The Star System in FilmsMAURICE YACOWAR
The distinction between the stage actor and th e film actor has exercised many professionals and even more academics over theyears. In 1937, Drama,the Journal of the British Drama League, canvassed a number of authorities on the question "Does the screen need acting?" Charles Laughton, Cedric Hardwicke, Robert Flaherty, Frank Borzage, Max Reinhardt, Elizabeth Bergner, Leslie Banks, Maurice Chevalier, Laurence Olivier, Diana Wynyard, Conrad Veidt, King Vidor, Leslie Howard, George Arliss, and lesser luminaries rehearsed the usual obvious differences between acting before an audience and acting before a camera, lights, and editor's scissors. The last shrewd word was heard from an unnamed British star fresh (as they say) from Hollywood: 'The difference between stage and screen acting is about 800 pounds a week."1 The debate has not advanced much since.
My present purpose is to suggest that the kind of acting which is most characteristic of film is not acting as we have come from theatrical experience to expect. Indeed, what is filmic is not so much acting as passiving, to recall the distinction drawn by Philip Hope-Wailace: "Acting for the stage is projection, something active. Acting for the cinema is submitting yourself to microscopic examination. There is, of course, nothing radically new in this notion. Pudovkin observed the discrepancy between emotive acting and a physically real landscape; Alexander Knox wisely distinguished between acting and behaving.
What I hope to add to this understanding is a demonstration of how the passive suggestiveness of the actor on film works and how it has been a characteristic of the most successful of film actors to establish a continuing persona over a number of films, capable of subtle inflection and cross-reference.
We might begin with theclaim that there are three kinds of persistenceof vision in the film experience. Of course, the first is the mind's retention of the visual image, that provides the illusion of moving pictures.4 But there is a second kind of persistence, the psychological continuity between the image on the screen and the viewer. This intensity of audience identification in film Andre Bazin discussed in his 'Theatre and Cinema":
"It is false to say that the screen is incapable of putting us 'in the presence of the actor. It does so in the same way as a mirror—one must agree that the mirror relays the presence of the person reflected in it—but it is a mirror with a delayed reflection, the tin foil of which retains the image."
Bazin quotes an opposite reflection (so to speak) made by Rosenkrantz in 1937:
'The characters on the screen are quite naturally objects of identification, while those on the stage are, rather, objects of mental opposition because their real pres- ence gives them an objective reality and to transpose them into beings in an imagi- nary world the w ill of the spectator has to intervene actively . . .'
One of Bazin's supporting examples it may behove one of us to test:
Let us compare chorus girls on the stage and on the screen. On the screen they satis- fy an unconscious sexual desire and when the hero joins them he satisfies the desire of the spectator in the proportion to which the latter has identified himself with the hero. On the stage the girls excite the onlooker as they would in real life. The result is that there is no identification with the hero. He becomes instead an object of jealousy and envy.
Parenthetically, one might find here the explanation why the actors who cavort with the damsels in film are required to have at least the manly image, while in burlesque shows there is the tradition of leering impotence, effemi- nate masters of ceremony; the latter constitute no rival to the male audience so their privileged stage position with the girls is not upsetting.
In any case, while watching a film the viewer has an impression of presence such as he receives from a mirror. But the viewer in a theatre is conscious of the physical presence of the actor, conscious that the actor occupies a physi- cal and psychic space which the viewer cannot enter. No such presence and exclusion.inhibits the viewer's psychic leap in film . So where in theatre our subconscious may define a deep sympathy w ith a character, in film it can
play at an identity.
My third kind of persistence of vision derives out of the stage actor's own
sense of his physical presence, for it dissociates him too from his role. The stage actor works to transcend himself to project a character, but the character remains in a constant tension w ith the actor's self. In film acting there is a continuity between actor and role because there is no body to overcome. There is only the total fluidity of the actor's image in film. Thus, as Edgar Morin has pointed out,
Bazin quotes an opposite reflection (so to speak) made by Rosenkrantz in 1937:
'The characters on the screen are quite naturally objects of identification, while those on the stage are, rather, objects of mental opposition because their real pres- ence gives them an objective reality and to transpose them into beings in an imagi- nary world the w ill of the spectator has to intervene actively . . .'
One of Bazin's supporting examples it may behove one of us to test:
Let us compare chorus girls on the stage and on the screen. On the screen they satis- fy an unconscious sexual desire and when the hero joins them he satisfies the desire of the spectator in the proportion to which the latter has identified himself with the hero. On the stage the girls excite the onlooker as they would in real life. The result is that there is no identification with the hero. He becomes instead an object of jealousy and envy.
Parenthetically, one might find here the explanation why the actors who cavort with the damsels in film are required to have at least the manly image, while in burlesque shows there is the tradition of leering impotence, effemi- nate masters of ceremony; the latter constitute no rival to the male audience so their privileged stage position with the girls is not upsetting.
In any case, while watching a film the viewer has an impression of presence such as he receives from a mirror. But the viewer in a theatre is conscious of the physical presence of the actor, conscious that the actor occupies a physi- cal and psychic space which the viewer cannot enter. No such presence and exclusion.inhibits the viewer's psychic leap in film . So where in theatre our subconscious may define a deep sympathy w ith a character, in film it can
play at an identity.
My third kind of persistence of vision derives out of the stage actor's own
sense of his physical presence, for it dissociates him too from his role. The stage actor works to transcend himself to project a character, but the character remains in a constant tension w ith the actor's self. In film acting there is a continuity between actor and role because there is no body to overcome. There is only the total fluidity of the actor's image in film. Thus, as Edgar Morin has pointed out,
The star is not only an actress. The characters she plays are not only characters. The characters of her film s infect the star. Reciprocally, the star herself infects these characters.
In addition to the star infecting the characters, the characters in film are frequently inflections in the continuing image of the star. Indeed we must consider the rhetoric of a film to include the precise shades of inflection that the actor's personaefrom other films bring to the statement.
We sometimes speak of a stage actor's personalizing his role—the Scofield Macbeth, the W olfit Lear, the Dr. Kildare Hamlet—but we rarely speak of a stage actor developing a consistent personality or image across a number of
roles. We judge the stage actor by his ability to leave his former roles and his self behind for each new character. But the film actor is all image, hence all fluid associative potential, so his performance is continuous over a number of roles.
Because the film actor is all image, we have had films in which different actors played the same character. In addition to the obvious substitutions as Philip Marlowe, for example, in that series of movies, or of Robert de Niro
for Marlon Brando in The Godfather, we have had innumerable cases of individual movies where a boy, a young man, and even an old actor, would portray stages in one character's life. On stage this would only happen in such an already cinematic drama as Williams's Summer and Smoke, say. This fluidity of a film character's image is otherwise exploited in That Certain Ob-
ject of Desire, the old anarchist Bunuel's rapt but ambivalent view of the new anarchy. Two actresses play the one character, for Bunuel's point is the essential unity of the character of Anarchy despite differences in age, body, and style. We can accept such overlap of casting in film more than in theatre, where the individual has both physical and psychic inviolability.
A more general consequence of this phenomenon in the twentieth cen- tury has been the paradoxical primacy of image over reality. The firm and wiry Alan Ladd is far more real than the little guy we know him to have been.
Even after we have seen the wrinkled Fred Astaire and a hobbling Groucho make spectral appearances on the Oscar show, the "real" Fred Astaire is still that light and elegant romantic from the '40s and the Groucho that is the real one is the loping, wisecracking, ever-winning insouciant. And as Daniel Boor- stin has asked in his more sombre analysis of this phenomenon, which is the
In addition to the star infecting the characters, the characters in film are frequently inflections in the continuing image of the star. Indeed we must consider the rhetoric of a film to include the precise shades of inflection that the actor's personaefrom other films bring to the statement.
