Friday, March 29, 2024 Mar 29, 2024
61° F Dallas, TX
Advertisement
Publications

The Movies Acting and Reacting

"All the good acting in Lenny and Murder on the Orient Express can’t raise them above their essential inadequacy."
By Charles Matthews |

Acting, of all of the crafts involved in movie-making, is the hardest for the critic to discuss with confidence in his own objectivity. We respond to movie stars for a variety of intensely personal, and hence almost totally subjective reasons. If you like the personality, the complexity of appearance and mannerisms of a star like Cary Grant, then you probably regard him as a good actor. If not, then you may dismiss him -or Gable or Cag-ney or John Wayne -as a “mere movie star, not a true artist.” Now it seems clear to me that Grant or Cag-ney or Gable or Wayne are true artists, who understand the nature of film as a medium for actors and have carefully and subtly crafted personal images suitable to the medium. The movies have made us as intimately familiar with their personalities as we are with the personalities of our friends and families. We don’t ask such stars to surprise us, to illuminate each role with new and revealing insights; instead, we know in advance what sort of character we will see them perform, and would feel cheated if they didn’t deliver. Wisely, they choose always to deliver.

But the younger generation of film actors has reacted against this form of type-casting. They want to take each role and make a statement about the character they are playing -not just ride an image they have established, or that film as a medium has established for them. There are two performances in recent films – Dustin Hoffman’s in Lenny and Albert Finney’s in Murder on the Orient Express – that exhibit some of the limitations of movies as a medium for the actor.

Both Hoffman and Finney got their big breaks in movies by landing roles in films that were, perhaps unexpectedly, great successes: The Graduate and Tom Jones. Suddenly there was a Dustin-Hoffman-Type, the likeable, rather bewildered young rebel against The System, and an Albert-Finney-Type, the likeable, rather bewildered Superstud. But it was only when Hoffman followed The Graduate with his magnificent performance as Ratso in Midnight Cowboy that some reviewers realized that Hoffman could act; their comments clearly revealed that they had taken Benjamin in The Graduate to be the “real” Dustin Hoffman. And after Tom Jones, Finney made several films in which he tried to escape from the type, but his only big success was Two for the Road, in which his role came close to the Tom Jones image.

In Lenny, Hoffman is again playing the rather bewildered rebel against The System, but with the important difference that Lenny Bruce is not supposed to be as likeable as Benjamin Braddock. Julian Barry’s screenplay, coupled with the quasi-documentary style, works hard to convince us that Bruce was a reforming force of major importance in bringing about a new awareness of First Amendment rights; and unfortunately, Barry feels that he has to make Bruce a sympathetic figure, the crusader rather than the iconoclastic entertainer.

John Schlesinger’s direction of Midnight Cowboy allowed Hoffman to efface the Benjamin image entirely, but Bob Fosse, who directed Lenny, seems to force Hoffman back toward Benjamin with, for example, many Graduate-style close-ups of Hoffman’s sad-eyed grin. Perhaps Fosse is evoking the Benjamin image as a shortcut to showing the likeable side of Lenny Bruce, but by doing so, he undermines Hoffman’s performance. When Hoffman has to be repellent and abrasive he succeeds, and he has real help from Fosse in the restaging of Bruce’s night club appearances, particularly the one when Bruce came onstage so stoned that he disintegrated in public, a sequence Fosse films in a single long take so agonizingly slow in its pacing that the movie audience squirms with embarrassment. In these, and a few other sequences, Hoffman gives a virtuoso performance as fine as anything seen in movies for years. But no one, neither Hoffman, nor Barry, nor Fosse, seems willing to try to conceive of Bruce as a single person: he is either appealing or self-destructive, but never are the two Lenny Bruces reconciled. A difficult proposition, to be sure, but without it the film fails to shed any light on the essence of the man; it avoids answering its own questions.

All of the acting in Lenny is good, which is fortunate -it gives the film much-needed energy since the screenplay’s portrait of Bruce as victim of a repressive society is almost leaden in its didacticism. Valerie Perrine has received a good deal of praise for her performance as Honey, Bruce’s wife. She deserves the praise, but she’s beginning to get a press build-up as a new sex symbol, which probably won’t help her career as an actress. Her role is the same kind of part, the victimized sex-kitten, that Ann-Mar-gret played, to similar acclaim, in Carnal Knowledge. Ann-Margret’s performance did little for her subsequent career as an actress, however. Perrine’s face has more depth and variety than Ann-Margret’s, so she may be able to break the mold and establish a major career.

I also liked Jan Miner as Lenny’s mother. Miner has inherited the kind of wisecracking female sidekick roles that Aline MacMahon or Eve Arden or Ann Sothern used to play. A delighted ripple of recognition runs through the audience as they identify her as Madge the Manicurist from the TV soap commercials, but Miner appears to have more potential as an actress than has been allowed her in her career. The credits for Lenny list Bruce’s real mother as an “Advisor to the Production,” and I suspect a heavy hand has been laid on there; the script hints at Lenny’s mother-problem, but doesn’t come out with it as a convincing psychological influence. Miner does the best she can with a role that seems to have parts missing.

