches as the film covers the conspiracies that led to Dreyfuss spending the best part of a decade imprisoned for something he didn’t do. What seems strange today is that the film makes no mention of the most famous angle of the case: Dreyfus was almost solely suspected because he was Jewish, and the case became one of the most infamous antisemitic persecutions in history. But the studio heads – Jewish themselves and nervous of being accused of making a film that criticised Nazi Germany – removed all reference to Dreyfus’ Jewishness from the script. It’s a curious omission, but by and large doesn’t affect the film’s final impact.

Dieterle’s movie is also one of the first courtroom dramas. A large chunk of the final third is given over to Zola’s trial for libel (after his famous J’Accuse article, denouncing the army’s persecution of Dreyfus). In a crowded courtroom, the film carefully follows the intricacies of the court case, from calling to witnesses to final speeches (all fairly accurate, even if Zola is given a larger role with a final speech). As in the trial itself, the blatant unfairness (witnesses shouted down, defence questions vetoed, evidence withheld and even invented) is hammered home with shocking regularity. Donald Crisp does fine work as the liberal lawyer, hamstrung by a crooked system.

The Dreyfus affair element is really what makes the film come to life. The French army officers are almost to a man a group of corrupt bullies, who have pre-decided the outcome of their investigation and are determined that every single element of it should support that decision. By contrast Joseph Schildkraut (winning an Oscar that feels more for Dreyfus than him, delivering an effective if rather one-note performance) is the soul of decency and nobility as a Dreyfus who is at first bewildered then fighting a manful struggle against despair. Even better is Gale Sondergaard, who gets an ahistorical impassioned speech to win Zola to the cause and carries a core of quiet anger under her shock.

The Dreyfus Affair was the struggle of Zola’s life, the crusade that would win him a place in history, perhaps even more than his books. It’s also the sort of campaigning material that gives rich rewards to actors. Paul Muni seizes the opportunity. The film was shot in reverse so Muni would need to spend less and less time in make-up as shooting went on: the old-age make-up and wigs are very effective, matched by Muni’s physicality and voice which subtly changes as the character ages.

Muni is an actor who seized any chance for a bit of grandstanding. The film gives him its best one with a five-minute monologue closing the trial, during which Zola argues with passionate but quiet reasonableness that Dreyfus is an innocent victim. It’s even more effective since Dieterle has kept Muni silently off-centre for much of the court case. Muni sometimes carries the whiff of stagey ham, but in several moments he brings both a charming cheek and strong morality to Zola. It’s a very strong performance from one of the leading actors of the 1930s.

The film itself is also a good mixture of the twee and the compelling. Most of the Dreyfuss material falls into the latter category. It’s the early days of Zola that falls into twee: Zola scrippling ideas, bantering with Cezanne on the purpose of art, playfully mining prostitute Nana for the material he will make into a hit book. There is a nice foreshadowing through the film with Zola’s obsession with blocking draughts – an obsession that will later cost him his life to a misfunctioning heater.

It’s a well directed film. Dieterle mixes in nice touches of humour (a husband and wife using subterfuge to disguise from each other that they are both buying Nana) and also effective details that speak of Dreyfus’ isolation (the letter that has been redacated into nothingness, the effective transition of several years at Devil’s Island that stresses how little has changed, Dreyfus’ giddy joy when finally allowed to walk unheeded in and out of his prison cell).

The Life of Emile Zola looks today like a surprising winner of Best Picture. But the patterns for both courtroom drama and many biographical dramas were laid down here. By the end, as the survivors pay tribute to Zola with high-blown speeches, the audience should be convinced that this was a man deserving of being honoured by a whole movie. It’s setting of a template copied many times over can make it look a little twee today, but its’ still well done, with some powerful flashes of effective film-making and great acting.

The Asphalt Jungle (1950)

A masterplan goes wrong in John Huston’s crime drama The Asphalt Jungle

Director: John Huston

Cast: Sterling Hayden (Dix Handley), Louis Calhern (Alonzo D Emmerich), Jean Hagen (“Doll” Conovan), James Whitmore (Gus Minissi), Sam Jaffe (“Doc” Erwin Riedenschneider), John McIntire (Police Commissioner Hardy), Marc Lawrence (Cobby), Barry Kelley (Lt. Ditrich), Marilyn Monroe (Angela Phinlay), Brad Dexter (Bob Brannom)

“Doc” Erwin Riedenschneider (Sam Jaffe) is out of the slammer after seven years, and the self-proclaimed “Professor” of criminal plans has a scheme for one final job. But rather than sell it to the highest bidder, Doc approaches crooked lawyer Alonzo Emmerich (Louis Calhern) to fund the crime and then split the proceeds with Doc. To carry out his robbery on a jewellery safe in a bank, he’ll need a gang including get-away driver Gus (James Whitmore) and Gus’ pal and “hooligan” Dix Handley (Sterling Hayden). But even the best laid plans of criminals can fall foul of events and the basic untrustworthiness of criminals themselves.

