Comebacks, Sequels, Remakes...the movie business thrives on deja vu.
I've just watched the Bugle Boy ad for the 113th time, the one in the desert, with the English girl and the black, smoked-glass car. I can't get enough of it; I'm really into deja vu. Not that I'm buying the jeans; not that I could afford the car or the girl. But I watch TV for that ad: it's like a song I can't get out of my head, or like a taste for salt; it's every film noir in 30 seconds; and I'm sure it says something about me. I'm in its cycle and the mystery hasn't eased yet. I just want it to keep coming back.
Everything comes back now: we're torn between addiction and eternal youth, conflicting versions of "play it again." Gone With the Wind is come again; Lawrence of Arabia is back, still formed by the flex of flashback. Young flesh comes back year after year. It has different names--Molly, Ally, Demi, Kristie, lone. And the names are so odd and quick they seem to know their time is short. The faces will change, but the medium needs its new skin.
Isn't Brando making films again? What will Al Pacino look like in his new offering? Can Noriega hang on? Will George Foreman be champion once more? Is it really true that Ronald Reagan is coming back to the silver screen, and that Garbo is going to play his mother? That's what I heard--they said Roman Polanski was coming back to direct it, and that Cary Grant was going to play a ghost who--Yes, Cary Grant. I know, I know, he wasn't going to come back while he was alive. But now that he's dead its so much easier. All they do, you see, is feed every existing moving image of Mr. Grant into this new computer--that's the database--and then they just program in new plots and new lines. It's amazingly life-like. You'll never know the difference. And apparently the copyright situation isn't as tricky as you might expect. Death is so close to public domain, and if we have the technology...They could put Cary in the Bugle Boy ad, out there in the desert, waiting to be astonished.
Where would we be without the comeback? One might as well ask if the Christian religion could have gone into business without the bonus prize of the resurrection of souls. Talk about your big finish--it's so big it's a new beginning! Look at it this way: that old, unforgiving line of destiny has now been whipped into a cute circle where everything keeps coming around again; and when Mrs. Bates's corpse grins in the swinging lamplight, O say can you see the coming smile of some earlier Shirley MacLaine?
There's something very much of the century in this--forgive me, I still want to call it the twentieth. You see, I was brought up on a very different adage. My father told it to me every year. He's still here; he's still saying it--"They never come back," he said, and I believed him, I wasn't smart enough to wonder at the truth of it when wiseacres were ready to hammer it home again, year after year, just as regular as the new Lassie picture or the next Roy Rogers, that "they" didn't come back.
My father was talking boxing, in an age when it was still just possible to regard that as a sport, instead of show business. He wanted to believe that boxing depended on once-and-only strength and readiness; that, just like great drama, when Hamlet was dead, he was gone. I remember the moment when the myth broke: it was 1951, and Randolph Turpin had just beaten Sugar Ray Robinson. That was it, my father told me. Sugar Ray had had to yield to soft living, a pink Cadillac and the implacable requirements of progress. Goodbye, Sugar. A few months later, Robinson beat Turpin and regained the middleweight championship of the world. Comebacks were in, and there would be Archie Moore, Ali, Nixon, Duran, Reagan and Sugar Ray Leonard to prove it.
It's not just a cheap shot at humor, relating the comeback to our religious yearnings. No, it's a way of indicating that the movies--that sea upon which the comeback is forever sailing--have always had profound kinship with spiritual renewal, and some innate aversion to the conventions of drama.
Let me spell that out. The movie business has thrived on repetition; after all, that is the rhythm of successful industrial manufacture. If the public likes something, show it to them again. The story goes that in Paris, in December 1895, when the Lumiere brothers put on the first moving picture performance, audiences came out of one screening and lined up to see the program again. Those pioneer suckers wanted to know if they could believe what they had seen. But they also needed further witness.
The star system began as the decision to bring certain pretty and appreciated faces back in more films--or in extensions of the same film. Most movies would be return vehicles for treasured stars, or reworkings of plots in which they had proved successful. By the time of the golden age of movie-making, the gold was an unfailing roster of stars and genres. A great deal of decision-making had been eliminated--and that is invariably a keynote of prosperity, and happiness.
But drama is not meant to function like that, for it is dramatic to the degree that a unique unwinding of action sets up momentous and irrevocable consequences. Soft hearts among us might say it would be nice if Lear and his daughter Cordelia could be reunited. In the eighteenth century, there was such an ending written to make Shakespeare more palatable. It has been discarded now because we know King Lear does not work--does not move us--if it is cheated of its tragedy.
