The Culture of Reincarnation

Movies today are so often about their own lines, ways, routine and schtick. That circle of repetition has become the model for life itself. Once upon a time that was a stirring breakthrough: in the late 1950s, there was a cluster of American movies that seemed to be in the exciting act of discovering that condition--_Rio Bravo_, Touch of Evil, Written on the Wind, Psycho, Some Like It Hot, Anatomy of a Murder, movies in which the ostensible genre was being torn to shreds with love and mockery before our eyes (this was before Jean-Luc Godard) in an exhilarating process of self-awareness and narrative deconstruction. The passion passed, and now movies meekly repeat the ways other movies address life, without knowing it. And so, perhaps, we grow up with less sense of reality, going to the ball game and waiting for the action replay to know what happened.

But there is another kind of comeback that is more authentic, achieved with more difficulty and thus far more encouraging. When you look at Sean Connery today, isn't it good to see an unfussy, versatile actor, content to be bald and his true age, so much more mature and satisfying than the icon who was 007? Why, he's even able to use his own Scots accent now. And, all of a sudden, Connery looks like the only screen star we have today as noble, un-neurotic and seasoned as Gable and Cooper once seemed.

There are others to be hailed. Nearly forty years ago, Gloria Swanson came back, in Sunset Boulevard. She was only 51 (younger than Elizabeth Taylor is now), and she was certainly astute enough to sec all the ways in which she was playing, or aping, herself. Let's say she took that risk and thought it less than the prospect of the part, the picture and Mr. Wilder. If she had not been Norma Desmond, why Gloria Swanson today would be no better known than Clara Bow or Pola Negri.

We have seen Dennis Hopper and Dean Stockwell come back from personal difficulty and relative obscurity. Blue Velvet found some of its fearful drive in the revelation, or freeing, of those excellent actors. Don Ameche is happily with us again--let us note that his return was in a movie that sought to soften the conclusive ness of death. Jodie Foster has made that very tricky journey from child actress to grown-up, without ever being cute or coy, without abandoning her own intelligence or promising to be glamorous.

But just because such recoveries are real, they run the risk of failure, too. Jerry Lewis was, let us say, perfect in The King of Comedy; and maybe it is the nature of that perfection that keeps him away, except on Labor Day. How touching it was at the time of Paris, Texas to see Harry Dean Stanton alive with the hope of being a romantic lead. Yet how inevitably he has slipped back to being a great sad face among supporting players. Tuesday Weld does good work, always, but she can never be Zelda Fitzgerald or Maria Wyeth again. She is Thursday now, and has to live with the fact that her quality was too tough for the big crowd.

Youth never comes back--unless in computer video regeneration. It is nearly as certain that Billy Wilder will not make the comeback some of us hope for. (If he did, it might be bitter enough to dissolve celluloid.) There is a vital tradition in this country of the talented filmmaker deemed too difficult, unreliable or old for more work. It began with D,W. Griffith, and it includes Josef von Sternberg, Buster Keaton, Erich von Stroheim, Orson Welles and Joseph L. Mankiewicz, as well as Billy Wilder.

Yet Wilder has scripts ready to go. So did Welles, and so I'm sure had all the others. To be of Hollywood (even in exile) is to cling to the thought of comeback. This may be absurd. Comebacks may mean nothing better than endless Rocky or Dirtier Harry, Comeback can be another way of saying commercial stereotyping. It is the opposite of true drama. And yet...there is in American movies a kind of code, a spiral in the genes, whereby we dream of repeating our youth, re-making our failed marriage, of dreaming that old dream again. Citizen Kane, His Girl Friday, It's a Wonderful Life are all movies in which life plays with the chance of comeback. For better and for worse, in lies and truth, it is a part of us.

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David Thomson, a San Francisco-based writer on film, is the author of Suspects and Warren Beatty & Desert Eyes: A Life & a Story, published by Doubleday.

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