John Huston surprised some by turning his attention – Oscar in hand from The Treasure of the Sierra Madre – to noir cops and robber’s thrillers, but that was to forget he had made his name with his masterful adaptation of Dashell Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon. And in The Asphalt Jungle he created a small scale but almost perfect slice of criminalise noir, a brilliantly paced and acted film beautifully assembled that effortlessly chronicles the disastrous fall out of a robbery where it seemed everything was going perfectly.

Huston’s direction of the piece is, as nearly always, superlative. His painterly framing of scenes is dead on the money here, his framing of the actors within the scene absolutely without fault. Huston has an uncanny scene for arranging his actors in the minimum number of shots necessary, reducing dramatically the need for clumsy cut aways. Instead multiple actors are often artfully arranged in the frame, allowing the performers to react in the moment and the camera itself to capture the complete story in one smooth shot. It also allows for some great character intros, not least a shot of the Police commissioner in the background of the frame while foregrounded are the hands of his subordinate Dietrich, nervously fondling his hat. Straight away we get the mood of the scene.

This is all part of the brilliant noirish construction of a film that largely features sympathetic criminals – and it’s clear that the film’s sympathy is with the robbers here, the cops either incompetent, bureaucrats or corrupt themselves – either turning on each other, crumbling under pressure, making rudimentary errors that wind up getting them caught or failing into tragic fates that are left questioning what the point of it all was. This is all superbly caught in the moody darkness and shadows that soak over the picture, and highlighted further by the superb script, that packs some excellent lines and beautiful thematic points throughout the film.

It’s also helped by some great performances. Sam Jaffe (Oscar-nominated) is terrific as the cunning calm and businesslike “Doc” who seems unable to understand why things are not quite panning out as he planned, but is heartily sorry that it’s the case. He at least has honour among thieves, refusing to abandon his fellow criminals and quietly disappointed when betrayal raises its head. I love as well his screamish apology that the crime will involve one “hooligan” – or heavy – since he’s not the sort of guy who likes to resort to messy crimes (no matter that things quickly slide out of hand). He’s the sort of professional who expects everyone to play by the same rules, but that doesn’t stop him having his own private passions, particularly for the fairer sex, that will wind up catching him out.

He’s especially proved wrong since Sterling Hayden’s ‘hooligan’ Dix turns out to be the moral force of the gang, despite his down-on-his-luck scruffiness. Hitting crime as a way to finance his dream of buying back his family’s horse farm – and sadly losing most of that finance on the horses – Hayden is gloomy faced and gruff but has his own clear moral code in an affectingly gentle performance of vulnerability beneath the toughness. Debts and betrayal are anathema to him, and he winds up far more of the decent crook than any of the rest – he’s also the only one of the lot who can hold down a loving relationship, forging a genuinely sweet relationship with Jean Hagen’s Doll. Huston’s sympathies are clearly with the down-on-his-luck Dix, a decent guy who has just lost at life.

Of course the crook they can’t trust is the lawyer, a fine performance of snivelling weasliness under a veneer of culture from Louis Calhern. Puffed up, arrogant but desperate for the money and fundamentally weak and easily led, Calhern is excellent as the money man who only adds to the gang’s troubles, led on by Brad Dexter’s wonderfully impatient and ruthless hired gun. Calhern’s sad air of corrupted authority is only enhanced by his lecherous delight in his lusciously young mistress, a radiant early performance from Marilyn Monroe (shot like a classic painting by Huston).

Huston’s film throws this gang together flies together into a superbly detailed and gripping drama of the planning, execution and dreadful fall out of a robbery that clearly inspired the (perhaps even better) Rififi (so much so that it practically has the same story and structure), The Asphalt Jungle is a fabulously made and written pleasure, unpretentious but wonderful story telling marshalled expertly by a director at the top of his game.