Movies were seldom so resolute. Certain stars could not die in their films; others had to. Those imperatives outweighed any feelings the writers or the directors (or even the actors] might have had about dramatic logic or necessity. Box office urged regeneration: sons of Kong and Dracula; the instant reassemblage of Tom in Tom and Jerry, no matter how completely one set-piece had reduced him to dust, smithereens or the thinness of prosciutto; and nothing quite as odd as the Thin Man films, where William Powell and Myrna Loy were brought back in sequels as the wisecracking Nick and Nora Charles, even though in the original the Thin Man had not been the detective, but the man killed--the label was too potent, so Nick became the Thin Man and William Powell had to watch his diet.
Even Conan Doyle had to go back on his tracks once and tell us, aha, Sherlock Holmes didn't really, didn't quite or actually die at Reichenbach Falls. He lived to sell another book. But if the detective is immortal, then danger or dread can never quite touch or deter him. Audiences began to feel the range or limits of certain pictures simply because of the casting. Endings became ordained, and so there could not be the force of dramatic consequence we expect in theatre or the novel. Movies drifted away from moral narrative and closer to dream and ritual.
Thus, at the end of Halloween, when the sidewalk is magically wiped clean of the destroyed Michael Myers, we do not laugh at the absurdity. Rather, we sigh with a terrible understanding--that sequels are in the natural order of movies; that Michael can no more die or cease than Tom, or fear; that the nightmare will return. It is a willful holding on to superstition, a way of preferring the atmospheric dark to any chance of moral light or reason.
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Just in, and upcoming: a make-over of Bringing Up Baby--it's the old film, but with Madonna instead of Katharine Hepburn, and Madonna will be in color--Warren is directing her in the blue-screening; Elvis and Eddie Murphy are going to do The Defiant Ones; James Dean and Grace Kelly are together at last in a remake of Peter Ibbetson, the classic story of separated lovers; in an ingenious montage of recently recovered out-takes and ILM know-how, it's the Judy Garland of Meet Me in St. Louis-vintage in A Star is Born Again--this time Vicki Lester becomes an evangelist; Robert Towne is doing a last-minute polish on What Jake Did at School--with Mickey Rooney of 1936 set to go and today's Mick on the payroll as "technical adviser"; Sly Stallone will be Godfather III (this after the snafu'd computer came up with the script for Three Godfathers!); Shirley MacLaine, will play Louise Brooks in... bed? And--I don't quite read the tape here--someone called Billy Wilder is coming back to direct a satirical comedy from his own script. What is "satirical," please?
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Not everything you have read so far in this article is going to happen. But don't take it for granted that one bit of it couldn't come to pass--and pass again. Truth to tell, the ancient dignity or grace that persuaded Garbo and Grant to retire before they had to... well, that's one gesture not coming back.
More than that, Garbo and Grant have never gone away. A year has not elapsed since Two-Faced Woman (1941) without either the rumor of a Garbo comeback, a photograph of a long wisp of shaded shyness, seen somewhere between Sutton Place and Sightseer Point, or a new book that reveals parts of her letters or lists. The possibility of Garbo has always been there, and who can doubt that the power of her legend has been armored by her absence? In a medium so dedicated to showing and seeing, there is an ultimate charisma in being invisible--if the retiree has the nerve to stay away.
Of course, if the star does retire and live another 30, 40... 50 years, then he or she may become a monster of unused appearance. If you have made yourself by pretending to be others for money, what do you do with just your self? In his last years, while turning down such roles as the one James Mason took in Heaven Can Wait, Cary Grant did experiment with a live stage act. It did not appear to be an "act." For Mr. Grant was billed as "Cary Grant," and he simply came on stage and answered questions from the audience. This was what you might call a "documentary" appearance. Yet he could not help but talk, move, react and--seemingly--think like the Gary Grant of_ North by Northwest_ or People Will Talk. He was that old wonder, still, and he seemed to be having and giving such a good time that one looked around for the cameras recording the evening for future use. But I don't think cameras were ever there; and the shows he did were at out-of-the-way venues. They were remarkable at every moment, and most extraordinary and beautiful in that they now depend on the memories of their spectators.
Surely, Grant felt, why take the risk of going back to the screen? Ahead of most of us, he may have divined that his writers and directors were gone, and that no one took his kind of movie seriously any longer. How easy it would be to come back and look stupid. For here is a point worth brooding on: in the last 30 years, movies have lost true faith in their own fancy and make-believe; they have gone camp, knowing how far they are recirculated versions of former selves--for in the culture of reincarnation can one life ever be quite as precious or as meaningful as when death and the single opportunity are real?
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.