Through a Glass Darkly

 

A very bad mood to see a film in: I arrived at the theatre, glowing, because I thought I was seeing Rebel Without a Cause (1955); I had gotten the date wrong. Ray's film was yesterday, they were showing George Stevens instead. Black & white has never seemed like such an inferior filming process as after that reversal. 

Stevens, a man with more Oscars for directing than Alfred Hitchcock, Howard Hawks, Orson Welles, Fritz Lang, Raoul Walsh, Ida Lupino, Samuel Fuller, and Nicholas Ray combined, is a filmmaker that none of the people whose opinions on film I value seem to value. His name carries gilded-fireplace reverence among old American men and not really any other World demographic. He is the ultimate AFI-core director. 

His career makes for a good biographer's blurb. At 13, he moved with his parents to Los Angeles and was immediately forced to drop out of school, as if from his entry into California it was fated that the classroom would have no more use for him, his life would be devoted to the cinema. The first half of his Hollywood career was spent directing comedies and musicals, passing through a museum of legendary Hollywood duos – Laurel and Hardy, Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, Cary Grant and Katherine Hepburn. When the war started, he joined the Signal Corps and filmed invaluable footage of D-Day, the liberation of Paris, the Battle of the Bulge, and the concentration camps. It was after this latter discovery that he quit the comedies and musicals upon returning to Hollywood, and devoted himself to dramas – portentous, ambitious, occasionally elephantine (Giant, The Diary of Anne Frank, The Greatest Story Ever Told). This second phase of seriousness, which is what most of his champions (and critics) now remember, was inaugurated by A Place In the Sun (1951), a tragic love story adapted from Theodore Dreiser's famous 1925 novel An American Tragedy, about an ambitious, self-educated young man (Montgomery Clift) who wants to abandon his pregnant working-class girlfriend (Shelley Winters) for a rich socialite he has fallen in love with (Elizabeth Taylor).

George Eastman (Clift), Angela Vickers (Taylor). Good names.

I've limned George Stevens' life not because of the strangely dark parallel between himself and George Eastman, the Clift character, but rather to illustrate that Stevens was a born maverick. His style reflects his insistently ambitious personality in a way that is in brief snatches brilliant, often watchable, and occasionally embarrassing. In virtually every set-up there is the sense of the dare, of the burning will to invent something original that will make a scene jump off the screen and lodge itself in the public's memory. But Stevens's reach as a director exceeds his grasp: he does not have the stylistic vision of a John Ford, in which the fictional world feels perfectly, effortlessly integrated with the mise-en-scene; Steven's style is based on a heterogeneous bag of tricks that has the consequence of the fictional world never quite feeling convincing. The shadow hand of a director labouring for art can always be sensed. Take for example the first 70 seconds of this scene (spoiler warning for link): the sudden presence of a Wizard of Oz tornado wind blowing their clothes, hair, and the pages of the registry book to symbolize "fate," which is magically about 50% more pronounced in the shots you can tell were filmed on a sound stage. It is exciting and a little bit false at the same time.

The director of the device, the trick up his sleeve – here, glittering water droplets judiciously planted on Angela's conveniently exposed back.

The experience of watching the film is therefore a bit like being a talent show judge. Every scene Stevens is going to bring in a new trick, and it may be exquisite (this dolly shot during George and Angela's first real meeting, where you think the camera will stop politely outside the two sets of pillars, but it continues to squeeze through, almost miraculously) or tawdry (in the window of George's apartment there is a flashing neon sign, "VICKERS," Angela's industrialist family name). 

The story also becomes long in the tooth in the last third, hammering on ideas that any decent viewer had already picked up on. There is one of the worst third-act cliches, the courtroom sequence.

Stevens and I met like two ships passing in the night, but a Taylor-Clift love affair did not begin; frankly, the film affirmed the misgivings of critics I respect, but it has a likeable brio.