American Film [antikvár]

Opposite page: Warren Beatty playing Bugsy' Siegel, the real-life gangster who built Las Vegas, and Annette Bening as actress Virginia Hill meet on a 1940s film set in -Bugsy" (1991). BY RICHARD SCHICKEL ? What is quintessentially American about American movies? The logical place to look for that essence is, perhaps, among the billions of images they have flashed before the world over the course of this century: a western hero in full, galloping pursuit of evil, both guns blazing with righteous indignation; a song and dance man singin' splashily in the rain; a tramp, cane atwiri, bowler hat perched, precariously perky, atop his head, taking his first jaunty steps away from trouble down an optimistically open road; a tycoon dying alone amidst the splendor of his wealth, an enigmatic word falling from his lips as a childhood bauble falls from liis hand; a gangster, mortally wounded, sinking into the gutter, victim of a fatal misunderstanding about just how much openness of ambition an open society will tolerate, his last words an expression of astonishment that his end has come so quickly, so squalidly. One could go on and on. Everyone could go on and on. All of us who have gone to ; the movies with any regularity for any length of time could create an entertaining, his- ^ torically valid montage of American film imagery and confidently present it as a little 3 visual essay on the American character as it has been reflected—perhaps one should ? say refracted—in its movies. The trouble is that after almost a century of production : the subject has grown too large for any single intelligence, no matter how devoted it is to this subject, to encompass. And, anyway, movies work on us in a highly subjective '. fashion. If my favorite contemporary actor is Clint Eastwood and yours is Mel Gibson, _ our reading of what constitutes the American essence will be considerably at odds. If,J historically, I say my favorite director is Howard Hawks and yours is Frank Capra,* what joint vision can we reach? Worse, what if I say Alfred Hitchcock and you say I Ernst Lubitsch? And we both stop to remember that though each did most of his best * work in the United States, the former was English by birth, the latter German, and many of their American films were set in foreign lands and employed, both in front of and behind the camera, artists who were, perhaps, American citizens, but whose gifts, like their leaders', were formed and trained elsewhere. What a muddle! The nice, entertaining quesfion with which we began turns into an insoluble conundrum. But one that nevertheless teases and tempts anyone who thinks at all seriously about the movies. For who can doubt that something of a nation's experience, something of its climate—physical, cultural, spiritual—must inevitably inform its films, setting them apart fi-om those made in other lands? In general, and allowing for a thousand exceptions, one thinks of American movies as less personal and subjective in tone than most European films, for example, are, and perhaps more likely to define their characters through action rather than through dialogue. They are also more likely to be lavish (not to say giddy) in terms of setfings, decor, costumes, and in the deployment of expensive technology to tell their stories. The idea is ever and always to make the world and its inhabitants appear not merely preternaturally beautiful, but utterly unblemished. In other words, their principal business, even when they think they are being frightfully hon- ' est and earnest, is to transform reality, to bathe it in romantic hues. And this delightful sense of excess, emo-tional as well as financial, pertains whether a film's ostensible subject is erotic, comic, or melodramatic, melodic or nostalgic or even socially conscien- nOLLYWOOD While the town of Hollywood celebrates its 100th birthday In 1992, so many Inventors contributed to the early days of motion pictures that the industry decided on a centenary celebration covering a six-year span, 1991-96.