44 | Sight&Sound | May 2020
MODERN ACTINGwas beginning to seem meretricious or an exercise,
like Terry Malloy’s business with Edie’s gloves.
I was a Brando enthusiast, and without having been in
Hoboken in 1954 I recognised the ‘gritty’ texture of the
location, the roughness in Boris Kaufman’s black-and-
white photography. I knew, more or less, the schematic
groundwork of testifying to the House Un-American Ac-
tivities Committee that had prompted the film. I could
believe I was seeing a parable on grim American dilem-
mas. That felt reassuring for a moment, before I noticed
that the film was a preposterous display of show-off, that
Marlon was fanciful as an ex-boxer, that Eva Marie Saint
was a wan madonna in Kazan’s lusting eyes, that Rod Stei-
ger was the kind of mobster auditioning to get a part in
The Godfather he had not heard of yet, while Lee J. Cobb’s
crooked union boss was as overdone as Jerry Lewis.
You may not want to agree with those revised verdicts.
On the Waterfront may be in your birthright, a film you
return to annually like Persona (1966) or The Shop Around
the Corner (1940). But there is a liability in such repeat-
ed viewings. Most of our movies were made to be seen
once. This was never a medium that expected depth or
repetition. That does not mean there were not films that
repaid return over the years. And I know I am speaking
to one of the most intense communities of repeat view-
ers – though by now our screened culture is sometimes
wearied by the endlessness of ‘stuff’, whether it is presi-
dential lies, the dumbing ditto device of the ads on our
phone, or even Citizen Kane (1941) once more.
This may cut across the grain of Sight & Sound, as well
as militating against the fragile economy of a magazine.
But it is wilful blindness to ignore how we have con-
sumed movies in a pattern of reiteration that subverts
the charge of being moved, surprised and ‘lost’ in the il-
lusion of a great story. Our habit has made us detached:
our adored Turner Classic Movies and Criterion leave us
vulnerable to diluted experience.
A crucial but neglected aspect of that experience has
been the loss of respect or involvement. Knowing how
a film ends helps you lose sight of how it is proceeding.
Nothing is hurt by that more than the earnestness with
which drama wants to be believed – it is what turns so
much drama into melodrama, or genre pastiche. By the
late 1950s, it was clear in America that the audience – ed-
ucated by the onslaught of trite movie-like stories on TV
- was becoming jaded over the narrative self-importance
of movies. By 1959, whether deliberate or not, Anatomy
of a Murder was a satire on courtroom pictures, Rio Bravo
was an amiable kidding of western conventions, and
Psycho was a shock treatment for the feeling that was
happy to be shocked.
If you doubt that, try going back to some of the very
‘important’ projects made around 1960. Try watch-
ing Ben-Hur without laughing, or The Hustler, or (pace
Philip Kemp in last month’s S&S Home Cinema
review) Judgment at Nuremberg. That all-star assessment
of Nazi wrongs is well done by the placid standards of
its time, but helplessly enthralled by an archaic notion
of character rooted in respect for ‘good’, or ‘penetrating’
or ‘stunning’ acting – all those words we use trying to
vindicate our emotional participation.
The case for strenuous and heartfelt acting, reduc-
ing itself to tears even, was becoming harder to accept,
let alone worship. In Nuremberg, Clift was ‘brilliant’,
I suppose. But he was sinking into a self-pity that had
been there from A Place in the Sun (1951) and From Here to
Eternity (1953), and which had some basis in the circum-
stances of his life. His character in that film might have
been more compelling – I don’t think its director Stanley
Kramer could have handled this – if the actor doing it
had been Alain Delon (as in Mr Klein, 1976), Dirk Bogarde
(The Servant, 1963) or even Cary Grant (Suspicion, 1941;
Notorious, 1946; or North by Northwest, 1959).
In 1975, I tried saying that Cary Grant was the most
important actor the movies had ever had. Some laughed
at this suggestion, or the thought that Grant could have
attempted to be Brando in The Godfather (1972), George
C. Scott in Patton (1969) or Rod Steiger in The Pawnbroker
(1964). He would have been too adroit to accept those
challenges. But don’t assume that signalled limitations in
his acting. Instead, remember his pursuit of ‘presence’ (a
thing he shares with Gary Cooper, Fred Astaire and Kris-
ten Stewart) to a point of enigma or our uncertainty. You
just can’t decide about his Johnnie Aysgarth in Suspicion,
while marvelling that Joan Fontaine’s meek lady got an
Oscar in that film as Grant went nearly unnoticed.
There was something afoot in Grant early on. Was it
being handsome, vain and evasive – was he a movie star
reluctant to show himself? Perhaps he had an instinct that
the celebrated self-display of famous ‘Actors’ was bogus,
just a front, while he stared back at us to taunt our wish
to gaze past that front. You can call that under-playing, or
movie acting (this aplomb haunted a versatile stage show-
off, like Olivier). But, as time passed, more lead perfor-
mances acquired a similar opaque mystery, a numbness
or a coldness – it was there in the first part of Dustin Hoff-
man in The Graduate (1967) before that picture caved in to
moral rearmament. Jane Fonda was doing it in Klute (1971)- don’t think she was going to be an easygoing Mrs Klute.
COMFORTABLY NUMB
Cary Grant is almost
impossible to read as a
potential murderer in Alfred
Hitchcock’s Suspicion (1941,
with Joan Fontaine, above),
an opacity you can also
detect in Dustin Hoffman’s
role in The Graduate (1967)he
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