We sometimes speak of a stage actor's personalizing his role—the Scofield Macbeth, the W olfit Lear, the Dr. Kildare Hamlet—but we rarely speak of a stage actor developing a consistent personality or image across a number of
roles. We judge the stage actor by his ability to leave his former roles and his self behind for each new character. But the film actor is all image, hence all fluid associative potential, so his performance is continuous over a number of roles.
Because the film actor is all image, we have had films in which different actors played the same character. In addition to the obvious substitutions as Philip Marlowe, for example, in that series of movies, or of Robert de Niro
for Marlon Brando in The Godfather, we have had innumerable cases of individual movies where a boy, a young man, and even an old actor, would portray stages in one character's life. On stage this would only happen in such an already cinematic drama as Williams's Summer and Smoke, say. This fluidity of a film character's image is otherwise exploited in That Certain Ob-
ject of Desire, the old anarchist Bunuel's rapt but ambivalent view of the new anarchy. Two actresses play the one character, for Bunuel's point is the essential unity of the character of Anarchy despite differences in age, body, and style. We can accept such overlap of casting in film more than in theatre, where the individual has both physical and psychic inviolability.
A more general consequence of this phenomenon in the twentieth cen- tury has been the paradoxical primacy of image over reality. The firm and wiry Alan Ladd is far more real than the little guy we know him to have been.
Even after we have seen the wrinkled Fred Astaire and a hobbling Groucho make spectral appearances on the Oscar show, the "real" Fred Astaire is still that light and elegant romantic from the '40s and the Groucho that is the real one is the loping, wisecracking, ever-winning insouciant. And as Daniel Boor- stin has asked in his more sombre analysis of this phenomenon, which is the
real Mickey Mouse: the line drawing or the costumed college kid we can circumnavigate, touch and converse w ith in Disneyland? The image is more real than the physical entity.
One of the greatest achievements of film alchemy has been to subordinate mere physical truth to the moving powers, evanescence and immortality of the image. Thus against all the opposition of early producers, actors became stars and stars became myths. Sometimes an individual film , whatever its in- dependent character or worth, achieves its deepest meaning as another moment In the career of its mythic presences. For instance, The Misfits is
thoroughly respectableasan Arthur Miller story and asaJohn Huston film, but its primary statement lies in its valedictory evocation of Clark Gable and Marilyn Monroe. Indeed the fatal vitality of those stars validates the themes and the emotions of the film. Similarly, the value of the James Dean films- East of Eden, Rebel Without a Cause, Giant—resonates beyond the individual texts to the canon and even beyond, to the myth, that includes the fan maga- zines, the motorcycle death, the suicide of his unrequiting love, Pier Angeli, and 9-30-55, a later director's memoir of his own reaction to Dean'sdeath. As Morin sums up:
the star intervenes and functions on every level of life, the imaginary level, the practical level, and especially on the level of the dialectic between the imaginary and the practical, i.e., in the bacteria! cultures of affective life where the personality elaborates and modifies itself.
And, "The stars are typically a cinematic phenomenon [though] there is nothing specifically cinematic about t h e m / ' All this is extremely active passiving, perhaps, but it is not what we call acting when we come to film from the ostensibly legitimate stage.
Now, some examples of actors whose meaning in an individual film may inhere in their fertile image and its associations from other roles.
When Dennis Hopper assumed center stage w ith Easy Rider, he immedi- ately added a new dimension to his peripheral appearances in earlier films, such as his roles as relay to James Dean in Giant and Rebel Without aCause.
Hopper explored his own persona in The Last Movie. Then in Wim Wenders'An American Friend, the scenes between Hopper and his old director, Nicho-
las Ray, draw upon their earlier association. Ray seems the haggard Hopper's source of renewal; Hopper again helps bring Ray's images to the public. And here, as in The Last Movie, the Hopper character is the instrument by which violence is brought to innocent, peaceful lives. He is party to the conversion of a domestic picture-framer into a B-film assassin—the Framer Framed, as it were.
Similarly, Carroll O'Connor's emergence as Archie Bunker deepens his role asthe driver of the truckload of toilets that kills Kirk Douglas in Lonely are the Brave, much as the comic emergence of Walter Matthau adds a note of
One of the greatest achievements of film alchemy has been to subordinate mere physical truth to the moving powers, evanescence and immortality of the image. Thus against all the opposition of early producers, actors became stars and stars became myths. Sometimes an individual film , whatever its in- dependent character or worth, achieves its deepest meaning as another moment In the career of its mythic presences. For instance, The Misfits is
thoroughly respectableasan Arthur Miller story and asaJohn Huston film, but its primary statement lies in its valedictory evocation of Clark Gable and Marilyn Monroe. Indeed the fatal vitality of those stars validates the themes and the emotions of the film. Similarly, the value of the James Dean films- East of Eden, Rebel Without a Cause, Giant—resonates beyond the individual texts to the canon and even beyond, to the myth, that includes the fan maga- zines, the motorcycle death, the suicide of his unrequiting love, Pier Angeli, and 9-30-55, a later director's memoir of his own reaction to Dean'sdeath. As Morin sums up:
the star intervenes and functions on every level of life, the imaginary level, the practical level, and especially on the level of the dialectic between the imaginary and the practical, i.e., in the bacteria! cultures of affective life where the personality elaborates and modifies itself.
And, "The stars are typically a cinematic phenomenon [though] there is nothing specifically cinematic about t h e m / ' All this is extremely active passiving, perhaps, but it is not what we call acting when we come to film from the ostensibly legitimate stage.
Now, some examples of actors whose meaning in an individual film may inhere in their fertile image and its associations from other roles.
When Dennis Hopper assumed center stage w ith Easy Rider, he immedi- ately added a new dimension to his peripheral appearances in earlier films, such as his roles as relay to James Dean in Giant and Rebel Without aCause.
Hopper explored his own persona in The Last Movie. Then in Wim Wenders'An American Friend, the scenes between Hopper and his old director, Nicho-
las Ray, draw upon their earlier association. Ray seems the haggard Hopper's source of renewal; Hopper again helps bring Ray's images to the public. And here, as in The Last Movie, the Hopper character is the instrument by which violence is brought to innocent, peaceful lives. He is party to the conversion of a domestic picture-framer into a B-film assassin—the Framer Framed, as it were.
Similarly, Carroll O'Connor's emergence as Archie Bunker deepens his role asthe driver of the truckload of toilets that kills Kirk Douglas in Lonely are the Brave, much as the comic emergence of Walter Matthau adds a note of
slouching apathy to the character of the sheriff. Of course, Bunker may well be just the climactic expression of O'Connor's physical suggestiveness, a thick, pushy, redneck querulousness.Hence his bigot and lynch-mob leader inInvitation to a Gunfighter and his thwarted father-in-law in Waterhole 3.