Like Hoffman, Albert Finney has elected to avoid being type-cast, but I think he has chosen the wrong way of doing it. He has taken on parts like the title role in Scrooge and inspector Hercule Poirot in Murder on the Orient Express, character roles which require enormous efforts at disguise to make him physically convincing in them. An actor can make roles like these work on stage, but the camera is a mercilessly revealing instrument which allows us to become preoccupied with peering through the make-up to find his familiar features. His Poirot is a witty and entertaining creation, but at best it is a tour de force, somewhat like those silly over-disguised cameos of Burt Lancaster and Frank Sinatra and Robert Mitchum in The List of Adrian Messenger.

Murder on the Orient Express is irresistible in the way some of those BBC imports on channel 13 are: the sheer skill and presence of the actors disarm much of our judgement about what is being performed. As a whodunit, Orient Express is a failure; we are not made to care very much why or how the murder was done, and the “who” comes as very little surprise. But it is at least a fine showcase for its actors. Acting is something its director, Sidney Lumet, obviously respects to a fault; for if we remember anything of the movies Lumet has made, which include films as varied in substance and quality as Long Day’s Journey into Night, The Pawnbroker, and The Group, we remember the performances and little else.

As might be expected, the British actors in Orient Express are better than the Americans. Of the latter, Martin Balsam is probably the best, although his role calls for no virtuosity, and his Italian accent is unconvincing. Lauren Bacall looks self-conscious in a role which asks her to be vulgar and brassy: her vulgarity is clearly a put-on. One of the film’s running jokes is about what an awful person she is, but she is still too beautiful – age cannot wither – to play the kind of woman men endeavor to avoid. Anthony Perkins has his usual part -the nervous young man with a mother-fixation – but he at least has the wit to attempt self-parody.

When people think of British acting, they usually think of actors like John Gielgud. But for me Gielgud’s mellifluous, stagey voice always evokes Shakespearean acting at its most emptily “poetical,” the style of acting which turns the plays into purple passages linked by tedium rather than into living human dramas. I like Gielgud best in comedy, where his pomposity becomes satiric, and he is fine in Orient Express as a valet -a gentleman’s, gentleman’s gentleman. Wendy Hiller is, I think, a more distinguished representative of British acting at its best. Her Major Barbara in the Gabriel Pascal film, for example, is the definitive Shavian heroine. As an ancient Russian princess in Orient Express, Hiller is the consummate aristocrat: authoritarian but gentle without condescension. The younger British actors – Rachel Roberts, Sean Con-nery, Vanessa Redgrave, Michael York -are their usual reliable selves. It’s a shame that Vanessa Redgrave hasn’t been given more light comedy roles in movies, for she waltzes through the little part in Orient Express looking amused at the whole business and leaving us wishing for more.

I have saved the best for last, for Ingrid Bergman’s performance makes us realize again what a treasure she is. I am so used to thinking of Berg-man as a great beauty, that I forget how wonderful an actress she is, how sensitive and intelligent and, when she wants to be, how funny. Some of the beauty is still there, even though the role calls for her to be gloomy and homely. The best moments in her performance come when she responds to encouragement and a flicker of joy lightens the gloom. We realize then that Bergman not only believes the silly character she is playing, but that she knows how to make fun of the character without hamming or camping it up. She achieves a wonderfully funny characterization with her entrance, when we see her board the train by first throwing her suitcase on it, and then, almost literally, throwing herself on it.

But all of the good acting in Murder on the Orient Express and Lenny can’t raise them above their essential inadequacy. They don’t offer us quite enough of what movies like The Godfather, Part II or Chinatown – to name two of the past year’s best movies- offer: fine acting performances enhanced by a directorial vision which haunts long after it has ceased merely to entertain. We watch Lenny with the sure knowledge that the real Lenny Bruce was a more interesting and complex man than the movie makes him out to be. We leave Murder on the Orient Express with the sense that we have been dining on hors d’oeuvres rather than on solid food. When the acting, or at least the “star-presence,” is stronger than the vehicle itself, it can disrupt the drama and diminish the impact. As good as the acting is in both films, I kept wishing they, had been made by directors with consistent vision and style – and with casts of unknowns.

Related Articles

Image
Arts & Entertainment

Here’s Who Is Coming to Dallas This Weekend: March 28-31

It's going to be a gorgeous weekend. Pencil in some live music in between those egg hunts and brunches.
Image
Arts & Entertainment

Arlington Museum of Art Debuts Two Must-See Nature-Inspired Additions

The chill of the Arctic Circle and a futuristic digital archive mark the grand opening of the Arlington Museum of Art’s new location.
By Brett Grega
Image
Arts & Entertainment

An Award-Winning SXSW Short Gave a Dallas Filmmaker an Outlet for Her Grief

Sara Nimeh balances humor and poignancy in a coming-of-age drama inspired by her childhood memories.
By Todd Jorgenson
Advertisement