Such inflection and consistency is richer over longer careers. For the sen- timental and patriotic John Ford, John Wayne generally worked as a term for
power, moral authority, and sensible independence. But Howard Hawks tended to use the Wayne term ironically, as a man who had the delusion of independence but had to learn his interdependence in society (Red River, Rio Bravo, El Dorado, Rio Loho, Hatari). Hawks uses Wayne as a man who thinks that he's the Wayne of a Ford movie. Once established, the Wayne persona was a rich source upon which other directors could draw in other ways. Big Jake and True Grit worked assummaries of his past roles.9 Don Siegel in
The Shootist uses old Wayne movie footage to establish the character's past life, then weaves in such other old star personae as Doc Jimmy Stewart (who could have given Liberty Valence a shot), Widow Lauren Bacall, and Richard (the sordid) Boone, all for an extremely moving statement about the passing of the mythic west into the immediate horror of cancer. In John Sturges's lesser film , McQ, Wayne is discovered in a post-Hawks predicament, sansfamily, community, and even gun-license, but carrying within him an integ- rity greater than the law. When Wayne directs himself, in The Alamo andThe Green Berets, the Wayne image adds to the Fordian wisdom and authori-
ty the Hawksian situation of being besieged—but,sadly, without the Hawks humor!
The Gary Cooper persona may have grown out of his quiet voice and gen- tle mien, but these traits were confirmed by his strongest roles. His ideality inHigh Noon embracesand supersedes the Quaker virtues of the Grace Kelly character, because Cooper himself trailed clouds of Quaker glory fromSergeant York through Friendly Persuasion, w ith variants in Meet John Doeand 777e Hanging Tree. Anthony Mann could count on the audience's fore- knowledge of the Cooper persona for the shock in his revelation of Link Tobin's past in Man of the West; the violence of the civilizing of the frontier survives even in the good citizenship of the missing Link. The primary tension in Cooper's last role, The Naked Edge, develops out of the irreconcilability
of our image of Cooper with the mass of evidence that implicates him in murder.
One can similarly trace the development of James Stewart's image from wingy romantic through to plodding, stuttering idealist, through its obverse, again the Anthony Mann dramatization of a selfish, violent man behind the
Such inflection and consistency is richer over longer careers. For the sen- timental and patriotic John Ford, John Wayne generally worked as a term for
power, moral authority, and sensible independence. But Howard Hawks tended to use the Wayne term ironically, as a man who had the delusion of independence but had to learn his interdependence in society (Red River, Rio Bravo, El Dorado, Rio Loho, Hatari). Hawks uses Wayne as a man who thinks that he's the Wayne of a Ford movie. Once established, the Wayne persona was a rich source upon which other directors could draw in other ways. Big Jake and True Grit worked assummaries of his past roles.9 Don Siegel in
The Shootist uses old Wayne movie footage to establish the character's past life, then weaves in such other old star personae as Doc Jimmy Stewart (who could have given Liberty Valence a shot), Widow Lauren Bacall, and Richard (the sordid) Boone, all for an extremely moving statement about the passing of the mythic west into the immediate horror of cancer. In John Sturges's lesser film , McQ, Wayne is discovered in a post-Hawks predicament, sansfamily, community, and even gun-license, but carrying within him an integ- rity greater than the law. When Wayne directs himself, in The Alamo andThe Green Berets, the Wayne image adds to the Fordian wisdom and authori-
ty the Hawksian situation of being besieged—but,sadly, without the Hawks humor!
The Gary Cooper persona may have grown out of his quiet voice and gen- tle mien, but these traits were confirmed by his strongest roles. His ideality inHigh Noon embracesand supersedes the Quaker virtues of the Grace Kelly character, because Cooper himself trailed clouds of Quaker glory fromSergeant York through Friendly Persuasion, w ith variants in Meet John Doeand 777e Hanging Tree. Anthony Mann could count on the audience's fore- knowledge of the Cooper persona for the shock in his revelation of Link Tobin's past in Man of the West; the violence of the civilizing of the frontier survives even in the good citizenship of the missing Link. The primary tension in Cooper's last role, The Naked Edge, develops out of the irreconcilability
of our image of Cooper with the mass of evidence that implicates him in murder.
One can similarly trace the development of James Stewart's image from wingy romantic through to plodding, stuttering idealist, through its obverse, again the Anthony Mann dramatization of a selfish, violent man behind the
civilized veneer, then back to the fumbling lawyer who didn't shoot Liberty Valence and the stable lawyer of the Hawkins television series. Mann's Stew- art in Where the River Bends, The Naked Spur and The Far Country extends the isolated bemusement that he displays in Harvey and the morally ambigu- ous positions that his detachment explores in Rope, The Greatest Show on Earth and Rear Window. As far back as 1939, Stewart expressed the same moment of his myth in two radically different but harmonious films, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington and Destry Rides Again; the star's persona unites the film s across genre and auteur lines.
In Peckinpah's Ride the High Country, Joel McCrae and Randolph Scott reputedly exchanged roles just before film in g began. One of the basic points in the plot is that the McCrae figure trusts the honesty of the Scott figure
even in the face of Scott's transgression. McCrae knows Scott better than Scott does himself. We accept this intuitive knowledge partly because of our familiarity with the actors from earlier roles. Specifically, there is a cross in their personae when Scott first appears as a circus sharp-shooter with the image of Buffalo Bill (an image McCrae played for Wellman in 1944). McCrae advances the sober morality from The Virginian and Stars in My Crown,while Scott's reform at the end is validated by his cycle of Budd Boetticher films as the Buchanan of exemplary integrity.
Henry Fonda's image is such a complete summary of American ideals that Sergio Leone cast him as a child-killer in Once Upon A Time in the West and
television's Maude tried to get him to run for President—two not incompati- ble attitudes, perhaps. Reviewers of Fonda's one-man Clarence Darrow show frequently alluded to his associations w ith justice, couarage, and articulate indignation in such film s as The Ox-how incident, The Grapes of Wrath, and
Twelve Angry Men. In the fine Italian exercise in mythopoeia, My Name is Nobody, Fonda plays a "national monument," Jack Beauregard.
Much of Peter Fonda's effectiveness in Easy Rider lies in his projecting a younger image of his father and a renewal of the Henry Fonda values and idealism. The persona of the father can be visited upon the son better than upon the daughter, it seems. Jane Fonda has developed her own image, but it draws more upon her off-film political activism than upon her family back- ground. Godard and Gorin in Letter to Jane include stills from The Grapes of Wrath and Young Mr. Lincoln aswell asfrom her own Tout VaBien andKlute to delimit the range of her serious commitment by asserting her deter- ministic background, both in family and in myth. Claire Bloom may be more effective than Jane Fonda in The Doll's House because Fonda cannot free her early characterization of the frivolous, childish Nora from the intelligence and commitment for which she is elsewhere known.
On a more complex level of control, for a series of films over fifteen years,from A Lesson in Love through The Shame, Ingmar Bergman conducted a public meditation in which he used Gunnar Bjornstrand and Max von Sydow as the opposing terms in a debate between the rational and the irrational validities in morals and in art.10 Von Sydow was always sensitive to deep compulsions and questionings; Bjornstrand simple, cold, and shallow. From the gas-filler in Wild Strawberries to the shattered husband in Winder Light,we can watch the von Sydow image develop in Bergman's mind. A shift begins in Through a GlassDarkly, where Bjornstrand is the artist and von Sydow is given the simpler, materialist character—a reversal of their roles in
In Peckinpah's Ride the High Country, Joel McCrae and Randolph Scott reputedly exchanged roles just before film in g began. One of the basic points in the plot is that the McCrae figure trusts the honesty of the Scott figure
even in the face of Scott's transgression. McCrae knows Scott better than Scott does himself. We accept this intuitive knowledge partly because of our familiarity with the actors from earlier roles. Specifically, there is a cross in their personae when Scott first appears as a circus sharp-shooter with the image of Buffalo Bill (an image McCrae played for Wellman in 1944). McCrae advances the sober morality from The Virginian and Stars in My Crown,while Scott's reform at the end is validated by his cycle of Budd Boetticher films as the Buchanan of exemplary integrity.
Henry Fonda's image is such a complete summary of American ideals that Sergio Leone cast him as a child-killer in Once Upon A Time in the West and
television's Maude tried to get him to run for President—two not incompati- ble attitudes, perhaps. Reviewers of Fonda's one-man Clarence Darrow show frequently alluded to his associations w ith justice, couarage, and articulate indignation in such film s as The Ox-how incident, The Grapes of Wrath, and
Twelve Angry Men. In the fine Italian exercise in mythopoeia, My Name is Nobody, Fonda plays a "national monument," Jack Beauregard.
Much of Peter Fonda's effectiveness in Easy Rider lies in his projecting a younger image of his father and a renewal of the Henry Fonda values and idealism. The persona of the father can be visited upon the son better than upon the daughter, it seems. Jane Fonda has developed her own image, but it draws more upon her off-film political activism than upon her family back- ground. Godard and Gorin in Letter to Jane include stills from The Grapes of Wrath and Young Mr. Lincoln aswell asfrom her own Tout VaBien andKlute to delimit the range of her serious commitment by asserting her deter- ministic background, both in family and in myth. Claire Bloom may be more effective than Jane Fonda in The Doll's House because Fonda cannot free her early characterization of the frivolous, childish Nora from the intelligence and commitment for which she is elsewhere known.
On a more complex level of control, for a series of films over fifteen years,from A Lesson in Love through The Shame, Ingmar Bergman conducted a public meditation in which he used Gunnar Bjornstrand and Max von Sydow as the opposing terms in a debate between the rational and the irrational validities in morals and in art.10 Von Sydow was always sensitive to deep compulsions and questionings; Bjornstrand simple, cold, and shallow. From the gas-filler in Wild Strawberries to the shattered husband in Winder Light,we can watch the von Sydow image develop in Bergman's mind. A shift begins in Through a GlassDarkly, where Bjornstrand is the artist and von Sydow is given the simpler, materialist character—a reversal of their roles in
(for example) The Seventh Seal and The Magician. This shift is amplified inThe Touch, when he cast the manic American Elliott Gould as the artist-
sensitive, revealing the maggots behind the icons, and made von Sydow the physician, the man of simple health and simpler understanding such as Bjornstrand used to play. The film seemed to end Bergman's speculations on
the functions of art and the demons behind the artistic impulse, because his actor image was here domesticated and his artist character played by an out- sider, of repellent craft and neurosis. Bjornstrand appears one last time inFace to Pace, cowering in a closet as he counts to ten to ward off death; his image still expresses the rational powers of man, but now Bergman empha- sizes their fragility and helplessness before the decay of the mind. One factor in Bergman's use of von Sydow is probably the strong facial similarity that he bears to Bergman. In The Serpent's Egg, which Bergman made after his flight from Sweden to Germany, he again stars an actor with a marked physical similarity to himself, David Carradine. The bilingual dialogue and Carradine's connection to the peripatetic politics of Woody Guthrie help to establish the theme of the artist outsider in a land of alien culture and horrifyingly alienat- ing direction.
John Ford seemed to use Ward Bond as his own representative in his films. Bond has the director's authority and responsibility in Wagon-Master, and Ford's style as Boots Mulcahy in They Were Expendable: "I'm not going to make a speech. I've just got something to say." Bond begins as a brutish hulk in Young Mr. Lincoln, plays a rugged man's man in Grapesof Wrath, Long
Voyage Home and My Darling Clementine, but grows into family life in Fort Apache and Three Godfathers, where his domesticity is played for laughs against his gruff image. He is too rugged for softer sentiments,so as Adam
Hartman in Drums Along the Mohawk, he playfully courted the widow but left to Henry Fonda the real fertility cycle by which the community would perpetuate itself.
Ford's final inflection of Bond begins w ith his Father Peter Lonergan inThe Quiet Man, where he combines hearty manliness with religious authority.
Then in The Searchers, he is Captain Reverend Sam Clayton, integrating the civil authority of a Texas Ranger with the religious authority of a lay preach- er. Clayton's integrated character is at home everywhere and ever sensitive to others feelings, in contrast to the obsessive drive of John Wayne's Ethan.
sensitive, revealing the maggots behind the icons, and made von Sydow the physician, the man of simple health and simpler understanding such as Bjornstrand used to play. The film seemed to end Bergman's speculations on
the functions of art and the demons behind the artistic impulse, because his actor image was here domesticated and his artist character played by an out- sider, of repellent craft and neurosis. Bjornstrand appears one last time inFace to Pace, cowering in a closet as he counts to ten to ward off death; his image still expresses the rational powers of man, but now Bergman empha- sizes their fragility and helplessness before the decay of the mind. One factor in Bergman's use of von Sydow is probably the strong facial similarity that he bears to Bergman. In The Serpent's Egg, which Bergman made after his flight from Sweden to Germany, he again stars an actor with a marked physical similarity to himself, David Carradine. The bilingual dialogue and Carradine's connection to the peripatetic politics of Woody Guthrie help to establish the theme of the artist outsider in a land of alien culture and horrifyingly alienat- ing direction.
John Ford seemed to use Ward Bond as his own representative in his films. Bond has the director's authority and responsibility in Wagon-Master, and Ford's style as Boots Mulcahy in They Were Expendable: "I'm not going to make a speech. I've just got something to say." Bond begins as a brutish hulk in Young Mr. Lincoln, plays a rugged man's man in Grapesof Wrath, Long
Voyage Home and My Darling Clementine, but grows into family life in Fort Apache and Three Godfathers, where his domesticity is played for laughs against his gruff image. He is too rugged for softer sentiments,so as Adam
Hartman in Drums Along the Mohawk, he playfully courted the widow but left to Henry Fonda the real fertility cycle by which the community would perpetuate itself.
Ford's final inflection of Bond begins w ith his Father Peter Lonergan inThe Quiet Man, where he combines hearty manliness with religious authority.
Then in The Searchers, he is Captain Reverend Sam Clayton, integrating the civil authority of a Texas Ranger with the religious authority of a lay preach- er. Clayton's integrated character is at home everywhere and ever sensitive to others feelings, in contrast to the obsessive drive of John Wayne's Ethan.
Ford formalized his adoption of the Bond image when he cast him asfilm director John Dodge in The Wings of Eagles, for which Bond reportedly wore
Ford's clothes.
So a director can use an actor as just one more term of his rhetoric. Berg-
man cast Nils Poppe as the same impossibly Christian naif in The Devil's Eyeand The Seventh Seal—so too the continuity between Bengt Ekerot's role as
Death in The Seventh Seal and his dying as Spegel (mirror) in The Magician.Similarly, Carl Reiner adds his personal stamp to Oh God by casting George Burns as God and John Denver as his earthly contact, for a Reiner film typi- cally involves the hero's dilemma between the prosaic practicality of his parents and the compulsion he feels to become an actor.11 Burns carries his vaudeville career into the role of God, so Denver's choice becomes not just one man between skepticism and faith but between supermarket and show- biz. Popular and art films alike exploit star associations,because they spring from and to the collective imagination.
The actor's image—capable of reference, inflection, even reversal—has two sources: his other roles and his personal life. The warmth between Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn and the electric charm between Bogart and
Bacall draw from their off-screen life to deepen the effect that their per- formances have upon us. On the other hand, could the Burtons ever play a quiet, conventionally loving couple? Here a number of myths thrive. Eliza- beth is the girl who had everything (the title of one of her films from the
'50s, as it happens), who disturbed the apple-pie marriage of Eddie Fisher and Debbie Reynolds (around Butterfield 8) and then ascended to the mythic love of Burton in (and all around) Cleopatra. For his part, Burton is the dis- sipated power, a man of wasted potential. Remember his Hamlet? Look Back
in Anger. Then their tumultuous love-life made it supremely film ic for them to be type-cast as larger-than-life lovers in The Taming of the Shrew, The Sandpiper, and Who's Afraid of Virginia Woo/f? Their myth overwhelmed their Dr. Paustus, where the wasting of Burton's Faustus is by the frequency of her appearanceattributed to Taylor's Helen of Troy (and she's just a devil
in disguise). Even the Columbia trademark, the female statue,assumed hellish reference from the red smoke at her feet!
In all these cases the typecasting of stars is something a deal more complex than the automatic repetition of a successful formula or some Pandarus flog- ging mechanical brides in the marketplace. Rather it is the expression of an essential characteristic of the fiction film—its fluidity of association, the star's fertility of cross-reference.When Hollywood doomed a star to a succession of similar roles, it was instinctively expressing its sense that a film actor projects
Ford's clothes.
So a director can use an actor as just one more term of his rhetoric. Berg-
man cast Nils Poppe as the same impossibly Christian naif in The Devil's Eyeand The Seventh Seal—so too the continuity between Bengt Ekerot's role as
Death in The Seventh Seal and his dying as Spegel (mirror) in The Magician.Similarly, Carl Reiner adds his personal stamp to Oh God by casting George Burns as God and John Denver as his earthly contact, for a Reiner film typi- cally involves the hero's dilemma between the prosaic practicality of his parents and the compulsion he feels to become an actor.11 Burns carries his vaudeville career into the role of God, so Denver's choice becomes not just one man between skepticism and faith but between supermarket and show- biz. Popular and art films alike exploit star associations,because they spring from and to the collective imagination.
The actor's image—capable of reference, inflection, even reversal—has two sources: his other roles and his personal life. The warmth between Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn and the electric charm between Bogart and
Bacall draw from their off-screen life to deepen the effect that their per- formances have upon us. On the other hand, could the Burtons ever play a quiet, conventionally loving couple? Here a number of myths thrive. Eliza- beth is the girl who had everything (the title of one of her films from the
'50s, as it happens), who disturbed the apple-pie marriage of Eddie Fisher and Debbie Reynolds (around Butterfield 8) and then ascended to the mythic love of Burton in (and all around) Cleopatra. For his part, Burton is the dis- sipated power, a man of wasted potential. Remember his Hamlet? Look Back
in Anger. Then their tumultuous love-life made it supremely film ic for them to be type-cast as larger-than-life lovers in The Taming of the Shrew, The Sandpiper, and Who's Afraid of Virginia Woo/f? Their myth overwhelmed their Dr. Paustus, where the wasting of Burton's Faustus is by the frequency of her appearanceattributed to Taylor's Helen of Troy (and she's just a devil
in disguise). Even the Columbia trademark, the female statue,assumed hellish reference from the red smoke at her feet!
In all these cases the typecasting of stars is something a deal more complex than the automatic repetition of a successful formula or some Pandarus flog- ging mechanical brides in the marketplace. Rather it is the expression of an essential characteristic of the fiction film—its fluidity of association, the star's fertility of cross-reference.When Hollywood doomed a star to a succession of similar roles, it was instinctively expressing its sense that a film actor projects
something somewhere between h is self and h is character when h e appears o n the screen. Typecasting w a s n o t just a matter of commercial reflex, b u ta valid consequence of the aesthetic nature of film .
Audiences often proved more responsive to this point than critics did, for whom an inherited theatre snobbery made thestar system andtypecastingan easy laugh. Forexample, awomen's group in thesouthern states picketedand had banned Hitchcock's Torn Curtain, claiming that th e morals of the coun- try's youth were endangered by theexample of Mary Poppins in bed with a man. Hitchcock clearly exploited thestars' personaein hisopening scene,and in thescene where Paul Newman (a "Hud" by anyother name) converts Julie Andrews t o h is rather selfish cause b y leading h e r u p a palpably false garden path.
Similarly, thepublic outrage against Fatty Arbuckle mayhave been largely due to th e discrepancy between his real party-life and his image as a lovable innocent in hisfilms. Wedon't expect stage actors to live up to their rolesbut film actorsweseemto.IngridBergmanwaspunishedforlivingoutherro- mance beyond the Hays Office fade-out, buttheStromboli posters exploited the sensational off-screen romance with giant lettering of equal-sized "Strom- boli," "Bergman," and "Rossellini." A nd when The Fourposter was filmed in
1952 after a long Broadway run, publicity merchants made much of th e fact that t h e stars, R e x Harrison a n d L illi Palmer, were actually married in real
life. In those days and climes, actors of opposite sexes were n o t allowed to appearinthesamebedinafilm,sothestars'marriagemadethefilm permis- sible. One reasonwhythetheatre in America hasseemedsomuch moreper-
missive than film (as thecases of Tennessee Williams andThe Moon is Bluesuggest) may well lie in this aesthetic inference: th e stage actor plays a role, but th e film actor lives o u t an extension of his life.
The point must be borne in mind when we evaluate film adaptations in particular. I have discussed this with regard to theTennessee Williams films
elsewhere. Often what is said is less suggestive than th e external associa- tions we make with thespeaker.Joseph Mankiewicz extends Sleuth by cast- ing Olivier and Michael Caine. Olivier's aristocracy and Caine's Cockney u p - start image (from Alfie on)give thefilm apolitical classdimension that is missingintheplaytext. CaineservesthesamefunctioninGuyGreen'sfilm of The Magus, where t h e Conchis character is radically distorted b y t h e vari-
ous Zorba associations that encumber Anthony Quinn.
The frequent success of unknowns or of nonactors in film confirms th e
function of the known image. For the unknowns in such films as Bicycle Thieves and Umberto D derive much of their power from th e fact that w e
know thecharacters notto beactors. Thecomforts of fictional detachment are dispelled by the characters' factuality. The best thing about Sidney
Audiences often proved more responsive to this point than critics did, for whom an inherited theatre snobbery made thestar system andtypecastingan easy laugh. Forexample, awomen's group in thesouthern states picketedand had banned Hitchcock's Torn Curtain, claiming that th e morals of the coun- try's youth were endangered by theexample of Mary Poppins in bed with a man. Hitchcock clearly exploited thestars' personaein hisopening scene,and in thescene where Paul Newman (a "Hud" by anyother name) converts Julie Andrews t o h is rather selfish cause b y leading h e r u p a palpably false garden path.
Similarly, thepublic outrage against Fatty Arbuckle mayhave been largely due to th e discrepancy between his real party-life and his image as a lovable innocent in hisfilms. Wedon't expect stage actors to live up to their rolesbut film actorsweseemto.IngridBergmanwaspunishedforlivingoutherro- mance beyond the Hays Office fade-out, buttheStromboli posters exploited the sensational off-screen romance with giant lettering of equal-sized "Strom- boli," "Bergman," and "Rossellini." A nd when The Fourposter was filmed in
1952 after a long Broadway run, publicity merchants made much of th e fact that t h e stars, R e x Harrison a n d L illi Palmer, were actually married in real
life. In those days and climes, actors of opposite sexes were n o t allowed to appearinthesamebedinafilm,sothestars'marriagemadethefilm permis- sible. One reasonwhythetheatre in America hasseemedsomuch moreper-
missive than film (as thecases of Tennessee Williams andThe Moon is Bluesuggest) may well lie in this aesthetic inference: th e stage actor plays a role, but th e film actor lives o u t an extension of his life.
The point must be borne in mind when we evaluate film adaptations in particular. I have discussed this with regard to theTennessee Williams films
elsewhere. Often what is said is less suggestive than th e external associa- tions we make with thespeaker.Joseph Mankiewicz extends Sleuth by cast- ing Olivier and Michael Caine. Olivier's aristocracy and Caine's Cockney u p - start image (from Alfie on)give thefilm apolitical classdimension that is missingintheplaytext. CaineservesthesamefunctioninGuyGreen'sfilm of The Magus, where t h e Conchis character is radically distorted b y t h e vari-
ous Zorba associations that encumber Anthony Quinn.
The frequent success of unknowns or of nonactors in film confirms th e
function of the known image. For the unknowns in such films as Bicycle Thieves and Umberto D derive much of their power from th e fact that w e
know thecharacters notto beactors. Thecomforts of fictional detachment are dispelled by the characters' factuality. The best thing about Sidney
Furie's The Boys in Company C was the platoon of unknown actors, because their very unfamiliarity expressed their doom in the war. Similarly, the cast
of The Boys in the Band were more successful than Burton and Harrison were
in Staircase, n o t because they were better actors, b u t because they were u n - knowns. They could create a more believable world, because Sexy Rexy and Plucky Dick were clearly performing a charade.
But the persona o f a star can guarantee a considerable impact. The classic example is the shock o f Janet Leigh's death in Psycho. Equally significant, however, is Carol Burnett's cameo asthe anarchist's girlfriend in Billy Wild- er's The Front Page. A n audience accustomed t o Ms. Burnett's comic roles w ill share w ith the gathered newsmen first the skepticism toward her pleas but then theshock at hersuicide leap to allow herboyfriend to escape.
Although m y present examples have mainly been American, the tradition of continuous personaeseems to function in Europe aswell. For example, Claude Chabrol's adaptation of ElSery Queen's Nine Days Wonder is a bril-
liant exercise in the mythic presences of Tony Perkins and Orson Welles.And Tony Richardson, by casting Mick Jagger as Ned Kelly, proposes a historic continuum between the Australian rebel and the modern British hero. Re- viewers are simply wrong-headed to discuss Jagger in terms of performing, when it is asa myth that he is meaningful, with powers of inflection.
Similarly, Michel Piccoli has developed th e image of a suave, sophisti- cated man with deviant undertow—through such appearances in Belle de Jour,
Topaz, LeGrandBouffe, TheInfernal Trio—tothe point that when heisthe voice-over narrator in Cesarand Rosalie, unseen, he still expresses a worldli- ness and experience quite beyond th e fumblings of businessman Yves
Montand and cartoonist Sami Frey. Losey's Mr. Klein draws upon the Delon "image" to suggest the criminality in the character's complacency.
To conclude, I wish to present Bertolucci's Last Tango in Paris as a docu- mentary of its stars' personae. A n unknown (Maria Schneider) is given a ro - mantic choice between t w o o f our best-known male images in film . F o r com- paring Brando's improvisations with those of the actor originally plannedfor the role of Trintignant Bertolucci told an American Film Institute audience:
I think that youmust adaptyourself eachtime. Butwhat Itried todowasreallya sort of documentary, always documentary and fiction a t the same time . . . . What
13
And what they really are are continuing personae, fertile images.
Jean-Pierre Leaud is the loser we have loved since 400 Blows. Throughthe
Godard and Truffaut films we have watched this child of cinema grow. Berto- lucci continues Leaud's persona o f a vulnerable, romantic cinephile. B u t here
Leaud subordinates his search for romantic perfection to a ludicrous search
of The Boys in the Band were more successful than Burton and Harrison were
in Staircase, n o t because they were better actors, b u t because they were u n - knowns. They could create a more believable world, because Sexy Rexy and Plucky Dick were clearly performing a charade.
But the persona o f a star can guarantee a considerable impact. The classic example is the shock o f Janet Leigh's death in Psycho. Equally significant, however, is Carol Burnett's cameo asthe anarchist's girlfriend in Billy Wild- er's The Front Page. A n audience accustomed t o Ms. Burnett's comic roles w ill share w ith the gathered newsmen first the skepticism toward her pleas but then theshock at hersuicide leap to allow herboyfriend to escape.
Although m y present examples have mainly been American, the tradition of continuous personaeseems to function in Europe aswell. For example, Claude Chabrol's adaptation of ElSery Queen's Nine Days Wonder is a bril-
liant exercise in the mythic presences of Tony Perkins and Orson Welles.And Tony Richardson, by casting Mick Jagger as Ned Kelly, proposes a historic continuum between the Australian rebel and the modern British hero. Re- viewers are simply wrong-headed to discuss Jagger in terms of performing, when it is asa myth that he is meaningful, with powers of inflection.
Similarly, Michel Piccoli has developed th e image of a suave, sophisti- cated man with deviant undertow—through such appearances in Belle de Jour,
Topaz, LeGrandBouffe, TheInfernal Trio—tothe point that when heisthe voice-over narrator in Cesarand Rosalie, unseen, he still expresses a worldli- ness and experience quite beyond th e fumblings of businessman Yves
Montand and cartoonist Sami Frey. Losey's Mr. Klein draws upon the Delon "image" to suggest the criminality in the character's complacency.
To conclude, I wish to present Bertolucci's Last Tango in Paris as a docu- mentary of its stars' personae. A n unknown (Maria Schneider) is given a ro - mantic choice between t w o o f our best-known male images in film . F o r com- paring Brando's improvisations with those of the actor originally plannedfor the role of Trintignant Bertolucci told an American Film Institute audience:
I think that youmust adaptyourself eachtime. Butwhat Itried todowasreallya sort of documentary, always documentary and fiction a t the same time . . . . What
13
And what they really are are continuing personae, fertile images.
Jean-Pierre Leaud is the loser we have loved since 400 Blows. Throughthe
Godard and Truffaut films we have watched this child of cinema grow. Berto- lucci continues Leaud's persona o f a vulnerable, romantic cinephile. B u t here
Leaud subordinates his search for romantic perfection to a ludicrous search
interested me in the actor is not the ability to act . . . but what they really are.
for a film truth. In Day For Night Truffaut has Leaud indulge his romance to the point of wanting to abandon his film , b u t Bertolucci has Leaud live, think, breed, feel through film and film allusions to thepoint that filmob- scures hisreality and emotions. Thus hisJeanne (Maria Schneider) disappears while he rhapsodizes "You're better than Hayworth and Novak and Ava
Gardner when she married Mickey Rooney"— the latter analogue itself a leap from film-legend to life-legend.
Where Leaud's film-living is in passionate anddebilitating earnest, Marlon Brando's Paul tosses off film allusions playfully: "Quo Vadis, baby?" "It's a
title shot, baby, we're going all th e way." Despite this play, though Paul's supposed "life" is made up of bits of Brando's film career. Paul says hewas
a fighter (On the Waterfront) anda revolutionary in South America (Viva Zapata,Burn).HelivedinJapan(TeahouseoftheAugustMoon,Sayonara)and debarked in Tahiti (Mutiny on the Bounty). Paul embodies the interface between actor and role on thelevel of self and being. Tom is a parody, on the level of mere knowing.
"Oh, God," saysPaul,"I'vebeencalledamillion namesallmylife."So he banishes namesand thefacts of theoutside world from hisapartment with Jeanne, to escape Role into Being. But as his being is composed of Brando's roles, Paul's ultimate dissolve into th e mere facts of his autobiography is in- evitable. He can't escape role into being because he has no being other than roles. Even in his name, which is unknown to Jeanne, Paul slips into th e role
of herfirst lover, another Paul, with whom she had masturbation races asa child. Similarly, Paul's dead wife Rosa coincides with Leaud's desire to name his daughter Rosa (after Rosa Luxemburg). Thus th e "real" tragic characters of Paul andRosa slip into thefantasy requirements of the simpler charac- ters, Jeanne and Tom, even within theplot. This isthetragedy of thechar- acters, th e triumph of actors, th e compulsion of drama, to be so used by audi- ence. BecauseJeannedoesnotwant to besomeoneelse'sstar,she complains toTom: "Youtakeadvantageofme.Youmakemedowhateveryouwant. The film is over. I'm tired of having m y mind raped." Those very things she will doto Paul attheend when shereduceshim to theimage of anameless transient.
It has been suggested that t h e entire Brando-Schneider relationship in t h e film happens only in thegirl's mind, that it is a piece of wild fantasy coherent w ith h e r complacency a n d self-conscious freedom in t h e opening images. This maybe,inwhichcasetheBrandofilm attheheartofLast Tangowouldbe
Herbert Cornfield's underrated Night of the Following Day,where just such a girl's onanistic fantasizing of a Brando threat occurs.
But whether on the level of event or of fantasy, thefilm traces the down- falloftheBrando/Paul image.Jeanne rejects thesimple Tom forthemysterious and powerful Paul butonly to subdue that energy. ThePaul of quaking anguish (from his "Fucking God!" opening) is reduced to a simper- ing, conventional romantic, posturing at death with a gesture of chewed gum, as if the balcony were another cinema seat. The lover who carried h is lady on hiserection attheir first union is reduced to the ignomy of a hand- job in the shadows, weeping. From blaspheming God h e is reduced t o mock- ing a dead general and turning h is nether cheek t o a n already ridiculous, emasculated tango hall. Tom earlier instructed Jeanne t o "Advance b y going backwards/' Paul's progress is the regression from an intense, world-wearied, sensitive and solitary man, to a romantic innocence, mooning like a college boy, courting the girl-with idle facts of hislife, like anadolescent,miming her father like a child, finally dying in the inevitable foetal curl.
Gardner when she married Mickey Rooney"— the latter analogue itself a leap from film-legend to life-legend.
Where Leaud's film-living is in passionate anddebilitating earnest, Marlon Brando's Paul tosses off film allusions playfully: "Quo Vadis, baby?" "It's a
title shot, baby, we're going all th e way." Despite this play, though Paul's supposed "life" is made up of bits of Brando's film career. Paul says hewas
a fighter (On the Waterfront) anda revolutionary in South America (Viva Zapata,Burn).HelivedinJapan(TeahouseoftheAugustMoon,Sayonara)and debarked in Tahiti (Mutiny on the Bounty). Paul embodies the interface between actor and role on thelevel of self and being. Tom is a parody, on the level of mere knowing.
"Oh, God," saysPaul,"I'vebeencalledamillion namesallmylife."So he banishes namesand thefacts of theoutside world from hisapartment with Jeanne, to escape Role into Being. But as his being is composed of Brando's roles, Paul's ultimate dissolve into th e mere facts of his autobiography is in- evitable. He can't escape role into being because he has no being other than roles. Even in his name, which is unknown to Jeanne, Paul slips into th e role
of herfirst lover, another Paul, with whom she had masturbation races asa child. Similarly, Paul's dead wife Rosa coincides with Leaud's desire to name his daughter Rosa (after Rosa Luxemburg). Thus th e "real" tragic characters of Paul andRosa slip into thefantasy requirements of the simpler charac- ters, Jeanne and Tom, even within theplot. This isthetragedy of thechar- acters, th e triumph of actors, th e compulsion of drama, to be so used by audi- ence. BecauseJeannedoesnotwant to besomeoneelse'sstar,she complains toTom: "Youtakeadvantageofme.Youmakemedowhateveryouwant. The film is over. I'm tired of having m y mind raped." Those very things she will doto Paul attheend when shereduceshim to theimage of anameless transient.
It has been suggested that t h e entire Brando-Schneider relationship in t h e film happens only in thegirl's mind, that it is a piece of wild fantasy coherent w ith h e r complacency a n d self-conscious freedom in t h e opening images. This maybe,inwhichcasetheBrandofilm attheheartofLast Tangowouldbe
Herbert Cornfield's underrated Night of the Following Day,where just such a girl's onanistic fantasizing of a Brando threat occurs.
But whether on the level of event or of fantasy, thefilm traces the down- falloftheBrando/Paul image.Jeanne rejects thesimple Tom forthemysterious and powerful Paul butonly to subdue that energy. ThePaul of quaking anguish (from his "Fucking God!" opening) is reduced to a simper- ing, conventional romantic, posturing at death with a gesture of chewed gum, as if the balcony were another cinema seat. The lover who carried h is lady on hiserection attheir first union is reduced to the ignomy of a hand- job in the shadows, weeping. From blaspheming God h e is reduced t o mock- ing a dead general and turning h is nether cheek t o a n already ridiculous, emasculated tango hall. Tom earlier instructed Jeanne t o "Advance b y going backwards/' Paul's progress is the regression from an intense, world-wearied, sensitive and solitary man, to a romantic innocence, mooning like a college boy, courting the girl-with idle facts of hislife, like anadolescent,miming her father like a child, finally dying in the inevitable foetal curl.
What kills Paul is the illusion that he can have a fresh start, abandonh is
role of intense grief and debasementforthe role of stereotyped lover.Perhaps the Francis Bacon portraits of the credit sequence are the real cast of char- acters: a woman tense and tight and a man big and exposed. The tw o pic- tures/characters are together b u t n o t a couple. Each is locked in h is o w n black, erotic solitude, h is own frame o r role. In the movie itself the couples are incomplete. We have melting alignments between Paul, Marcel and Rosa, between Paul, Tom and Jeanne, and between the saxophonist, hiswomanand his sax. In each triangle there is a n artist, a controlled actor, and a n audience.
It takes three to tango in a world where the love-dance is a contest, a world of unfathomable mystery even in one's mate, where man and woman live o ff each other in that performance of mutual parasitism that binds actorand audience. Bertolucci continues the bleared and smeared textures o f Bacon's faces b y often shooting through pebbled glass, a n image o f man seeing others onlythrough theglassofhisowndefenses,ofaudiencestwistingrolesof others to feed their own fantasies. In Last Tango, one of the great mythic presences of film, Marlon Brando, the energy and stud of The Wild One and
A Streetcar Named Desire, succumbs t o the parasitic puerilities o f bourgeois romance (Jeanne d'arc lights?) and the sterilization o f h is bleak vision b y sen- timental conventions.
Much of the strength of this film lies in the power of the performances and in the director's splendid technique. B u t its present interest lies in its aware- nessof how afilm actor athisbestwill work, projecting animage orpersona
that w ill survive a number o f performances, gaining character and depth as it develops. One o f the important functions o f Last Tango is that it openly e x - ploits a process of star-reference that in most films operates unadmitted.
Film is n o tjust a matter of acting and behaving. It is more like the ribbon of dreams. It is even more like a mercury magnet, catching and fertilizing th e most fugitive of associations from the public and the private minds alike. If
role of intense grief and debasementforthe role of stereotyped lover.Perhaps the Francis Bacon portraits of the credit sequence are the real cast of char- acters: a woman tense and tight and a man big and exposed. The tw o pic- tures/characters are together b u t n o t a couple. Each is locked in h is o w n black, erotic solitude, h is own frame o r role. In the movie itself the couples are incomplete. We have melting alignments between Paul, Marcel and Rosa, between Paul, Tom and Jeanne, and between the saxophonist, hiswomanand his sax. In each triangle there is a n artist, a controlled actor, and a n audience.
It takes three to tango in a world where the love-dance is a contest, a world of unfathomable mystery even in one's mate, where man and woman live o ff each other in that performance of mutual parasitism that binds actorand audience. Bertolucci continues the bleared and smeared textures o f Bacon's faces b y often shooting through pebbled glass, a n image o f man seeing others onlythrough theglassofhisowndefenses,ofaudiencestwistingrolesof others to feed their own fantasies. In Last Tango, one of the great mythic presences of film, Marlon Brando, the energy and stud of The Wild One and
A Streetcar Named Desire, succumbs t o the parasitic puerilities o f bourgeois romance (Jeanne d'arc lights?) and the sterilization o f h is bleak vision b y sen- timental conventions.
Much of the strength of this film lies in the power of the performances and in the director's splendid technique. B u t its present interest lies in its aware- nessof how afilm actor athisbestwill work, projecting animage orpersona
that w ill survive a number o f performances, gaining character and depth as it develops. One o f the important functions o f Last Tango is that it openly e x - ploits a process of star-reference that in most films operates unadmitted.
Film is n o tjust a matter of acting and behaving. It is more like the ribbon of dreams. It is even more like a mercury magnet, catching and fertilizing th e most fugitive of associations from the public and the private minds alike. If
YACOWAR / The Star System in Films 51
film speakssopowerfully tothesubconsciousof itsaudience,that isbecause oneofitsbasiclanguages,thelanguageoffaces,hasrootsinthe audience's unacknowledged butlively starassociations.
MauriceYacowarisaProfessorofDramaatBrockUniversity-Region Niagra. He is theauthor of Hitchcock (1977) and Tennessee Williams and Film (1977).
Notes
1.Drama, April,1937(XV,7),pp.110-14.
2. Philip Hope-Wallace, "Acting," Sight andSound, 1950, p. 22; p. 375 . . .
3. SeeAlexander Knox, "Acting and Behaving," in R.D.McCann, Film: A Montage
of Theories (Dutton, N.Y., 1966), pp. 66-72; V.I. Pudovkin, Film Technique and Film Acting (Grove Press, N.Y., 1960); Ernest Lindgren, The Art of Film (George Allenand
Unwin, London, 1970), pp. 146-57.
4. Thorold Dickenson attributes thephenomenon to theslownessof thebrain rather
thantheretentivenessoftheretina(ADiscoveryofCinema,OxfordU.P.,London, 1971, p.1).
5. Andre Bazin, What is Cinema? V o l. I (University of California, 1967), pp. 97, 9 9 . The mirror analogue is pursued by George Linden in Reflections on the Screen (Wads- worth Publishing, California, 1970). Renaissancedrama and satire traditionally claimed the ameliorative function of mirroring the defects of its audience (e.g., The Mirrour for Magistrates) b u t in film t h e analogue has a physical basis.
6. Edgar Morin, The Stars, trans. Richard Howard (Grove Press, N.Y ., 1960), p. 3 7 . 7. Daniel Boorstin, The Image, Penguin, 1963.
8. Morin, pp. 145-46, 152-54. 9.OnHawks'sWayneseeRobinWood,HowardHawks (SeekerandWarburg,Lon-
don, 1968),pp.32-57,89-92.OnBig Jake seeMichael Kerbel's review in The Village Voice for July 1,1971,p.49: "Eighteen members of thefilm's company have reported-
ly worked on a total of 150 Wayne films."
10. Robin Wood notindefensibly openshismonograph (Ingmar Bergman, Praeger,
1969) around the development of Bergman's women. An appendix on theuseof Liv Ullman is in order.
11.Forexample,TheClown,EnterLaughing,andTheOneandOnly.InWhere's Poppa? the performance inhibited by familial pressures is sexual-romantic, butthe hero's
legal careerandthegauze-glosspresentation of theheroine make hisdesired activity theatrical in nature. In th e first Dick V an Dyke television series, created by Reiner, there is a happy compromise of a theatrical career with an assimilated father-tyrant (played by Reiner himself, as Alan Brady) and with Morey Amsterdam andRose Marie as theloving step-parent figures.
12.MauriceYacowar,TennesseeWilliamsandFilm(FrederickUngar,N.Y.,1977). The present paper includes material treated slightly differently in "Reflections on the DocumentaryofFiction,"inmy/Found ItAtTheMovies (Revisionist Press,N.Y., 1978). On the significance of a director's appearances in his films see the Appendix
MauriceYacowarisaProfessorofDramaatBrockUniversity-Region Niagra. He is theauthor of Hitchcock (1977) and Tennessee Williams and Film (1977).
Notes
1.Drama, April,1937(XV,7),pp.110-14.
2. Philip Hope-Wallace, "Acting," Sight andSound, 1950, p. 22; p. 375 . . .
3. SeeAlexander Knox, "Acting and Behaving," in R.D.McCann, Film: A Montage
of Theories (Dutton, N.Y., 1966), pp. 66-72; V.I. Pudovkin, Film Technique and Film Acting (Grove Press, N.Y., 1960); Ernest Lindgren, The Art of Film (George Allenand
Unwin, London, 1970), pp. 146-57.
4. Thorold Dickenson attributes thephenomenon to theslownessof thebrain rather
thantheretentivenessoftheretina(ADiscoveryofCinema,OxfordU.P.,London, 1971, p.1).
5. Andre Bazin, What is Cinema? V o l. I (University of California, 1967), pp. 97, 9 9 . The mirror analogue is pursued by George Linden in Reflections on the Screen (Wads- worth Publishing, California, 1970). Renaissancedrama and satire traditionally claimed the ameliorative function of mirroring the defects of its audience (e.g., The Mirrour for Magistrates) b u t in film t h e analogue has a physical basis.
6. Edgar Morin, The Stars, trans. Richard Howard (Grove Press, N.Y ., 1960), p. 3 7 . 7. Daniel Boorstin, The Image, Penguin, 1963.
8. Morin, pp. 145-46, 152-54. 9.OnHawks'sWayneseeRobinWood,HowardHawks (SeekerandWarburg,Lon-
don, 1968),pp.32-57,89-92.OnBig Jake seeMichael Kerbel's review in The Village Voice for July 1,1971,p.49: "Eighteen members of thefilm's company have reported-
ly worked on a total of 150 Wayne films."
10. Robin Wood notindefensibly openshismonograph (Ingmar Bergman, Praeger,
1969) around the development of Bergman's women. An appendix on theuseof Liv Ullman is in order.
11.Forexample,TheClown,EnterLaughing,andTheOneandOnly.InWhere's Poppa? the performance inhibited by familial pressures is sexual-romantic, butthe hero's
legal careerandthegauze-glosspresentation of theheroine make hisdesired activity theatrical in nature. In th e first Dick V an Dyke television series, created by Reiner, there is a happy compromise of a theatrical career with an assimilated father-tyrant (played by Reiner himself, as Alan Brady) and with Morey Amsterdam andRose Marie as theloving step-parent figures.
12.MauriceYacowar,TennesseeWilliamsandFilm(FrederickUngar,N.Y.,1977). The present paper includes material treated slightly differently in "Reflections on the DocumentaryofFiction,"inmy/Found ItAtTheMovies (Revisionist Press,N.Y., 1978). On the significance of a director's appearances in his films see the Appendix
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